Evolution, not revolution, for Saudi women
By Hassan M. Fattah The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2005
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi journalist in this Red Sea
city, was in Manhattan when the terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept.
11, 2001 occurred. She scrambled to contact her editors and send reports, but
was rebuffed because they did not trust the work of a woman.
Sharif, who has since been promoted to being a midlevel editor, said it
would be different today because much has changed for Saudi women - and the
Sept. 11 attacks is one of the reasons. Wrapped in black, still paid less than
her male counterparts and still barred from driving, Sharif sat in her office
inside the cramped "ladies section" of the newspaper Al Watan, sighing about
the difficulties someone like her faces.
Nonetheless, she ticked off numerous substantive changes, beginning with
something that happened recently. Two women were elected to the 12-member board
of directors of the Jidda Chamber of Commerce, the first time women were
elected to, or even permitted to run for, such a visible post in the kingdom.
Until a few years ago, Saudi women were completely excluded from the
public sphere. Now their photographs (heads covered) appear in newspapers, and
they have their own picture identification cards rather than being disembodied
names on their husbands' or fathers' cards. This means that Sharif, who went to
New York in 2001 accompanied by her husband, can and does travel alone now,
although she still needs her husband's permission.
The first university courses for women studying architecture or law have
begun. Divorce is easier to obtain, and women no longer need a frontman to
register a company. Individually, such changes may seem minor. But taken
together, they represent a real shift.
"We came from below zero," said Sharif, 37, who is pregnant with her
seventh child and whose eldest is in the first class of female architecture
students. "Now we have reason to be optimistic."
The changes, rapid and radical by Saudi standards, are noticeable to
anyone who has not been here in some years. Of the dozen women interviewed for
this article, most agreed to meet male journalists without being accompanied by
a male relative, a rarity a decade ago.
Several even agreed to have their photographs taken, although the others
declined, saying their parents or husbands would object.
The shifts, which are largely limited to the well-off and well-educated,
have a number of sources. One is the double shock produced here by the fact
that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi and by the subsequent wave of
terrorism by Al Qaeda that struck this country. Suddenly, the ruling family had
reason to push back against some of the more reactionary practices imposed by
the powerful clergy.
The huge national debt created by the 1991 Gulf War was another factor.
The country needed to expand its economy, and many women here hold a great deal
of idle cash. Finally, the rise to power this year of King Abdullah, a
moderate, is widely viewed as significant.
The women leading the movement for more rights are not presenting
themselves as secular feminists. Rather, they are citing Koranic scripture for
their demands, hoping to beat the clerics at their own game. When Saudi clerics
say women should not drive, these women say the Prophet Muhammad spoke
approvingly of a day when women could travel alone. They say women played
crucial roles in the days of the prophet and that his wife, Khadija, was an
important merchant.
"We have been insufficiently educated in our own religion," said Ghada
Angawi, a personal coach for businesswomen who considers the Koran a vital
weapon in the fight for women's equality.
To make their point, the leaders are acting with caution. Lama
al-Suleiman, 39, one of the two women elected to the Chamber of Commerce, holds
a doctorate from King's College in London and runs a company. Trilingual and
sophisticated, she has gone around Jidda for years without covering her hair
and greeted journalists from The New York Times at her house in jeans. For a
photograph, however, she changed clothes, saying that, having entered public
life, she did not want to give her opponents any excuse to discredit her.
"You have to melt the culture, not break it," she said.
Sharif, the editor, made the same point. She said she kept the article
about Suleiman and Nashwa al-Taher, the other woman elected, off the front page
lest it attract too much attention. Maha Fitaihi, the wife of Jidda's mayor and
a prominent women's activist, said, "We don't want a civil war, we just want
this to be an evolutionary change."
Fitaihi learned firsthand the risks of over-publicizing her activities
earlier this year when she organized a basketball tournament for girls. Within
days, religious figures contacted local leaders to put a stop to it. Girls were
forbidden to play sports, they insisted. Fitaihi scrapped the event.
The changes tend to come two steps forward, one back. Women have risen in
the ranks of banks and hospitals, running segregated sections for women, but
they still do not have real authority to make decisions. They no longer need a
man to sign documents for them, but few have been made aware of it.
The Chamber of Commerce elections are widely expected to be a prelude to
women running in Saudi municipal elections in 2009. But there are already
worries. It did not take long for some clerics to object to the Chamber's
elections, saying, as one imam put it, that they produced a "dangerous and
corrupt association of women and money."
It was not always so difficult, Fitaihi said, especially not in Jidda, a
cosmopolitan city where for centuries many cultures have passed through on
their way to pilgrimage in nearby Mecca. As a girl, she had drama, arts and
sports in her school, and there were movie theaters in the city. None of that
is true today.
"I always tell my kids that I had a better childhood than they did," she
said.
Many of the restrictions followed the Iranian revolution and the siege of
Mecca by extremists in 1979, as the government sought to appease them through a
broad expansion of extremist policies and power: strict segregation of the
sexes, the removal of women from the public sphere and laws firming up existing
measures against women.
Today, along with changes for women, there is talk of other forms of
opening up. Several malls under construction in the city include movie theaters
in the hope that they will be permitted to function in the coming few years,
Fitaihi said. Achieving change requires care and stealth, she and others said.
"It's like being on an island where no one will come to save you," said
Angawi, the business coach. "You have to learn to survive."
When Angawi sought a divorce from an abusive husband five years ago, no
one was there to help her. She was forced to enter a man's world and fend for
herself.
Angawi, a mother of five, has remarried, but somewhat unhappily as a
second wife to a man with another family. Having more than one wife, permitted
by the Koran, is common.
The women say persistence is the key. Sharif, the journalist, said only a
tiny number of Saudi women were journalists, and that most worked for a few
years, married and then quit. But she is planning on sticking it out.
"I'm like a mountain," she said. "You can't move me."
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