Breaking the silence: Saudi abuse of women

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Breaking the silence

Rania al-Baz's popularity as a TV news presenter was always an implicit threat to Saudi Arabia's repressive, male-dominated culture. But it wasn't until her husband beat her so badly he thought he had killed her - and she decided to publish the photos of her injuries - that she really shook Saudi society. She talks to Ed Vulliamy about what happened when she dared to challenge the culture of violence against women

Wednesday October 5, 2005
The Guardian

By the time she was in her early 20s, Rania al-Baz had become one of the best known and best loved faces in her home country of Saudi Arabia. As presenter of a programme called The Kingdom this Morning on state-owned television, her hair was always covered by a hijab, as is required, but her face remained uncovered, and she would choose headscarves of defiantly flamboyant colours to cover her immaculately styled hair. She became, for hundreds of thousands of Saudi women, admirable, enviable and challenging - and, thus, an implicit threat to a society in which women are forced to cover themselves, are not allowed to drive, cannot vote or participate in political life, cannot leave home unless accompanied by a chaperone or travel without authorisation from a father or husband, and cannot establish a business without a male sponsor.


Then, suddenly, on April 13 2004, Baz disappeared from the airwaves. When she emerged two weeks later, her face was all over the newspapers, but it was barely recognisable. Her husband had savagely assaulted her, slamming her face against the marble-tiled floor of their home until it suffered 13 fractures. He was disposing what he assumed to be her dead body when she showed signs of life and, panicking, took her to hospital, where doctors gave her only a 70% chance of survival.

During the days in which Baz was in a coma, fighting for her life, her father took photographs of her grotesquely disfigured face. And after she recovered, she decided to permit the photographs to be published, thus doing what no woman in the Kingdom had ever done. Of course, there was nothing particularly unusual about her bruises: Baz was a victim of one of the world's most common, and least punished crimes. But in Saudi Arabia especially, Baz had shattered a wall of silence about domestic violence. The images of her grotesquely bruised and swollen face sent shockwaves through her country and around the world, casting an unwelcome but glaring spotlight on the abuse of women that thrives behind the mask of Saudi religious dogmatism. Baz would also go on to divorce her husband - almost unheard of in Saudi Arabia, where divorce is invariably the other way round - and win custody of her children, again in defiance of precedent.

Fifteen months after the attack that nearly killed her, Baz is in Paris, visiting for a few days. We had intended to meet in Jeddah, where she lives, but she feels safer, she says, talking outside Saudi Arabia. "It would have been hard for me, even for you maybe, to talk there - who knows?" So instead we meet at a hotel in the Latin Quarter. This evening, she wears no hijab; she is carefully made up, her hair meticulously cut. "I love Paris," she enthuses, surveying the night. "It is a lovers' city". She and her husband, Mohammed al-Fallatta, came here for their honeymoon. "At first," she says, "we could not be parted. He swept me off my feet."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,1585123,00.html