MODERNIZATION OF SPORTS

Modernization of Sports in Saudi Arabia

Modernization of Sports in Saudi Arabia

There is certain thing deeply paradoxical about the new Al Faisaliah buying center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Arambling, three-story aggregate entire with air-conditioning and wireless internet, the lively shopping shopping centre is chock full of US fast-food chains and swanky apparel stores boasting everything from bras to basketball footwears. And yet, these hallmarks of financial modernity and Western-style mass consumerism are strikingly juxtaposed with the rigidly enforced cultural mores that have changed only marginally since the days when Riyadh was little more than a assemblage of dirt roads and grime houses.

A Society of Paradoxes

This tension between modernity and custom in Saudi Arabia is perhaps most palpable with consider to these laws in the direction of women, but it is a paradox that has furthermore manifested itself in virtually every agency of Saudi society. As Saudi Arabia evolves, it has seen an ever-increasing number of contradictions between its up to date financial institutions and rigid political and communal systems. In a country whose finances is considerably reliant on the presence of foreign laborers, not to mention the innumerable Western professionals that assist to the oil sector, there is still no flexibility to worship any belief but Islam. Despite being one of the newest authorized voting members of the WTO, Saudi Arabia has still never had a national election--making it one of the world's ten smallest democratic states, according to the Economist understanding Unit's 2007 Democracy Index. Part of a multi-decade effort to reinforce the personal sector, the country now has the strongest supply market in the region, but the kingdom's would-be entrepreneurs are graduating from universities that are graded amidst the smallest in the world. Barriers to foreign direct buying into, which until lately had been insurmountably high, have been significantly let down, and yet the state still refuses to grant tourist visas to Westerners, opening its boundaries only to Muslims that travel to Mecca on the Hajj.

In 50 Years, from Rags to Riches

When monarch Abdul Azziz marked the treaty with the British government in 1932 that established the Saudi state, he inherited a fractured and rearwards country that had next to no unified finances or infrastructure. For six years Saudi Arabia's finances limped along, when in 1938, a group of US geologists stumbled over what would subsequent be regarded the world's greatest provide of natural oil, launching Saudi Arabia on a 50-year ascent to financial prosperity and material wealth. By the 1970s, the Saudi government, which obtains almost 75 per hundred of its budgetary inflows from oil exports and controls 95 per hundred of all domestic oil production, was starting to accrue huge incomes from Saudi oil exports. Aconfluence of components in the mid-1970s commanded to this sudden financial acceleration, the utmost of which was an exponential growth in world oil prices (from $0.22 per barrel in 1948 to over $10 per barrel in 1974) initiated by the 1973 Arab oil ...