Good news for young people in Saudi Arabia! Sixty-two young men and women will participate in the fourth national dialogue next week. The dialogue will focus on the problems of youth and their aspirations for the future. In the sessions, education, the meaning of citizenship, society, culture and work opportunities will be discussed. Great news! And at these times, it is something we all look forward to. Here, however, ends the good news and commences the reality.
Naturally the dialogue depends on trust, frankness and should include free minds and independent characters. The national dialogue which is a much-needed step toward a society that can talk openly, discuss frankly and deal honestly with the realities is an excellent idea. The previous ones have proven there is more to the people of Saudi Arabia than meets the eye. Thankfully, the dialogues have opened all kinds of topics for discussion; they opened avenues for people’s perceptions and aspirations. At the same time, they have opened wounds — wounds which have been patched up without looking into why they occurred in the first place.
One of these wounds is that for some people the national dialogue is a media creation and a media event; ordinary people are not invovled and are, for the most part, ignorant of the meaning and basic idea of dialogue.
So much for generalities; I will now move to the specific. Last week, several local papers carried reports of certain happenings involving female students in the Home Economics Department of the Education College. For those who do not know, this college has a very strict code of both dress and conduct. From the outside, the code seems out-of-date, even in our conservative society. The girls in the department were prevented from attending lectures, exams and even going to the bathroom for five hours, not to talk of how they were treated by college staff. Now what serious breach or breaches resulted in such severe punishments? The severity of the breach, I will leave to the reader to decide. What happened was that some girls did not follow the college dress code.
The dress code directs that solid-colored shirts with buttons and no decoration as well as long skirts without side slits should be worn. The material must not be velvet, suede, crepe, silk or denim. The colors must be black, blue, brown, beige or white.
The girls who were stopped from attending lectures said they were dressed in the colors the college specified for students. Their only offense was wearing denim skirts, T-shirts instead of shirts with buttons or striped shirts instead of solid colored ones.
In other words, in an all-female institution, someone actually sat down and worked out a meticulously detailed dress code that strikes one as being abnormally strange. One wonders if such meticulousness was applied to producing a curriculum. In an educational institution in Saudi Arabia, the stress should be on more serious things. If the college were at the top of some international standard, perhaps we could pardon this eccentricity. None of our colleges or universities, however, occupy such a place. Time is wasted on what students wear — only the outward appearance — instead of on what they are taught, what they learn and what benefits they receive from their so-called education.
This case, and many others like it, tells us a great deal about the double standards in our society. Somehow our society inspires people to have double and triple personalities. They are not accepted for what they are. In this case, young people are treated as small children who must have every decision made for them, even what they wear. From their youngest days, they are told what to do, what to think and are controlled by rules set by family, by school and then college, by work place and, on top of them all, by society.
Let me be perfectly clear. I have no objection to rules as long as they protect people, preserve their dignity and allow them some freedom of choice. In our society, however, people are obliged to act in a certain way that is in accordance with certain social norms. There is little room for self-expression since there is always a “critic” on the spot, accusing the person of all kinds of things and labeling him or her “socially incorrect.”
Who sets these standards is one question. Another is how many different authorities are involved in setting the standards. People follow certain standards of behavior within the family that might not satisfy “society” with its insistence on niceties while deploring frankness. Added to all this is the way we look at things. We always stop at the facade; if the outside is pleasing, then there is no need to look behind it. And that is where all our problems begin and end. We are utterly obsessed with appearances and we almost never look at what is — or most importantly, what is not — behind them.
We have read endless reports, for example, about how the Ministry of Health, having ensured that all is well on the health front, is now focusing on how female employees in hospitals dress. The obsession has gone beyond what is normal or acceptable to focus on the color and design of what women should wear. I stress “women” here; we have not read any report concerning male employees or students. And so we have now arrived at the greatest of all Saudi obsessions: women. Granted in many institutions there is a professional look that should be maintained but that is not the only thing to be dealt with — nor is it the most important. At the end of the day, the individual institution must decide what is right for it; that decision should not then become a public issue.
What is interesting is what this kind of thinking indicates, what kind of message it sends to young people. It is not an openly stated message but it is a very strong unstated one. No matter what takes place in the upcoming national dialogue, we are saying to young people that appearance is much more important than who they are or what they do. Our young people will always be faulted for failing to dress according to what society has decided, regardless of their ideas. Their dreams must be kept to themselves simply because no one is interested in them!
