On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (15 page)

“
We have the opportunity now to push the wheel further,” Princess Adelah says. “We should make an effort to move ahead as quickly as possible. What used to take five years, we can now do in one. Society is more open. And Jeddah and Dhahran are even more open.” Echoing a sentiment endorsed by her father, she says that if a woman can help develop her society, she should be encouraged to do so. “We need the help of men who believe in the ability of women. We do not want this to be women against men. It is not a woman’s issue but a society issue.”

She is convinced that the progress toward greater openness for women in recent years, encouraged by her father, will continue even after he is gone. She acknowledges that the freedoms of the pre-oil-boom days were lost in the 1980s but insists that won’t happen again. “We didn’t have the experience of fundamentalism in the 1980s, so we thought that might be an answer. But we know better now.”

What accounts for her eighty-nine-year-old father’s willingness
to give women more freedom and opportunity? “Older people are more open-minded,” she says. “
People had less means to be complicated back then. Life was simple, and men and women shared the work.” Ironically, it was oil wealth that made possible the sidelining of half the country’s productive population. These days, as government allocation of oil wealth fails to keep up with a growing population and increased public expectations, more and more women hope to get off the sidelines and into the game.

Activist women pressing, however politely, for change can be found scattered across Saudi society, from the soccer field to the riding ring to the chamber of commerce. These women, many of them young, are pushing the parameters of what is permissible in Saudi society. A still small but growing number of young women shun veils and scarves and don jeans and sneakers under their
abayas.
They seek employment as computer programmers, interior designers, filmmakers, artists, and even engineers at Saudi ARAMCO, which has begun in recent years to award women scholarships to study engineering abroad.

Women’s sports are officially banned, but young women increasingly ignore the prohibition and play hidden from public view. Here, members of a new women’s cricket team are discreetly covered. (
ROGER HARRISON
)

Women’s sports are the latest arena for female activists. Officially, sports for girls are banned. In 2009 Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Ashaikh told
Okaz
newspaper he had ordered a university in Riyadh to cancel a women’s marathon. A year earlier the governor of the Eastern Province publicly condemned a soccer game between women, played before only female fans, after religious officials complained. A professor at Imam University wrote on an Islamic Web site that allowing physical education classes for women in public schools would be tantamount to “following in the devil’s footsteps.”
All this helps account for why some 66 percent of Saudi women (as opposed to 52 percent of Saudi men) are reported by health officials to be overweight.

Despite this strong religious opposition, women in recent years have been forming soccer, basketball, volleyball, and cricket teams. Some are in schools. More are under the auspices of charities. And some, like Kings Court, a soccer team in Jeddah, are independent. Indeed, Kings Court has won financial and public support from Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, probably Saudi Arabia’s best-known businessman and a nephew of King Abdullah.

The girls, whose team logo is a lion’s face, began playing soccer simply as a group of friends to avoid the boredom of surfing the Internet or shopping. Reema, thirty-one, the coach, assembled the team after her father died. He had played soccer with her when she was a girl and pushed her to develop her talent. She is a reporter for Saudi television Channel One and coaches the team in her spare time. She organizes the practices, requires each girl who wants to play to obtain written permission from her parents, and is responsible for the young women while at practice or games. “
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with responsibility for the girls,” she says.

Reema is a tiny woman with short dark hair and a frail physique. She meets her team for practice at six thirty
P.M.
on a soccer field surrounded by a high wall, about half an hour from downtown Jeddah. The women arrive with male drivers. Each girl pushes open the sliding steel door to the
walled field and, once inside, closes it, leaving the male driver behind to await her return two hours later. Because there are only women at the practice, the girls roll their
abayas
, stuff them into gym bags, and prepare for a round of warm-up exercises in baggy shorts and T-shirts. Before practice begins, Reema dons her
abaya
and disappears into a room to pray the Maghreb, or sunset prayer. One young team member says she joined the team because she likes all sports. She plays beach volleyball in Tunisia every summer. “Even in Saudi Arabia, I lead a European life,” she explains. “Not in public, of course, but with my family. I go to the beach here where girls wear bikinis and we go to restaurants with boys every weekend.” (There are only a few private beach communities where strict privacy from the prying eyes of the religious police is provided and where liberal, wealthy families can allow their daughters to appear in bathing suits or even to drive a car. For 99.9 percent of Saudi families, however, these restricted areas might as well be on the moon.)

These young women dream of being allowed to play more openly and competitively. Reema is careful to say it is up to the government to decide what happens to women’s soccer teams and it’s not appropriate for her to express a vision for the team. “But if one day government asked us to represent Saudi Arabia, we would have no problem doing it. I would like to reach that level—a career—if not for me, then for the next generation.” She notes that Iranian women wear scarves and long pants and long-sleeved shirts to play soccer. “If they can do it, surely we can do it too.”

Since
Al Watan
, a reformist Saudi newspaper, first revealed the existence of the women’s soccer team, they have received a lot of publicity on television and in newspapers. “We were the first to take the risk of publicity,” Reema says. Indeed, the publicity has brought them denunciations. “Yes we get mail from people who oppose us, but these people represent themselves, not the people of Saudi Arabia,” she says. “This is all possible because of God and King Abdullah,” she adds, pounding her heart with her fist when she mentions the monarch. “We love King Abdullah. He has a white heart.”

If team sports are controversial and still rare for women,
individual sports are forbidden. Alya Al Huwaiti, a Saudi woman in her late twenties, is an eight-time winner at international endurance horse racing for women, but she isn’t allowed to compete inside the kingdom. At sixteen, Alya won her first endurance race in Jordan in 1997, triumphing over fifty-two men. She and her horse covered 120 kilometers in five hours and thirty minutes. Since then she has competed in Qatar, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan. “Horses are part of our culture,” she says. “
Women rode in the Prophet’s day. But because we are a male-dominated society, they feel threatened by women.”

Alya began riding as a young girl, strongly supported by her father and mother. But once she won the race in Jordan, she began getting hostile messages from Saudis. The religious police urged the government to confiscate her passport so she couldn’t disgrace the country by riding competitively abroad, and they insisted she wasn’t a Saudi. “Nobody supports me here,” she says. “I am under a lot of pressure, so sometimes I get very sad, but I keep on.” The key to winning an endurance race, she says, is patience. “If you push your horse too much, you hurt him and go out of the race.” Her analysis of endurance racing aptly applies to women seeking opportunity in Saudi Arabia.

Paradoxically, Alya tells her story sitting alongside a ring for show horses on the private farm of Prince Khalid bin Sultan, the kingdom’s deputy defense minister and son of the late Crown Prince Sultan. The prince owns a sprawling horse farm some forty-five minutes from Riyadh, where he hosts an annual event to display his prize-winning horses and those of other wealthy owners from around the world. It is a unique Saudi gathering, with men and women mixing in a large white tent across the ring from the royal pavilion, which features large gold and brown overstuffed chairs for the prince and his special guests, including Arabs, Europeans, and Americans. At one end of the royal pavilion, elite Saudi women in black
abayas
, including some with uncovered heads, watch the parade of prize stallions, mares, and geldings.

To see Saudi men, women, and children relaxing in a tent,
sipping coffee, eating sweets, and talking to each other and to foreigners is very rare. Alya is dressed in a pink blouse topped by a white sweater and tight jeans stuffed into fur boots. A shiny two-inch-long crystal fish is pinned on her left shoulder. Her long dark hair hangs below her shoulders. There is no
abaya
or even a scarf in sight. Her sister, Sara, who also rides but not competitively, is studying to be a lawyer, even though at present women are not allowed to present a case before the kingdom’s male judges. “
I am like my sister,” she says. “I chose a very difficult career. It is in the family not to take the easy way.”

For Alya, this is a bittersweet Cinderella moment. Because she is on the private property of a senior prince hosting an international event, she can sit in her native country and witness Saudi men and women relaxing together in common admiration of Arabian horses. She can dress as if she were outside Saudi Arabia. But she is denied the right to compete in the endurance race hosted by Prince Khalid. Even senior princes have their limits.

Not all women are grateful for the modest changes that undeniably are occurring in the kingdom. Alia Banaja, a businesswoman in Jeddah who heads a technology company she founded in 2002, says bluntly, “
We have had some progress in the past five years, but if you compare us to the countries around us, like Qatar and Dubai, we are standing still. They are jumping to compete in the world, so the gap between me and businesswomen in the Gulf is widening.”

She grows more indignant as she speaks: “The king didn’t give us our rights because he believes in us. He did it because we made noise for three or four years. We should be running, but instead we are looking at the moon and debating whether it is the moon or the sun. So I can’t call what has been done in recent years ‘progress.’ ”

Banaja isn’t alone in her impatience. Jeddah has a considerable number of such activist, outspoken women who have led the fight for change in their city and, by extension, across the kingdom. One is Manal Fakeeh, a slight, attractive mother of three who serves on the board of the Kadijah bint Khuwailid
Businesswomen Center at the chamber of commerce. “If you want to change society, you have to change the women,” she says. The kingdom’s wealth is dwindling, she argues, and the new generation must be taught to create wealth, not simply consume it, as earlier Saudi generations have done. Fakeeh clearly is not a typical Saudi mother. She relishes diversity in a society that prizes uniformity. With her Buddhist cook, her pastel-colored
abayas
, and her children in international schools, she obviously fits no norm and takes pride in that. “
I’m not advertising an alternative lifestyle,” she says. “I am living it.”

Women’s education clearly has helped create a demand among women for better lives, more independence, and more opportunities to fulfill roles in society beyond breeding children and satisfying a husband. In the 1970s, the kingdom had only a handful of prominent women, mostly doctors. In the intervening decades, more and more women have begun pursuing careers and rearing families simultaneously. The number of women achievers in Saudi Arabia these days in medicine, in academe, and in business offers us some reason to believe they will continue to press forward and in so doing pull the country with them. The sharp edge of the female wedge has been planted, but the sheer density of religion and tradition in Saudi culture means the society remains largely resistant.

Perhaps the strongest sign of things to come isn’t even the activists like Fakeeh but the changing lives of young women in a remote and conservative Saudi province like Qassim, where forty years ago parents protested the introduction of girls’ education. These days at least some rural parents are permitting their daughters to live without a male chaperone in apartments near Qassim University, to enable them to obtain an education. That, more than any activist sentiments expressed in a Jeddah drawing room, is a sign that times indeed are changing.

The tale of one woman from Al Jouf named Fatima Mansour encapsulates the conflicting currents of traditional female subservience, emerging women’s rights, and a monarchy
seeking to navigate between the two. In 2005 Fatima’s half-brothers took her to court to demand she divorce her husband because he was from a lesser tribe than their family, something the brothers claimed he had hidden from their father. Even though the father had approved the marriage before his death and even though the couple had two small children, the judge annulled their marriage. Fatima, uneducated though she was, refused to comply. Unable to go home to her husband, as that would amount to adultery, she also refused to return to her family, for fear her half-brothers would kill her for what they regarded as bringing shame upon the family.