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Saudis Race All Night, Fueled by Boredom
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — The young men start gathering around midnight, on a broad strip of highway between the desert and the sea. By 1 a.m. there are hundreds of them, standing in clusters alongside their cars, glancing around uneasily for the police.
Then, with a scream of revving engines, it begins: a yellow Corvette and a red Mitsubishi go head to head, racing down the road at terrifying speeds, just inches apart. Shouts go up from the sidelines, and another pair of racers shoot down the road, and another.
This may be the most popular sport of Saudi youth, an obsessive, semilegal competition that dominates weekend nights here. It ranges from garden variety drag racing to “drifting,” an extremely dangerous practice in which drivers deliberately spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators.
For Saudi Arabia’s vast and underemployed generation of young people, these reckless night battles are a kind of collective scream of frustration, a rare outlet for exuberance in an ultraconservative country where the sexes are rigorously segregated and most public entertainment is illegal. They are, almost literally, bored out of their minds.
“Why do they do it?” said Suhail Janoudi, a 27-year-old sales clerk who was watching the races from the roadside with a faint smile around 1:30 a.m. “Because they have nothing else to do. Because they are empty.”
Some young people, asked why they risked their lives this way, said it was because of “tufush,” a colloquial Arabic word for boredom whose meaning is said by some to derive from the gestures made by a drowning man. Drifting, which tends to attract poorer, more marginal men, has also been an unlikely nexus between homosexuality, crime and jihadism since it emerged 30 years ago. Homoerotic desire is a constant theme in Saudi songs and poems about drifting, and accomplished drifters are said to have their pick of the prettiest boys among the spectators. Drugs sometimes also play a role. But a number of drifters have also become Islamic militants, including Youssef al-Ayyeri, the founder of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who fought in Afghanistan and was killed by security forces in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
“The idea behind drifting is, the economy and society don’t need you,” said Pascal Ménoret, an anthropologist who did four years of field work in Riyadh, the capital, and is now teaching at Princeton and writing a book on Saudi youth culture. “They are mostly young Bedouins who recently moved to the city, and whose lives are marked by suffering and self-destructive behavior.”
But most racers are more like young men almost anywhere: restless, thrill-seeking and madly in love with cars.
If you missed out, there's a place for you....
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — The young men start gathering around midnight, on a broad strip of highway between the desert and the sea. By 1 a.m. there are hundreds of them, standing in clusters alongside their cars, glancing around uneasily for the police.
Then, with a scream of revving engines, it begins: a yellow Corvette and a red Mitsubishi go head to head, racing down the road at terrifying speeds, just inches apart. Shouts go up from the sidelines, and another pair of racers shoot down the road, and another.
This may be the most popular sport of Saudi youth, an obsessive, semilegal competition that dominates weekend nights here. It ranges from garden variety drag racing to “drifting,” an extremely dangerous practice in which drivers deliberately spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators.
For Saudi Arabia’s vast and underemployed generation of young people, these reckless night battles are a kind of collective scream of frustration, a rare outlet for exuberance in an ultraconservative country where the sexes are rigorously segregated and most public entertainment is illegal. They are, almost literally, bored out of their minds.
“Why do they do it?” said Suhail Janoudi, a 27-year-old sales clerk who was watching the races from the roadside with a faint smile around 1:30 a.m. “Because they have nothing else to do. Because they are empty.”
Some young people, asked why they risked their lives this way, said it was because of “tufush,” a colloquial Arabic word for boredom whose meaning is said by some to derive from the gestures made by a drowning man. Drifting, which tends to attract poorer, more marginal men, has also been an unlikely nexus between homosexuality, crime and jihadism since it emerged 30 years ago. Homoerotic desire is a constant theme in Saudi songs and poems about drifting, and accomplished drifters are said to have their pick of the prettiest boys among the spectators. Drugs sometimes also play a role. But a number of drifters have also become Islamic militants, including Youssef al-Ayyeri, the founder of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who fought in Afghanistan and was killed by security forces in Saudi Arabia in 2003.
“The idea behind drifting is, the economy and society don’t need you,” said Pascal Ménoret, an anthropologist who did four years of field work in Riyadh, the capital, and is now teaching at Princeton and writing a book on Saudi youth culture. “They are mostly young Bedouins who recently moved to the city, and whose lives are marked by suffering and self-destructive behavior.”
But most racers are more like young men almost anywhere: restless, thrill-seeking and madly in love with cars.
If you missed out, there's a place for you....
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