BEYOND THE VEIL

BY SALLY BUZBEE

 

Hoda el-Salem is a young reporter with a good idea: She wants to write about what the teen-age boys in her city do with their idle time after school. She knows it's a big problem. She sees them herself, hanging out in parking lots, getting into trouble. And she knows the government is worried. Officials have proposed some new after-school recreation centers.

But Mrs. Hoda (as Saudis would address her) can't drive over to the mall parking lot to interview the young men loitering there. She can't talk with a kid at a fast-food joint, or wait outside his school. She can't even call her government source on the telephone to ask about the recreation centers.

When Hoda goes outside her house in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, she has to put on a long, thick black cloak that covers every inch of her body. Then she puts on a black veil that covers all of her hair, and another black veil that covers all of her face. She can't drive. She can't talk to a man other than her husband or brothers, usually not even by phone.

She could fax a man some questions. But to do that, she has to get the fax approved by her editor. And that involves another fax, because the editor sits on the other side of a wall at their Arabic-language newspaper, Al-Riyadh. Hoda has never met her editor face to face, because he is a man and he works on the men's side of the building.

Hoda works on the ladies' side, in a small set of rooms sealed off from the rest of the building. To get there, she bypasses the front entrance of the modern skyscraper and instead heads around back, to a small, unmarked door near the loading dock, with a security camera above.

So it goes these days in Saudi Arabia, in a society still rooted in ancient traditions yet lurching toward the modern world. Once nonexistent and still technically outlawed under the country's strict version of Islam, Saudi women journalists now routinely write for both Arabic- and English-language newspapers, usually for women's pages, sometimes free-lance, sometimes on salary.

At gatherings in Riyadh and Dhahran over the last year, I met with more than twenty women journalists who are tearing down the barriers to their profession. For even as they abide by strict rules governing what women can do, Hoda and her colleagues are pioneering a new type of journalism focusing on topics of intense interest to Saudi readers, but almost never covered in the past, especially social problems such as divorce, inadequate schools, and abuse of maids and other women.

They are working at a time when new access to the Internet and satellite TV have made information more available to average Saudis, and forced newspapers to a freer journalism, touching on subjects that in the past were off-limits.
It is a time of change even for male journalists. But for women, it is even more extraordinary. Talk to women here and you get the sense that they have become the real go-getters in Saudi society, perhaps because they have the farthest to go. They are the ones who seem most intent on getting an education, for example, and most intent on learning how their colleagues in other countries operate.

And despite a total lack of formal journalism training, the women reporters in Saudi are bright, relatively sophisticated -- at least to the extent that they are painfully aware of their own educational shortcomings -- and utterly determined to learn.

Like all women in Saudi Arabia, the women journalists wear the abaya -- the long black cloak -- and veil whenever they are out in public or around men. But in the privacy of their own office, where only women are allowed, they hang their abayas on coat racks and walk around in regular clothes -- pants, skirts, high heels. Occasionally a Sudanese copy boy from the men's side will come to the curtained door, ring the bell, and leave outside a load of fax paper or a pile of that day's newspapers. The female office assistant always waits until he is gone before pulling back the curtain to gather the supplies.

Because the women are not allowed to drive, the newspaper provides a car and driver to bring them to and from work, and to take them to women-only interviews or speeches. The one driver for perhaps twelve women is extremely busy, they joke.

Hoda and a few others appear to be natural reporters with instincts as good as any I've seen. Without any formal training, Hoda came with a project to fax surveys to Internet cafes -- strictly off-limits to women -- to ask the young men there what they do after school. The proprietors at the Internet cafes handed out the surveys to their customers.

In this way, Hoda was able to "interview" the young men -- shabab -- of her city and write about their lives, even though she is unable to approach them as they gather by their cars in parking lots. If Hoda tried to do that, she would be arrested.

And she got good stuff. Some lied in the surveys, she believed. But others told her what Internet sites they looked at, what they talked about with friends, and where they hung out after school. She ended up with a good feature story.

The women's biggest problem is in finding such creative ways to skirt restrictions. Often they rely on fax or e-mail. Ibtihal Hasan, a young Iraqi woman whose family has lived in Riyadh her whole life, has success reporting on technology issues, such as the Internet, because her sources are often Westerners willing to talk to women. She recently interviewed some Microsoft officials by phone when they were in Riyadh, for example.

Often, however, the women reporters focus solely on women's issues, simply because women are the only ones they can easily interview. Bareah Ibrahim was visiting a women's psychiatric hospital when a source told her of bad conditions there, including patients chained down and force-fed. She went to former patients' homes to interview the women and their families, then held onto the information for a year, until her editors began loosening restrictions on what could be written. She finally wrote an exposé last year that received much publicity.

Working as a journalist is still technically illegal for women in Saudi Arabia; the approved career fields are health care and education. Some Saudi men will talk to the women reporters by phone but many won't. Occasionally, if she annoys a male source, says Haiam el-Mofleh, the man will challenge her and tell her that journalism is illegal for women. Usually, she just tries to change the subject.
When they go to cover a speech, they must sit in a side room or watch the speech on a video monitor. Afterwards, the male reporters in the audience can ask questions, but the women usually cannot. They are still largely excluded from the more glamorous assignments, such as covering government news. It also frustrates them that their stories seldom get picked up by the Saudi Press Agency.

These frustrations are in addition to the profound restrictions that all journalists, male and female, still face in Saudi Arabia, where any criticism of the ruling Al Saud royal family is strictly off-limits and editors are still accountable to the government. Some women reporters were recently forbidden to write about children born to women in prisons, for example.

Nevertheless, newspapers routinely now report on sensitive aspects of Saudi culture that once were swept under the carpet, such as the problems faced by Saudi women who marry foreign men, suicides by runaway maids, and even "weekend marriages."

Many journalists working in Saudi Arabia attribute the change squarely to the growing availability and influence of the Internet, which was opened to the public in 1999, and to the reach of the cable television program al-Jazeera from Qatar, which presents frank and uncensored accounts, interviews, and talk shows on topics of interest in the Middle East.

As they struggle to be taken seriously, only in the last year have a few women at Al-Riyadh been granted contracts that provide a steady salary plus benefits. Most still continue to be paid for each piece, on a free-lance basis, and sometimes work from home.

Most of them came to journalism by accident. Often they had written since childhood, sometimes poetry, and then began sending in material to newspapers at a friend's urging. They have almost no formal training, as no women's university has a journalism program. And often they feel they are stumbling around with little guidance. Hoda, for example, says she sometimes cries when she interviews a woman with a sad story, and was very worried this would brand her as unprofessional. She seemed relieved to learn that most Western journalists view compassion as an important trait for a reporter.

Hoda recently attended a three-month course sponsored by a government ministry that taught her some basic concepts about how to organize stories. But the course was purely theoretical and not of much use practically, she says. Bareah is studying media through a distance-learning program offered by Cairo University. Ibtihal studied communications at a university in Malaysia and speaks fluent English and thus is a mini-resource for the others, especially in using the Internet.

The women, while happy with their work and grateful that the field is opening to them, express frustration at the restrictions they still face. They blame these rules not on their religion but on antiquated traditions running up against modernity. By pursuing a career in journalism, and staking out new roles for women in Saudi society, they are not only opening their own lives to new professional horizons, they are helping their country open up to the world. *
 
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Sally Buzbee is a longtime reporter and editor for The Associated Press in Washington. She spent the past two years on leave in Saudi Arabia while her husband worked at the U.S. Embassy there. During that time she conducted several seminars for women journalists in various parts of the country, under the auspices of the public affairs section of the embassy.