My friend Muhammad Al-Ajmy told me a very interesting story recently. He took his two young daughters, 8 and 6, to the King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh two days earlier.
He wanted to watch the match between Al-Hilal and Najran. It is not like Muhammad to attend live matches in stadiums; he simply wanted to kill routine and entertain his young daughters with a different experience.
My friend didn’t realize the terrible mistake he made until he reached the entry gate to the stadium. He was told harshly that his daughters couldn’t enter the stadium. He argued that these were young girls who didn’t have to comply with the “No Women Allowed” rule of Saudi public stadiums. His pleas fell on the indifferent ears of stadium security.
The stadium’s manager, Salman Al-Namshan, came over and intervened. He ended the dispute by offering my friend and his two girls some seating near his corner of the stadium.
This story doesn’t help rid people of the notion that there’s an aversion to women here. Forbidding two young girls into a public stadium (with 80,000 seats to watch a relatively unimportant match that didn’t attract very many people in the first place) increases the image problem.
“Do you not know there are people here who are working hard to shut down kindergarten schools because they have young girls and boys together?” I asked my friend.
Indeed, it seems that some people here oppose everything. They oppose the idea of women teaching in elementary schools. They oppose teaching girls in the first place. And they currently oppose the idea of teaching physical education in girls’ public schools.
Exacerbating the social opposition to such trivial matters are the rules and regulations that ban women — and especially young girls — from public stadiums. In the 21st century you’d think we would at least make a distinction between a woman and a girl.
