A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

A MOST MASCULINE STATE: GENDER, POLITICS, AND RELIGION IN SAUDI ARABIA Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Ca mbridge University Press, 2013 (xii + 333 pages, works cited, index) $78.79 (cloth), $26.99 (paper)A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia will become an essential reference for discussions of what the author Madawi Al-Rasheed calls "the globalized question of Saudi women" (26). Saudi women are subject to economic marginalization and strict rules that regulate their everyday lives. While Western media focus on the ban on driving, this book explores the "deep-rooted exclusion" of women in the Saudi kingdom (1). Male guardians determine and control women's mobility, education, employment, and health just as the state makes their subordination possible at the legal, social, political, and economic levels.Al-Rasheed identifies her book as a project exploring "the intercon- nection between gender, politics, and religion" in an attempt to explain the continued exclusion of Saudi women from the public sphere (3). The ban on independent associations and organizations has also played a major role in denying Saudi women a chance to press collectively for social transforma- tion (2). The status quo is, however, changing with the expansion of com- munication technology that allows Saudi women to be present and active in the public sphere. Their voices are no longer unheard as they challenge ociety "through daring voices, critical texts, and real mobilization" (2).Acknowledging pioneering texts in the study of gender in Saudi Arabia, including work by Soraya Altorki, Saddeka Arebi, Eleanor Doumato, and Amelie Le Renard, and drawing upon the work of feminist scholars Deniz Kandiyoti, Suad Joseph, Mounira Charrad, and Sylvia Walby, Al-Rasheed looks to fill a gap in the growing literature by placing gender in Saudi Arabia in relation to the state and religious nationalism. She formulates the concept of "religious nationalism" in conversation with and against Joseph Massad's and Partha Chatterjee's theories of nationalism, which, she argues, "fail to account for the imaging of Saudi Arabia" (9). Unlike Jordan, for example, which was "invented" by forging a nationalism based on Bedouin culture, "the Saudi nation articulated an identity by claiming to apply the Sharia in all aspects of life and submitting to a universal Islamic ethos" (14). Citing the work of Beth Baron and Mervat Hatem, she also contrasts the case of the Saudi kingdom with that of Egypt, where anticolonial nationalism allowed women to benefit in certain legal aspects while "projecting gender relations as a function of greater political projects" (17). In the Saudi kingdom, religious nationalism involved breaking the military and political autonomy of the tribes, even as it drew upon the tribal ethos to keep "women in a patriar- chal relationship under the authority of male relatives" (5). By looking at both secular and religious nationalisms in the region and their relation to modernity, mostly through the prism of their discourses of women's rights, Al-Rasheed shows how "in both cases, women are turned into symbols, representing anything but themselves" (17).In the Saudi kingdom, a limited women's presence indicates the nation's obedience to Islamic law. Al-Rasheed surveys a number of Saudi fatwas on women in the 1980s whose restrictive interpretations of Islam, she shows, were used by the state to further limit women's visibility in the public space. The religious 'ulama' have also emphasized women's "emotionality" to deem them incapable of serving in state positions and public offices. This narra- tive was further used to make the subordination of Saudi women possible in legal, social, and religious terms. In order to control their appearance and mobility, women's bodies were referred to as sources of fitna (which the author translates as "chaos" rather than "temptation").According to Al-Rasheed, Saudi women face a "double exclusion"- "one in the general economy and one in the domestic sphere" (23). …