Saudi Arabia: Cardamom Coffee, Desert Hospitality and a Country in Transformation
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Saudi coffee — qahwa — is made from lightly roasted green coffee beans infused with cardamom, saffron, and sometimes cloves and rose water, and poured from a long-spouted pot into small handleless cups. It is served continuously and refilled automatically. It is pale golden in colour and tastes almost nothing like the dark roasted coffee of most of the world. It is the first thing offered to a guest and the most direct expression of Saudi hospitality — a tradition that the Bedouin codified and that the Kingdom has maintained as a social foundation through every other transformation.
Saudi Arabia contains Mecca and Medina — the two holiest cities in Islam — which together receive over two million pilgrims during the annual Hajj, one of the largest peaceful gatherings of human beings on earth. The organisation of the Hajj — managing millions of people in extreme heat performing complex ritual movements across multiple sites — is one of the world's largest logistical operations. Non-Muslims are not permitted to enter Mecca. The experience of Hajj for those who complete it is described consistently as transformative in a way that few other experiences match.
The changes underway in Saudi Arabia since 2016 — women driving, cinemas reopening, entertainment culture expanding, women participating in the workforce at historically unprecedented levels — represent a transformation of daily life that is happening with a speed unusual for any society. The country is negotiating between its deeply conservative religious tradition and an economic and social modernisation agenda driven by its young population and its Vision 2030 plan.
