Last week the MEAI hosted a talk by Amelie Le Renard who discussed how consumerism was affecting the social culture of young women in Riyadh in terms of changes in dress that are considered transgressions in Islam. She also went into detail over how these transgressions are much more complicated and have much more effect on the modern urban Muslim society than simple adolescent rebellion against strict rules.

Ms. Le Renard's study was conducted on the Alaysha campus, a single sex public university campus in Riyadh surrounded by high walls and regulated, at least on paper, by a set of government issued regulations that follow Islamic teachings regarding how women should appear and act in public. These include very conservative dress codes such as wearing dark colored, undecorated 'Abayas (traditional Muslim overgarment) on the head to give a shapeless appearance to a woman opposed to the more flattering and feminine look given by wearing 'Abayas on the shoulder. Wearing an 'Abaya is considered a very conservative Muslim dress code that is meant to be modest, but Ms. Le Renard observed that many young women in the campus either did not wear Abayas, but rather very Western clothes, some very revealing such as tank tops and tshirts (sometimes even with provocative messages on them), or turned the Abaya into a fashion statement by wearing intricately decorated ones and on the shoulder.

To clarify, the general guidelines stating how a Muslim should dress are meant to assert three things: 1) a feminine identity, 2) a Muslim identity and 3) modesty. Interestingly, young women who transgress this dress code do not make an effort to hide them while at school. In fact, Ms. Le Renard suggests that it has instead become a peer-pressured sort of culture in of itself-- to see who could be more fashionable and have new ways to transgress these dress codes. Through these transgressions, she claims, young women are constantly redefining pre-existing norms, testing limits and contributing to a progressive movement. However, one should note, she says, that this progressive movement is not political in nature. Most of the young women who transgress this dress code are not doing so because they want to be "liberal" -- a very defined category for them. Many of them think that liberal Saudi women who speak out on television for voting rights and integrated co-ed work spaces are radical and overly influenced by their experiences in the West. For older women, things like voting in municipal elections are not even of interest because of how little importance they carry.

Naturally one wonders how these young women justify their practices. Many do not consider their transgressions to be a form of revolting. They recognize a clear difference between convictions and practice. Many are still very much Muslim, but simply do not see a problem between their dress codes and their beliefs and push against a literalist translation of Islam. These young women are very interesting because they represent an emerging group in urban Saudi; while they are not a large percentage of the population they're establishing themselves as an essential rather than peripheral group of society and helping redefine what society's norms are. Many of them have new, more visible jobs and carry a symbolic impact.

At the conclusion of the talk, one member of the audience asked a very interesting question, " Why do universities have these rules if they're not usually firmly enforced, for why else would there be so many cases of transgressions?" Ms. Le Renard acknowledged that the punishment was indeed not often given out and even the punishment itself was not so severe: Write a promise to not repeat the same transgression. It should be noted that if a student has written three such promises, she may be expelled from the university. Ms. Le Renard did not give a definitive answer, but suggested some very plausible explanations such as:

1. Maybe the administrators are not quite convinced about the importance of these rules themselves
2. Maybe parents are not quite so convinced of these rules and thus continue to allow their daughters to dress how they want to, or they are not aware because their daughters will bring multiple sets of clothes to change into once at school
3. or maybe administrators are too lazy to deal with so many cases of dress code transgression.