The Complexities of Gender Relations in a Masculine State

Abstract

The Complexities of Gender Relations in a Masculine State Laleh Khalili (bio) Madawi Al-Rasheed’s A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013 A deep exasperation with banal clichés about women in Saudi Arabia opens Madawi Al-Rasheed’s absorbing, thought-provoking, and lucid A Most Masculine State. Al-Rasheed has no truck with the two stereotypical images of Saudi women as “either excluded, heavily veiled victims of their own religion and society, or wealthy, glamorous, cosmopolitan entrepreneurs benefiting from inherited wealth and state education” (1). So she sets out to tell her readers a deeply researched story about the trajectory of women as political subjects in Saudi Arabia since the end of the nineteenth century. Her central contention is that to understand Saudi Arabia, we need to analyze the peculiarities of Saudi “religious nationalism,” as well as the power of the Saudi state to shape both the ideologies pertaining to the position of women in Saudi society and the material conditions of their existence. The instruments for this process of social and ideological engineering are, inter alia, notions of piety and public propriety, laws around marriage and employment, provision of education, and labor regulatory regimes that make housework a job best suited to migrant laborers. It is the genius of the book that it also provides a persuasive analysis of why so many Saudi women are themselves invested in the maintenance of the rigid system of control in which the women are embedded. She further argues that what ultimately counts—far beyond ideological attachments of the women themselves—is their class location where “wealthy West-ernised elite women enjoy far more freedoms than young marginalised divorcees and mothers” (37). What makes the book so rewarding and useful is, first, the thoughtful, richly detailed historical context it provides for understanding women’s [End Page 314] education, the regulations of women’s bodies and sexuality, and the place of women in business relations in Saudi Arabia over the span of several decades. But Al-Rasheed is also very attentive to both the state-centered mythologizing and religious discourse-making that goes into the maintenance of gender relations, as well as the contestation over the boundaries of control. She provides an instructive chapter on “the new religious women” who are crucially engaged in the thoroughly modern “resort to an Islamic discourse in which they find solutions to gender issues such as gender discrimination, inheritance, marriage, divorce, and employment” (254). Their version of gender struggles entails a pious protection of the chastity of women and their role as mothers and wives. These women are compared with novelists who have become celebrities in the “West” because of their “cosmopolitan fantasy” and their sometimes fantastical representation of Saudi women not only as sexually active autonomous subjects but also as voracious neoliberal ones. It is a testament to the sensitivity and astuteness of Al-Rasheed that she sees both the cosmopolitan novelists and the pious preacher-women as people contending to be included “within modernity’s expanding horizons as guardians of a noble past” and as participants in the social and political life of Saudi Arabia. Because of her past political stances, Al-Rasheed is presumably unable to travel to Saudi Arabia. This means that the primary research for this book has depended on electronic conversations and meetings with a broad range of Saudi women outside Saudi Arabia itself (in both Europe and the Middle East), as well as a close reading and analysis of a vast corpus of texts (including novels, pamphlets, books, online documents, official statements and religious sermons, and lectures and treatises). Al-Rasheed has a broad enough set of contacts, extensive enough memories of living in Saudi Arabia, and deep enough knowledge of the place that her inability to travel there does not affect the quality or plausibility of the arguments she makes. However, her presence there would have enabled her to address an important lacuna in our knowledge about women in Saudi: the lives of poorer women—whether with Saudi citizenship, or especially the vast armies of domestic servants and migrant workers, some of whom have lived in Saudi Arabia...