COLUMN ONE : New Roles Tugging at the Veil : Economics and sheer frustration are drawing Saudi women into the work world. They chafe at traditions that keep them sheltered and separated.

The family portraits hang in two rows on the living room wall, just above the sofa. There is Wahid Ishgi’s, looking stern and fatherly, and his wife’s, with her dangling earrings and irrepressible smile. Below those are school photographs of the girls.

Well, most of the girls. Sixteen-year-old Meme ordered hers removed last year, lest an uncle or a cousin enter the house and see her face unveiled. Meme no longer shakes hands with male relatives, and she emerges from the house only when swathed in robes.

Her mother, who loves donning her clingy emerald jumpsuit and high-heels and flying to Cairo for a weekend at the nightclubs, shrugs when Meme scolds her and tells her they will never meet in heaven.

The women of Saudi Arabia, the veiled enigmas who have for centuries provided the West with an enduring myth of exotic harems and hidden enchantresses, today are chafing under some of the most stringent restrictions on females anywhere in the world: laws and traditions prohibiting them from driving, from studying or working with men, traveling unescorted, even emerging from the house unveiled.

A proper Saudi woman, one explained bitterly, historically has had three opportunities to emerge from the shelter--and prison--of her home: “when she’s with her father, when she’s getting married and when they bury her.”

Now, as an increasing number of women are being forced by the worsening oil economy to finish their educations and move into the work force, many are beginning to question the traditions that for years have kept women ensnared in the protective web of family, home, religion and custom--even as some of their daughters, caught up in a wave of religious conservatism that is sweeping much of Saudi Arabia’s youth, are turning back to the veil.

It is a recipe for conflict that has many families on edge, though in Meme’s case, her mother is proud.

“We want her to be better than us,” she explained.

Meme, who spent her days riding her bicycle or roaming the shopping malls when her father was completing his degree in the United States, said she became troubled when she returned to the turbulent Middle East with a nagging fear that she would go to sleep and not wake up.

“But I woke up,” she said simply. “God blessed me, and I put a cover on my head.”

Saudi Arabia, which regards itself as the seat of Islam because it is the home of its two holiest shrines, Mecca and Medina, has over the years largely defined the role of women according to Koranic tradition. A religious scholar, for example, recently considered a Jidda woman’s question about why Allah never sent any women as prophets.

“The message,” he theorized, “needed the power of mind, the strength of the body and the zest of the soul. It means that the conveyor of such a message must be very patient, hardened and enduring. All these characteristics are not always attainable by women. A woman gets tired by natural vicissitudes. She gets menstruation and falls pregnant. She cannot bear a weighty message because of this.”

The Koran advised that the proper Islamic woman keep her head covered in public, an edict that spawned the present custom of shrouding women from head to foot in black cloth and preventing them from any contact with men. In the workplace, women work largely in separate, heavily guarded buildings or offices. Most are limited to the teaching, health or banking professions, where they will have dealings with no one but women. At the universities, women study on separate campuses, listening either to female teachers or to lectures from male professors on closed-circuit television.

“Militancy in Saudi Arabia is still very, very far away,” explained one businesswoman, who asked not to be identified. “First of all, you’re going against your family, and your husband, who’s probably divorced you by now anyway. And then you’re going against God. With all of this, with God against you, how can you win?”

Nonetheless, a growing number of women, by economic necessity and sheer frustration, are beginning to move into non-traditional jobs and challenge religious authorities who say they don’t belong there. Female university graduates, who totaled 13 in 1970, are up to several thousand a year. Though even now they make up only about 12% of the work force, Saudi women have become businesswomen, surgeons, university professors and factory owners.

They still wear the traditional long, black abaya in public, but it’s now likely to sport a flounce or elegant gold braiding. Azza Raslan, who manages a women’s bank in Jidda, wears a heavily tailored abaya with black silk embroidery by Yves St. Laurent. She has another one by Dior on the coatrack in her office.

“When you have to wear a black cover from top to bottom,” she explains, “then you try to make it as elegant as possible . . . in Saudi Arabia, it’s a fashion statement.”

Ilham Mansour Dakheil, a 27-year-old with a doctorate who heads an occupational training program for women in Riyadh, contends that there is nothing in the Koran about what kinds of jobs women can hold. “You read the Koran, and the men interpret it for you, they tell you what the law is. But when you’ve got an education, you read it yourself, and it’s different.”

None of it has come easy, though. Sabah Safi, a professor of linguistics at King Abdulaziz University in Jidda, remembers last year, when she flew to Riyadh for a professional conference and tried to register at the Marriott Hotel. Unaccompanied women are not permitted to check into hotels in Saudi Arabia without permission from their husbands, fathers or employers.

“I had to call my husband and say, ‘Quick, can you fax me a letter or something?’ ”

Huda Awad owned her own contracting company and was employing up to 400 men during Jidda’s construction boom in the 1970s. But, as a woman, she was not permitted to go over site problems with the construction foreman. A male intermediary had to take care of it. And she wasn’t invited to the places where most jobs were handed out--parties and dinners for men. She had to send a male employee.

“How do you know he won’t pocket something?” complained Awad, who sports fashionable purple eyeglasses, short, slicked-back hair and a scoop-necked dress under her abaya and scarf. “I mean, the only person that will stick to my interests is myself alone, not a man. The only person that knows what I’m all about is me. The man is not going to give me my ambition. I’m the only one who can fight my own war and achieve what I want, and then be happy about my life.”

Unlike Awad--who in the past has paid for it--most Saudi businesswomen keep their offices in the back of the building and meet with men directly only if they are certain they will not be observed or reported to the dreaded Mutatawa, the religious police of the Committee for the Protection of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

Nearly every woman has an unpleasant encounter with the Mutatawa to report, an incident when she was observed talking to an unrelated man in public, or shopping without the proper headgear or abaya, and subjected to a public tongue-lashing, or worse.

“In the souq (market), they’ll come up to you and say, ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ Or worse yet, they go up to your husband and say, ‘Aren’t you a man? Why are you dragging this hussy around with you?’ ” Raslan said. “You’ve embarrassed yourself, you’ve embarrassed your husband, and for what? For what reason?

“Officially,” she said, “they say, ‘We don’t want the ladies having to face the hazards (of being part of the working world), we want to protect them.’ But unofficially, what the women see is they are apprehensive of women finding their own feet.”

At the same time, many Saudi women say they see their younger sisters and daughters becoming increasingly conservative, veiling themselves earlier, shunning virtually all contact with men. The public ice rink in Jidda, for example, used to be available to both boys and girls. Now, they skate during different hours, and young women also have mostly stopped going to the large carnivals along the seafront if men are present.

“I never talked to any boy in my whole life,” said one teen-age girl, whose family asked that she not be identified. “I’m not used to boys. I don’t know how to talk to them.”

Some girls, she said, cruise Jidda’s shopping malls behind their veils, waiting for young Saudis to thrust their phone numbers into their palms. Then they “love each other” for hours at a time on the phone, without meeting. It is one of the few ways Saudis have of becoming acquainted. But she said that “those kinds of girls, I don’t talk to, and neither do my friends.” Someday, she expects to marry someone who is likely to have seen little of her behind her veil.

“One look only,” she said with a sly smile.

Saudi men, predictably, aren’t delighted with signs of budding feminism, but oddly, some of them complain that women aren’t pushing hard enough.

A Saudi prince, who asked not to be identified by name, said he was driving in the desert with a young Saudi businesswoman several weeks ago when he pulled over to the side of the road and got out.

“You drive,” he ordered, challenging her to flout an edict against women driving that is rooted more in tradition than in the law. She seemed reluctant, and he was perplexed.

“We can only do so much, and then they have to take over. I told her, ‘We need suffragettes!’ ”

“Women, they need to change their roles, they need to fight for themselves,” echoed Dakheil’s husband, Abdulrahman A. Otaiby, a communications professor at King Saud University. “You think men should provide the environment,” he told his wife one recent night during one of their frequent arguments. “I think women themselves should be aggressive enough to ask for help from the government, write articles in the newspaper, do something!”

“The top administration is all in the men’s hands,” she countered. “All the keys are in the men’s hands. Now, if we’re going to go anywhere, whom do we have to convince?”

One Saudi businessman complained that his wife had recently gone to work but appeared to be more interested in “socializing” than in her job.

“Looking at the nature of our women here, they’re used to having maids in the house, drivers driving them around, and I’m beginning to feel that the woman has resorted more to pleasure than being an active member of our society,” he complained. “Maybe we are the cause of the problem, because we are the ones who made it easy for them to have maids and so on. But if we didn’t, our homes would be like hell.”

Even many of the most militant Saudi women say they are not feminists in the Western sense. Rather, they are seeking to expand themselves as Muslim women, as they interpet Islam.

Safi’s little form of rebellion was to shed her black veil and abaya for a long white robe and scarf, a dress she considers more appropriately Islamic. But she is not ready to try designer jeans, she says, nor is she willing to give up the protections from the outside world she enjoys as a Saudi woman.

“I have more value here as a woman,” she said. “My brothers are expected, it’s their job, to look out for me. They feel the obligation to have to take care of a sister.”

Murphy, The Times’ Cairo bureau chief, was recently on assignment in Saudi Arabia.