Okay, there are sexist, misogynistic societies, and then there’s Saudi Arabia.

My wife and I got a hint of just how backward the country is many years ago when my wife gave driving lessons to several women from Saudi Arabia. Their families were scandalized enough to know that they were learning to drive, but this was compounded by the problem that they could not go to any commercial driving schools in the United States because they might have to interact with male instructors. So my wife made quite a bit of money teaching Saudi Arabian women to drive.

But you don’t realize just how far along the misogynistic scale that a society can still be until you read defenses of the system in Middle Eastern outlets, such as Arab News. Arab News’ Raid Qusti has an op-ed defending his view that efforts by Saudi women to vote are pointless and a waste of time,

We are not the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, or even Egypt. Our society is entirely different. Complete segregation of male and females in all aspects of our life is part of our culture, whether we like it or not.

The other factor we have to bear in mind is the conservative nature of Saudi Arabia. Saudi women do not appear in public, be it in the media or in public life. And when they participate in events it is segregated with women only allowed to attend. No cameras allowed.

Open all of our 11 Saudi dailies from cover to cover and you will not find a single photo of a Saudi woman. I believe that most Saudi females would not run for office, and restrictions from their families and social taboos would stop her from appearing before a camera and present her agenda. Getting a Saudi female to actually appear on television for a short interview and state her full name ? even if she has her face covered ? is an endless endeavor. Most would reject it. Both for personal reasons, because she does not want to appear in public, or for cultural reasons; that her husband or family would prevent her from doing so.

Social restrictions forbid women to appear in public. We, Saudi men, are not the ones who have come up with this culture. In fact, the majority of Saudi women want that. Whoever thinks that the majority of Saudi women want mixing and want to appear in the media or in the public eye is naïve or a fool, or both.

But it is what Quist has to say a couple paragraphs later that is most shocking (emphasis added),

I think Saudi women have more important things to concentrate on for the present. One of them is to insist their names be heard in public. Currently, the social norm is that uttering a female?s name in public is taboo. That is why all Saudi wedding cards that are distributed to male guests say, ?We would like to invite you to the marriage of the young man so and so to the daughter of so and so?. Her name is never mentioned. Her name being mentioned to men is a taboo.

This is a society that makes Medieval Europe look like “Herland”.

Source:

Why Women?s Voting Is Complicated. Raid Qusti, December 1, 2004.

The BBC reported earlier his month that religious police and commerce officials in Saudi Arabia were cracking down on what they thought were risque abayas.

The abaya, of course, is a head to toe black cloth government that women are required by law to wear in Saudi Arabia.

Officials in Saudi Arabia confiscated 82,000 abayas on the grounds that they were indecent because they contained decorations or they were not thick enough. According to an Arab News report,

The confiscated cloaks were found to be revealing, tight and carried drawings and decorations in violation of a fatwa, or religious ruling, which requires that “decent women?s cloaks” should also be thick and open from the front only.

These abayas are reportedly becoming popular with women in urban areas of Saudi Arabia. Thank goodness that country has a Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice to prevent women from wearing loose fitting black head to toe garments.

Sources:

82,000 ?indecent? abayas seized from major cities. Arab News, May 6, 2002.

Saudi Arabia bans ‘indecent’ cloaks. The BBC, May 5, 2002.

On Monday, March 11, 2002, a fire destroyed a school in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killing 15 girls — most of whom were crushed to death in a panic to exit the building. But rescue efforts at the fire were hampered when members of Saudi Arabia’ religious police — the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice — refused to allow either girls to leave the building or firefighters to enter the building. The reason? The girls were not wearing their traditional head scarves or black robes.

The English-language Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that a member of the COmmission told men trying to enter the building to try to save the girls that, “it is sinful to approach them” because they were not wearing the required garb.

Meanwhile, a civil defense officer told Saudi Arabian newspaper al-Eqtisadiah that he saw members of the Commission “being young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya . . . We told them that the situation was very critical and did not allow for such behavior. But they shouted at us and refused to move away from the [school's] gates.”

The official response from the Saudi Arabian government has been to claim that the people blocking access to the school were not really members of the Commission. In an article in the Saudi English-language newspaper Arab News, the Civil Defense Department now claims that it has information “which casts doubt on whether the members of the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice who allegedly played a role in hampering rescue operation at the fire-hit Makkah girls? school were really members of the organization.”

As the Wall Street Journal put it, this claim smacks of a bad cover-up, but either way this is exactly the sort of attitude toward women and girls that Saudi Arabia’s leaders have long promoted with their funding and promotion of Islamic extremism.

Source:

Were commission members at fire tragedy impostors? Khaled Al-Fadly & Saeed Al-Abyad, Arab News, March 17, 2002.

Saudi police face deaths criticism. Reuters, March 14, 2002.

The BBC reports that large numbers of women are beginning to ignore Saudi Arabia’s strict prohibition against men and women working together.

Under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic laws, it is illegal to have mixed sex workplaces. Many business women, some having spent time abroad in the West, are ignoring the law in order to hire the most qualified worker regardless of sex. The BBC quoted one business woman saying, “I wasn’t brought up in a way or even used to a way in the United States where I would have to be constrained by choosing a female worker if I think a male is more qualified, or is more helpful to me.”

Under Islamic law, it is also frowned upon for women to interact with male customers. Women in Saudi Arabia are getting around that stricture by turning to the Internet where they don’t have to meet their customers face to face.

Women are still forbidden by law to drive cars and can’t leave the country without written permission from their husband or father, but their growing economic clout might force changes in those rules. Where once the number of businesses owned by women was negligible, today an estimated 10 percent of private business are run by women.

Source:

Saudi women defy business curbs. The BBC, January 21, 2001.