By Miranda Simon

STANFORD - When Hillary Clinton visited a young women’s college in Saudi Arabia this February, journalists expected a rerun of U.S. envoy Karen Hughes’ 2005 debacle. The settings were strikingly similar: a group of college women garbed in black abayas, anticipating the latest dictum on how Americans perceive the situation of women in Saudi Arabia and hope things will change.
Karen Hughes’ visit had been carefully choreographed: the city, Jidda, is considered one of the most liberal areas in Saudi Arabia, and Hughes was believed to be particularly “careful.” But when she said she hoped women would be able to fully participate in society and drive, she met considerable resistance.
Clinton struck some of the same chords, but when it was the women’s turn on the microphone, they sidetracked the topic completely.
The students asked many interesting questions: why the United States was putting so much pressure on Iran not to make a nuclear bomb and why Israel has them, among others. But the next day’s headlines were along the lines of “As Saudi Women Meet Clinton, No Talk of Rights,” or “Female Saudi Students Meet Clinton but Miss a Cue.”
The news was the absence of the expected story, instead of the event itself – as if there were an inextricable link between the mention of Saudi women and women’s rights that cannot be severed even when the scenario unfolds otherwise.
Diplomats, politicians and journalists alike carry a cultural baggage that is impossible to leave at the border. For many westerners, the place of women in the Middle East has become a salient symbol of a culture clash.
“They can’t say they’re against Islam and that’s why they zero in on women,” says Guity Nashat, professor at the University of Illinois and author of many books on women and Islam, “It’s not because they feel sorry for them.”
Nashat, who has a Masters’ degree in Journalism from Columbia University, says that when newspapers place considerable importance on the question of women’s rights in Islamic countries, they inevitably create an illusion that the issue is more widespread than it is.
“One of my professors used to say that if a journalist stays in a country for two days he or she can write a story easily. If they stay a month, it becomes harder for them to write because they start to see how complex it is and how much more they need to know.”
“Journalists should strive to get both sides,” says Aleena Syed, Vice President of Stanford’s Muslim Student’s Awareness Network. “They sometimes stop at the one woman who is unhappy. If they talked to different women, it would make for more interesting journalism.”
Journalists should, many argue, be allowed to denounce practices they find unsavory, like child marriages in Saudi Arabia, for example. There is, after all, no such thing as completely objective journalism. But Nashat believes opinion should stick to the editorial pages.
Nashat says that the western image of backwardness associated with Islam is heavily based on what we hear from Afghanistan, “in last year’s Iranian election, women were visible, aggressive and prominent. But people don’t go past the burqa.”
Maureen Dowd wrote an op-ed column in last Sunday’s New York Times, in which she asked a few educated Saudi women how they “could acquiesce in their own subordination,” but then goes on to realize that, as a Catholic woman, she was doing the same thing.”
She makes reference to the present scandals in the Catholic church. For a journalist that is usually blatant in her distaste for what she sees as a mistreatment of women in the Middle East, she makes a suprising statement.
“I too belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity,” she says.
Aleena Syed was born in the United States but has Pakistani origins. She has that modern multicultural syndrome of not fully belonging anywhere. She believes there should be room for social commentary in journalism, as long as there is respect for religion.
“When I go to Pakistan, I sometimes find it difficult not to voice what I believe is wrong,” she says. But when she’s in the U.S., she perceives other kinds of female subjection.
“From an outsider’s point of view, wouldn’t beauty pageants be a form of subordination too?”