{"id":20644,"date":"2012-06-27T16:35:13","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T12:35:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=20644"},"modified":"2012-06-27T18:10:58","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T14:10:58","slug":"norah-al-faiz-a-living-anomaly-in-the-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/region\/gcc\/saudi-arabia\/norah-al-faiz-a-living-anomaly-in-the-kingdom\/","title":{"rendered":"Norah Al-Faiz: A Living Anomaly in the Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Norah al-Faiz is supposed to be a symbol of progress in Saudi Arabia. She was appointed deputy minister of education by King Abdullah in February 2009, making her the kingdom’s highest-ranking female official. At the time, many observers\u00a0hailed<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>the move\u00a0as a sign of reform.<\/p>\n

But controversy has dogged Faiz since the beginning of her tenure. When the news of her appointment first broke,\u00a0the\u00a0Saudi\u00a0daily\u00a0al-Watan<\/em>\u00a0published\u00a0<\/strong><\/a>a small headshot of her,\u00a0wearing\u00a0a headscarf but showing her face.\u00a0She reacted angrily, and quickly clarified that she wore the\u00a0niqab<\/em>, a black covering that hides the face except\u00a0for\u00a0a small slit\u00a0for\u00a0the eyes. For\u00a0Saudi women\u00a0who wear the\u00a0niqab, showing their faces in public, let alone mainstream media, is unacceptable.<\/p>\n

“The publication of my photo upset me immensely,” she\u00a0told<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0the\u00a0newspaper in an interview. “[I]t is well known that I am a Saudi woman from Najd,” she said, referring to the conservative central region\u00a0of\u00a0the country, “and thus I wear a niqab. I will never allow the publishing of my photo in newspapers and I will not accept that it be put up anywhere.”<\/p>\n

Faiz asked the media not to use any photographs of her and, for the most part, it respected her wish. Upon her inclusion in\u00a0Time<\/em>‘s\u00a0list of the world’s 100 most influential people, the magazine used an\u00a0illustration<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0of a woman wearing the niqab. In response to questions about how she can work with her male colleagues — given\u00a0the strict gender-segregation rules that prohibit\u00a0men\u00a0and\u00a0women from working\u00a0side by side in government offices —\u00a0she\u00a0responded<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0that their interactions\u00a0would be\u00a0conducted “through closed-circuit TV.” (In other words, she would sit in a different room from her male colleagues and would be able to see and hear them, while they would only be able to hear her voice.)<\/p>\n

A woman’s decision to cover her face is a personal choice, and I respect it. But despite Faiz’s\u00a0repeated invocations<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0of her pious Najdi roots, she does not regularly wear the niqab. And the fact that she feels the need to tell the Saudi media differently raises some troublesome questions about the prospects of those trying to reform the kingdom’s policies on women’s rights from inside the system.<\/p>\n

The evidence Faiz doesn’t always wear the niqab is all over the Internet.\u00a0Walid Fitahi, a well-known\u00a0Saudi\u00a0doctor,\u00a0recently\u00a0tweeted<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0a photo of Faiz addressing Saudi graduates from American universities in Maryland that showed her wearing a white headscarf.\u00a0A\u00a0photo<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0distributed by Saudi Arabia’s official state news agency\u00a0<\/strong>on the same day\u00a0shows her in the same outfit, sitting next to Saudi\u00a0Ambassador\u00a0to the United States Adel al-Jubeir.<\/p>\n

I was surprised, but Twitter followers told me this was not the first time Faiz has appeared in public niqab-free. One of my followers sent me a link to\u00a0this photo<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0released by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, showing a smiling Faiz shaking hands with Britain’s Undersecretary of State Alistair Burt during their meeting in London earlier this year. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned, but\u00a0sitting with men\u00a0and shaking\u00a0their\u00a0hands\u00a0contradicts her self-portrayal as a conservative Najdi woman.<\/p>\n

She doesn’t cover abroad and she is not a typical conservative Najdi,” my fellow Saudi blogger Eman al-Nafjan\u00a0comment<\/strong><\/a>ed\u00a0on my blog. “She does and says those things to appease people who are looking for any excuse to bring her down.”<\/p>\n

If Faiz wishes to don a headscarf, I respect that decision as well. The problem is that she is doing one thing and telling a mass audience the other — leaving Saudis to guess at the reasons for her sartorial choices. Just few months before\u00a0the above\u00a0photo was taken\u00a0in London, Faiz\u00a0appeared on Saudi TV<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0wearing her niqab — what changed since then? Is she no longer a conservative Najdi woman? Was she wearing the niqab to deter attacks from religious conservatives, who until recently controlled girls’ education in the country?<\/p>\n

Some argue that as the first Saudi woman in such a senior position, Faiz has come under unfair scrutiny. Covering her face is a small compromise she has to make to reform the failing education system in our country. If this were the case, then she would hardly be alone: There are many Saudi women who do the same thing. They choose to cover their face or hair in public not because they prefer to take the veil, but because they want the focus to be on their cause or their work, not their clothing.<\/p>\n

These sorts of awkward compromises have won women incremental progress in recent years, but Saudi Arabia still denies them many fundamental rights. In September 2011,\u00a0women were given the right to vote and run in upcoming municipal elections four years from now, and will be appointed to the Shura Council,\u00a0a consultative body that serves as the kingdom’s quasi-parliament.\u00a0They still can’t drive, however, and need the permission of their male guardian for things like\u00a0<\/strong>traveling outside the country\u00a0<\/strong>or attending university.\u00a0Efforts by women’s rights activists to push reforms in these areas have fallen on deaf ears in the government.<\/p>\n

As for Faiz, does revealing her face suggest that Saudi Arabia has finally become more willing to put women in leadership roles? She’d certainly have you believe that the opportunities for women in the kingdom are improving.\u00a0“It’s a new stage in Saudi Arabia where the women will be included in the decision-making,” she\u00a0told\u00a0Saudi\u00a0graduates in her U.S. speech, pointing to changes taking place in the education ministry, especially in the curriculum.<\/p>\n

But let’s just say it’s\u00a0hard to take Faiz’s words at face value. After all, she is a government official who was speaking at a government-sponsored event. Out of the 6,000 students celebrated in that\u00a0graduation ceremony<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0held in Maryland, less than a quarter were women. The real test is to see them assume high positions in the government\u00a0and\u00a0the private sector. For now, Norah al-Faiz, with her niqab or without it, remains an anomaly.<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in Foreign Policy<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AHMED AL OMRAN: The controversy surrounding Norah Al Faiz’s wearing of the niqab seems endless. What’s the significance? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":20645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,173,482,10],"tags":[2224,634,7478,630,2196,191,3029,18275,4647,166,18337,18302,177],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20644"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}