March: In the Land of Invisible Women

This month, we will read a book about Saudi Arabia. The author, Qanta Ahmed, is a Muslim woman, a Pakistani who was born in Britain and trained as a doctor in the United States. Her book, In the Land of Invisible Women, she describes her choice to go to work in a hospital on a military base in Saudi Arabia.

The main reason we are reading this book right now is because of the recent campaign that Human Rights Watch launched in Los Angeles: Let Them Play. The February 2012 press release that launched the campaign was on the report, Steps of the Devil, which documents the broad discrimination against women in Saudi Arabia- from girls in public school not getting any physical education to no official sporting events for women athletes anywhere in the country to no Saudi sportswomen supported by the government to compete abroad in any competition- and links this discrimination to the International Olympic Committee's responsibility to hold member countries to account when they fail to live up to the values and rules of the Olympic Movement. Along with Qatar and Brunei, Saudi Arabia is the only other country that has never nominated a women to compete in the Olympic Games.

The fantastic news is that this campaign has made some waves!  Now, a Saudi Arabian female sports commentator will run with the Olympic torch in London. Not only that, the IOC is actively encouraging the government of Saudi Arabia to send women to the Games; Qatar is sending at least two women, and Saudi Arabia has apparently submitted a list of four women, and Brunei has submitted a list of female athletes to the IOC to compete in London as well.

We chose the book by Qanta Ahmed so we could get some more perspective on the country of Saudi Arabia. Some of the interesting things to look for in this book are:

•  the oppressive and liberating aspects of the hijab and abaya (this may contain some links to our discussion of Orhan Pamuk's book).
• the complexity of belonging- the author assumed that she would fit in and understand a lot more in Saudi Arabia because she was Muslim, but she discovered that it was not that simple. At the same time, when she was in Saudi Arabia, she went on the hajj to Mecca and found a deeper connection to her religion.
• the complexity of oppression and rebellion in a highly controlled and traditionalist society; the racism and other complex divisions in a society that from the outside is usually seen as monolithic; also the dramatic complexity of consumer culture and conservative social norms.