breaking move, a delegation of nine prominent Saudi women arrived in Paris in December bearing the bold message that the status of women was changing in their highly conservative country. The presence in France of these well-educated, highly-articulate women was a striking indication that the pace of reform is quickening in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. They were business executives, university professors, scientists, human rights activists, all very much at ease in answering often tough questions at a crowded press conference. One member of the delegation, Lama Al-Suleiman, a young woman in her early forties, has a degree in biochemistry from an English university. She is the first woman to be elected to the governing board of the Jiddah Chamber of Commerce, and is also on the board of the Saudi Fransi bank. Speaking with authority in both Arabic and French, her pale intense face wrapped in a black head scarf, she made a considerable impression. In the Kingdom, the impulse for reform is coming from the very top – from King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz himself, as members of the delegation made clear. His priority, they said, was the wide participation of women in Saudi public life. The King's daughter, Princess Adeelah, herself a campaigner for women's rights, chose the members of the delegation but was unable to accompany them to France. In a country like Saudi Arabia, where segregation is the rule, where women are heavily veiled in public, have restricted employment possibilities, cannot drive cars or travel abroad without being accompanied by a male member of their family, these ideas are little short of revolutionary. It is significant that even here – an immensely rich but socially traditional country, where clerical views carry great weight – the empowerment of women is gaining momentum. In September, when the King presided at the inauguration of one of his pet projects, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), he faced criticism from Sheikh Nasser Al-Shithri because the campus of this high-tech graduate college is coeducational, the very first in the country. The King's response was to remove him from the Council of Senior Scholars to which he had recently appointed him. In a reference to the ancient traditions of Islamic learning, the King has described his new university as a Bayt Al-Hikma, a House of Wisdom. In the view of Robert Lacey, a historian of the Saudi Kingdom, the King is playing the fundamentalists at their own game, by arguing that he is not so much building a 21st century university as going back to the great old days of Islam. The King's strategy was revealed in Paris by the repeated references the women's delegation made to Khadija, first wife of the Prophet Muhammad – and, during her lifetime, his only one. When they married, he was twenty-five years old, while she, a widow of forty, was a wealthy businesswoman with three children. She asked to marry him, rather than the other way round! How many women, a member of the delegation asked, would dare to do that today? All these active Saudi women, professionals in their various fields, stressed their Muslim identity. For them Khadija was a role model. They had chosen to work, as she had done in her time. This did not mean, they hastened to add, that they wished to live as in the early centuries of Islam. They were inspired by Khadija – as well as by Ayesha, the Prophet's favorite wife to whom he was betrothed after Khadija's death, and who was later to become an authority on Islamic doctrine – but they also insisted that they intended to benefit fully from modern life. The “real Islam” they advocated was one in which women were respected and were given every opportunity to participate in public life. Although frowned upon today in conservative Saudi society, the mixing of sexes was common in the early centuries, members of the delegation said, and should be so today – although it had to be done, they added, with decorum and decency, not in any decadent fashion. The veil, one of them said, was more of a problem in France than in the Muslim world, where it was not an obstacle to the promotion of women. “We want parity with men,” they said, “but we recognize that it has to come gradually.” They explained that the King's reforms had met resistance, but this resistance was more social than religious. While change was being encouraged from the top, Saudi society, anxious to protect its traditional identity, was reacting with fear. In Paris, members of the delegation met with several high government officials, educational establishments and feminist groups. They came away, they said, more than ever convinced of the need for quotas for women – that is to say, for positive discrimination in jobs. At present Saudi women were employed mainly in education and health. They wanted to expand opportunities for them in other professions. They were pressing for women to be allowed to work in factories. Article 160 of the Labor Law, which prohibited the mixing of sexes in the work-place, had been cancelled, they said. According to the latest report on Arab women's access to economic and financial resources, compiled by ESCWA, the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, participation of Saudi women in the labor force has crept up from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2007. Women clearly still have a long way to go to reach parity but, as the delegation in Paris stressed, the trend is in the right direction. Saudi women are even edging their way into politics, long the exclusive preserve of men. Last Feb. 14, an American-educated Saudi woman, Noura Al-Fayez, was appointed the first ever deputy minister in Saudi Arabia – in charge of women's education – an appointment widely hailed as a milestone. Others will undoubtedly follow.
