Here’s an interesting column from Maureen Dowd, in The New York Times. She writes of attending an art exhibit in Riyadh that brought together male and female artists, and their work, of course! What she found surprising—as did some Saudi participants—was that the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice didn’t show up to shut it down. Taken together with the post below (on how the Haya stepped in to protect the Riyadh Book Fair), it’s beginning to look as though the Saudi religious police have gotten on board with the argument that ikhtilat does not equal khulwa. I suspect some arms had to be twisted to get to this point, but that seems worth the doing.

The column goes on to discuss with Saudi women how they prefer to set their own agenda when it comes to women’s rights. I do note that the Saudi women speaking here could be considered ‘elite’, with a different set of values than rural Saudis might have. Nonetheless, this is an exceptional article, particularly considering the source…

Driving Miss Saudi
MAUREEN DOWD

In other capitals of the world, it would not have been an extraordinary scene.

An opening at a hot new art gallery with men and women mingling and enjoying themselves.

But in this case, part of the frisson was nerves. Would the marauding religious police see unmarried — and some uncovered — women talking freely with men in the merry crowd of 600 and stage a raid?

It was an unlikely moment, SoHo comes to Saudi Arabia — the first mixed exhibition anyone can remember in Riyadh, the stultifying capital of a country that bans any exhibition of skin, fun or romance.

But the most astonishing part was that the Islamic purity enforcers failed to show up at Art Pure.

“I was worried, but the religious police just sort of disappeared,” recalled Mounira Ajlani, the mother of Noura Bouzo, a 27-year-old artist featured at the exhibition who painted the saucy “Saudi Bling.” “It was very relaxed, very normal. Everyone was saying, ‘Are we in Saudi Arabia?’ ”
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