THE CURTAIN RISES
How young Arab women are quietly but profoundly changing their world,
Journalist Katherine Zoepf travelled to five countries — Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — as a reporter for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Her conversations with hundreds of young women who came of age after 9/11 form the basis of her book Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World. This interview has been edited and condensed.
You write that “the world changes because of wars and terrorist attacks but it also changes because a daughter makes slightly different decisions from the ones a mother made.” What do you mean by that?
I think in a region where so much news is necessarily driven by conflict it can be difficult to see ordinary life clearly. I wanted to write about women but I also wanted to give people a sense of texture of these places. Reality is so particular and you need to understand a lot of context to see what change really looks like, feels like, what change the people want. The first time I went to the Middle East I went to Syria and many of the women I was befriending didn’t necessarily want the things that I thought they would want.
Such as what?
For many years under the (Bashar) Assad government, girls weren’t allowed to wear the veil at school. That changed when I was there and it was something that was incredibly popular; it really boosted the regime’s popularity. That was startling for me.
You write about Syria and a mysterious organization, the al Qubaisi sisterhood, and what role it played for women before the war. Can you talk about that?
There was this woman, Munira al Qubaisi, who had studied in Saudi Arabia and came back and organized a prayer and discussion group that grew. Numbers are hard to come by but it was safe to say tens of thousands of Syrian women had joined the sisterhood. Women’s spaces are a little more protected than men’s so they were able to gather. It became a sort of engine for social mobility for a lot of poor Syrian women. Young women who joined and were well regarded had their marriages paid for, and received help finding jobs from sisterhood members.
What happened to them?
I was trying to follow them in the early days after the war but most of my Syrian friends and contacts are living outside Syria. Everyone who can afford to leave is gone.
In Saudi Arabia, women can train as lawyers now. When did that happen?
In 2004 they were able to study law but for many years they weren’t able to practise. It was only in 2013 that the first women, four of them, were licensed as lawyers which meant they could appear in court.
And are they taking on the system?
It is subtle. The women lawyers thought the important thing was, for women, to insist on all their rights within the existing system. The notion of criticizing Islamic law has a strong deterring effect when you are talking about laws that affect women and family. It is hard for women to appear to be taking that on in any way.
By western standards that’s not much of a change, but you’re arguing that women becoming lawyers is really important.
I’d argue it’s 1,000 times more important than allowing Saudi women to vote in the (kingdom’s) elections. Municipal elections have been held in the past but no one knows when they meet, if they meet, what they discuss, what they advise the ruler. Even within this advisory role no one knows what the extent is. You know, the previous king, King Abdullah, for all his faults looks like Martin Luther King Jr. by Saudi standards, in comparison with the current King Salman. There’s been a really chilling effect on activism of all kinds.
King Abdullah reformed some of the laws regarding women’s employment. You write about a Saudi woman who works as a salesgirl in a women’s-only mall in Riyadh but she was judged “immoral” by many people.
It is hard for them. It calls into question your family, your morals and so on. The women who take these jobs are still to some degree on the outside of society. They are divorced or widows or they are maybe the children of the third wife and after the father died they were cheated out of their inheritance so they have to work. I heard a lot of stories like that. Yet it is a kind of freedom, working in women-only spaces like lingerie shops, cosmetic stores?
After divorce, many of these women go back to their family home, the ex doesn’t let them see the children and they are isolated.
With these jobs, for the first time they are meeting women like themselves, maybe having sandwiches in the backroom of the store after prayer time. They are sharing information and hearing for the first time that they do have the right to see their children. They have the wherewithal to fight for it in court because they have a bit of money. Even if the salaries are tiny it gives them a little more freedom, power and a little extra standing in the family. And also self-respect.
Oil prices have recently tanked. I can’t see how Saudi Arabia can afford to have a society where women are segregated and unable to work, forever.
Culturally, the segregation of the sexes is so ingrained I don’t know what the answer will be. I heard an anthropology lecture once about call centres in India as an engine of progress.
A lot of them were women-only and conservative families would feel comfortable sending their daughters to work there. Suddenly women were meeting other young women and earning money. They were out-earning the men in their family that gave them extra standing.
And maybe you were able to argue for more choice of husband when your family is discussing marriage. I always thought about that model and you see that happening in Saudi Arabia.