The secret behind the veil: Saudi women find solace in ‘safe love’

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From The Sunday Times
October 18, 2009

The secret behind the veil: Saudi women find solace in ‘safe love’

http://networkedblogs.com/p15909708

Caught in a rigid society that stifles affection even within marriage, women in the kingdom are turning to lesbianism

Robert Lacey

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6879290.ece

In theory, Saudi Arabia should not exist — its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man and running their oil-rich country on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops are closed for prayer five times a day, executions take place in the street — and once we get started on the status of women . . .

Mashael (not her real name) got married when she was 18. “I’d been seeing my husband secretly for about a year and a half,” she remembers. “His sister was a good friend of mine, and she helped us get together away from the world. We spent hours on the phone. I was crazy about him. I forced my family to agree. It was so romantic.”

But the romance melted within months of the couple getting married.

“I could not believe how quickly it happened. After the second day, I thought, ‘This man is weird.’ He was so incredibly possessive. I was no longer my own person. He expected me to build every detail of my life around him while he kept the right to do whatever he liked. He told me what to wear, how he wanted me to cut my hair — even what I should think and feel. That was his right. I was his new piece of property.”

The world is full of possessive and domineering husbands, but in Saudi Arabia the law actually enshrines the principle that the male knows better than the female. A woman may not enrol in university, open a bank account, get a job, or travel outside the country without the written permission of a mahram (guardian), who must be a male blood relative — her father, grandfather, brother, husband or, in the case of a widow or separated woman, her adult son.
“I had to agree completely with his opinions, what he felt about our family and friends. If I disagreed, he’d fly into a temper, use ugly words and threaten me. I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I wanted to go back to my family, but my pride would not let me. I knew that they would blame me.”

Mashael had been unwilling to accept the ancient tradition of family-arranged marriage, with its modest, not to say pessimistic, expectations of personal happiness. Like a growing number of young Saudis, she had been tempted by the western fantasy of fulfilment through “love”, which Saudi TV and popular culture promote today as enthusiastically as any Hollywood movie. But Saudi taboos rule out the rituals of courtship and sexual experimentation by which young westerners have the chance to make their mistakes and move on. Open dating, let alone living together, is unthinkable in a society ruled by traditions that judge families by their ability to keep their daughters virginal.

“My husband and I simply did not know each other,” says Mashael, today a stylish woman in her late thirties, whose long black hair tumbles over the black silk of her abaya, an outer garment. “I’m not blaming anyone but myself. We married too young.”

Having fallen victim to a common Saudi problem, she adopted what turns out to be a common Saudi solution. “I found love with a woman. Before I was married, I never knew that a relationship between woman and woman could happen. I did not dream it was possible. Then I went to university, and I had my first love affair with a woman. It was soft. It was warm. It was like a painkiller.”

Lesbianism is not hard to find on Saudi female campuses, according to numerous Saudi and western women, with crushes and cliques and superclose friendships. These relationships may not always be sexual, but they are marked by the heightened emotions described by Jane Austen and other chroniclers of early 19th-century England, where the industrial revolution was creating the world’s first “modern” society, bringing new concepts of “romance” and individual choice into conflict with traditional family rules and rigidities.

“I was looking for consolation,” says Mashael, “and I found it. I entered those groups. To start with, you are curious, then you go with the flow. It is around you everywhere. A girl strokes your hand and you know she’s trying to seduce you, but, in a way, you want to be seduced. You think, ‘Why not?’ Sex life is a disaster between Saudi men and women, and everyone knows the men play around. The level of betrayal is extraordinarily high. So after a time you think, ‘Why not with another woman?’ It is a great way to have revenge.”

And also a safe way. “In this society, you are mad if you have an affair with a man. With a woman it is safe. No one can question why you spend an evening at home together. You can go shopping or go out to eat with a woman. You can have a conversation. You can have friendship. You are two individuals with your own rights and personalities. You are not an object, the mere possession of someone else.

“There does not have to be sex every time. You can just hug each other or touch. And when there is sex, it is more romantic and slow. Even the kiss is different between woman and woman. It is more gentle. You are trying to give each other pleasure, not just take it, and you are sharing your feelings. You can be open together about your troubles and your problems. The love is generous. You can give each other quality time — because in Saudi Arabia a man spends very little time with his wife. It is in that separation that lies the pain.”

Lesbian or not, many Saudi women spend immeasurably more time with other women — and their children — than they do with their husbands. Men routinely head out in the evening to dine, drink coffee, gossip, talk politics and generally while away the time in masculine pastimes, much as Edwardian gentlemen did in their clubs. Even if he does not have much more than TV-watching on the agenda, the husband will go out to view, and usually eat, in the male section of a friend’s house, while the womenfolk gather in their own quarters — both sexes being catered for, even in quite lowly homes, by the ubiquitous Asian menservants, cooks and maids.

“At the end of the evening,” says one Saudi woman, “the husband will come home with one expectation. He’s been chatting all night. It’s not more conversation that he wants.”
This segregated lifestyle is the rule in the royal family, so there is lesbianism inside the palaces as everywhere else.

“I’d hate to be a princess,” says a woman who has royal friends, “because it is not easy for them to marry outside the family. Nowadays, many of them are well educated and they do not want to marry any self-indulgent idiot prince. Some were previously married briefly. So behind those walls there are a lot of clever, pretty women in their thirties who are single with no prospect of a man.”

Tribes control their identity by controlling their womenfolk, and that is certainly the case with the kingdom’s top tribe of all. Rare is the princess who is able to marry a Saudi non-royal, and should she wish to marry a foreigner, according to a Riyadh joke, she must be over 40, physically disabled or the holder of a PhD — preferably all three at once. Maybe it is not a joke, for there are an increasing number of royal women taking further education, and who like to be addressed as “Princess Doctor”.

“The elite wear masks in this country,” says Mashael. “They pretend they don’t feel the pain, that empty-inside feeling of dissatisfaction with their life. Men and women are conditioned in this society to live separate lives, so they go on living separately. It’s not questioned.

“If you’re a woman and you want the happiness that goes with being part of a couple, you have to get that, in my experience, from another woman. And because you both want each other to be happy, that can help with your marriage. Often my girlfriend would give me advice to help me make things better with my husband. When things were difficult at home, I would give her a phone call just for two or three minutes and I would feel recharged.”

Still married to the same husband, with several children and another child on the way, Mashael, like a growing number of middle-class Saudi women, now runs a successful small business. She does not consider herself a lesbian.

“In another society, I would never have gone with a woman. I would never have thought of it, or been offered it. And I would certainly never want to live with a woman. I know that is not the solution. I have a 60% good marriage. Today I get my strength from my work, my kids and, above all, from myself — not from the necessity of having another woman. At the end of the day, there’s the same pain.”

She lists the qualities she has derived from her intimate friendships with women: “Tenderness. Sharing. Trust. Honesty. Support. Strong and clean emotions. Respect — above all, respect. If you want those good things in your life in Saudi Arabia, you can only get them from a woman. You will seldom get them from a Saudi man, at least not from any Saudi man that I have met — especially not respect. There are very few Saudi men who treat their women as truly equal partners in life — not in their hearts.”

Mashael believes the problem lies in the overwrought, convention-obsessed atmosphere of the kingdom itself, with its emphasis on appearances and “face”.

“It’s amazing,” she says, “how my husband becomes a different man when we go on holiday and can escape from this country — even to Bahrain. We start to do things as a couple. We go shopping together. We play together in the swimming pool. The children become closer to us. The whole family benefits. I’m without my black [clothes], he’s without his headdress. It’s as if, by taking off our Saudi costumes, we’ve become ordinary human beings, not putting on an act, just natural and warm. He says he can feel my warmth.

“Then we bump into some friends from home, and he freezes. Once, we were walking together in the street somewhere abroad, and we saw some Saudis coming from the other way. He just walked off in another direction, as if he was nothing to do with me.”

In 2009, it has to be said, it is possible to see young Saudi couples, presumably married, walking hand in hand in shopping malls — with the woman, usually, covered totally by a veil. But such public expressions of affection remain the exception, and traditionalists see nothing wrong with that. Social conservatism is the glue that is holding the kingdom together, in their view, while more laid-back Arab societies have fallen apart.

“Look at our neighbours in the Middle East,” says one traditional Saudi. “Look at the Lebanese. They are considered to be the sophisticates, the ‘Europeans’ of the area, so clever and free and easy, compared with us, the old-fashioned, conventional tribal stick-in-the-muds. They drink wine and hold hands. But look at the mess that the Lebanese have made of their government. They have great cooking and lousy politics — with militia carrying weapons in the streets. What’s wrong with a bit of oldfashioned tribal toughness and deference to those in authority, saying your prayers and sticking to the rules?”

The rules, however, can lead to tragedy. On March 11, 2002, a fire broke out at a girls’ school in Mecca, and as the flames spread, the girls and their teachers started running for the street. The girls were dressed in their school uniforms, but in their haste they did not have time to collect their abayas.

Guarding the entrance to the school were some bushybearded members of the religious police, who were not prepared to let them out unless they were wearing their abayas and veils. The long skirts and long sleeves of the girls’ school uniforms were modest by most people’s standards, but that was not good enough for the male guardians of their morality.
They kept the doors barred and, according to eyewitnesses, three of the “holy ones” actually beat some of the girls who tried to force their way to safety. Trapped inside the burning building, 15 girls died and more than 50 others were injured.

Dr Khaled Bahaziq, a childhood friend of Osama Bin Laden and veteran of the jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan, is trying to change the male Saudi mindset.

His experiences in Afghanistan led him to think about “how people could learn to live together in harmony — and man-woman relations are the basis of that”.

Khaled, a university lecturer, started to volunteer for an Islamic charity, attending the domestic law courts to offer support to the victims of divorce and custody cases — who were invariably women.

“I used to cry as I watched some of those cases. Many women had asked their husbands for their rights, and had been given a violent answer. They had been battered. One woman had lost her sight in one eye. But the courts gave no redress. So far as I could see, everything in the legal process, and especially the prejudice of the male judges, favoured the man.”

Looking in Islam, Khaled could find no justification for this. “Nowhere in the Koran does it say that the woman must serve the man. If anything, it is the other way round. That is how the Prophet acted. It is famous that he did all the work for his wives.”

Feeling certain that he was dealing with a social, not a religious, problem, the former mujahid became a marriage counsellor and was offered a weekly show on a cable channel. His earnest advice that men should behave more gently and sweetly towards their wives turned out to be a hit.

If you switch on the television just before iftar, the breaking of the fast, you can catch a special Ramadan version of his programme Yalla Saadah — Let’s Go for Happiness.

“Since the men won’t come to my therapy sessions,” he says, “I am taking the message to them. I hope that just a few of them will listen — though I fear that it will only be just a few. Women will be driving cars in this country, I believe, long before their men start to change — and it will be from that sort of practical change, inshallah, that some sort of mental change may follow.”

The ban on women drivers is a deeply symbolic issue in Saudi Arabia. In 1990, when the

American military presence during the Gulf war was shaking up social attitudes in Saudi Arabia, a group of activist women enraged the religious conservatives by staging a mass drive-in around the streets of Riyadh. Nearly two decades on, the ban continues — although, according to popular rumour, King Abdullah is perennially preparing to lift it.

The king has been gradually introducing political and social reforms since ascending the throne in 2005. Two years ago he intervened in the scandal of the “Quatif girl”, the victim of a gang rape. Her evidence was used against her to bring a charge of adultery and a sentence of 200 lashes. The king pardoned her and set up an inquiry into what he called “the dark tunnel of iniquity” surrounding the rapists, their connections to the local police and the faulty response of the judicial system.

The inquiry has still to report. There is only so much a reforming monarch can accomplish in a country of entrenched habits, but he keeps on trying.

One outspoken writer and thinker was worried to be summoned to the royal presence after he wrote an article that criticised the slow pace of reform. There were too many obstacles to modernisation, he complained — lazy bureaucrats, wasta (elite influence, meaning royal and business corruption) and also the religious establishment: the sheikhs were getting in the way.

“A good article,” Abdullah informed him approvingly. “You should write more like that.”

“Thank you, tal omrak [may your life be long],” replied the writer, relieved not to be bawled out.

“But I have to tell you that I am getting very seriously threatened for what I have said.”
He had received dozens of hostile and even murderous text messages on his mobile phone in the 48 hours since his article had appeared.

“I am happy to write more articles like that,” he said hesitantly. “But if I write them, who will give me protection?”

There was a moment’s silence, then Abdullah looked him full in the face, his black beard jutting fiercely forward. “Ana [I],” he said deliberately, striking his right hand loudly against his barrel chest so that it echoed. “I — Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.”

© Robert Lacey 2009 Extracted from Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia by Robert Lacey, to be published by Hutchinson on October 22 at £20. Copies can be ordered for £18, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
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