Girls of Riyadh

"Yes. I chose it to illustrate what the West looks for in Saudi Arabia. It’s written as a series of email exchanges between four or five girls who talk about all sorts of things that young girls talk about, from relationships, to makeup, to going out. They discuss and debate all sorts of things, but it’s a very, very simple book with, I think, minimal literary qualities. It is obviously not a work of world literature, but it got huge publicity in the West. It was translated into over 25 languages. It was regarded as a liberating text for Saudi women and the author, who’s a very young dentist, had the foreword written by the Saudi ambassador in London at the time. He endorsed the book. But the book was initially banned in Saudi Arabia, where the author was living. There were also religious “opinions” about the book. I wouldn’t call them fatwas, but religious opinions against the author because she was seen as tarnishing the reputation of the girls of Riyadh by depicting them in the way she did. What was interesting was the hype about this text in the West. I looked at it as a window to examine Western thinking about Muslim women, especially Saudi women. Everybody who reviewed the book or wrote about it in the media praised it for its almost revolutionary impact and for the bravery of the author. Rajaa Alsanea hints at sexual encounters, but without actually being very explicit. Yet the act of talking about sex on paper was regarded as a revolutionary act. People in the West think that Arab culture is like the middle-class culture in Britain or France where sex is a taboo and women don’t talk about it. It’s only in recent times that talking about sex entered the public sphere in the West, and there are quite a lot of people from particular classes in the West who look down on and are apprehensive about the public discussion of sex. But Arab or Muslim women talk about sex all the time. They just talk about it in different contexts. The book seemed to provoke the realisation that Muslim women actually have a sexual life and they talk about it in very open ways among themselves. It is part of an oral culture. People in the West don’t realize that historically in Islamic civilization there were sexual manuals published and circulated—written by men mostly—about sex. So, the publication of this book exposed this ignorance in the West about the sexual lives of Muslims and the fascination with them. It’s almost like an orientalist-fixation fetishism."

"It’s a 21st-century look at Saudi, one of the most secretive societies in the world. There was a lot of hype about this book. The author was likened to Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City. So this was the Eastern version but without the sex! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It was a glimpse into this secret society and that is what drew me to it. It talks about dating, relationships, love, Islam and expectations. And of course Saudi is a very conservative Islamic society. Well, I don’t think it challenges stereotypes about Saudi. It still shows it to be a very male-dominated society where the women feel stifled. There are so many expectations put on them in terms of who they marry, what it means to be a good Muslim girl. It does. Although I didn’t think it was particularly well written. May be that was lost in translation, but it is still an interesting world to find out more about. Despite being such a male-dominated and conservative Islamic society, the women there still have hopes and dreams like women worldwide."