Frogs and Shooting Stars

Today I got an insight into the flirtation patterns in conservative Muslim societies like Saudi and Yemen. We met Yusuf, a friend of a friend at a café today. He is a Syrian college student who has also lived in the United States, Saudi, Kuwait, and Yemen. We got on the subject of same-sex relationships, which are apparently more common than you would think among young people. The conversation then turned to relationships between young people in general. Yusuf told how when he first moved to Saudi he learned from friends how you could tell which girls were conservative and which were more “open.” He also described how guys would go cruising in Saudi or Kuwait and toss their mobile numbers at girls as they passed. A more modern development is to write your number on your iPad to flash to girls at traffic stops. Receptive girls would call you back if the car was nice enough and the man handsome enough. Once in Yemen, he even saw a girl toss her number into a car as it passed. He told the man, who was chewing a large wad of qat at the time, that the number was for the car, not him.

We then asked how one could tell in a place like Yemen, where the vast majority of women wear the full niqab, whether a girl was hot or not. He answered with this saying: “Taht al-buraqa difadaa wa najoum sataa,” or, “Under the burqa are both frogs and shooting stars.”