Saudi Arabia - The Enigma; Love, Marriage, Divorce

Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Flag; On a background of green, the color of Islam, is the Shahada, above an unsheathed sword, both in white.

After driving south to Medina we flew to Jeddah, so the missing parts of Ibn Battuta’s journey will be written about on another visit.   Ibn Battuta visited Saudi Arabia many times because he kept coming back to perform the Hajj.  It is my intention, as was it his most of the time, to avoid backtracking - he did not always succeed and up to now I am not doing much better.  It is quite incredible just how difficult it is to follow him exactly. After visiting the Western part of Saudi Arabia he went to Iraq and western Iran. He then came back through Iraq and what is now eastern Turkey and north-eastern Syria to Saudi Arabia for another Hajj before going off to Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Oman, south-eastern Iran, Bahrain, the eastern part of Saudi Arabia, Mecca and yet another Hajj.  I have already been to Yemen and as I am in Saudi Arabia, I am going to write about the Eastern province now. Furthermore, I am going to combine Ibn B’s first and second journeys to Iran into one visit -  visas and passports are an expensive and time-consuming business, all of which he was spared. 

I first visited Saudi Arabia in 1977 - it does not look anything like it looked then. I saw it change over the years and was last there in 2002, but I am still amazed at what they have achieved. Saudi cities look like modern American cities except they are in fact more modern with better roads and cleaner streets, and when one considers that in 1976 Jeddah had one traffic light, and now the country is criss-crossed with modern highways, bridges, underpasses and overpasses, in addition to which everyone has accommodation with electricity, running water and sewage piping, high quality healthcare and education to university level is free for citizens, I would say they have done a remarkable job - I am not sure any other country could have done better.
Wheat circles taken from the plane above Wadi Diwassir in the center of the country. Saudi Arabia is a wheat exporter......

It is also a country that is difficult to understand for most Western people. How can it be, they ask, that it looks so ‘modern’, that it has all the brand names and stores and cars and supermarkets and apparent lifestyle that we have, yet at the same time be a society where men and women often have very separate lives, where women have no ‘freedom’ and cannot even drive? How, they ask, do these two sides of the country so seemingly at odds reconcile themselves? 

Saudi Arabia moves slowly on social issues. The government has a fine line to tread between the conservative ulema who would ideally like to keep everything as it is, (in some cases some of them would probably be happier to see things go backwards), and the progressive thinkers who would like to see social change implemented much faster.

Saudi with a prized falcon which he took on the plane with him - the sport is still highly esteemed here.

The Saudis were gravely affected by the fall of the Shah in 1979 - a Shah who was very pro-American, who perhaps thought he was doing the right thing for his people, at least initially, by forcing forward social reform, but who was so far out of touch with them that he was unable to see the writing on the wall.  The Saudi government moves cautiously - the country has the added impetus of being the home of the two holiest Islamic sites, and they take this responsibility very seriously; the King’s title is “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”.

The fact that women cannot drive is an obsession with Westerners - most Saudis will tell you it is indeed absurd and is all about tradition, which really just means men being reluctant to relinquish control. (And that is, or has been, universal.....!) However it is not the most important issue for most Saudi women for whom other social issues take precedence.  In any event despite the fact that women are not yet allowed to drive, they can now buy and register cars in their name so it surely is only a matter of time - I saw a woman driving on a semi-private road as did our police escort, who did nothing.

And so on the topic of social matters, I had an interesting discussion with a young woman, product of an American/Saudi marriage, about marriage and divorce in the Kingdom. I told her that when I was living there I remembered a law had been passed whereby men had to get permission from the government to marry foreign women. It was said to have been instigated by Saudi women who at that time were not allowed to marry foreigners yet saw their men being snapped up by foreign wives. She told me things had changed a little; Saudi women over the age of 25 can now marry foreigners if they are Muslim, and Saudi men over the age of 35 can marry foreign women. (Men can also marry non-Muslim women who are not obliged to change their religion although things are more complicated if they do not). Special permission is needed if people who are younger than the ages stipulated want to marry foreigners.   She also said that not many men took multiple wives any more as they could no longer afford it. Only the very wealthy still carried on the tradition.
Saudis are very hospitable - here a local man has invited us for coffee. He is pounding the coffee beans to make traditional Arabic coffee which is slightly bitter at first but delicious when one has acquired the taste. It is served in tiny handleless cups and it is customary to accept at least two cups.

The subject of multiple wives has also long been a subject of prurient interest in the West. There may be some remote rural communities where women’s lives are hard, and older wives who can no longer be bothered with their husband’s amorous proclivities, are not disturbed if he takes a second wife if only to help her with the daily work, but I do not personally know of any. On the other hand I have never met an urban woman whatever her education, wealth or social status, who was happy with the idea of her husband taking a second wife. Most women do not wish to become one either, and it usually only occurs if the girl is older (25 and still single in some countries is ‘over the hill’ ), and her choice of a husband becomes limited and perhaps more importantly, her chance to have children diminishes, or the man is very wealthy which would be beneficial to her and her family. This is a whole other subject which will be discussed later. 

In Arab countries, marriage has traditionally been a contract. Just as families in much of the rest of the world married their offspring to ‘suitable’ mates for dynastic or financial reasons, Bedouin Arab families married cousins so accumulated wealth would stay in the family, and so they could be sure of the provenance of the family, (this is now dying out as they realize it is the cause of many birth defects), while urban families arranged marriages with suitable families for social or financial reasons. Love rarely entered into it and if the couple liked each other so much the better, if they did not they could always get divorced, and they frequently did. My friend’s grandmother married 8 times. Rarely was any stigma attached to divorce because it was purely a contractual agreement. My friend however felt that now there was a greater stigma and her theory was that women, and even men, now wanted to marry for love. She explained that the Western notion of romantic love had entered Saudi society and now if a couple married for love and it did not work out, personal failure was attached to it in a way that was not the case when marriage was arranged as a contractual matter. Women perhaps felt they were not thin or pretty enough to keep the man, men probably felt they did not earn enough money or were too boring to keep their wives. I thought it an interesting theory for which I am going to try and get more anecdotal evidence - “progress” knows no bounds...........

Traditional tribal wedding dress from the western part of the country.