My friend’s sister had returned to the Kingdom after an absence of almost two decades. I attended a lunch thrown in her honor and not surprisingly the topic of last week’s article entered the conversation.
“So what happened to you?” inquired one of the guests. “Did you manage to get your travel papers?”
“No, not yet,” I replied feeling rather enervated by the whole process.
“What travel papers?” asked the chief guest. Her sister-in-law narrated the whole incident to her as she listened intently in disbelief. “Are you serious?” she said.
“Yes,” I said glumly and adding feebly, “you have been living in the States for too long.”
“What sort of a response did you get?” asked the gentleman next to me.
“Mostly hate mail,” I confessed. “That’s what is so sad. It seems that what I had written entirely missed the point. I think there were some people who recognized the absurdity of the system, funnily enough even those implementing it themselves. I met one guy who told me that when he went to the airport to drop off his wife and one-year-old daughter, the officer asked him whether he thought it wise to allow his child to travel without a male guardian! A one-year-old baby for goodness sake!”
“You’re joking,” said the gentleman.
“I wish I was,” I replied jadedly. “Another lady I know called me and narrated an interesting incident that happened to her. She went to the airport with her 35-year-old brother and was barred from leaving. The guy was listed on her family card, Islamically speaking is her ‘mahram,’ but as he was not her ‘listed male guardian’ she was not allowed to travel. And then there was a friend of mine who was driving to Bahrain with his mother who is in her late 50s. They were stopped at the border and were being turned back because she didn’t have a paper from her husband. After a bit of cajoling the guy let them through, but he warned my friend severely not to leave his mother in Bahrain. As if!”
“So what’s the solution?” asked another of the guests.
“I don’t know,” I replied earnestly. “I stand accused of haranguing after something that I can seemingly quite easily procure with all my contacts and connections. I am deeply criticized, as usual, for bringing yet another moribund procedure to light. Most likely I will be allowed to travel even if it means resorting to extreme measures but I do not see why I should have to beseech the mercy of individuals when it comes to something as generic and basic as this. What’s more is that I have a conscience. I think of all the other women who may well be in a similar situation and don’t have the privileges I do. Who do they turn to? I am certain that should such a similar situation arise for them it would be tantamount to a disaster. And why? Because no one wants to upset this peculiar status quo? It’s a hard reality that there are many women who don’t want change among us. But is it really fair that this means that all opportunities should be eliminated from the rest of us or would it be more sensible to afford us the choice? Should the natural evolution of any society be held back due to the whims and fancies of certain elements within or should those elements come to terms with the fact that this is the way forward and they have the choice to opt out?”
“I agree with you,” he concurred, “and the whole scenario is totally ridiculous.”
“From my understanding,” volunteered an elderly ex-ambassador, “it would be far easier if you just got married. You know? All those marriages that you can do these days. Just find someone, marry him and get him to sign off on that bit of paper you need,” he concluded.
This suggestion had been made by everyone who had anything to do with the dilemma from the facilitator to his secretary to the peon at the passport office. Such an easy solution. Find an idiot on the street (I’d be spoilt for choice), pay him a bit of money, enter into a “friendship marriage,” get the travel permission signed, dump the idiot on the street and leave. Hey presto! What a wonderfully practical solution. What’s absolutely shocking about the whole concept is that this is what women have been reduced to in our society. It’s unthinkable for a woman to try to function as an independent entity irrespective of her capabilities, inclinations, or preferences. In fact, judging by the responses that I received it is wholly deplorable for a woman to even think of traveling by herself even if she is going to meet her parents. Yet it is considered noble and pragmatic for her to enter into such a phony baloney marriage in order to do exactly the same thing under some masquerade of “protection.”
In one of my previous articles I had maligned the whole concept of marriages of convenience. Now I am being forced to recognize their importance and integral necessity within our current societal framework. I think that it is a great shame that the sanctimony of marriage has taken such a backseat in favor of the bureaucracy of man. If we are truly serious about reform and progress then such regressive tools of male hegemony need to be buried once and for all and women need to be reinstated to their rightful position as ordained by God.
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)