Excellent Daughters by Katherine Zoepf

Author:Katherine Zoepf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Young Saudi women try on makeup in a Riyadh mall while a male employee looks on.

Five

BEFORE WE GET MARRIED, WE HAVE EACH OTHER

DECEMBER 2007—RIYADH

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that is governed according to a severe and puritanical form of Islam that is usually called Wahhabism (though Saudis themselves tend to dislike this term). Saudis often refer to their king as the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” and the facts that the country was the birthplace of Islam and is home to Islam’s two holiest mosques, in Mecca and Medina, are cornerstones of national identity and the locus of great pride. The entire country runs according to the rhythms of the Islamic day—all businesses and government offices close during prayer times—and there are few places in the world where the Islamic practice of seclusion is observed so completely.

Saudi Arabia devotes enormous resources to maintaining a strict separation between the sexes. This separation is the most noticeable feature of Saudi life, so extreme that it is almost impossible to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are spirited around in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special “family” sections of cafés and restaurants, which are carefully partitioned off from the sections used by male diners. There are bank branches, travel agencies, and sections of government offices that serve only women. Even fast-food chain restaurants, like McDonald’s and KFC, have separate counter lines for men and for women.

I sometimes think that discussions of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia move past these particulars just a bit too quickly. Young people are isolated from the opposite sex from adolescence onward. For the most part, adult Saudi men and women have almost no contact with the opposite sex beyond their own immediate families, and this has an incredibly far-reaching effect on their sympathies, their emotional lives, and their way of thinking about the world. Men socialize with men and women socialize with women. If a man invites another man to visit him at home, they will normally socialize in a sitting room located near the entrance to the house, and set up in such a way that the women of the house are completely protected from view. Traditionally, Saudi men don’t even mention the names of their sisters or daughters in public. Some of the most well-traveled people I’ve ever met are Saudi, yet I’ve been frequently startled at the degree to which the Saudi girls and women I’ve interviewed seem to genuinely fear public life, and unknown men. This ingrained fear can coexist, on an individual level, with remarkable sophistication. At a women’s dinner party I attended during a 2013 visit to Riyadh, a professor at an elite women’s college described her students’ panic at a rumor that one of the college gates had accidentally been left open: the girls, many of whom planned to apply for overseas scholarships, had been hysterical, inconsolable at the possibility that they had been seen for a few moments, uncovered, by a man.

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