"The Changing Face of Saudi Women"

"Saudi Arabia is the most profoundly gender-segregated nation on Earth, and amid the fraught, fragile, extraordinary changes under way in the daily lives of the kingdom’s women—multiple generations, pushed by new labor policies and the encouragements of the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, are now debating what it means to be both truly modern and truly Saudi...

Somewhere along that complicated spectrum, improvising to suit her own ideas about dignity, Noof has established her personal requirements inside the company offices: no physical contact with men, please, no matter how incidental. “The lady who is training me understands,” Noof said. “I told her, ‘This is not because I have a baby and am worried about germs. This is religion. I can’t touch a man who is not my father, my uncle, my brother. That’s why.’”

Thus the nickname. “Mrs. Noof Not Shaking Hands,” Noof said, and laughed so hard that she almost fell over on the sofa. Noof’s laugh, which is rich, is one of the reasons we became friends. She’s quick-witted and tough. She makes fun of people who are officious or rude. One of her cell phones rings to music from Grey’s Anatomy. In her 20s she rejected alternative suitors preferred by her family because she was determined to marry Sami, whom she loved. She estimates that she saw Titanic at least ten times when she was a teenager; movie theaters are prohibited in Saudi Arabia, but popular DVDs are easy to come by, no matter what disapproving conservative sheikhs may say. (When I recalled that Titanic includes an enthusiastic sex scene featuring the not-yet-married heroine, Noof was unruffled. “Yeah, it’s OK,” she said. “It’s her culture.”)...

There’s no law that specifies abaya color. There’s no actual law requiring abayas, for that matter. Four decades ago, older Saudi women told me, protocols for covering and comportment varied across the kingdom, according to region, class, and one’s own family and tribal standards. The monarchy was a young nation then—established in 1932, newly flush with oil money, and still a patchwork of Arab cultures, from desert tribes with ancient traditions to cosmopolitan cities along the coasts. Although Islam of an especially conservative and all-consuming form was the faith of the whole country, its expression varied from place to place.

And in certain Saudi regions of that era, older women remember, there was nothing shocking about going out in a casual short abaya or wearing modest clothing with no outer cover at all. “Most of us went without veils,” a retired Riyadh pediatrician in her 70s recalled. “Sitting with a man you are not married to, in a restaurant? No problem, as long as you were behaving correctly. And then—the change. Some twisting, I will say. In the mind, in the heart.”
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/saudi-arabia-women-text

This was really interesting.

I mean, it's always annoying when National Geographic writes an article about people next to one about, like, the unusual physiology of some fish. So, given that this is National Geographic, this article is sometimes a little too... Western gaze-y? Unapologetically intrusive/otherizing?

But I also don't encounter much writing about life in Saudi Arabia, outside of the way that people use the country as a scapegoat for sexism: "At least you can drive, unlike those poor women in Saudi Arabia!"

Related: Muslim Women are not for Western stuff...