On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (12 page)

It is easy to exaggerate the significance of these small public protests. That said, however, even small acts of public defiance are a remarkable sign of change in a society where all public demonstrations are banned and in which the overwhelming majority of women are totally subjugated by religion, tradition, and family. Driving isn’t the most critical issue confronting women. Wasting their talents, which could be used to develop society, frustrates most women far more than not being allowed to drive. Still, it is impossible to overstate the symbolic importance in Saudi society of women driving. If a woman could exercise the freedom to drive, a tether of male control would be severed. Indeed, the whole core premise of Wahhabi Islam—that men obey Allah and women obey men—would be challenged. Fortunately for men, Allah is distant, but unfortunately for women, men are omnipresent. In Saudi Arabia women are the thin wedge of change. The sharp edge of that wedge is the tiny number of women willing to confront authority openly, but behind them is the far larger number of younger women who are deeply albeit mostly quietly dissatisfied with their subordinated status and are taking steps to push social strictures where possible.

In today’s Saudi Arabia, the struggle over the role of women is visibly intensifying. Younger women have greater expectations for individual fulfillment than did their mothers, the result of better education and especially of external influences like travel and the Internet. At the same time, King Abdullah, a traditionalist in many respects, has emerged as a relative champion of expanding the role of women, thus encouraging them to press for more freedom. In 2011, he announced that women would be allowed to vote in the kingdom’s largely meaningless municipal elections in 2015 and to be appointed to its Potemkin parliament, the Majlis Ash Shura, or Consultative Council. Many Saudis saw these moves as cynically intended to impress the West while at home providing a new pretext to stall growing demands for election of members to the Consultative Council. All 150 members now are appointed by the king. To be sure, the king definitely is not issuing proclamations for full equality of women, but even the modest steps he has taken on their behalf are dramatic in the context of a society in which women traditionally have been subservient—and in the past generation, totally subjugated. Even today, religious scholars issue fatwas attempting to govern women’s menstruation, makeup, and even the length of their nails.

Saudi females lead diverse lives. Most remain fully shrouded in black; a growing number, like these students at Dar al Hekma College for Women in Jeddah, are challenging dress and other conventions. (
GETTY IMAGES
)

In that environment, the king’s call to allow women to help develop society has made the elderly monarch a hero for many modern Saudi women—and something of an apostate to conservative men and women. Here again it remains to be seen whether the historic Al Saud skill at balancing contending forces will meet the challenge of this controversial issue,
on which both modernizers and traditionalists are marshaling scripture from the Koran to support their deeply divergent positions. “
The resistance to change is getting greater, because the change is getting greater,” says Madawi al Hassoun, a thoroughly modern woman who sits on a Jeddah business development board and admiringly sports a lapel pin bearing a likeness of King Abdullah. “We pray for his long life,” she says. Nashwa Taher, another Jeddah activist and successful businesswoman, says, “
We don’t want to be equal with men. God created us differently. What we want is an equal right to live our lives, to have a voice, to have a choice.” Even these modern Saudi women wear
abayas
, cover their hair with a scarf, and excuse themselves in the middle of meetings to comply with the call to prayer. They are far from bra-burning Western feminists, though sometimes their conservative female opponents portray them that way.

“
We feel sorry for the modernizers who have strayed,” says Amal Suliman, a
daiyah
, or female religious teacher, who instructs women on the requirements of Islam. “I dream of females leading society, not with their minds but with their behavior.” That behavior, she says, requires a woman to pray five times a day, fast once a year, remain unseen always, and obey her husband in all things. “If she does these things, the Prophet Muhammad says she can enter paradise through any gate she wants,” says Suliman. Because we are meeting in a public coffee shop with male waiters, Suliman’s head and face are completely obscured in black. Only when the waiters retreat does she even slightly lift the bottom of her veil to insert a straw up to her lips to sip orange juice. Even after several hours of conversation, it remains disconcerting to converse with a disembodied voice, and I find myself straining to make eye contact through her black veil but to no avail.

Not only are women divided against each other, they also are divided from the rest of society by the religious establishment that enforces separation of the sexes. To be born a woman in Saudi Arabia is at best to endure a lifelong sentence of surveillance by a male relative and to take no action outside the household without male approval and, most often, male
accompaniment. A father controls every aspect of a Saudi girl’s life until she is passed to a new dominant male—her husband. At worst, a woman’s life is one of not just subjugation but virtual slavery, in which wives and daughters can be physically, psychologically, and sexually abused at the whim of male family members, who are protected by an all-male criminal system and judiciary in those rare cases when a woman dares go to authorities. So it’s not surprising to learn that the supplication to Allah that a groom offers on his wedding night is the same he is instructed to offer when buying a maidservant—or a camel: “
Oh Allah, I ask you for the goodness that you have made her inclined toward and I take refuge with You from the evil within her and the evil that you have made her inclined toward.” Imagine on your wedding day in any other society being equated by your husband to a servant or a beast of burden.

As small children, Saudi girls look like those in the West. In airports and shopping malls, little girls in frilly short dresses or knit tights and T-shirts joyfully jump about their black-draped mothers like little bees circling a hive. But very quickly this vivaciousness is snuffed out, as the cell door swings shut. After age six, a Saudi girl no longer goes to school with boys. By twelve, she can’t join her dad at a soccer match, the kingdom’s major sporting event, or for that matter any other male gathering. And by the age of puberty, she is expected to swaddle her body in an
abaya
, plus veil her face if she wants to appear a truly devout Muslim.
In sum, the religious ideal in the kingdom is that the two sexes never meet outside the home after kindergarten.

A woman is not allowed to drive a car, not because Islam forbids something that didn’t exist in the Prophet’s day, but ironically because authorities say she might be prey to misbehavior by Saudi men. Nor can she be alone with a man who isn’t a close relative, even in a public place—indeed,
especially
in a public place, as this flouts religious tradition against gender mixing. When she shops, she cannot try on clothes in the store, because sales attendants are men. She must first buy the garment and then take it home or to a
female-supervised restroom for a fitting. In some conservative homes, she doesn’t even eat with her husband but dines only after his meal is finished.

Because most ministries and places of business are staffed only by men, if she wants to apply for a job, pay a telephone bill, or secure a visa to import a maid for her home, she needs a male relative to accompany her. If the men in her life are not enforcing these strictures, self-appointed members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the
mutawa’a
, or so-called religious police, will always do so. These men are recognizable by their trademarks of public piety—long beards, shorter than average
thobes
hitting above the ankle, and head scarves devoid of the black
agal
, or double circle of twisted yarn that most men wear to anchor their
shemagh
or head scarf. Such decoration is a sign of vanity and extravagance. The
mutawa’a
patrol shops and streets, on foot and in cars, to enforce their stern standard of proper Islamic behavior.

“
A woman is made to feel she cannot survive without a man,” explains Salwa Abdel Hameed al Khateeb, an anthropologist and associate professor at King Saud University in Riyadh. As an anthropologist, she has written articles on marriage and family in Saudi Arabia. “My mother told me to respect a man: If your husband says milk is black, you must agree.”

To any Westerner, the traditional role of Saudi women remains an enduring paradox. Here is a society in which even according to the words of the Prophet, a mother is the most respected person in a man’s life. It is mothers rather than fathers who rear sons in their formative years. In this sense, Saudi Arabia is a more maternal society than most. How is it, then, that these same dutiful sons wind up subjugating their wives to a degree unprecedented in any other society? The answer, of course, is tradition. Traditionally, it is the responsibility of men to safeguard their families from the shame that could result from almost any independent action by a female family member. Therefore the surest way to protect the family reputation is to cloister the family’s females. Nevertheless,
to any outsider, Saudi women acquiescing in their own imprisonment seems a form of Stockholm syndrome, in which prisoners sympathize with their captors.

Foreign women, too, are expected to adhere to these societal restrictions and are not exempt from harassment by the religious police. Sitting with a Saudi man in the family section of the food court in one of Riyadh’s exclusive shopping malls, I was startled by two young religious police who demanded in perfect English, “Cover your head. You are in Saudi Arabia.” They demanded my passport—and the identity card of my companion, a government official. The fact that his ministry had assigned him to escort me on this particular day made no difference to the religious police, who were enforcing their edict against mixing of unrelated men and women. I was ordered to my hotel, and my companion was taken to the headquarters of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, who questioned him for nearly an hour before releasing him. (This is just one of the many examples of legal contradictions in the society: a government employee following the instructions of his ministry runs afoul of that same government’s religious police.)

If there are limits on a woman’s freedom, a foreign female in Saudi also has definite advantages. Only a woman can explore all aspects of the intensifying battle over women’s status, including, most important, the views of women. Conservative Saudi women would never talk with an unfamiliar man, but they are happy to speak to another woman. Because foreign professional women in Saudi Arabia are treated as honorary men (by all but the religious police), they have access to both males and females. Indeed, men often take me to meet the women of their household and then, seemingly oblivious to the irony of their behavior, usher me to join a group of men for dinner, leaving their own women isolated behind walls. It is hard not to feel a twinge of guilt when a Saudi wife prepares dinner for her husband, a male guest, and me but cannot enjoy the meal with us. When the food is ready, she knocks quickly on the closed sitting room door but is nowhere to be seen as we emerge to enjoy the food.

Slowly—very slowly—the role of women is changing, primarily
due to education. Since the 1970s, women have had access to both secondary and higher education, albeit in gender-segregated classrooms.
As women become more educated (60 percent of university graduates now are women), they are pressing for more partnership in marriages and in life. Some even want jobs. They want more opportunities for their children and are prepared to work to help provide them.
They want divorces from men who abuse them: one in three marriages now ends in divorce. Since King Abdullah came to power in 2005, he has supported more freedom for women through a range of government declarations.

For the first time, women can obtain a photo identification card, giving them an identity independent from their male guardian, on whose card they previously had been listed. For the first time, they can check into a hotel or rent an apartment without a male guardian alongside them. They can register their own business and even receive a government scholarship to study abroad—so long as they are accompanied by a male relative. To help them secure government services, the king has required all ministries to open sections for women, though some continue to ignore him—yet another example of the petty lawlessness rampant in the kingdom.

More visibly, the king has once again, for the first time since the 1980s, permitted female television anchors who, on camera for all Saudis to see, wear head scarves but neither veils nor
abayas.
And he has named the first woman deputy minister of education, the most senior role ever held by a female in the kingdom.