Women in Saudi Arabia: Change from Within

Our discussion this month (as is often the case) took us to some unexpected places, and expanded our knowledge of women's rights issues.

A key theme this time was complexity.

Women's issues in Saudi Arabia are nothing if not complex.

In the middle of this complexity is the undeniable fact: male guardianship laws and sex segregation in Saudi Arabia are so extreme that women face massive insecurity, lack personal autonomy and experience violations of even the most basic human rights. They are Perpetual Minors in the eyes of the law.

Qanta Ahmed, the author of In the Land of Invisible Women (a moderate Muslim and a British-born, American-trained doctor of Pakistani descent) was a particularly helpful guide through some of this complexity. This is because she was well-positioned to confront a lot of this complexity in a very personal way-she was both an outsider (a foreigner, with no real knowledge of Wahhabism) and an insider (a Muslim, highly educated, a doctor) in the relatively elite social context of the military hospital ICU where she worked.

Imprisonment and Empowerment
One of the most contested and complex issues is obviously the (often violently enforced) extensive covering of women in public. Even before the author, Qanta, lands in Saudi Arabia, she is worried about the appropriateness of her clothing. The first thing that she does after settling in her apartment is to go shopping for an abbaya with her secretary. Qanta passionately declares:
"... polyester imprisonment by compulsion is ungodly and (like the fiber) distinctly man-made."

But as soon as she puts the abbaya on, Qanta also recognizes the safety and empowerment that it lends her as a woman who must navigate exceptionally predatory and aggressive male-dominated public space. For a beautifully crafted personal statement by one woman about choosing to cover herself in public, watch the video-poem "The Shield". And still, there is the opposite experience of emotional and physical illness about being compelled to cover.

At the same time, men are not as free as they may initially appear: Qanta notes the emotional imprisonment of many privileged and relatively empowered young Saudi men, who seem to be caught in an impossible struggle for a sense of purpose. Many of these young men from privileged backgrounds have unlimited access to cars and material things, but are faced with a weak sense of social belonging and too much freedom. She called them "lost boys" and treated them in the hospital when their drug-taking, alcohol consuming 120mph recklessness landed them in the emergency room.

Identity and Belonging
One of the main threads in this story is the question of the shifting personal identity of the author: she is challenged to confront her identity at multiple levels throughout her time in Saudi Arabia. This may be familiar to those in the book club who read Lipstick Jihad, several years ago, and is familiar to anyone who has struggled with hybrid or multiple identities based on religion, heritage, ethnicity, citizenship or language. Qanta gives us a lot of clues about the divisions of class and race in Saudi Arabia, and how qualified the sense of belonging can be in the face of so much pressure for conformity and homogeneity in public spaces.

Social Change  
One of the most challenging and hopeful elements of our discussion recognized the very sensitive issues of human rights critique and enforcement that comes from "outsiders"and acknowledged the importance of change happening from inside Saudi Arabia itself.

In reading about many human rights abuses all over the world (including in the US) we can often see education as the key to ending violence and suffering. But the people Qanta describes are highly educated. In many cases, the lack of basic economic security appears to be a related issue: with better access to shelter, food and health care, human rights will improve in many situations: but in spite of class disparity and some economic vulnerability, basic needs are not the main issue in the Saudi case. The end of civil war, violent rebellion, or occupation is another common solution to human rights abuse in many countries, but not in Saudi Arabia where the country is at "peace" and the violence that is most rampant is domestic violence.

In Qanta's description of Saudi Arabia, we see a wholehearted embrace of consumer culture, a country that has mastered modernity and is also highly resistant to external pressure to adopt liberal democratic concepts such as multiculturalism, religious tolerance, universal suffrage. The power of the traditionalists' arguments for cultural/religious 'exceptionalism' rests on a foundation of resistance to the erasure of difference and a defense of identity. Outsiders trying to criticize and change things are not going to be very helpful here. But there is a lot of hope for improved women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and it is coming from inside the country:

• There are many men in Saudi Arabia who support women who strive for more autonomy by owning businesses and professionals, and are their supporters and allies. Samar Badawi's lawyer and husband Waleed Abu Alkhair helped her challenge Saudi guardianship laws that allowed her father to continue abusing her: she recently won a 2012 Woman of Courage award.
• There are organized movements of women in Saudi Arabia who are pushing for change, and who have made progress. The movement to allow women to legally drive, for example.
• Saudis understand the dynamics of "religious conservatives... (who) emotionally blackmail Saudis by preying on their weaknesses to always be good Muslims" (Sabria Jawar), and have found ways to resist this, with impressive results. The focus seems to be on incremental change, although impatience is mounting.

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.