I suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste be he man or woman: the one of you is of the other.
—KORAN 3:195
Of all the divisions in Saudi society, in none are the battle lines more sharply drawn than on the matter of the status, role and future of women. The Prophet’s first wife was a successful businesswoman, and his favorite wife led troops in battle, but today women themselves are the battleground. The intensifying clash over the role of women in Saudi society is about far more than whether women should be allowed to drive or, however well shrouded, mix with men in public places. It is not a war between the sexes, but rather a proxy war between modernizers and conservatives over what sort of Saudi Arabia both sexes will inhabit and over the role and relevance of the omnipresent religious establishment in Saudi society.
As Arab youths challenged authoritarian regimes across the Middle East in the Arab Spring of 2011, in Saudi Arabia, ironically, it was the women, not youth, who had the temerity to confront authority. This challenge amounted to some dozens of women repeatedly gathering outside the Interior Ministry demanding the release of their husbands, brothers, and sons imprisoned for political reasons. Some dozens of other women staged a succession of “drive-ins” to protest the continued ban on women driving. Some were arrested; others were ignored. Still, courageous individual women across the kingdom have continued unannounced to test authority by getting behind the wheel of a car and posting videos of their defiance on YouTube.
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.
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.
One of the ironies of strict Wahhabi Islam, which encourages Muslims to return to the original teachings and practices of the Prophet, is that the Prophet’s first wife, Kadijah bint Khuwailid, was a successful businesswoman. Indeed, having lost two husbands to death in raids, she hired her distant cousin Muhammad to lead a trading caravan to Syria. She was so pleased with the profits he returned to her that she asked the twenty-five-year-old Muhammad to marry her. And she asked him directly to his face, not through a male relative. “Son of mine uncle,” she said to Muhammad, “I love thee for thy kinship with me and for that thou art ever in the center, not being a partisan amongst the people for this or for that; and I love thee for thy trustworthiness and for the beauty of thy character and truth of thy speech.” He accepted and then agreed to inform her uncle. (She is estimated by Islamic historians to have been ten to fifteen years Muhammad’s senior.)
Their relationship apparently was one of great affection and respect. Some fifteen years later, when Muhammad returned home shaking and sweating from his initial encounter with the archangel Gabriel, it was a composed Kadijah who calmed and embraced him. She immediately assured him he was sane. “You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress,” she told him. Kadijah became the first convert to Islam.
So long as Kadijah lived, Muhammad took no other wives, even though polygamy was common in Arabia. Once Kadijah died in A.D. 619, he married another ten women before his own death in 632. His favorite was Aisha, the prepubescent daughter of his companion, Abu Bakr, one of the men who would lead the Islamic believers after Muhammad’s death. Aisha was only six when she was promised to Muhammad, nine when she moved to his home, and eighteen when he died in her arms. She never bore him a child.
One story recounts how Aisha, tired of hearing the Prophet proclaim Kadijah’s virtues, said to her husband, “She was only an old woman with red eyes, and Allah has compensated you with a better and younger wife.” The Prophet responded, “No. He has not compensated me with someone better than her. She believed in me when others disbelieved; she held me truthful when others called me a liar; she sheltered me when others abandoned me.”
Most of Muhammad’s wives were young and beautiful. All but Aisha were widows or divorcees, like the beautiful Zaynab, forty, who caused something of a scandal by divorcing Muhammad’s adopted son to marry the Prophet. This marriage violated the ban on a father marrying the wife of a son, but Allah conveniently sent Muhammad a revelation that adoption did not create the same ties as blood kin. Nor did the Prophet limit himself to Muslim women—or to only four wives at a time, as later became the rule for Muslim men. At least one of his wives, Safiyyah, seventeen, was a Jewess who converted to Islam. He also had a beautiful Christian concubine, Mariyah, who bore him a son, Ibrahim, a favorite because the sons he fathered with Kadijah had died.
The Prophet made no secret of his love for women. “It hath been given me to love perfume and women,” he said. But he treated his wives with kindness and enjoyed their company. He used to run races with Aisha and her young friends. He allowed all his wives to speak openly to him, including about their jealousies of one another and their wish that at least occasionally he would provide better for them when he passed out the spoils of Islam’s military victories rather than keep them in penury. His companion Umar complained to Muhammad that he should demand more respect from his wives. The Prophet laughed as one of his wives promptly told the prickly Umar to mind his own business. “Yes, by God, we speak freely with him, and if he allows us to do that, that is surely his own affair.” Muhammad sometimes teased his wives about their jealousy. Entering a room where his wives were gathered one day, he held out an onyx necklace and said, “I shall give this unto her whom I love best of all.” The wives began to whisper that he would give it to Aisha, his well-known favorite. Instead, he beckoned to his little granddaughter, Umamah, and placed it around her neck. Clearly the Prophet did not view women as temptresses waiting to lead men astray unless closeted, as his latter-day Wahhabi followers do.
The Prophet, as we clearly see, was not averse to strong women. Women in his day attended mosque, listened to his discourses, and even participated in war. Nusaybah, a woman of Medina, joined other women in providing water to soldiers at the Battle of Uhud, and when Muhammad came under attack, she joined the fray, drawing her sword and shield to protect the Prophet, something Saudi religious clerics do not mention. Similarly, after the Prophet’s death, Aisha led an army in a bloody attempt to shape the leadership succession of Islam. She took up arms against the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali, to try to deny his succession as caliph, or leader of the Islamic believers. Some ten thousand men were killed in the Battle of the Camel, so called because Aisha sat astride her camel leading her troops, until Ali’s men succeeded in sneaking up behind her and cutting off the legs of her mount. Captured, she later was released to live out her life in Medina, finally dying at age seventy-four.
The independence and forthrightness of Arab women like Kadijah and Aisha were curtailed over the next centuries, as the new Islamic religion conquered most of the area from Arabia to Spain and its triumphant foot soldiers procured captured women as multiple wives and concubines. During the eighth and ninth centuries, women, now plentiful in the harems of elite men, became debased and dependent. Unfortunately for women, codification of Muslim legal thought and practice occurred during this period and achieved final formulation in the tenth century in four major schools of thought that still dominate today. These schools of thought were—and still are—deemed infallible. Thus, legal scholars to this day are obliged to follow precedent, not originate legal doctrine. As a result, women continue to be seen as sex objects whose intrigues can destroy men and disrupt society unless tightly controlled. “Establishment Islam’s version of the Islamic message survived as the sole legitimate interpretation … because it was the interpretation of the politically dominant—those who had the power to outlaw and eradicate other readings as ‘heretical.’ ” The same is true in Saudi today, where the Al Saud and their senior ulama enforce their interpretation of Islam.
As a result, neither of the prophet’s strong wives is seen by Wahhabi ulama as evidence that women in the Prophet’s day played large roles in society and thus should be allowed to do so today. But modern Saudi women cite them and point to verses in the Koran such as Sura 3:195 that indicate Islam indeed does regard women as equal before Allah. “I suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste be he man or woman: the one of you is of the other.”
Suhaila Zein Al Abdein Hammad, the female head of the Saudi Human Rights Commission, a new organization in the kingdom, is one of the leaders of the struggle to help women gain more rights and responsibilities with the help of the Koran. “Our religious leaders say females are less intelligent than males. It isn’t true,” she says. “The Prophet consulted always with his wife, Kadijah. His successor named a woman, Al Shifa bint Abdullah, as in effect the first minister of municipalities. She oversaw the market in Medina.” What’s more, says Al Abdein, Allah himself praised the legendary Queen of Sheba. “He said her governance was good. He wouldn’t have done so if he were against women leaders.”
It is telling, of course, that the female leaders whom these women cite lived centuries, if not millennia, ago. Today Saudi Arabia has no women in its Majlis Ash Shura, the Consultative Council (though appointments are promised for 2015), and no female ministers. When the kingdom conducted its first experiment with elections in 2005, allowing Saudis to elect representatives to municipal government councils, women were not permitted to vote, let alone seek seats on the largely ceremonial councils. That exclusion held when the elections were repeated in September 2011, though as we have seen, the king has announced they will be allowed to participate in 2015. Only in 2009 did King Abdullah name a female as a deputy minister—and then of women’s education, a field composed entirely of women.
Norah al Faiz, this deputy minister, is the daughter of a woman with a third-grade education. She has no royal connections but simply a résumé of rising from humble beginnings through hard work. The eldest of ten children, she graduated from King Saud University with a degree in sociology and in 1979 left Saudi to attend Utah State University while her husband was earning a degree in Texas. Since returning to Riyadh in 1983, she has worked full-time and reared five children. Every summer, instead of relaxing, she has taken some training course abroad to improve herself, she says. This is rare, as the majority of Saudi women still feel they can’t leave the country even for educational opportunities.
“I am the first woman, and thus I have more challenges,” she acknowledges in the privacy of her office after a few months in her new position. “If the first woman fails, it is very bad, so I am working hard to understand this new job and make the right changes.” Even though she says she is accustomed to speaking to male audiences, she is treading cautiously in her new job. A sign of how slowly things change: to communicate with the new minister of education, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, the king’s son-in-law, she must sit before her office computer in the Women’s Education Building—only a few miles from the minister’s office—and communicate via video conference, always careful to block the camera atop her computer so the men don’t see her. Yet both the deputy minister and her boss are U.S.-educated Saudis who mix easily with members of the opposite sex; that they dare not flout conservative tradition in their official capacities speaks volumes about the pervasive clout of religious extremists. Ministers who dare stretch the limits of tradition report receiving regular visits from the religious scholars who insist on strict Wahhabi interpretations of Islam.
It’s not surprising that women like Al Faiz tread carefully when deciding how much to challenge tradition—and how much to remain bound by it. All over the kingdom, Saudis perform daily a sort of Japanese Kabuki theater, daring to nudge the edges of behavioral norms while trying to appear consistent with tradition.
King Abdullah has tried to stretch the rules and focus the spotlight on women achievers. In 2010 he conferred the King Abdul Aziz Medal of the First Order on a prominent Saudi female scientist, Dr. Khawla al Kuraya, director of the research center at King Fahd National Children’s Cancer Center; he was also shown on television and on the front page of Saudi newspapers placing the medal around her neck and shaking her hand, an unprecedented public display of proximity to an unrelated woman. Not long afterward, he attended graduation ceremonies for female nurses, a career that Saudi women only now are tentatively entering, and shook hands with each as she received her diploma. This ceremony, too, was shown on television, including one traditional young woman who declined to shake hands with the monarch. The king responded by saying, “God bless you.”
The tug-of-war over women’s proper place in society goes on daily, spurred by a small but growing minority of women who actively are pushing for more independence from men and more opportunity in society. Among the most active is Princess Adelah, one of the king’s daughters, who uses her prominence to champion change for all women and particularly to support abused women. A casually elegant woman in her midforties, Princess Adelah has joined with activist female physicians, eyewitnesses to the effects of abuse, to create a national program to raise awareness of domestic violence. Again, it may not sound radical, but in a country where public organizations mostly are forbidden, any such association is a sign of change. The group has obtained an order from the king requiring each Saudi city to open a home for abused women, has secured a fatwa from the grand mufti declaring domestic violence a “crime,” and most important, is holding public meetings in major cities between women and authorities—police, prosecutors, and judges—responsible for protecting them from their tormentors. The need is great.
At the Jeddah center for battered women, a twenty-nine-year-old with no independent means of support and little education sits shrouded in black to tell a visitor her story, unfortunately an all too common one. A drunken husband’s beatings sent her repeatedly to the hospital, until finally a doctor referred her to the shelter. Not all abused women are so fortunate. One female doctor who works with abused women angrily decries the refusal of the all-male judiciary to protect women. She cites a judge who refuses to protect a thirty-year-old whose father sexually abuses her and then, when she complains to authorities, claims his daughter is mentally ill. The woman’s stepmother is ready to testify for her stepdaughter, but the judge refuses and further refuses to allow a mental evaluation of the father. Instead, he has ordered the young woman dispatched to a religious sheikh who is to read verses from the Koran over her to drive the devil out.
Persuading judges to render justice is the primary purpose of the public sessions that Princess Adelah convenes. At one of the public sessions in Dammam, attended by some nine hundred women and sixty men from police and legal organizations, authorities outline how abused women should be treated when they go to the police or a hospital. The women then tell their own stories of how the system really works—or doesn’t. There is a huge gap. Or as the princess delicately puts it, “Sometimes we find there is a deficiency in the procedures.” Airing grievances clearly is progress, even if redressing them often remains elusive because cases wind up being adjudicated by men.
At another such session in Abha, one judge justified a husband’s beating his wife because he agreed with the husband that the woman had spent excessively. There were murmured protests from the assembled women in attendance and more activist outrage around the country when the judge’s comment was reported in the press. The judge later apologized. “If a woman can stand up to a judge in public, she can get the courage to stand up to her husband,” says Dr. Maha Muneef, who heads the National Family Safety Program, working with Princess Adelah.
“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.
Instead, she insisted on imprisonment with her one-year-old daughter while she appealed the judge’s ruling. She stayed in jail for nearly four years while her husband cared for their son. Her plight gained growing public attention and quiet support from Princess Adelah and eventually the princess’s royal father. Four years into the sordid saga, the king asked the Supreme Judicial Council to review the case. Within months, the lower court’s decision was overturned, and after more than four years of separation, Fatima, Mansour, and their children were reunited. Fatima’s tale, however horrifying, also is uplifting since it indicates that even poor and uneducated women can refuse to accept the status quo when they reach the limits of their tolerance of tradition and of a sometimes cruel social system. It isn’t any longer only modernizers who seek more dignity for women.
Over the past half-dozen years, society’s attitude has shifted marginally toward greater acceptance of women pursuing higher education, jobs, and even a modicum of independence. Still, when it comes to marriage, to making the critical decision of what male will assume control of a woman’s life after her father, most Saudi women continue to wait for others to seal their fate. “Girls wait to be selected like a commodity from a fruit stand,” says Fawzia al Bakr, a sociologist at King Saud University and a veteran of the 1990 driving protest who is researching young Saudis’ attitudes. “For a Saudi woman, there is no legal age for having no guardian. She is always dependent on some male.”
Such dependence remains a fact of Saudi life, but what is new is that increasing numbers of Saudi women so clearly resent it. Saudi women may remain trapped in cocoons, but they are flexing to burst free. This process may well prove liberating for all of Saudi society.