Educated for indolence

Thousands of Saudi women get university degrees. Few get jobs

To say that Saudi Arabia is second only to Afghanistan's Taliban regime in its repression of women invites charges of western prejudice against Islam. But there is one international norm by which it has become a beacon of virtue: quantitatively and probably qualitatively, Saudi women are now more highly educated than Saudi men.

This theocracy rests on two pillars, a spiritual authority vested in the Council of Senior Ulema (religious scholars), a temporal one in the ruling al-Saud family. If the ulema had had their way, there would have been no female education. But in the 1960s the late King Faisal overruled them, and with nearly $3bn (£1.8bn) a year now spent on them, women represent 58% of university students.

The number of female graduates, 87,000, recently outstripped the males, 79,000. But how do women then benefit from the great sums spent on their higher education? Very little. The 275,000 or so who work represent well under 2% of the workforce, if 6m foreigners are included.

This anomaly cannot be accounted for by Islam as such, even the harsh Saudi version of it. In her thesis, a young feminist shows how, in the pastoral days before oil, women played a major role in a labour-intensive economy.

It stems, rather, from the bizarre chemistry of Islam-plus-modernisation, and especially from a reactionary clergy who have ceded ground where they had no choice but expanded it wherever they could. They themselves equipped women for a part in modern life - for, formally speaking, the clergy are in charge of female education - and then prevented them from doing so.

This is now one of a range of steadily growing problems which, unchecked, will threaten the kingdom's stability. With the boom days over, the role of women has become more than a social and cultural issue. Now it is a very concrete economic one.

Doubtless moved by such concerns, Crown Prince Abdullah, the reform-minded acting ruler, recently took a stand in women's favour. He would, he said, allow "no one, whoever they are, to undermine or marginalise their active role". Innocuous almost anywhere else, his words were a bombshell in the veiled and allusive politico-religious discourse of Saudi Arabia.

What incensed the clergy was less the crown prince's remarks than intepretations put on them by the liberal intelligentsia. Expressions like "women's rights", even "liberation", crept into the furore.

Some went so far as to forecast an easing of the ban on ikhtilat, or "mixing" between the sexes in public places, which is the main obstacle to women working and to the vast economic rationalisation and savings that would bring.

Outrage at such interpretations of the crown prince's words came from the top. Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Aqil, a court adviser, said that what these "deviant" Muslims wanted was "to feast their eyes on women, unveiled and naked as in the west and some other [Muslim] countries. The Muslim woman is a precious jewel whom only her rightful owner can possess, for he has paid dearly for that in accordance with God's conditions."

For another Saudi, Abdul Rahman Harithi, the liberals wanted to "destroy the family by putting women into factories, offices and other wicked occupations"; such advocates of "harlotry" within Muslim society were as dangerous as nuclear destruction from its enemies.

"It is vital", said another opponent, Abdullah al-Sharif, "to dispel the illusion of Arab and Muslim intellectuals that women have a cause and are entitled any rights besides those already conferred by God."

The ruling family has generally been far more progressive than the clerics. But Crown Prince Abdullah, on whom high hopes are pinned, does not yet have the standing, even if he has the desire, of a Faisal to defy the ulema.

The rulers' legitimacy rests on Islam, and the clergy - however much some princes despise them - are its inescapable, official interpreters. But the deep conservatism of Saudi society also helps the clerics. A recent, informal poll showed that, while only 20% of men wholly opposed working by women, most of those in favour wanted them to do so in an all-female environment.

Many women are very conservative, too; and oil affluence has made their initiative atrophy, just as it has the men's. "I know many educated women who wouldn't know how to buy a plane ticket," said one woman, Soraya, "even if their husband let them."

For the time being, the small number of Saudi women who work consists overwhelmingly of teachers - so prosperous a category that men place ads in newspapers seeking marriage with them - and hospital staff.

Among the more independent-minded are some 70,000 businesswomen; typically, they furnish goods or services from home, and preside behind the scenes over shops with a "mixed" clientele, or, up-front, in women-only ones.

Most of these female entrepreneurs need a male family member as a "proxy" in all dealings with officialdom or other organisations. But occasionally, new technology helps bypass men: 23-year-old Nida Fayyez exults at her rich pickings on the New York stock exchange, via the internet.

The pressures for female employment will grow - explosively, some forecast - not only because of the desire of educated women for self-fulfilment, but because family budgets can use a second income in these leaner times. And because - thanks to en forced indolence, affluence and Islamic inheritance laws - women own 70% of the liquid capital in local banks, money that could be put to work in business.

But no one yet publicly advocates mixing of the sexes, only reforms within the existing segregation. There should be women's departments in the state administration, the courts, and police stations, and women's business centres. Some speak grandly of wholly female companies or "female industrial cities".

"Mixing" will come in the end. "We know that," said a senior prince, "but, meanwhile, just go to Qasim province [the conservative heartland] and ask if they even want women driving." This is one of the issues on which the secular power will sooner or later have to confront the religious one.

But the ruling family has little stomach for a showdown, realising that this question has become one of those deeply symbolic conflicts that reflect the whole balance of power in any society. If the ban fell, the whole citadel of the "pure faith", and the clerics as its custodians, would be imperilled.

"It's crazy", said a local journalist, "but the fact is that our rulers would stir up more trouble for themselves by letting women drive than by perpetrating some great national scandal, like, for example, selling our oilfields to the Americans."

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