The TEFL Times

By Sarah Adham

Are women in the Gulf really oppressed? Unfortunately this widely-held opinion is based on ignorance and prejudice by people in the West. Women in the Gulf are just as intelligent, articulate, capable and ambitious as their Western counter-parts. They just haven’t been given the opportunities by their governments to exercise all that ‘drive’ until recent times – meaning in the last two decades.

Nowadays, there are many universities, colleges and learning centres in the Gulf region specially geared towards women. Many women work as teachers, business women, psychologists, gynaecologists and in many other professions.

Women in the UAE and certain other Gulf states are free to drive their cars, anywhere and at any time, and although Saudi Arabia has banned women drivers up until now – many observers say it’ll only be a matter of time before the law changes. Certainly from my experience as an English Teacher in Saudi Arabia, the young adult women I taught were far from being oppressed. They were well-clued up about all the latest catwalk fashions, even more so than women in the West and the latest in make-up trends and hairstyles. They were happy to be driven around by their chauffeurs to any amount of exclusive shopping malls within the capital, Riyadh. Many of them, I found, were thoroughly spoilt and ‘pampered’, had their own maids, cooks and baby-sitters and therefore had the ‘freedom’ to meet up at a branch of ‘Starbucks’ for an afternoon coffee! The girls I taught, many of them, had access to swimming-pools (for women only, of course), work-out gyms and liked to go bowling in the new bowling-alley that exists in the women’s section of the Kingdom Mall in Riyadh. They also informed me that they liked to play ‘Pool’, more popularly known as, ‘Billiardo’ in Saudi Arabia.

Some students were into American sit-coms such as ‘Friends’ and others liked to watch ‘So you think you can dance?’ – I’m sure they weren’t watching those semi-clad dancers while their parents were around! A friend phoned me from Saudi while I was holidaying in the UK and informed me as part of the conversation we were having that roughly a third of all the Porsches and Lambourghini’s in the world are purchased by Saudi women who then like to ‘Tailor-design’ them with diamond studs, as well as other ’stuff’. Many Saudi women as well as women from the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait are heavy smokers. Strange how they might see that as ‘liberating’?

All in all, the West needs to wake up to the fact that these ‘Veiled women’ are not all Quran reading, husband-loving, ‘paragons of virtue’ as they would have us believe. There are some wild women around, for sure. Neither are they all oppressed, walking ten feet behind their husbands, and imprisoned in their houses on a twenty-four-seven basis! Many women in the Gulf are conversant in English more so than at any other time in the past and the arrival of the Internet has flung open wide all the doors to the outside world that were previously closed. So shame on those in the West who ’spin’ untrue reports about Gulf women. I say, get your facts right!

About the Author

Sarah has been living in the Arabian Gulf for the last five years. My family and I moved to Saudi Arabia after a brief stint in the United Arab Emirates. We came over to the region from the United Kingdom in 2003. Living in the Gulf has its own challenges as well as limitations but there have been plenty of fun and inspiring moments as well. Visit http://www.thegulfhealth.blogspot.com