This past summer, an incident occurred at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blackburg, Virginia, where King Abdulaziz University funded a faculty development program. At the request of the Saudis, the classes for the 30 men and 30 women participants were segregated by sex, a condition that the state-funded co-ed Virginia tech agree to, as the Saudis were paying customers. Unfortunately, a Virginia Tech marketing professor, Eloise Coupey, was not happy about the presence of single sex classes on her campus, and filed a complaint with the school's Equal Opportunity Office, alleging that single-sex classes create a "hostile" and "intolerant environment in which there is little concern for gender equality."

Professor Coupley's feeling of offense, even though the Saudi program had nothing to do with her personally, her teaching, or any of her students, reflects an institutionalized and very American presumption about the value and meaning of gender equality, one that was twice validated by the United States Supreme Court.[1] This same presumption of a causal link between gender equality and women's progress is embedded in much of feminist scholarship on the Middle East, which holds that gender inequality flies so high atop the flagpole of culture that women's modesty and subordination have become the virtual definition of culture--not ritual performances, not no-interest banking, not dietary laws, not hospitality nor foods or clothing styles. The signal feature of "Culture," in this view, is women's separation from men outside the family and their subordination within the family, and it is the emotional yearning for cultural preservation that stands in women's path toward independence and full citizenship.

If this inequality is taken as a given, the introduction of democracy in the Gulf region poses a paradox, because one of the crucial components of democratic forms of governance is equality for all. Any observer of democratic initiatives in the Gulf region would notice that liberal reform efforts bring women into the political process only when non-democratic, authoritarian regimes open the door for them. And wherever democratic processes are at work, we see that democracy gives political voice to conservative publics, who may not see women's empowerment as a desirable goal, who may see women's empowerment as a challenge to cultural preservation, and who try to use the democratic process to exclude them or reassert male control.

For example, Iraq's new constitution, written under the auspices of the American occupying power, recognizes that women are at a disadvantage and stipulates an affirmative action quota to insure seats for women in the Iraqi legislature. But this same constitution, approved through democratic elections, reverses the equitable family laws put into effect under the Baath, and returns them to religious courts which put women at a disadvantage when it comes to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Kuwait's parliament, finally granted women the right to vote, but this was the same parliament that had twice voted down a decree issued by Emir Shaikh Jaber al-Sabah granting women full political rights, and the same parliament that two weeks earlier voted against a measure allowing women to participate in city council elections, and the same parliament that voted to segregate the University of Kuwait's co-educational classrooms.

When women do get the vote, they tend to be just as conservative as male voters: Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa appointed four women to Bahrain's Shura Council in 2000, and then opened the vote to women in the 2002 municipal elections. Even though half of the 51% of the Bahrain electorate who actually voted were women, not a single one of the 34 female candidates won, and a survey conducted ahead of the parliamentary elections revealed that 60 percent of Bahraini women were opposed to the participation of women in the elections. Furthermore, conservatives in the Bahraini Parliament proposed during the 2004 legislative session to segregate the sexes at University of Bahrain.[2] Similarly, in Qatar, women were granted the right to vote and run for the 2000 municipal council elections by a decree of the emir, but out of six women candidates, none were elected.

The pattern of leadership from the top challenged by a conservative public is echoed in Saudi Arabia. Even though women were ultimately dis-invited from participating in the 2005 municipal elections, it was Crown Prince Abdullah's personally- appointed "Advisory Working Group" [convened to study challenges facing the Kingdom] that first proposed municipal elections and explicitly called for full voting rights for women. When the Shura initially announced the plan for elections in October, 2003, women were not excluded: in fact no criteria for voting or running for office based on sex were issued. The decision to exclude women came later, after a year of vacillating while keeping a collective finger to the political winds. When Interior Minister Prince Naif ended speculation about whether women would vote or not, the reason he gave avoided the appearance of having succumbed to conservative pressures, and left the door open for future elections: the issue was not religious values or tradition, but simply an immediate problem with the logistics of sex-segregated polling stations.[3]

Given the Gulf experience with elections, it's fair to question whether American exported democracy is helping to foster women's empowerment, or whether women might not be better off under authoritarian rulers as quota beneficiaries for jobs, appointees to high-profile positions, recipients of state-guaranteed education, and manipulators of traditional networks. These have been and continue to be the avenues to success, and in this light it's worth nothing that the Virginia Tech episode, despite the embarrassing critique in the American press about single-sex classes, illustrates not the failures but the kind of successes women have experienced by a combination of enlightened leadership and plying a course of expeditious compromise, working through networks and regime controlled administrative channels. Here were thirty women professionals, traveling abroad without chaperones, contrary to Saudi law, and living in a fully integrated American environment, as their university anticipated they would. The sex-segregated classrooms that offended American observers were probably set up not to insulate the students from the shame of sitting in a classroom with members of the opposite sex, but to protect whoever allocated the funding from potential criticism for having allowed the women to go in the first place. If coming to the United States had been out of step with the professors' own values, they wouldn't have come.

On the other hand, when it comes to issues of women's employment in general and women's driving, the ceiling for women is calibrated at the same level as the regime's capacity to absorb risk. Today women constitute 58% of all university students, but only 4.8 percent of the total indigenous work force, and only 5.5 percent of the 4.7 million women of working age. The rate of Saudi women's employment is the lowest of all the states in the Gulf region, which has the lowest rate of women's employment in the world.[28%]. Saudi leadership appears very concerned to respond to demands for employment opportunities, but their actions are designed to put women job-seekers into the starting gate, and keep them there still feeling hopeful. For example, in September 2005, the Council of Ministers approved a new labor law that allows women to work in all fields, all fields, that is, that suit their nature. This is the same self-contradictory language written into the original education policy for women in the 1960s, which said that women's education was to allow women to work only at such jobs as teaching and child care, jobs that suit their nature. It is the same language in the original labor law, and it is designed to allow the regime to respond to women's demands for work without having to do anything risky to allow those opportunities to happen. The same tactic applies to women's driving. King Abdullah has marked himself as a progressive, in contrast to his predecessor who in 1990 joined bin Baz, the mutawwa'in, and the whole religious establishment in condemning women for publicly demonstrating for the right to drive a car. In an interview with Barbara Walters in October 2005, Abdullah said that he personally supports women's driving, but would not impose women's driving against the will of his people.[4]

The question is, what is the will of the people? Though we have no way to accurately judge how the Saudi population at large feels about empowering women, two recent surveys suggest that the regime understands its own people very well and has a realistic appreciation of the risks involved.

Nawaf Obaid's poll of over 15,000 Saudis is the most hopeful, revealing that over 90 percent of those interviewed wanted to grant women more rights, and 63 percent thought women should be allowed to drive. Almost 80% percent considered unemployment their most pressing concern, which might suggest that allowing women more employment options would meet with a favorable reception.[5] However, the "Human Values and Social Change Survey" taken a year earlier, which included interviews with about 1,000 Saudis, showed that a huge majority believe men should have priority in employment when jobs are scarce.[6] A huge majority [81%] expressed the view that women are always obligated to obey their husbands, and 45% approved of polygyny without reservation. Both polls showed that a majority support the official clergy." Obaid found that 59% approved of the clergy's conservative social agenda but others said they felt the clergy were out-of-step with the needs of the country. In the human values survey, 67% of Saudis felt that religious authorities adequately respond to "people's spiritual needs, moral problems, family needs, and social problems."

Stories of resistance, which are many, are also indicators of public opinion. In June, 2005, Shura Council member Muhammad al-Zulfa asked the council president to allow the council to discuss the possibility of doing a study to look into the feasibility of women driving. In response there were calls for him to be expelled from the council and even stripped of his citizenship. He was not asking to allow women to drive, just to talk about it, and to consider the economic implications of having one million foreign drivers hired at a cost of 12 billion SR [his figure] a year to do for women what they could do for themselves. One of his most virulent critics was Council of Senior scholars member Shaikh Saleh Ibn Fawzan Ibn Abdullah al-Fawzan, who argued that "the financial cost of importing foreign drivers is nothing compared to the loss of honor" from letting women drive.[7] Shaikh al-Fawzan is a very influential person in the kingdom, and the author of the infamous 10th grade Tawhid textbook that taught Saudi students to despise all things western and to shun non-Muslims, and he's also the author of the revised edition.

If popular opinion leans toward the side of Shaikh Fawzan, it seems to me that democracy, meaning a legislature with real power whose members are elected, whether or not women are included, would not necessarily be helpful to women. In fact, in my view, it could spell disaster. The problem with voting is that once people are asked to vote, their opinions matter, and when people vote, they are likely to vote their values rather than their interests. What better example than the 2004 presidential election in the United States. As Thomas Franks observes in What's the Matter with Kansas,[8] the Bush campaign succeeded in winning voters' hearts by calling for a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and a court that will oppose abortion, while at the same time promising to take away their guaranteed social security benefits and shift the tax burden away from the most wealthy. Cultural identification alone, says Franks, motivates people to make political choices that are very much against their own interests. "Gay marriage" and "abortion" have been to George Bush what "women's rights" have been to the ruling family over the years: hot button issues that appeal to the emotions of a public who feel their values are under attack, who feel they are victims of powerful liberal elites who mock religious faith and undermine traditional values. As in the case of Americans, many people in Saudi Arabia quite rightly feel themselves victims of influences, both cultural and political, that are undermining their way of life, and like Americans, can be swayed by the emotional appeal of the values card, even at the expense of their own economic self-interest.

However, democratizing reforms, as opposed to democratic elections, offer possibilities. A freer press, freer associations, more workplace opportunities, a gradual integration of public venues & facilities, and raising the profile of women in high positions can help to change the culture in a way that will ultimately make democratic elections work for women as for all citizens. These kinds of changes are occurring all the time. While women were unable to vote in the municipal elections, they are running for other offices and being appointed to very visible positions: for example, in November 2005 women competed for seats on the board of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry,[9] and two of them were winners [with the support of male voters: out of 5000 voters only 100 were women].[10] Women are also running for seats on the Board of Directors of the Saudi Engineers' Association, which is remarkable since women officially have been excluded not just from the profession but from studying engineering in government schools. Ten women were appointed in 2004 by King Fahd to the National Organization for Human Rights with a mandate to monitor women's rights.[11] A family physician has been appointed Deputy Director of Health Affairs for the Mecca region, becoming the first woman to hold any high administrative office in the Jeddah Health Affairs Department, and another was appointed the first director of the General Directorate of Nursing in the Ministry of Health, the first woman to hold a position of that level at the ministry.[12]

These kinds of actions are the hope of Mr. Al-Zulfa, who argues that the obstacles before women are the fault not of Saudi leadership but of a small group of clerics and traditionalists who exert influence over policy. This small group is just not ready for change, he says, but they are able to impose their ideas on everyone else. The government, he says, is more advanced and reform-minded than their own people, but open dialogue in the media can influence people to change their views. Eventually, he says, women in the Kingdom will drive; it is "just a matter of time, determination, and education."[13]

Possibly. Or, the reforms we assume will liberalize society could work the other way, to spark a reaction, much as we're seeing now in the United States in the resurgence of the conservative Right. In the United States, gender equality evolved into a cultural orthodoxy only after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and while equality has been more and more institutionalized in our legal system, public dialogue has continued to give voice to little heresies that are only now growing into great big challenges to established moral truths. As we think about the impact of a free press and freedom of association on women in Saudi Arabia, it's sobering to note that at the same time the Virginia Tech professor was filing her hostile environment case over the Saudis sex-segregated classes, high school students in Pawtucket Rhode Island were being instructed from a textbook called "Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education," paid for by our federal tax dollars. Along with discouraging contraceptive use, the textbook describes "what makes a man" [men are "strong" and "protective"] and "what makes a woman" [a woman is "caring" but "sends a clear message" by choosing her "clothes, expression and gestures carefully"]. One lesson could have been taken from the 12th century theologian al-Ghazali's "Book on the Etiquette of Marriage," or from the current Saudi high school Hadith books: it says that "Girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn't invite lustful thoughts."

In other words, ideological battles are never won, but democratizing reforms of the kind that are appearing in Saudi Arabia bring out society's diversity and allow give and take to happen. Some Saudis may -or may not-- like the outcome, but a free press and freedom of association keep all our little heresies alive for the next time around.

[1] The court held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits a hostile work environment on the basis of sex, race, or religion. Meritor Sav. Bank v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57 (1986).

[2] N. Janardhan. "In the Gulf, women are not women's best friends." Daily Star, June 20, 2005.

[3] BBC News, Nov. 10, 2004.

[4] Maha Akeel & Hassan Adawi. "Abdullah Wins Applause for Assurance on Women Driving." Arab News, 15 Oct 2005.

[5] Nawaf Obaid. "What the Saudi public really thinks." Daily Star, June 24, 2004.

The survey was conducted under the auspices of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project, a private, non-governmental research body that includes 75 researchers, and covered all of the kingdom's 13 provinces between July and November of 2003. The results (with a margin of error of 3 percentage points) were based on a total of 15,452 respondents (62 percent men and 38 percent women). The objective was to survey Saudi perspectives on political reform, the religious establishment, women's empowerment and terrorism.

[6] Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, "Islamic Culture and Democracy: Testing the ‘Clash of Civilizations' Thesis," in Human Values and Social Change: Findings from the Values Surveys (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002).

[7] Saad Al-Matrafi, "Ulama Council Never Discussed Women Driving," Arab News, June 6 2005.

[8] Henry Holt and Co.: New York, 2005.

[9] The businesswomen running for office are: Amani Ibrahim Abdulwasie, Ibtisam Al-Jedaili, Buthaina Moemina, Batool Jamjoom, Jawaher Jelwan, Hanan Al-Madani, Hussa Al-Aun, Khadeeja Bukhari, Dunya Ibrahim, Salwa Ridwan, Sameera Shek, Aliya Banaja, Abeer Muhammad Salama, Lama Al-Sulaiman, Madhawi Al-Hassoun, Nashwa Taher, Nawal Baytar and Ulfat Qabbani.

[10] "Two women win Saudi chamber polls," Trade Arabia.
Posted: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 [www.tradearabia.com]

[11] Khalid Al-Dakhil. "2003: Saudi Arabia's Year of Reform." Arab Reform Bulletin March 2004, Volume 2, Issue 3.

[12] Abeer Mishkhas, abeermishkhas@arabnews.com]

[13] Raid Qusti. "Women Driving: Minority Dictating Terms." Arab News, September 28,2005.

source: A Commentary Presented at the Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, November 2005