A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia by Amélie Le Renard

Author:Amélie Le Renard [Le Renard, Amélie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

BREAKING THE RULES

Everything is forbidden, so they do everything.

A teacher in a public high school, talking about her students

Had I waited two more minutes, I would have had to enter through the security post and show my student ID, which I never had in my wallet except on exam days at the end of each semester. This wasn’t carelessness, but rather a trick learned from the students who went before us. Better not to have your ID on you, that way if the monitors stop you . . . , you can give a fictional name and escape punishment.

Seba al-Herz, Al-Akharun (The Others)

ONE MORNING at the Open Arabic University, a private but inexpensive establishment, I found out upon arrival that the student who had asked me to come, Sahar, had not requested permission for my visit. She showed me around the buildings, then we settled down in the cafeteria with a group of her friends or classmates. I explained the purpose of my study and took the opportunity to mention that it would be best if they did not tell anyone about my presence except their peers, given that I had no authorization. Whereas I had expected that this would make them mistrustful, the opposite happened. They assured me that there was no problem and added: “Anyway, they don’t want us to have any contact with the outside world, that way we won’t know how things are in other places”; “They want us to be content and satisfied with our situation”; “Anyway, at the university everything is forbidden.” I noticed that my lack of authorization created a form of complicity between us. Together, they and I were on the same side of the divide. After conversing for a few hours, we saw the director of the female section who had just entered the cafeteria where we were seated. Seeing her look our way and fearing that she noticed the intruder, Sahar launched with remarkable skill: “How do you do, professor? Did you know that we miss you?” Under cover of showing friendliness, she put acting skills to work in order to distract the director and frame the interaction as a convivial and egalitarian exchange, rather than a hierarchical one.1 In this way, she got away with a flagrant transgression of the rules.

I was frequently able to observe such transgressions, which were more or less obvious or intentional depending on the person. This especially concerned transgressions in the dress code of what I call official Islamic rules, since they are mainly justified by a maximalist application of Islamic precepts that appear in fatwas and publications of official religious institutions, in school textbooks, and in some legal texts and sectorial codes. Public spaces, particularly campuses and shopping malls, are stages for interactions between young Saudi women and the authorities in charge of enforcing principles for regulating public order. Transgressions of these principles through one’s attire are visible to all women, and to men as well if they occur in spaces open to them.

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