Saudi Arabia- how much has changed?
Women in Saudi Arabia don’t get it easy. A great deal is made of the fact that they can now drive but how much has really changed?
My short trips to Riyadh haven’t been easy. Strange men knocking at the hotel room door at 10pm; trying to get food at a hotel and walking down the street to buy a kebab with rows of men staring at me.
So how have things changed? Can they change that quickly?
This feature article by Louise Callaghan, Middle East correspondent at The Times, sets about answering this question.
Women in Saudi Arabia can work, party — and now drive. But is their newfound freedom all it seems?
The relaxation of guardianship laws has brought hope to a new generation of Saudi women. But life in the kingdom is still patriachal and repressive, says Louise Callaghan
From the time she hit puberty, and quite often before that, men had always told Najlaa what to do. Her brothers, her father and two successive husbands had decided what was best for her. They told her to cover her face with the niqab, a sheet of black chiffon with a headband and two strings to tie it round the back of her head. When she wanted to travel, they told her yes or no, and went with her in case anything happened.
One day this spring, she decided it was going to be different. At 39, she was going to go out and show her face in public.
It began with her daughter Rama. Rama is 14 and on that day she was wearing a T-shirt with Thrasher, the name of a Californian skateboarding magazine, printed on it in orange and red letters. Her hair reached down to her hips in frizzy waves over her cream abaya (a long, baggy coat worn by Saudi women), which hung open. Her glasses were wire-rimmed circles.
Rama had told her mum that she wanted to go to Comic Con, a festival where people dress up as characters from comic books or fantasy novels. It was being held in their city of Jeddah, a gleaming outcrop on the Hejaz, where the Red Sea meets the desert. They would go alone, with no male chaperones. Rama had said that there would be a women-only section. There was, but that’s not where they were standing. They were in the mixed area, queuing patiently for karaoke. Around them, girls wandered about dressed as Harry Potter (“the cloak is the only thing that really works as an abaya, dressing-up-wise,” remarked one) and various aliens. Some had make-up smeared all over their faces, having been asked to remove it by the guards. They were all having a ridiculously good time. Screaming girls rushed through the stalls, clutching each other and laughing at the boys in bloody Halloween masks as music pounded. Men and women walked around together, eating ice cream.
Najlaa was smiling. She was also very nervous. Though she was wearing a long black abaya and a black headscarf, she felt naked without her ni
“She made me come without it,” Najlaa said, nodding at Rama, her hand springing to her mouth again. “Is everyone staring at me? I feel like everyone is staring at me.”
“It’s OK,” smiled Rama. “No one is staring at you.” And Najlaa stepped up to the karaoke booth.
The gulf between Najlaa and Rama is the gulf between the present and the future in Saudi Arabia. Just a few years ago, the idea that a woman could walk around, with men she wasn’t related to, with her hair and face uncovered, dressed as a wizard (magic is illegal), listening to music, long considered haram (forbidden), and especially singing in public in Saudi Arabia would have been risible — on a par with suggesting that the kingdom was about to open a branch of Wetherspoons.
For much of the last century, Saudi has been one of the most isolated countries in the world. Obsessively inward-looking and fabulously rich, its rulers have enforced an extremely strict interpretation of Islam that dictates the repression and segregation of women. Every woman, whether she’s five or 50, a schoolgirl or a doctor, has a male guardian who can stop her travelling abroad or receiving certain types of medical treatment. Every woman wears the abaya, many wear a niqab, and the overwhelming majority — bar a few rebels — cover their hair.
The rules have been loosened in the past few years: under King Abdullah, who died in 2015, women started working in shops selling lingerie, and the guardianship laws began gradually to be relaxed.
Since last summer, however, change has come at a pace never seen before in the kingdom, in a way that nobody predicted.
As the clock struck midnight on June 23 this year, I watched camera lights shine on the faces of a handful of beaming women as they gripped the steering wheels of their 4x4s and rolled gently forwards. Their daughters and friends clapped as they drove off into the balmy Jeddah night. One woman went and demanded free coffee from a drive-thru in a car full of female relatives, giggling at the recklessness of it all. The man behind the counter took a picture of them to send to his wife.
Some conservatives had predicted that lifting the de facto ban on women driving would lead to chaos on the kingdom’s roads. The fact that Saudi highways are already made highly dangerous by incompetent male drivers seemed to pass them by. Instead, like all the other times when conservatives had claimed that modernisation would lead to societal collapse (“It was the same with camera phones,” a friend sighed), it was all fine — and a bit anticlimactic.
The changes are mostly down to one man: Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old crown prince, who has launched a project to remake the country. The bearish royal has blasted aside opposition: imprisoning about 200 of Saudi’s most influential people — many of them his relatives — in a luxury hotel in Riyadh before allegedly extracting huge sums in return for their freedom. By 2030, he has promised, he will have revitalised Saudi Arabia’s oil-reliant economy, building hi-tech cities in the desert to attract investment and harnessing the power of the sun to keep the country’s lights on.
Last September, MbS, as he is known, announced that women would be allowed to drive. But in May, just weeks before the ban was to be lifted, the government ordered the arrest of the kingdom’s best-known female activists, some of whom had campaigned for decades for women to have the right to drive. To Saudi watchers, the arrests came as no surprise. MbS has repeatedly made clear he has no desire to liberalise Saudi’s political arena. Quite the opposite: with his rise to prominence, observers say, the kingdom is losing its rule by consensus. Where decisions used to be made by long-winded negotiations with various branches of the family, now MbS picks up a phone and it is done. One man, one decision.
He may have had meetings with Mark Zuckerberg, opened cinemas and said that women don’t have to wear the abaya, but any liberalisation comes on his terms. Entertainment and small freedoms will keep his population happy as oil prices fall, but the arrests of the driving activists sent a very clear message that anyone expecting to get results from opposing government policies will end up behind bars.
By the time his father, King Salman, named MbS crown prince in June 2017, Saudi Arabia was already changing. In recent years, the streets of Jeddah and, to a lesser extent, Riyadh exploded with pinks and blues as women put aside their black abayas in favour of pastel versions. Now, many leave their abayas open, showing long skirts or skinny jeans underneath. A few are taking off their headscarves. But the prince went further. In an interview on American TV this year, he said that women were equal to men.
If Mohammed bin Salman succeeds, he’ll reshape the Middle East. If he fails, the entire region will be destabilised. Over several visits to the kingdom this year, I spoke to dozens of Saudis — young and old, male and female — about what comes next. There were a lot of doubts and criticism of the reforms. But one thing came up more often than not: hope.
The Haifa shopping mall in Jeddah is a strip-lit concourse several hundred feet long, with air so cold it freezes the sweat onto your arms. It has a Marks & Spencer, a New Look and a Starbucks; women queue on one side, men on the other to avoid any immoral behaviour among the frappés. It is the area’s most popular meeting spot, packed with groups of giggling girls in niqabs, trying on flower crowns and taking group selfies, and boys strutting like ostriches.
More than 70% of Saudi Arabia’s population is under 30, and almost all of them are bored. For most of the year, it’s too hot to spend long outside. Until this year, there were no cinemas. Cafes and restaurants are segregated by gender. It is, logistically, very difficult to meet members of the opposite sex. In the absence of parks, concerts or clubs, they head to the malls: out of the heat, and easy to find an excuse to visit. As groups of boys and girls pass in the Haifa mall, they smile at each other and sometimes stop — briefly — to exchange phone numbers or Facebook profiles. Others find more creative means.
“I had a friend who became an Uber driver, so he could meet girls,” said a PR consultant in his mid-twenties. “One time he was chatting to a passenger and she said, ‘Do you want to go and make out somewhere outside the city?’ So they did.”
Mostly, though, young Saudis live online. The internet has changed their lives beyond all recognition. On their phones, they chat late into the night, just like any other teenagers. They learn about fashion trends, bands and films at the same time as the rest of the world. And, most important, they can be themselves.
“I don’t know what I did before I got a phone with internet,” said one female 27-year-old master’s student. “Just sat in the air conditioning and ate, pretty much. I didn’t have any male friends, I didn’t know anything. It was so f****** boring.”
Online, some girls who cover their faces in public post pictures wearing shorts and T-shirts. They contour their faces with elaborate make-up learnt from YouTube tutorials and take whole albums of selfies. Their hair is Disney-princess long. Even those who remain covered can’t resist the lure of social media. Some post pictures where their face is completely obscured by an outsize emoji.
For these people, MbS’s changes are a life-saver. They mean, at least, that they can start going to the cinema, where there might be opportunities for furtive gender-mixing in the back row. Most significantly, they can now mingle in public without fearing the religious police, who used to break up gatherings of unmarried men and women — sometimes separating couples walking in the road and quizzing them individually on how they met, when they married and the colour of their bedsheets. Since April 2016, when MbS took away their powers of arrest, the police have been resigned to poking around the cities, occasionally telling women to cover their hair. They’re often ignored. But as strict as the rules remain, young people have always found ways to break them.
As Latino music played over the stereo, Ahmed, 26, took another swig of home-brewed date wine. This room, in his friend’s apartment, was the one he and his mates used for parties. A disco ball dappled the packs of crisps, the flatscreen TV and the lone bottle of alcohol.
“There’s such a craving for parties,” Ahmed said. “People party during the day, so that their families don’t notice. We usually finish around 11. That’s such a short time if you’re trying to meet girls.”
The room is completely soundproof, so the neighbours don’t complain. For Ahmed and his friends, most of whom studied in the US under scholarship programmes provided by the Saudi government, partying is a way to relieve the tedium of being back home. But meeting girls can still be hard. As liberal as many young Saudis are, the old social conventions still grip hard.
“In the US there are rules, you know? Like if you meet a girl, and you like her, then you might sleep with her and you never see each other again, or you might date her,” Ahmed said, vaguely tapping his foot to the music. “Here, there’s so much shame. People don’t know what they want. If you sleep with a girl, she might never talk to you just because she feels ashamed.”
In Saudi Arabia, reputation counts. The way that people talk about girls who have done “shameful” things, such as talking to a boy who isn’t her relative, reminds me a lot of my British grandmother. For her, virtue was something to be kept, and “good girls” were demure and softly spoken.
The niqab is the extreme iteration of this attitude. For many Saudi families, the face-covering is seen as way of avoiding shame and preserving their reputation, rather than a simple sign of religious piety. The same applies to husbands wanting to preserve their family’s “integrity” by asking their wives to cover their faces.
It wasn’t always like this. Some Hejazis, who were ruled by the Ottoman empire until the Arab Revolt during the First World War, like to claim that the niqab is native to the Najd, the central region of Saudi Arabia that is the home and power base of the al-Saud family. But as they have ruled, an article of clothing that was once the preserve of ultra-strict Bedouin culture spread across the Gulf, and over much of the world. I spoke to more than 30 women in Riyadh and Jeddah, in rich and poor areas, about why they wore the niqab. Three said it was because of their religion — though of course the reaction may have been different had I asked women in villages. The vast majority said the same thing: because my brothers (or my father) told me to.
On a humid Jeddah evening this spring, Haifa, 25, and her friends were walking on the corniche. They had come to town for a wedding, and knew the only way their brothers would let them have a look around was if they wore the niqab. In the circumstances, they worked with what little they had. Haifa’s eyes were thick with eyeliner. Her friends all had sequins subtly embroidered into their abayas.
For a few days, in Riyadh and Jeddah, I wore a niqab. It’s not as bad as you would think. When you look at people wearing it, they seem cut off. But if you’re wearing it, you can feel protected. People don’t look at you. You are still there, but you’re withholding something from the rest of the world. In that sense, I can see how it could make you feel powerful. Nora, 34, has used that power to eke out a little more freedom. After living in Canada, where she wore a loose headscarf with her jeans, she moved back to Saudi. She wanted to work, but was worried about people in her community gossiping, or men trying to harass her.
“I only wear the niqab at work,” she said, as she tidied the make-up counter of the shop where she was providing staff training. “No one knows who I am, no one can say anything, no one tries to bother me.”
Another friend told me she only wears a niqab if she goes shopping by herself, just to avoid her husband’s relatives.
“You can just go right past them, they have no idea,” she said, cackling.
With niqabs or without, it is in the shopping malls and office blocks of the kingdom that Saudi women’s best hope for freedom lies. Back when the country was boundlessly rich from its oil wells, there was little reason for women to work. But by 2015, the price of oil had fallen to $50 a barrel, where the Saudis had predicted it would stay at $100. The kingdom’s rulers began to realise that the black gold, which made up 90% of Saudi’s exports, would not sustain them for ever. Now, women are being pushed out of the house and into public life by economic need — hoping the free market will free them.
“Everyone needs to work,” said Lamia Aleisa, 23, one half of Lamb & Lu, a Riyadh-based pop-up space and jewellery store. “The lifestyle that I was brought up with isn’t sustainable unless it’s a two-income household. We were living on cloud nine. It was ridiculous to be living on that kind of government subsidisation. We’re currently not a productive society and that needs to change. We basically got a reality check and it’s sinking in.”
Face value: make-up and lingerie stores began the move towards female employmentIMAN AL-DABBAGH FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
It has become much more widely accepted in Saudi families that women should work. But although women make up more than half of Saudi’s university graduates, a third of working-age women are unemployed — a rate five times higher than for men. It is an enormous challenge for any government, let alone one that allows men to control women legally.
For all the hopeful rhetoric and all the changes, Saudi Arabia is still not a good place to be a woman. Your life depends on the luck of the draw: if your father or your brother or son is nice, they’ll let you do what you want. You can work, travel and, now, drive. But if they’re not, they can turn your life into a living hell with no repercussions.
Even if the guardianship laws are repealed — and such a move is rumoured to be in the works — Saudi’s ultra-patriarchal culture will remain. A woman’s word will still be worth less than a man’s. Because of the extraordinary power held by families in Saudi, male relatives will still be able to control “their” women.
“If you’re being beaten by your husband and call the police, they will say they can’t do anything,” said one middle-aged Riyadh woman. “Or your husband could say you’re just lying because you’re crazy. Even if, yes, legally you’re allowed to leave home, or marry, your family still in practice has control of your life.
“My guardian is my son. He is 19. If one day he decides he’s angry at me, or I don’t give him money, or anything, he could just stop me travelling. He’s my baby. Isn’t that crazy?”
For a proportion of Saudi society — it’s hard to know how large — this is the natural order of things. Change, they believe, should not come at the expense of their traditional values. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for women to drive,” said Dalal Hazazi, 38, a housewife in a working-class area of Riyadh. “They never used to, and it’ll be hard to start. Maybe for non-Muslims it’s good, but we shouldn’t change.”
The instructions printed on the concert ticket were clear: strictly no dancing or swaying allowed. All along the edges of the stands, female guards dressed in burgundy abayas stood scanning the audience, like a Muslim Handmaid’s Tale, watching for anyone whose claps got a little too rhythmic. But the event-planners hadn’t reckoned with just how excited 6,000 Saudis can get when Tamer Hosny comes on stage. The Egyptian crooner, dressed in a black suit, swept across the stage and pointed at the crowd: “Hello, Saudi Arabia!” he shouted, before launching into one of his — relatively raunchy — pop songs.
While the men in the segregated audience mostly sat silent, filming themselves or Hosny, the women partied as if it was the end of the world. The night air was speckled with lights as they held up their phones and swayed. Sequins glittered on abayas carefully chosen for the rare night out. Eyes were heavy with layers of fake lashes. Plasters from fresh nose jobs were worn with pride. As Hosny paused for a second during a chorus, thousands of women screamed out his lyrics and fell about laughing. One by one, they started clapping, occasionally rising in their seats — sending the guards flying about to sit them down again. They, too, were smiling.
In Saudi Arabia, not much has really changed for women. The government has allowed some entertainment, lifted a few restrictions and let women get behind the wheel, but it has remained autocratic and extraordinarily repressive. For some women, though, everything has changed. For the first time in a long time, there’s hope.
“I don’t know if these changes will be for ever, or if everything is just going to go back to how it was again,” said Noura, 22, as the applause swelled. “But either way, I’ll take it. I’ll take what’s happening right now.”
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