The most striking thing which most visitors to Saudi Arabia notice is the way women are treated: their lower social status, fewer rights, restrictive dress, and efforts to separate women. One might imagine that changing these things would be a priority for reformers, but that isn't the case. On the contrary, most women have so internalized the teachings that they are inferior that they accept it.

The Economist reports:

[A]side from private homes, the most uninhibited spaces in today's Saudi Arabia are the holy cities of Mecca and Medina: less prudish foreign Muslims mingle freely here, and statutory pilgrim garb is actually more revealing than the cover-all black abaya required in other Saudi cities.

In fact, a surprising number of Saudi women are quite content with the ban on ikhtilat [mixing of sexes]. Some of them are more bothered by the incompleteness of the separation. Many government departments, for instance, have failed to create a women's section, so women either have to send an appointed male agent or be accompanied by a mahram or protector: a father, husband, brother or son.

Women only get half of a man's share of inheritance. Women's testimony in courts isn't worth as much as a man's. Men can deny women the ability to attend a university, to work, or to travel. Mothers have no custody rights over children. Men can divorce with a simple oath, but women must appeal to the judiciary.

All of this is not suppose to give people the impression that women are discriminated against in Islam. None of this should be interpreted as an indication that Islam is the least bit oppressive or backwards. Women in Saudi Arabia don't believe that changing any of this should be a priority.

A more common hazard of Saudi life is harder to measure: simple boredom. The bans on mixing, as well as on public entertainment such as cinemas and theatres, leave few distractions beyond home, family and the mosque. Many Saudis have grown addicted to satellite TV. Sociologists also note an increase in tafheet, juvenile delinquency such as drug-taking, hooliganism and late-night drag-racing in city streets. Boredom also prompts some to turn to religious extremism.

The rest make do with shopping. When a new store in Jeddah handed out gift vouchers to promote its opening last year, 15,000 people turned up, creating a stampede in which two people got trampled to death. What attracted them, said a local columnist, was the utter lack of anything else to do.

And this form of Islam, extreme and uncompromising, is supposed to be a model for the rest of humanity to follow? Better that the species just commit collective suicide rather than contemplate, even for a moment, that this form of this religion be the right one to follow. It's fortunate that not all forms of Islam are like this, but it's also true that Saudi religious clerics are major sponsors of Islam, Islamic teaching, and Islamic cultural centers around the world. Their influence on world-wide Islam is staggering and difficult to overestimate.

What are other Muslims doing about this... if anything?

 

Read More:

• Islam
• News About Islam
• Islam and Politics
• Women in Islam
• Wahhabi Islam
• Religion in Saudi Arabia