Saudi Arabia: under the veil the Revolution - Jeune Afrique

Far from the clichés about the silence to which Saudi women are doomed, an investigation by journalist Clarence Rodriguez recounts the journey of several feminists in the kingdom whose struggle is not so fruitless.

Symbol of a fantasized condition of Muslim women, the full veil is no longer the prerogative of the strict Gulf States. Carried by the Salafist propaganda of Riyadh, it won the suburbs of Cairo such as downtown Casablanca, the French suburbs and even the cities of the New World.

For Western opinions, in the shadow of the veil, it is silence and absence, as if it were an empty bell under which nothing could be created or thought. The piece of cloth would transform the woman who wears it into a hollow shadow. This shortcut, fueled by media with latent orientalism, is it not as obscurantist as the desire to make women disappear under the veil? And when the Western media are interested in these "exceptional Saudi women" who seem to belie the rule, these "cannot be estimated beyond the fact that they do not wear the veil", underlines the academic Amélie Le Renard.

A new wave of Saudi women

Which recalls the case of the filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour, director of the remarkable Wadjda, about which the French daily Liberation headlined "Haifaa al-Mansour, in jeans and without a veil". The Saudis, they know well that the heart of a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter beats under the abaya, and that thoughts, feelings and a will can develop there as securely as under "normal" clothing.

Better, the ideas of emancipation and individual fulfillment vaunted by the West have seeped under the fabrics and, in the face of the peaceful but determined questioning, by a growing number of Saudi women, of the moral conditioning imposed by the politico-religious oligarchy, fear changes sides and leads the regime to make concessions.

For thirty years, the Wahhabi kingdom has been living a real Revolution under the veil, title of a book by journalist Clarence Rodriguez, correspondent for many French media in Riyadh, which relates the journeys of eight Saudi women, all of whom with contrasting points of view and paths, to improve the status of women in the country. Continuing her meetings, the French drew a documentary broadcast in December 2015 on France 5, Saudi Arabia, women's words.

Alive and out of place, featuring protesters as stakeholders in the system, both the essay and the documentary effectively break "the image of Saudi women eternally or victims and powerless, or rebels and repressed" and relativize the stereotype of a uniformly reactionary and misogynistic people.

From Madeha, a pioneer of the feminist cause, to Princess Adela, daughter and adviser of the late King Abdullah, to Lina, founder of the Jeddah women's basketball team, to Lama, a more conventional businesswoman, these Saudi women show and hear more nuanced realities than the black and white with which the women and men of their country adorn themselves. Most of them have in common having studied in the United States or Europe and having discovered there the notion of equality and the movements of social emancipation.

But it is much more to the tough character and combative nature of these women than to foreign influences that the female sex of Saudi Arabia owes the advances in their condition. Without wishing to present herself as the "exceptional Saudi woman" prized by the Western media, one of the most famous among them, Manal al-Sharif, recalls that these vocations remain exceptional, conceding that "in the end, women ready to commit are very few in number – and even fewer those able to move from words to action”.

Hers gained worldwide notice when, on May 27, 2011, she posted a video of herself driving a car in the town of Al-Khobar on YouTube. Because Saudi Arabia remains the only country in the world where women are not allowed to drive and must rely on a foreign driver or a member of their family to get around.

Many claims

For this "totally spontaneous gesture", Manal is imprisoned for nine days. Her media exposure leads her to the pillory of Saudi society. But the good was done: the Women2Drive (“women at the wheel”) movement was launched, and King Abdallah ordered that such “gaps” no longer lead to incarceration.

This stunt was not unprecedented. On November 10, 1990, the founding date of the Saudi feminist movement, forty-seven women performed the taboo gesture of driving and defying the authorities in procession to claim freedom of movement. Now a photographer and psychotherapist, Madeha al-Ajroush had the idea when she saw American soldiers driving armored vehicles through the streets of the capital, while Uncle Sam's troops had set foot in the peninsula to drive off the Iraqi Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

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— Taxi 21 Mon Apr 29 19:24:51 +0000 2013

Since then, permission to drive alone has become the flagship demand of Saudi women who aspire to greater freedom. Beyond the anecdotal bravado presented in the international media, driving has become for women an essential milestone on the road to their emancipation, the symbol of the rejection of male tutorship imposed in all aspects of their lives.

Author of the pioneer Saudiwoman’s Weblog, Eman al-Nafjan recalls: “The two main measures that we are waiting for, everyone knows them: the authorization to drive and the end of male tutoring. This authorization, Haifaa al-Mansour, the first female film director in a country where cinema is prohibited, symbolically granted it in her feature film, difficult to create but appreciated worldwide, Wadjda: the heroine, a 12-year-old girl. years old, fights for a bike "like the boys" and ends up getting it.

Cosmetic, symbolic or real, depending on your point of view, the concessions made by the government to women's demands have multiplied in recent decades under the impetus of the previous king, Abdallah, effectively advised by his daughter Princess Adela. For the first time, in 2011, the king mentioned his subjects in his speech to the Shura: "We will not accept to marginalize women", prefiguring undeniable progress.

But car advocacy, while quietly backed by some of the kingdom's highest influences, is still not on the agenda. Some women fighters, like Madeha, Manal and Eman, are campaigning by freeing themselves from the yellow lines set by the regime, in the wind of the Arab Spring which has shaken one of the most conservative states in the world. . They paid an often high price for it: Madeha saw ten years of photographic work burned during an auto-da-fé, Manal had to go into exile in Dubai and Eman put her blog to sleep for a while.

But harassing families, especially male chaperones, who bear legal responsibility for their actions, is the most effective intimidation. Because, well beyond the political threat they represent, it is the attack on a conception of patriarchal honor stemming from a Bedouin and Islamic heritage distorted by urbanity and the monarcho-religious oligarchy that is seen as sacrilege.

“Girls’ virginity obsesses and poisons,” says Eman. The woman who shows herself in public is the obscene, the one who expresses herself is the scandalous. But the latter remain convinced of the "butterfly effect" that their success would entail: the small achievement of today will bring the big changes of tomorrow.

For others, more connected to the system, therefore less militant but just as committed to improving the condition of women, it is rather the "snowball effect" that must be targeted, each success paving the way for another, at a pace bearable by a society largely hostile to progressivism.

"There is no point in rushing the movement at all costs, because then we risk obtaining totally counterproductive results by targeting the mentalities of the refractory or the timorous," says businesswoman Lama Omar Aggad , founder, in 1990, of a center bringing together beauty, sports, offices, restaurants and shopping areas for women. Believing "that we may no longer need [male tutoring] in ten years", she however hammers "one thing at a time".

Another supporter of the policy of "small thoughtful steps", Hoda al-Helaissi, university professor and member of the Shura, explains her reluctance in the face of militant protest: "When we see where Egypt is today oday, we can think in retrospect that we have escaped the worst. »

But whether they are militant rebels or wish to change the system from within, all these women want to send the same message to their compatriots: "Do not be afraid and above all do not resign yourself: to a brave woman, nothing is impossible, even in the realm of prohibitions, and our success is proof that the victory of all of us is inevitable. »

“And the men in all this? asks Clarence Rodriguez in conclusion. The eight women featured in her essay are constantly reminded of what they owe to a husband who espoused their cause, to a father who rescued them from the clutches of the religious police or encouraged them to work, to a brother who sacrificed his employment to defend them. And one could say that behind every great Saudi woman hides a Saudi man. Not as an austere chaperone but as an ally and support.