On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (13 page)

While none of this may sound revolutionary—or even ambitious—to American women, whose fight to gain equal opportunity in education and the workplace began in earnest at least fifty years ago, it definitely is daring in Saudi society. There is no reliable polling on this issue, but one Saudi business owner offers a microcosmic glimpse of female conservatism. At her company, female job applicants are asked a gating question: Are you willing to work in a gender-mixed environment with your face uncovered? Fewer than 10 percent answer yes.

Most Saudi women, of course, can’t work—or they refuse
to work in a mixed environment.
Women make up less than 12 percent of the total labor force, the lowest percentage in the Middle East, and an enormous waste of productive talent for the Saudi economy. Most who are working are employed as teachers of other females. While many more women want and need jobs these days, the religious pressure against working in gender-mixed environments means few jobs are available to them. As a result, more Saudi women are starting their own businesses, though the number of female-owned businesses still is less than 5 percent.
Despite efforts by King Abdullah, women continue to confront endless obstacles, including limits on their ability to travel, long delays in securing required registrations from often obstinate bureaucrats at the “female sections” of government ministries, and lack of enforcement of the modest new rules and regulations that are intended to help women.

A new survey of Saudi businesswomen recommends above all else the creation of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs to monitor enforcement of royal decrees regarding women and to devise a national strategy for their transition into the Saudi economy. Lack of enforcement of royal decrees, of rules and regulations, and even of court judgments is a major problem for all Saudis but especially for women. Given the many religious and regulatory hurdles women face, it is understandable that the majority simply stay home.

One evening at two different social gatherings illustrates how diverse and divided are Saudi women beneath their public uniform of black, which makes all of them, regardless of age or physique, resemble flying crows.

In a wealthy neighborhood of North Riyadh lives the large family of an imam, or religious leader. Approaching the door of the imam’s home requires covering oneself in an
abaya
and ensuring that every hair is hidden beneath a black scarf. Anything less would be tantamount to allowing the neighbors to see a loose woman entering the home of a religious leader.

Inside, the women have gathered in a sitting room furnished with heavy burgundy couches and chairs. Pots of coffee and tea rest on a table in the center, along with bowls
of dates and trays of chocolates and the ubiquitous box of Kleenex for wiping fingers soiled by sticky dates. The imam’s mother, a small woman sixty years of age, presides. She is dressed in a plain floor-length cotton dress with long sleeves and a scarf tightly binding her hair and neck. The younger women, all bareheaded since no men are present, are wearing long skirts but not the high-necked dress of the matronly hostess, indicating that even in a conservative religious family, the young are edging away from tradition—if only in dress. The conversation rapidly turns to family.

“Sometimes people say don’t have children as they are expensive,” says the imam’s mother. “But the more children I had, the more God provided.” She has six boys and six girls and twenty-two grandchildren. Most of her daughters have one or more young children on their laps or leaning against their chairs. Still, she teases them and urges, “Why not more children? Get busy.” Even in this conservative home, her daughters are university graduates, but they, like their mother, stay home with their children. The grown daughters take turns pouring tea while their young daughters perpetually press trays of sweets on all the women. (In Saudi, sweets precede dinner.)

Over dinner, served in traditional Saudi style on a plastic sheet spread on the floor, the hostess squats on her knees and eats with her right hand, rolling the rice and vegetables into a ball and scooping them into her mouth. Her more modern daughters use forks and spoons. Throughout the meal, the mother dispenses advice on proper Islamic living. “Women shouldn’t have two maids,” she says. “It is all right to have someone to help with the cleaning, but if you have someone to look after your children, what do you do? You go out. This is wrong. You should focus on your children.” These daughters don’t smile or snicker to one another as Western daughters well might upon receiving such motherly advice. They listen respectfully and nod obediently.

In this home, religion, not work, is topic number one. The hostess asks God that one day all assembled here will be together with him in paradise. She and her daughters deplore
the impact of modernity on the lives of Saudi women. “The prophet tells us not to do what others are doing. If they are going this way, we should go that way,” says one of the women, using her cell phone to draw a sharp turn on the floor. “But young Saudi girls watch television, and instead of being proudly different, they do what others are doing, and this is a shame. They cut their hair. They don’t wear the
hijab
[scarf] and
niqab
[full-face veil].”

The imam’s mother, like many traditional Saudi women, is one of several wives of her husband. His two other wives, she explains, live nearby so he can easily move from home to home. The wives do not mix, but their children do. One of the other guests acknowledges that she too is the second wife of her husband of two decades. “I knew he had another wife,” she says, “but what is important is only whether or not he is a good man. Will he treat us equally?” These two wives do not see each other now, though in earlier years their husband used to drop his new wife’s baby with the first wife so that the younger second wife could attend university—hardly likely to endear the two women to each other. I ask if any of the younger females shares her husband with another wife, and each emphatically shakes her head no. “But it is not my choice,” adds one. “If Allah wills, I accept.”

While there clearly are some generational differences in outlook within this family, all the women, young and old, adhere to a way of life that acknowledges the primacy of men and the centrality of Islam. While the younger women are adapting to some changes in society, none seeks to change society.

On the same evening, in a large walled home not far away, another group of women are gathered in a different setting pursuing a very different conversation. These women, while far from revolutionaries, are pushing gently against the traditional strictures of Saudi life and seizing whatever new space society allows women. The hostess, a slim thirtyish woman in white pants and blouse with long stylish dark hair and expensive jewelry, is entertaining a half-dozen friends. There are no clinging children to wrinkle the expensive Western
outfits of these women. Nor do any of them share their husband with another wife. Alone among the group, the hostess isn’t employed outside the home, as she has four children, including a new baby. The other women include an event planner, an elementary school principal, the owner of a small business, and a trainer in cosmetology. All the women speak excellent English. All graduated from King Saud University in Riyadh, and all have educated mothers who encourage them to work. All have traveled to Europe, and they greet each other with several touches of the cheek before sinking comfortably into plush chairs and couches in this modern Western-style living room. Two Filipino maids circulate silently serving tall fruit drinks, then Arabic coffee, then tea, and finally trays of expensive little sweets.

This scene and these ladies could be anywhere—Paris, London, New York—but for the content of the conversation. In no Western gathering of women discussing social mores would one hear talk of whether and how to shake hands with men. “In a professional situation it is up to the lady whether or not to offer her hand,” says Sadeem. “If a woman sticks out her hand with a stiff arm that means shake hands only; if the arm is slightly bent that means one is willing to touch cheeks.” It is a largely hypothetical conversation. Most traditional Saudi men, of course, would refuse to shake hands with a woman and would be horrified at touching cheeks, because strict religious believers see touching an unrelated woman as forbidden by Islam.

These working Westernized women who can afford drivers, nannies, and maids insist they like the special, protected role of women in Islam. “Men are supposed to take care of us even if we work,” says Hala. “We like our life and our religion.” But they also say they want the opportunity to choose their lifestyle. “We want a choice,” says the cosmetology trainer. “We want to work or not, drive or not, shake hands or not.” In their childhood, before the migration of nearly 80 percent of all Saudis from rural villages into one of three urban centers—Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam—people were much freer, they say. A woman’s
abaya
was simply a short
shawl around the shoulders. Couples mixed over dinners in their homes. Children played all across their neighborhoods and spent the night in each other’s homes, something most children aren’t allowed to do these days. “In the eighties the country became very conservative,” says one woman. “We no longer know what is required by religion.”

Certainly Saudi was much freer in the late 1970s for both Saudi and Western women. In those days, most Western women, including me, rarely wore an
abaya
, and I often was invited to mixed-gender dinners in the homes of Saudi officials. Now an
abaya
is essential to avoid unwanted attention, and Saudi women are much rarer than alcohol at dinner, even in the homes of elite businessmen and government officials.

Since Islam underpins all of Saudi society, advocates for more freedom and opportunity for women couch their arguments in the Koran. References to what is required by religion have a far wider resonance with women—and surely with men—than talk of women’s rights, since anything Western is suspect as being imposed or encouraged by an alien culture for a sinister reason. So if confrontation—bra burning, marches, and demonstrations—was the predominant tactic of American women demanding equality in the second half of the twentieth century, co-option is the strategy of their Saudi sisters in the dawn of the twenty-first. A group of Saudi women tried confrontation once with very unhappy consequences.

In October 1990, articles began appearing in the heavily censored Saudi press quoting Saudi women expressing alarm that had Saddam Hussein invaded Saudi Arabia rather than Kuwait, they would not have been able to drive their children to safety as Kuwaiti women had done.
A month later, forty-seven women driven by their chauffeurs gathered at a supermarket in downtown Riyadh and dismissed their drivers. About a quarter of the women—all of whom had valid international driving licenses—took the wheel, with the other women as passengers, and drove off in a caravan through Riyadh. Within blocks, the religious police stopped the cars and ordered the women out. Regular police officers arrived
and took control. The police officers drove the cars with the religious police in the passenger seats and the women in the backseats to police headquarters.

Before their demonstration, the women, all from prominent Saudi families, had sent a petition to His Royal Highness Prince Salman, at that time the governor of Riyadh, begging his brother, the Saudi king, to open his heart to their “humane demand” to drive. They argued that in the Prophet’s day, women rode camels, the primary means of transportation, and that “such is the greatness of the teacher of humanity and the master of men in leaving lessons that are as clear as the sunlight to dispel the darkness of ignorance.” The women were detained while Prince Salman summoned religious and legal experts to discuss what to do with them. Since all the women were veiled with only their eyes showing, the religious officials found no moral issues, and because the Koran says nothing about driving, and the women had legal international licenses, the women were released. But any celebration of this small victory for women proved premature.

As word of the demonstration spread from family to family (even though it wasn’t covered in the Saudi media, and the Internet did not exist), the women, many of whom taught at women’s universities, found themselves denounced by messages tacked to their office doors, in sermons at mosques around the kingdom, and by leaflets in the streets entitled “Names of the Promoters of Vice and Lasciviousness.” This sort of spontaneous religious backlash is what makes even the Al Saud cautious about pushing reform too fast.

Sure enough, nervous royals quickly caved. Prince Salman’s finding was buried. The kingdom’s grand mufti, Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz, the blind sheikh famous for declaring some thirty years earlier that the earth was flat, issued a fatwa. “
Allowing women to drive,” the grand mufti declared, “contributes to the downfall of society” by encouraging mixing of the sexes and “adultery, which is the main reason for the prohibition of these practices.” And there things still stand, more than two decades later, though there are recurrent rumors that the driving ban again may be reviewed and
relaxed, perhaps starting with foreign females, Saudi women physicians, or women over thirty-five. Essentially a Saudi woman is seen as some kind of sexually depraved creature who, if alone in a car, would be rapidly lured into adultery. On the other hand, that same woman being chauffeured around Riyadh by a foreign male driver is considered secure, as she is under the control of a man—the driver. Moreover, that man by virtue of being foreign is seen by Saudi men as merely a sexless extension of the car with no possible appeal to the female passenger. It is just one of the myriad mystifying contradictions of Saudi society.

“
The king wants to let women drive,” explains one of his close royal relatives. “But he did a poll that showed 85 percent of Saudis oppose women driving. He was shocked; totally shocked. But what can he do?”

Saudi women learned from their aborted drive-in two decades ago. If the religious establishment would use the Koran as a sword against women, then women would use the holy book as their shield—and even occasionally as a sword—against religious officials. When the women of Jeddah, the kingdom’s most international city, finally won agreement, a decade after the driving incident, from the all-male chamber of commerce to create a business bureau for women, they named it after the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, thus the Kadijah bint Khuwailid Businesswomen Center.