My life inside the Saudi kingdom
Fiona Moss
Published: 12:01AM BST 04 Jun 2004
The expat life in a well-heeled compound has its compensations, despite the restrictions on entertainment, driving and clothes, says Fiona Moss
This week, I had a tense phone conversation with an expat in Khobar, Saudi Arabia – where, until recently, I used to live – who was reeling after the recent terrorist outrage. Michael Hamilton - the Briton shot at the wheel of his car at the weekend, whose body was then tied to a vehicle and dragged through the streets - had been her friend. "Too close for comfort this time," read an e-mail sent to me by another woman, my former neighbour, as she headed for the airport.
What was apparent in both women's words was that the sense of security, both physical and psychological, provided by the ubiquitous expatriate compound wall is crumbling fast and that, for many, it really is time to get out - or, at the very least, to weigh up the benefits and costs of remaining.
A few months ago, I, too, would have been faced with the same tough decision - is clearing your UK mortgage and living the good life while you do it worth running the risk of death at the hands of Saudi militants? The question is almost universally applicable, because the common denominator linking the estimated seven million expatriate workers in Saudi Arabia (most of them from the Indian sub-continent) is the promise of huge financial gain.
My husband and I set out for Saudi Arabia in 2001, hoping to clear a £60,000 mortgage and to build a sufficient nest egg to extend our home in the UK; while there isn't a lot of money left over, it's not a bad return for two and half years away. A tax-free secondment to BAE Systems put my husband's income in a different league from his former salary as a military officer. With two young children and no education fees to worry about, it was, for us, the most extraordinary period of earning and saving.
Aside from the financial rewards, what British friends have always been most curious about is the quality of life that expats enjoy in Saudi Arabia. The first thing to be said is that the kingdom is very different to Dubai, the expat playground of the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi calendar does not acknowledge Christmas, so you take your annual leave to fit in with Ramadan and hajj - Christmas is not part of the company leave entitlement. I made no complaint about this - we were well briefed by my husband's company on the cultural changes we should expect, and I had some passing familiarity with the country as a former military Middle East intelligence officer. Similarly, being warned not to bring pork, pornography, Bibles, crucifixes and the obvious ingredients of home-made alcohol into the country did not come as a surprise.
What clearly fascinates the observer is the extent to which life within an expatriate compound in Saudi Arabia is at odds with that without. In Dubai, there is virtually no distinction between the two. There, as a Western woman, you may don your Capri pants and kitten heels, leave the family house (which is not necessarily on a designated expat compound) in the family 4x4, drop your children at an expensive international school, where their cultural horizons will be widened, before going to your club for a spot of tennis, a swim in a unisex pool and a hair-do. You might even work - thus staying on your own career ladder while your husband brings home the bacon and the booze.
By night, a standard of restaurant and cinema commensurate with the classiest tourist destination beckons. It's a good life, as I can testify from family breaks spent in the Emirates, and you don't even have to remind yourself that you are in the Middle East.
The differences between Dubai and Saudi Arabia are not immediately apparent. Within our compound, we enjoyed spacious, furnished and air-conditioned villas, Western dress codes, unisex swimming and gymnasium, satellite TV, internet access, European-style foodstuffs in the small compound shop and, yes, a "facility" with real alcohol, albeit the liver-hardening and home-made variety, made with local red and white grape juice, yeast and sugar. And, while a compound worker washes your car, tends the garden, even does your housework for ludicrously low payment, you, as the lady of the house, can choose to off-load the children at the compound crèche and laze by the pool, or perhaps take quilting classes in a neighbouring villa for the entire duration of your husband's contract.
Existence could not get much emptier than this, but for a season, these are the considerable compensations of life in a well-heeled British compound. The complexes in which Americans live have a reputation for even finer facilities and are highly sought-after as preferred residences. And Oasis compound, the scene of last weekend's Khobar atrocities, was until that point very firmly in the "glamour club" of expat homes.
Beyond the bricks and mortar and the barbed wire of the compounds, Western families find a world like no other. Saudi Arabia is devoid of public entertainment, cinemas and clubs; the country is littered with nondescript US fast-food outlets, but there are fine and friendly Indian restaurants, too, all of which have separate seating areas for single men and families (single women are not allowed in restaurants unaccompanied).
Every aspect of the nation's business life is circumscribed by a strict adherence to the Muslim call to prayer five times a day. During the holy month of Ramadan, when the Muslim population abstains from eating, drinking or smoking until the sundown prayer, most shops and all restaurants and cafés are closed during daylight hours. Only hospitals and veterinary clinics have a dispensation to remain open during prayers.
A prayer schedule in one's pocket is possibly more essential to Saudi life than a credit card. I have kept the one for 2003 as the most appropriate souvenir of my stay there, just to remind myself that the Maghrib prayer was called in the week beginning July 19 at 6.33pm, precisely. Time it badly and you could be standing in the supermarket with a trolley full of frozen peas when the lights go out and the checkouts close.
For women, the contrast between compound life and the outside world is visibly more stark than for men. First, in public, one is required to wear traditional Islamic female dress, a black, cloak-like affair called the abaya, which masks any semblance of the female form from male onlookers. In the supremely strict environment of the capital, Riyadh, this has always been a requirement but it only became so in the relatively more cosmopolitan conditions of the eastern province in the fallout from the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.
I arrived into the new world order and never thought to defy it. Running the gauntlet of the mutawa'a, the self-appointed religious policemen who roam public places looking for inappropriately dressed females of all races to admonish and threaten with sticks and arrest, did not seem worth the hassle. In certain areas of Khobar, and particularly after Friday prayers when anti-Western feeling tended to run high, some of us added a headscarf to complete the armoury.
The dress code has its uses, hiding a bad hair day in the heat or concealing a full-blown pregnancy. And never let it be said that there is no hierarchy of fashion: catch any well-to-do Saudi woman with a good figure to show off and you will notice that her abaya has a cut that is a touch more body-skimming than is usual, the cloth will be silk and embroidered and, yes, her heels will be vertiginous and her bag genuine Gucci.
You can trust the droves of young Saudi males who gawp their way around the crowded shopping malls on a Thursday night (the Muslim weekend) to go completely wild in appreciation. This is Saturday night fever, Saudi-style, and the dating game is played out with mobile phones. The boy - who hasn't come to the mall to shop - drops his number into her open Gucci bag when the mutawa'a aren't looking. For public entertainment in a land that forbids all contact between the sexes of different families, this is as good as it gets.
The second most visible symbol of the differences between the Middle East states is that, in Saudi Arabia, a woman may not legally drive a car. An Arab News article during my time in the kingdom reported that 50 per cent of the nation's road accidents were attributable to women, which, for non-drivers, is some feat and probably goes to show the level of subterfuge the male population must employ to cover its pride. A study of this phenomenon by the University of Al Ahsa concluded that women routinely argued with their husbands or demanded that they stop suddenly at the sight of a nice-looking dress in a shop window, and so caused pile-ups.
Any Western woman who wishes to travel outside a compound without her male escort (her husband), must therefore order a taxi from a firm that is designated for female use; they usually come with blacked-out windows and a polite Asian driver. I felt safe at all times in taxis, even when I travelled alone, but the regime's efforts last year to "Saudi-ise" the profession and shoehorn young unemployed Saudi males into the drivers' seats, coupled with the general rise in fear among Westerners, sent shockwaves through the female expat community.
The alternative is to use compound buses, which are hot and uncomfortable and run only from the bigger compounds on designated routes to supermarkets and malls. In my last few months in the kingdom, they became regarded as an easy terrorist target and, thus, an unacceptable security risk. Indeed, in the build-up to conflict in Iraq last year, some were set upon in car parks by angry Saudi youths. Unsurprisingly, many Western women ceased, even at that time, to leave their compounds for anything but essential visits to the supermarket, accompanied by their husbands.
The third crucial factor defining life in the kingdom for all women is the public segregation of professional Saudi females, preventing them from having any direct contact with males in the workplace. This results in the (female) Gulf editor of Arab News having to work from home rather than in the newsroom, and all shops and businesses (beyond the most exclusive and inaccessible ladies' centres of fashion and beauty, designed for the wealthiest Saudis) being staffed by men.
Usually, the shop assistants are quite liberal and friendly Asian expats rather than Saudis, but they can't cut your hair, give you a facial or fit you with a piece of clothing. So, if you don't know your bra size before you go into a shop, don't even bother looking. You will not be permitted to try the thing on in any case, and the assistant risks his job if he lets you head off to the loo with it and the mutawa'a are in town. The best retail relationship I ever struck up in Saudi Arabia was with a charming Indian who let me walk off with handfuls of Wolford bodywear, the most exclusive of Austrian labels, to try in the comfort of my home. For trust, that takes some beating.
All of these constraints on women should not detract from one very favourable difference between Saudi and British life. The child in Saudi society can do no wrong, which, for any parent who has ever wrestled with a toddler having a full-on tantrum in a supermarket, is a philosophy that can be sorely tested. Losing my elder son down an aisle on a supermarket visit was never of great concern, as he invariably turned up hand in hand with a kind Indian or Arab, clutching a biscuit. The last thing on your mind is that your child could have been abducted.
As a Western woman with fair hair, I have been gawped at, made to feel uncomfortable, even openly derided by a young Saudi generation that is more culturally confused than its forebears, who grew up untroubled by the presence of Western expertise in the military or oil industry. But take a child with you, and the Arab world respects you instinctively. Take a male child with fair hair and you are onto a winner.
I am painfully aware that it is not a cultural nicety I can expect an al'Qaeda sympathiser to observe, but I felt safer in Saudi Arabia as a mother than I did as a lone woman, and it is a memory I shall carry with me long after the dust of the impending Western family exodus from the kingdom has settled.
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