Qatar Culture Club: Kalekjya (كلكجيه)

“Kalekjya” is a term that is widely used by old Qatari people. It is used to describe deceiving people. The term is originally Iraqi, but through cultural diffusion it is used in gulf countries. The story of this term started, when I was on Facebook checking some of my friend’s photos. I came across album of Qatar’s national day 2010, where my friends and their relatives were participating in Qatar’s national day. They were on a traditional dhow, the dhow was very old and it was about 100 years old. One of my friend relatives had repaired and renewed this dhow. It was the oldest dhow to participate on that day. So part of their participation, was to act like sailors, in the old traditional way. His relative, who was mainly responsible of that, which had the experience, was teaching them what do and how to do it. So they were driving him crazy because they did not really do what he was asking them to do. So he was making fun of them by describing them with this word “Kalekjya”. They really liked it and started commenting on what he is saying. They still remember his word and used it so much even after the event.

The word is not so common for us as a young generation. At the beginning, I went to my mom asking her what this word means. She told me what it means and when to use it. In addition to, the word origin. After that I understood the word I use it so much in these days. So similar effects to what my friends had.

But this also made me raise the question. What makes my friends and I like this old traditional term. My friends and I are university students and every day we are learning something new. We always learn new terms, but we do not really focus on them that much and use them as the term “Kalekjya”. I tried to find an explanation and I ended up with this. I believe the term “Kalekjya” was really different because of the emotional response it stimulates in me and my friends. However, we are guys; we do not really have an emotional response to everything as girls do. Then the question is what stimulates our emotional response here. I believe it was sort of hidden cultural relativism. Some might say that I am using the term cultural relativism in the wrong way. However, that not true, because we have our own culture as young generation. This is different that our father’s culture and that is why I used cultural relativism term. Even if we do not feel that, we really tend go back to our father’s culture. We went back to it because we like it. This happened here because we liked the term” Kalekjya.”