Dating Saudi style

The Financial Times has another interesting article on Saudi Arabia following last week's comments on the Saudi economy. This time the topic is the role of women in Saudi society. If you thought getting a date over here was hard, the Saudi alternative is far, far worse:

t is a Thursday evening outside Feisalia shopping mall in Riyadh. Only families are allowed in on the eve of the Muslim weekend. Single young men, thought to be too disruptive, sit in their cars outside, blocking traffic.

The mutawa'a - religious police - are nearby and will intervene if the mall's security guards let the men slip by.

The usual practice is to wait for a glimpse of a woman entering or leaving the mall. The chances are that all the men can see is her eyes - the rest is hidden under a robe.

If a girl looks at them the men will throw a piece of paper with their phone number on it. Some plaster the number on car windows and hope to get a call.

This is boy (tries to) meet girl, Saudi style. With men and women segregated, opportunities for relationships are limited. Marriages are most often arranged; sometimes young men and women meet on family trips abroad and try to see each again at home.

There is apparently increasing domestic criticism of the strict segregation of men and women. As the FT says, "In education the result has been graduates well-versed in the Koran but ill-suited for a modern job market." The article links the current ultra-repressive religious orthodoxy to the takeover of Islam's holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 when a group of over one hundred armed fighters seized it. The group's leaders, Juhaiman and Muhammad Al Qahtani claimed that they wanted to return to the strict practice of Wahhabism. They claimed that the influx of petrodollars had led the house of Saud to abandon the true path. After a siege, the Grand Mosque was stormed in a massive assault. In this assault, many of the conspirators were shot on the spot, others executed later. In The Closed Cirlce, the affair is summed up:

The ulema, pliant as usual, issued a decree to sanction the killing of these dissidents even within the mosque's precincts.

This bit of theology will come is handy when the war moves to Iraq. Also compare the handling of the situation with the siege at the Church of the Nativity. Israel was blasted for laying a siege, when the Palestinians were the ones commiting the war crime of using a holy place as a battleground.

In response to the siege at the Grand Mosque, the Saud rulers of Arabia took an even harsher line in interpreting Wahhabism domestically for fear of setting off a wider islamicist revolt against their rule. The danger of pinning your legitimacy to a religious creed is that it's easy to be challenged by others who claim that you've strayed from the true path. Then you can either reform, or go for maximum orthodoxy. The Sauds chose the latter course which has led to further radicalization of their own population, without actually achieving substantially greater popularity. With the economy not doing so well, the population becomes more critical of their rulers. The bribe of oil money that worked in the past is no longer sustainable, so the Sauds have to seek refuge in their role of guardians of Wahhabism and the muslim holy places.

But Islam in general, and Wahhabism in particular in Saudi Arabia, has always been used by those in power to justify their rule. Even though there are many "secular" rulers in the Middle East, religion and piety are central parts of the image they cultivate exactly because Islam is so deeply linked Arab culture. The actual question of whether they believe any of it is irrelevant. It's the image that counts.

So will the power of the Sauds be challenged by even more radical Islamists, or do reformers have a chance? The FT article ends with the following:

But the planned introduction this year of English in primary schools was postponed in what was seen as a concession to the conservative clerical establishment.

"We have been told that by learning English we stand to lose our own language and cultural traditions. Can any of those who promote this idea cite even one instance of people losing their language and traditions by learning English or any other language?" wrote Khaled al- Maeena, editor of Arab News, an English-language daily.

"By learning English we open the door to different ideas, different ways of thinking and different ways of living. That, after all, is what education is about - or should be about."

Perhaps there are indeed reformist forces at work within Arabia that could help the country to open up and move away from its current stultifying state. One thing that does give me some hope is that in getting hits from Saudi Arabia a lot seem to come from search engines. What are they looking for? Well, sex. Arab and Saudi sex. At least some aspects of human nature are culturally invariant.

So perhaps there's hope yet, but I remain highly skeptical.