Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

ECONOMIES OF DESIRE, FICTIVE SEXUAL UPRISINGS
Saudi women and the chick lit revolution
Source:
http://mondediplo.com/2011/05/05saudisexnovels
ECONOMIES OF DESIRE, FICTIVE SEXUAL UPRISINGS
Le Monde Diplomatique-English edition May 2011.
Saudi women and the chick lit revolution
A new generation of Saudi women novelists is taking the topic of sex into the very public sphere of chick lit, causing shock waves in Saudi Arabia and beyond. By defying sexual constraints imposed by state and religion, they have exploded the myth of a society sailing on a sea of piety
By Madawi Al-Rasheed
Saudis are reluctant to respond to the revolutionary effervescence that is sweeping neighbouring Arab countries. With the exception of the Shia in the Eastern province, most Saudis have been co-opted into accepting limited political, human and civil rights in return for royal largesse. Even so, a revolution of a different kind is definitely taking place.
Young women novelists are stretching the boundaries in unprecedented ways. They are doing this through producing Saudi versions of the “chick lit” of the 1960s. A new generation of novelists is writing about women as sexual agents rather than submissive victims of patriarchal society.
Among many others are Raja al-Sani (Girls of Riyadh), Samar al-Muqrin (Women of Vice) and two pen names, Warda Abd al-Malik (The Return), and Saba al-Hirz (The Others). Their novels are published in the obvious place, Beirut, with the publisher al-Saqi taking the lead in promoting this new daring literature (1).
Over the last decade, the increase in the number of Saudi novels that deal
with women as active sexual agents has been dramatic. In 2007, 55 novels
(written by men and women) had sexual themes; that increased to 64
novels in 2008, and 70 in 2009 (2). These figures attest to the
predominance of the economies of desire in which explicit sexuality is
central. Many are shocked when Warda Abd al-Malik writes in The
Return: “He took his clothes off and kept his long stretched yellowish
underpants. He didn’t offer me a glass of water or a rose. I didn’t see
chocolates or fruits. I didn’t hear a word or a whisper. He didn’t caress me
as I imagined. He just sat on top of me like a camel inflicted with leprosy.”
Among themselves, in informal settings, Saudi women, and Arab women
in general, engage in elaborate “sexual” talk that may seem shocking to
western middle class women, who are far more reserved in discussing
their own personal sexual lives in the company of female friends (even if
they have no qualms at exploring and exchanging information gathered
from Cosmopolitan or Elle or popular television series dealing with
explicit sexuality). Saudi women’s sexual conversations are not
embarrassing for those who engage in them, nor are they criticised –
provided they take place among married women. And although the
conversations often exclude young unmarried girls, these girls are just as
much engaged among themselves in constant sex talk.
What is shocking for Saudis is the entry of sex talk into the public sphere
through novels written by young women. These novels with their explicit
sexual material have unsurprisingly attracted criticism. Not many Saudis
want to hear Samar al-Muqrin’s heroine reflecting on a hot night with her
lover: “All barriers collapsed, I proceeded to quench the thirst that was
looking for a real sigh coming from deep passions, not a sex machine that
can be switched on and off after ejaculation.”
Legitimate erotic theology
Yet religious sexual manuals are accepted and widely circulated in Saudi
Arabia, provided they are supported by the opinion of the early authorities
on the subject and their later representatives. These publications form a
body of legitimate erotic theology. Since the advent of satellite television,
Saudi ulama (religious scholars) have dealt with all sorts of sexual issues.
Famous scholars now sit in Saudi Fatwa on Air television programmes to
respond to women’s questions on how to please husbands in bed, how to
distinguish different bodily fluids and, most recently, whether
Viginoplasty and Labiaplasty are Islamically legitimate cosmetic surgery
enhancing the sexual lives of Saudis. The Saudi ulama’s great expertise in
these matters has won them the amusing title of ulama al-haidh wa alnafas
(ulama of menstruation and childbirth).
The new women novelists shun these religious programmes, and write
their own narrative about sexuality, desire, passion and love. And they get
into trouble for their fictive sexual uprisings; for when informal, private,
girls’ sex talk moves from the oral context in which it normally takes place
to become international literature, Saudi society feels uncomfortable. A
small, cosmopolitan, government-employed intellectual elite tries to
celebrate the new chick lit authors, but a large section of literary critics
and the public in general have condemned women’s sexual novels.
Even non-Saudi Arab literary figures and observers have been astonished
by the daring literary production of this later generation of Saudi
novelists. Kuwaiti novelist and essayist Layla al-Othman, who has herself
written daring texts with explicit sexual references, accused Saudi
novelists of overdoing the sexual theme (3). Many Saudi women writers,
especially those belonging to an earlier generation, such as Sharifa al-
Shamlan and Siham al-Qahtani, accepted al-Othman’s criticism: al-
Qahtani wrote that she is sometimes ashamed to read sections of these
novels. And while al-Othman’s long writing experience allows her to deal
with sexual themes in sophisticated ways, many new Saudi women
novelists lack such skills, leading some critics to say their sexual scenes
tend to be vulgar, without the benefit of a really good story. On the other
hand, other Saudi women writers were surprised that al-Othman, who
had herself suffered ostracism and imprisonment in Kuwait as a result of
her daring literary productions, should voice criticism relating to explicit
sexual material found in recently published Saudi novels (4).
Many Saudi novelists explain the saturation of the new literature with
sexual themes as a reflection of Saudi society’s obsession with this very
human instinct. Novelist and essayist Badriya al-Bishr argues that sexual
themes in the new literature do not amount to society’s excessive
obsession with sex. Contemporary Arab literature, al-Bishr told me, “is
saturated with sexual scenes but critics do not concern themselves with
this. Only when Saudi women write about sex, they are singled out. This
is because the country has been grounded in darkness and now things
have changed. Women voices, which were absent, are now heard around
the world.” Saudi society is, she says, “organised around sex, either to
make it permissible or to prohibit it. Sex is everywhere. Obsession with
sex permeates all institutions like marriage and education. Young girls
encounter sex as children if they are sexually harassed; they then come
face to face with it as adolescents, whose mothers groom them for
marriage. Later, in marriage, sex is the primary purpose.”
And in Iran too
This overwhelming presence of sex, and the representations of sex in
popular fiction, is not unique to Saudi Arabia. Iran, a country that shares
many common features with Saudi Arabia, has in recent years also
engaged with promoting, regulating or condemning sex in an
unprecedented manner, at the level of both state and society. In Iran, sex
has become both a source of freedom and an act of political rebellion (5).
But since the 1980s, the regulation of the sexual life of the citizens is
taken as a state policy, explained and propagated by religious scholars in
the country (6).
The overwhelming place of sex in contemporary Saudi society may not be
simply a function of an innate and eternal “Saudi obsession”, amounting to
a pathologically compulsive condition, but a reflection of interrelated
contemporary factors.
The alleged obsession with sex is no more than a reflection of the marriage
between two forces: Wahhabi religious nationalism and its focus on the
private sphere as a protected and heavily regulated arena; and the state’s
desire to gain religious legitimacy through controlling and regulating the
private sexual life of its citizens.
This control is manifested in the endless signs separating men and women
in the public sphere, from market to mosque, university and school; in the
regulation of marriage to foreigners, subject to the requirement of
obtaining permission from the ministry of interior; in the guardianship
system imposed on women through sharia and many other legal
restrictions, at the heart of which is the regulation of the body and its
desires, in addition to family and marriage. These political and religious
forces coincide and so generate the obsession that baffles novelists like
Badriya al-Bishr and many outside observers.
In order to comply with the tenets of the old religious nationalism, the
state must be seen as regulating, controlling and managing all personal
and private desires. The occasional raid on a mixed encounter between a
man and a woman in a restaurant or café (the central theme in one novel)
is important. It is the symbol that signifies the state’s commitment to
protecting the public sphere from the excess of desires, initially stimulated
by the state and its entrepreneurs under elaborate urban shopping
development plans and private entrepreneurial initiatives to transform
the landscape into one where cosmopolitan fantasy flourishes for all to see
-- but not to consume or enjoy. To distinguish this newly created urban
space from any other one, control of sex and desire must become a priority
for the state occasionally to remind its people of its commitment to
religious nationalism.
There is another point. Saudi immersion in a capitalist economy that
fetishises sex, promotes unlimited desires and stretches the imagination
in the service of gratification must have turned a natural instinct into a
fetishised obsession. The oil economy had a tremendous impact on gender
relations, marriage and sexual life. Sudden wealth opened new
opportunities for sex while social mores and religion were not able to
advance at the same speed. Saudi ulama struggle with accommodating old
desires that become more urgent under the new oil economy.
Marriages of convenience
The popularity of misyar (visiting) and urfi (tribal) marriages in the 1980s
is an example of the constant quest for solutions to problems imposed by
changing economic, social and demographic contexts. The solutions
obviously remain grounded in the requirements of religious nationalism,
that is, privileging procreation within a legitimate Islamic framework, the
family. Saudi ulama justified these marriages and since the 1990s, in
order to respond to contemporary issues, invented more daring unions
such as misfar (travel), nahar (daytime) and “boyfriend” marriages –
arrangements that allow cohabitation without the usual obligations of
traditional Islamic marriage. A Saudi student at King Abdul Aziz
University in Jeddah shocked a public student forum in which discussion
of misyar was organised by students in higher education when she
announced that “like men, women too look for sexual pleasures” (7). Other
girls supported her in private.
These new unions remain controversial but they are increasing, especially
among older unmarried women who live with their parents. Misyar
marriages are now organised informally by female matchmakers, who
have good knowledge of the local marriage market and arrange compatible
unions (8). Matchmakers are reported to say they receive between seven
and 10 applications a day from men seeking misyar in Jeddah. Religious
sheikhs who run offices attached to mosques for facilitating marriage in
Jeddah conduct misyar marriages, whether they accept them or not. Many
women still object to solutions seen as privileging male interest, without
any consideration of the impact of such unions on women.
While the oil economy helped consolidate the obsession with sex and
enforcement of sex segregation, the recent neoliberal monetisation,
privatisation, consumption and excessive advertising since the late 1990s
are all contributing factors that push young Saudi women novelists to
privilege sex stories in their recent literature. Saudi society is not
essentially or naturally obsessed with sex; it is simply being drawn into
global images and practices of old and new desires, sex being only one of
them. So it is not a surprise that novelists have internalised the alleged
obsession with sex and saturated their stories with a quest to enjoy it,
against the background of disappointing marriages, social, legal and
religious restrictions, punishment and denial.
The “sex novel” appeared exactly at the time when the state decided,
under pressure, to reverse previous restrictions and promote the
cosmopolitan woman. The televised erotic theology is no longer the only
manual that determines sexual desires and regulates sexual acts. Today
Saudi society is exposed to other sexual paradigms that are eroding
previous taken for granted wisdom on sex and desire. The new novels
reflect these developments and articulate the tension between old and
new.
The quest for the cosmopolitan woman, which both the state and some
sections of Saudi society strove to locate and highlight after 9/11, has
found its expression in the fiction of young Saudi women novelists. These
young women are urban, educated, sophisticated and speak many
languages. They belong to the emerging middle class that has benefitted
from oil wealth, education and, since the late 1990s, the free market
economy that opened up not only business and investment opportunities
but also the media in its old and new forms.
The heroines of this younger generation are immersed in a cosmopolitan
fantasy, portrayed as cappuccino drinkers, shisha smokers and
globetrotters. They move between home, college, private business and
shopping centre, like any aspiring privileged youth today. The new
generation novelists know only the local modern high-rise shopping
centre, café culture and their equivalents in famous world capitals. Above
all, they are “connected” through their family networks, exploration of the
virtual world of the internet and regular travel abroad. Their language is
a mixture of Arabic and English, with the idioms and abbreviations of
email messages, Yahoo groups, Facebook and Twitter creeping into their
everyday language.
Heroines are lovers who travel to London and Sharm al-Sheikh to
experience freedoms denied at home, such as spending a night with a
dream lover, simply sipping a glass of wine in a bar or sharing time with
the opposite sex in restaurants, cafes and parks. From the new wide
avenues of Riyadh to the streets of London, New York, Paris, Geneva and
San Francisco, they skilfully navigate places and cultures. They travel for
education, work experience, freedom and holidays. The novelists and their
heroines are products of the neoliberal capitalist economy that creates
“avenues, means, and commodities of gratification, material and symbolic,
often related in one way or another to sexuality” (9).
At home our heroines shop in glass and steel malls, carry Louis Vuitton
bags and blog in Arabic and English. Some transgress so much that they
find themselves in the hands of the Committee for Promoting Good and
Prohibiting Wrong. Others engage in playful, carefully concealed courting
or flirting, which do not lead to such dramatic outcomes. The struggle of
these heroines is a battle between them and society, with its many agents
of control. In these novels, mothers, fathers, brothers and husbands, in
addition to religious vigilantes, work hand in hand to enforce surveillance
over young women.
The new women’s chick lit is neither heroic resistance nor outright
subversion. Its abundance after 9/11 is a reflection of the shifting relations
of power between the state and religion. The state’s desire to promote a
new feminine face allowed women to engage in a cosmopolitan fantasy in
which they became active sexual agents. Moreover, women novelists and
their fiction now represent the increasing penetration of Saudi society by
the neoliberal consumer economy. Today the Saudi revolution is a fictive
sexual uprising, reflecting realities on the ground that many observers
inside and outside the country prefer not to see or write about. The myth
of Saudi Arabia as a sea of piety is now difficult to substantiate, not just in
fiction, but on the ground.
Madawi Al-Rasheed is professor of anthropology of religion at King’s
College London and author of several books on Saudi Arabia including A
History of Saudi Arabia and Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices of
a new Generation, Cambridge University Press, 2002 and 2007
Original text in English


(1) Raja al-Sani’s bestselling Banat al-Riyadh (Girls of Riyadh), Penguin,
2007 (English); Samar al-Muqrin, Nisa al-Munkar (Women of Vice), al-
Saqi, Beirut, 2008 (Arabic); Warda Abd al-Malik, Al-Awda (The Return),
al-Saqi, Beirut, 2006 (Arabic); Saba al-Hirz, Al-Akharoun (The Others),
Seven Stories Press, 2009 (English).
(2) Yasir ba Amer, “Jadal al-jins fi al-riwaya al-saudiyya” (The Controversy of sex in
Saudi novels), Al-Jazeera, 8 May 2010.
(3) Layla al-Othman recounts her long journey through the courts to defend her
novels in Al-Muhakama (The Trial), Dar al-Adab, Beirut, 2009, in Arabic only.
(4) Huda al-Daghfaq, “Saoudiyat yuwajihna itihamat al-Othman hawl al-jins alrowai”
(Saudi women respond to al-Othman’s accusations regarding sex in novels),
Al-Watan, Kuwait, 4 May 2010.
(5) Pardis Mahdavi, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s sexual revolution, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, 2009.
(6) Iranian state and religious circles endorsed and popularised temporary marriage in
the 1980s. See Shahla Haeri, Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi’i Iran,
Syracuse University Press, New York, 1989.
(7) Electronic Wakad newspaper, 4 March 2010; http://waked.net
(8) Mariam al-Hakeem, “Misyar marriages gaining prominence among Saudis”, Gulf
News, 21 May 2005; gulfnews.com
(9) Sami Zubaida, Beyond Islam: a New Understanding of the Middle East, IB Tauris,
London, 2011, pp 8.