In the Land of Invisible Women

by Qanta Ahmed

  I looked at the drivers. Within these obese Cadillac-shaped camels, among the Benz-clad Bedouin, falcon-eyed men lounged at the wheel, each invariably dressed in checkered shemaghs and flowing white thobes. To a man, each carried a cell phone, a near-appendage to his headdress. The men were driving nonchalantly with one hand, reclining. So many commuting caliphs. Of course, there were no women drivers. The absurd, clamorous clash of modern and medieval—Benz and Bedou, Cadillac and camel—was one which would reverberate throughout my stay in the Kingdom. It never became less arresting to behold.

  In these first moments, I was already captivated, in more ways than I knew.

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  1 Sharia Law was originally derived from multiple schools of legal thought interpreting Divine Law originally codified in the Quran. In the first few centuries of Islam over thirty schools of legal thought existed and originally the Sharia was diverse and pluralistic. Some of this rich diversity has been lost over time, particularly in the modern era of resurging orthodoxy. Sharia literally means “The Way” and refers to the body of Islamic Law codified by the Quran and teachings referred to as hadith and sunna which recount the Prophet's sayings and actions respectively. Reference: The Great Theft, by Professor Khaled Abou El Fadl. In, “Introduction: Islam Torn Between Extremism and Moderation,” page 23.

  2 In Islam, travel is regarded as a hardship for Muslims and therefore the five daily mandatory prayers are ascribed shorter duration to ease the difficulties borne by the traveling Muslim.

  3 A nephew of the current monarch King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and grandson to the original founder of Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz al-Saud, Prince al-Waleed, often known colloquially as “Waleed,” is renowned as a progressive agent of reform, most notably promoting women's rights throughout the Kingdom.

  4 Abbayah means veil. Every woman, western or non-western, Muslim or not, is required by law to wear an abbayah over her clothing whenever in public. These garments are full length and include a head scarf to cover all hair. In Saudi Arabia they are almost always black in color.

  5 A thobe is a loose fitting long sleeved ankle length garment worn by Saudi men. Usually white in color except for brief months in winter when it may be made of darker cloth (brown, black, or navy). Summer heat means the white thobes are usually made of fine cotton. Sleeves can be cuffed or simply loose. The neckline can be collared, in which case it is usually worn buttoned up, or round necked and worn unbuttoned.

  MY NEW HOME,

  A MILITARY COMPOUND

  WE WERE NOW AT THE extreme east of the city. Waiting at traffic lights, the dusty silence was punctuated by rubber burns on slick, vacant roads. Crackling Arabic music carried on currents of exhaust fumes drifted into earshot from a nearby car. I could smell gasoline. We were on a deserted road leading up toward a compound. It was remote; soon there were no lights. In the darkness I could sense the edges of a huge desert.

  Sudden floodlights heralded a gate. Barriers blazing, guardhouse gleaming, this was the gate to my new life, my life in Saudi Arabia. I would be working at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital, a hospital for the military protecting the Saudi royal family. I was now an employee of the Saudi Arabian National Guard Health Affairs and so would live on a militarized compound. Quickly, the well-groomed Saudi soldiers, uncovered hair perfectly coiffed and waxed even this late in the night, waved us through the gate without inquiry; I was in a hospital vehicle, with a known escort.

  After a few brief turns through the campus-like grounds, we approached one of many buildings. Flat-roofed, cuboid buildings coated in garish terracotta paint extended far and wide. External air conditioning units peppered the surfaces, barnacles on whale hide. No central air, when it would be over 120°F in the summer? I wondered about the furnace of summer ahead, noticing the night air, which tasted of the pervasive dust. I smacked my already chapped lips to get the chalky taste away.

  The heaving white minivan, mimicking its driver, ground to a lethargic halt. I looked at a neglected bilingual sign: Building 40. Even in the dark, the building was evidently in poor repair, a stark contrast from the dazzling airport. I entered cautiously, following Umair. I watched with amazement as he expertly gathered the skirt of his thobe. Curiously woman-like, he deftly raised the hem to avoid tripping while he carried my suitcases upstairs. For a time, I digested the strange scene of the heaving bulk of a man who now revealed the distinct gestures of a woman.

  We entered an airless apartment, inhaling mouthfuls of dust. A plywood door slammed cheaply behind us. With a clumsy swipe, Umair slapped on the lights. I could smell hot dust burning on bare light bulbs. The apartment had been unoccupied for a while. More animated than at any time yet, Umair now reveled in the role of rotund realtor. Eagerly he showed me the appliances, opening all the drawers and showing me the cutlery for ten. He explained how to switch on the satellite television, smiling as he surfed channels which were broadcasting from a West now as remote to me here as Jupiter. He peered at me closely, reviewing my reaction. Somewhere in between passport control and the apartment it had become appropriate to look at me. Finally, he directed me to a welcome food pack. He left, his heaving footsteps retreating as he clumped down the concrete stairwell, doubtless while clutching the dangerous hems of his thobe. Stupidly, but suddenly, I missed him.

  Hours later, I awoke, heavy-headed, disoriented. Slowly my thoughts came into focus. My sandpapered throat was rasping. The bed was facing the wrong direction. As I regained full consciousness, shaking off the heavy vestiges of sleep, I remembered: my entire life was now facing in this new, wrong, Eastern direction. I drew back the heavy black-out curtain, blinking in the stinging winter sunlight. Molten light poured in through windows as I opened them, chasing away every drop of darkness. Above, an interminably blanched sky would soon make me yearn for long-forgotten, gray clouds of England. The view from my apartment revealed that Saudi Arabia seemed now a poor country, despite the swashbuckling Mercedes of my arrival. I would learn that Saudi Arabia was many things to many people: to the rich, a land of boundless wealth; to the poor, a prison of abject poverty; to the expatriate worker, a land of contrasts and inconsistencies, an ever moving labyrinth of contradiction, not wholly one nor wholly the other. I readied myself for my first day in the Kingdom.

  Dressing, I noticed a number of typed notes throughout the apartment; detailed instructions from the chairman of the department. Away from Riyadh at the time of my arrival into the Kingdom, he had left helpful details. I read with interest, hungry for information.

  I unfolded a map, studying the glossy colors like a child. I felt displaced. According to my best estimations, I was perched on a precipice of encroaching desert. I looked out of the window. Certainly my eyes confirmed this was so. Returning to the map, I noticed the utter lack of detail. Riyadh didn't look very big or very labyrinthine according to this map, the way a city of 4.2 million6 surely should be. I wondered about my new bearings.

  “Think of yourself as in someone's private garden, Qanta. You are a guest in a private retreat, unlike anywhere else you may have lived. I like to call it The Magic Kingdom,” I remembered the chairman saying. I wondered what he could mean.

  Nearby, I noticed a handbook on Islamic etiquette that he had also left for me. I glanced at it. Cartoonish diagrams peppered short couplets of text, curiously like a child's book. I flicked through the pages, disinterested. These simple diagrams hoped to communicate the most complex cultural subtleties to non-Muslims? Suddenly, I wondered whether the chairman understood he had hired a Muslim woman. Pictures of veiled women and thobed men discussed codes of behavior with which I then believed myself to be familiar: a man greeting a man (with handshakes); a man greeting a woman (without handshakes and never without the presence of her male family member); permitted and forbidden items of consumption (alcohol, porcine flesh, illicit drugs); nature and timing of prayer (five times a day during which shops would always shut). After skimming through this “child's stuff” (stuff of
my childhood at least), I discarded it. While I had briefly considered culture shock on arrival to the Kingdom as a possibility in past weeks, I had quickly dismissed it as silly, assuming my Muslim womanhood would give me an immediate and very natural carte blanche of insight and acceptance in Saudi Arabia.

  I wasn't remotely worried about customs and culture here. As a Muslim, I considered myself a member of this club. My trite self-assurance began to ring hollow. Echoes of doubt were already magnifying in my new reality. What I didn't know, as I carelessly tossed the wooden books aside, were the legislated ways of orthodox Islam. Knowing the basic tenets of Islam would not get me very far. I would only make my painful discoveries with time as I bloodied myself colliding in one culture clash after another. I was to need an altogether different guide book for this “Kingdom of Strangers.”

  I returned to the notes. I was to call Maurag, my secretary, at once, one of them instructed. I dialed the number, speaking into a receiver that smelled of dust. She would be right over to take me to lunch so we could make plans for my essential first purchase in Saudi Arabia: tonight we were going shopping for an abbayah.

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  6 Riyadh's population is 4.26 million as of February 2005 and has grown by 4.2% in the eight years prior. Of the total, 34% (1.46 million) are expatriate workers, the remainder Saudi nationals (2.46 million). While the population continues to grow, the rate of population growth has diminished as internal domestic migration to Riyadh has decreased in recent years. http://www.saudiembassy.net/ 2005News/News/NewsDetail.asp?cIndex=5111.

  ABBAYAH SHOPPING

  I HAD NEVER HEARD THE WORD abbayah before planning to move to the Kingdom. As Maurag explained, I realized this was the same as a burqa, the outdoor covering that I had first seen women wearing during my childhood vacations in Pakistan. My young mother would wear an ivory burqa when she was shopping in Karachi. I thought she looked like a bride on those special outings. In England she switched this for the peculiarly British ensemble of raincoat and headscarf which still covered her with Islamic propriety.

  Though I had spent all my life as a Muslim, my wardrobe lacked any burqa, or chadhur, or in fact any kind of veil. My family, my parents in particular, had never required me to dress anything other than modestly. I was firmly settled in standard Western clothing of trouser suits or modest skirts. My hair was only covered when I prayed. My family allowed me and every other woman in our family to make the critical choice of veiling for themselves. I would quickly find Riyadh to be much less tolerant and much more demanding than my family.

  The burqa or abbayah (as it is called in Saudi Arabia) is a thin, flowing robe that covers the entire length of the body, from head to foot. It is fastened at the neck and mid-chest, overlapping extensively to leave no clothing visible underneath. The abbayah has an accompanying and often matching scarf, also called a hijab, to cover the hair and head, leaving the face exposed. Some women additionally wear a cloth covering the face to varying degrees, called a niqab, veiling the face from the bridge of the nose downward.

  In Saudi Arabia, women veil themselves in progressive, man-made demarcations of orthodoxy, each vying in severity with the next. Some expose eyebrows which are groomed, others brandish ungroomed eyebrows as a medal of orthodoxy in the eschewal of artificial reshaping, while continuing to veil the remainder of the forehead and the face below the bridge of the nose. Those with exposed eyebrows could reveal their expressions of surprise, dismay, or, rarely, a hastily suppressed joy. Others choose never to reveal even the allure of an arched brow. Instead they wrap the black cloth lower, brushing the center of upper eyelids barely revealing the margins of unmascaraed eyelashes.

  Even more canonical were the extreme Wahabi1 women whose veiling was unlike anything I had ever seen, even during childhood journeys to Afghanistan, Iran, or northern Pakistan.2 Years later, when I saw blue-meshed bundles murdered at anonymous gunpoint in a forgotten Afghan hellhole, I recognized every Wahabi woman in Riyadh.

  In Saudi Arabia, these women follow the most extreme veiling, which engulfs the entire woman. The whole head, every feature, eyes and ears included, is covered in an opaque shroud of black. Even the crocheted face mesh of the Taliban is forbidden. Hands are gloved in thick black cotton, as are toes. Not an inch of skin is visible, every atom of womanhood extinguished by polyester blackness. Many of these überorthodox women continue to wear full veiling indoors, even in the company of women, at every occasion, births, marriages, and deaths, taking a proud stance of zealotry over other women who are less observant.3 The women are faceless, voiceless fragments of a lurid Wahabi imagination. They are easily forgotten.

  This veiling was anathema to me. Even with a deep understanding of Islam, I could not imagine mummification is what an enlightened, merciful God would ever have wished for half of all His creation. These shrouded, gagged silences rise into a shrieking register of muted laments for stillborn freedoms. Such enforced incarceration of womanhood is a form of female infanticide. Throughout the Kingdom, short, tiny prepubertal girls could be seen tripping over their abbayahs, well before Islam asks for female modesty to be protected. While these veils conceal women, at the same time they expose the rampant, male oppression which is their jailor. Polyester imprisonment by compulsion is ungodly and (like the fiber) distinctly man-made.

  Regardless of whether the face is covered or not, in Saudi Arabia, no woman can go anywhere in public without wearing an abbayah that covers at least the body and her head of hair. In Riyadh, these abbayahs are almost always black, year-round, irrespective of the intensely hot climate. Mine would be no exception.

  These were the rules of Sharia law. The Kingdom is the only Arab state that claims Islamic law (known as Sharia) as its sole foundation for legal code. Inexplicably, the Kingdom's clerics compel non-Muslim women to veil also, a rule which is not to be found codified in the Quran. To the enforcers, this was a minor detail easily abrogated. In the eyes of the clergy, there could be no choice for a woman, in veiling or in any other matter; covering the hair and wearing the abbayah was legislated by their version of Sharia law, irrespective of any personal beliefs including fundamental professions of revealed faiths.

  Sharia law is expressed in Saudi Arabia as decreed by Wahabi clerical lawmakers, followers of the most extreme brand of Islam. Wahabiism is the movement founded by Mohammed bin Abdul Wahab (died 1792), a monstrous and very modern phenomenon that distorts much Islamic teaching through his myopic, blinkered interpretations of a magnificent religion. In its place, he spawned a rigid movement that dismantled centuries of careful pluralistic Islamic discourse and learned interpretations, denouncing such scholarship as “innovative” and corrupting of Divine instruction.

  Over time, the Wahabi stance toward innovation (which is often expressed as a hysterical counter to perceived “infection” with Western ideologies and appetites) has evolved into a number of laws designed to subjugate and oppress women. Citing Sharia, the clerics ban women from driving cars, forbid women from buying music, prevent women from booking hotel rooms in their own names, and attempted (but failed) to dissuade female passengers from wearing seat belts in front seats of cars for fear of defining a woman's veiled cleavage. Earlier, Wahabis had worked hard to prevent the telephone from being introduced in the Kingdom, fearing it would be used as a satanic instrument encouraging male-female interactions and succeeded for a time to keep out television (a heinous portal of evil un-Islamic influence), satellite television (multinational invasion of satanic forces), and even the Internet (unassailable external evil available on dial-up, and even worse, now broadband). New dilemmas plaguing the clerics include illicit Bluetooth interfaces between the sexes, cameras on handheld phones, and text messaging.

  Modern Wahabi forces in the Kingdom are very alive today, where interpretation other than that deemed appropriate by Wahabi rigidity is haram, or absolute heresy. The clergy has effectively extinguished public diversity and distorted Islamic jurist thought into a harsh, mandated apa
rtheid: men from women; Saudis from non-Saudis; Muslims from non-Muslims; Wahabis from non-Wahabis.

  As I spent time in the Kingdom, I was to see just how far removed the state-enforced theocracy was from the truth which is Islam and also how conflicted the Saudis around me, both men and women, had themselves become. Their state no longer represented their personal beliefs. They were just as much victims of oppression as any visitor to their country. Perhaps even the same could be said for some members of the monarchy who bravely fostered the beginnings of progressive reform in this difficult climate.

  Thus, even though Islam clearly mandates no compulsion in faith, because of Wahabi Sharia law, it was here I would experience enforced veiling. My oppression had begun. It began with my consent to work in a police state, followed by Umair's authority on my passport, then my subjugation within the robes of the abbayah and my bewildering introduction to legislated male supremacy. Finally I found my own spineless capitulation when all my defiance exhausted me and I too cowered, muted under the perpetual specter of ruling Wahabiism.

  For now, I merely wondered how much the abbayah would cost, regarding it no more of a hindrance than I did my doctor's white coat for my work. Maurag promised to lend me an old abbayah of hers to wear so I could safely (as she put it delicately, when we both knew she meant “legally”) move outside the compound and enter the mall where we would make the purchase. After the Isha prayer, when shops would reopen after their mandatory closure for evening worship, we would be going abbayah shopping.