On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (23 page)

On a visit to Hail, a poor province on the Iraq border, King Abdullah is reliably said to have been told by the provincial governor, one of his nephews, that there was no available land on which to build public facilities. The king, surveying a vista that included much open land, asked who owned it all. The answer: the defense ministry, a decorous way of saying the land was owned by the then minister of defense and royal half-brother, the late Crown Prince Sultan. The next day, by prearrangement, the governor, this time in the presence of both King Abdullah and Prince Sultan, again raised the issue of land to develop his poor province. King Abdullah coyly inquired, “Who owns all this land?” Prince Sultan,
put on the spot, responded to the king that the land was “all yours” to dispose of. So Abdullah graciously accepted, and the governor got his land. Again, it is a nice example of what happens when the king personally intercedes, but by definition it is a rarity in a regime where even the king has to balance his priorities with those of his powerful half-brothers and their sons.

If reforming education in general faces multiple obstacles, educating girls should logically face even more. Yet here arguably more progress has been made than in any other area of Saudi educational reform. In 2002 religious police infamously allowed fourteen middle school girls to burn to death inside their Mecca school just after classes began one morning.
The girls who tried to flee the burning school were forced back inside by the religious police because the girls were not fully covered in
abayas
and veils.

The national outrage that followed gave Abdullah the opportunity to remove girls’ schools from the supervision of religious authorities and put them under the Ministry of Education, which already controlled boys’ schools. Girls’ schools, at their creation in the 1960s, had been put under the control of the General Presidency for Girls’ Education, an autonomous government agency controlled by conservative clerics, as a compromise to calm public opposition to allowing (not requiring) girls to attend school. Now a new wave of public criticism emboldened Abdullah to reverse that decision, yet another instance of the Al Saud bending back and forth with prevailing winds.

Change of control, while progress, doesn’t necessarily mean substantive change. For example, in many girls’ schools, particularly those in rented buildings, safety inspectors—who invariably are male—are not permitted to enter the schools at any time the girls are present to inspect or enforce safety standards. Moreover, female students, much like medieval nuns, are locked inside their schools, and access is controlled by elderly male guards outside the high walls that surround all schools. The girls arrive in the morning and enter the school through a narrow portal, which then is locked behind
them. When school is over, the door is unlocked, to allow the girls to be picked up by drivers or parents. At one such school I was conducted inside in the company of several senior women administrators of education for a tour. At the conclusion of the visit, the group knocked on the locked door to leave, and no one responded. The male caretaker had left his post. Phone calls finally produced him a few minutes later, but had there been an emergency inside, the students would have been trapped until either the female principal inside or the male guard outside unlocked the door. The tendency of elderly guards to wander off on personal errands during school hours has led some parents to propose that schools be safeguarded instead by professional security companies, but so far tradition prevails.

Despite all the limitations and the continued segregation, there are areas of small progress for young women. Women’s education clearly is better off under the control of even a religiously dominated Ministry of Education than under the direct control of religious authorities. The appointment of Norah al Faiz to head women’s education is a significant step, even if she is proceeding cautiously.

There are some outposts of outstanding education in the kingdom. Ahliyya School in Dhahran, founded in 1977 by Khalid al Turki, a successful businessman, and his Ohio-born American wife, Sally, is one. A private K–12 school, Ahliyya, with tuition of $6,500 a year, attracts mostly well-off students. Most of the girls are daughters of Saudi ARAMCO employees. During a visit with twenty senior class students, the most articulate and impressive women I encountered on visits to a dozen schools and universities in the kingdom, all said they had traveled to the United States, some 80 percent had visited European countries and 30 percent had visited Asian countries beyond Saudi Arabia. All intended to have careers and children simultaneously. Their teachers spend five weeks each year being trained in the latest methods to stimulate students to learn, not just recite. The girls have been taken abroad to compete with other international students in a Model United Nations debate, something unheard
of for public school students. “The fact we wear long black robes doesn’t mean we can’t think,” says one young woman. “Things are changing fast,” she adds. “Five years ago my parents said I could never go to the United States to university. Two years ago they said maybe I could go with my brother. This year they said I could go alone.” Why the change? “Society has changed to accept more things for women,” she says matter-of-factly. And in her little corner of Saudi society, it has.

Another sign of progress: even a few law schools have opened for women in recent years. Although females still are not permitted to appear in court as lawyers, dozens of girls flocked to Riyadh’s Prince Sultan University law school when it opened in 2006. Maha Fozan, a freshman in this first group of law students, enthusiastically predicted in 2007 that by the time she graduated, women would be allowed to practice before a judge, not simply prepare legal arguments for their male colleagues to present. “
The time has come. Society needs women lawyers. King Abdullah is behind us, so things will change,” she insisted with youthful certitude.

Sure enough, in this case optimism seems not to have been entirely misplaced. In late 2009, Maha, the articulate young woman whose confidence had visibly grown in the intervening years of her law studies, said emphatically, “I am going to have a career in law just like I planned.” Indeed, the minister of justice, another new appointee of King Abdullah, says he is evaluating a regulation to allow women to represent female clients before the kingdom’s male-only Sharia judges. The minister, Muhammad Abdul Kareem al Eisa, forty-six, not only agrees to meet me but also expresses support for the idea of women lawyers in courts. “
A woman is allowed to speak in court and represent a woman now, but she isn’t yet licensed as a professional lawyer,” he says. “This is now under study, and I hope it will be completed and women will soon be licensed as professional lawyers.” Nothing happens quickly in Saudi Arabia, surely nothing as fundamental as changes to a judicial system under complete control of the religious establishment. But for now things do seem to be on track for
women to be licensed as professional lawyers and permitted actually to practice in court.

Some other career opportunities also are opening these days for educated women, who traditionally have been limited to the fields of education (teaching only girls) or medicine (treating mostly women). A sprinkling of female university graduates now can be found in business, interior design, computer technology, and marketing, though these women represent only a token presence in overwhelmingly male workplaces. If a glass ceiling still limits career women in the West, concrete walls still block most in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia remains an almost entirely segregated society where men and women don’t mix at the water fountain—or almost anywhere else—so job opportunities remain restricted. For example, a young woman university graduate is offered a position in a small interior decorating firm that employs two men and one woman working in adjacent but separate offices. The young woman’s mother expresses fear that if her daughter takes the job and joins the other young woman in the female section, at some point the men and women will encounter each other in their work, and that encounter will be glimpsed by one of the omnipresent religious police, who then could arrest the young people for immoral mixing. “This will ruin my daughter’s reputation even though she is doing nothing wrong,” the woman frets. “I don’t want her to risk her life for this job.”

Such concerns are common to all women in the society, however well educated they may be. Only in the rarest of workplaces, such as the offices of multinational firms, can women function alongside men, and even at these offices there are occasional raids by religious police. The one institution exempt from all these conventions and restrictions is Saudi ARAMCO, which since its founding has operated as an innovative and international island in the largely stagnant Saudi sea. KAUST is now a second island. The government has made it clear that these islands—like foreign embassies in Saudi Arabia—are off limits to the religious police.

Whatever educational problems exist now, the government
is going to have to run fast just to stand still, given the geyser of young people erupting from Saudi schools.
The kingdom’s 5.5 million students will increase 20 percent to 6.2 million by 2022. At present, some 140,000 young men (and a similar number of young women) graduate from high school each year, but fewer than half gain admission to a Saudi university—
even though between 2002 and 2006 the kingdom opened sixteen new universities, bringing the total to twenty-four public universities. The Princess Nora University, a massive campus for fifty thousand women, opened in 2011, making twenty-five. Private universities, located primarily in major cities, jumped from one to eight.

Of course quantity alone is not sufficient to meet the country’s need to train graduates for jobs in a global knowledge economy. “
Families put kids on a track to get grades, not to develop as individuals,” says Dr. Muhammad al Ohali, deputy minister of educational affairs in the Ministry of Higher Education and the man in charge of crafting Saudi higher education reform plans for the next twenty years. “Knowledge these days expires quickly, so we have to find a way to set the fire in students to want to learn.”
Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, minister of education and King Abdullah’s son-in-law, adds, “The king’s message is that oil is not our first wealth. Education is. We have to develop the people now.”

Easier said than done. Stephane Lacroix, a Saudi expert at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, sums up the battle over education in Saudi Arabia: “The education system is so controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, it will take twenty years to change—if at all. Islamists see education as their base so they won’t compromise on this.” As with the struggle over women’s role in society, the tug-of-war over education continues, with the religious still pulling the greater weight.

L
and at any Saudi airport and proceed to baggage claim. The men offering to handle your luggage are from Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan. Exit the airport for a taxi, and your driver almost surely is Pakistani. Arrive at your hotel, and the guard who performs the obligatory security check on the taxi’s trunk is probably from Yemen. The doorman who greets you is Pakistani, and the smiling men behind the check-in desk are Lebanese. The waiter offering coffee in the lobby is Filipino, as are many of the men who will clean your room. So you have been in Saudi Arabia for more than an hour and, except at passport control, have yet to encounter a Saudi.

One of every three people in Saudi Arabia is a foreigner.
Two out of every three people with a job of any sort are foreign.
And in Saudi Arabia’s anemic private sector, fully nine out of ten people holding jobs are non-Saudi. To the extent that there is enterprise in the kingdom, it is almost entirely imported.

Visit any middle-class Saudi home, and you are likely to see one or more young men of the family, some educated and some not, hanging around, with little prospect and often little interest in finding a job. Second, you are even more
likely to see a number of young women of the family, almost surely better educated and more ambitious, who are unable to enter a workforce that offers them precious few opportunities. Third, the family is likely to employ one or more foreigners to do much of the work within the household and to provide almost every service required in daily life, from a ride in a taxi, to tutoring for children, to shopping at a department store.

Saudi Arabia, in short, is a society in which all too many men do not want to work at jobs for which they are qualified; in which women by and large aren’t allowed to work; and in which, as a result, most of the work is done by foreigners—Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis, and others—who compose the a majority of the labor force. Most of these 8.5 million foreigners are treated as second-class citizens; their lives are controlled by a sponsoring employer, who must give permission for them to change employment. Essentially they are indentured servants for the period of their contracts.

On the surface, the entire kingdom functions like a grand hotel. Saudi citizens check in at birth, remain isolated in their rooms, take little pride in caring for their surroundings, and merely demand the services provided by the hotel’s foreign employees, who are paid pitifully low salaries from the government’s bountiful oil revenue. After all, one in every four barrels of oil sold on the world market comes from Saudi Arabia.
In 2011, thanks primarily to huge oil revenues, the kingdom’s GDP totaled $560 billion, ranking Saudi Arabia number twenty-four among world economies. But this is misleading. Try as it might, with multiple five-year plans over the past thirty years, the kingdom has failed to diversify its economy beyond oil, which creates few jobs for the ever-expanding slick of young Saudis.
As a result, on a per capita income basis, the country ranks number fifty-five, between the Seychelles and Barbados. So over the past thirty years, the five-star Saudi hotel has deteriorated into something more like Motel 6 for most Saudi citizens, while royals and some elite business families continue to enjoy a penthouse lifestyle.