Saudi Arabia is to gender what apartheid South Africa was to race. In public life a woman is almost entirely segregated from men: excluded from the workplace, penned in special ”family sections” in restaurants, taught in separate schools and colleges and forbidden to drive.
Under the country’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, her husband may marry up to four times, but an adulterous woman faces death by stoning. Outside the home she must wear the abaya, a black gown that enshrouds her completely, except for a slit for the eyes.
There are signs, however, that the kingdom is reforming. It is not so much a wind of change as a puff, but it is significant. Women have been granted voluntary identity cards for use in banks and other public places. The card ends the iniquitous legal position in which a Saudi woman simply does not exist. As a child she is the ward of her father, as an adult the ward of her husband and as a widow the ward of her sons.
In a current case an Italian woman who divorced her Saudi husband because he wanted to take a second wife has been told she may never see her daughter again — the child will never reach independence and therefore will never have the right to choose to live with her.
The new ID has to be issued to a father or brother, rather than the woman herself, but it is being heralded as the first step towards proper legal recognition and the rights that flow from that. Before the cards were introduced a woman was not allowed to open a bank account without a male relative verifying her identity. Many have been swindled by husbands or brothers who pocketed their money, using another woman to pose as the account holder.
Other barriers are gradually being overcome by a new generation of ambitious, highly educated young women who account for more than half the school and university students.
Selwa al Hazzaa is of the new generation. She was the first woman in the kingdom to hold a top hospital job: five years ago she was made head of ophthalmology at King Faisal hospital in the capital, Riyadh.
She points to the contrast between her life and that of her mother, who is only 15 years older. ”My mother didn’t go to school. She was only taught to read the Qur’an. Her father was a sheikh and she got married at 14. A huge jump has been made.”
Al Hazzaa lives in Riyadh and has spent several years studying in the United States. As such, she is part of a tiny minority of urbane, Westernised women at the cutting edge of reform. Most Saudi women continue to be constrained by centuries-old restrictions legitimised by the country’s harsh Salafi religion.
Vice police, the mutawwa, patrol public places to prevent young men and women mixing. In March a fire broke out at a girls’ school in Mecca. The mutawwa allegedly prevented several girls fleeing the burning building because they were unveiled and would be exposed to male emergency workers. Fifteen died.
The traditional role of women is challenged daily by satellite TV images of scantily clad Hollywood stars beamed into most Saudi homes. Yet male attitudes remain doggedly opposed to change.
Two young men in an Internet cafe in Jeddah said they were fans of Sandra Bullock and Brooke Shields, whom they described as ”cute”. But asked whether their sisters should be allowed to drive, they were adamant. ”A woman is like a queen here. She shouldn’t drive,” one said.
”Men are just scared of women being independent,” said Layla, who works in a segregated women’s office at a private company in Jeddah and did not want to give her full name. ”They have to control a woman to make them feel like men.”
According to Western diplomatic sources, the Saudi royal family is considering giving driving licences to professional women aged 40 and over. The kingdom spends millions of dollars a year employing immigrants as drivers.
A few women believe the enforced wearing of abayas, the ban on driving and the segregation are products of Saudi Arabia’s reactionary interpretation of the Muslim faith.
”There is nothing in the Qur’an that says a woman can’t drive, or has to have her face covered. This is male domination — not Islam,” Layla said.