Hope seems to be in the air a lot these days. We elected Barack Obama here in the US, a black man with a Muslim name in a country with a history of slavery and segregation and anti-Muslim feeling. A timetable has been set to pull out of an unpopular Iraq war. Global warming and environmental change is finally starting to look like an international priority, including at long last, in the USA. But the signs are both large and small, and sometimes the small ones are the most meaningful. Finding out about the AccoLade, a Saudi Arabian all female rock band, has made me suddenly more hopeful than I've felt in months.

Saudi Arabia is where my husband grew up. Between his tales of his upbringing in this religiously suffocating place with it's textbooks that teach hate and suspicion to children and moral police that crack down on the most minor improprieties (married couples couldn't even walk hand in hand without harassment) and the news stories that seem to indicate that things are only getting worse as the most extreme brand of Islam is being exported via Saudi money through mudrassas and media all over the Middle East and reaching out into the world, I thought things would only get worse. As a lover of Middle Eastern dance (aka belly dance), I've been disconcerted to watch it decline in acceptability in it's homeland, Egypt, where formerly, no wedding was complete without dancers, but more recently I heard reports of professional dancers being shot at when performing at weddings in public. I saw this as just one of many examples of cultural and artistic decline in the face of religious extremism. But today I read this story in the New York Times:

www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24...4saudi.html

It doesn't seem like much, but in my vision of Saudi, a female rock band even existing is a big, big deal. It means that something is shifting, something has loosened up or backed off. In the article, it stated that after 9-11, Saudis had taken a little time to self-reflect and see what extremism breeds. The morals police had lightened up a little. It looks like the new generation of Saudis want change, want freedom, want something different.

No culture will change overnight. But when music and art are at the heart of change, I think there is a chance for it to win those hearts and minds we always talk about. The hearts and minds of a culture that will hopefully arrive at a hard rock angry need for a better life for themselves and for a more accepting perspective of the rest of the world. Rock is something Saudis and Americans can come together on. Maybe the rock and roll generations in the West can start relating more to people in Saudi. Maybe in the future it will mean both a shift away from extremism in the Middle East and a also a shift in America to more humanitarian foreign policy towards that region.

It is a dream, but sitting here listening to Saudi girls rockin' out, I have a little beam of hope.

The photo is of Edmund Blair Leighton's painting "The Accolade" that inspired the name of the band. The imagery of a powerful woman is artistically provocative.

Here is a link to their myspace page:
profile.myspace.com/index.cfm

enjoy!