From Saudi Arabia Corespondent Eman Al Nafjan…

In Saudi Arabia my gender decides whether or not I can enter certain ministries, what I can major in college and if I can name my own child.

My gender mandates that I cannot drive my own car. No matter what age I am or how well I drive, I have to find a male to drive my car.

If I were divorced, a widow or simply had a husband that was out of the country at the time, my gender dictates that I have to find a male relative to obtain a birth certificate and document my child’s name at government circles.

My gender also mandates whether I can freely leave the country or not. As a woman, if I need to travel, I am at the mercy of my father and husband. At the airport I am stopped and required to show an official yellow card from the Saudi Interior Ministry that states that my husband has granted me permission to travel. If I fail to provide it, then I’m escorted out of the airport and told to go home and convince my husband.

My husband can legally divorce me without reason, without my presence and without my knowledge.

In public schools, from the age of twelve, girls are forced to cover their faces completely with not even a slit for their eyes as they enter and leave the strictly girls only schools.

All restaurants cannot allow women in unless they have a separate entrance and area for them to sit in.

All of these rules are not only socially or culturally enforced but legally as well. So that no matter how much our society may move forward and general awareness is raised, the laws pull us back. This legal and governmental factor makes it extremely difficult for forward thinking women to demand change. If I drive my car as a woman, I am not only breaking a social taboo but also entering into a discussion of whether or not I’m breaking the law and challenging the government. This is what has led to the nine-day imprisonment of Manal Al Sharif. One of the accusations presented against her by government officials is driving a car while female within a city and inciting other women to do the same. Just last week another Saudi woman was sentenced to ten lashes for driving a car in a city. The king soon pardoned her, but it remains a fact that a judge can do that.

A member of the highest Islamic council, Sheikh Al Manea, reasons that it is justified to sentence a woman to physical punishment or imprisonment for driving a car, not because she drove the car per se but because she broke the law. These types of arguments are what makes it particularly difficult for the women rights movement in Saudi Arabia. The argument that you are not only breaking a social, cultural or even religious taboo but also going against the government and legal system can be a powerful deterrent to Saudi women who need to speak up for their rights.

A few months ago, the aforementioned Manal Al Sharif, spearheaded a movement to get Saudis used to the idea of a woman behind the steering wheel. July 17th was set as the day when Saudi women would start to drive themselves to work or school rather than rely on a male driver. The purpose was that from that day and onwards more and more women would slowly gain the courage to drive. At the same time Saudi society in general would gradually get used to the sight of women driving. Unfortunately that was not how it worked out. A couple of weeks before July 17th, Manal Al Sharif was arrested.

On the day itself there was a heavy police presence on all the main streets. Despite these obstacles, a few brave women drove their cars. I was fortunate enough to be able to be a part of it, even though Ive never learned to drive. I got into the car with another Saudi woman, Azza Al Shmasi. As I videotaped, she drove for 15 minutes close to a main street in Riyadh. When I got home I excitedly shared the video with my followers on Twitter, as did all the women who drove that day. Then for the next few weeks, more and more women drove and uploaded videos. It seemed as though we were making progress.

Unfortunately our progress was severely halted when several of the women who took part started receiving phone calls from the interior ministry and getting trial dates. I started receiving calls from the investigation unit at the Interior Ministry about a month after the last time I got into the car with Azza. In the beginning it seems as if they had made the assumption that my husband does not support me in my fight for women rights. They asked to speak to him, as though they did not have his full details right there in my file. This tactic of threatening women with informing their male guardians might have worked decades ago but Saudi society has evolved past that. The overwhelming majority of women who went out to drive have the full support of their immediate families. After two weeks of these harassing phone calls, my husband was called to the ministry. He refused to sign the pledge that he would make sure that I would not drive or upload videos of driving. The phone calls stopped. However, another Saudi woman, Najla Hariri has not been as fortunate. After her phone calls and visit to the interior ministry, she is currently awaiting a trial.

Here we were, fighting for the simple and basic right to drive our own cars. So we were surprised when King Abdullah surpassed all these rights that we had been fighting for and granted women not only the vote but also the right to be nominated as candidates in the 2015 municipal elections. The king also announced that women would be included in his appointed parliament. These changes are huge breakthroughs in the fight for womens rights, however they remain far in the future and have no effect on the day to day life of Saudi women today. They have however enraged many of our sheikhs. One such sheikh is Shiekh Allehiedan, another member of the Saudi highest Islamic council. He came out on TV to state that the king had not consulted with him before these announcements and that he is more protective of the country and its Sharia constitution than the king himself. Other extreme conservatives have also made a point of stating their unhappiness with these announcements. A worrying but unsurprising development; the extreme conservative have had a hold on the country from its very beginning. A partnership between the government and the mosque that is gradually growing sour because of the failure of both in reining in the peoples demands for their freedom and rights.

Many people fail to realize how relatively new Saudi Arabia is. It was not declared a country until 1932, so it is only about 80 years old. It is about 5 times the size of Germany. Our first king, King Abdulaziz, managed to unify this vast desert land despite the different cultures and even religious Islamic sects of its people. Then with the discovery of oil, led our dispersed people into building one of the more prosperous countries of the world.

Unlike the majority of our neighbors we were not colonized so we did not have a western law system imposed upon us. We had to start with the tools we had at the time; Arab tribal law and religion. Starting as we did from square one in the modern world makes for some interesting challenges. Condensing hundreds of years of evolvement of national law, civilian rights and freedom in a few decades. From that perspective, it is not hard to understand how we have come to have all these modern amenities and yet live a lifestyle that is reminiscent of medieval times.

As a Saudi woman, I understand all this. I also understand how exotic Saudi women are to the rest of the world. Our abayas and culture are a more subtle form of the same exoticism of the Padaung tribe where women wore neck bracelets that made them look giraffe necked. Despite how uncomfortable it looked and how much it affected their lives, it seemed to outsiders as though they were proud of their heritage and wanted to maintain it by passing it on to future generations. However when human rights organizations dug beneath the surface they found that it was face, politics and economics that were forcing this tradition on women who wanted better for themselves and their daughters.

Although we don’t wear our niqabs because we need to draw tourists, we still have in common with these Burmese women that a combination of face, politics and economics have constricted our freedom and put many unnecessary obstacles in the path of our happiness. Arab traditions and culture have dictated the most extreme governmentally enforced environment of gender discrimination. So much so that these factors have resulted in the creation of the only gender apartheid in todays world.
As a Saudi woman, I understand all this, yet; somehow it does not alleviate my frustration at how my country’s history has such an impact on my day-to-day life.

This is the English original version I wrote and was translated to German and published in the new print edition of Stern magazine no41/2011, Thursday, 6th of October, pages 54-57

From David Anthony Hohol…

I started playing hockey at the age of four, and it remained an integral and constant part of my life until I was nearly twenty years old. Hockey in Canada, especially in rural areas, is not just our nation’s pastime, but a way of life and a belief in an idea. Hockey is organized like most sports with minor leagues, junior ranks, semi-pro and pro levels, each with their own governing bodies and modus operandi. All kinds play the game of hockey, as there are many different roles to be filled. There are certain personas in team sport, however, that rise to positions of leadership and power, just as there are those who lead us on the fields of battle, and in the politically charged ideological wars of our postmodern world.

Leadership and social power are both integral parts of athletics, and even more so in a violent and physical sport such as the game of hockey. Effective leadership in hockey makes the team more successful. Who becomes team leaders and what makes them effective is something that I began to actively pursue an understanding of about half way through my fifteen-year hockey career.

I so loved playing that game. At times the feelings that still live on within me surge through my body and manifest themselves into tiny pockets of emotion. Pride, reverence, and sentimentality flow through me, as I look back at the time I spent in the sport of hockey and see it as amongst the most important and self-improving times in my life.  In retrospect, it seems I was a part of something that was indefinable yet complete in itself. Philosophical undertows aside, I was a member of a very powerful and decisive subculture. We all worked together in order to achieve a common goal. We had our own rules of protocol, our own rituals, our own values, and even our own language. Like men on a frozen battlefield, our goal was always victory. Other valuable objectives, both as a team and as individual players would always be included, but it was conquest that everyone’s efforts revolved around, and thus victory was our ultimate goal. The structure of hierarchy on a team was to be respected at all times, as we needed to be a cohesive unit in order to achieve that victory. Problems with individuals were discussed amongst the team first, the coaching staff second. We were the ones who would be out there in the fight together, so disputes had to be settled internally. Problems with the team system or philosophy would be communicated to the team captain or his assistants first. We did not disrespect our coach in front the team. We left the dressing room in the same order, we warmed up in the same order, and ended every warm up the same way with the ritualistic tapping of our goaltender’s pads. Last but not least, the captain would always be the last man back with the goalie before the opening face-off.

Most importantly, no matter if it was the pre-season, the regular season or the playoffs, and no matter what the score or situation, if two or more opposing players physically doubled up on one of our own, we were to save our man at all costs. This precluded absolutely everything and is the only time victory or defeat was temporarily set aside. When one of our men was down, it was the team’s responsibility to not only get him safely out of harms way, but to avenge him with extreme prejudice. This is why physical play in hockey is so revered, as it represents sacrifice, solidarity, leadership and power all at once.

What results from this exceptionally powerful cohesiveness and structure is the emergence of a unique language or argot, a form of communication born from the domestic side of hockey and is used to refer to both teammates and opponents alike. Whether it be grinders, goons, cherry pickers, hackers, stick men, submariners, hat tricks, shut outs, bangers, or shadows, the terminology is endlessly unique and is quite perplexing to those fully removed from the group. The bottom line is that such idiosyncratic standards demonstrate patterns of a distinct subculture. Deeper still, the foundational super structure that serves as point zero for any and all characteristics is that we all operated under the pretext of hegemonic masculinity, as power and leadership within a male inter-group structure of hierarchy was vital to the maintenance, growth and success of the team. As all subcultures are, any team I played on was a social group that stood completely separate from yet integrally connected to the daily ingestion of human experience.

I spent a large portion of my years playing hockey in a leadership role. Why did I become a team leader? As I now look back upon my past through the lenses of a classical education, it seems the necessary characteristics were there, and perhaps they always had been. Without question drive, the desire for achievement, and leadership motivation were all integral components of my ability to lead. I wanted to be the best, I wanted to be the one that the coaches and the team looked to as an example of how to play the game; I wanted it more than anything. Further still, honesty and integrity was applied through my candid approach to both my coaches and my teammates. At times, I was seen as a hothead, as I just couldn’t help but say what was on my mind. Contrarily, I was respected as someone who was always open and honest. I played honest as well, as no matter who it was I played for when I was out on that ice my heart was always on the sleeve of my jersey. Self-confidence and cognitive ability also applied to my ascent to the leadership role. I never considered being intimidated an option, which directly correlated to the development of my ability to read others team’s systems, discover their weakest points, and my specialty, latching on to the opposing teams weak minded players and provoking them right out of the game.

Although I didn’t make all of the decisions all of the time and I didn’t constantly give orders, I probably leaned towards an autocratic style of leadership. I did so, however, as an autocratic in democratic clothing, a Napoleonic style of leadership that works very well, albeit slightly Machiavellian. Present to your teammates the right to choose, but subtlety convince them that your way is the best without them knowing it. If one is a good leader this approach encourages all to participate while simultaneously activating your ideas the vast majority of the time. At all times, however, I was well aware of team hierarchy. Certain players were more followers than leaders, and other players were more leaders than followers. Beyond the team aristocracy, there was a wide range of players who were all important parts of the team, no matter how big or small their role. I felt it my duty as a team leader to be able to handle different players in different situations, and at different levels to maintain the power structure of the team. The sociological approach that most applies itself at this point is called Normative Theory, that suggests leaders are most effective when their decision-making styles are formulated on a situational basis. In other words, a leader’s ability to establish a definition of the situation is a vital part of leadership, as the idea of the reflexive self once again demonstrates its centrality to social psychology.

I believe that the inter-actionist approach explains much of why I came to lead, as I was the right leader for the right situation due to a combination of past experiences. The ability to lead and the ideals of masculinity from which they stemmed, had been developed from within my childhood reference groups and role models. My grandfathers both epitomized masculinity. My mother’s father was a paratrooper for the British Army during WWII, and then served as a police officer for twenty-eight years, including twenty years as a homicide detective. He always symbolized authority and that masculine detachment from emotion. My father’s father worked his entire life farming out on the prairies of Alberta, working with his hands and his back for more than sixty years, a man’s man and the picture of strength. My father’s image was that of Johnny Slick, an in- your-face publisher heavily involved with politics, who was sued for defamation of character countless times, but in representing himself in court never lost once. Telling it like it is, regardless of the sting that resulted, was my father’s specialty. All these men, in combination with the traditionally subordinated persona of my grandmothers and my mother, produced a constant countenance of masculinity and I came to see these ideals as being represented in leadership, and in some ways I guess I still do.

The masculine image of the men of my reference group brings us to the idea of hegemonic masculinity; the masculinity of power and leadership. Hegemonic masculinity is part of the very fiber of my hockey experience. The masculinity of leadership is an integral part of sport, and it becomes heightened with a higher the level of violence and physical play. There’s no doubt, team leaders become figureheads of hegemonic masculinity. As mentioned, I used the normative approach to leadership and incorporated my legitimate power as a team leader, my reward power to offer my approval from a position of authority, and my referent power, as I had the ability to call my team into action. Like the sport/war metaphors that are so common in the world of athletics, when I stood in front of my teammates before a big game I spoke with an androcentric tongue and stood as an elite male extending his influence and control over lesser status males within the team inter-male dominance hierarchy.

Sport/war metaphors valorize masculinity and lionize or make heroes out of the most aggressive men. I always led my team with a socialized power motivation. I wanted to be lionized. I wanted to be seen as the picture of masculinity to serve my own ego, but also to work with my teammates and lead by example, so that in the end we all would be victorious. As a hockey player, victory was the only thing that ever mattered to me, the only thing I played for… for fifteen years. And not only did I want to win, to use a sport/war metaphor, I wanted to crush my opponent and stand above my vanquished enemy as a symbol of hegemonic masculinity. I was often told by the many I played with and against that I was one of the most brutal and animalistic players they had ever seen. I did and still do take pride in that. Furthermore, I always saw myself as though playing on a stage and as a result I would often skate a brief but victorious circle around a fallen foe, still dazed from the crushing blow I laid upon him and say “Keep your head up boy”, as I skated back into battle leaving him immersed in hegemonic totalitarianism.

I respected the hierarchical structure of leadership and power in the game of hockey immensely. Hegemonic masculinity is always constructed in relation to a variety of subordinated masculinities and I was by no means always the vision of the elite male. The first half of my hockey career I was the subordinated male in the power structure of the team and I did so with pride. I remember when playing for and winning the Alberta Championships, I wanted the best players out there on the ice as much as possible, well aware that at that time I was not one of them. I looked at my role as providing rest for the team’s elite and security for my coaches by playing solid positional hockey when I was on the ice. I wanted to win – nothing else mattered. My role was embedded in the structural hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity. I had a part to play and played it well.

The second half of my hockey career involved a five-inch and fifty-pound growth spurt and the discovery of how physical play, and even out right violence triggered not only my offensive skills, but also my ability to lead. I remember as if it were yesterday the first time I was struck with this revelation at the age of thirteen. I’d already began to play rougher early in that season, but there was one instance in just our third or fourth game of the year when I caught a guy with his head down and literally knocked him cold right in front of our bench. What I remember clear as crystal was that when I looked up, I saw all my teammates and even my coach pumping their fists and screaming approving obscenities. The whistle blew and the young man had to be taken off the ice by his trainer.

I’ll never forget that hit. It was the first time I experienced power, not from the hit itself, but through my teammates’ reaction to it. It was a catharsis that changed my hockey career and deeper still, it changed me as a person. I made the jump to being a leader shortly thereafter and I began to realize that male solidarity is achieved and maintained by constructing and reconstructing inter-group relations at many levels. At a societal level, this represents hegemonic values as not only advantageous, but entirely essential to social order as it serves as an amalgamating ideological structure.

Fast forward a couple of years and I’d immersed myself in machismo and testosterone and more often than not, I was the leader. I became of those off-the-hook, over-the-top lunatics, who specialized in athletically sanctioned battery and assault. By extension, I was extremely adept at whipping an entire room of young men, oozing socially prescribed maleness, into an absolute frenzy. While in the locker room before hockey games, there were times I would pound my head into a steel cage that held the team’s equipment, while screaming war cries like some kind of madman, until my teammates frothed at the mouth. During the pre-game warm up, I skated out onto the ice without my helmet, so the opposing team could see the steel grating of the cage imprinted on my forehead. All the while, I stared down my opponents with a look that seemed to suggest I was planning on drowning their kittens or shooting their dogs after the game.

The off-shooting result of such ritual is the systematic delineation of gender. Manly men of aggression are lionized, while men who appear to be weak or passive are marginalized and emasculated. An extremely physical sport such as hockey thus links maleness to highly valued visible skills, and with the positively sanctioned use of violence and aggression. Such images serve as resources of mobilization to advance, justify and rationalize the patriarchal values that delineate hegemonic forms of masculinity.

Hegemonic masculinity also pigeon holes women into the subordinated roles of mother, wife or girlfriend, while officially licensing homophobia all in the name of the masculinity of leadership and power. Hegemonic masculinity represents, reproduces and legitimizes relations of domination under the guise of cultural values, norms, and beliefs. Such a construction frames out resistance as to challenge this will be perceived by many as challenging the fundamental morality of the social order and is often painted as an opposition to the very core of values upon which our society was built.  In the end, hegemonic masculinity thus survives and thrives on the mantle of its own neutrality, and the hegemonic androcentric construct of Western society is one in which the most manly of men still construct, maintain, and control the agencies of domination and power. The extremely cathartic experience of athleticism is an extension of these societal ideologies and gives the masses the temporal opportunity to wield micro-level power, while reciprocally supplying an arena to restore to the world the pre-conceived learning mechanisms of a given civilization, perpetuating the mass production of a society’s membership and the structure of power that results.

From Saudi Arabia Corespondent Eman Al Nafjan…

Gender Apartheid is the best word to describe the situation in Saudi Arabia. I don’t believe there is any other place in the world where gender decides everything a person does on a daily basis and to the minutest details. To the outside world this manifests in the ban on women driving and the compulsory abaya. However it goes much deeper than that in that gender discrimination is institutionalized in every sector of the Saudi government.

The majority of government ministries are off limits to women, both as visitors and as employees. Women are assigned a side building that is usually in the back with a separate entrance and it’s usually cramped. Moreover, when a woman needs to get her own papers done, these women sections are only authorized to do the most routine and mechanical administration. As an example let me tell you about a close friend of mine; she happens to be a Saudi who was born in another country and as such carries dual nationality. She went to renew her other passport and the embassy noticed that there was a discrepancy between her Saudi passport date of birth and her birth certificate by a few days. They insisted that this discrepancy had to be corrected before they could issue her a new passport. So naturally she took her Saudi passport and her original birth certificate to the ministry of foreign affairs. Of course she didn’t go through the main door like the men but to a small building to the side, added like an afterthought. That’s bad but it can be tolerated since it’s basically an aesthetic issue. But what was really frustrating for my friend was that the women working inside told her they were powerless to help her. They told her that her husband, brother, or father has to go to the men’s section to get her passport birth date corrected.

Of course, she got upset because at the time she was separated from her husband, she does not have a brother and she didn’t want to bother her father with such a mundane errand.

This scenario is extremely common; Najla Barasain here gives an account of how pointless the women’s section is at the ministry of higher education. And I’ve personally visited the women’s section at the ministry of education and they too had no decision-making power. Neither did female heads of departments at the women’s sections of universities. They were there just for appearances sake. Any real decisions had to come through the men’s section.

This translates to the impossibility of Saudi women getting hired, transferred, starting a business and even properly quitting without the total support of a man. When I had to get some paperwork done, I resorted to hiring a stranger and giving him a cell phone and my file. He would go to the offices that I directed him to, call me and then hand the cell phone to the official behind the desk. I couldn’t call the officials at their office numbers because frankly they rarely answered. And so this guy I hired would go from one official to the next at my instructions like a remote controlled robot. All this because as a woman, I am prohibited from entering a government ministry.

There is little likelihood that this will change anytime soon. Shiekh Al Barrak recently issued a fatwa stating that those who call for the mixing of genders even in the workplace should be killed. The Fatwa led the government to censor the shiekh’s website, but that did not stop him. He just moved to another website.

Moreover 27 other fundamentalist shiekhs signed a petition in support of Al Barrack’s violent fatwa. Al Barack himself is the last living member of the traditional, misogynist eighties rat pack of sheikhdom. However he has a loyal following within the muttawas of Nejd. His call for the death of gender mixing people has been linked by some to the burning of a literary club tent in Al Jouf. Feelings run high when it comes to women’s rights issues in Saudi Arabia. For every Saudi willing to speak up for women’s rights, there is a Saudi willing to attempt murder to shut them up.

To read more about Saudi gender apartheid check a translation of Dr. Fawzia Al Bakr’s article here.