03/31/2002

ON MARCH 11, a fire at a public school for girls in Mecca killed at least 14 students. Saudi press reports says that witnesses asserted that the mutawwa'in, members of the morals police, prevented some girls from leaving the building because they were not covered in the abaye, a black coat worn with a head scarf and a second scarf over the face.

Reports from the scene also assert that the mutawwa'in beat civil-defense workers who tried to enter the building while students were still inside, and others assert that emergency exit doors were locked.

Whatever else happened that day to cause the death of so many children, certainly the escape routes were inadequate. In the name of "protection," every public building for women is guarded by men, and often women's "protection" requires bars on windows, no windows, or windows placed too high to see out or in, as well as locked doors and high encircling walls.

In January, I visited the main headquarters of the General Presidency for Girls' Education, in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the ulama (cleric)-controlled agency that oversees girls' education in the kingdom. Being a woman, I was driven past a grand front entrance reserved for men, and taken to the back, where the unwelcoming women's entrance is approached through two sets of dark-tinted-glass double doors.

On one set, the outside handles were removed and the inside handles sealed together with a chain and padlock. The remaining doors opened to a clutter of file cabinets jammed into an air-lock foyer, and beyond was a warren of small offices teeming with employees who didn't seem to have much to do. Like every public building for women, the headquarters for girls' education is a fire-trap.

Keeping women separate from men is Saudi Arabia's national obsession, and women's invisibility is its most visible symbol of Islamic identity, consciously promoted to infuse a sense of loyalty to a regime that claims to rule according to Islamic law.

The chief method of promoting Islamic identity is the national education curriculum, which puts religious studies at the center of every child's school day: nine hours a week in elementary school, down to four a week in high school, except for religious-studies concentrators, who are allowed to drop secular subjects altogether.

Among the most persistent themes in the mandatory texts for middle and high school students is sex-segregation and correct behavior between men and women. Using selective passages from the Koran and the Hadith (the canonized sayings of the Prophet Mohammed), the lessons extrapolate advice for daily living from the principle "whatever leads to forbidden things must be forbidden."

For example, students learn that the Prophet said, "A man must not be alone with an unrelated woman unless he is her mahram [male guardian]." The text explains that being alone with a man will cause a woman to fall into prostitution, and therefore a woman must not ride in a car alone with a hired driver and a female servant should not stay in the house alone if unrelated men are present.

School boys are taught that just seeing a woman opens the door to Satan, and so they must not look at photos or watch films with women in them. Ninth graders learn that every part of a woman's body is private, and that girls should wear fabrics that are nontransparent and wide enough to hide the shape of their bodies. Boys should never shake the hand of an unrelated woman, unless she's old.

The ulama in the General Presidency who write these texts use scriptural authority to reinforce their own parochial sex-segregation customs, which are being increasingly challenged by forces of modernity. The presence of state-funded mutawwa'in at the girls schools reflects society's urge to dam the floodgates.

I doubt the mutawwa'in assigned to the school consciously chose to prioritize the modesty of those children over their safety. I think instead that the prioritizing of sex-segregation is so much a part of who Saudis are that obstructing the escape of young girls trying to run outside without their abayas was a knee-jerk response, about as thoughtless and self-righteous as removing the handles and locking the doors to the women's section of the General Presidency.

The public anger against the religious establishment over these tragic deaths presents an extraordinary opportunity to chip away at the legal and physical edifice of sex-segregation. The ruling family could begin by immediately enforcing fire codes and forbidding any locking or blocking of exit doors, and announcing publicly that they intend to ensure that Saudi girls receive the same public-safety considerations as do boys.

High-profile prosecution of any men found complicit in preventing the girls' escape would go a long way toward starting a public discussion about the pernicious side of sex-segregation. Once this taboo is broken, the Saudis might consider the mismatch between their religious-studies curricula and the preparation required for success in the world their children -- boys and girls -- will inhabit.

Eleanor Doumato is a visiting scholar at Brown's Watson Institute and author of Getting God's Ear: Women, Islam and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf (Columbia University Press, 2000).