Women alone or accompanied by their drivers in Saudi Arabia are almost always harassed wherever they go by men of all ages. The situation has become so pathetic that the term “open season” is an understatement. Even more perplexing is the fact that when women are walking with a Saudi man, no one dares to approach them in any way; the worst that will happen is a quick stolen glance. I admit I like it when one of my brothers agrees to take me somewhere, not because I could not defend myself if I had to, but because Riyadh suddenly becomes a much more peaceful place to walk in, with less savage behavior.
Looking at my brother as he walked next to me in the shopping mall, I wondered what it was about him that was so threatening. He is a regular teenager, tallish but without much muscle; my driver (with whom I’m constantly being harassed) is much taller and has a more threatening build. And that was when it hit me. It was not the physical build but the fact that he was a Saudi man. That is why more and more women require that their drivers wear the traditional thobe and ghoutra/shummagh: In other words, they make their own scarecrows.
The saddest part of all this is the realization that we are a nation with so little self-discipline that we need this and other types of scarecrows to make us behave. Why is that? What made us this way? Was it the way we were educated and raised? Have we been inadvertently taught that punishment is the only reason to be moral? And if there is no chance of being punished, then what? No boundaries?
We have so many scarecrows, and they come in all sizes and shapes. When I first came back from the States, in middle school, I was introduced to my first scarecrow: What is known as a muragbah or observer. This person’s job was literally to watch students and reprimand them for any violations of dress code, attendance, misbehavior in class and so forth. Never once in all my school years here did I hear any civilized dialogue between students and these observers — civilized as in the latter trying to convince the former of the benefits of conforming to the dress codeor the morality of respecting class times and teachers. Instead, it was always punishment without delay. Moreover, the sentences passed were usually immoral and even vindictive in themselves: Young girls with short hair would be asked to wear veils covering their hair until it grew long, those wearing shoes with anything resembling heels would be forced to walk barefoot all day, and those late for class would be asked to stand outside the principal’s room all day long. The educational environment became closer to a prison; no wonder then when an observer was absent the school went wild.
On the streets, the case is no better: Men harass unescorted women; women and men flirt when there are no mutawwa; people run traffic lights when there are no police officers; teenagers vandalize cars or cover buildings with graffiti when no one can see, protestors from all camps flood the “unsupervised” Internet with their anti-this or anti-that ideas, etc. Maybe, that is why when we travel abroad (where there are fewer scarecrows) we have been noted to transgress all boundaries of morality, and sometimes even those of civility.
The vital question now becomes: Where is our own inner observer? Have we no consciences or self-discipline? How is it that we, who believe ourselves to be a nation of “strong faith and belief,” do not act upon that belief? Don’t we all know that God is the supreme observer? Doesn’t He know what we do all the time?
We of all people should be the least in need of scarecrows. Instead, we are perhaps the most watched, and conscious of being watched, people in the world. Even people watch people to make sure they are conforming to every little social custom and rule, and God help anyone who strays in any way (not that we don’t all stray behind closed doors). We no longer know if we are conforming because we believe it to be right or just because we are required to conform.
It is a vicious circle, and it must stop. We need to pinpoint our morals and instill them in both ourselves and in future generations the right way. Moral behavior is not something that exists only under certain circumstances. We must teach our future generations the benefits of conducting themselves in a civilized and honorable way. We must teach them to think critically about why they should conform to certain behaviors and avoid others. If in the process they learn to question some of our social habits and customs, so be it.
We have mixed religion, morals, and customs so much that we can no longer distinguish between what can be changed and what must never change. More importantly, we are so paralyzed with fear by the idea of any kind of change that we forget that sometimes change is for the better. So what if we change? Let us change. Who knows? Maybe after some time, we can even learn to live decently without scarecrows.
— Moodhy Al-Khalaf is a Saudi writer. She is working on a Ph.D in communications. Al-Khalaf is based in Riyadh.
