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Connecting worlds: Filipino and Indonesian sojourns to Saudi Arabia
Abstract
This article is a comparative study of Filipino and Indonesian migrant workers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It investigates how these two different transnational communities envisage their lives in the Kingdom. It examines (1) the historical dynamics and contemporary developments of Filipinos and Indonesians in Saudi Arabia, (2) the underlying motives, purposes and rationales of their sojourn and employment in the Kingdom, and (3) their perceptions and insights about their Saudi Arabian experiences. Interviews were conducted with 17 Filipinos and 16 Indonesians living and working in Saudi Arabia. This study suggests that many factors affect these two groups’ perceptions and experiences such as religiosity, employer/employee relations, and/or cultural factors.
... Moreover, based on Figure 1 above, the second destination country for Indonesian migrants is Saudi Arabia, with 833 Indonesian migrant workers. The abundance of job opportunities in the household and construction sectors and religious factors (Hajj and Umrah) contribute to the high number of Indonesian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia (Magliveras & Al Qurtuby, 2023;Silvey, 2004). ...
The purpose of this article is to improve Islamic financial literacy among Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia, with a focus on proper financial management and planning following Islamic principles. This activity was held on January 28, 2024, in Penang,Malaysia, and was attended by 40 Indonesian migrant workers. This community service method uses a qualitative method through seminars and discussions covering financial management strategies, Islamic
investment, and Islamic financial principles. The results of the questionnaire showed that the majority of participants felt that this program provided significant benefits. In addition, participants were dominated by females, which indicates a greater need for Islamic financial literacy among female migrant workers. The novelty of this article relates to paying particular attention to the specific needs of migrant workers and a group often underserved in financial literacy program
... Hungary stands out since it only catered to Filipino migrant workers just right after the peak of the pandemic. Additionally, unlike in other Western states, the number of Filipino workers has surged in recent years (Magliveras & Al Qurtuby, 2023 ...
... Some informants even stated that becoming a nurse was not their dream, but they had no regrets and were grateful to be nurses in Saudi Arabia. This is in accordance with research conducted by Magliveras & Al Qurtuby (2023) that one of the motivations for Indonesian Muslim nurses who work in Saudi Arabia is to be able to worship in the two holy cities of Islam, namely Mecca and Medina. ...
The Covid pandemic has ended, but health workers, especially nurses in Saudi Arabia, are still experiencing burnout due to high workloads. This study aims to analyze burnout and job satisfaction related to intention to leave among Indonesian nurses in health services in Saudi Arabia. This research used a qualitative method with a case-study approach. The research subjects used purposive sampling with a typical case of 12 Indonesian nurses who worked in health services and terminated their work contracts in Saudi Arabia. This research used data triangulation, source triangulation, and peer debriefing. In-depth interviews conducted at a predetermined place, data analysis follows 7 steps of Colaizzi's analysis. The results showed that burnout was closely related to emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low appreciation for one's abilities. Indonesian nurses who worked in health services in Saudi Arabia were happy and did not experience burnout. Meanwhile, job satisfaction or nurse satisfaction in dealing with work situations and environments is related to internal factors such as salary and rights to work facilities, while externally, it is related to self-development and professionalism.
Filipinos are a major part of the workforce in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia with a population of almost one million. This article investigates the effects of gender segregation on Filipino workers and how they navigate their lives through systems imposed on them. In particular, it examines the Kafala system (administrative sponsoring system) used for recruiting migrant workers for GCC countries. This article suggests that contrary beliefs about gender segregation and dress codes, Filipinas found it empowering. However, this article also concludes that gender segregation and dress codes also lead to isolation and loneliness. In addition, it is concluded that the fate and contentment of the overseas Filipino workers are directly dependent on who sponsors them.
Philippine migration studies have tended to emphasize the drawing power of the global labor market and the Philippine response to these labor demands. While these studies have obvious value to systematic investigations of global processes, there is a definite merit to explore migration within the context of an “earlier globalization
” which occured roughly in the late thirteenth century until the arrival of the Spanish colonial powers
toward the latter half of the sixteenth century. What emerges is a movement of migrants from the Arabian Peninsula
toward many parts of Southeast Asia
including the Philippines, establishing settlements and laying the foundation for institutions that have been entrenched and sustained even during the colonial period. Drawing from secondary sources as well as archival research, this paper seeks to investigate more deeply the waves of Arab (and other Middle Eastern) migrations to pre-colonial Philippines
. A historical approach to the study of migration is an effort to offer a counter-narrative to the more dominant Spanish-Christian-American account of Philippine history
. It also attempts to reveal the forces that have shaped a pluralistic Philippine culture
despite the insistence of Christian hegemony
. Finally, the paper promotes a historical perspective to migration studies that foreground transnational connections through local and regional connections, which, in the Philippine case, illustrates the enduring transnational connections between the Hadramawt region in Yemen and the southern sultanates
in the Philippine archipelago
.
In the electronic age the increase in Internet-mediated marriages constitute a new phenomenon among Filipinas who navigate the Web in search of (mostly) American spouses. This article discusses the notion of the ‘cultural logic of desire’ (Constable 2003) as the basis for Filipinas’ preference for American male spouses. This logic has been fashioned out of a specific historical relationship between the United States and the Philippines in which American cultural superiority and American benevolence provide the filters for Filipino women's marital preferences. This logic underlies these migration choices. The United States as the proverbial ‘land of milk and honey’ constitutes migrants’ first preference as a destination, and marriage as the most efficient route by which to realise migrants’ aspirations.
This article focuses on the study of the relationship between Islam, travel, and learning by conducting a case study on Indonesian Muslim students who studied (or are studying) in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it examines the changing dynamics of these students who traveled, immigrated to, and studied in Saudi Arabia in search of knowledge from previous centuries to the contemporary era. This article shows that Indonesian students in this peninsula are deeply plural and complex, far from being a monolithic group in terms of social background, religious affiliation, political orientation, major field of study, and motive of their study, among other factors. Thus, the present article aims at demystifying and challenging the common beliefs and narratives which hold that Saudi Arabia–trained Indonesian students have been exporters of Islamist intolerance, radicalism, or even terrorism.
This book examines Indonesian educational migrants and intellectual travellers in Saudi Arabia including students, researchers, teachers and scholars to provide a unique portrait of the religious and intellectual linkages between the two countries. Based on in-depth interviews and questionnaires, Sumanto Al Qurtuby identifies the “Indonesian legacy” in Saudi Arabia and examines in turn how the host country's influential Islamic scholars have impacted on Indonesian Muslims. The research sheds light on the dynamic history of Saudi Arabian-Indonesian relations and the intellectual impact of Indonesian migrants in Saudi Arabia.
The Virgin Mary plays a major–although often paradoxical–role in the incarnation and crucifixion and in the ecclesiastical structure of Christianity. This role is shaped by sacrifice as understood in terms of the religious patrimony of ancient Israel and as refigured in the new Christian and Islamic paradigms arising from it. Here the offering up of a son is a frequently occurring motif, one in which fathers and mothers play an emotionally fraught, anthropologically conditioned and theologically significant role. Like such figures as Abraham and Sarah in the Hebrew Bible, Mary’s relationship to sacrifice has profound implications not only for Christian theology, but for later developments in monotheism, including the role of women and gender in creating and sustaining religious identities, the emergence of competing definitions of orthodoxy, and the institution in some traditions of a masculine priesthood and religious hierarchy.
This is an introduction to a Filipino virtue ethics which is a relationship-oriented virtue ethics. The concepts to be discussed are the result of the unique history of the Philippines, namely a Southeast Asian tribal and animist tradition mixed with a Spanish Catholic tradition for over 300 years. Filipino virtue ethics is based on two foundational concepts in Filipino culture. The first is loób, which can easily be misunderstood when literally translated into English as ‘inside’ but which is better translated as ‘relational will’, and the second is kapwa, which is literally translated as ‘other person’ but is better understood as ‘together with the person’. These serve as pillars for a special collection of virtues (kagandahang-loób, utang-na-loób, pakikiramdam, hiya, lakas-ng-loób/bahala na) which are not individualistic virtues in the same way as most of the cardinal virtues of the Western tradition (i.e. prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude) but are all directed towards the preservation and strengthening of human relationships. This introduction to a Filipino virtue ethics is articulated and organized through a dialogue with Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue ethics.
This article argues that the bagong bayani (new hero) representation of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) justifies labor export. Specifically, it seeks to account for the manner in which such a discursive label was shaped by political discourse surrounding the much publicized case of Flor Contemplacion, a domestic helper hanged for double murder in Singapore in 1995. Using textual analysis of Senate hearings and news reports, this paper shows that shared discursive themes found in the texts resonate with the heroic discourse of migrants. These themes are likewise argued to be inter-discursively linked with gendered and globalized discourses in society. Overall, the findings indicate that the heroic discourse and its linguistic elements downplay the state's fundamental role as a labor exporter and the contradictions associated with state sponsorship of overseas migration. © 2013
In this article, Angeles explains how historically Islam in the Philippines has been identified as a religion of ethnic groups that are concentrated in the southern part of the country. Yet Islam in the Philippines has now transcended ethnic boundaries with the increasing number of Filipino Catholics converting to Islam. The author describes how labor migration to the Middle East has led to changes in the composition of Muslims in the Philippines, which in turn has resulted in the growing plural nature of Philippine Islam. This change is demonstrated by the growth of the Balik Islam (converts/ “reverts” to Islam) movement in the country and the changing material culture of the religion (Islamic dress, mosque architecture). Angeles traces the historical development of Philippine labor migration to the Middle East, explores the linkage between labor migration and conversion, and then studies the composition, purposes and aims of the Balik Islam movements that are linked to labor migration. She goes on to analyze the patterns that emerge out of these movements and their implications for Philippine Islam.
This paper examines how Muslim Filipino domestic workers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia creatively assert agency and solicit recognition despite their precarious position in that country. One way that they do so is by leaving their legal employers to go ‘freelance,’ selling their labor to the highest bidder and living as best they can as irregular migrants in that country. The capacity to act in that way is enabled by the high demand for domestic labor and the wider network of relations among compatriot and kin who provide them with assistance. While effectively drawing on those social networks, migrant domestic workers, nonetheless, continue to bear the cost of a stigmatized social position among their co-nationals.
While contemporary philosophers have been content to declare the logical possibilities of sacrifice exhausted, to have finally ‘sacrificed sacrifice,’ for many people around the world the notion of sacrifice – whether religious, secular, or somewhere in between – remains absolutely central to their understanding of themselves, their relations with others, and their place in the world. From religion to economics, and from politics to the environment, sacrificial tropes frequently emerge as key means of mediating and propagating various forms of power, moral discourse, and cultural identity. This paper lays out reasons for retaining sacrifice as an analytical concept within anthropology, and argues for the importance of a renewed focus on the ‘other side of sacrifice’, as a means of understanding better how sacrifice emerges beyond ritual and enters into the full gamut of social life.
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The Philippines deviated from the usual Southeast Asian pattern of Hadhrami Arab dominance among Middle Easterners. Despite the influence of Muslim Arabs in the Islamic southwest, the predominant community initially consisted of Armenians, and then of immigrants from Ottoman Syria from the 1880s. Coming via Latin America, the United States, or Asian entrepôts, most of these "Syrians" were Christians from modern Lebanon. They, however, included substantial Muslim Druze and Oriental Jewish minorities, and some came from Syria proper, Palestine, and even further a field. They formed the largest twentieth-century Syro-Lebanese community in Monsoon Asia. Some Middle Easterners became Filipino citizens, speaking either Spanish or English, others emigrated to the USA or Australia, and yet others went home. Their main contribution to the Philippines was economic. Initially peddlers and small shopkeepers, they moved into real estate, agriculture, mining, the leisure industry, the professions, the import-export trade, embroidery for export to the USA and, after independence, manufacturing for the local market.
Abstract There is heated debate in contemporary Indonesia about the rights and regulation of transnational women migrants, specifically about the ‘costs to families’ of women working overseas, but little attention has been given to women migrants' own views of family or women's own motivations for migration. In this article, which is based on field work in a migrant-sending community in West Java, I focus on migrant women's narratives of transnational migration and employment as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. I contribute to the literature on gender and transnational migration by exploring migrants' consumption desires and practices as reflective not only of commoditized exchange but also of affect and sentiment. In addition, I show in detail how religion and class inflect low-income women's narrations of morally appropriate mothering practices. In conclusion, I suggest that interpreting these debates from the ground up can contribute towards understanding the larger struggles animating the Indonesian state's contemporary relationships with women and Islam.
Recent efforts to elaborate a feminist geopolitics have centered on challenging and expanding classical spatializations of “the political”. Building on this growing body of work, this article explores the gender politics of state power as refracted in struggles over women’s transnational migration and domestic labor. Specifically, it analyzes the Indonesian and Saudi states’ involvement in shaping the migration and working conditions of Indonesian domestic servants employed in Saudi Arabia. It examines key aspects of both states’ direct and indirect influences on the feminization of the migrant labor force, the limitations of their policies for protecting overseas migrant women, and the political strategies that activists are employing to broaden the states’ spaces and scales of jurisdiction. It points up gender-specific limits to the internationalization of state labor regulation, as well as possibilities that NGOs have identified for improving the protection of migrant workers in this transnational context. It thus identifies some particular ways in which contestations around women’s transnational labor migration and gendered constructions of domestic labor are interlinked with the changing geographies of state power.
"This paper, in a comparative analysis of the Philippines and Indonesia, examines first under what conditions can migration favorably contribute to the process of economic development and then to what extent can economic growth impact upon reducing emigration pressures in these labor surplus economies. The paper also argues that there is still considerable scope for putting in place [an] agreed set of rules and policies to ensure better protection for the more vulnerable migrants."