Okaz

It is springtime and so it is usual for some members of the Shoura Council to come up with some strange ideas. Some newspapers recently published a suggestion by a Shoura member who called for the removal of tribal names from Saudi ID cards.

We would like to improve on this suggestion and draw attention to the fact that the tribe’s name is preceded by a clan’s name, which makes it easy to identify family trees. This, therefore, must also be deleted. Then there remain the names of fathers and grandfathers, which may be a way of guessing the tribe or family of a person. As a result, I suggest deleting citizens’ names and replacing them with numbers. For example, my name could be 812690, my neighbor could be 798543 and the name of a colleague in the office could be 470217.

This would be an easy solution. We could get rid of intolerance. However, if this suggestion were approved, then we would need a plan to prevent show-offs from getting special numbers for themselves or their family members.

It is important to mention that the respected Shoura Council member acknowledges the importance of information related to a citizen’s social roots for governmental purposes. Therefore, I suggest that this information be kept confidential in the hands of the Ministry of Civil Services. This would limit the chance that people would learn their tribal roots or who their grandparents and ancestors were unless they worked for the Ministry of Civil Services or were married to an employee there. In that case, a man could sweet talk his wife or give her his credit card for a week so she could get the required information for him.

The Shoura Council member who made this suggestion seems to have forgotten that people of leftist ideologies have throughout the Arab world encouraged people in Yemen and Iraq to ignore their tribal names and only mention their first names and the names of their fathers and grandfathers. However, this decision did not change anything. The tribe is still the foundation of political and social power in Yemen.

The disorder that Iraq has gone through has revealed the importance of tribes. Eliminating a tribe’s name from national ID cards will not change society’s perceptions. It is a futile decision.

There is no doubt that tribal intolerance is a dangerous way of thinking that threatens the unity of a nation. Racism is a disease that many people suffer from in many ways in our society. To treat this disease, laws need to be created and implemented followed by an awareness and education plan using the media. There is no doubt that creating awareness as well as implementing laws is the responsibility of the Shoura Council. However, they need to focus on important matters and leave these strange ideas aside.