Headscarves and Hymens (19 page)

Instead of calling out the ban on women’s driving, in the way courageous activists have, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on violence against women gave Saudi Arabia a free pass by suggesting it create alternatives to women driving. Remember, this struggle is about women’s mobility and freedom. By not recognizing it as such, Ertürk joined the long list of officials and international bodies who refuse to call out Saudi misogyny and instead allow it to pass under the umbrella of “cultural differences.” By continually caving in to such cultural relativism, international officials side with the regime and with hard-line clerics and fail to support the brave work of local activists who maintain that their country should not be given a license to discriminate.

In 2000, Saudi Arabia ratified an international bill of rights for women but stipulated that if there were conflicts with the bill’s provisions, the country’s interpretation of Sharia would prevail. So why sign in the first place? Especially since the Saudi interpretation of Sharia is where so much discrimination against women originates—including polygamy, child marriage, restricted access to divorce, and reduced inheritance for women. Other countries also hide behind such a condition, which begs the question: Why are they allowed to sign conventions they effectively ignore?

When are we going to stop applauding the Saudi regime for throwing women crumbs that pass as “reforms”? The fact of the matter is that the power of women terrifies the Saudi regime. At least that’s how I like to explain its decision to delay municipal elections in 2009.

It started with Kuwaiti women. In May 2009, four women won seats in Kuwait’s parliamentary elections. Their victory was made all the more delicious because the fundamentalists who had long opposed women’s suffrage lost several of their seats in the Kuwaiti parliament.

The very next day, Saudi Arabia extended the mandate of municipal councils by two years to give time to “expand the participation of citizens in the management of local affairs.” By the accounts of several activists, those local councils are useless. They are the result of the kingdom’s first brief fling with democracy in 2005. At the time, five women announced their candidacy, but those first nationwide elections were deemed off limits to women by ultraconservative clerics.

Ever since, Saudi women and their supporters continued to hope that King Abdullah would open up the 2009 poll to women. So you can imagine how nervous the royal family got at the sight of four newly minted Kuwaiti women parliamentarians. Saudi Arabia knows too well that Saudi women can learn from their Kuwaiti sisters: in the aftermath of Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, many Kuwaiti men and women fled the violence by getting into their cars and driving to neighboring Saudi
Arabia, helping to inspire the driving protest of that year.

It remains to be seen whether women will indeed be able to vote and run for office in local elections starting in 2015 or if the Saudi regime will again balk. In 2013, King Abdullah appointed thirty women to the Shura Council, an advisory quasi-parliament, where they now represent 20 percent of the previously all-male body. But the Shura is toothless, and it is unclear how much of its “advice” actually becomes policy. More indicative of the Saudi stance on women in politics is Grand Mufti Abdulaziz’s remark that letting women into politics is “opening the door to evil”—what the powers that be actually fear is opening the door to a revolution in women’s rights.

One of King Abdullah’s recent concessions to women was the lifting of restrictions on women in some employment fields, such as lingerie shops, where women formerly had to buy bras and underpants from male sales assistants. This was an absurdity almost on par with the ban on female drivers, which results in women who are otherwise allowed to be nowhere without a male relative, having to spend hours alone in cars with male drivers unrelated to them. This contradiction gives the lie to Saudi Arabia’s gender apartheid. It is not about separating women from men, much less “protecting” women from men, but about restricting women’s mobility, and thereby their autonomy.

Religious hard-liners are making Saudi Arabia a laughingstock. A country that in about six decades built multilane highways across the desert, and is one of the most connected on the information superhighway, keeps its women locked in a medieval bubble—and the world is shamefully silent.

There are more Saudi women on university campuses than men, yet according to a 2013
New York Times
article, the employment rate of women in the kingdom is a paltry 15 percent. Slowly, fields such as law have opened up to them. In 2013, Abdullah allowed the first women in the kingdom to be licensed to practice law, with the right to represent clients and to own and run their own law firms. Other fields remain off-limits, though—there are no women judges, ambassadors, or ministers, for example. The highest post held by a woman in government is deputy minister of education, which was attained by Norah al-Fayez in 2009.

As Yemeni academic Elham Manea pointed out in a 2013 article, the Saudi labor code decrees that, in adherence with Sharia, “women shall work in all fields suitable to their nature.” She concluded that “Saudi women continue to be marginalized almost to the point of total exclusion from the Saudi workforce.”

She went on to explain that “both public and private sector require female staff to obtain the permission of a male guardian to be hired, and employers can fire a
woman or force her to resign ‘if her guardian decides for any reason that he no longer wants her to work outside the home.’ In jobs in clothing stores, amusement parks, food preparation, and as cashiers, guardian permission is no longer required. However, strict sex segregation in the workplace is imposed and female workers are prohibited from interacting with men.”

Undoubtedly, that women can work in these fields at all is due not to the altruism of the royal family but to the work of “extremists” such as al-Huwaider and al-Sharif, who have fought long and hard to push the regime to make these concessions. The Saudi king and other dictators must understand that they have to catch up to their people, not the other way around. Only sixty women drove in 2013, but thousands watched and surely were changed forever. Some of those considered “out of touch” actually represent the dilemmas of so many—such as Nahed Batarfi, a fifty-year-old divorced mother of seven who holds a driver’s license from the United Kingdom and earned a PhD. She was one of the sixty women who drove in October 2013. She had waited for three months for a visa for a driver to enter Saudi Arabia, and was forced to depend on her nineteen-year-old son to drive her and his four sisters to school and work. With her son about to leave for study abroad, Batarfi decided to begin driving for herself, whatever the consequences.

A political revolution has not begun in Saudi Arabia—unlike in Egypt or Libya or Tunisia—but a social one has. There are more Saudi women on university campuses than men. Women have embraced blogs and social media as eagerly as men. Much as young people in authoritarian countries such as Egypt create in the virtual world the space for themselves that does not exist in real life, Saudi women can express themselves online in ways unimaginable in the streets and public areas of the regime and the clerics.

The reason women such as Wajeha al-Huwaider and Manal al-Sharif and their fellow driving activists so frighten the clerics is that they directly challenge the male guardianship system. Saudi professor and campaigner Aziza Youssef told the Associated Press that just before the October 2013 driving campaign, she and four other prominent women activists received phone calls from a top official with close links to interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The caller warned them not to drive on the day the campaign had set for the women’s driving.

The regime’s response to the driving protests makes clear that it understands the threat these women pose. The brave work of these activists is about abolishing more than the ban on driving: it is about abolishing a system of gender apartheid upheld by the patriarchs within and without. “Until [the guardianship rule] goes, all the
changes are just a show for outside,” Youssef has said. These women are sending a message to the patriarchs in government and the patriarchs at home that they do not need or want their “protection.” The social and sexual revolution is unstoppable, and these women will be remembered as its vanguard.

I
finally began to reckon with my own sexuality when I was twenty-eight. Just as it had taken me eight years to take off my hijab, it took me a long time to overcome all that I had been taught about sex and what I should and should not do with my body. Unlearning cultural and religious lessons and taboos can involve a radical turning against all that you have been taught. But it can be just as radical to slowly unchain yourself, working your way carefully through layers of guilt so that you do not completely fall apart from exhaustion and loneliness.

I had spent most of my twenties working hard at building a journalism career. I openly identified as a feminist and wrote as many features as I could on women’s rights. In the summer of 1995, I took a month off work and flew to China to attend and report on the United Nations’
Fourth World Conference on Women, which produced the Beijing Platform for Action, the most progressive reproductive rights agenda the world has seen. I had wanted independence and self-sufficiency, and there I was, traveling to China alone, dining out alone, and writing alone. I was very good at alone.

I had learned the terminology of sex-positive feminism, I could write about reproductive rights, and I learned the term
sex worker
as an alternative to
prostitute,
yet none of this new vocabulary applied to my life. For someone who dealt with words and exposed what was usually hidden, I now realized that I was hiding behind those words, as I had once hidden behind the hijab, and that I had compartmentalized and separated my personal life from my political engagement. I used words as weapons in my working life, but I never used them to explore or explain the biggest struggles of my personal life: I couldn’t even tell people that I’d once worn the hijab. I realize now that, back then, I did not have the power.

Channeling all my energies into work was also a convenient way to avoid marriage, which at the time was the only way I could conceive of having sex. I had avoided marriage because I feared I would not have the strength to fight the religious and cultural disadvantages with which I felt a wife must wrestle. So I shut down the personal and focused on the political—the external aspects
of it at least. But, as I now realize, the political will never truly change unless it is accompanied by a parallel fight in the realm of the personal—the double revolution.

Most of the women I knew in Egypt—highly educated, financially independent women—would invariably pay lip service to the importance of placing children and family first, but I did not want to promote the primacy of something that could hurt me or curb what little freedom I had won for myself. Why should I marry if it meant “obeying” my husband? Why should I have to pretend that, as hard as I had worked, once I had children, my family would have to come first?

I have seen several highly accomplished women develop multiple personalities after they acquiesced to the demands society made of them. While a part of them reveled in autonomy and accomplishment, another pushed their daughters to conform to a code of behavior expected of girls and not boys, especially when it came to sexuality and bodily autonomy. This is how our society’s values are passed like a baton from mother to daughter. I’ve seen mothers push their daughters to marry regardless of the daughters’ ambivalent feelings, and push those same daughters to go off birth control and have children regardless of whether they and their husbands felt ready. In doing so, such mothers operate almost in a culturally determined maternal autopilot that is antithetical to the values implicit in their own accomplishments.

I’m not saying that all women should forgo marriage and children. But so many women—themselves unhappily struggling against the weight of societal expectations—instill in their daughters undeserved reverence for conservative gender roles. We must remember that these mothers often do this to “protect” their girls, and that it is unfair to place the full burden of change on them unless we also dismantle the system that demands they socialize their daughters thus. Yet this does not absolve them. If these women—educated and economically independent—do not push against the system, if they do not recognize the levels of privilege that cushion them, and that this privilege obliges them to push against cultural barriers, then what chance do our societies have?

This is all to say that at the age of twenty-eight, I reconciled with the idea that I would not marry anytime soon. I was fed up with waiting, tired of knowing about sex and its mechanics only from books and magazines. Just in time—and I took it as a sign that I should finally turn my knowledge into experience—I met a man I was attracted to and who would become my first sexual partner. I asked him out, he accepted, and we began to date. He was a few years younger than me and was not a virgin. Nonetheless, he was very patient and accepted the pace at which I explored my sexuality with him. Just after my twenty-ninth birthday, we finally had intercourse. That patience is what I wished for the thirty-five-year- old
woman who asked me if she was “normal” and if she would enjoy sex despite her cutting.

I did not bleed. It did not hurt. It was a beautiful experience that put me on a high, partly because it felt so illicit. I wanted to tell someone, anyone, how wonderful it was to feel the kind of intimacy I’d only ever read about, to experience an orgasm with another person and not just through masturbation, and to say that this love and pleasure were things that should never be tainted with that ugly word
fornication.