ABBAYAH SHOPPING
I HAD NEVER HEARD THE WORD abbayah before planning to move to the Kingdom. As Maurag explained, I realized this was the same as a burqa, the outdoor covering that I had first seen women wearing during my childhood vacations in Pakistan. My young mother would wear an ivory burqa when she was shopping in Karachi. I thought she looked like a bride on those special outings. In England she switched this for the peculiarly British ensemble of raincoat and headscarf which still covered her with Islamic propriety.
Though I had spent all my life as a Muslim, my wardrobe lacked any burqa, or chadhur, or in fact any kind of veil. My family, my parents in particular, had never required me to dress anything other than modestly. I was firmly settled in standard Western clothing of trouser suits or modest skirts. My hair was only covered when I prayed. My family allowed me and every other woman in our family to make the critical choice of veiling for themselves. I would quickly find Riyadh to be much less tolerant and much more demanding than my family.
The burqa or abbayah (as it is called in Saudi Arabia) is a thin, flowing robe that covers the entire length of the body, from head to foot. It is fastened at the neck and mid-chest, overlapping extensively to leave no clothing visible underneath. The abbayah has an accompanying and often matching scarf, also called a hijab, to cover the hair and head, leaving the face exposed. Some women additionally wear a cloth covering the face to varying degrees, called a niqab, veiling the face from the bridge of the nose downward.
In Saudi Arabia, women veil themselves in progressive, man-made demarcations of orthodoxy, each vying in severity with the next. Some expose eyebrows which are groomed, others brandish ungroomed eyebrows as a medal of orthodoxy in the eschewal of artificial reshaping, while continuing to veil the remainder of the forehead and the face below the bridge of the nose. Those with exposed eyebrows could reveal their expressions of surprise, dismay, or, rarely, a hastily suppressed joy. Others choose never to reveal even the allure of an arched brow. Instead they wrap the black cloth lower, brushing the center of upper eyelids barely revealing the margins of unmascaraed eyelashes.
Even more canonical were the extreme Wahabi1 women whose veiling was unlike anything I had ever seen, even during childhood journeys to Afghanistan, Iran, or northern Pakistan.2 Years later, when I saw blue-meshed bundles murdered at anonymous gunpoint in a forgotten Afghan hellhole, I recognized every Wahabi woman in Riyadh.
In Saudi Arabia, these women follow the most extreme veiling, which engulfs the entire woman. The whole head, every feature, eyes and ears included, is covered in an opaque shroud of black. Even the crocheted face mesh of the Taliban is forbidden. Hands are gloved in thick black cotton, as are toes. Not an inch of skin is visible, every atom of womanhood extinguished by polyester blackness. Many of these überorthodox women continue to wear full veiling indoors, even in the company of women, at every occasion, births, marriages, and deaths, taking a proud stance of zealotry over other women who are less observant.3 The women are faceless, voiceless fragments of a lurid Wahabi imagination. They are easily forgotten.
This veiling was anathema to me. Even with a deep understanding of Islam, I could not imagine mummification is what an enlightened, merciful God would ever have wished for half of all His creation. These shrouded, gagged silences rise into a shrieking register of muted laments for stillborn freedoms. Such enforced incarceration of womanhood is a form of female infanticide. Throughout the Kingdom, short, tiny prepubertal girls could be seen tripping over their abbayahs, well before Islam asks for female modesty to be protected. While these veils conceal women, at the same time they expose the rampant, male oppression which is their jailor. Polyester imprisonment by compulsion is ungodly and (like the fiber) distinctly man-made.
Regardless of whether the face is covered or not, in Saudi Arabia, no woman can go anywhere in public without wearing an abbayah that covers at least the body and her head of hair. In Riyadh, these abbayahs are almost always black, year-round, irrespective of the intensely hot climate. Mine would be no exception.
These were the rules of Sharia law. The Kingdom is the only Arab state that claims Islamic law (known as Sharia) as its sole foundation for legal code. Inexplicably, the Kingdom's clerics compel non-Muslim women to veil also, a rule which is not to be found codified in the Quran. To the enforcers, this was a minor detail easily abrogated. In the eyes of the clergy, there could be no choice for a woman, in veiling or in any other matter; covering the hair and wearing the abbayah was legislated by their version of Sharia law, irrespective of any personal beliefs including fundamental professions of revealed faiths.
Sharia law is expressed in Saudi Arabia as decreed by Wahabi clerical lawmakers, followers of the most extreme brand of Islam. Wahabiism is the movement founded by Mohammed bin Abdul Wahab (died 1792), a monstrous and very modern phenomenon that distorts much Islamic teaching through his myopic, blinkered interpretations of a magnificent religion. In its place, he spawned a rigid movement that dismantled centuries of careful pluralistic Islamic discourse and learned interpretations, denouncing such scholarship as “innovative” and corrupting of Divine instruction.
Over time, the Wahabi stance toward innovation (which is often expressed as a hysterical counter to perceived “infection” with Western ideologies and appetites) has evolved into a number of laws designed to subjugate and oppress women. Citing Sharia, the clerics ban women from driving cars, forbid women from buying music, prevent women from booking hotel rooms in their own names, and attempted (but failed) to dissuade female passengers from wearing seat belts in front seats of cars for fear of defining a woman's veiled cleavage. Earlier, Wahabis had worked hard to prevent the telephone from being introduced in the Kingdom, fearing it would be used as a satanic instrument encouraging male-female interactions and succeeded for a time to keep out television (a heinous portal of evil un-Islamic influence), satellite television (multinational invasion of satanic forces), and even the Internet (unassailable external evil available on dial-up, and even worse, now broadband). New dilemmas plaguing the clerics include illicit Bluetooth interfaces between the sexes, cameras on handheld phones, and text messaging.
Modern Wahabi forces in the Kingdom are very alive today, where interpretation other than that deemed appropriate by Wahabi rigidity is haram, or absolute heresy. The clergy has effectively extinguished public diversity and distorted Islamic jurist thought into a harsh, mandated apartheid: men from women; Saudis from non-Saudis; Muslims from non-Muslims; Wahabis from non-Wahabis.
As I spent time in the Kingdom, I was to see just how far removed the state-enforced theocracy was from the truth which is Islam and also how conflicted the Saudis around me, both men and women, had themselves become. Their state no longer represented their personal beliefs. They were just as much victims of oppression as any visitor to their country. Perhaps even the same could be said for some members of the monarchy who bravely fostered the beginnings of progressive reform in this difficult climate.
Thus, even though Islam clearly mandates no compulsion in faith, because of Wahabi Sharia law, it was here I would experience enforced veiling. My oppression had begun. It began with my consent to work in a police state, followed by Umair's authority on my passport, then my subjugation within the robes of the abbayah and my bewildering introduction to legislated male supremacy. Finally I found my own spineless capitulation when all my defiance exhausted me and I too cowered, muted under the perpetual specter of ruling Wahabiism.