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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Saudi Arabia
Index
Public playground, Abha
Courtesy Saudi Arabian Information Office
The family and religious values have profound implications
for future development and for policy planning. Family values,
and the corresponding behaviors of individuals, have been
institutionalized by the state in the process of centralizing
control and allocating resources. Many of the state-supported
restrictions on women, for example, did not exist in the 1960s
and 1970s. They were the product of attempts to reconcile family
and religious values with opportunities and objectives that have
grown out of the development process and of increased religious
conservatism. Over the past two decades, one striking outgrowth
of Saudi development has been rapid migration of the population
to the cities. In the early 1970s, an estimated 26 percent of the
population lived in urban centers. In 1990 that figure had risen
to 73 percent. The capital, Riyadh, had about 666,000 inhabitants
according to the 1974 census (the most recent official census).
By 1984 the population, augmented by the removal of the
diplomatic missions from Jiddah to Riyadh, was estimated at about
1.8 million.
Urbanization, education, and modernization were having
profound effects on society as a whole, but especially on the
family. The urban environment fostered new institutions, such as
women's charitable societies, that facilitated associations and
activities for women outside the family network. Urban migration
and wealth were breaking up the extended family household, as
young couples left hometowns and established themselves in
single-family homes. Education for women also was encouraging the
rise of the nuclear family household: a study in Ad Dammam
carried out in 1980 showed that of a sample of 100 salaried
women, 91 percent of whom had a high-school or university
education, fully 90 percent lived in nuclear family households.
By contrast, in a sample of rural women who were 91 percent
illiterate, only half lived in a nuclear family unit. The same
study showed that the more educated, salaried women had an
average of two children, as opposed to rural women with an
average of 4.6 children. As the level of education rose, the age
of first marriages rose as well: 79 percent of the salaried women
were over the age of sixteen (and most over the age of nineteen)
when first married, whereas 75 percent of rural women were
married between the ages of ten and twelve.
In spite of the limitations imposed by sex-segregation
values, and in spite of the small proportion of women in the work
force relative to men (7 percent in 1990), the number of working
women--and the kinds of places in which they worked--were
growing. In the early 1990s, women were employed in banks,
including banks exclusively for women, in utility and computer
operations, in television and radio programming, and in some
ministries. They worked as clerical assistants, journalists,
teachers and administrators in girls' schools, university
professors, and as social workers. In medicine, women served as
doctors, pharmacists, and, more recently, as nurses. In 1992
there were almost 3,100 Saudi women trained and employed as
nurses, or 10 percent of the total number of nurses employed in
the kingdom. This number represented a dramatic change in the
attitudes of some families, not only toward the profession, but
about the limits of sex segregation. In the 1970s, nursing was
disparaged as a profession for women because of the presumed
contact it entailed with male doctors and patients; nursing
programs in Saudi Arabia thus could not recruit female Saudi
students.
By the 1990s, women had proved themselves competent to
succeed in employment that had been culturally perceived as men's
work, and, in the academic field they had shown that they could
be more successful than men
(see Education
, this ch.). Women had
also carved out for themselves positions of respect outside the
family, whereas previously an aspect of respect for women came
from being unknown outside the family.
The practices of veiling and separation, and the values
underlying these practices, however, were not being dislodged.
There was little expressed desire for such change because the
practices were grounded in fundamental family values, religiously
sanctioned and institutionalized by the government. The premise
that women, from a moral standpoint, should not associate with
unrelated men was the basis for all Saudi regulations on the
behavior of women, including the separation of boys and girls in
the education system, the requirement that women have a male
chaperon to travel, that women hire a male manager as a
requirement for obtaining a commercial license, that women not
study abroad without a male chaperon, not check into a hotel
alone, and not drive a car in the kingdom.
There was a link between tribal-family values, religion, and
state power that made intelligible the outcome of the women's
driving demonstration of November 1990. If, in fact, society held
as a basic moral premise that a woman should not be seen by any
man outside her own family, how could the same society allow her
to drive a car, when anyone passing by could see her face? The
position of the ulama as stated in a fatwa by the head of
the Department of Religious Research, Missionary Activities, and
Guidance was that women should not be allowed to drive because
Islam supported women's dignity. The fatwa did not say
that Islam forbade women's driving--Saudi Arabia was the only
Muslim country that forbade women to drive--but said that because
Islam supported women's dignity, a Muslim government must protect
women from the indignity of driving. The state could not easily
abrogate such rulings of the ulama because these rulings
responded to the family-tribal values and the interpretations of
Islam that were at the heart of Saudi society. The general public
response was supportive of the ulama and the actions of the
state. Indeed, there was a broad consensus of support for such
rulings precisely because they corresponded to the values of
modesty and sex segregation that were enmeshed in religion and in
the honor of the family.
Changes being wrought through urbanization and development
were having disturbing consequences for the traditional notion of
the family and its values. They brought closely held religious
values into question. For men, the consequences were particularly
unsettling because these changes brought their position of
control and protection of the family into question. Education,
urbanization, and modernization placed women in areas of public
space where, culturally, they should not be, for public space was
space reserved for men. The physical world around Saudis was
changing. Social groupings were realigning, status categories
were shifting, and economic dislocations were altering people's
income expectations. In such a fluctuating world, for both men
and women, clinging to traditional attitudes about women in the
family was an expression of a desire for stability in the society
at large. The development policies of the 1970s and 1980s, had in
effect, planted the seeds of a cultural backlash, seeds that were
coming into flower in the early years of the decade of the 1990s.
* * *
The classic work on Arabian beduin is H.R.P. Dickson's The
Arab of the Desert. For information on beduin today, see
especially William Lancaster's The Rwalla Bedouin Today
and Donald Cole's numerous publications including Nomads of
the Nomads. Motoko Katakura in Bedouin Village writes
about issues of beduin settlement. Some of the best
anthropological studies available on Saudi Arabia, such as
Arabian Oasis City: The Transformation of 'Unayzah, have
been prepared by Soraya Altorki and Donald Cole. On gender
issues, see the work of Aisha Mohamed Almana, Soraya Altorki, and
Eleanor Doumato. Deborah Amos's book Lines in the Sand
contains a chapter on gender issues during the Persian Gulf War.
John Esposito's books on Islam, such as Islam: The
Straight Path and The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?
are among the best and most readable. James P. Piscatori's work
on Islamism, Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis,
contains information pertinent to Saudi Arabia, as does
"Transforming Dualities: Tribe and State Formation in Saudi
Arabia" by Joseph Kostiner. John S. Habib's Ibn Sa'ud's
Warriors of Islam remains the best reference for the Ikhwan
movement. Edward Mortimer in Faith and Power and George
Rentz in "Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia" write on the Wahhabi
movement. Christine Moss Helms's The Cohesion of Saudi
Arabia is not only valuable on the formation of the Saudi
state, but also on geography, ecology, and human settlement.
In Alan Richards's and John Waterbury's book, A Political
Economy of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia may be seen in
relation to other Middle Eastern countries. J.S. Birks and C.A.
Sinclair discuss issues of economy and development in Saudi
Arabia into the '90s. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1992
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