Here, It’s Ladies’ Day Every Day

There is no heavenly sentry outside the Ladies’ Kingdom, only a listless pair of khaki-clad policemen ready to run off any errant men. The women make their way past the gatekeepers, disappear behind frosted glass and step into a shopping center all their own.

The white floors glisten like pearl; the ceilings stretch high and airy. A hatcheck clerk collects abayas, the heavy black shrouds that women must wear in public. Unsheathed women saunter among the lingerie displays in plunging baby T-shirts and thigh-hugging pants. Philippine and Indian nannies trail with strollers.

“I prefer to shop in Rome or Beirut,” says Aziza Abdel Aziz, a 30-year-old Saudi banker who has sunk herself into a bench with a small mountain of newly purchased shoes at her feet. “But at least here we can remove the cover, take a coffee and just” -- she grasps for a word -- “relax.”

In a land where women are kept under wraps by packs of cane-wielding religious police, the Ladies’ Kingdom is a rare liberated zone. Some call it a scrap of progress for women who enjoy few liberties. Others see yet another monument to gender segregation -- a reminder that Saudi society will endure any complication and cost to keep the “ladies” far from men.

It is just one floor in one shopping mall, tucked within a massive arc of glittering steel and glass that rises from the flat stretches of Riyadh. But this ring of posh boutiques and polished coffee corners offers a very particular glimpse into a country that is enamored of all things modern and fashionable -- and ruled by a rigid code of Islamic and desert customs.

Saudi women are forbidden to check into hotels alone or travel abroad without permission from a male guardian. They may not drive and are generally banned from mixing with men in classrooms or offices.

Teenage Saudi boys are so hungry for contact with girls that they are engaging in an unusual mating ritual: They scrawl their names and telephone numbers on slips of paper, crumple them into balls and hurl them at passing girls in shopping centers when the religious police aren’t looking.

“No one even dares discuss the question,” says a young Saudi intellectual who, like nearly all Saudis, was unwilling to be quoted by name on the topic of women. “But what you see in Saudi Arabia is absolutely abnormal, by all means. Leaving the ethical and moral dilemmas aside, look at it practically -- it’s destroying the economy and society.”

Quietly, women have begun to stand up for themselves, albeit in ways that would be almost imperceptible to most Westerners. In January, some of Saudi Arabia’s most influential businesswomen drew the fury of the religious authorities by appearing unveiled and mingling with men at an economics conference in the Red Sea port city of Jidda where Bill Clinton was a keynote speaker.

“Allowing women to mix with men is the root of every evil and catastrophe,” thundered Saudi Arabia’s leading cleric, Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Sheik.

Gender mixing is “highly punishable,” he said, “a reason for greater decadence and adultery.”

This spring, a popular TV anchorwoman, beaten by her husband, allowed video of her bruised, contorted face to be televised in a protest against domestic violence.

But civil disobedience is hardly the currency in the corridors of the Ladies’ Kingdom, billed as “an oasis for ladies in the big city.”

“The greeter at the mall entrance is the last male to have any contact as the customers sweep through the main door,” promises an advertisement for the shopping center. “First stop is the concierge desk, manned, of course, by ladies.... Shielded from the unwelcome gaze of people on the lower floor by a frosted panel, customers are free for the first time to browse, shop and try on clothes, test cosmetics and much more.”

Trying on clothes has been a rare luxury in Saudi Arabia, where all salesclerks in mixed shops must be men, and where women’s dressing rooms are forbidden. In the haven of the Ladies’ Kingdom, women can try on clothes and lipstick at Saks, have their nails painted or shop for toys. They can take a yoga class at the women-only spa, send faxes from the business center or visit a bank with a female staff.

They can sip espresso at an all-female Starbucks. In the Starbucks two stories down, a woman so audacious as to plant herself in one of the plush seats in plain view will be politely ordered to leave. She will be directed to enter through a separate door and buy her latte at the Family Counter on the other side of the high wooden walls.

“Family” means that women are permitted and lone men are not. Even the steel takeout counters at McDonalds and Haagen-Dazs are split by plywood dividers, with one side marked “Ladies” and the other, “Gents.”

Postures slacken as the “Ladies Only” elevator car climbs heavenward toward the Kingdom. A woman tugs a panel of thin black silk off her face and drapes it over her head with a tiny sigh.

“See how fashionable they are?” asks Nada Barazi. “They come, they take their abayas off, and they’re happy.”

At 59, Barazi is as crisp and stylish as one would expect a manager at Giorgio Armani to be. Her hair falls in a jaunty crop; her makeup is immaculate; her blazer is smooth. But when she speaks about the abayas, she gets tangled in conflicting impulses. As Barazi describes the pleasure of wandering free of the robes, two women catch her eye. They have chosen to leave their abayas and face scarves in place; only their eyes are showing. At first, Barazi seems piqued. “Why do they have to cover their faces?” she asks.

But then her face clouds over, and she answers her own question: “Our religion says we should cover.” She glances down at herself. “We are good Muslims,” she says. “You know, when I am not covered, I feel bad.”Look here, this store belongs to Prince Alwaleed’s wife,” she says, brightening and interrupting herself at the sight of a boutique window aglitter with rhinestone boots and lace shifts. “The women here are very, very, very, very fashionable, even the poor.”

Gender segregation and a subordinate status for women are deeply ingrained in Saudi culture and in the strict Wahhabi form of Islam practiced here. As calls for change mount, the separation of sexes has emerged as a compromise between austere religious edict and the demands of a Saudi public modernized by satellite television and university education.

This spring, for example, Saudi Arabia announced plans to build women-only industrial parks and set up new sections in government buildings where female bureaucrats would cater exclusively to women. For the first time, women will be able to operate businesses under their own names, rather than under the patronage of male relatives. They will also be allowed to work in lingerie and cosmetics shops in mixed shopping centers.

But anybody who questions the separation of sexes risks bringing shame, condemnation and even violence upon their families. It is easier for a visiting journalist to get Saudis to discuss jihad or sensitive political reform than to elicit an on-the-record comment about the fact that women and men are generally forbidden to brush elbows.

Nada Ateegi, the assistant general manager of the Ladies’ Kingdom, is happy to receive a visitor, but she firmly refuses to be interviewed. She has spoken to a reporter only once, she says, and was quoted talking about driving a car. That simple remark -- a misquotation, Ateegi insists -- prompted a torrent of harassment against herself and her family. These days she hands a journalist some pamphlets about the Ladies’ Kingdom and politely ends the encounter.

Privately, some Saudis complain that by separating the sexes, Saudi Arabia is handicapping its economy and dragging down the educational system -- not to mention creating adults who might choke when confronted with a foreign business meeting or social affair.

Unless a man has studied overseas, a Western diplomat here says, “he is not socialized to deal with women.”

“It’s a huge problem for Saudi society,” the diplomat says. “If this society doesn’t open up, then what happens? At the most practical level, how are you going to operate anywhere else in the world?”

The Ladies’ Kingdom is aptly named, for in the Saudi lexicon a woman is rarely called a “woman.” Instead, she is a “lady,” a term that airbrushes her status with a gloss of gentility. To hear the men tell it, the “ladies” of Saudi Arabia are dignified, pampered and, above all, liberated from sordid tasks such as driving cars or enduring the ogling gazes of strangers. They don’t even have to deal with parking, Saudi men often exclaim without a trace of irony.

“Before, we never discussed it,” says Nourra Youssef, a U.S.-educated economist in Riyadh. “We took it for granted. Women don’t go to this -- OK, we don’t go. Women don’t do that -- OK, I won’t. Now we can discuss, ‘Why?’ Let’s talk about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Youssef doesn’t waste time worrying about whether women can drive or on which floor of the shopping mall they buy their designer gowns. “We are not looking for driving a car. This is a luxury for us at this stage,” she says. “I’m not looking for luxury. I don’t want to waste our time.”

She is concerned with the “bad interpretation of Islam” that leaves mothers separated from their children or penniless and isolated after divorce. She is worried about an environment in which Saudi women have been beaten or even killed for disobeying a husband or smudging their families’ honor; in which 15 schoolgirls died two years ago because they forgot their abayas when they tried to flee their burning school, and religious police blocked their escape.

“There are women who are poor, and they don’t know their rights,” Youssef says. “It’s like they’re lost.”

Youssef is a member of the kingdom’s first human rights organization, formed last winter. As soon as the group was established, she says, women flooded her with phone calls and faxes.

“But we’re trying to take it gradually,” she says. “The extremists got so aggressive, so outrageous, that it brought us back.”