This particular night, as the half-loaded bus lumbered down the tarmac toward Saudia Airlines green and white Logo, I reflected once again on the gross discrimination against women in Saudi society. I was jolted out of my reverie when the bus shuddered to a stop among the glaring beams of the giant floodlights and the frenzied activity around the plane. As soon as the bus door opened, the usual frantic scramble to board commenced. Suitcases, baby strollers, and bulky bundles of bedding, the ordinary baggage of a traveling Saudi, were tossed, scooted, and pushed as impatient men steered their women along. Gripping my hand luggage and gathering my long skirt around me, I was pushed by the crowd behind me into the noise of whining engines and the noxious smell of exhaust fumes. A Saudia employee, armed with a walkie talkie in one hand and an airline schedule in the other, excitedly flagged us over to the boarding ramp and hurried us up the steps. Struggling on the ramp in front of me was a heavyset woman of indeterminate age. Her progress was stymied by her long dress, which she grasped in one hand, while with the other hand she desperately clutched the black abaaya around her for fear it might fall from her shoulder to expose her fully clothed body to the eyes of a man. Arduously she felt her way up each step with the toe of her pink plastic sandal, for the heavy veil over her face obscured the light. Suddenly all progress ceased as the shoe slipped from her foot, leaving her stranded. Her husband, standing at the top of the stairs, screamed "yellah!" ("come on, hurry up!"), never making the slightest move to help his wife, immobilized by the archaic dress code imposed on her by him and his fellow men.  

Saudi women are victims of a set of rigid traditions that celebrate a godlike superiority of men and hold women responsible for their mystical honor. It is a society in which women are little more than chattels. Denied many basic human rights, responding time after time to society's demand to reproduce, haunted by the fear of a second wife, spending her time in the emptiness of shopping and tea parties, a woman exists to serve men. During my four years in Saudi Arabia, I watched with feelings of pain and anger how Saudi women live, I talked with them, I wrote about them, and I publicly suffered many of the same indignities that they suffer. Out of these experiences I learned to care deeply for these women, and, as a woman, I developed a deep empathy with them. In no other facet of Saudi culture have the shock waves of modernization struck as strongly as they have for women. And in no other area is the potential fallout from development so difficult to evaluate. On the surface women have reaped enormous benefits from the opening of Saudi Arabia to the outside world. Yet, beyond the new educational opportunities, women themselves appear unwilling to struggle for their stake in the new society. From a Western point of view, women show an alarming obedience to the basic presuppositions of the Saudis' traditional culture. Although there are pockets of resistance, the vast majority of women continue to accept their imprisonment at the hands of men.  

Tradition commands this position of near imprisonment for women because Arab ethics revolve around a single focal point: the personal honor of the man. And the most important factor on which the preservation of a man's vaunted honor depends is the sexual behavior of the women for whom he is responsible, his daughters and his sisters. Responsibility for his wife's sexual behavior resides not with him but with her male relations. Men live in terror that their women will commit a sexual offense. So exacting are the rules that a woman can lose her sexual honor by doing something as seemingly chaste as sitting next to a man on an airplane. And once lost, her sexual honor can never be regained. Beneath this exaggerated apprehension surrounding a woman's honor, in truth, it is the man's honor that is at stake. Sharaf, or the honor of a man in his own eyes and the eyes of his peers, depends almost entirely on the ird, or sexual honor, of the females of his family. It is as if a man's honor is buried in the vaginas of his women, for a woman's violation of her chastity is a violation of the honor of her men. In a kinship culture such as Saudi Arabia, family bonds are so strong that all members - fathers, brothers, cousins - suffer from the dishonorable act of any one of them. Her indiscretion is their dishonor or the men to regain their honor, the offending member of the family must be severed from the group. 

Sensitivity to the ird is so great that an entire way of life has been built around it. Saudi society is structured to keep a woman within strictly defined limits that make it difficult if not impossible for her to lose her sexual virtue. Beginning even before the onset of puberty and continuing until death, a woman is protected by societal arrangements decreed and policed by men. 

The Saudis' preoccupation with female sexual chastity has become an obsession, explaining many of the baffling social practices that con front foreigners in the country. The veil is the most obvious. There are others. A traditional Saudi woman does not go out alone. She speaks to no man other than her husband or blood kin. She seldom leaves her house unless she has the permission of the senior male of the family. She cannot travel outside Saudi Arabia without the written permission of the senior male member of her family. The precisely circumscribed role of each sex is so complete that Saudi society, in important aspects, is defined by the way in which it treats its women. 

Over the centuries, women were physically confined to protect their chastity. Ahdul-Wahhab's old house in Diriyah lays out in mud and stone the conditions in which Saudi women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived. The house is perhaps a little more grand but still typical of the basic design of the home of a well-to-do village dweller. As I crouched through the low doorway that fronts on the dirt street running through the settlement, the temperature instantly cooled by at least twenty degrees as the thick mud walls absorbed the pounding rays of the sun. The bare simplicity of the old receiving room is much as it must have been in the mid 70's, when travelers from the high plateau of the Nejd came to sit at the feet of Mohamed ibn Abdul-Wahhab. The men's area, fronting the street, is a rambling collection of meeting rooms, bedrooms, and storage areas where most of the activity of the house and all of the contact with the outside world occurred. In Abdul Wahhab's time or even in the time of the second Abdul Aziz, I, as a woman, would never have been permitted there. These rooms were reserved for the men's exclusive use. Women were banished to their quarters in the back of the house. 

Built around its own interior courtyard, which allowed the women and children to get some sunlight and air but screened them from the life of the house, were the rooms shared by the women of the house and their female servants. This was the hareem. Hollywood has imprinted on the Western mind an image of the hareem, commonly translated into English as "harem," as a stable of concubines. In truth, the hareem is simply the women's quarters. For the women of Abdul Wahhab, this is where they lived their lives in seclusion. They were not allowed to shop in the souqs or venture out for a walk. As I stood in one of those cramped, windowless bedrooms, looking out into the walled courtyard, a feeling of utter depression washed over me when I thought about any woman who had been confined there. She entered as a bride and, except for the one day a year when her husband allowed her to visit the hareem of another family, left when she died. 

That was the eighteenth century; what about the twentieth century? The basic layout of a family house was still very much the same in the period following World War II. Marianne Alireza is an American who married a member of one of Saudi Arabia's most distinguished families while he was a student in California. She was brought back to the Alirezas' old tabby house in the sleepy backwater seaport of Jeddah in 1948, veiled, and relegated to the hareem as any other Saudi wife. The family's living quarters were upstairs and the offices of the family business were downstairs. I once heard Marianne Alireza describe the wooden bridge with enclosed sides above the courtyard that connected the opposite corners of the house. The bridge's construction enabled the women of the family to pass from one wing of the house to the other without showing themselves to the men working below. When the women wanted to come into the garden, it took a massive organizing effort to remove all the men working there. Once the men were moved out, trusted family servants were posted at the doors as guards to chase away any man who might wander in unaware that the women of the house were present. Even following the oil boom, the Saudis continued to build houses that accommodated the separation of the sexes. The Saudi-style house that I lived in during 1978-79 had a large balcony above the entrance, on which the women of the house, separated from the men, could entertain their friends. A friend of mine lived in a house in al-Khobar that had two front doors and two living rooms, one for men and one for women. 

The purpose of keeping women in seclusion is to protect their chastity and their value. For the worth of a woman in Saudi culture is as breeding stock to increase the size and the strength of her husband's family. Regardless of the education, travel, and career opportunities that came with the oil boom, a woman's life is still largely spent penned up like a valuable mare, her pure bloodlines protected from contamination until it is time for mating with a male who has been chosen by her family.  

Women succumb to their lot largely because of the overpowering hierarchy of sexes in Saudi culture. Society decrees the privileged status of males and the inferior position of females from birth. A man's honor resides not only in the sexual honor of the females of his family but in the number of sons he sires. No Saudi experiences more joy than at the birth of a son, for a son is the supreme statement of a Saudi male's virility. The society's preoccupation with male children is so inbred that the birth of a girl often results in nothing but shame for the mother and anger for the father. A mother can become so upset by the birth of a daughter that she will refuse to see the baby for several days. The father's initial disappointment in a daughter is replaced at puberty by anxiety over whether or not she will violate the moral code, bring disgrace on her father and his entire family. In all relationships between fathers and daughters, both affectionate and distant, looms the unspoken fear that she is a danger to the honor of her father. 

The importance of sons goes back to the days of tribal war. Traditionally, when a girl married she left the house of her family and went to that of her husband's. Her offspring contributed to the strength not of her own group but his. This is why the birth of a son was always greeted with such jubilation. He would grow up to become part of the group and would marry, bringing a wife and more sons to his family. A daughter, on the other hand, was a liability. She consumed scarce food, could not defend the camp, and would eventually leave, taking her precious fertility with her. Over the centuries, it became imperative to a woman's position within her family and for her own self-esteem to bear sons. In some tribes still, a woman is not given a prestigious name until she produces a son. No matter how many girls she might have, she remains known as, for example, Nura bint ("daughter of") Hamid. But on the birth of a son, she becomes Nura umm ("mother of") Abdullah, or simply umm Abdullah, "mother of Abdullah." 

The society's approach to and methods of rearing males and females is so different that there ale no Arabic equivalents for the English words "baby," "infant," or "child." Awalad, or children, for example, is actually the plural of walad, meaning male child. The typical male attitude toward women as primarily sex objects whose destiny is to serve and obey men is instilled early, even before the weaning process begins. For instance, boys are breast-fed much longer than girls, often for as long as two to three years. And all breast-feeding of a boy child is demand feeding. In the hareem, I saw little boys who were old enough to speak in complete sentences walk up to their mothers and demand to be breast-fed. Within seconds, the child was gathered up in his mother's arms, where he blissfully lay stroking her breast as he nursed. From the Saudi women I knew, I suspected that rather than feeling victimized by her child the mother received great satisfaction from this long nursing period. Through nursing, a woman can fulfill the culture's demand that she give intensive pampering to her sons, and at the same time she can enjoy prolonged intimacy with a male, something she does not have with her husband nor will she have with her child beyond the age of about four. 

The pampering of a male child is not solely the preserve of the mother. All of the women in the hareem participate. It is common practice for the women of the hareem to pacify baby boys by fondling their genitals. As with breast-feeding, this continues so long that the child carries into adult life memories of women stroking his penis. A Saudi boy comes to believe very early in childhood that women are there to provide for his pleasure. As a result, "The association of the mother, and women in general, with erotic pleasure is something that Arab male infants experience and that predisposes them to accept the stereotype of the woman as primarily a sexual object and a creature who cannot resist sexual temptation." * 

*Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p.32.

Girls, unlike boys, are weaned by the time they are one to two years old. Within a few months of weaning, a female begins to internalize her role as a woman: a subordinate with little personal worth and subservient to the whims and desires of the men who will dominate her life. So ingrained is this attitude that by the age of four or five a girl requires little discipline compared to a boy and by eight or nine is already taking on the role of mother. In the hareem, it was fascinating to watch the little girls of all social classes compete with each other over the care of a young male child. Both the upper-class girls, dressed in lacy frocks, gold earrings through their pierced ears, and a hint of make-up on their faces, and the Bedouin girls, who wore dirty dresses of velveteen or polyester, behaved the same toward young boys. Each would pursue toddling little boys to caress them, brush their hair, or play with them, all the while looking over her shoulder toward the adults for nods of approval. 

Ironically, even though girls experience a far less nurturing relation ship with their mothers, growing up for girls is probably less traumatic than it is for boys. No matter how a girl is treated, she experiences a certain security from always staying in the woman's world. Boys, on the other hand, are forced to make the painful transition from the hovering, adoring world of their mothers to the demanding world of their fathers. They are two worlds that stand in stark contrast. In his mother's world, a boy is constantly catered to, humored, and generally kept happy by women both younger and older than he. In his father's world, which he enters permanently by the age of seven, he must conform to the hierarchy of males determined by the rule of seniority. This rigid social order is dominated by older men with younger men ranked by age working their way up the ladder, while lagging behind, forbidden to put a foot on even the bottom rung, are all women, regardless of age or position. A boy learns quickly to live up to his father's expectations, to pattern his life to his wishes, and to obey his commands. The male personality that eventually emerges reflects the strictly ordered society of the man's world in which it developed. 

Women survive by totally placing themselves in the hands of men. It is in this basic relationship of master and servant that a woman 5 physical needs are met. Emotionally she draws her strength from other women, from her place in the family, from her image of herself as a prized possession, and, after marriage, from her role as a mother. Restlessness is repressed. Obedience is security. 

The man's absolute authority over the women in his family is main tamed through fear - the fear of physical brutality, the fear of economic insecurity, and, above all, the fear of being alone, severed from the security of the family Girls are brought up to fear their fathers. When they marry, they fear their husbands. If they are widowed or divorced, they fear their brothers, brothers-in-law, or sons. There is always a man to fear and the fear is real. I once sat in the women's quarters of a modest house of a traditional family near Khurays, half- way between Riyadh and Dammam, nervously fingering the camera that I always carried with me. The presence of cameras around Saudis is always touchy, for few Saudis will ever permit their picture to be taken. * With great trepidation, I asked my host if I could take pictures of his family. He said I could photograph the children but not the women. With that injunction, the men left the hareem and I was left alone with the women and children. Putting aside my 35-mm Olympus, I propped a Polaroid camera on my lap while I studied the light and decided how to pose the children. The women stood at the door, looking out at the retreating men. When they were safely out of sight, the women with childlike exuberance repeatedly pointed at the Polaroid and then at themselves. Perplexed, I told them that the men had said no. Like giggling schoolgirls, the women posted the mother of four as a lookout to warn of the approach of the men. The others threw back their veils, merrily posed, and gestured to me to take their pictures. As each print came out of the camera, the subject snatched it and quickly stuffed it into the bodice of her dress. The Polaroid film I was rapidly exhausted, forcing me to switch to 35-mm film. No one understood why no more pictures were appearing. When I explained that the remaining pictures would be dispatched to them as soon as they were developed, looks of what can only be described as terror crossed their faces. Fortunately, an Iraqi friend was with me who could translate the rapid and, to me, garbled conversation. After several minutes, she said that the women told her that under no circumstances was I to send back any pictures of them. They wanted the pictures of the children but if any woman appeared, even in the background, of any one of them, I was to throw it away. Increasingly puzzled, I asked why. My translator lowered her head and quietly said that if the men found out about the women's disobedience, they would be beaten. * 

 *For many years, Wahhabis believed that photographs violated Mohammed's injunction against the artistic representation of the human figure. It was not until Abdul Aziz began to allow himself to be photographed that the most religious among the Wahhabis became less fearful that the camera would capture their souls. Today a Saudi's refusal to have his picture taken has more to do with his honor than his soul. The camera summons forth great apprehension about looking foolish or appearing as an object of ridicule to a westerner. women are seldom photographed by anyone outside the family and then. with some exceptions in the western Province, never without their veils. 

The repressive superiority of men and the servile inferiority of women is so impressed into the subconscious of both males and females that it exerts a profound influence on the overall social order. It is from the typical child-rearing practices combined with the highly structured social order that a girl enters adulthood with an image of herself as little more than a sex object, dependent on the whims and at the mercy of the men in her life. Consequently, women see themselves primarily as erotic objects to be pursued. This perception of themselves is rein forced by the hareem environment, where the various attentions of women cause little boys to develop a wholly erotic attitude toward females. After these heavy doses of sexuality, both males and females are then burdened with the sanctity of female chastity and the threat it poses to male honor. In an attempt to protect families from dishonor, parents and other authority figures ingrain in the Saudi child the concept of the sinfulness of sex, and the repressive atmosphere of the society as a whole constantly reinforces the idea. Out of these primitive attitudes about sex and sexuality, males and females emerge with their whole approach to life rooted in a warped outlook on sex and on each other. The woman's image of herself as an erotic object to be pursued, combined with the male's fantasy that all women are sex- craved creatures, results in a society obsessed with sex. Sex is such a taboo that it is, ironically, the prime preoccupation of the culture. As a result, the air is charged with a sexual tension that engulfs all women, Saudi and Western. Underlying even the most casual encounter between a Saudi man and woman is the assumption of intense and uncontrollable sexuality. Most Saudis actually fear that any man and woman of suitable ages will be irresistibly driven to having sexual intercourse even if they have never seen each other before and regardless of the consequences. 

Yet the responsibility for a dishonorable sexual act is hung around the neck of women. In the Saudi mind, the sexual drives of women can only be controlled, and their fathers, therefore, protected from dishonor, by a strict code of conduct that prevents both women and men from being exposed to erotic temptation. An intricate system of restrictions has been devised to protect society from indiscretions resulting from the threatening sexuality of women. The sexuality of the male is seldom discussed expressly, for the strong sex drive of men is socially acceptable. Instead, society decrees that women are to be policed to protect their chastity from their own sexual urges, and relieves men of the responsibility for the violation of a woman's ird. 

* The prevalence of physical abuse varies widely according to social class. see Chapter 8. 

The paradox is that in policing the freedom of women in their families, men impose an enormously heavy burden on themselves. They are victimized by their own system. As an example, women are for bidden to drive, as a way of controlling their movements. This throws the problem of logistics on the men. Men commonly do the grocery shopping. They frequently find themselves accompanying their wives, sisters, or daughters to the souqs or the boutiques. The man of the family must do most of the errands and take care of all of the family business. These are inconveniences. But it is the psychic energy that is expended to uphold tradition and to protect a man's image among his peers that so drains the energies of Saudi men. I once wrote a story about the strict prohibition on women driving in Saudi Arabia that gives perhaps more insight into the weight of tradition and male anxiety about the behavior of women than it says about the issue of driving a car. In response to male concerns, King Saud issued a royal decree in 1957 that banned women from driving. Nonetheless, women drivers are not illegal in the strict sense of the term. The operation of a motor vehicle is not included in the sharia, the Islamic body of law. It is tradition, a far greater force than the rules of kings, that prevents women from driving. The comments of the men I interviewed for the story would be comical were it not for the underlying tragedy of Saudi society. All freely admitted that there is nothing in religious law prohibiting women from driving. But all defended the ban, on the hallowed grounds of tradition. One of those interviewed was a Moslem scholar who resides in Mecca. "To say that for the woman to drive a car is forbidden [in the sharia] there is no evidence." And then he went on to say, "For a woman to drive in the present social circumstances in the kingdom, I will not advise it nor will I take the responsibility to do so." Captain Ohali al-Badr, the head of the Jeddah Traffic Bureau, confirmed that nothing in the legal code prevented municipalities from issuing a driver's license to a woman. But he was careful to point out numerous "practical" obstacles to women drivers. "Suppose she has parts of the female anatomy emerged that are aurat, things that cannot be shown. A woman's hair but not her face is aurat. Traditional Moslem women, especially in the Middle East, bind their heads in an array of scarves or knitted head wraps that conceal every wisp of hair. Even in Saudi Arabia, covered hair, not the veil, is the universal standard. But it is the veil that has stamped its imprint on a whole culture. 

The origin of the veil in Saudi Arabia is unknown. Face veiling in the Middle East is recorded as far back as the Assyrians (1500 B.C.), followed by a brief revival about the time of the Crusades. The most accepted theory about the specific veiling practices in Saudi Arabia is that when the eastern coastal areas were under Turkish control, women of high social standing wore veils, probably to protect their complex ions against the brutality of the desert sun. The desire for status - an overpowering emotional need among Arabs - decreed, therefore, that every woman wear a veil so everyone could lay claim to being upper class. Another theory is that when Bedouin tribes made war on each other and raided the livestock of the rival tribe, the women were veiled so that the beautiful ones would not be carried off with the goats. Others say Bedouin women were such fierce fighters in these raids that, by a code of desert chivalry, women were veiled as a form of identity and kept out of battle so the intrepid men were spared the risk of fighting them. 

Regardless of the veil's origins, today few Saudi women are allowed by their men outside the house without a veil. The rule applies to women in all social classes, from those sharing the back of a pickup truck with shaggy sheep to those stepping from limousines at chic boutiques. In public, women lose all personality and individuality to be- come so many black blobs gliding down the street. Each is covered in black, her face masked behind impenetrable black gauze. In the eyes of a Westerner, the veil is starkly symbolic of woman's subservience to man in all areas of Saudi life. It sets the tone of a woman's confinement and states her total dependence on the male members of her family, who regulate her ability to function as a member of society. 

To further protect the female's ird, Saudi society has devised an elaborate system of sexual segregation. By the age of seven, boys spend their time in the man's world, girls in the woman's world. All public facilities are segregated. There are boys schools and girls schools, men's waiting rooms and women's waiting rooms, a women's door and a men's door to the respective sections on public buses, with a steel wall separating the two. In Riyadh's Baatha gold souqs, some shops are reserved for women customers only, some for men, and others for "families." Christian Dior on Nassiriah Street has a men's department and a women's department, each with its own door and divided by an impenetrable wall. Even as a Western woman, I always had to be aware of my place. When I arrived in Riyadh, the Intercontinental Hotel had the only restaurant in the city that would serve women. Although other eating establishments gradually opened up (only to be closed periodically by the matawain), the underlying message to women was always there: Your presence is a danger to men. The few Western- style fast food places that began to creep into the coastal areas in the late 1970's tried to accommodate women by walling off a section of the dining area for their use. In the coastal cities, going to the Dairy Queen with a group of women was one of my few forms of entertainment. Because we were not allowed to stand in line with the men, our food was handed to us from the side of the counter, and then balancing hamburgers, Pepsis, and french fries, we parted the heavy drapes hung over the doorway and disappeared into the women's section to eat. I learned to accept these indignities with a certain equanimity. But periodically I went into a rage. I stumbled onto a Jeddah pizza parlor that had posted a sign outside saying, "Ladies are requested not to come inside this restaurant. If you want to order, wait outside and we will serve you. This system of strict sexual segregation and the Saudis' desire for modernization are in constant conflict. Early in the oil boom, it became apparent that women as well as men were acquiring great wealth and property. Under the law of the sharia, a woman has the right to inherit property as well as retain as personal property the dowry she receives when she is married.* But a woman was immobilized in the management of her assets by her inability, among other things, to enter a bank. A tenuous truce between tradition and progress was struck when the first women's banks were opened in 1980 by the al-Rajhi Establishment for Currency Exchange, in a flurry of publicity about the forging of modernization within the sanctity of religion. A few months after the women's banks opened in Riyadh, I rode in the women's section of the public bus to the National Commercial Bank on Nassiriah Street. 

* A woman does not share in her husband's property except through the legally stated share she can inherit. "Do not give the feeble-minded the property with which Allah has entrusted you for their support; but maintain and clothe them with its proceeds...." Sura 4:2. 

I found its women's bank tucked behind and to the side of the parent company. As I rounded the corner, a uniformed policeman standing with a Saudi in a traditional thobe curiously watched while I crossed the open courtyard that separated the bank from the street. When I reached the building and opened the heavy glass outer door, I was immediately confronted by the guard stationed in the small foyer for the purpose of repelling any man who might come on the premises. Silently he nodded for me to pass. I followed two black-clad women through an archway draped with heavy damask into the main part of the bank. Just beyond the drape, hanging like shrouds from a chrome hall tree, were the symbols of women in Saudi Arabia: black veils and abaayas. Except for the tightly closed and darkly curtained windows that protect the women from the view of men and the all-female composition of the staff, it looked like any other bank. 

At the time that the women's banks were founded, voices of doom rumbled over the kingdom. An unnamed bank official said women's banks would "have dangerous repercussions on society and women themselves, for they would be departing a realm where they find natural safety." * But by 1983, the regional manager of the western zone for the al-Rajhi Establishment was one of many who touted the progressive nature of the idea. "It's the Arabian custom that women don't go in public places where men are. This is the Islamic religion. The second thing is that women who are divorced or widowed and have their own wealth should not have to hire someone to run their businesses. With us, they can look after it themselves." ** The al-Rajhi Establishment, like the banks, goes to extraordinary lengths to maintain the all-female character of its women's bank. A woman audits the female branches and the guards at the door are married to women working inside, so that papers delivered to the bank can be passed from man to wife and then on to the branch manager. As one bank official said, "We take great care in these things."  

Most officials of the banks with facilities for women agree that many of their customers are attracted to their banks because they do not want their husbands to know how much money they actually have. All of the banks that offer services to women say that most of their customers' accounts are kept in savings. In the women's bank of the Saudi-British Bank in Jeddah, an average of 8o percent of deposits are in savings.

*Saudi Gazette, April 28, 1980. 
**Quoted in Jane Alford [Sandra Mackey]. "Saudi Banks Experiment with Branches for women," Atlanta Constitution, November 6, 1983.

The primary reason is that women have little use for checking accounts since many shops and businesses will not accept a check from a woman. Businessmen who do accept checks from women often have difficulty in cashing them. One jeweler took as payment from a princess a check on the women's branch of his own bank. His bank refused to cash it. When he took it to the women's bank, he was refused admittance. Finally that ever-present guard took the check and passed it to his wife inside, who cashed it and passed the money back to her husband, who in turn gave it to the merchant. Most of the banks will not make personal loans to women, although they do make rare loans for entrepreneurial enterprises. And in spite of the rosy forecasts that greeted the establishment of women's banks, they have not proved profitable. Even the ones that ale showing a profit admit that it is small. Most of the branches are regarded as "customer service" and have been written off as revenue producers by their parent companies. The profit problem appears to lie with the women themselves. It seems that Saudi women are hesitant about breaking out of their traditional role and still depend on men to do their banking for them. One official of the Saudi-Cairo Bank said, "It is amazing. We are doing all these things to facilitate things for them, but many still prefer to do things the traditional way and have more faith in the men's banks."  

The reluctance of women to experiment with the few opportunities afforded to them is not surprising. Although on the surface it appears that Saudi women have made significant strides since the oil boom began, many of these are superficial. Education, banking, access to public transportation, and job opportunities are still rooted in strong traditional values. Women as well as men largely uphold sexual segregation. The severe shortage of women teachers for female students at the university level, for instance, has forced modern innovation to uphold ancient social practices. The universities do, at times, use men teachers for women's classes, but all such instruction is done via closed circuit television so that the teacher and the students never meet face to face. The King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah uses a microwave system of communications, which it considers an "improved media tool for the girl students, who cannot be taught by male professors in the normal face-to-face classroom method." * 

*Arab News, December12, 1982

The long-standing prohibition against women working in Saudi Arabia has its roots in the strict segregation of the sexes Under Saudi law, women may work only in capacities in which they can serve women exclusively - as doctors or paramedics, teachers, or in a few other special situations where there is no physical contact with men. There are currently approximately fifteen thousand women working in government jobs in highly restricted areas One of the privileged few is a woman named Jameela. I met her at one of the endless women's teas that are a constant of Saudi social life. She is tall, with striking good looks still gracing her in middle age, highly intelligent, and commands a great presence. She is employed by the government as the supervisor of six female secondary schools in one of the kingdom's major cities. In describing her job, she told me that she visits schools under her jurisdiction to ensure that the government's education policy is being carried out and to solve problems. It is a middle management job and is hers, rather than a man's, because as a female she can enter the girls schools. With a heavy sigh, she said she has risen as high as she can go in her career. The next step would put her into a policymaking role in the overall educational system, which would require that she work with men. Reflecting the general level of frustration of the minuscule cadre of career women, she spoke with indignation about the absurdity of her situation. In conducting any business with her superiors (all men) she must either write a letter or speak to them over the telephone. A personal conference between the two can never take place, and her superior can never go into the schools under his authority because in doing so he would step across the sacred line of male-female exclusiveness.  

Theoretically, a woman in present-day Saudi Arabia can hold any job in which she does not come into contact with men. The Ministry of Planning under Hisham Nazer, one of the few Saudis in government who favors using women in the work force, has prepared for women employees. A whole section of the ministry building has been set aside for females, properly separated from the areas used by men. It now waits for authorization from the ruling hierarchy to put women to work. 

Even if the House of Saud wanted to significantly alter the position of women, it is almost powerless to do so. In the Saudi political sys tem, public policy is, like women, hamstrung by tradition. And tradition all but shuts women out of the economic and political system. Traditionalists claim that they oppose women in business and politics not so much because of women's perceived abilities or inabilities but because they could not retain their chastity. The Majlis, or audience with the king, the major avenue for the ordinary Saudi to take his grievances to the ruler, is closed to women because the king is a man. Traditionalists argue that women could never be allowed to vote be- cause they would have to mix with men in the polling places. It is a flimsy argument that covers the basic attitude of men toward women. Always returning to the Koran to back up his assumptions, a traditionalist quotes Mohammed: "In truth, the woman, because of her femininity is tempted to abandon the path of reason and measure." * 

While the government of Saudi Arabia proudly proclaims to the world that in a few short years it has moved from its medieval past into the modern world, events continue to confirm that the kingdom is still inextricably tied to its tribal origins. 

Always alert to a good story, I was intrigued by rumors circulating around the hospital about a mother and a new baby who were being kept under guard by the hospital's security department. Making the rounds of my contacts, I soon learned that no one knew or was willing to tell me anything of substance. It was not until a year later, when I was able to surreptitiously obtain a copy of the security department's records, that I knew the whole tragic story. 

A twenty-year-old unmarried Saudi woman, accompanied by her mother and a male relative, appeared at the hospital's emergency room complaining of severe abdominal pain. Her mother told the doctor that her daughter had been suffering from a stomach tumor for several months. As soon as the girl was examined, she was rushed to the delivery room, where she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. When her mother and the male relative, assumed to be her brother, were told that the girl had delivered a baby, they were outraged and demanded that the medical staff kill both mother and baby with lethal injections of drugs. Totally perplexed, the medical staff called into the melee a Western-educated Saudi woman who was a social worker at the hospital. Intervening on behalf of the patient, she persuaded doctors to tell the family that a "mistake" had been made. The child actually had been delivered by another woman while the daughter was in the operating room having the troublesome tumor removed. Seemingly calmed by the new information, the family left and the medical records were clamped under tight security. 

*patai, The Arab Mind, p.127.

But the episode was far from over. The mother and her son, now strengthened by several other family members, returned. Among them was a man who had at one time been a medical resident at the hospital Re had gained access to the guarded records and reported to the family that the girl had, indeed, had a baby. New threats of death against the mother and child erupted, making it necessary to place hospital guards around the clock at the mother's room and the nursery. During the following days, various law enforcement agencies and government officials were dragged into the case. The office of the governor of Riyadh conducted an investigation and, it is assumed, would have liked to have quietly whisked the mother and child out of the country before the story found its way into the Western press, tarnishing the government's progressive image. But by this time the local police were involved at the insistence of the family. Unable to intervene in family issues, the government hierarchy allowed the wheels of tribal justice to grind on. Five days after the baby was born, the hospital surrendered the mother and child to the local police. The police, in turn, handed them over to the waiting family, which took them home where its own justice would be dispensed.  

The punishment for fornication is the same as for adultery: death. Both are acts of sexual dishonor that reflect on the honor of the female's family. In the case of adultery, the female's family is much more damaged than her husband because it is her male relatives and not her husband who are responsible for her behavior and her dishonor. Therefore, it becomes their duty, not her husband's, to punish the adulterous woman. The mores of society simply do not force the wronged husband to carry around the shame that falls on the adulteress's family. For in the eyes of society, the wronged husband's honor has not suffered in the same sense as the honor of the woman's family. Her family has been shamed; her husband has only been smudged. He escapes the burden of shame because society considers it demeaning for him to admit that a wife's frailty could move him to any emotion warmer than contempt. If he does demand blood revenge from his wife's sexual partner, it is because his property rights in her exclusive sexual services have suffered irreparable damage. A traditional Saudi will likely kill his wife's lover, and the culture and the law will exonerate him.  

The purpose of punishment for adultery by the woman's family members, like so much else in the culture, is to maintain group cohesion. In the patrilineal family structure of Saudi Arabia, the patriarch of the group jealously guards his control over the life of its members.

This right is not abdicated when a daughter marries. If the wronged husband were allowed to punish her adultery, the woman's family would, in essence, surrender control over one of its members to an outsider, weakening the control that the patriarch exerts over the rest of its members. In the Western view, a person can neither legally nor morally be held responsible for the acts of another. But in societies where kinship is as important as it is in Saudi Arabia, all family members suffer from the dishonorable act of any one of them. Killing daughters who have disgraced the family is known as u4, traditional local law. While Islamic law protects society from the sin of adultery, it is tribal law that restores the honor of the family. 

The most celebrated case of the patriarch avenging the family honor was the July '977 public executions of Princess Mishaal bint Fahd bin Mohammed and her lover Khalid Muhallal. The incident was graphically dramatized in the television docudrama Death of a Princess, which became a cause celebre and dealt the House of Saud's carefully cultivated progressive image a severe blow. The princess was a great-niece of King Khalid and Muhallal was the nephew of General Ali Shaer, the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon. Few of the facts have been con firmed, and so the episode continues to whirl in contradictions. Apparently, the princess was married and the mother of a small child. Muhallal is believed to have been a student at the University of Riyadh. Unable to marry, the pair is purported to have fled from Riyadh to Jeddah, where they spent several days at a seaside hotel and then at tempted to flee the country with the princess disguised as a man. Apprehended at the airport, Princess Mishaal was returned to her family. The head of that family was Prince Mohammed, older brother of King Khalid, who had renounced the succession in 1965. Mohammed was an arch traditionalist and a real power within the inner circle of the senior princes. As the king's senior brother and a man known for his temper and strength of personality, he possessed enormous political power within the royal family. For Mishaal's adultery, Mohammed insisted on his right to sever this offending member from his family for the shame she had brought on his house. To set an example to other women in the family who might be tempted into similar deviate behavior, Mohammed demanded a public execution. Horrified at the prospect of the foreign publicity that might result from such an action, Khalid refused and pushed for the executions to be carried out behind a palace wall, far from the public eyes. But the king was unable to resist the demands of his brother entirely. The punishments were finally carried out in a Jeddali parking lot instead of the public square and on Saturday rather than Friday, the official day for public executions. No public announcement was made following the deaths, as in state executions, and no identification of the victims was made. The whole episode might well have quietly joined the league of legends that surround the royal family if a British expatriate with a nose for money to be made in the expose' press had not happened along with a small camera concealed in a cigarette pack. As he took pictures, Princess Mishaal was shot six times in the head, while her lover was be- headed with five hacking blows to the neck, probably performed by the princess's husband or a member of her family rather than by a public executioner.  

When British television aired the infamous Death of a Princess, the government of Saudi Arabia went on the offensive. I read story after story in the Saudi press that claimed the whole episode was an attack on Islam, the usual argument when something detrimental to the Saudis' image hits the foreign press. To demonstrate Saudi Arabia's displeasure with the British for allowing the program to air, the government asked the British ambassador, James Craig, to leave the kingdom on April 23, and he was not allowed to return until August 26. Various recriminations were meted out to British expatriates in Saudi Arabia. These ranged from the loss of contracts to the segregation of British citizens from the other passengers on incoming London flights. The British passengers were then forced to wait until everyone else had cleared customs before they were allowed to proceed. A deluge of anger and verbal abuse descended on all Westerners, who took it in stride while desperately trying to smuggle videotapes of the movie into the country. The government's ongoing public argument with the foreign press was that the punishment for adultery is clearly stated in the sharia and, therefore, the charge that the due process of law was not carried out in the case of the princess and her lover was unfounded. The point missed by the critics was that there was no need for a trial. It was tribal law and not religious law that had been invoked. Under tribal custom, Prince Mohammed as the senior member of his family had every right to kill any woman in the family who violated her third in order to restore the honor of the family. The executions were a matter of his honor, not a matter of the sharia courts.