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A Society of Young Women
Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia
By Amélie Le Renard STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9137-3
CHAPTER 1
RIYADH, A CITY OF CLOSED SPACES
Residents of Riyadh are eager to find any trace of desert beneath the city homes and streets that mask the past. At the first hint of spring, families venture beyond the stifling walls and into the vast stretches of sand. They rekindle a dream that is deep within them: the caravan is still there, waiting for them, at the edge of the city; it will always be there.
Umayma al-Khamis, Bahriyyat
ARRIVING IN RIYADH, I was struck by its silence. Even the constant hum of air conditioners and traffic was absorbed by it. The city seemed both noiseless and odorless. Then I began spending weekends at shopping malls: giant sound boxes containing a brouhaha of women's discussions mixed with the laughter and shouts of children. Like many inhabitants of this "city of walls," I felt closed in. It seemed that only construction workers got to spend time outside; like everyone else, I was either indoors or in a car, which I could not even drive. Given the city's design, and especially how spread out it is, walking was not a viable option. In 2004, the municipality began to construct large sidewalks or "promenades" (mamsha). These were nicknamed "streets for pregnant women" (shari' alhawamil), as if they had been created to resolve the absurd situation in which some women found themselves: doctors recommend walking for exercise, but there is nowhere to walk. Frequent checkpoints and religious police who may pop up at any moment, as well as security checks (taftish) at the entrances to women-only spaces, notably to exclude forbidden items like cameras, reinforce the feeling that so much is forbidden, regimented, monitored. Measures designed to police morality, or to prevent attacks and misdeeds by "youth," create a climate of ubiquitous surveillance.
Although some of the women I met did refer to Riyadh as a prison, most of them had a very different impression from my own. The following anecdote illustrates this gap. I was planning to meet a journalist named Nada and go to dinner at the home of a friend of hers, and she offered to pick me up at a supermarket that was on her way. This type of arrangement is common in Riyadh. I could not wait in the street or in a car, since I did not have one, and coming to my home was complicated because it was in a restricted zone, with the entrance guarded by soldiers who often refused entrance to people who did not look "Western" enough when embassies were closed. So that evening, I took a taxi to the supermarket and waited for Nada. I entered the supermarket immediately, a reflex unconsciously acquired in Riyadh, to protect myself from passing vehicles who might bother me in one way or another, even if just to beep their horns to emphasize the abnormal character of my presence outside as a woman alone. After several tries, I succeeded in getting in touch with Nada, who told me that she would be very late. With nothing else to do, I began roaming the supermarket. A few moments later, the call to prayer burst out, the doors of the supermarket closed for around half an hour, so that I and everyone else were locked in. While I was strolling through the aisles, a woman wearing a niqab and pushing a cart greeted me warmly, laying a hand on my arm. It was Ala, a young hospital employee I had met through her sister, who had become a friend. She was doing the shopping for her family. She asked me what I was doing there, and I told her in a slightly irritated tone what had happened: I was getting tired of being constantly closed in and dependent for my mobility. She answered that it was because, as a foreigner, I was not used to it. She herself found it more comfortable to be driven by her brothers than to drive herself, and she enjoyed walking around the supermarket and doing the shopping. It was a welcome change of scenery. This quite ordinary anecdote highlights different ways of experiencing the socio-spatial organization of this city, and particularly the fact that gender-based restrictions operate in such a way that a supermarket—or a shopping center—can seem like a space of relative freedom for women.
How did this state of affairs come about? Riyadh has been shaped by the building of a modern state, along with developmentalism, oil revenues, the Islamic Awakening, and trade liberalization. In an era of reform aiming to attract international investors and transform Saudi Arabia's image, the capital of the kingdom has gradually acquired towers and malls inspired by America and Dubai—what Saskia Sassen has called an "urban glamor zone." The recent availability of new places for women to work and shop, modeled on the U.S.–Dubai-inspired "theme park," where interactions are monitored by private security, accommodates and combines in diverse ways with strict gender segregation policies. The city is marked by two opposing discourses regarding gender norms and spatial layout. On the one hand, there is the discourse of national distinction, with gender-based segregation presented as a central element of Saudi identity. The implementation of this discourse dates from the period of the oil boom (tafra) and the Islamic Awakening. More recently, reform discourse has been promoting salaried work for women, development of the private sector, and the opening of markets for foreign exchange. This discourse has influenced the lifestyles of young urban women. It is often juxtaposed and intertwined with the national distinction discourse, and both can be pronounced by different state institutions at the same time, or by the same institution at different times. The Saudi state is not monolithic. Official policies toward Saudi women stem variously from the king, the Ministry of Labor, the Council of Senior 'Ulama, and other entities, which may pronounce more or less conflicting discourses at the same time. Spaces accessible to women may be opened or closed according to the sometimes contradictory initiatives of the Ministry of Labor, members of the religious police, the municipality, entrepreneurial princes, and/or businessmen from the private sector.
Gender Segregation and Saudi National Distinction
The word "traditional" is incorrectly applied to gender segregation as practiced in Saudi Arabia today. The current socio-spatial structure is the result of public policy grounded in a compromise between the government and state religious authorities. This policy is written into law: since the 1960s, mixed spaces are legally forbidden for employment and education. Gender segregation is one aspect of a broader discourse presenting Saudi society as Islamic—soliciting sentiments of national unity in the context of a state founded (in its current borders) in 1932 on a territory that was previously fragmented. This "Islamic society discourse" was promoted by the institution responsible for Saudi girls' education from 1960 to 2002, a commission of 'Ulama (religious scholars) that reported to the Council of Senior 'Ulama and was independent of the Ministry of Education. The curriculum's official goal was to make female students into good, pious, virtuous wives and mothers, protected from interactions with men. The official fatwas of the Council of Senior 'Ulama, who are high-ranking civil servants, govern the daily lives—dress, authorized behavior, and so on—of Saudi women. It is recommended that they completely cover themselves. I call this a model of "Islamic femininity" because those who promote it do so mainly in the name of Islam.
In nomadic and rural life, gender segregation did not concern all groups. Historical and ethnographic evidence gathered by Saudi researchers (primarily women) discredits the dominant reading of Saudi history in terms of linear progress and modernization, according to which all obstacles to women's professional activity are the result of traditions inherited from the past. Instead, the research reveals a contrast between the activities that women exercised before the Saudi state and the oil boom and the obstacles that they currently encounter throughout the peninsula. Women previously participated in a wide variety of occupations. Frequently, the subsistence of rural and nomadic families depended on women's agricultural work. For this reason, in the Hijaz and Asir provinces, for example, women did not wear the abaya, but rather clothing better suited for outdoor work. Only women belonging to rich sedentary families could allow themselves to remain indoors; gender segregation was an indicator of high status, as is the case in many other contexts. Gender segregation for all and the wearing of black clothing indicate the "Saudization" of various regions, contemporary to a process of rapid urbanization. Establishment of the Saudi state, followed by the oil boom of the 1970s, attracted a large number of families to cities in hopes of benefiting from the numerous new public-sector jobs.
Many of the families immigrating to Riyadh could be described as "uprooted." The rural exodus and, for nomads, sedentarization, led to women's increased confinement to the domestic space. Salwa Al-Khatib's ethnographic study in 1980 of sedentarized bedouin in a settlement (hijra) revealed that in their previously nomadic existence, the women had enjoyed freedom of movement and had not been separated from the men of their extended families. They had participated in numerous tasks, some of which were shared with men, such as pasturing the herds, wearing the face cover called a burqa' in Saudi Arabia. After sedentarization, they were restricted to female sociability and their homes, while continuing to wear the burqa', and they felt that their role in the community had become secondary. "We have no other occupations but to fill our bellies, pray, and sleep," one woman observed.
Although no ethnographic study has been published on the impact of migration to urban areas on women's lifestyles in Arabia, we can imagine a similar process. Sedentary inhabitants of Najd (the central region of Arabia, where Riyadh is located) practiced gender segregation, and in contrast to nomadic and rural women, women living in the city rarely worked outside the home, aside from the poorest among them. Women arriving in the city were forced to adapt as best they could to such practices. Additionally, they were forced to adapt to living surrounded by strangers, rather than among a large extended family. Women's freedom of movement was affected by this change from nomadic life: according to Salwa Al-Khatib, nomadic bedouin women circulated freely among relatives, who would not compromise the honor of their family's women. For families belonging to prestigious bedouin tribes, this "uprooting" also accentuated feelings of loss due to their fall in status within the political context of the Saudi state. Today, in light of their current circumstances, the nomadic life of former times is sometimes reinterpreted by the mothers of the women I spoke with as idyllic, or at least more egalitarian, since women benefited from greater freedom and autonomy within the extended family; when they evoked this period, they often forgot its harshness.
Gender segregation became strictly enforced in the rapidly expanding city of Riyadh. Due to a housing shortage within the city, many Saudis, particularly bedouin, created makeshift settlements and slums on its periphery, without access to water and electricity. Finally, in 1971, the government created the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, followed by the Real Estate Development Fund in 1974, with the goal of encouraging the private sector to construct housing. Zero-interest loans allowed many Saudis to construct their own villas, in districts further and further from the city center. These villas needed to be sufficiently spacious to respect gender segregation and to allow double circulation, with a double receiving room (majlis). Walls around the villas protect families' intimacy. This was a sharp contrast from the much smaller mud houses of the old city center in which some women I met (the interviewees' mothers) who had arrived in Riyadh in the 1960s and 1970s had spent their childhoods or early married lives.
With the expansion of Riyadh, residential streets now merge into large boulevards instead of leading to the mosque as they used to. Formerly, the narrow streets of residential neighborhoods constituted semi-private spaces, allowing women a certain freedom of movement. These were eliminated as the city was remade to accommodate automobile traffic only: it was spread out, with few or no sidewalks. Neighbors rarely socialize. Spontaneous family visits have become rare because of the distance between homes. It may also be difficult to get to someone's house, because only the large streets' names are used, and houses sometimes have no numbers or the house numbers are unknown.
Gender segregation has become more strictly enforced since the Islamic Awakening (Sahwa), a hybrid protest movement that assimilated various currents of both official Saudi Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood. It began in the 1960s and reached the height of its influence within the state and society (among men and women alike) in the 1980s. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) was originally devoted to encouraging men to pray, but later also focused on systematic control over women's appearance in public. With new norms of acceptable public behavior enforced by surveillance from the CPVPV's "religious police," all women were urged to wear the black garment that covers them from head to foot. Even those who would never have chosen this attire of their own accord had to submit to the fatwas of the Council of Senior 'Ulama. Here, it is important to note that, unlike in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the wearing of a veil is required, no law specifies how women should dress in Saudi Arabia. Certain fatwas are enforced by the CPVPV and by the municipal police, whereas others are not. In other words, the legal status of these fatwas is unclear.
The fact that education is generalized within the framework of a developmentalist agenda contributes to spreading the model of Islamic femininity. Gender segregation is institutionalized by a separate school system for girls, in terms of both location and curriculum. From primary school to pedagogical universities for training teachers after high school, schools and campuses for girls are separate from those for men and surrounded by walls through which only women can pass. Inside, since they are among women, they wear neither veil nor abaya. But they are required to arrive in an abaya with their faces covered, which contributes to making everyone dress the same within the kingdom. Women have begun to cover their faces in regions such as the Eastern Province where this was not previously the custom. Through spatial segregation and the standardized performance of the difference between Saudi men and women under precise rules of self-presentation, gender overrules other differences such as faith, tribal belonging, or geographic origin.
Gender segregation in public manifests the Islamic character of Saudi society. This mark of national identity is also a mark of national distinction, differentiating Saudis from nonnational residents. Throughout the 1970s, roughly half the working population consisted of non-Saudis, the majority being Arabs (Palestinians, Yemeni, Egyptians, and others). Since the end of the 1970s, the proportion of Asian immigrants has increased, particularly of Indians, Pakistanis, and Filipinos. The social hierarchy between Saudis and these nonnationals (some of whom were born in Saudi Arabia) relies both on apparent material superiority, even if in reality not all Saudis became rich following the oil boom, and on the pretense of religious and moral superiority. This distinction is signified and reinforced through clothing. In Riyadh, the thawb, a sort of long, white djellaba for men, and the covering of the face for women standardize the appearance of Saudis and differentiate them from nonnationals, even if some of these also adopt Saudi dress. Wearing the thawb or covering one's face serves to materialize and reinforce the Saudi/foreigner distinction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Society of Young Women by Amélie Le Renard. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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