Bending It Like Beckham, Saudi Style!

Exactly a year ago Saudi papers carried a story about an all-women football match inside an eastern province university.

It was a match between a team from the eastern province university and a team from a girls’ college in Riyadh. It took place inside the girls’ section and naturally had a women-only audience. Yet that single match brought so much trouble to the university. The match was criticised by the local and religious authorities and the university was made to understand that such events were not permissible and should not have happened anyway.

This incident was the first thing to come to my mind when I read in Al-Watan newspaper yesterday about the formation of a women’s football team in Jeddah. The paper interviewed the team captain Reem Abdallah, who talked about how the team started and the games it had with similar teams.

According to the captain, a group of girls who love football decided to form a team and actually rented a private compound with playground and swimming pool to practice away from men’s eyes. The girls donated money towards the expenses and they managed to get a local company to sponsor their matches. Now they are proud that they have three teams, each with 15 players, and that they have competed against each other and three other new women’s teams. Abdallah said that the games are popular with women and children who come to watch, but she had to add that games are held privately and in a closed stadium so as not to cause controversy.

The project has prospered by remaining private. The number of people who knew about it was small. At this point, I started feeling worried for those girls, because now they are going public with it, they can expect trouble. As the Eastern province case proved to us, there are still those who do not approve of women sports, they consider it as breach to tradition while others claim it is against religious rules as well. In that specific case, the imams condemned the event.

The commission said that the match attracted men’s attention. They did not attend the match, yet as the commission stressed at the time, they gathered outside the building where the 
match took place, which was considered harmful enough. So the new team will have to contend with a wave of condemnation from commission and maybe local authorities, let alone volunteers who like spread the law as they understand it. There is also of course all those fatwas that consider sports for girls a bad thing that has harmful effects (no one has told us what those effects are exactly, this is simply left to the individual imagination). But for those who like to pick on Saudi women, just a small reminder: we are told that we have to have our own world away from men. As girls we had our games, so it makes sense that when we grow up we should still enjoy them with our friends. What reason is there for men to be offended?

This of course reminds us of our historic ban on PE in girls’ schools, as the ministry of education refuses to allow it. No substantial reasons have ever been given for this prohibition. Instead, vague explanations are offered, such as the importance of obeying social rules.

Girls are not supposed to imitate boys. But individual projects like this say so much more about Saudi women’s needs. Instead of being content with shopping and social gatherings, they would prefer to fill their time with more enjoyable and useful activities.