Journey to the Kingdom: Our writer spends a month in Saudi Arabia
“You’re going where?”
That was the near-unanimous response from friends and family when my husband Joe Messing and I announced our plans to go to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for the month of February. People then went on to question our safety (and our sanity) and always, to ask whether I would need to don a head scarf or face veil or walk six paces behind Joe.
As avid travelers, we considered the offer to coach an intensive business skills program at a private university in Riyadh an opportunity to explore a place we would never otherwise see. We figured we would learn at least as much as our students. In an increasingly homogenized Western world, the month in KSA provided an immersion into a culture radically different from our own, where Islam has primacy and impacts every aspect of daily life and social interaction.
The university was divided into male and female colleges and never the twain did meet. (“Across that courtyard and behind that wall,” one young man said in referring to the women’s campus, “is wonderland.”) Joe and I could not meet during the day and even video chats between us were discouraged. Our students, college seniors about to embark upon mandatory six-month assignments with various businesses in Riyadh, were bright and ambitious and thankfully, proficient in English. Not only were they extraordinarily welcoming to us (the legend of Arab hospitality is indeed the case) but they were endlessly curious about how Saudis were perceived in the U.S. and what our pre-conceptions had been about the country.
“Do people think we live in tents and have an oil well out back?” one young woman asked me. Another said, “Were you worried about terrorists when you came here?” No, I replied, “I was worried about wearing an abaya.”
Yes, as frivolous as that may seem, I was obsessed with wearing the abaya, a traditional cloak worn by women.
Of all the things that were strange and even uncomfortable about KSA — the strict segregation of the sexes, the fact that women weren’t allowed to drive, the razor-wired compound in which we lived, the crazy traffic and the “religious police” who patrolled the shopping malls, to say nothing of the extraordinary machinations that the society goes through to protect women from public view — one of the oddest parts of my daily life was certainly my floor length abaya.
Hogwarts in the desert?
Every woman in Saudi, Muslim or not, must wear an abaya when she’s out in public or in the presence of unrelated men. The robe covers you from neck to feet (the more religious you are the further it drags on the ground) and is accompanied, for Muslim women, by the hijab or head scarf and for the more observant, some form of niqab, or face veil, and maybe even black gloves.
Having provided the relevant measurements in advance, our greeter at the airport presented me with a little box containing my abaya and matching scarf. It was a pretty basic affair; black polyester with some simple beading on the cuffs. My co-coach, Leah, decided that if we wore white blouses under it we could pretend we were Supreme Court Justices, but I decided to channel “Harry Potter” and think of it as a Hogwarts house robe. Both of these scenarios were far more appealing to us than having to wear the garment to protect our modesty, or worse, to cloak our entire beings and fade into the desert scenery.
Initially, all we saw were flocks of women in head-to-toe black so it seemed all abayas were the same and thus, by extension, so were the women. But we soon realized that those seemingly uniform outfits were not so at all. Abayas can indicate socioeconomic, regional, religious, national or even political differences. Western women tended to wear plain ones (probably because that’s what they were given at the airport!). Ex-pat domestic workers such as Filipinos and Pakistanis had hoods so they could cover their hair if a member of the religious police was around. Women from Jeddah on the west coast break the black barrier and slyly introduce color. Some educated Saudis deplored the entire custom and wore the most basic robes they could find. Others, however, took the opportunity to turn this government dictate into a major fashion statement.
Baubles, bangles, bright shiny beads
We were amazed at the amount of “bling” on the robes and matching hijabs, particularly for evening wear, but even in the abayas the students wore to school. We saw sequins, embroidery, faux fur, cowboy-inspired fringe, marabou feathers, appliqués, deep velvet cuffs and lace trim. Styles change every year and buying new ones each spring and fall is apparently de rigueur. You can order bespoke garments from high-end designers for thousands of dollars or buy more reasonably priced off the rack robes for as little as $10 to $12. Every souk and mall has an array of abaya shops. In some perverse twist on the Stockholm Syndrome, Leah and I began to feel that our utilitarian polyester garments left us woefully under-dressed, particularly when we were dining in a nice restaurant or attending a special event.
Abayas are accessorized with up-to-the minute designer handbags, shoes and enormous sunglasses. In fact, a young American woman being posted to the U.S. Embassy recalled asking someone already in Riyadh what she should bring with her. Fully expecting to hear “sun block,” or “lots of moisturizer,” she was startled when the reply was “a good designer purse.” And as for the question of what goes under an abaya, the answer is, anything goes. You can catch of glimpse of attire that ranged from plain to quite sexy — perhaps a fabulous evening gown or cocktail dress — to contemporary yoga pants. (In one store I even saw black leather hot pants.)
Like so much of what we saw and experienced, the abaya turned out to be another manifestation of the push and pull of Saudi life; the constant tug between the dictates of a religious state butting up against the influences of their Internet-inflected modern life.
Yes. Just another day in the Kingdom.
