‘I'm glad I'm not a Saudi woman’: the First Gulf War and US encounters with Saudi gender relations

Abstract

On 6 November 1990, nearly 50 Saudi women staged a protest against the ban on women operating motor vehicles in Saudi Arabia. Occurring in the midst of the First Gulf War, the women's protest was a political statement about the harsh restrictions placed on women in the Middle Eastern country which both reflected and influenced Saudi society’s encounter with their American allies during the war. When United States (US) military personnel flooded into Saudi Arabia during the war, they were shocked at the way American servicewomen were treated by their Saudi allies and the second-class status of Saudi women throughout the country. This article explores Americans' reactions to their encounter with Saudi gender relations during the war and argues that the poor treatment of women in Saudi Arabia—which Americans dubbed ‘gender apartheid’—caused many Americans to question the longstanding US alliance with the conservative Muslim country. In doing so, US journalists, military personnel, scholars and the general public began to demand that concern about women's rights should be integrated seriously into US foreign policy towards the Muslim world.

Notes

¹ ‘Polygyny’ refers to the practice of one man having multiple wives. It is a more specific form of polygamy, which refers to one person, either male or female, having multiple spouses.

² On some nineteenth-century American observations of Islamic women, see Oren (2007).

³ The use of the term ‘fundamentalist’ when referring to Muslims has been debated among scholars. Since the term originated as a self-description for a particular brand of American Protestantism, some scholars have argued that the term is inappropriate when applied to Muslims. They have proposed as alternatives the terms Islamic ‘radicalism’, ‘Islamism’, ‘religious revivalism’, ‘traditionalism’ and ‘religious nationalism’. While sensitive to the problematic nature of the term ‘fundamentalism’, I find the alternative descriptors even more unsatisfying. I will use the word in this article to refer to political, radically conservative Muslims like Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and the Taliban in Afghanistan. See the contrasting arguments of Watt (2008) and Moghissi (1999).

⁴ In discussing a topic as broad as the ‘Islamic world’, there are certain limitations in terminology. There are many differences between Muslim societies, and Islam is practised in many different ways by various groups. However, Americans often generalize by referring to these diverse societies as the ‘Muslim world’ or ‘Islamic world’. Without implying that I see all Muslim societies as a monolith and with the knowledge that there are Muslims living worldwide, I necessarily use the terms as shorthand to refer to those countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia with majority Muslim populations and/or governments who use Islamic law as an organizing principle. Just as the ‘Muslim world’ is not a monolith, there is no one ‘Muslim gender system’. Women's rights, roles and status vary greatly across Muslim communities, cultures and class lines. However, the common perception in the US has been that the Islamic gender system is one in which women have lower status and less rights than men; it is to this general understanding of ‘the Muslim gender system’ I am referring when I use this term.

⁵ See, for example, Shirazi (2001), Kahf (1999), Ahmed (1992), Alloula (1986), Badran (1995), Lorcin (1995), Mernissi (2001), Scott (2007), Thompson (2000) and Jarmakani (2008).

⁶ See, for example, Connelly (2002), Hahn (2004), Little (2002), Amanat and Bernhardsson (2007), Mamdani (2004), McAlister (2001), Wall (2001), Yaqub (2004) and Randall (2005).

⁷ See, for example, Costigliola (1992), Dean (2003), Goedde (2002), Greenberg (2005), Renda (2000), Rotter (2000) and Shibusawa (2010).

⁸ See, for example, Tyrrell (1991), Hunter (1984), Huber and Lutkehaus (1999), Wexler (2000), Yoshihara (2003), Sneider (2008), Laville (2009) and Hoganson (2007).

⁹ See Brooks (1990a; 1990b), Minerva's Bulletin Board (1990a; 1990b), Amos (1991), Beyer et al (1990) and Brooks and Horwitz (1990).

¹⁰ See Boston Globe (1990), Umrigar (1990), Cannon (1990a; 1990b), Philadelphia Daily News (1990) and Williams (1990).

¹¹ FGM is not solely practised by Muslims; it is traditionally an African custom practised by Muslims and non-Muslims in West, Central and East Africa. However, those African countries where FGM is most widespread and/or the most severe forms of FGM are practised tend to be Muslim-majority countries, like Egypt, Somalia and Sudan. In these communities, FGM is defended as an Islamic practice, though it is not condoned by the Koran. Therefore, it is both an Islamic practice and not. This complicated relationship between FGM and Islam, however, has been lost in American public discussions of the custom. Instead, most in the US believe it is solely a Muslim practice, which represents for them the most drastic example of the Islamic oppression of women.

¹² The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) led the most publicly visible campaign against the Taliban in the late 1990s, and they called their mobilization, launched in 1997, the ‘Campaign to End Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan’.

¹³ In autumn 2010, after Obama initially indicated he was considering a negotiated settlement to the Afghan War, Time published a special issue on Afghan women which condemned any suggestion that the US would negotiate with the Taliban or abandon the protection of Afghan women's rights. Later that week, Christiane Amanpour used the issue of Time to confront Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi on the first first episode of Amanpour's new television news interview programme.

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Kelly J Shannon

Kelly J Shannon is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She specializes in the history of American foreign relations and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, Veiled intentions: Islam, global feminism, and US foreign policy since 1979.