Saudi women: A counter-factual story

Book review of Queens of the Kingdom: The Women of Saudi Arabia Speak

“I did my groceries at Safeway, I bought my shoes from Marks & Spencer, I watched movies on Amazon Prime...”
 
This is not an excited holidaymaker on the joys of being in London or New York, but the author of this book Nicola Sutcliff writing about her life in Riyadh which, she found, was nothing like the hellhole portrayed by her French compatriots back home. She says she was “surprised...how little culture shock I actually suffered”. She went on to live in Saudi Arabia for four years teaching at its first women’s university; and her experience bore little resemblance to the unremittingly “negative” Western narrative about life in Saudi Arabia, especially the status of its women.
 
“It was a negative narrative cemented by its repetition. Every news article I read on the country seemed to follow the same cut-and-paste formula. The first paragraph outlined the headline issue, the second — regardless of the article’s topic — offered commentary on the female driving ban, and the third helpfully informed the reader of any executions ordered during the preceding months,” she writes wryly, recalling that when she told her parents that she had been offered a well-paid academic post abroad they were delighted but when they learned that “abroad” was Saudi Arabia their “smile froze”.
 
What she discovered was that the Western perception of Saudi Arabia, especially its attitude towards women, was shaped by a combination of ignorance, wilful prejudice, and “sensationalist” media reportage. Saudi Arabia had become the “pantomime villain of international media, rivalled only perhaps by North Korea”.
 
The reality, Ms Sutcliff points out, is that once you discount the social and cultural differences unique to all societies the desert kingdom is like any other place. Riyadh is not exactly Paris; Saudi Arabia is a socially conservative society (indeed, illiberal by Western standards); individual freedoms are restricted; even more restricted for women. But it’s more to do with deeply-ingrained traditional social and cultural practices than with any Islamic “conspiracy” to oppress women as suggested in the Western narrative.
 
Ms Sutcliff spoke to hundreds of Saudi women of different groups and from different strata of society — conservative matriarchs, middle-aged housewives, young professionals (journalists, doctors fashion designers), students and rights activists.  Most of the interviews for this book were conducted between 2014 and 2017.
 
Opinion varied but “regardless of their differing views” they rejected the idea that they were “oppressed” and ridiculed Western campaigns on their behalf as propaganda. 
 
She found that issues such as the driving ban (now lifted), the burqa and gender segregation portrayed in the West as emblematic of Saudi women’s second-class status barely bothered most women. Rather than playing the victims, they saw themselves as “queens of the kingdom”.
“Queens don’t drive,” they joked.
 
Ms Sutcliff writes: “These were not the oppressed victims in need of rescue or international intervention I had read about in the papers or online — I was looked at with utter bewilderment when I mentioned...international NGOs campaigning on their behalves.”
 
Yes, they are aware of the barriers they face in a deeply conservative patriarchal society but they are also fighting against them in their own way while remaining “proud of their homeland, their families, and the changes they are witnessing — and instigating.”  Notwithstanding profound cultural differences, in essence Saudi women are no different from their counterparts elsewhere when it comes to their everyday concerns, she claims. They have “far more in common” with the global sisterhood than what sets them apart.
 
“I was reassured in my conviction that ...despite what those attention-grabbing headlines would have us believe, Saudi women’ primary concerns are not… patriarchal oppression or the dimensions of the cloth that covers them, but rather of the standard of education enjoyed by their children, the challenges of balancing work and child care,” Ms Sutcliff says.
 
Her impressions, however, must be seen in the context of the timing of her Saudi sojourn. It was a period of profound change —“a remarkable period in Saudi and global women’s history,” as she points out.
 
“During this time, women in Saudi Arabia gained the right to vote, to work in retail, to accept employment without their male guardian’s permission, and, indeed to manage their own businesses...a society on the cusp of change.”
 
What she witnessed was in such stark contrast to the “two-dimensional stock images of black-veiled figures” she had been fed, that she felt a compelling need to disseminate it to the wider world.
 
Ms Sutcliff is a Paris-based linguist, teacher and writer; and the book is as much a product of intellectual curiosity as about a sense of fair mindedness to acknowledge Western prejudices around Islam and the Muslim world. But, she points out, “stereotypes run both ways”.  And one of them is how women in the West get thrown out from their parents’ homes on their eighteenth birthday, spend “every night in a different bed”, and that prostitution is “a mainstream career option”. It’s so widely prevalent that women even “in their most honest moments” fail to mention it. Maybe a topic for her next book?
 

Queens of the Kingdom: The Women of Saudi Arabia Speak

Nicola Sutcliff 

Simon & Schuster

374 pages; £14.99