Headscarves and Hymens (18 page)

The Saudi excuse was always that girls in the kingdom were simply not allowed to take part in sports, and for too long the world and, most shamefully, the International Olympic Committee—whose charter bans all forms of discrimination—accepted this. Why were girls and women barred from sports in the kingdom? Because ultraconservative clerics deemed women’s sports sinful.

If you’re wondering how sports could be sinful, look no farther than a 2006 book by the cleric Mohammed al-Habdan. “This [sports for women] is exactly what the disbelievers in the West want,” he wrote. “Their plan is to lure Muslim women out of their homes and subsequently out of their headscarf too.”

It gets worse: apparently, women’s sports are not only a Western plot, but also a gateway to Sapphic temptation. Habdan writes that girls might become attracted to one another after seeing classmates in tight leotards and tops. That is why, says Habdan, “good” Saudi girls do not disrobe outside their homes.

This hypersexualization of girls and women is all too common among the kingdom’s ultraconservative clerics and says more about them than about their country’s female population.

Twenty-six women participated in Egypt’s team at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I was delighted to see a woman carrying the flag for the Bahraini team, and another for the team from the UAE—the first woman ever to represent her country at the Olympics. Sheikha Maitha bint Mohammed bin Rashid, the twenty-eight-year old who carried the flag for the UAE, competed in tae kwon do. During the opening ceremony, she wore a black headscarf and abaya, although she does not veil when she competes. In contrast, the women on the Algerian team wore skirts and high heels.

A few days before the Beijing opening ceremony, the Saudi women’s rights activist Wajeha al-Huwaider posted a video on YouTube protesting the ban on women’s sports in her country. Others challenged the ban by playing underground soccer and basketball and learning to ride horseback. In 2008, Saudi religious authorities banned an all-women’s marathon and a soccer match, but the Jeddah United women’s basketball team made public appearances as part of their fight against that ban. They risked state anger but were determined to be recognized.

All these efforts put enough pressure on the IOC to make it force Saudi Arabia’s hand. The kingdom sent two female athletes to the London Games in 2012. Ultraconservatives
launched a vicious campaign against the two women on social media, calling them whores—just as the regime’s clerics did with the women who dared to drive in 1990—and using the hashtag “prostitutes of the Olympics” on Twitter and other social media. No Saudi television channel broadcast their participation in the games.

Before Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani could even compete, her headscarf became the object of a tug-of-war among Olympic organizers, Saudi officials, and the International Judo Federation. Judo officials had initially ruled out competition in a headscarf, saying it could be dangerous because of chokeholds and aggressive grabbing techniques. The Saudi officials, apparently to save face with hard-liners back home for having allowed women to compete at all, insisted that Shahrkhani compete wearing a headscarf. Olympic organizers fought back, trying to overcome their reputation for being too soft in the past on Saudi misogyny.

How small all these officials seemed in comparison to the young woman carrying the ambitions of millions on her shoulders! In the end, she wore a modified hijab—it looked like a black cap. Yet even that was not enough for Saudi hard-liners, who said she was “dishonoring” herself by fighting in front of male referees and judges.

You see—it’s not about covering our hair or about “modesty.” It’s about controlling women’s bodies, and to
maintain this control, hard-liners will always move the goalposts to our disadvantage.

Shahrkhani was a blue belt judoko competing at the Olympics, for which a black belt is requisite, but she was given an exception. Women in Saudi Arabia cannot qualify for international competitions because they cannot enter national trials in the kingdom because of the sporting ban. In the end, when she finally competed, Shahrkhani lost in just eighty-two seconds, to a much more experienced competitor from Puerto Rico, Melissa Mojica.

The other Saudi competitor, Sarah Attar, at nineteen, was just a year older than Shahrkhani. A U.S.–Saudi citizen who lives in the United States, where she belonged to her university’s track team, Attar trained as a long-distance runner, but because she was not among the world’s elite, organizers had her compete in the 800 meter.

Like her compatriot in the judo competition, Attar was warmly received by the crowd, which gave her a standing ovation even though she came in last. Like Shahrkhani, Attar was very aware that she was making history.

“This is such a huge honor and an amazing experience, just to be representing the women,” Attar told the Associated Press. “I know that this can make a huge difference … For women in Saudi Arabia, I think this can really spark something to get more involved in sports,
to become more athletic,” she said. “Maybe in the next Olympics, we can have a very strong team to come.”

In the United States, Attar would run in shorts and a tank top. At the London Games, she was covered from head to toe—a headscarf tucked into a long-sleeve jacket and full-length trousers. Competing against the world’s top athletes, who were dressed in the most aerodynamic running gear available, Attar was surely hampered by her baggy clothes. They were a far cry from her running gear in the United States and left her looking visibly uncomfortable in the London heat.

As if these young women’s lack of experience and the tremendous scrutiny placed on them were not enough, the kingdom’s conditions that they must “comply with Sharia” made a mockery of their participation. Instead of shaming the kind of cleric who would warn that girls’ sports encourage lesbianism, instead of shaming the online bullies who called these two Olympians “whores,” the Saudi regime instead shames women—when it should be celebrating them. Saudi Arabia sent no women to the September 2014 Asian Games in South Korea.

In May 2013 the ban on sports in private girls’ schools in Saudi Arabia was lifted, on the condition that students adhere to “decent dress” codes and the rules of Sharia. Education Ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Dakhini was quoted by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) as saying that the lifting of the sports ban “stems from the teachings of
our religion, which allow women such activities in accordance with Sharia.” Yet Wajeha al-Huwaider had already made exactly that point—that Islam encouraged women to play sports and that women at the time of the Prophet did so—and al-Huwaider was routinely called an extremist.

The greater test will come with government schools. The regime has quietly tolerated sports in private schools. In April 2014, the SPA reported that the Shura Council had asked the Ministry of Education to look into including sports for girls in state-run schools, again with the condition that the schools conform to Sharia rules on dress and gender segregation. Reuters reported that conservatives staged a rare protest outside the Royal Court in the capital, Riyadh, against such “Westernizing” reforms. What is “Westernizing” about sports for girls? As with the hijab, conservatives invoke a false cultural dialectic to hide the real nature of the struggle.

Participation in sports must be a right for all girls in Saudi Arabia, not just those whose families can afford to send them to private schools that cushion them somewhat from their country’s “exceptionalism.” The wealthy often—though not always—are protected from some kinds of misogyny, and the disadvantaged, the most marginalized, and the most vulnerable are often the ones who feel misogyny most painfully.

The restrictions on sports and driving are both principally about one thing: mobility. Saudi women have multiple problems to contend with, but no other issue so acutely dramatizes their captivity under the regime.

A year before the London Olympics, Manal al-Sharif was jailed for nine days for driving a car, with her brother in the passenger seat, and posting a video of this infraction on YouTube. A single mother with a toddler, she was arrested after police swooped in on her apartment as if to capture a terrorist.

At a conference in Cairo where both she and I presented, al-Sharif spoke of another single mother whom she had met after her arrest. The woman, a mother of two teenage girls, pleaded with Manal to teach her daughters to drive so that they could go to school and run errands, because the mother could not afford a driver and her ex-husband did not pay her child support or alimony.

Al-Sharif’s May 2011 driving campaign, largely organized online, brought out dozens of women who similarly uploaded videos to YouTube of themselves driving. Several of them offered to teach their countrywomen how to drive. Some drivers made it home without a problem. Others were arrested, to be released only after their fathers had signed a pledge that their daughters would not drive again. All these women had earned their driver’s licenses outside Saudi Arabia, but were forbidden to use them in the kingdom.

Al-Sharif told reporters that the storm begins with
just one raindrop and argued that the kingdom cannot forever keep at bay the hurricane of women’s rights. Conservatives found al-Sharif’s storm to be such a threat that she was eventually hounded out of her job at one of the largest oil companies in the world and had to leave Saudi Arabia for Dubai.

In October 2013, two years after Manal al-Sharif’s arrest, about sixty Saudi women got behind the wheel. A smaller number of them were detained this time. Interestingly, in a change of tack by the state, two men, including a columnist, were jailed for a few days because of their support for the women’s driving campaign. With this protest, the regime had to acknowledge what it had always denied: that it wasn’t society that was “not ready” for female drivers. For years, especially in more remote areas, Saudi women have been driving. Some women dress as men to escape scrutiny. Others drive only in emergencies, for example, to rush a relative to the hospital. Others drive just for the sake of it. The world has not ended. Their presence behind the wheel does not cause mass hysteria among male drivers, and some women have their male relatives’ support. It is the regime and its clerics who are not ready.

Just sixty women drove in the 2013 campaign, a mere ten or so more than in 1990. This is an indication of the fear and internalized subjugation among women in Saudi Arabia. Nonetheless, it is impossible that those who heard of the driving campaign will remain unchanged
by it—just as people across the region watching revolutions and uprisings on their television sets and computer screens have been irrevocably changed, whether or not they join the protests.

Sitting in the passenger seat and filming during one of Manal al-Sharif’s drives before her arrest in 2011 was Wajeha al-Huwaider, the woman behind the video challenging Saudi Arabia’s lack of women on its Olympic team at the Beijing Games. In 2008, al-Huwaider produced a clip of herself driving in which she offered to teach other Saudi women how to drive and recited an open letter to the country’s interior minister asking him to lift the ban on women driving.

Al-Huwaider has been a tireless, fierce, and at times lonely warrior for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. Barred from travel and from writing for the local press, she has often been accused of performing “stunts,” of being “too extreme” in her feminism, of being out of touch with Saudi Arabia. But it is exactly her “extremism” that hits a repressive society where it hurts most. To be “out of touch” with a society in which women have internalized their subjugation is an admirable thing.

As long as women such as al-Huwaider are fighting, we—that is, everyone who lives outside Saudi Arabia—owe it to them to listen to their demands and amplify them. Neither al-Huwaider nor Manal al-Sharif nor any
of the women involved in the three waves of driving protests has ever called on anyone to “rescue” her. They fight against unimaginable obscurantism and misogyny, and their fight is proof that Saudi women are not only ready for change, but demanding it.

It is cowardly and shameful to refuse to acknowledge their fight—as U.S. secretary of state John Kerry did when he visited Saudi Arabia shortly after the 2013 driving campaign. When asked about the women’s demands, Kerry said, essentially, that Saudi Arabia had the right to have whatever social order it saw fit. No recognition of the women’s fight or courage. No recognition of the outrageous violations of women’s rights. If any ethnic or religious group were being treated the way Saudi women are treated, such an apartheid would long ago have been condemned, and Saudi Arabia boycotted, by the United States and other Western nations.

Instead, Saudi Arabia buys its way into international organizations such as UN Women, where it is one of two countries guaranteed seats on the organization’s board as emerging donors. Why are countries such as Saudi Arabia eager to join international bodies such as UN Women? Because it translates into clout—membership in a powerful new agency—with very few obligations.

The United States and other Western countries successfully fought to keep Iran off the UN Women board, yet they turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia’s failings
with regard to women. This is yet another reminder that they will ignore women’s rights whenever it is more convenient to do so. Once again, women are the cheapest bargaining chips.

It’s not as if the United Nations were unaware of Saudi Arabia’s terrible record on women’s rights. After all, who could forget the farce that ensued in 2008 when a Saudi delegation appeared for the first time before the UN women’s rights panel in Geneva and absurdly insisted that women in their country faced no discrimination? The most ludicrous claim came when the UN committee asked why Saudi men could marry up to four wives. With a straight face, a Saudi delegate—a man, of course—explained that it was to ensure that a man’s sexual appetite be satisfied legally if one wife could not fulfill it. Not surprisingly, the then UN special rapporteur on violence against women, Yakin Ertürk, soon after went to Saudi Arabia on a ten-day fact-finding mission. Ertürk said after her visit that Saudi Arabia needed to construct a legal framework based on recognized international human rights standards, and she criticized the restrictions on women’s lives that resulted from the guardianship system. Amazingly, though, she said the ban on women’s driving did not come up in her conversations with Saudi officials. Even more shockingly, she said, “If the ban on driving is going to continue, I think there is a need to provide transportation possibilities for people to get
around, especially those who cannot afford to have a car and a driver. Whatever the preferred norm is in a country, the obligation of the state is to provide alternatives.”