Fems rule: changes for women in Saudi-Arabia, land of patriarchal polygamists

Saudi Women See Changes, and Reasons to Expect More -- by HASSAN M. FATTAH

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia - Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi journalist in this Red Sea city, was in Manhattan when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. She scrambled to contact her editors and send reports, but was rebuffed because they did not trust the work of a woman.

Ms. Sharif, who has since been promoted to a midlevel editor position, said it would be different today because much has changed for Saudi women - and Sept. 11 is one of the reasons. Wrapped in black, still paid less than her male counterparts and still barred from driving, Ms. Sharif sat in her office inside the cramped "ladies section" of the newspaper Al Watan, sighing about the difficulties someone like her faces.

Nonetheless, she ticked off numerous substantive changes, beginning with something that happened recently. Two women were elected to the 12-member board of directors of the Jidda Chamber of Commerce, the first time that women were elected to, or even permitted to run for, such a visible post in the kingdom.

There is more. Until a few years ago, Saudi women were completely excluded from the public sphere. Now their photographs appear in newspapers, heads covered, and they have their own picture identification cards rather than being disembodied names on their husbands' or fathers' cards. That means that Ms. Sharif, who went to New York in 2001 accompanied by her husband, can and does travel alone now, although she still needs her husband's permission.

In addition, the first university courses for women studying architecture or law have begun. Divorce is easier to obtain, and women no longer need a front man to register a company. Individually, and to a Westerner, such changes may seem minor. But taken together, they represent a real shift.

"We came from below zero," said Ms. Sharif, 37, who is pregnant with her seventh child and whose eldest is in the first class of female architecture students. "Now we have reason to be optimistic."

The changes, rapid and radical by Saudi standards, are noticeable to anyone who has not been here in some years. Of the dozen women interviewed for this article, most agreed to meet male journalists without being accompanied by a male relative, a rarity a decade ago. Several even agreed to have their photographs taken although the others declined, saying their parents or husbands would object.

The shifts, which are largely limited to the well off and well educated, have a number of sources. One is the double shock produced here by the fact that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudi and the subsequent wave of terrorism by Al Qaeda that struck this country. Suddenly, the ruling family had reason to push back against some of the more reactionary practices imposed by the powerful clergy.

The huge national debt created by the Persian Gulf war in 1991 was another factor. The country needed to expand its economy, and many women here hold a great deal of idle cash. Finally, the rise to power this year of King Abdullah, a moderate, is widely viewed as significant.

The women leading the movement for more rights are not presenting themselves as secular feminists. Rather, they are citing Koranic scripture for their demands, hoping to beat the clerics at their own game. When Saudi clerics say women should not drive, these women say the Prophet Muhammad spoke approvingly of a day when women could travel alone. They say women played crucial roles in the days of the prophet and that his wife, Khadija, was an important merchant.

"We have been insufficiently educated in our own religion," said Ghada Angawi, a personal coach for businesswomen who considers the Koran a vital weapon in the fight for women's equality.

To make their point, leaders for women are acting with caution. Lama al-Suleiman, 39, one of the two women elected to the Chamber of Commerce, holds a doctorate from King's College in London and runs a company. Trilingual and sophisticated, she has gone around Jidda for years without covering her hair and greeted journalists from The New York Times at her house in jeans. For a photograph, however, she changed clothes, saying that, having entered public life, she did not want to give her opponents any excuse to discredit her. "You have to melt the culture, not break it," she said.

Ms. Sharif, the editor, made the same point. She said she kept the article about Ms. Suleiman and Nashwa al-Taher, the other woman elected, off the front page lest it attract too much attention. Maha Fitaihi, the wife of Jidda's mayor and a prominent women's activist, said, "We don't want a civil war, we just want this to be an evolutionary change."

Ms. Fitaihi learned firsthand the risks of overpublicizing her activities this year when she organized a basketball tournament for girls. Religious figures contacted local leaders to put a stop to it. Girls were forbidden to play sports, they insisted. Ms. Fitaihi scrapped the event.

The changes tend to come two steps forward, one back. Women have risen in the ranks of banks and hospitals, running segregated sections for women, but they still do not have real authority to make decisions. They no longer need a man to sign documents for them, but few have been made aware of it.

The Chamber of Commerce elections are widely expected to be a prelude to women running in Saudi municipal elections in 2009. But it did not take long for some clerics to object to the elections, saying, as one imam put it, that they produced a "dangerous and corrupt association of women and money."

It was not always so difficult, Ms. Fitaihi said, especially not in Jidda, a cosmopolitan city where for centuries many cultures have passed through on their way to pilgrimage in nearby Mecca. As a girl, she had drama, arts and sports in her school, and there were movie theaters in the city. None of that is true today.

"I always tell my kids that I had a better childhood than they did," Ms. Fitaihi said.

Many restrictions followed the Iranian revolution and the siege of Mecca by extremists in 1979, as the government sought to appease them through a broad expansion of extremist policies and power: strict segregation of the sexes, the removal of women from the public sphere and laws firming up existing measures against women.

Today, along with changes for women, there is talk of other forms of opening up. Several malls under construction in the city include movie theaters, in the hope that they will be permitted to function in a few years, Ms. Fitaihi said. Achieving change requires care and stealth, she and others said.

"It's like being on an island where no one will come to save you," said Ms. Angawi, the business coach. "You have to learn to survive."

When Ms. Angawi sought a divorce from an abusive husband five years ago, no one was there to help her. She was forced to enter a man's world and fend for herself.

She now encourages all women to make choices for themselves.

The choices, however, remain limited. Ms. Angawi, a mother of five, has remarried, but somewhat unhappily as a second wife to a man with another family. Having more than one wife, permitted by the Koran, is common in Saudi Arabia. Some issues will not be easily overcome.

But women say that persistence is the key. Ms. Sharif, the journalist, said that only a tiny number of Saudi women were journalists, and that most worked for a few years, married and then quit. But she is planning on sticking it out.

"I'm like a mountain," she said with a laugh. "You can't move me."