Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
The Islamic world has a strange geography. Unlike basically every other civilisation around, Islam is centered around a barren wasteland. China has the fertile Yellow River, India the immense Gangetic Plain; but Islam has the arid and worthless sands of the Arabian peninsula at its heart.
Before this week, as I mentioned in a blog last year, I had only ever visited Morocco out of the majority Islam countries, but I'm currently working out in the gulf moving between several countries there. Morocco is a comparatively habitable land with some arable places and plenty of pastureland in the hills. If one were to predict where a new civilisation would spring up it would certainly be there rather than the deserts here. And Morocco was indeed far more important to the Arab world than the ancestral homelands were until very recently. In fact all of the great Islamic powers (with the obvious exception of Muhammad's empire) have been located outside of the Arabian peninsula in more inviting lands such as Egypt, Persia or Anatolia. It has only been since the oil revolution that Arabia has found itself anything but a historic backwater. But as the world's eye came to gaze on the previous black water old tribal warlords rose up from the desert dunes forming sultanates and kingdoms willy-nilly as they overthrew their non-arab overlords (helped along by the British). Saud, Hashem, Almeeri to name a few. Today the countries of the peninsula are each dominated by four or five tribal families with which every functionary of state is filled.
This "newness" of Arabia is often overlooked, as is the sheer nothingness that not-so-long-ago was ubiquitous here. The modern Arabs reinvented themselves as kings and nobles in an era when the rest of the world was moving the other way. Most of the big metropoles of the modern Gulf like Dubai or Doha were literally sandy fishing villages a century ago: the UAE was brought into the British Empire by a single gunboat, and the now hyper-rich countries of Qatar and Bahrain didn't even get a treaty when they joined. So in the vacuum of human civilisation an uneasy culture developed which feels inferior to the west (because it is) and needs to prove itself. And so the desert sheikhs created the "postmodern plastic hyperreality caliphate".
Here the rule is ostentation, and anything else is secondary. Men are required to own the finest objects like Rolex watches, Aston Martin cars and French designer clothes. Or rather they are required to be perceived as owning such things, the majority of things you find here are counterfeit: priceless on the outside but worthless on the inside. Nobody cares about the authenticity though, which makes the whole charade even weirder. Men will rut against each other in their full regalia knowing full well that everything both are wearing is pure fiction, but they simply don't care.
The other aspect to the bizarrity is that nobody here even understands the things they are parodying. Because the Gulf States can't produce anything but oil (even Dubai Chocolate is made abroad) they have to latch into western ideals of wealth and western companies like those mentioned above without living within the real context of them. You'll commonly see men in posh designer suits with a stupid chav cap, or (even funnier) women with provocative red high heels and a full burkha. Everything is stripped of context and meaning and just stands in for power and prestige.
It's hard to know what the locals think of all this; people here either don't speak to foreigners or are so ingrown with plastic and fake handbags they can speak only in platitudes. I've only managed to speak to a few Arabs, but a fair few western expats (they don't like it if you call them immigrants) and a lot of indentured Indians, which is a whole other thing entirely. Leaving the casual slavery aside for now, the expats are a fascinating group. Most seem totally enamoured with the high life here, dulled into a stupor as they play-pretend aristocrats in their hotel apartments. All smiles no souls these people; even the kids are weird, but growing up the strange international compounds like they do it's hard to blame them. I think the glazed stare of a millionaire desert princess from suburban New York gives a good insight into the psyche here.
I honestly have nothing good to say about Arabia. I'm totally unimpressed with what they have achieved in the last hundred years. I don't care for shopping malls nor ski-slopes in the desert. Anything remotely interesting here (the Burj Khalifa is indeed rather tall) is designed and built by westerners and slave labour. It's proof that good fortune can sometimes ruin a nation and brainwash a people. I say if you want to visit Arabia go to Morocco instead.
