I listened to Saudi media personality Daoud Al-Shuryan during a television interview in which he spoke about the return to roots in Saudi society through the collective Saudi memory's recovery of many ancestral customs that had faded away over the years. He spoke about certain customs that some Riyadh neighbourhoods have revived with the return of Saudis from the Al-Zubair region, who, as he put it, "opened the black box of memory" and brought back to life some of what had been lost for 400 years.
Al-Shuryan's talk was candid, engaging and of the utmost importance; it opened a wide window onto the questions of identity and the return to roots, particularly in Gulf societies, which the social and cultural forces of globalisation appear to have failed to dislodge from their conservative Arab identity.
There is no doubt that the phenomenon of peoples returning to their roots and demanding the preservation of their cultural distinctiveness is no longer confined to Arab societies alone — even Norwegians at World Cup matches were cheering their national team in the manner of their Viking forebears. This is happening after many peoples abandoned their personalities and cultural particularities under the pretext of openness and modernity, yet a sweeping return to roots now appears to be sweeping the world like a wave or a hurricane.
This phenomenon, then, is no mere passing trend; it is perhaps one of the most significant cultural shifts in the world over the past two decades. After roughly two centuries of betting on globalisation and modernity as a path to dissolving cultural differences, we are beginning to witness a counter-movement that might be called "the return to roots" or "the rediscovery of local identity" — with all its power and lustre — and a restoration of the true meaning of belonging and of ties deeply rooted in land, history and family, alongside a repositioning within this vast world.
Behavioural scientists and anthropologists have identified causes for this return, and perhaps the most important from my perspective is that globalisation produced a feeling among people everywhere of sameness and loss of distinctiveness. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, people appeared to be converging on a single culture — wearing the same clothes (jeans and shirts, for men and women alike), listening to the same music, frequenting the same restaurants, and most of them even speaking English — whereas the human being, at the core of his nature, wants to feel that he belongs to a nation, a history and a story different from those of others. From that idea sprang the question: who were we before we became a copy of this world?