In the Land of Invisible Women

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c95d0fd2-7ad9-11dd-adbe-000077b07658.html

In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom
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Few outsiders have been able to break into the secretive world of Saudi women. In an inward-looking conservative kingdom that goes to great lengths to hide its women – physically and socially – the feelings and the aspirations of that half of Saudi society remain a mystery.

Are they fed up with their condition? Are they rebellious? Are many of them even aware that they represent one of the most egregious cases of discrimination against women?

Qanta Ahmed, a British-born Pakistani pulmonologist, had the rare opportunity to penetrate that world when she took a job at a hospital in Riyadh in the late 1990s, after being denied a renewal visa to the US.

She spent two years in a military hospital that caters to one of the kingdom’s security forces and to many of the Saudi royal family. At that time healthcare was one of the few industries where the government had defied the clerics and allowed men and women to work side by side. The King Fahd National Guard Hospital, moreover, was run by a well-connected and enlightened chief who promoted women.

But it was also a time when Saudi Arabia was at its most angry and obscure, its society radicalised, and the voice of its women suffocated after some had tried to rebel in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war.

Ahmed was exposed to the decadence of some of Saudi Arabia’s elite and the extraordinary contradictions between what the kingdom preaches and how it behaves. She met some of the country’s most educated and ambitious women who, despite their status, remained trapped in the restrictions imposed by religion and tradition.

Unfortunately, her journey in the Saudi kingdom, In the Land of Invisible Women, fails to live up to expectations. Although daring and brutally honest in some of its descriptions of Saudi life, Ahmed rarely probes deeply enough into the complex subjects she writes about, or stays long enough with the people that she meets to allow readers to understand and connect to them.

Part religious journey, part romance, and part study of Saudi life, the book takes snapshots but never weaves them into a coherent, compelling album.

A westernised Muslim, Ahmed confronts an intolerant brand of Islam in a land that resembles America, with its fast food outlets and its Cadillacs, but where women are not even allowed to drive. Her reaction turns from curiosity to outrage.

There is plenty in her book about the oppression of the abaya, the black garb that women are forced to wear – and only men are allowed to sell. Early on Ahmed describes how families require the face of a woman to be covered during an operation, when even her breasts are bare. And there is an excessive amount of reporting on the religious police, the long-bearded fanatics who seem to appear everywhere Ahmed goes, descending on groups of men and women in Riyadh restaurants.