Redux: Saudi Women Have Windowless Dorms

It is well-known that Saudi Arabia is an incredibly suffocating country for women. The Kingdom is without question the most misogynistic country in the world. A rolling band of fanatical religious police harshly punishes any women who is not veiled and who is in the company of an unrelated male. Women can only be see by fellow women doctors. And this principles adhered to all level of Saudi society where sex segregation is a ruling maxim: in the bureaucracy, justice system, university, ect... there is no sexual intermixing. And, of course, as is well known women are prohibited from driving.

But sometimes life is literally suffocating. In 2002, the band of fanatical kooks making up the religious police blocked the exit of a burning school because the running and screaming girls did not have their head scarfs on. At least a dozen girls were burned to death. This is how insane and grotesque, and criminal, the religious Wahhabi police in that country are. After this incident, the Saudi public was so disgusted that the clerical establishment lost control of all oversight over female schools.

But that does not mean that the religious police no longer exercise influence and mandate procedure. They still do and this is exhibited in a new dorm building at a Saudi University:

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The Saudi government blocked the windows of the women’s dorms at the University of Um Al-Qura to prevent interaction between men and women. The female are complaining about lack of ventilation and sun and the hazards in case of fire.

Although they face hurdles, the women in Saudi Arabia are not all submissive. In 1991, they took to the streets demanding their right to drive. And there is a reformist movement in the country that champions women’s rights. They face hurdles in the form of reactionary and obscurantist religious fanatics, but they are resisting and change is happening slowly. The ban on sex intermix is slowly being revoked and the right to drive may soon follow.

Redux: Even though Saudi women face may obstacles and hurdles it would be wrong to portray them as submissive. Many of them are pioneers in their country and stand against the oppression:

Lama al-Sulaiman, a 43-year-old Saudi Arabian businesswoman, was elected deputy chairman of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry in December.

That might not be news in most places. It was in her country, where al-Sulaiman is the first female to hold such a post in Saudi history.

“With King Abdullah, we are changing so that women can have far more opportunities,” said al-Sulaiman, wearing a black abaya long-sleeved robe and a headscarf, in a 10th-floor conference room overlooking the Red Sea.

The king is pushing to raise women’s employment in the world’s largest oil exporter, where only 15 percent of the labor force is female. More working women would give Saudi and international companies higher-skilled employees, since almost 60 percent of Saudi university students are women, and help Saudi Arabia diversify from energy by building technical skills.

“By including more women in the labor force, you increase productivity” and thus add jobs to the economy, said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Riyadh-based Banque Saudi Fransi. “By employing them, the government will get a return on its investment in education.”

Most of the international companies operating in Saudi Arabia are energy-related or contractors, such as Midland, Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil Corp. and Munich-based Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company.

It is these Saudis, not the fanatical kook clerics and their religious cadre of policing thugs, who will build the future.