I was stranded at the wrong telephone office my second day in the Gulf state of Qatar, where I’ve been sent to cover a war in Iraq. A young woman named Mona offered me a ride to the right one. A policewoman, she had a few days off from work and she quickly became my guide. She was wearing the uniform of Qatari women: a head scarf and an abaya–a loose-fitting black cloak that covers everything. “I have to wear it especially when I drive,” she explained as we raced around the capital, Doha, in the car she bought for herself.
Though most Qataris follow Wahhabism, the conservative Islamic sect prevalent in Saudi Arabia, women in this tiny country are much freer than in their giant neighbor. They drive, travel alone and, thanks to recent reforms, vote. The emir’s wife, Sheikha Mouza, has pushed for legal reforms and co-education–although she was criticized recently for being photographed without a veil during the, um, unveiling of a Cornell University satellite location here. Despite all the modernization that oil and gas money has afforded Qatar, it is very much a traditional Islamic country. She is one of the emir’s three wives.
There are signs of Islam’s separation of the sexes everywhere in Doha: In the restaurant “family room” for women and children, in the “ladies hours” at the gym and the “ladies section” at the bank where Mona pays her monthly car installment to a female loan officer in Western dress. Even if there isn’t a special section, there is often special treatment. At the correct telephone office, Mona walked right past a line of men to the front, dragging me along. The men just stepped aside without a word as I sheepishly approached the teller.
Mona does not speak English fluently, and so far my vocabulary in Arabic is up to about five words, but we can talk about work, relationships and what we do when life gets hard. She sits alone by the harbor, where I join her one night to drink chai, sweet tea, and stare out at the neon lights of the Doha nightscape. We study each other and ask intrusive questions. I ask her about her thick, black tattooed eyebrows. She asks me why I’m not married. Mona married young. She has four children, but only the youngest lives with her. The rest are with her estranged husband in Saudi Arabia, where he wants her to move. She refuses. “He has a second wife now,” she says sharply.
Even with the looming war, we spend a lot of time laughing. Mostly at me. I had asked Mona to help me buy an abaya, a symbol of Qatari national identity in a country where two-thirds of the residents are foreign workers. There is actually lots of variety given that that they are all long and black. The style is in the details, like the embroidery or the buttons. What I thought was a perfect fit she derided as way too short. A proper abaya hits just above the knuckles and nearly covers the shoes. I passed on the suffocating niqab–the face mask that covers everything but a woman’s eyes–and opted for a black chiffon head scarf with an embroidered flower border. Mona even showed me her trick for getting it to stay in place: a tiny safety pin.
Qatar has censorship to enforce moral codes, but the biggest pressure here on women is social. At 30, Mona lives with her parents, her five brothers and their wives. Her father is a very devout man. She must be home by 9:30 p.m. or he gets very angry. Except the night before the Friday holiday. One recent Thursday we stayed out until 10:30 p.m. smoking sheesha–a fruit paste drawn through a long pipe that sits on the floor–and joking. “A woman gave birth to twin boys,” Mona says, a smile already creeping onto her face as she begins the joke. After the first child was born, the woman’s husband was very happy. But when the second one was born, he started hitting her. “Whose baby is this?” he screamed. We burst out laughing. Stupid-men jokes know no cultural barriers.
My attempts at being culturally sensitive by occasionally donning my head scarf have proved mostly comical. One night Mona invited me to dinner with an Iraqi woman friend of hers. (She told me not to mention what I was doing in Qatar.) I showed up in my modest suit and head scarf; her friend showed up in tight jeans. “Why are you wearing that?” she asked. My other foray with the head scarf was when Mona and I had lunch with two of her male friends. I was trying not to be provocative by covering every last wisp of hair, which is what the guidebooks say. Then one of the guys cooed, “You look cute in that.” I’m thinking of writing my own tips for women traveling in Qatar.
