‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.’
—Galileo Galilei
Seventy years ago, one might have imagined Saudi Arabia as a country of impoverished Bedouins enduring a life of extraordinary hardship in one of the most forbidding countries in the world. In a few short years after that, oil revenues created the more prevalent public image of the Saudi as a playboy jet-setting around the gambling joints of Europe, then returning home to his austere land to relax in his air-conditioned palace. Both stereotypes still exist. Small numbers of incredibly rich Saudis still travel the world spending money like water. Half a million or so Bedouins still roam the deserts. But between these two stereotypes lie the bulk of the people, the middle class, most of whom live urbanised lives.
Saudi Arabia is widely regarded as a wealthy country. This is a misconception based on the well-publicised antics of the very rich. In fact, before the oil price spiked in 2003—in terms of GDP per capita—Saudi Arabia was well on its way to becoming a poor country. According to World Bank statistics, in the year 2001, Saudi Arabia lay in 62nd place in a list of wealthiest countries of the world, between Slovakia and the Seychelles. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the country had been caught in a debt trap, with export receipts falling and population rising. Since then, things have improved as rising oil prices eased the country’s financial problems.
Saudi Arabia’s population tripled between 1980 to 2004. Its rate of population increase of about 1.5 per cent per year is high by world standards. In terms of long term sustainable carrying capacity, Saudi Arabia is greatly overpopulated.
Saudi society’s attitudes to family planning flow from cultural factors, not the least of which the cleric’s interpretation of the Qur’an. Like Christianity, Islamic teachings on family planning—go forth and multiply!— were developed to suit the times. In the 7th century, large families were needed to replace people claimed by high infant mortality and to provide a steady supply of soldiers to be killed in battle. Over the years, the need for people diminished but the dogma stayed the same; hence the present population problem. The average size of the Saudi family, according to 2010 statistics, was 5.8 children with one third of the population under the age of 15. Millions of young Saudis will enter the job market in the next decade, to face one of the modern country’s most insidious problems—unemployment of Saudi youth.
The family is the most important social group in Saudi Arabia. Saudi families are large with the oldest male being considered the head. Families tend to be more selfcontained than Western families and more intergenerational. Three or four generations may live under one roof. The elderly are looked after by the younger generations and afforded respect. Saudi children tend to be indulged with not too much discipline within the home. Foreign labour is cheap in Saudi Arabia. Not very wealthy families may have an Indonesian or a Filipina housemaid. In richer families, children may have their own allocated servants.
From a Saudi point of view, the ideal home is a selfcontained villa away from the peering eyes of neighbours. Saudi houses are typically surrounded by high walls. Within the walled area, houses of extended families may be connected to each other in what resembles a walled estate. Not only do the walls keep out sandstorms prevalent in most areas of the country, in a figurative sense at least, they also protect the family inside from contact with the outside world. As a result, family members have closer relations with each other and probably less with outsiders than in other cultures. Family members get intimately involved in each other’s affairs. Children are encouraged to stay in the home, and may well not leave it when they reach adulthood. Intergenerational Saudi families have a plentiful supply of babysitters, and generally a lesser need for them since so much social activity is conducted within the family and within the home.
Social rules between males and females are immensely complicated in Saudi Arabia by restrictions and rules flowing from religious beliefs. Social life, in particular for women, revolves around the extended family and close friends. Saudi women spend a lot of their waking hours inside the home chatting with other women in what in the West might be termed ‘coffee groups’. Some Saudi men even go so far as to lock their womenfolk inside the house from dawn to dusk
A male visiting a Saudi household is unlikely to meet a female resident of the house. Dining arrangements are similarly complicated. Women and girls eat separately from boys and men. One of the authors once received a lunch invitation to a Bedouin encampment—along with 20 or so other Westerners, both male and female. Arriving at the camp, men and women were separated and irected into different areas of a large tent that had been partitioned across its centre. Men dined on one side of the partition and women on the other.
A whole roasted sheep was the main item on the menu. The sheep was brought into the male dining area on an enormous plate and surrounded by rice. The plate was borne by the small boys of the tribe and placed on the floor of the tent. Squatting on rugs around the roasted sheep, the male diners used their hands to tear off whatever meat they wanted to eat. When the men had their fill, the boys returned and carried the plate to the women in the compartment next door. After the women had cleaned up the left-overs, the dogs were given the remains. The order of feeding reflected the pecking order of the tribe—men, women and dogs.
In a land where religious instruction is the core curriculum, the grip of Islam on the young mind is every bit as strong as its hold on the older generation. With a heavy emphasis on religion in their education, Saudi youths generally respect their elders, undertake their religious duties, maintain strong family ties and do not openly engage in premarital sex. By the standards of the West, the majority of Saudi youth is unrebellious. Children tend to find their amusements inside the home rather than ‘hanging out’. Though one place teenage Saudi boys like to gather with their friends is at the arcades in shopping malls, where behaviour codes are fairly relaxed.
On the other hand, religious fervour can inspire young Saudis to commit desperate acts. Dozens of disaffected Saudi youths have sacrificed themselves for causes that seem incomprehensible to most Westerners. Fifteen out of the nineteen 9-11 highjackers were young Saudis. According to The Economist, ‘Hundreds of young Saudis are thought to have joined the jihadists in Iraq.’
Though Saudis have a strong sense of family, they may not have a family name. In naming their children, Saudis string together a long series of first names, using the word bin to mean ‘son of’ (or bint meaning ‘daughter of’), followed by their father’s name. Depending on how many generations they care to go back in the family history, this can lead to some exceedingly long names. For example, one of the powerful princes in the Saudi dynasty is Faysal bin Turki bin Abdallah bin Mohhamad bin Saud—a name that extends as far back as the great-great-grandfather. Including the Saud name even as far back as five generations means the holder can claim to be Royalty and thereby enjoy some privileges. Given the reference to Royalty in the fifth link of the chain, the name is unlikely to be shortened by future generations.
An alternative to a naming convention that flows backwards in time is one that flows forwards. Saudis might like to be referred to as the father of their son’s name. A Saudi man using this style of naming might be known as Abu Dhabi meaning the ‘father of Dhabi’. For mothers, the equivalent nomenclature is Umm Said meaning ‘mother of Said’.
While the law allows a man to have up to four wives, the Qur’an states that rights to this privilege come with a condition that the man must look after his family members both properly and equally. In the modern world, this is a considerable restraint. As in the West, the average Saudi faces the same daily economic struggle that grinds down the rest of the world. Like kids from other cultures, the younger generation of Saudis demand their parents’ full participation in the consumer economy. They need education, the latest in computers, music and whatever else is ‘in’. In a country where most women do not work, most families have a single breadwinner. The customary complaint from polygamous husbands is the cost and time of attending to the needs of their multiple families. Four families expand the financial burden on the breadwinner by a factor of four.
Other than for the wealthy, multiple families are no longer commonplace. The major exception is the Royal Family which practices polygamy to excess. While the Saudi laws on marriage and divorce stipulates a man can have only four wives, there is a loophole. The law stipulates a man is restricted to four families at any one time. Over a lifetime, there is no limit to the number of wives a man may have. Taking advantage of this oversight by the Prophet, over the course of their lives, Saudi princes have taken an extraordinary number of wives. Following the example of their father, Ibn Saud, princes and kings of Saudi Arabia have spent much of their spare time marrying and divorcing women at will, and producing an immense number of royal children in the process. Marriage on this scale is expensive, but since the Royal Family is in personal charge of the country’s treasury, money had proved no object in this pursuit of regal fecundity. The Royals can afford as many children as they like from as many wives they feel like taking. An extended Saudi Royal Family numbering thousands has been the consequence.
Although individuals are theoretically entitled to select their own marriage partners, most marriages are arranged between the respective families. Saudis don’t marry their siblings, but marriage to a first cousin is considered desirable. Expatriates working in Saudi Arabia in the medical profession have reported frequent cases where intermarrying within extended families has compromised health of progeny through inbreeding.
As in many societies, attitudes to virtue are quite different for men and women. Saudis put a monetary value on the intact bridal state. Virginity amongst unmarried women is highly prized, some would say essential. Top bride prices are paid for virgins. Divorcees and widows attract smaller amounts. Unmarried non-virginity is in limited demand and can sometimes be life-threatening. By contrast, virginity amongst unmarried men isn’t a consideration.
Attitudes of men to women are closely related to questions of honour and shame. To the great disadvantage of Saudi women, Saudi men see themselves as the fearless upholders of the female virtue. At issue here is the Arab question of honour, and its opposite number—shame. The concept of shame in Saudi Arabia differs from the equivalent idea in the West. In Saudi Arabia, shame describes the state of mind in a man whose ‘honour’ is besmirched not by his own behaviour but by the indiscretion (alleged or otherwise) of a close relative. A typical ‘crime’ committed by a woman bringing shame on the menfolk of her family is consorting with a man outside the family group.
Men who think nothing of taking concubines and wives a third of their age impose extraordinary punishment on women whose ‘honour’ has been ‘besmirched’ by men just like themselves. Women can have ‘justice’ exacted by male family members with little interference from the justice system. Killings of alleged female adulterers are rarely reported. Particularly in rural areas beyond the reach of the authorities, punishment for adultery becomes a private matter of family honour. The counterpart male adulterer is much more likely to get off than the female.
Associated with adultery is the thorny issue of rape. Rape victims are similarly shunned for the ‘dishonour’ that their unwilling participation in a crime brings to their families through their diminished status and compromised marital prospects. Though the kingdom provides the death penalty for rapists, to make her case, a raped woman has to present in court four upright Muslim men as witnesses to the crime. If she is unable to produce four honest voyeurs who happened to be in attendance when the crime was committed, she may be charged with slander and receive punishment additional to that which has already been received at the hands of the rapist. Since the level of proof is so onerous, rape cases brought by plaintiffs are exceedingly rare in Saudi Arabia.
Rape Victim Punished
A 23-year-old unmarried woman unwisely accepted an offer of a ride from a male car driver. The man took her to a rest house east of Jeddah where he and his four friends assaulted her all night long. Afterward, when she fell pregnant she tried to abort the foetus. When that failed she requested an abortion at King Fahd Hospital. By that time she was eight weeks pregnant. Reported to the authorities, she was then charged with adultery and attempting to procure an abortion. The District Court in Jeddah found her guilty and sentenced her to one year’s prison and 100 lashes. According to the ruling, the woman will be sent to a jail outside Jeddah to spend her time and will be lashed after delivery of her baby who will take the mother’s last name.
— From Saudi Gazette, February 2009
The status of women in Saudi society has earned widespread condemnation elsewhere in the world. The double standard so objectionable to women liberationists world-wide is alive and well in Saudi Arabia. Under strict interpretation of Shariah Law, a woman is meant to have the same legal rights as men. But in reality, women have difficulty obtaining their rights under a legal system run entirely by male clerics.
As the world is firmly in the 21st century, are there any signs of change of these 7th century attitudes? Possibly some. In recent times, young men and women have used modern technology in ingenious ways to circumvent Saudi Arabia’s restriction on sexes. Pickup trucks of teenage boys and young men cruise the streets, pulling up beside chauffeur-driven cars full of girls covered from head to toe in abayas, their faces obscured by veils. Windows are wound down. Scraps of papers with cellphone numbers of the hopeful romantics are interchanged through the open windows. The cars drive off. The phones get busy. Text messages are sent and received. Contact has been made. The two parties speak to each other on their phones. But the next step, an actual meeting, is more hazardous.
The activities of Saudi Arabia’s women are highly restricted, particularly outside the home. The street is the domain of men. To travel beyond their doorstep in saudi Arabia, a woman needs the permission of a male guardian—called a mahram—and generally the father or husband. Women in the street are usually on a mission, usually a shopping expedition. Otherwise, they are encouraged to stay indoors and avoid casual contact with strangers. Operating in pairs and threesomes and covered in abayas, women tread lightly through the outside world, flitting like wraiths amongst the shadows of the background.
Within the home, people familiar with the workings of Saudi families may claim that women may wield more influence than appears apparent from a Westerner’s viewpoint. Strongminded women may, for example, influence the behaviour of their menfolk by determining the careers of their sons. But mostly, the role of women is subsidiary.
The popular Western view that Muslim women hold diminished rights is quite at odds with official Muslim PR on this subject. The Muslim website, The Religion of Islam (www.islamreligion.com/articles/355/), carries an article entitled ‘Women’s Liberation Through Islam’ which describes the Muslim take on gender equality in Saudi Arabia. According to this account, women are meant to enjoy equal status with men, the right to choose their own religion, the right to choose their own husband, and the right to vote. In the real world of Saudi Arabian street-life, these claims ring hollow. According to most other accounts, the reality for Saudi women is far more restricted. Most women marry partners selected by their families. The Muslim religion is compulsory. Women have no say in the affairs of state. In Saudi Arabia, few rights to vote exist for men, and practically none at all for women.
Saudi women in black abayas out on the street.
The stultifying boredom of women’s earthly role in Saudi society was described in the biography Princess by Jean P Sassoon, a book claiming to describe the true-life story of a member of the House of Saud who told her tale under the pseudonym ‘Princess Sultana’. The book describes how royal women lived in a closed society where they had absolutely nothing to do from one day to the next. A retinue of domestic help looked after the chores and the high-born women were not permitted to engage in any form of outside work, even voluntary work.
Princess Sultana and her female companions were encouraged to remain in their palaces. Princess Sultana and her contemporaries felt like captives inside their opulent palaces—golden birds in gilded cages—from which they were rarely released by husbands they hardly knew. Husbands, by contrast, were out and about, doing business with each other and casually marrying and divorcing other women whose existence the principal wife might only suspect.
According to Sassoon’s account, some cast-off wives turned to tranquillizers and drugs to alleviate their boredom. Others got into more serious trouble. Princess Sultana recounts how a group of such women arranged trysts with foreign men in one of the many houses owned by their husbands. They were caught. Charged with besmirching the honour of the family, one of the unfaithful wives was weighed down with chains and drowned in the family swimming pool after a ‘trial’ conducted by the male members of her family. Another was put into lifetime solitary confinement in a darkened room within a family house where, in short time, she went crazy and committed suicide.
Some Saudis have disputed the account of Princess Sultana. Defenders of the Saudi Arabian way of life claim that Princess is sensationalism, written by a woman’s rights author for Western consumption with the express purpose of making money. There is no question that the book has made money. In fact, a sequel made even more money; then, for good measure, a third book was published.
As usual in this enigmatic country, the truth is hard to determine and the right balance is hard to strike. For those who want to hear the opposite viewpoint—that all is, in fact, well between womanhood and Saudi culture—an alternative is the book At the Drop of a Veil by Marianne Alireza. The book is a personalised description of an American woman living in Saudi Arabia and married to a Saudi man—an arrangement that, according to the author, was highly satisfactory.
The most widely reported execution of a high ranking female for a sexual transgression was in 1978 when Princess Mishaal, grand niece of the then reigning monarch King Khaled, was put to death. Princess Mishaal, who had by the age of 17 already undergone an arranged marriage and had then been casually divorced, had fallen in love with a young man who requested her hand in marriage. But the House of Saud withheld its permission for this union. Princess Mishaal defied her family. She met her suitor, Khalid Mullalal in a Jeddah Hotel; but she was recognised and caught. Both were tried and privately executed in a car park in Jeddah. She was shot and he was beheaded. This was an ‘honour killing’ to avenge a perceived slight that had been perpetrated on the Royal Family. There was no trial, but there did happen to be a TV camera on location. The story made news in the BBC documentary Death of a Princess that the House of Saud subsequently spent about US$ 500 million unsuccessfully trying to suppress.
The Muslim religion has had a tough time defining the precise status of women either on earth or in heaven. Women are expected to embrace the Muslim faith, but the Saudi clergy has not quite decided whether or not women should be admitted to mosques, or whether they should be restricted to pray at home. After 1,400 years of debate, this issue seems to be decided on an ad hoc basis. In some mosques, women are allowed to pray with men in a common area in which the two sexes are obliged to make minimum contact. In other mosques, women are allocated to a secondary area. For some other mosques, female participation is excluded completely. If they are allowed inside mosques at all, women are cautioned that wearing perfume is prohibited for fear that an alluring scent might distract men from their devotions.
Women and the Afterlife
Like Christianity, the reward in Islam for leading a good life on Earth is a place in heaven. Like Christianity, Islam believes Heaven is its exclusive province. The details provided by the official Muslim website are sketchy on the question of what goes on in the Muslim afterlife, but a commonly quoted take on the Islam version of Paradise for a man is a place of cool breezes, running water, and the companionship of a plentiful supply of beautiful females (72 virgins per man being a popular estimate for this service); in short, most of the things that are missing from life on Earth for the average male in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Over the ages, this vista of indolence and pleasure has been enough to tempt battalions of desert fighters to sacrifice themselves for some earthly cause in order to gain the keys to such a Paradise while they are still young enough to enjoy it. Of course what attractions Paradise might offer the female of the species—an eternity to service the bodily needs of designated men—is not really covered in this picture of the future.
The article ‘Women’s Liberation Through Islam’ also claims that the Qur’an affords the right of women to conduct business and own property. Maybe so. The idea has tradition. The Prophet’s first wife was a wealthy woman who ran a prosperous trading company. But this right has also not been well recognised by the Wahhabi version of Islam. Saudi women have had a tough time obtaining their rights in a legal system that imposes additional burdens on the fairer sex.
For most of its history, despite what the Qur’an has to say on the subject, Saudi Arabia regarded a woman merely as an appendage of her family. In the physical world, Saudi women moved through their community as anonymous black-clad objects indistinguishable one from another. The Saudi legal system treated women the same way. Women who raised legal issues in Saudi courts of law were such low profile creatures that their identity as unique individuals was typically at issue. In Saudi Arabia, establishing the identity of female claimants is an important part of the judicial process. Normal aids to establish identity, like passports, driver’s licences and ID cards were unavailable to Saudi women. Since the abaya is such a ubiquitous coverall, photographs of Saudi women are rarely taken. Proving they were actually the people they claimed to be proved a real burden to female claimants trying to obtain their rights through the court system. Was the person in the court the same person to whom the contested rights should have flowed?
Lacking an easy proof of identity, a woman trying to obtain legal rights, had to produce two male relations to confirm who she is. Saudi women have had difficulty in Saudi courts fighting false claims to their property and obtaining their rights to inheritance. Imposters and false documentation have been used to swindle women who have fallen out of favour with their families. Should the man deny that the woman in the court is his mother or his sister, the man’s word will normally be taken.
Signs have emerged that Saudi women, hitherto their society’s invisible people, are acquiring greater rights to their own identities. The main advance is entitlement to the identity card itself. Saudi men are issued identity cards that are meant to be carried in public at all times. Hitherto, women were named as dependants on their guardians’ identity cards, meaning that, strictly speaking, women were not allowed in public without their guardian male on whose card they are included.
In 2001 the law relaxed a little to allow the issue of cards to a small number of selected women provided they had permission of a mail guardian. In 2006 this rule was relaxed some more to grant all women the right to their own ID cards with or without the permission of a male in their family. This was a major step forward for women’s rights in the Kingdom.
Commenting on the social advance of issuing ID cards to women on a restricted basis, the Minister of the Interior Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz felt it necessary to state that the practice of recognising women as human beings with their own separate identity was no relaxation of Islamic rules but merely a pragmatic measure to fight fraud and forgery. Said the Prince, “The issuing of identity cards to women was dictated by the requirements of modern life.”
Given this sentiment from on high, the intrinsic right of a woman to her own identity was not really conceded by the ruling elite. In granting this limited concession, old habits died hard. To make the point that a woman’s right to a separate identity had been recognised with reluctance and only to convenience the commercial world, women’s identity cards were issued to their guardians instead of to the card holders directly.
In other areas too, are women in Saudi Arabia gradually being afforded concessions. A small advance in women’s rights in recent times has been the appointment of the first woman to the inner circle of Saudi government. In early 2009, in a major cabinet reshuffle, King Abdullah appointed Nour Fayez as deputy minister for women’s education.
Modern Saudi women with experience in the West sometimes express their frustration at the niggling rules of the male-dominated society. While in Saudi Arabia on business, one of the authors was invited to a dinner party where he met a single Saudi woman who had returned to Riyadh with a master’s degree in psychology from Stanford University. During the meal, the conversation turned to the status of women in contemporary Saudi Arabia. After spending five years studying in the USA, how did an educated Saudi Arabian woman resolve the dichotomy of the two opposing cultures? In answer to the question of what restrictions really irked her about her return to Saudi Arabia she said, “I don’t really mind having my husband chosen for me by my father. What I really resent is not being able to drive a car.”
Though the Qur’an claims that men and women are equal in the eyes of God, there is some way to go in Saudi Arabia before the claim can be made that men and women are equal in the eyes of man.
Recent statistics confirm that prejudice against women is still strong in Saudi Arabia, with about 12 per cent of the female population holding jobs—one of the lowest figures for any country in the world. Many female graduates remain unemployed and many others are forced to take jobs in nearby Arab states.
A handful of women in the country now own their own businesses—mostly dealing in specialist female products. Like the issue of ID cards, some degree of male influence over even that small incursion into male dominance has been maintained. Although women are allowed to go into business in a few restricted areas, the enabling legislation stipulates that a man must look after most of the documentation.
Working Women and the Qur’an
The more general ruling by the clerics who write the law in Saudi Arabia is based on an interpretation of the Qur’an that seems to twist a man’s obligation to look after his womenfolk into a restrictive covenant on a woman’s right to work. This ruling that women are denied the right to work comes from the section of the Qur’an which was written to define rights of women to rely on their menfolk for support and sustenance. The clerics claim that the Qur’an states the husband’s duty is to maintain his womenfolk and the woman’s duty is to look after the house while the husband is away. The English translation of the appropriate section of the Qur’an reads:
‘Men are the maintainers of women because Allah has given men more strength than women, and because men support women from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient and guard in the husband’s absence what Allah would have them guard.’
— Qur’an, Surah 4:34
Only in specialist, specifically female occupations where contact with women is unavoidable, such as providing doctoring and nursing services to women, does female employment thrive.
King Abdullah, when he was crown prince, hinted that restrictions on the employment of women might be relaxed. In 2012, the government approved the employment of women in the retail sector, but only in a limited capacity. Women will be able to work as salespeople in shops that sell uniquely feminine products, such as cosmetics and lingerie, which until now have been sold only by males!. Tentative steps have already been taken in the civil service and some private companies, including banks where separate branches have been created that employ only women. This measure ensures that segregation between the sexes is maintained in the workplace—which can lead to interesting working conditions. For example, the Chief of Econometrics within the Ministry of Planning has a staff of 20 female statisticians. Modern technology comes to the rescue to preserve the rule that men and women cannot work in the same workspace. While the cleric’s interpretation of the Qur’an prohibits face-to-face communication between men and women, nothing in the Qur’an bans video conferencing. Statisticians of opposite genders working in the same office talk to each other via closed circuit TV or through the intra-office Internet.
Hanadi Hindi is the first woman pilot in Saudi Arabia.
Veiled Saudi women working in a hospital in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia’s rules restricting the activities of women contrast with most of its neighbouring Islamic Arab countries. Bahrain, UAE and Jordan all provide their women equal educational opportunities, and permit them to work and drive. In neighbouring Bahrain, across the causeway that connects the two countries, women even work as limousine drivers.
What a difference a border makes!
The judicial system in Saudi Arabia is Shariah Law which combines the body of laws found in the Qur’an with the Sunnah—the collection of practices of the Prophet Muhammad—and the Hadith—the traditions and legends surrounding the Prophet. Like the Christian states of centuries past in Europe, religious beliefs and common law in Saudi Arabia are inextricably mixed. Saudi Arabia has adopted the Qur’an as its constitution. The Qur’an is not merely a religious text, it is also a lawbook.
Islam conducts far fewer debates than Christianity on how the rules written in its Holy Book should be interpreted. The Qur’an is far more straightforward and less ambiguous than the Bible. It is also much shorter. The English translation of the Qur’an runs to about 75,000 words—about the length of this book.
Unlike the Bible—which was periodically transcribed, written in three languages by many different authors in many different time periods—the Qur’an was written at one time, in one language recording the experiences of a single individual. While the Bible has been retranslated frequently, not one word of the Qur’an’s 114 Chapters, known as Suras, has been changed since they were first written.
According to its adherents, Shariah Law was intended to be merciful. Compared to other systems of justice that prevailed at the time the Holy Book was written, it probably was. Elsewhere in the world in the 7th century AD, rough justice was widespread. In the throes of the Dark Ages, Europe, for example, was a lawless place. Such laws as existed were administered erratically by medieval courts at the whim of the Lord of the Manor.
The major problem with Shariah Law compared to the world’s more modern legal systems is that it contains no provision for self-improvement. No doctrine of precedent exists. No body of case law can accumulate to guide the next judge who hears a similar case. Each judge who hears a case decides the outcome based on his view of the Qur’an and that alone.
The Judiciary is a kind of old boys club. Judges in the administration of Shariah Law are heavily provincial. More than three quarters of the 700-member Judiciary come from a region in the centre of the kingdom known as the Qasim, the home territory of Wahhabism. Nearly all the senior judges are from the Qasim region. Judges rule the courts. No jury system exists in Saudi Arabia, though the hierarchy of appeal courts is similar to the West.
Decisions of the judges are known as fatwas. Their principal objective is to preserve Islamic purity. Shariah judges may issue fatwas on anyone, whether inside or outside their jurisdiction, and whether brought to trial or not. The most publicised fatwa of recent times has been that of author Salman Rushdie—a sentence of death, so far not carried out, which was imposed by the mullahs of Iran on Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, which was seen to parody Muslim beliefs.
The Qur’an is a key factor in a strange duality between the country’s administration and its religious orders. Religion and civil administration overlap and merge imperceptibly. Saudi clerics paid by the government perform a simultaneous political and religious function. They are public servants, answerable to the rules of public service as well as to the Ulema. Clerics and government officials are mutually answerable to each other, and this is a source of tension for both parties. If clerics get out of step with the rulers, they may find themselves out of a job. If administrators and government officials stray too far from religious beliefs, they may find they have a palace revolt on their hands.
Religion permeates all Saudi institutions. Saudi Arabia not only has a civil police force, it has a parallel religious police force—the Mutawa’een—a shadowy organisation in charge of purifying thought and action in the community. The Mutawa’een is God’s police force. Its full name is the ‘Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and for the Prevention of Vice’. The Mutawa’een performs a similar role in modern-day Saudi Arabia to the Inquisitors of Christianity’s most nefarious period. It seeks to impose its view of life on the population. It ferrets out the morally and religiously suspect, extracts confessions and brings the malefactors to court.
The civil and religious police forces answer to quite different organisations. Though the Mutawa’een are meant to be accompanied by the civil police when discharging its duties in the community, often this does not happen. The Mutawa’een can come and go as it pleases, entering private property without search warrants and detaining whoever it thinks fit. It patrols the streets, enters homes to ensure that people dress modestly and that the laws of Islam are practised, and checks that shops close their doors during prayer time. During Ramadan, the Mutawa’een is particularly active, entering businesses to ensure that employees are not eating, drinking or smoking cigarettes during daylight hours.
An extraordinary and widely reported event in Mecca in March 2002 illustrated the clergy’s iron grip over common sense and humanity. A fire had broken out at a girl’s school. Trying to escape the fire, the girls fled down a stairwell of the burning building to find the ground floor exit of the fire escape locked. Firemen managed to break down the door in time to let the girls out, but at that stage the Mutawa’een had arrived on the scene. The girls, the clerics determined, were unveiled and not wearing headscarves. The Mutawa’een cautioned firemen attending the scene that their morals would be compromised if the improperly-clad girls were released. Trapped in the stairwell of the burning building, on the wrong side of a door that the Mutawa’een refused to open, the doomed girls burned to death. Fifteen girls were killed and 52 others injured. The Saudis tried to censor the incident, but word leaked out to the wider world, alternatively bemused and incensed by the depth of the cultural divide.
A common Western view of Saudi Arabia is of people who are jealous of the West. According to this stereotype, Saudis strive to be more like the West, and would like to escape to the West and live a Western life. Many people who have lived in Saudi Arabia have recounted the following story, or one like it.
A Westerner is sitting in a plane, heading out of King Fahd International Airport in Damman or one of the other Saudi international airports. Next stop is London or perhaps New York. Seated nearby is a Saudi woman dressed in an abaya. She is encased from head to toe in a shimmering black sheath. Not far into the journey, the lady gets up from her seat, makes her way down the aisle and disappears into the aircraft toilet—never to be seen again. A little while later, a completely different individual emerges. She is elaborately made up, wears a dress with a revealing neckline, short skirt, nylon stockings and high heel shoes. She is clutching a Louis Vuitton bag out of which pokes the merest hint of black material. This stylish lady wiggles her way down the aisle, slides into the seat that was previously occupied by the Saudi Arabian woman. She shoves her bag under the seat and orders a cocktail.
A version of the story also exists for males of the species, who disappear into aircraft toilets dressed in traditional Arab clothes and emerge clad in smart business suits.
There are various theories why these mysterious and possibly mythical creatures are inclined to enter small enclosed spaces to change into the outfits of alternate tribal identities in the tradition of superwoman and superman. One view, favoured by some in the West, is that Saudis are uncomfortable with their own identity. Proponents of this view hold that Saudis share a desire with many other countries in Asia, to adopt the ubiquitous Western cultural identity.
The real reasons that Saudis slip easily between one culture and another may be far more pragmatic. Saudi women may wish to change their clothes merely because wearing an abaya is plain uncomfortable. Another reason is the fear of mistreatment on arrival in the West, or the East. Since the 9-11 event in 2001, and the subsequent terrorist scares, it may now be awkward, or even dangerous, to get around the streets of New York and other Western cities, dressed in a thobe and gutra—the apparel of a terrorist in a prevailing Western view.
Geographically, Saudi Arabia sits at the boundary of the West and the East. Culturally, its position is much the same. Arabs have fraternised with people from neighbouring countries for a long time and adopted many foreign ways. Many Arabs have already forsaken their traditional clothes in their domestic day-to-day lives. In places like Lebanon and Egypt, Western clothes are common. By contrast, most Saudis wear their traditional clothes inside their own country. Outside the country, as they see fit, some adopt the identity of the destination country while others stick with their own national dress.
Like other Bedouins, only two generations back, even the Al Saud Royal Family walked or caught a camel when they wanted to travel. Though the present generation of Saudi princes live in palaces, members of the House of Saud have not strayed all that far from their Bedouin roots. King Abdullah, born in 1923, might just be old enough to remember a life of tents, camels and austere pleasures from the early days of his own life.
Since the House of Saud has been running the country, the policy of mutual support between Bedouins and the Royal Family has worked well for both parties. For their part, the Bedouins have provided the bulk of the judiciary, most of the religious leaders and much of the Praetorian Guard that protects the King and his entourage from various potentially subversive forces (including elements of the Saudi military).
Despite the homogenising influence of globalism, much of Bedouin culture has survived intact, particularly in Saudi Arabia’s more remote regions. Even in the 21st century, a significant nomadic population follows a close replica of the traditional Bedouin way of life. Modern-day Bedouins still pitch and strike tents, move their flocks about the countryside and generally behave in a Bedouin-like manner. On the fringes of the Empty Quarter—the desolate, waterless plains in the south of the Arabian Peninsula—the tribes of the Rub Al Khali (the Rashih, Saar, Manahil, Manhrah, Awamit, Bani Yas and Dawasir) still operate their traditional complex cultural mix of honour-based tribal lives of conflicts, raids and fragile alliances.
Land Compensation Claims, Bedouin-style
Bedouins have long lived by trading. Since they were traditionally on the move, Bedouins failed to develop a culture of property ownership common in societies which adopted permanent agriculture. However, when Western influence arrived, some Bedouins cottoned onto the idea of land rights quickly enough and cashed in. Bedouin tribes, according to popular accounts, followed pipeline projects across the country, making financial demands on oil companies, claiming the companies were intruding on their traditional lands. The more audacious claimants, having learned of an intended pipeline route in advance, would set up an encampment ahead of construction and claim the pipe was infringing some ancient right. Appeals by oil companies to the king would normally be settled on the side of the Bedouins. Money would pass hands and the Bedouins would move their camps to establish their ancient civilisation somewhere else where a construction project was about to start.
According to some estimates, Saudi Arabia still has 600,000 full-time Bedouins and many more part-timers. In modern society, Bedouins may wear their tribal affiliations as a badge of honour. Bedouinism is like citizenship. It carries financial and social advantage. To some extent, modern-day Bedouins can have the best of both worlds. They can enjoy their Bedouinism without quite making the full commitment to the nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors. Courtesy of its oil revenue, the government has created a fall-back position for Bedouins, the markaz—small towns of concrete block houses—to accommodate Bedouins wishing to adopt an urban lifestyle and in which they can receive health care and their children can receive education.
The success of the markaz programme has been mixed. Some Bedouins still prefer to stay in the desert to tend their camels in the traditional way. Others stay in town, perhaps reluctantly. Only a couple of generations away from life in the desert, urban Saudis with no obvious connection to the nomadic life may retain an affinity with their antecedents. According to one observer, “the first thing a Saudi does on building a house is erect a tent in the garden.”
Education in the kingdom is universal and free for Saudis, but not compulsory. Most Saudis attend kindergarten followed by six years of primary school, three years of middle school and three years of high school. In a country where the sexes are kept separate, schools for Saudis are not co-educational. Teaching tends to be by rote learning of facts. Long passages from the Qur’an are memorised. Intellectual curiosity incompatible with religious dogma is discouraged. Aversion to other religious beliefs is instilled at an early age. Saudi children are encouraged to recite sayings such as ‘I will purify the Arabian Peninsula of Jews and Christians’ (attributed to Omar the second Caliph). The Wahhabi manifesto, the Tawhid, is compulsory study that cites, amongst its teachings, that ‘Allah has said never support the infidels’. The products of this educational system are steeped in religious dogma that does not, in general, equip them to make their way in the modern world and hold down significant jobs.
In 2012, there were 36 universities in the kingdom. 23 of which have been founded since 2000. Saudi universities include King Saud University in Riyadh, King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, and King Faisal University in Al Dammam. Other tertiary level institutions are the Technical Institute in Riyadh and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. Various Western universities have campuses in Saudi Arabia. With this recent influx of new universities about to produce their first graduates, the number of Saudi graduates is set to increase sharply, with about 30,000 graduates expected to enter the job market in 2015. One of the effects, the Ministry of Education estimates, is that the proportion of teaching staff in Saudi tertiary institutions will rise to about 40 per cent— which could affect the chances of expat workers seeking the same posts. On the other hand, only about 20 per cent of the country’s graduates qualify in technical and scientific subjects—the skills that Saudi Arabia particularly needs.
Education in Saudi Arabia is still strongly biased towards its Islamic roots. Curricula for all disciplines emphasises Islamic Sharia laws and the Qur’an, with a heavy emphasis on Islamic studies. Unemployed, and for all practicable purposes, unemployable graduates of religious colleges—numbering about 400,000 in 2005—provide a ready supply of rebels to trouble the administrators in modern day Saudi society.
Prejudices in Education
Women, according to Saudi authorities, are entitled to an education. A hadith of the Prophet Muhammad states: ‘seeking knowledge is a mandate for every Muslim (male and female)’. Despite the fact that females outperform their male counterparts academically in Saudi secondary schools by a wide margin (with 60 per cent of females going onto college after graduation against 50 per cent of males), prejudice against Saudi females exists even among the educated, as evidenced by an editorial in the local Arab News. ‘Is there any logical justification,’ the editorial runs, ‘for spending huge amounts of money on women’s education when thousands of female graduates face the prospect of either remaining at home or entering a single profession?’
International schools teaching an international syllabus are available at the major population centres to accommodate the needs of dependants of the expatriate workforce. International schools inside Saudi Arabia are co-educational as they are anywhere else. Further details are contained in the Resource Guide at the back of this book.
