The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (12 page)

The in-flight movies offer a taste of things to come. If you order
The Proposal
, you get a blurry blob over Sandra Bullock's modest décolletage, and even her clavicles, and the male stripper scene and the erection joke have vanished altogether. A curtained partition goes up so that Saudi women can nap without their abayas. There's no alcohol onboard, although some veteran business travelers en route to the Kingdom order vodkas at the airport bar and pour them into a water bottle for sustenance along the way. At the airport in Riyadh, the gender segregation ratchets up. There's a Ladies' Waiting Room and a Ladies' Prayer Room. If there hadn't been a Saudi majordomo to come and collect us, we would have been in limbo—a pair of single women wandering the airport with no man to get them out, trapped forever like Tom Hanks in
The Terminal.

In America, you get chocolates in your hotel room. In Riyadh, you might get a gift bag from your hosts in the Kingdom with something to slip into for dinner—a long black abaya and a black headscarf that make you look like a mummy and feel like a pizza oven. And even then they'll stick you behind a screen or curtain in the "family" section of the restaurant. The big Gloria Steinem advance in recent years is that women now wear abayas with dazzling designs on the back (sometimes with thousands of dollars' worth of Swarovski crystals) or Burberry or zebra-patterned trim on the sleeves.

I respect Islam's mandate for modest clothing. But I don't see why I have to adopt a dress code, as Aaron Sorkin put it on
The West Wing
, that makes "a Maryknoll nun look like Malibu Barbie." Needless to say, Barbie herself was banned in Saudi Arabia, though I did see Barbie paraphernalia for sale in a Riyadh supermarket and a Barbie-like doll, accessorized with headscarf and abaya (and of course not in a box with Ken), in the National Museum gift shop. As for
Hello!
magazine, a recent import to the Kingdom, Saudi censors paste small white squares of paper on the models' glossy thighs.

 

Soon after our arrival I asked Prince Sultan bin Salman, the tourism minister, about the dress code for foreigners. "Well, the abaya is part of the uniform," he said. "It's part of enjoying the culture. I've seen people who go to India dress up in the Indian sari." Najla Al-Khalifah, a member of the prince's staff in the female section of the tourist bureau, offered another analogy: "You can't wear shorts for the opera. You must dress for the occasion. If you don't like it, don't go." Fair enough, but if you do wear shorts to the opera, you won't get arrested by the roving outriders of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—that is, the
mutawa
, or religious police.

Being in purdah pricks more deeply when you're dealing with American-owned enterprises—it's as if your own people are in sexist cahoots with your captors. In 2008, covering President Bush's trip to the Middle East, I was standing next to ABC's Martha Raddatz at the desk at the Riyadh Marriott when she angrily pressed the clerk about getting into the gym. He gave her The Smile. How about never, lady? On this trip, at Budget Rent a Car, the man at the counter explained to me that women could rent cars only if they paid extra for a driver. (And, to boot, it would be dishonorable for a woman to sit in the passenger seat unless a male relative were driving.) When I said I could drive myself, the man's head fell back in helpless laughter. I enlisted Nicolla Hewitt, a gorgeous, statuesque blonde New Yorker on business in Saudi Arabia, to join me in a brief sit-in at the men's section of Starbucks in the upscale Kingdom Centre mall. Her head was swirling with lurid news accounts of a Western woman who had been dragged from a Starbucks for committing the crime of attempted equality. "If I see the bloody
mutawa
," she said, gripping her latte nervously, "I'm hoofing it."

At various establishments I began amusing myself by seeing how long it took for male Cerberuses to dart forward and block the way to the front sections reserved for men. At McDonald's, dourly observing my arrival, a janitor barred the door with a broom in two seconds flat. At the posh Al Faisaliah Hotel, in Riyadh, I was asking the maître d' why I couldn't sit with the businessmen when he suddenly caught sight of an elegant woman sashaying through the men's section. He made a Reggie Bush run to knock her out of bounds before turning back to thwart my own entrance with a Baryshnikov leap. I did manage a moment of Pyrrhic triumph in the deserted men's section in the lobby café of the Jidda Hilton, ordering a cappuccino, but then the waiter informed me that he couldn't serve it until I moved five feet back to the women's section.

Hotel desk clerks would warn me to put on my abaya merely to walk across the lobby, even when I was wearing my most modest floor-length navy dress, the one reserved for family funerals. "You will get lots of attentions—not good attentions," one clerk said. Not wearing an abaya can be hazardous—but so can wearing one. Signs on the mall escalators caution women to be careful not to get their cloaks caught in the moving stairs. (A Muslim woman was recently choked to death by her hijab while on holiday in Australia; it had gotten caught in a go-cart at high speed.) You soon become paranoid, worrying that if you open the door for room service wearing a terry-cloth robe, you'll end up in the stocks. But the top hotels are staffed by foreign men—something I realized must be the case when my butler at the Al Faisaliah folded my underwear unprompted. If I were buttled by a Saudi, we'd probably be shuttled to Deera Square—or Chop Chop Square, as it's better known—where the public beheadings occur. It's the one with the big drain, which the Saudis claim is for rain.

The first time I traveled to Saudi Arabia was in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, had invited me to come over and see for myself that not all Saudis are terrorists. On that trip, I was more heedless and cavalier. I wore a hot-pink skirt, with fringe, to go to an interview with the Saudi education minister. When I came down from my hotel room, the men in the lobby glared with such hostility that I thought they'd pelt me to death with their dates. My minder turned me back to the elevator. "Go get your abaya!" he yelled. "They'll kill you!" (My Guardian Knew What Was Best for Me.) This was right around the time when fifteen Saudi schoolgirls had died in a fire because the
mutawa
wouldn't let them escape without their headscarves and abayas, a horrifying episode that shook the Kingdom. Confronted by carloads of screaming men whenever I wore my own clothes, I added more layers but still got into trouble. I was swathed in black with a headscarf at a mall next to the Al Faisaliah Hotel when four members of the
mutawa
bore down. They barked in Arabic that they could see my neck and the outline of my body, and they confiscated my passport. All this was happening against the backdrop of a storefront underwear display featuring a lacy red teddy. My companion, the suave Adel al-Jubeir, an adviser to King Abdullah and now the Saudi ambassador to Washington, managed to retrieve the passport and obtain permission for me to leave the mall (and the country), but it took a disconcertingly long time.

With each incident, you feel more cowed and less eager to defy the dress-to-repress rules. For this trip, I had an abaya made so I wouldn't have to swelter inside the standard polyester ones in the baking heat. I didn't go for anything as gauzy as Dorothy Lamour's in
The Road to Morocco.
I wanted simple black linen. But the tailor tried too hard to give it a flattering shape, adding slits so high they could get my throat slit. When I wore it, my minders pestered me to put an abaya over my abaya. It reminded me of Martin Short's mischievous question about Hillary Clinton's nightwear: "Does she have a pantsuit on under her pantsuit?"

Still, this time around, I decided to look on the sunny side of repression. Feel guilty about not jogging? Don't even try! Tired of running off to every new exhibition? Lucky you—there aren't any art museums! Can't decide which sybaritic treatment to select at the hotel spa? Relax—the spa's just for men. And you never have to stress about a bad-hair day.

The two words you'll quickly learn are
haled
(permissible) and
haram
(forbidden)—the kosher and nonkosher of the Arab world. Since your old pastimes are now mostly
haram
, you'll have to pick up some new vices. Gorge on gamy camel bacon at Friday brunch. (Friday is the Muslim Sunday.) Develop a new obsession with tweezing and threading your eyebrows and blackening your Bedouin bedroom eyes—now literally the windows to the soul. Enjoy a country that is the last refuge of indoor smoking. I went to the cigar bar at the fancy Globe restaurant in Riyadh and enjoyed a "Churchill's Cabinet" stogie for 180 riyals ($50), with its "lovely notes of leather and cream, hints of coffee, citrus, and spice." To go along with beluga caviar and Maine-lobster snacks there was an elaborate wine presentation, with the waiter showing off the label of a nonalcoholic Zinfandel before nestling it in a silver ice bucket. "It's from California," he said proudly. I fell into tippling in the morning, starting the day with Saudi champagne, a saccharine apple juice concoction.

 

You might also want to emulate the spoiled Saudi set and just loll about until the sun sets, watching
The Bold and the Beautiful
or Glenn Beck on satellite TV. (There are no public movie theaters.) The Saudis have a homegrown version of the
Today
show in English, with their own Meredith Vieira in headscarf, promoting buttocks exercises and colon cleansing, and a hefty Martha Stewart doppelgänger in a babushka, baking dried-apricot sandwiches in flower shapes. It's all very cozy, even if the crawl underneath is crawling with less-than-flattering stories about Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. One night, deciding to take a risk, I smuggled a young Saudi man up to my hotel room to translate some of the scary-looking rants on TV by guys in
thobes
and kaffiyehs. Were they trashing the Great Satan? He told me that the serious-looking bearded guy talking a mile a minute was merely chatting about soccer, and another scowling fellow with intense brown eyes was just praying. Likely story.

Once out of your room, you can stroll through the malls with your girlfriends for some Bluetooth flirting, where Rashid and Khalid detect your cell phone network as you walk by and send text messages that range from chatty to creepy. One of my young married minders said he regularly gets hassled by the
mutawa
when he's out flirting with female friends: "They say, 'Can I ask who you are with?' and I tell them, 'Oh, she's my sister.' And they say, ''Your sister? Do you laugh like that with your sister?'" There's no date night in Saudi Arabia. The romance strictures here—a few virginal meetings, a peek under the veil, a marriage contract, an all-female wedding reception, and a check of the bloody sheets—make
The Rules
look like the Kama Sutra. In Jidda, there's a Chinese restaurant called Toki, where unmarried girls can show themselves off in front of likely prospects on a fifty-eight-meter catwalk. The prospects are not young men, however, but their mothers, who traditionally made the match with help from the
khatabah
, or yenta, who was sometimes sent over to surreptitiously look under the hood and kick the tires of the bride-to-be. She would give the girl a hug to check the firmness of her breasts and then drop something on the floor to watch the girl pick it up. When the young lady would bend over and her abaya lifted ever so slightly, the
khatabah
could see her ankles and infer the shape of the legs and derrière.

Back in the 1940s, when the oil began gushing, Saudi Arabia was the sort of place where the country's first king, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, traveled in a Ford convertible with his falcons and shot gazelles from the car. The king knew the name of every visitor to Riyadh. Travelers could not move around the Kingdom without the king's express consent, and he personally tracked each one's odyssey. Some Saudis, who had rarely seen airplanes, assumed they were cars that simply drove off into the sky. Prince Sultan bin Salman is a natural choice for tourism czar, given that he was the first Muslim in space. In 1985 he went up as part of an international crew on the
Discovery
shuttle. Trying to find Mecca from space—imagine gravity-free kneeling—was nothing compared with persuading other royals (thanks to polygamy, there are now thousands of them) to consider the desirability of making Saudi Arabia tourist-ready. For one thing, Saudis don't have that fondness for their own history that the British and Italians do. Many pious Muslims look askance at civilizations that predate Islam ("the time of ignorance," as they call it), and they have reservations about archaeological digs that may turn up Christian sites. Archaeology was not fully recognized until the last few years as a field of study in Saudi universities. In other countries, many of the famed tourist sites are what you might call "big broken things"—Machu Picchu, the Colosseum. Saudis don't go for broken, or even slightly worn. You will never see a Melrose Avenue-style vintage store; it would be considered shameful to buy or sell old clothes. It's all about the new and shiny.

Prince Sultan was traveling through Tuscany a few years back, snapping pictures of big broken things and talking to preservation experts, when it hit him: maybe there was a way to get Saudis to appreciate their own ancient heritage. He gathered forty or so mayors and governors who liked nothing better than to tear down their cultural heritage, and showed them that they could develop historic sites where local crafts and fresh produce are sold in a "joyous" setting. The cultural education did not begin well. The prince had wanted the officials to see Siena. "And I get a phone call at four
A.M.
that woke me, and the pilot was calling. He said, 'I'm in Vienna.'" Eventually, the Saudi mayors and governors began to acquire a taste for old stuff. They've done five more trips, and one to Seville was coming up, though maybe they'd end up in Savile Row. (Saudis certainly know the way.)