Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  Partly because of the risk of such humiliation, few Saudi women work outside the home. In 1986 women made up only four percent of the paid work force. Mostly, the small number reflected a lack of jobs open to women. In the Saudi government, even jobs directly concerned with women’s affairs were held by men. At United Nations International Women’s Year conference in Mexico City in 1975 and the Decade for Women conference in Nairobi in 1985, the Saudi Arabian “women’s delegation” was entirely composed of men.

  But even in fields where women could work, some husbands were reluctant to let them. Faiza’s husband, a Lebanese, was proud of her accomplishments. And some Saudi husbands felt the same. But often there was tension between pride in a wife’s achievements and apprehension about where her work might lead her. One businessman bragged of his wife’s graduation from medical school, then told me he hoped she would go on to specialize in surgery, “so her patients will be unconscious when she touches them.”

  The issue of working wives came up frequently in Saudi newspapers, especially on the religion pages. “What are the conditions relating to a wife going out to work? Is this permitted under Islam, and if so, under which circumstances?” asked “Working Wife, Jeddah” in a letter to the Saudi Gazette’s religious editor. “There are legal and moral rights that become consequential on marriage,” responded the editor. “Because of their different physiological structures and biological functions, each sex is assigned a role to play in the family.… It is the husband who is supposed to provide for the family. If he cannot gain enough to support the family, or if his income is too low to provide for a relatively acceptable standard of living, and provided the wife is willing, both of them may work for gain. However:

  1. The husband has the right to terminate a wife’s working whenever he deems it necessary;

  2. He has the right to object to any job if he feels that it would expose his wife to any harm, seduction or humiliation;

  3. The wife has the right to discontinue working whenever she pleases.

  Once, flying to Saudi Arabia, I’d sat next to a Saudi who had been grappling for a year with the issue of what kind of job might be appropriate for his wife. His own business was trading, and he became increasingly edgy when our plane approached Jeddah. As we circled for landing, he mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief. He was worried about the underwear in his luggage. “More than two hundred brassieres,” he whispered. “I bought them in London, from Marks and Spencer. All made in Israel.” Saudi Arabia enforced a boycott on goods from the land it referred to as “the Zionist entity.” So the night before, in his London hotel, he had sat up late with a thick marker pen, writing Saudi-riyal prices over the offending labels to make the country of origin illegible. “But by the end I was very tired,” he said. “If I missed one, and customs sees it, I will be in big trouble.” He swabbed again at his brow. “What can I do? I’m a trader, and these are the brassieres that Saudi women like to buy.”

  Saudi customs searches were notorious. One American who’d gone to work there had had his five-generation family Bible ripped up in front of him, because it flouted the kingdom’s ban on non-Muslim religious items. The Saudis took the ban on other religions’ symbols to such an extreme that the plane in which we were flying had just been repainted, along with the rest of the Saudia Airlines fleet, following a fundamentalist’s complaint that the space between the s and the a in the previous Saudia logo had formed the shape of a Christian cross,

  I thought I had purged my luggage of anything that could be construed, or misconstrued, as religious. But at the customs desk in Jeddah the grim young inspector scowled as he plucked two pieces of contraband from my bag: a dry reference work titled Political Dictionary of the Arab World and a book about early explorers in Arabia called Passionate Pilgrims. He objected to the first because the word “political” in the title made it potentially seditious; the second because the word “passionate” had pornographic potential, while the word “pilgrims” might have referred to religion.

  The trader, Mohamed, had been luckier. I saw him in the arrival hall, grinning broadly. The illicit bras had passed inspection. To celebrate, he said, I should come to lunch the next day and meet his wife, Adela.

  Mohamed shared a small apartment building with his extended family: father and mother on the ground floor; brothers, their wives and children filling the flats above. Even in Saudi Arabia’s modern cities, families still followed the tribal patterns of the desert. Saudi men, when they married, brought their wives into their parents’ home. Rich families managed this in rambling walled compounds with several villas arranged around a garden. Poorer families built slab houses that grew by a floor every time a son took a wife. As a result, Saudi cities seemed dotted with unfinished buildings. Tufts of steel reinforcing bars stuck out of the flat roofs as if the houses had been given punk haircuts.

  To me, with family scattered on three continents, having everyone together in one building seemed enviable. But Mohamed had begun to find it stifling. When we climbed the stairs to his flat, doors opened on every floor, as brothers and tiny nieces and nephews peered out to see who Mohamed was bringing home. To get some privacy, he’d started to build a new house, just for himself, Adela and their three children. But he didn’t know if he’d be able to move into it. “It’s difficult to convince my father that moving away is a good idea,” he sighed. Mohamed was thirty-five years old, but his father’s word was still law. Like most Saudis, Mohamed worked from 7 A.M. until one in the afternoon, then returned to his business for a few hours in the evening. Schools and offices closed during the heat of the day, and families gathered to take lunch together. Mohamed and Adela ate at a table, Western style, instead of spreading a cloth on the floor in the traditional Arabian way. They served an array of Arabian specialties—steaming bowls of rice, braised lamb in saffron gravy, skewers of grilled chicken—and a Western-style plate of french fries. After lunch the family sprawled in front of the TV, flipping past the heavily religious Saudi stations to pick up the wobbly signal from Egypt, with its racier fare of movies and variety shows.

  Adela had been just sixteen years old and still at school when she married Mohamed. She completed a sociology degree while having her children. “Most of the women in the course were doing the same,” she said. Many Saudi schools provide day-care centers and nurseries for their students’ children. Exams can be rescheduled to accommodate the arrival of a baby. After university, when her two sons and daughter had all started school, Adela became miserable. “There was just this terrible boredom every morning once the kids left,” she said. In the past, she would simply have had more children. In rural areas, many Saudi women still reproduced to their utmost capability. One British doctor, on an eighteen-month posting to a Jeddah hospital, thought his interpreter had failed him during an ante-natal checkup on a twenty-eight-year-old Bedouin. “I asked her when she’d had her last period, and she said, ‘What’s a period?’ It turned out she’d never had one. She’d been married at twelve, before her menarche, and had been pregnant or lactating ever since.”

  But, for the majority of urban Saudis such as Adela and Mohamed, the tribal imperative for a huge family no longer applied. So more and more educated women were competing for the few Islamically sanctioned jobs in medicine, education or women’s banks. The banks, run by Saudi women managers and staff, had opened in 1980 because, although the Koran gives women control of their own wealth, Saudi segregation rules were denying them that control by effectively banning their entry to banks used by men. Even though daughters inherit only half as much as sons, in post-oil Saudi Arabia that often comes to a fortune. The new banks were meticulously segregated, down to women auditors to oversee the accounts of the female branches and guards posted at the door to see that men didn’t enter by mistake. Usually a guard was married to one of the women employees inside, so that if documents had to be delivered he could deal with his wife rather than risking even that slight contact taking place between unmarried members o
f the opposite sex.

  Medicine, the only career in which segregation isn’t enforced, is under constant attack by fundamentalists, who object to women doctors treating male patients. Their campaign has been unsuccessful so far because the government has been able to show that there aren’t enough Saudi men in medicine yet to handle the demand.

  There had been an opening at the Ministry of Health for which Adela was qualified, but Mohamed had been against it because it involved some contact with men. “She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile—if she smiles at a man he will think, ‘Ah, she loves me,’ ” Mohamed explained. As he sat on the sofa flipping the TV channel selector, he paused for a minute on a Saudi channel where a woman announcer, her hair carefully veiled, was reading the news. “This is new,” he said. The television had had women presenters before, but rarely a Saudi. What if Adela wanted to be a news reader? I asked. “She would never agree to be seen in public like that, and I wouldn’t permit it,” Mohamed said firmly. Soon Adela would start work in the only job she could find that both she and Mohamed deemed suitable: a clerical position in a girls’ school. The job wasn’t up to her qualifications, “but the hours are good, and it is better than sleeping all day,” she said. Without a job, any job, Adela had little to fill her empty hours besides TV, videos and women’s tea parties. There were no theaters or cinemas in Saudi Arabia, and she couldn’t go shopping alone without risking stares and harassment.

  As the afternoon turned to evening, Mohamed suggested a drive along Jeddah’s seaside. Before Adela stepped outside, she tied her hair back in a large black scarf, wrapped a small piece of black cloth around her face like a baddie in a Western, leaving just her eyes exposed, then slipped an abaya on top of everything, covering her colorful floor-length dress. The two of us sat in the back seat of the car with the children, with Mohamed and his uncle up front. All along the Red Sea shore, clumps of white-robed men sat just a little apart from clusters of women, their black cloaks billowing in the hot sea breeze as they arranged their evening picnics.

  We parked and strolled along the waterfront, the white pavement throwing out the day’s stored heat. As the sun eased into the sea, the city behind us exploded in a cacophony of calls to evening prayer. Mohamed reached into the trunk of his car for prayer mats. He and his uncle lined up, raised their palms to God, and bowed toward the nearby city of Mecca. Adela didn’t join them, explaining that Saudi women usually didn’t pray in public. As we waited, she groped for a tissue, lifting her black veil to wipe the sweat-drenched face beneath. Nevertheless, Adela seemed to be enjoying this modest outing. It was one of the few things she and Mohamed still could do together. A few months earlier they’d been able to take the children to an amusement park, or skating at a rink where dense white plastic substituted for ice. But both places had come under pressure from the religious establishment and now offered only segregated men’s and women’s hours that made family visits impossible.

  Some Saudi businessmen were fed up with segregation’s effects on their companies. Hussein Abudawood, whose factories produced Clorox bleach in Saudi Arabia, had wanted to do some Western-style market research to see how Saudi households did their laundry. “Obviously, I couldn’t send male market researchers to talk to women. But I couldn’t send Saudi women, either, because they might run into the men of the household. And how do I find enough Arabic-speaking women here who aren’t Saudi?” He’d eventually scraped together a few Egyptian and Lebanese interviewers, who’d had a terrible time explaining themselves in a land where strangers just don’t come to the door. “Most places have a guard at the gate with instructions not to admit anyone who doesn’t have an appointment,” he said.

  Hussein found the whole system riddled with contradictions. “If a Saudi woman wants a new bra and panties she has to discuss it over the counter in a shop staffed by a bunch of guys from India. Yet if she’s a businesswoman who needs to file a document at a government ministry, she can’t set foot in there—she has to send a man.” Hussein had been part of a group ofbusinessmen asked to comment on a draft of a Ministry of Development economic plan. He had taken issue with a line in the draft that stated that the government would promote women working according to Islamic rules. “I got up and said, ‘Here’s half a line about women in a thirty-six-page development plan and you have to put ‘according to Islamic rules.’ What about the rest of the thirty-six pages? You mean the rest of it isn’t according to Islamic rules? Are you just trying to satisfy the extremists?’ “

  The extremists were almost impossible to satisfy. Even segregated workplaces were at risk. Saudi Cable Company, the kingdom’s biggest industrial concern, had floated a proposal to build a factory where every job, from production line to senior management, would be filled by women. In a country with an acute labor shortage, I thought such a plan would be hailed for its initiative. But when I went to see the official in charge of the project, he begged me not to write about it. “We have already had too much attention,.” he said. He worried that the project would be scuttled if the fundamentalists started a campaign decrying it for luring women from their homes. However, he did introduce me to his wife, Basilah, who ran the magnificent Dar al Fikr girls’ school.

  After showing me the school, Basilah invited me to her home for afternoon tea. The pale stone villa, with its floodlit pool, Persian carpets and elegant furnishings, made it clear that her job wasn’t a case of “financial necessity,” such as the Saudi Gazette’s religious editor would have approved. “I didn’t work when I first got married,” she said. “I would spend most of the day in bed, then when Fawaz would get home tired from a hard day’s work I’d be so bored I’d insist he take me out to the shopping mall. After a while we both decided the situation was crazy, that I should be doing something with my life that would make some kind of contribution.”

  Basilah had invited a woman friend who helped her mother run a successful construction company to join us for tea. When her father died, she and her mother had expected his male relations to run the business and provide for her and her children. But they were lazy and incompetent, and it seemed that everything her father had worked for was going to be destroyed. “Finally my mother took over,” the woman explained. “She went to the Ministry of Construction with the papers that needed official approval. No woman had been in there before. The officials ordered her out. She refused to go. She sat there, and sat there, until they were forced to deal with her. She turned out to be a very good manager, and she saved the business.”

  As maids glided in and out with glasses of tea and a dazzling array of French cakes and pastries, conversation turned to how my husband felt about all the traveling I had to do for my job. I told Basilah that neither of us liked being apart so much but that, as a journalist himself, he understood the job’s demands. Then, bragging a little, I told her how he’d rearranged his own career to accommodate mine. “When my newspaper offered me the Middle East post,” I said, “he gave up his own job so I could accept it.” I had expected Basilah to be surprised; Tony and I were used to the automatic assumption in the Middle East that he was the one whose job had brought us there. But the look on Basilah’s face was beyond surprise. She looked utterly dismayed, as if I’d just admitted that my husband had committed mass murder. She fussed with her tea glass, cleared her throat and changed the subject.

  It was hard to get information on women who worked in jobs outside the relatively safe spheres of girls’ education, women’s banking and medicine. When I asked the Ministry of Information for help, I was stonewalled. So I tried various other contacts. “Don’t even touch this subject unless what you plan to write is a hundred percent positive,” warned a Lebanese businessman in Jeddah. When I indicated that was unlikely, he refused to arrange any introductions. I’d heard of women in Jeddah and Riyadh who were the bosses of businesses as diverse as photography studios, clothing manufacture and computer training schools. I thought the Chamber of Commerce might be able to give me some lea
ds. “No problem,” said a helpful official, “I’ll set you up some appointments.”

  The next day he told me to be at the administrative office at Jeddah airport at 2 P.M. I thought he’d found a woman executive for me to talk to there. But when I arrived I found I’d been scheduled for a mind-numbing “official tour” that had absolutely nothing to do with women. I was there for hours, being shown videos, walked through computer rooms and deluged with official statistics—a 625% increase in passenger traffic between 1975 and 1988, an 870% rise in cargo traffic, a terminal the size of eighty football fields just for pilgrims making the Hajj, roofed with Teflon-coated fiberglass to deflect the heat. There was no polite way to cut the tour short. Developing countries always complain that reporters don’t write about their achievements; that we focus on colorful tribal traditions and neglect technological progress. Still, I was irritated with the Chamber of Commerce for wasting my time and the time of the airport officials.

  As it happened, there was a part of the shining modern airport that had relevance to my story on the status of women in Saudi Arabia. But it wasn’t part of the tour. I didn’t see it until I was leaving the country, two weeks later. While I was waiting in the departure lounge I had to use the women’s toilet. I walked past the polished glass and gleaming chrome of the public areas and pushed on the blond wood door marked by a stylized drawing of a veiled head.

  Inside, I gagged. The floor was awash with excrement. Blocked toilet bowls brimmed with sewage. The place looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Nobody had noticed, because nobody who mattered ever went in there.

  Saudi Arabia is the extreme. Why dwell on the extreme, when it would be just as easy to write about a Muslim country such as Turkey, led by a woman, where one in six judges is a woman, and one in every thirty private companies has a woman manager?