On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (14 page)

One of the ironies of strict Wahhabi Islam, which encourages Muslims to return to the original teachings and practices of the Prophet, is that the Prophet’s first wife, Kadijah bint Khuwailid, was a successful businesswoman. Indeed, having lost two husbands to death in raids, she hired her distant cousin Muhammad to lead a trading caravan to Syria. She was so pleased with the profits he returned to her that
she
asked the twenty-five-year-old Muhammad to marry her. And she asked him directly to his face, not through a male relative. “
Son of mine uncle,” she said to Muhammad, “I love thee for thy kinship with me and for that thou art ever in the center, not being a partisan amongst the people for this or for that; and I love thee for thy trustworthiness and for the
beauty of thy character and truth of thy speech.” He accepted and then agreed to inform her uncle. (
She is estimated by Islamic historians to have been ten to fifteen years Muhammad’s senior.)

Their relationship apparently was one of great affection and respect. Some fifteen years later, when Muhammad returned home shaking and sweating from his initial encounter with the archangel Gabriel, it was a composed Kadijah who calmed and embraced him. She immediately assured him he was sane. “
You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress,” she told him.
Kadijah became the first convert to Islam.

So long as Kadijah lived, Muhammad took no other wives, even though polygamy was common in Arabia.
Once Kadijah died in
A.D.
619, he married another ten women before his own death in 632. His favorite was Aisha, the prepubescent daughter of his companion, Abu Bakr, one of the men who would lead the Islamic believers after Muhammad’s death.
Aisha was only six when she was promised to Muhammad, nine when she moved to his home, and eighteen when he died in her arms. She never bore him a child.

One story recounts how Aisha, tired of hearing the Prophet proclaim Kadijah’s virtues, said to her husband, “She was only an old woman with red eyes, and Allah has compensated you with a better and younger wife.” The Prophet responded, “No. He has not compensated me with someone better than her. She believed in me when others disbelieved; she held me truthful when others called me a liar; she sheltered me when others abandoned me.”

Most of Muhammad’s wives were young and beautiful. All but Aisha were widows or divorcees, like the beautiful Zaynab, forty, who caused something of a scandal by divorcing Muhammad’s adopted son to marry the Prophet.
This marriage violated the ban on a father marrying the wife of a son, but Allah conveniently sent Muhammad a revelation that adoption did not create the same ties as blood kin. Nor did the Prophet limit himself to Muslim women—or to only
four wives at a time, as later became the rule for Muslim men. At least one of his wives, Safiyyah, seventeen, was a Jewess who converted to Islam. He also had a beautiful Christian concubine, Mariyah, who bore him a son, Ibrahim, a favorite because the sons he fathered with Kadijah had died.

The Prophet made no secret of his love for women. “It hath been given me to love perfume and women,” he said. But he treated his wives with kindness and enjoyed their company. He used to run races with Aisha and her young friends. He allowed all his wives to speak openly to him, including about their jealousies of one another and their wish that at least occasionally he would provide better for them when he passed out the spoils of Islam’s military victories rather than keep them in penury. His companion Umar complained to Muhammad that he should demand more respect from his wives.
The Prophet laughed as one of his wives promptly told the prickly Umar to mind his own business. “Yes, by God, we speak freely with him, and if he allows us to do that, that is surely his own affair.” Muhammad sometimes teased his wives about their jealousy. Entering a room where his wives were gathered one day, he held out an onyx necklace and said, “I shall give this unto her whom I love best of all.” The wives began to whisper that he would give it to Aisha, his well-known favorite.
Instead, he beckoned to his little granddaughter, Umamah, and placed it around her neck. Clearly the Prophet did not view women as temptresses waiting to lead men astray unless closeted, as his latter-day Wahhabi followers do.

The Prophet, as we clearly see, was not averse to strong women.
Women in his day attended mosque, listened to his discourses, and even participated in war.
Nusaybah, a woman of Medina, joined other women in providing water to soldiers at the Battle of Uhud, and when Muhammad came under attack, she joined the fray, drawing her sword and shield to protect the Prophet, something Saudi religious clerics do not mention. Similarly, after the Prophet’s death, Aisha led an army in a bloody attempt to shape the leadership succession of Islam. She took up arms against the Prophet’s
son-in-law, Ali, to try to deny his succession as caliph, or leader of the Islamic believers. Some ten thousand men were killed in the Battle of the Camel, so called because Aisha sat astride her camel leading her troops, until Ali’s men succeeded in sneaking up behind her and cutting off the legs of her mount. Captured, she later was released to live out her life in Medina, finally dying at age seventy-four.

The independence and forthrightness of Arab women like Kadijah and Aisha were curtailed over the next centuries, as the new Islamic religion conquered most of the area from Arabia to Spain and its triumphant foot soldiers procured captured women as multiple wives and concubines. During the eighth and ninth centuries, women, now plentiful in the harems of elite men, became debased and dependent.
Unfortunately for women, codification of Muslim legal thought and practice occurred during this period and achieved final formulation in the tenth century in four major schools of thought that still dominate today. These schools of thought were—and still are—deemed infallible. Thus, legal scholars to this day are obliged to follow precedent, not originate legal doctrine. As a result, women continue to be seen as sex objects whose intrigues can destroy men and disrupt society unless tightly controlled. “
Establishment Islam’s version of the Islamic message survived as the sole legitimate interpretation … because it was the interpretation of the politically dominant—those who had the power to outlaw and eradicate other readings as ‘heretical.’ ” The same is true in Saudi today, where the Al Saud and their senior
ulama
enforce their interpretation of Islam.

As a result, neither of the prophet’s strong wives is seen by Wahhabi
ulama
as evidence that women in the Prophet’s day played large roles in society and thus should be allowed to do so today. But modern Saudi women cite them and point to verses in the Koran such as Sura 3:195 that indicate Islam indeed does regard women as equal before Allah. “I suffer not the good deeds of any to go to waste be he man or woman: the one of you is of the other.”

Suhaila Zein Al Abdein Hammad, the female head of the
Saudi Human Rights Commission, a new organization in the kingdom, is one of the leaders of the struggle to help women gain more rights and responsibilities with the help of the Koran. “
Our religious leaders say females are less intelligent than males. It isn’t true,” she says. “The Prophet consulted always with his wife, Kadijah. His successor named a woman, Al Shifa bint Abdullah, as in effect the first minister of municipalities. She oversaw the market in Medina.” What’s more, says Al Abdein, Allah himself praised the legendary Queen of Sheba. “He said her governance was good. He wouldn’t have done so if he were against women leaders.”

It is telling, of course, that the female leaders whom these women cite lived centuries, if not millennia, ago. Today Saudi Arabia has no women in its Majlis Ash Shura, the Consultative Council (though appointments are promised for 2015), and no female ministers. When the kingdom conducted its first experiment with elections in 2005, allowing Saudis to elect representatives to municipal government councils, women were not permitted to vote, let alone seek seats on the largely ceremonial councils.
That exclusion held when the elections were repeated in September 2011, though as we have seen, the king has announced they will be allowed to participate in 2015. Only in 2009 did King Abdullah name a female as a deputy minister—and then of women’s education, a field composed entirely of women.

Norah al Faiz, this deputy minister, is the daughter of a woman with a third-grade education. She has no royal connections but simply a résumé of rising from humble beginnings through hard work. The eldest of ten children, she graduated from King Saud University with a degree in sociology and in 1979 left Saudi to attend Utah State University while her husband was earning a degree in Texas. Since returning to Riyadh in 1983, she has worked full-time and reared five children. Every summer, instead of relaxing, she has taken some training course abroad to improve herself, she says. This is rare, as the majority of Saudi women still feel they can’t leave the country even for educational opportunities.

“
I am the first woman, and thus I have more challenges,”
she acknowledges in the privacy of her office after a few months in her new position. “If the first woman fails, it is very bad, so I am working hard to understand this new job and make the right changes.” Even though she says she is accustomed to speaking to male audiences, she is treading cautiously in her new job. A sign of how slowly things change: to communicate with the new minister of education, Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, the king’s son-in-law, she must sit before her office computer in the Women’s Education Building—only a few miles from the minister’s office—and communicate via video conference, always careful to block the camera atop her computer so the men don’t see her. Yet both the deputy minister and her boss are U.S.-educated Saudis who mix easily with members of the opposite sex; that they dare not flout conservative tradition in their official capacities speaks volumes about the pervasive clout of religious extremists. Ministers who dare stretch the limits of tradition report receiving regular visits from the religious scholars who insist on strict Wahhabi interpretations of Islam.

It’s not surprising that women like Al Faiz tread carefully when deciding how much to challenge tradition—and how much to remain bound by it. All over the kingdom, Saudis perform daily a sort of Japanese Kabuki theater, daring to nudge the edges of behavioral norms while trying to appear consistent with tradition.

King Abdullah has tried to stretch the rules and focus the spotlight on women achievers.
In 2010 he conferred the King Abdul Aziz Medal of the First Order on a prominent Saudi female scientist, Dr. Khawla al Kuraya, director of the research center at King Fahd National Children’s Cancer Center; he was also shown on television and on the front page of Saudi newspapers placing the medal around her neck and shaking her hand, an unprecedented public display of proximity to an unrelated woman. Not long afterward, he attended graduation ceremonies for female nurses, a career that Saudi women only now are tentatively entering, and shook hands with each as she received her diploma. This ceremony, too, was shown on television, including one traditional
young woman who declined to shake hands with the monarch. The king responded by saying, “God bless you.”

The tug-of-war over women’s proper place in society goes on daily, spurred by a small but growing minority of women who actively are pushing for more independence from men and more opportunity in society. Among the most active is Princess Adelah, one of the king’s daughters, who uses her prominence to champion change for all women and particularly to support abused women. A casually elegant woman in her midforties, Princess Adelah has joined with activist female physicians, eyewitnesses to the effects of abuse, to create a national program to raise awareness of domestic violence. Again, it may not sound radical, but in a country where public organizations mostly are forbidden, any such association is a sign of change. The group has obtained an order from the king requiring each Saudi city to open a home for abused women, has secured a fatwa from the grand mufti declaring domestic violence a “crime,” and most important, is holding public meetings in major cities between women and authorities—police, prosecutors, and judges—responsible for protecting them from their tormentors. The need is great.

At the Jeddah center for battered women, a twenty-nine-year-old with no independent means of support and little education sits shrouded in black to tell a visitor her story, unfortunately an all too common one. A drunken husband’s beatings sent her repeatedly to the hospital, until finally a doctor referred her to the shelter. Not all abused women are so fortunate. One female doctor who works with abused women angrily decries the refusal of the all-male judiciary to protect women. She cites a judge who refuses to protect a thirty-year-old whose father sexually abuses her and then, when she complains to authorities, claims his daughter is mentally ill. The woman’s stepmother is ready to testify for her stepdaughter, but the judge refuses and further refuses to allow a mental evaluation of the father. Instead, he has ordered the young woman dispatched to a religious sheikh who is to read verses from the Koran over her to drive the devil out.

Persuading judges to render justice is the primary purpose
of the public sessions that Princess Adelah convenes. At one of the public sessions in Dammam, attended by some nine hundred women and sixty men from police and legal organizations, authorities outline how abused women should be treated when they go to the police or a hospital. The women then tell their own stories of how the system really works—or doesn’t. There is a huge gap.
Or as the princess delicately puts it, “Sometimes we find there is a deficiency in the procedures.” Airing grievances clearly is progress, even if redressing them often remains elusive because cases wind up being adjudicated by men.

At another such session in Abha, one judge justified a husband’s beating his wife because he agreed with the husband that the woman had spent excessively. There were murmured protests from the assembled women in attendance and more activist outrage around the country when the judge’s comment was reported in the press. The judge later apologized. “
If a woman can stand up to a judge in public, she can get the courage to stand up to her husband,” says Dr. Maha Muneef, who heads the National Family Safety Program, working with Princess Adelah.