Saudis 50% Unemployed: 90% plus for Females

Youssef Ibrahim, formerly WSJ's oil commentator and latter-day guru on the predicaments of the oil states, has a very revealing piece in today's New York Sun.
""Day 1: A Ranoosh fast-food restaurant in Seihat, Saudi Arabia, hires two women to take phone orders. Day two: Bearded, shoeless Wahhabist religious police arrest the owner and shutter the business for "promoting lewdness" - in other words, for employing women.

Fast-forward a year and half to March: The proprietor, Nabil Ramadan, is sentenced by a religious court to 90 whiplashes on his back and buttocks, to be administered publicly, as are beheadings. The court specifies that the 90 lashes will be delivered in sets of 30 over a maximum of four hours.

Mr. Ramadan did not wait for the beatings to begin. He fled the country and became the subject of jokes, complaints, and gossip, as his actions were debated in Saudi homes and streets.

On Saturday, a Saudi Web-based daily, Elaph, rehashed the matter, bluntly asking why the government and authorities are unable - or unwilling - to rein in a religious court that has run amok.

The ongoing saga encapsulates some of the tremendous contradictions within Saudi society and government, as well as the degree to which militant Islamists and their many supporters control things.

Elaph is not a lightweight publication. Owned by a seasoned and powerful publisher and editor, Othman Al Omair, it is an instrument of beleaguered Saudi liberals, sanctioned by progressives among the immense Saudi royal family (22,000 princes at last count).

While Mr. Omair provokes with royal protection, there is no guarantee the family's fundamentalist elements will spare him. He lives mostly in London or in Morocco, and Elaph is produced out of London. From these outposts, Mr. Omair and other prominent Saudis are pushing the envelope.

In its report, Elaph asked how the government reconciles its stated desire to employ more Saudis and fewer foreigners with its policy of allowing religious establishments to ban women in the workplace. And how can the Ministry of Labor deny Saudi businessmen the right to secure visas for foreign laborers while expecting investments to stay at home?

Indeed, by publicizing the gruesome details of Mr. Ramadan's would-be punishment, Elaph questioned how a civilized government could condone the barbaric humiliation of a man who simply wanted to conduct good business.

"The case has caused profound embarrassment to the authorities, especially the Ministry of Labor, as it represents the first of its kind," Elaph said. "There is no clear item of law banning the employment of properly covered women who follow [Islamic] Shariah laws, nor any designated authority to deal with such a case."

To put things in perspective, in Saudi Arabia male doctors must "interview" women patients without seeing them because of religious prohibitions on the mixing of sexes.

Such crippling practices have made for mediocre educational institutions and a shackled economy. Of an estimated 26 million inhabitants of Saudi Arabia, about 8 million are foreign - imported guest workers performing jobs that most Saudis cannot or will not take. Nearly 50% of the native population of 18 million is unemployed.

The majority of Saudi university graduates either are unqualified to handle demanding careers in the oil or banking industries or are unwilling to perform the required tasks of the jobs, preferring to live off the bloated welfare state. Meanwhile, women, with very few exceptions, are simply prohibited from the workplace

Sadly, there are few incentives to even get a university education for men. Women are the ones who can rise by a university education, especially in medical areas, beyond the blinkered family view of the universe most females are cloistered into accepting.

With virtually unlimited oil supplies, the Saudis can live a rentier economic existence off the industrialized world for decades to come. Their population has burgeoned from 8 million to over 25 million in three decades and will presumably treble again the next three.

The Saudis have very mixed feelings about foreigners---witness the 800-mile fence/barrier they are erecting along their border with Iraq, almost all of which is virtually trackless wastes uninhabited except by occasional traditonal tribal caravans and beduoins. However symbolic this wall might be, it portends a lot.

The Saudis have been avoiding a confrontation with modernity and westernization for the last forty years, believing that foreign workers can be rigorously segregated into the indefinite future. That may be true.

However, the major problem facing the Saudis is their indigenous cluster of Yemenis, whose homeland was divided a la the Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo and the northern sections absorbed into Saudi Arabia at the Treaty of Taif in 1930.

Osama bin Laden represents just one family of the entrepreneurily adept Yemeni refugee/subcaste stratum of Saudi society that has prospered and now may be slowly developing irredentist feelings towards their now free and independent homeland to the south. Many of the Yemeni non-tribal elements are traditionally descended from the Babylonians forced out of Mesopotamia around the time of Nebuchadnezzar, so the legend goes. Their work ethos and economic skills are apparent to those who have lived in Saudi for a time. The Yemenis, however, are not a threat to the oil supply, as their home territory along the southern escarpment of Asir Province is on the other side of the country.

The Saudi Royal Family has no real ability to do much more than gently nudge the country away from its natural religious conservatism. A xenophobic policy towards millions of pilgrims making the yearly Hajj makes no sense at all. It is all too predictable that any attempt to change the institutional set-up of the Kingdom will be towards religious enforcement, as Youssef Ibrahim's story above indicates. Also predictable is that the empty lives being led by Saudi unemployed youths will result in conversions to radical religious activities, including the insurgency in Iraq and suicidal acts against Israel.