The Saudi Fashion Police

By: Daniel Brumberg

February 27, 2009

Rana Jad is a 20-year-old student at Dar al-Hikma Women's College . . . "Girls don't feel very comfortable when males are selling them lingerie, telling them what size is for them . . . He's totally checking the girls out! It's just not appropriate, especially here in our culture."

That's an excerpt from a BBC story about Dr. Reem Asaad, a finance professor who recently launched an Internet campaign to have Saudi Arabia's lingerie shops staffed by women. Taking a solidly business-like approach, Dr. Asaad insists that "the consumers are the final decision makers." Rana Jad—one of her keen students—clearly agrees.

Wrapped in this story of Saudi lingerie sales is a larger tale of politics, conservative Islam and state legitimacy.

As I was reminded in my recent trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia boasts a sophisticated class of professional women. Those professors, doctors, scientists and businesswomen believe that their faith allows them to fully participate in economic life, and in the halting liberalization of the country's political institutions.

Traditionalists have long opposed the entrance of Saudi women into the business world. But in a country ruled by a Royal Family—partly beholden to a clerical establishment that defends a deeply embedded social conservatism—it is wholly inappropriate for men to assist women in selecting underwear. So in 2006, an ordinance was passed giving women the right to sell lingerie. Making good strategic use of the country's conservative ethos to advance their quest for equal economic rights, Saudi women entrepreneurs secured one small victory.

But the lingerie law was never enforced. In a country with 13% of the male workforce unemployed and a judiciary controlled by clerics, women are still thwarted from entering the retail sales system. That is why Professor Reem's campaign is not about who sells underwear. Ultimately, it is an effort to loosen and realign some of the uneven threads in the fabric of conservative cultural and religious hegemony in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi leaders recently have taken steps that might advance this wider struggle. On King Abdullah's orders, the country's first woman minister has been appointed. The King also has appointed moderate clerics to a powerful committee of religious scholars. These steps are hardly revolutionary, however. None of the moderates threaten hard-line conservatives. And the woman minister was appointed by a King who, while he has allowed municipal elections to take place, (women excluded), in large measure does not have to worry about the formal constraints of democratic governance.

Some argue that this absence of democratic accountability is a necessary evil. The problem facing women's rights advocates in Saudi Arabia—a problem not confined to the Muslim world by any means—is that elections in a land still permeated by a socially conservative ethos can produce an assembly of leaders opposed to change. If, as Mel Brooks once said, "it's good to be King," it can be useful to have a benevolent, forward thinking monarch who selectively deploys his authority to foster—or even impose—modern reforms.

The problem, of course, is that today's benevolent monarch might be replaced by tomorrow's backward looking, malevolent king—a point that I am sure has occurred to Professor Asaad and her enthusiastic students.

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