What is Saudi Arabia? It is, in part, an oil-rich desert kingdom with lots of wealthy citizens and veiled women, a U.S. ally that was indispensable in the fight against communism, a loyal customer of the U.S. armaments industry, and the country that produced 17 of the 19 hijackers who perpetrated the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Saudi Arabia has built mosques around the world and funded many an Islamist movement. It is also, in the apt title of the book under review, a most masculine state.

Despite the country’s vast wealth, Saudi women lag behind other women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) on many social and gender indicators. Political anthropologist Madawi Al-Rasheed, the author of several other books on her native Saudi Arabia, explores the historical roots of the country and the interconnections of gender, politics, and religion that shape and perpetuate the persistent exclusion of Saudi women. Identifying Wahhabi ideology (Wahhabiyya) as religious nationalism under the auspices of the state, she underscores the significant role of the Wahhabi religious authorities (ulema) and the Saudi state as ideologies and institutions that cast women as symbols of national identify and authenticity. As such, this well-researched and engrossing book is a most welcome addition to the growing literature by feminist scholars of the Middle East that examines the gender dynamics of state formation and national-identity construction.

A Most Masculine State has seven chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusion. Chapter 1 provides details on the transition from Wahhabism to the religious nationalism of the Saudi state. The focus of Chapter 2 is the contestation over the education of women and girls. Here, we are introduced to the very progressive Abdullah al-Qasimi, who called for the use of reason rather than the authority of religious scholars and insists on the benefits of women’s education for women and the nation. Still, the new colleges that were established for young women were intended to produce qualified teachers for girls, as well as “good Muslims, successful housekeepers, and ideal wives” (p. 102). Chapter 3 highlights the developments of the 1980s, characterized by even stricter application of Sharia law and the issuance of numerous fatwas on women and the family. Chapter 4 examines the shift to “cosmopolitan modernity” following the 9/11 attacks and the perceived need to present a more modern and women-friendly face to the world. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Saudi women’s literary products, seven of which are books described in fascinating detail. Chapter 7 puts the spotlight on divisions among Saudi women, especially in terms of the conservative role of women preachers and Islamist women activists. Finally, the Conclusion reflects on the Arab Spring and its implications for Saudi Arabia.

The introductory chapter provides a historical overview of the making of the Saudi state, including the years of violent contention that culminated in the conquest by Abd al Aziz ibn Saud over the Hashemites. The very name Saudi Arabia references his role, rather than any preexisting nationalist movement and project. Indeed, it was the British who organized the so-called Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War I. The invention of Saudi national identity included elements of Wahhabism, the territory conquered by Ibn Saud, and Arabic. As Al-Rasheed writes: “The foundation of the Saudi state in 1932 was not a function of anti-colonial struggle or secular nationalism. . . . A polity was born prior to a national discourse” (p. 65). Another characteristic of Saudi Arabia was tribalism, as both social organization and political arrangement. As other feminist studies have shown, communal identities are not conducive to gender equality. Wahhabism—with its elements of strict application of Sharia law and male dominion over women—was institutionalized in the new masculine, religious state, and controlling all aspects of women’s lives was seen as integral to the Saudi state’s integrity and specificity. In other words, women’s subordination was inscribed in the new state—as has been the case in many other countries, and not only in MENA (see, e.g., Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, 1988). “In this fusion of religion and nation, women were integrated as fundamental symbols,” Al-Rasheed explains (p. 76).

Oil wealth transformed Saudi Arabia in a variety of ways. As I have argued since the early 1990s, the regional oil economy has been a key causal factor in the low economic participation rates of women in MENA. In the most conservative states in particular, oil wealth enabled the importation of labor for occupations that were considered inappropriate for native women. (The same held true for native men; but labor shortage was also a factor.) What Al-Rasheed underscores is the way that oil wealth enabled men to assert their privileges and entitlements, by taking full advantage of their Sharia-derived right to polygamy, as well as innovations such as pleasure marriage (e.g., while traveling): “Oil wealth turned women into commodities exchanged by men who can afford them” (p. 23).

The chapter on the 1980s reveals a period of widespread Islamization, including ideological competition between the new revolutionary Shia Islamic regime in Iran and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism. It highlights the obsessive attention of the Saudi authorities to personal status matters, and to all manner of surveillance and prohibitions. These included the injunction that women’s hair be parted in the middle and partitioned in three sections (p. 118) and the identification of the ideal marriage partner for a Saudi woman (permission was needed to marry certain categories of people while marriage was prohibited with others). According to one fatwa, “being the second or third wife of a morally and socially worthy man is far better than remaining a spinster” (p. 125); a man may benefit from polygamy, especially at times when the sexual availability of a wife is reduced, for example, during fatigue, menstruation, or childbirth. Some of the fatwas, which are described in detail, are odd, outrageous, or embarrassing; most are premised on biologistic assumptions about male sexuality.

After 9/11, many changes occurred, in part because a new generation of women had emerged with modernity and globalization. Al-Rasheed provides examples of a small number of dissident women, most of whom have chosen to live outside Saudi Arabia. Women were allowed employment to present a modernizing façade in the face of international opprobrium, to address high rates of women’s unemployment, and to prevent poverty. But Saudi Arabia never experienced the kind of deep or extensive modernization characterized not only by industrialization, urbanization, and modern social classes, but also by emancipative values (as per Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel) that lead to aspirations for change and challenges to power holders in a democratic direction.

Some emancipative values may be on display in the works of Saudi women novelists, who take on subjects such as inequality and racism, as well as the indignities of polygamy and even taboo topics such as premarital sex, homosexuality, bisexuality, and adultery. Al-Rasheed interviewed the women authors and has also carefully read their writings. We are informed that the daring novelists are to a certain extent protected by the state, and that they do not challenge the state. The author describes how “blasphemous” women novelists who write on taboo subjects have been the subject of takfir fatwas (reserved for unbelievers or apostates), but “none has been detained like political and social activists who have directly called for serious political reform” (p. 202). She regards the women’s literature as articulations of aspirations, rather than directed at wider emancipation and empowerment.

Indeed, for Al-Rasheed, there are limits to Saudi women’s political consciousness: They remain supporters of the regime and its lip service to women’s rights. There seems to be neither an “Islamic feminist” critique of male entitlement and a defense of women’s equality and rights rooted in Islamic history and theology nor a concerted campaign for equality and change. As such, the women appear very different from the dissident women in Iran and their feminist campaigns, which directly confront the Islamic constitution and religious-based family law. For this, the Iranian women activists were deemed by former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be “threats to national security” and by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to be followers of an alien ideology (feminism).

This is a book rich in historical, political, and social analysis, but it falls short in one area: defining and elucidating the Saudi state and its evolution over the decades. At one point, Al-Rasheed seems to conflate the state with “the persona of the king and his sons,” here referring to Ibn Saud. While initially drawing attention to the fusion of religion and the state, she later suggests a clash between the “religious nationalism” of the religious hierarchy—the fatwa-issuing ulema and the Committee for the Commandment of Good and the Forbidding of Evil—and “the state as modernizer.” As she writes: “Whether liberal or Islamist, today many educated women consider the state as a savior from strict religious control and a protector against conservative social tradition” (p. 137), and further, that “[a]s the state is currently embarking on limiting the interference of religious scholars and institutions in public affairs, it has found in elite women a source of support” (p. 147). What are the main institutions of the state, and who are the sociopolitical forces that constitute the ruling elite?

It was not until 2002 – after the notorious incident in which schoolgirls died in a fire because the religious police would not let them out of the burning building without their veils—that girls’ schooling was taken away from the ulema and put under the authority of the Ministry of Education (as boys’ schooling had always been). This may indicate a gradual weakening of the power and authority of the state’s religious institutions, but available evidence suggests that the religious institutions and religious nationalism remain integrated in the political and ideological apparatus of the state. Today, political and economic power is still concentrated in the royal family, and there appear to be no organized democratic forces in Arabian society that could mobilize public opinion in favor of changing that most masculine, authoritarian state to a champion of women’s participation and rights and greater social equality.