Saudi Women in the Masculine State

Saudi women are not so much the victims of Wahhabi Islam as they are the political pawns of the regime that uses them to manipulate the image of the ruling Al Saud family to preserve its nearly 300 year stranglehold on power in Arabia-or so argues Madawi Al-Rasheed, Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King's College, University of London, in her new book, A Most Masculine State.

Thus, in the 1980s the regime, eager to appear pious after Islamic fundamentalists had ousted the Shah of Iran, allowed the Saudi religious establishment to impose all sorts of restrictions on women who were forced to become an icon of the kingdom's purity. Changing rooms in stores were forbidden; Saudi women could remove their clothing only in their husband's home. Hair coloring and driving were forbidden as these imitated Western infidels. Saudi was the "last bastion of Islam" according to the kingdom's senior religious leader, the blind Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah bin Baz. Female "invisibility in the public sphere was ironically a visible token of state piety and the nation's commitment to Islam," writes Al-Rasheed.

Once again, after Saudi terrorists attacked the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2011, the regime used its women to create a new image at home and abroad. This time the regime sought an image not of rigid religiosity but of moderate modernism. Al Saud rulers realized that two decades of indulging Islamic fundamentalists had bred a virulent threat not just to the West but also to the regime as home-grown terrorists began attacks inside the kingdom. Quickly the regime began to seek a more modern image.

Educated Saudi women were allowed visibility as television anchors, as business women, and as columnists and critics of the religious establishment (though not the royal rulers).