- Blurred
- Aug 26, 2004
-
WELL I WONNER WHAT IT'S LIIIIIKE TO BE A GOOD POSTER
|
quote:Part 4:
Well, I'm back for a 3rd instalment due to popular demand. I'll try to keep to the main topic - the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia - but forgive me if I do digress now and then. Writing these stories and responding to the comments some people have posted have brought back a plethora of memories. Recollections keep popping into my mind and I'll try to write them down in a coherent manner. I've included a few bits I posted in the comments forum related to this OP, but have a fair amount of new material for you.
As I did mention in the comments thread, from our experience travelling to the UAE and Egypt, and in speaking to Arabic staff members in the kingdom, the other Arabs seem to hold the Saudis in distain for their hypocrisy and their arrogance. Saudis hold themselves out to be the custodians of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, and in fact, that is one of the King's official titles. I still have the envelope that I got my $20,000 bonus in for helping to save King Fahd with this title on it.
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/custodianenvelope.jpg
The Saudis preach conservative Wahabbism and regard themselves as the moral role models of the Islamic world. However, in reality, many Saudis went overseas to slut and drink their way around known sin spots such as Bangkok and Bahrain. The causeway linking Bahrain to Saudi is a direct arterial link to the many vices that are officially denied Saudis in their own country - sex, drugs and loose women. It's not just expats that make the drive across the water to regain a bit of normalcy for a while. I know for a fact that Saudi men have caught HIV from unprotected sex with prostitutes in Bahrain, Bangkok and Africa, as I've x-rayed some of them (and their infected wives) for the complications of full blown AIDS and a few told me their self pitying stories. It's funny though, that as late as 1997, the Arab News had a headline stating "No AIDS in Kingdom" with an accompanying article stating how their superior moral values have prevented the entry into the kingdom of what was largely an immoral western illness. I should mention that as a prerequisite for working in Saudi Arabia, expatriates are forced to have an HIV test, which is repeated within weeks of entering the kingdom. HIV positivity is grounds for immediate deportation if you are a foreigner.
Now, there is an interesting side story here about being in a community of proven HIV negative expats. I'll say that this is 2nd hand information, as Leanne and I don't swing that way - or swing at all for that matter. Apparently there were some special "key parties" held at one of the married staff members' accommodations at another hospital in Riyadh. Some expat couples there apparently had a wife swapping club going on - car keys were dropped into a bowl and the willing contestants drew them out to see who they'd be partnered with for the evening's frivolities. My understanding was that their alleged HIV status gave them the confidence to be promiscuous. Now there's not only the danger of being caught committing adultery, which in itself is a capital offence, but the HIV tests were only conducted once upon entry to the kingdom, and so westerners who vacationed out of the kingdom and were sexually active were at risk of infection with any number of sexually transmitted diseases. The more intelligent reader would realise at this point that there would be little way of telling if they brought the infections back into the kingdom, and so, apart from the morality of the situation, I thought that it was extremely reckless behaviour. But the restrictions of the kingdom made some people do wild things to compensate.
One sensible outlet for our frustrations was sport, but western women were not able to participate in a wide variety of sports for a number of reasons. Any outdoor activities were restricted by virtue of the fact that women had to stay covered in public, and so the hospital that we worked at had no official female counterparts to the sanctioned mens' soccer competition, tennis squad, squash team, and the like. Some corporations housed their staff in high walled compounds with security and guards and so women within the walls could wear shorts and t-shirts and play sport such as tennis and field hockey. Of course, it was desert climate - searing hot for 6 months of the year, with the thermometer reaching the mid to high forties celsius on a regular basis, and so there were few sports played in the lengthy summer anyhow. The hospital we worked at had a few tennis courts hidden behind high walls and “women only" gymnasiums in their single female accommodation areas.
As I mentioned earlier in the comments thread, Leanne and other western women did play softball at the American Embassy softball field in Riyadh. The field was a 3 sided U shaped valley nestled in between high hills, with security guards keeping out the locals on the 4th open side. Once past the vehicle search and inside the gates, the western women could get around in shorts and t-shirts and feel free for a few hours. Also at the softball field was a burger joint that sold......BACON Burgers !!!! Expats tended to order a triple bacon burger with extra bacon on the side, and take the excess home to use for breakfasts or caesar salads, as bacon was illegal in Saudi Arabia.
I've previously mentioned the arab men staring at western women at the hospital pool on the designated "family day", making it an intimidating experience. Leanne and some friends also came across a similar thing on our own building. We were all moved by the hospital housing department in our 3rd year to a new building downtown that had a pool on the roof, as well as a gym and sauna. The hospital employed some Pakistanis to be front door security and cleaners one of the little guys used to hang about in the gym and spent hours on end cleaning the mirrored wall at one end of the gym, staring at the western girls in their workout gear in a very creepy kind of way. A few of the married men eventually took him aside and had some illuminating and encouraging words with him - something about being thrown off the top of our new 8 story building - and he soon desisted.
Going back in time to our first week in the kingdom, our welcome "care package" supplied by our hospital of rice, tinned guava juice and non-pork canned spam (well beyond its use-by date) was looking more and more unpalatable by the hour. Braving our new surrounds, Leanne and I went on a trepidatious 1st grocery shopping expedition. We fully expected to see whole skinned goats hanging in butcher shop windows and camel burgers at their fast food outlets. To our surprise, we stumbled across a western style supermarket with all the modern conveniences and similar, if not actually the same products as home. We were thrilled to find a measure of familiarity down each aisle. However, our relief soon turned to apprehension when the lights all suddenly went out and people started yelling at us and other shoppers to get out. Leanne and I looked at each other in panic and wondered aloud if there was a robbery in progress or a terrorist incident unfolding before our very eyes. I grabbed Leanne and steered a beeline for the doors with a couple of men shouting, "Salah ! Salah!" at us as we fled. We exited the supermarket to find a couple of dozen people lounging around outside in the 45 degree heat and looking quite calm, albeit a little sweaty. As dozens of mosques began to emit wails in a discordant cacophony, a kind westerner saw our obvious confusion and approached us to see if we were new in the kingdom. We replied that we were and he went on to explain that Salah meant prayer time and that the supermarket had just closed for the mid-afternoon prayer. As we'd only just entered the store a few minutes before, we apparently missed the loudspeaker announcement of "attention dear shoppers, we will be closing for prayer in approximately 10 minutes" and were chased out due to the presence of Motowa nearby.
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/prayertimes.jpg
Everything closes for prayer 5 times per day in Saudi Arabia. Prayer times are published in the newspaper, and both locals and westerners plan their shopping and dining out around prayer times. Establishments with publicly viewable areas such as shops and supermarkets were deserted during prayer. However, restaurants merely locked their doors, dimmed their ceiling lights and pretended that nobody was inside. No entry or exit was allowed for the duration of the 25 to 30 minute prayer time in case they were caught by the dreaded Motowa and prosecuted for a violation of the law. In the family section, we'd be dining by candlelight inside our booths and wouldn't be allowed out even if our meals were finished and paid for. Being late to a dinner date often meant an extra 30 minute wait for the restaurant to reopen after prayer time. Conversely, eating too slowly meant that you might be held inside for the same period of time. We always ate out with an eye on our watches.
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/closedforprayer.jpg
Shops sometimes also violated the law for westerners in other ways. One such example was the sale of Christmas gear. In late November, some shops sold "festive season" decorations, but the packaging was either blotted out by felt pens or had stickers placed over them to hide all references to "Christmas" which as I've mentioned, is illegal.
Censorship of items with female images on them was rife. I've already mentioned that magazines were taken to with the big bad black felt pen. Here is an example of a CD that we purchased in Saudi Arabia. The original cover had a silhouette of a women in close proximity to a silhouette of a man on it, but even that is too risque and had to be blotted out. The photos associated with the biographies of the female artists on the inside cover were also censored if they showed any cleavage.
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/censored1.jpg
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/censored2.jpg
As much as Saudi women cover up when in kingdom, Saudi women travelling on international flights very often de-veil once outside of Saudi airspace. Leanne and I have witnessed on several occasions a rush of women to the plane's bathroom and shortly after, the women emerge in glamourous gowns, ostentatious jewellry and reeking of expensive perfumes. They are re-seated just in time for the locked alcohol cabinets to be re-opened and drinks served. The reverse applies when travelling towards the kingdom. The ninja outfits come back on and the airline locks away the booze. But international travel was the realm of the wealthy and sophisticated Saudi woman, who became more liberal when travelling outside the kingdom.
One aspect of segregation did manifest itself on plane flights, particularly domestic ones. Occasionally, women would be seated next to non-relative men or vice versa and there would be chaos. The poor flight attendants often had to reshuffle seating assignments to put women with women and men with men, often at the direction of the husband or relative travelling with the woman. Leanne and I had an experience where a Saudi man refused to sit with us in the 3-across seating of a particular plane flight, as he would be near a western woman and he demanded a seating change. As no Saudi woman would sit near me, we ended up having the 3 seats to ourselves.
I must digress and share a personal Saudi story about flying with you at this juncture. Leanne and I were due to fly out of the kingdom on our very first trip home. It had been over a year since we'd been home to Australia and despite having had 3 vacations in Egypt, London and France respectively, we wanted to get home badly. We caught a flight out of Riyadh to Singapore (via Bangkok) that left at 1am. Leanne was especially tired, we were anxious about the flight and we just wanted to get home. Strangely enough (and we forever took this as a bad omen) our Saudia flight took off on time. It's the first and only time that that's happened to us. As we pulled out onto the tarmac, the "travel prayer" was played over the plane's intercom. Yes, the airline routinely starts all flights with the prayer that Mohammed said whenever travelling. It's in Arabic, sounds morbid and quite sombre in tone, but is translated something to the effect that we pray to Allah that we get there in one piece.
Anyhow, we started the take off roll and as we picked up quite a bit of speed, there was a loud thump that sounded from somewhere under the plane. We thought aloud to each other that maybe a luggage access port had come open or that we'd hit something. However, the plane took off and we were off into the sky. I commented that we weren't very high up as I looked out the window, but Leanne said not to worry and almost immediately put on her sleep goggles and put her seat back for a snooze. I continued to look out my window and noticed that we seemed to be going around in circles, as I'd seen the moon twice and was sure I could see the city again. Leanne shushed me and told me that the pilot knew what he was doing. I then noticed the next suspicious thing and tapped Leanne on the shoulder and asked her to look out the window. With a grumpy frown, she sat up, snatched off the goggles and looked out through my window to the wing where there was now fluid pouring out of the tip of the wing. A loud "holy poo poo!" filled the cabin just before the pilot came over the intercom.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, due to some technical difficulties, we will be returning the Riyadh International Airport. However, for safety reasons, we will be dumping fuel for the next 30 minutes in preparation for our emergency landing back in Riyadh. I request at this time that the re-familiarise yourself with the emergency procedures contained on the pamphlet in your seat pockets and obey the instructions of the flight crew. I thank you for flying with Saudia, and should you survive the flight, we sincerely hope that you choose to fly with us again"
OK, maybe he didn't say that last bit, but I knew he was thinking it. I know I was. So anyhow, we flew around the desert for almost 40 minutes dumping jet fuel to lighten the load and minimise the explosion hazard. Leanne and I noted dozens of Bedouin campfires ringing the city limits and wondered if any looked to the sky wondering why rain was falling before WHOOOOOFF, up went the jet fuel as it hit their fire. As we returned to the airport for the final time, we could see dozens of flashing lights and vehicles lining the remote emergency runway that we were being diverted to. It turned out that we had blown an engine on takeoff, but were too far gone to pull up and had to keep going up into the sky, hence the shallow take off angle. When we landed, the 747 could only do reverse thrust on 2 engines (one wasn't working and a 3 engine reverse thrust would have skewed the plane across the runway) and so, we whizzed past the fire trucks, ambulances and police that were waiting our arrival. The plane ended pulling up with its nose wheels in the desert and the rear wheels just on the tarmac. Saudis on the flight scrambled to the obvious exits and demanded immediate release, but we remained calm and planned a quick escape down the back exits which were unattended and unnoticed.
To cut a long story short, we had a new plane prepared, transferred the luggage and took off 4 hours late. Our planned 4 hour stopover in Singapore was looking wholly inadequate and we were stressing about missing the connection home. To our amazement, we picked up about 20 minutes on the flight due to tailwinds and after radioing ahead to Singapore, we were met by frantic escorts and sprinted through the Singapore terminal, reaching the QANTAS flight just as they were closing the door to the plane.
But back to the main story...
I participated in a “medical outreach program" where our hospital sent senior staff out to smaller provincial centres to evaluate and teach them. Because of the restrictions on women travelling unaccompanied, and because women are not allowed to book hotels or stay in hotel rooms by themselves, there were no women in the program. At one hospital's x-ray department, I arrived to find two female Filipino Radiographers working slavishly whilst 25 or so Saudi and a few non-Saudi male Radiographers largely sat around doing nothing. I enquired what was happening and the reply was that they had a strict policy that males x-ray males and females x-ray females. The patient split was 50/50 between the sexes, but the overwhelming imbalance between the ratio of male to female staff meant that the two poor girls were working their buns off whilst the men sat back and socialised most of the day.
There was one positive aspect of segregation for Saudi women, and that occurred during wedding celebrations. Saudi weddings involve a civil registration of marriage followed by a segregated wedding reception where the men are in one hall and the women in another. Leanne witnessed at one wedding we went to (and had to stay apart at) the fact that the mothers of young Saudi men take the opportunity to size up potential brides for their offspring whilst they're all unveiled and dressed “normally" . It was one of the few times that non-related Saudi women had the opportunity to see each other revealed. Leanne described it as an absolute meat market. She had an Arab friend of hers translating the conversations around her and many revolved around commenting on the child bearing hips of a particular dancing woman or outright asking young women if they were married (or betrothed) and if not, then how the mothers had male children looking for wives. Sadly, some approaches were along the lines of "your cousin Ali is looking for a 3rd wife....interested?" As marriage and motherhood as the main vocation for women is drummed into Saudis from an early age, many girls at the wedding receptions did seem to make positive overtones towards the circling sharks.
But in public, and even during hospital medical procedures, most Saudi women are conditioned to cover their faces, often at the expense of other parts of their anatomy. I've mentioned ladies for x-rays coming out of change rooms with their breasts exposed but their heads covered with the patient gown. I also witnessed women having more intimate procedures such as a hysterosalpingogram (HSG) with their naked legs up in the air in stirrups, but their faces covered with a veil still. For your information, an HSG is a radiology test where a catheter is inserted up via the vagina, through the cervix and into the uterus and contrast is injected to see if the fallopian tubes "fill and spill" indicating patency. Apparently covering the face was more important than other modesty considerations during tests.
Speaking of female medical matters, I have one correction stemming from my earlier posts. Leanne informs me that most of the female circumcisions she saw in labour and delivery were evident on Sudanese and Eritrean Muslim women, and not very often on Saudis. Removing the clitoris and narrowing the vaginal opening to make sex unpleasureable was more of a cultural thing in that part of the Islamic world, and not in Saudi.
In 1996, I was feeling bad for women patients who weren't getting their procedures explained - remember, they couldn't give consent for their own tests or procedures. And so, I got my section to create and translate bilingual patient information pamphlets. They took several weeks to create, proof read, correct and then gain approval by several layers of red tape wielding hospital administrators. We proudly publicised them and distributed them for reading, only to realise later than most patients - especially women - were illiterate and couldn't read the drat things.
http://fi.somethingawful.com/is/img209/9764/patientpamphlets650zl3.jpg
Ignorance isn't always bliss for women in the kingdom though. Not only are there no women's health campaigns, but no safety and accident prevention campaigns either. We frequently saw families driving around Riyadh with no seat belts on and children climbing throughout the speeding vehicles. Driving is nuts in Saudi Arabia and high speed collisions frequently killed entire families, as the vehicle's occupants would be catapulted through the windscreen and smeared across the road, or bounced around inside vehicles like a pinball. We cynically referred to small Saudi children as "Saudi airbags" as we saw for ourselves thousands of examples where the mother would be sitting unbelted in a car with one or two unrestrained children on their lap.
article on speeding deaths
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion ... m=7&y=2004
and whole families being killed
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion ... m=5&y=2004
Another aspect of ignorance in the kingdom was that people frequently didn't know how old they were. Firstly, the Hejira calendar is lunar and not coincidental with the solar year that we follow. Also, anyone older than about 40 to 50 had little reference for their birth. Prior to the 70's or even 80's, records weren't kept and births were related via oral tradition. Some of the references for births were oblique, such as “I was born at the start of the great war of liberation". That might have meant the Arab/Israeli war of 1967 or the one in 1973. Others were born in the year of the great flood, or the year of the comet. For hospital medical records, we had to estimate the approximate Gregorian calendar year of birth, and if the actual birth date wasn't known, 1st of January was used as a default birthday for thousands of patients. This led to some obvious miscalculations in age, but perhaps none more so than this 145 year old man as reported in the Arab News. Note the number of grandchildren attributed to him - 600 from less than 10 children, equals some 60 or more grandchildren per child. Needless to say, don't believe everything that you read - particularly in Saudi Arabia.
http://fi.somethingawful.com/is/img233/6892/145yosaudi650az0.jpg
When we arrived in Saudi Arabia, the year was 1414, literally ! They follow the Hejira calendar and the date was fairly indicative of the attitudes. It was kind of like being alive 600 years ago. And yes, many of the cultural practices and educational standards were appropriate for the Middle Ages by our enlightened western standards. But you have to remember that Saudi Arabia was largely undeveloped and cut off from the rest of the world until the 1970s. That's less than 40 years to evolve from a superstitious, ignorant Middle Age mentality to try to catch up and join the modern world community - and they have a long way to go
Durro
P.S. I found that I did have a copy of the "Dear Islam" article from the Arab News about whether it's permissible to kill a bastard child and stone the mother to death. But I got it wrong when I mentioned it earlier it was strangle the child, not drown it. Must have been thinking about kittens instead of children....
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/dearislam.jpg quote:Part 5:
Hello again and welcome to part 4 of this series about the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia.
As mentioned earlier, women in Saudi Arabia have severe limitations placed upon them with regards to travel. They are not supposed to be in public without a male relative in attendance and cannot drive or book a hotel room. Some wealthier families have "drivers" invariably from 3rd world countries that drive the women, act as escorts/man servants and carry their belongings/shopping. Technically, it's probably illegal under Saudi Law but it's one of the few instances where these rules are publicly bent. The Koran does say that women can reveal themselves to their slaves/servants. We did notice however, that the drivers tended to stay a long distance away from their charges and none seemed to have a close relationship with the female family members of their employers. To get too close is to risk facing the prospect of committing adultery which of course is a capital offence.
We went on a couple of weekend scuba diving trips to the Red Sea while we were in Saudi. Each time, it was deliberately arranged by the diving tour group we used that we booked our trip to coincide with a few western single females from our hospital who wanted to go at the same time, so that we could legally “escort" them as a married couple. The dive companies can't take unescorted single females without risk of prosecution. Leanne and I had to ensure that we had our western marriage licence translated into Arabic and carry it with us to prove that we were married and to take responsibility for the single ladies. The final dive of the day was carefully timed in the early morning so that we could still go on the plane back to Riyadh later that evening without risking getting the bends at altitude - the single girls couldn't get a hotel room in Jeddah and so had to fly out the same day and of course, we had to escort them on their journey. The only exception to this rule was when western females traveled in and out of the kingdom on international flights - in this instance, they could travel unaccompanied.
The Durro's with one of the single ladies being escorted by us, taken just after leaving Jeddah. Note that everyone is wearing long clothes - the girls had just ditched their abayas and I am wearing the standard western male clothing - shorts in public aren't allowed.
http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/SDurro/diveescort.jpg
For western women, shopping was one of the few outlets from their mundane and restricted existence. Haggling for price is an institution in Saudi Arabia and my wife Leanne turned it into an art form. Apart from being a useful tool for obtaining bargains, it is one of the vehicles that women can use to get assertive, if not actually aggressive, against men. You do have to bear in mind that most shop employees are 3rd world nationals - by law, Saudis own the businesses but overwhelmingly don't run them personally and generally hire cheap labour to front them. In our experience, the Pakistani and Indian men who manned the shops were generally more subservient than what you might usually expect from a western salesman. Both western women and many Saudi women often delighted in hard bargaining for goods as it was one of the only opportunities for women to take the upper hand against men. Haggling was done in virtually every shop except supermarkets - everything else such as gold, electronics, clothing, Persian carpets and furniture was fair game. As much as I enjoyed the friendly bantering, jokes and the give and take of haggling, Leanne attacked it with gusto and has become our family's official negotiator with most large purchases. Later when we returned home to Australia, she got $8000 knocked off the price of our cars and $3,000 (35%) off our white goods and furniture when we restocked our home once we returned back. We recently got a new plasma TV, and even several years after returning home from Saudi, I sent in my haggling pit bull terrier to do the deed and she got a $3100 TV for $2300. Herb Cohen move over, because this woman really can negotiate anything.
Other aspects of returning home to Oz weren't quite as smooth. For about a year after coming home, Leanne was self conscious about wearing shorts and skirts in public, after 5½ years wearing a neck to toe Abaya when out. She was so conditioned to wearing the Abaya that she felt uncomfortable wearing revealing clothing and usually wore jeans or slacks. She still doesn't wear bikinis at the beach or in our own swimming pool, preferring a more modest one piece swimsuit after a bad experience with arab men staring at the hospital pool when she went for a swim in the hospital pool on a designated "family day" .
I was also able to play a trick on her soon after we got home to Australia - we decided to play cholesterol roulette and have KFC for dinner one particular evening. As we approached Kentucky Duck, I grabbed her by the shoulder and said “Hey, you can't go in there, that's the men's section". She did a double take, looked around in confusion for the family entrance and it took her a good 5 or 6 seconds for the penny to drop as to where she was. I got a solid thump on the shoulder for that one...
I was having lunch at a sushi place here in Oz a few months ago, and got speaking with the store owner. She revealed that the shop was closing, as her and her family was packing up to move back to Saudi Arabia. We shared experiences and I asked what the reason was for her returning. She said that she had trouble coping with paying bills and managing her household without a maid and was returning to the kingdom as life was “easier" for her. Yes, I should mention that part of the deal over there is that the employer generally provides free, furnished accommodation. There are no electricity bills, gas bills, local phone bills or insurances to pay. Expats usually only have to pay for international phone calls and their personal costs. A lot of returning expats are fairly useless with budgeting and a fair percentage do end up going back to earn the tax free dollars as they are terrible money managers and often burn through their savings. The other issue for foreign families in Saudi is that many expats over there do hire live-in maids. For about 3000 SR per month (less than Aus $1000 per month) plus free food, families can hire a 24 hour live in maid/nanny 6 days per week to cook, clean, shop and child mind. The maids are usually the wives of Eritrean, Filipino or Sudanese workers in kingdom who earn extra money for themselves, often more than doubling their own family’s wages given that street sweepers, taxi drivers and McDonalds' counter boys don't get paid much.
In kingdom, sometimes western women get seduced by the dark side of The Force and convert to Islam (Muslims call it “reverting" to Islam, as we're all apparently born in Allah's good grace until our minds are poisoned with blasphemy). We knew a few western women who went the whole hog so to speak, and adopted Muslim names and wore Islamic headscarves. One American Radiographer I worked with, Michelle, was a very vivacious and attractive southern belle from down Carolina way who met and fell in love with a Saudi man and converted to Islam before eventually marrying him. She went from outgoing and friendly to more subdued and quiet in a fairly short time. She started wearing headscarves at work, and I was shocked one time to see a veiled woman show up to a westerner's party, only to see Michelle strip off the veil once she was in the door. She explained to me that her new fiance demanded it to prevent her being "harassed" in public because of her long platinum blonde hair. As soon as she was married, she was no longer allowed to mix with her colleagues out of working hours and became socially isolated.
I have heard many stories of western women who marry Saudis and have a very short honeymoon before the traditional cultural pressures exert themselves and the woman's place is rigidly defined and restricted by her husband who reverts to type. Many of these marriages end up in divorce, as the western women end up with a "different person" to the man they thought they were marrying. I'd like to mention that under Saudi law, if a foreign woman ends up getting divorced, the Saudi man gains automatic custody of the children and the western ex-wife has no rights. In comparison, a Saudi woman retains the right to keep the children until a boy is 7 and a girl is 9 before she has to hand them over to the father. See the references for these issues at :- http://www.international-divorce.com/d-saudi.htm
As I mentioned in an earlier post, some women are more equal than others in Saudi Arabia and in particular, the royal family has a different set of rules. It's rare for them to be held accountable to their own laws, and the “death of a Princess" saga ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha%27il ... hd_al_Saud ) from the late 70's was very much an unusual event for a royal family that gets away with tremendous excesses. In our direct experience, Princesses (and there's thousands of them) usually got around in stylish abayas with very see through veils. Their faces are often heavily made up and they have glimpses of expensive clothing showing through their minimal (but still quite modest by our standards) coverings. I once x-rayed the King's sister - she had a slight head cold and the doctor requested a paranasal sinuses x-ray series. The Princess refused to come down to the department for her imaging, and so I had to trudge up to the VIP unit to x-ray her portably (a technically very difficult exercise). I was the X-Ray Department's designated hitter for VIPs and royalty, as I'd already successfully x-rayed the Crown Prince (now King Abdullah) and helped save the life of King Fahd while men with machine guns watched on intently....more on that later. I found the VIP ward to be as opulent as any 5 star hotel - marble floors, sterling silver cutlery and gold leaf embossed plates, solid wood reception desks and luxurious, expensive Persian rugs on the floors. I had to wait for some 30 minute so the princess ( a 67 year old woman) could finish her foot massage and head massage from her two Filipino handmaids. There was consternation from the royal protocol people about taking her veil off for the x-rays, but in the end, the princess and I got to meet eye to eye and had a nice chat in English while I did the unnecessary, but surprisingly technically good x-rays.
The Saudis have a term for being highly ranked on society, or more importantly, having friends in high places. It's called “Wosta Wu" - it translated literally as “Vitamin A" , but means having powerful connections. Many Saudis used the protection of Wosta to evade traffic fines, get preferential treatment and generally throw their weight around. If you were friends with a particular Prince, or perhaps knew a friend who lived next door to the brother of the guy who was in charge of the - well, you get the idea, then influence could be wielded. We saw promotions and advancement given to male and a few female Saudis with Wosta power. When my section rejected a terrible (male) Saudi student who wanted to join my team, he tried to use Wosta against us and get a few of us westerners fired to make way for him. His Wosta influence with a mid-level hospital administrator was not powerful enough though (I was the V-VIP designated hitter in Radiology), and so we stayed and he ended up leaving for another hospital where he soon got promoted to be in charge of a section, only 1 year out from university.
Leanne did actually turn down an opportunity to be the personal nurse/midwife and nanny for a high ranking princess who was pregnant with triplets and decided that she would go to the USA for her confinement and maybe some recovery time in Britain. She had lined up 3 Filipino NICU nurses to look after each triplet, but was after a western NICU nurse with Midwifery experience to oversee the 3 Filipinas and be the big boss of the nurses and babies while the Princess recovered. Leanne, a senior NICU nurse in her unit and a Midwife was given 1st choice to accompany the Princess to New York. Leanne declined as she didn't want to be separated from me, but one of her single female colleagues who fitted the bill snapped up the opportunity for international travel whilst getting paid double - once by the princess and she was still being paid by our hospital whilst being seconded to the royal family. Turns out she was away for 6 months, not 3, and spent time in NY and London before going to a villa in Spain where Sean Connery was the next door neighbour (apparently he is very charming over afternoon tea but refuses to talk about movies). Leanne's colleague got a sizeable monetary bonus and a new car purchased for her (shipped to her home, as she couldn't drive it in Saudi Arabia) at the completion of her duties.
It wasn't all roses over there, and in fact, Leanne got woken up by a car bomb that went off in broad daylight a few hundred metres down the road from where we lived in 1995. A reference for the bomb can be found at the CNN website http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9511/saudi_blast/pm/
The blast killed several people including 5 Americans and wounded dozens of others. Leanne was at home sleeping after a night duty shift. The American training facility that was targeted was only a few hundred metres down the street and Leanne said that when the bomb went off, the building shook and the windows vibrated, making her wake up and think that there was an earthquake in progress. She looked out the windows and saw a column of smoke rising down the block on Thalateen Street. We came very close to coming home then and there, but as this was the first real violent episode we'd seen against westerners, and witnessing the extreme security clamp down in the kingdom in the months after, we rationalized that we were statistically safe but curtailed a lot of our extracurricular activities for a while until things settled down.
As westerners, we theoretically lived with the implied threat of violence from Islamic hardliners. Apart from the 1 bombing near home, there weren't any real signs of overt danger to us. In fact, we often (except in the months following the bombing) walked the streets at night without fear of mugging or attack. Leanne often wore several thousand dollars worth of gold jewelry and there was no instances where she felt unsafe doing so. Overall, we did feel generally safe.
However, both when we were there and after returning home, we did hear about some westerners being pursued in vehicles in road rage incidents, having a pipe bomb placed under a car at a shopping centre, being shot at by an amateur sniper and observing suspicious behaviour by Saudis seemingly reconnoitering western housing compounds. We regularly received faxed warnings from the various embassies about the various incidents and often received advice on keeping a low profile and maintaining personal security. Our softball league was closed down for several months following the tensions of the Riyadh bombing and again after the Dhaharan Bombing which killed hundreds of US military personnel. The recent movie “The Kingdom" about a terrorist attack on a western compound in Saudi Arabia was far too close to home for us and Leanne and I found it personally disturbing viewing ....what could have been, in retrospect...
Some of the softball team boys decided to try and attend the execution of the 4 guys who did the Riyadh bombing which killed the 5 westerners and woke Leanne up. So several of us went down to "chop-chop square" in downtown Riyadh on the Friday we were told it was going to happen. We were forewarned that westerners are generally pushed to the front of the crowd to witness up close Islamic justice. As we were all medical people who have seen the horrors of gunshot wounds, motor vehicle accidents and various other terrible injuries, we figured that we'd be able to stomach a beheading and were interested in seeing justice served to the guys that bombed close to home for us - metaphorically and literally. It turned out that our bravado was unnecessary, as the terrorists were executed on a different day. We did witness however, the spectacle of hundreds of men exiting the local mosque and coming out to the square to spit on the spot where the condemned are executed. It seems that the final indignation for the condemned prisoners is to look down at a mound of phlegmatous sputum that their severed head are about to fall into face first.
Festeringbob asked me a specific question in the discussion thread linked to this forum about women wearing abayas in public given the climate issues. To go you an idea of the heat, Riyadh experiences Death Valley type temperatures for around 4 to 6 months of the year with near zero humidity. It's arguably the world's driest, hottest capital city and some friends independently recorded temperatures in the high forties and low 50's Celsius in the height of summer on a regular basis. That's over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. It's like opening an oven and feeling a blast of hot dry air come out at you, except you're completely surrounded by it. You barely notice any sweating in Riyadh in summer, as any moisture on the skin evaporates off almost instantly. The rest of the year, it's just drat hot and dry, except for a month or so of cool weather after New Year and 2 or 3 days per year of rain. Of interesting note is that the King publicly calls for a national day of prayer for rain once a year - usually timed for when a huge rain-bearing low pressure front is advancing on the kingdom across Nth Africa. Lo and behold, it usually rains the day after the King's proclamation, cementing his place as one of Allah's chosen people and the true Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. In summer - well for about 6 months of the year really - we had to turn our hot water system off in our apartment to get cool water. The "cold" water coming in from the pipes in the street was heated by the sun and sand to near boiling temperatures, and the only way to get cold running water was to let the water in the (switched off) hot water system cool down. The net effect was that for 6 months of the year, cold and hot taps are reversed in function. Anyhow, it's bloody hot. Fry an egg on the sidewalk hot. And bloody dusty too.
So, with this in mind, consider the women who wear the black coloured neck to toe length abaya all year round. And under their abaya, they still had to wear modest clothing so that no skin would show if the abaya blew up in the breeze or rode up legs when women ascended staircases, etc. For most western women, they avoided going out in the heat of the day, and went from air-conditioned taxis/cars to air-conditioned shops to air-conditioned apartments. But in those instances where outside walking was required, it was drat hot and uncomfortable. Many Saudi women seemed to wear their abayas without cleaning them too often and you could frequently smell them from some distance. Even in the hospital, you could smell the odours of stale sweat and caked on grime/dust drifting down the corridors. A small but significant percentage of Saudi ladies we encountered were absolutely rank in their personal hygiene and their abayas were foul.
In closing, I'd like to refer you to http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/ which has an English translation of the Koran and commentary. Some of the things that the Koran says about women are fairly ghastly by our standards (but then again, that applies to the Bible as well in parts). As you'd guess, these discriminatory and sexist beliefs are fairly well adhered to in the conservative Muslim Saudi Arabia. It outlines things like women can only inherit ½ of what men get, 2 women equal one man's testimony in court and that men shouldn't pray if they have touched a woman. The link is at http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/q ... /long.html
Some examples include :-
Men are in charge of women, who should be obedient
Women 4:34 Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property (for the support of women). So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded
Don't pray if you are drunk, dirty or have touched a woman.
Women 4:43 O ye who believe! Draw not near unto prayer when ye are drunken, till ye know that which ye utter, nor when ye are polluted, save when journeying upon the road, till ye have bathed. And if ye be ill, or on a journey, or one of you cometh from the closet, or ye have touched women, and ye find not water, then go to high clean soil and rub your faces and your hands (therewith). Lo! Allah is Benign, Forgiving.
Men are superior to women
The Cow 2:228 …….And they (women) have rights similar to those (of men) over them in kindness, and men are a degree above them. Allah is Mighty, Wise.
Menstruation is an illness and women should not be touched until their period is over.
The Cow 2:222 They question thee (O Muhammad) concerning menstruation. Say: It is an illness, so let women alone at such times and go not in unto them till they are cleansed. And when they have purified themselves, then go in unto them as Allah hath enjoined upon you. Truly Allah loveth those who turn unto Him, and loveth those who have a care for cleanness.
You can have sex with your wife whenever you want.
The Cow 2:223 Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will, and send (good deeds) before you for your souls, and fear Allah, and know that ye will (one day) meet Him. Give glad tidings to believers, (O Muhammad).
And women are feeble and unable to formulate plans.
Women 4:98 Except the feeble among men, and the women, and the children, who are unable to devise a plan and are not shown a way.
It is from this sort of material that the secular laws of Saudi Arabia are derived, as well as their moral code and cultural traditions. Thousands of years of tribal ignorance compounded by a sexist, misogynistic and backward religion makes for a very different culture to what we experience in the west. It was certainly an eye opener for us.
Well, that's about it for now. Thanks again for taking the time to read these stories. I'm happy to answer questions on the comments thread.
Durro
the end
apologies for 
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2009 11:51
