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Saudi Arabia
URBANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT
The family and
religious values have profound implications for future development
and for policy planning. Family values, and the corresponding
behaviors of individuals, have been institutionalized by the state
in the process of centralizing control and allocating resources.
Many of the state-supported restrictions on women, for example,
did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s. They were the product of
attempts to reconcile family and religious values with opportunities
and objectives that have grown out of the development process
and of increased religious conservatism. Over the past two decades,
one striking outgrowth of Saudi development has been rapid migration
of the population to the cities. In the early 1970s, an estimated
26 percent of the population lived in urban centers. In 1990 that
figure had risen to 73 percent. The capital, Riyadh, had about
666,000 inhabitants according to the 1974 census (the most recent
official census). By 1984 the population, augmented by the removal
of the diplomatic missions from Jiddah to Riyadh, was estimated
at about 1.8 million.
Urbanization, education, and modernization were having profound
effects on society as a whole, but especially on the family. The
urban environment fostered new institutions, such as women's charitable
societies, that facilitated associations and activities for women
outside the family network. Urban migration and wealth were breaking
up the extended family household, as young couples left hometowns
and established themselves in single-family homes. Education for
women also was encouraging the rise of the nuclear family household:
a study in Ad Dammam carried out in 1980 showed that of a sample
of 100 salaried women, 91 percent of whom had a high-school or
university education, fully 90 percent lived in nuclear family
households. By contrast, in a sample of rural women who were 91
percent illiterate, only half lived in a nuclear family unit.
The same study showed that the more educated, salaried women had
an average of two children, as opposed to rural women with an
average of 4.6 children. As the level of education rose, the age
of first marriages rose as well: 79 percent of the salaried women
were over the age of sixteen (and most over the age of nineteen)
when first married, whereas 75 percent of rural women were married
between the ages of ten and twelve.
In spite of the limitations imposed by sex-segregation values,
and in spite of the small proportion of women in the work force
relative to men (7 percent in 1990), the number of working women--and
the kinds of places in which they worked--were growing. In the
early 1990s, women were employed in banks, including banks exclusively
for women, in utility and computer operations, in television and
radio programming, and in some ministries. They worked as clerical
assistants, journalists, teachers and administrators in girls'
schools, university professors, and as social workers. In medicine,
women served as doctors, pharmacists, and, more recently, as nurses.
In 1992 there were almost 3,100 Saudi women trained and employed
as nurses, or 10 percent of the total number of nurses employed
in the kingdom. This number represented a dramatic change in the
attitudes of some families, not only toward the profession, but
about the limits of sex segregation. In the 1970s, nursing was
disparaged as a profession for women because of the presumed contact
it entailed with male doctors and patients; nursing programs in
Saudi Arabia thus could not recruit female Saudi students.
By the 1990s, women had proved themselves competent to succeed
in employment that had been culturally perceived as men's work,
and, in the academic field they had shown that they could be more
successful than men (see Education , this ch.). Women had also
carved out for themselves positions of respect outside the family,
whereas previously an aspect of respect for women came from being
unknown outside the family.
The practices of veiling and separation, and the values underlying
these practices, however, were not being dislodged. There was
little expressed desire for such change because the practices
were grounded in fundamental family values, religiously sanctioned
and institutionalized by the government. The premise that women,
from a moral standpoint, should not associate with unrelated men
was the basis for all Saudi regulations on the behavior of women,
including the separation of boys and girls in the education system,
the requirement that women have a male chaperon to travel, that
women hire a male manager as a requirement for obtaining a commercial
license, that women not study abroad without a male chaperon,
not check into a hotel alone, and not drive a car in the kingdom.
There was a link between tribal-family values, religion, and
state power that made intelligible the outcome of the women's
driving demonstration of November 1990. If, in fact, society held
as a basic moral premise that a woman should not be seen by any
man outside her own family, how could the same society allow her
to drive a car, when anyone passing by could see her face? The
position of the ulama as stated in a fatwa by the head
of the Department of Religious Research, Missionary Activities,
and Guidance was that women should not be allowed to drive because
Islam supported women's dignity. The fatwa did not say
that Islam forbade women's driving--Saudi Arabia was the only
Muslim country that forbade women to drive--but said that because
Islam supported women's dignity, a Muslim government must protect
women from the indignity of driving. The state could not easily
abrogate such rulings of the ulama because these rulings responded
to the family-tribal values and the interpretations of Islam that
were at the heart of Saudi society. The general public response
was supportive of the ulama and the actions of the state. Indeed,
there was a broad consensus of support for such rulings precisely
because they corresponded to the values of modesty and sex segregation
that were enmeshed in religion and in the honor of the family.
Changes being wrought through urbanization and development were
having disturbing consequences for the traditional notion of the
family and its values. They brought closely held religious values
into question. For men, the consequences were particularly unsettling
because these changes brought their position of control and protection
of the family into question. Education, urbanization, and modernization
placed women in areas of public space where, culturally, they
should not be, for public space was space reserved for men. The
physical world around Saudis was changing. Social groupings were
realigning, status categories were shifting, and economic dislocations
were altering people's income expectations. In such a fluctuating
world, for both men and women, clinging to traditional attitudes
about women in the family was an expression of a desire for stability
in the society at large. The development policies of the 1970s
and 1980s, had in effect, planted the seeds of a cultural backlash,
seeds that were coming into flower in the early years of the decade
of the 1990s.
* * *
The classic work on Arabian beduin is H.R.P. Dickson's The
Arab of the Desert. For information on beduin today, see
especially William Lancaster's The Rwalla Bedouin Today
and Donald Cole's numerous publications including Nomads of
the Nomads. Motoko Katakura in Bedouin Village writes
about issues of beduin settlement. Some of the best anthropological
studies available on Saudi Arabia, such as Arabian Oasis City:
The Transformation of 'Unayzah, have been prepared by Soraya
Altorki and Donald Cole. On gender issues, see the work of Aisha
Mohamed Almana, Soraya Altorki, and Eleanor Doumato. Deborah Amos's
book Lines in the Sand contains a chapter on gender issues
during the Persian Gulf War.
John Esposito's books on Islam, such as Islam: The Straight
Path and The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? are
among the best and most readable. James P. Piscatori's work on
Islamism, Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis,
contains information pertinent to Saudi Arabia, as does "Transforming
Dualities: Tribe and State Formation in Saudi Arabia" by Joseph
Kostiner. John S. Habib's Ibn Sa'ud's Warriors of Islam
remains the best reference for the Ikhwan movement. Edward Mortimer
in Faith and Power and George Rentz in "Wahhabism and
Saudi Arabia" write on the Wahhabi movement. Christine Moss Helms's
The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia is not only valuable on
the formation of the Saudi state, but also on geography, ecology,
and human settlement.
In Alan Richards's and John Waterbury's book, A Political
Economy of the Middle East, Saudi Arabia may be seen in relation
to other Middle Eastern countries. J.S. Birks and C.A. Sinclair
discuss issues of economy and development in Saudi Arabia
into the '90s. (For further information and complete citations,
see Bibliography.)
Data as of December 1992
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