Lois Ruble lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia from 1977 to 1999 working as a nurse for Saudi Aramco. She had the opportunity to work along side, treat and converse with Saudi women. She observed them within the Aramco company compound and came to understand how Saudi women lived outside the compound with their families and within the Saudi community.
On February 16, 2006, Lois lead a discussion sponsored by the San Diego World Affairs Council on the lives of Saudi Arabian women. The following are her discussion talking points:
"Now let’s jump forward about a thousand years. The central area of the Arabian Peninsula has been slumbering and forgotten in its isolation. By this time the Ottoman Empire ruled the coastal areas, but never controlled the central part. In the 18th century the al Saud family rose to prominence there, close to present-day Riyadh. They were ambitious. At the same time in a neighboring town, another family produced a pious son, Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab. He saw that Islam had incorporated many beliefs and practices from non-Islamic sources. People prayed to saints, and venerated dead holy men, making pilgrimages to their tombs. He was outraged by this idolatry and preached a return to the pure religion of Mohammed, a strict monotheism. The eldest son of the al Saud, also named Mohammed, welcomed Abdul Wahhab when his own town drove him out for his strict, puritanical teachings. These two Mohammed’s joined forces, Al Saud marrying a daughter of Abdul Wahhab to seal the alliance. From then until now the Al Saud and Abdul Wahhab families have continued to intermarry. So besides the political and religious alliance of the Saudi royal family with the founders of Wahhabism, the two families are all cousins.
The fortunes of the al Saud family waxed and waned until the late 19th century when they were driven out of Riyadh, finding refuge in Kuwait. The oldest son was Abdul Aziz, and in 1902, at the age of 22, he made a daring raid on Riyadh with a few followers and captured it.
Over the next 25 years, through conquest, strategic alliances and marriages, he united most of the Arabian Peninsula under his rule. His conquest of the Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina was especially important. In doing this he ousted the ruling Hashemites, descendents of the prophet Mohammed and allies of the British during WW I. As a reward for their support, the British had put Hashemites on the thrones of Iraq and Trans-Jordan, countries created out of part of the defeated Ottoman Empire.
These conquests by Abdul Aziz presented challenges, since the Wahhabi interpretation of Sunni Islam was not practiced outside the central heartland. The Hijaz was Sunni, but a more relaxed version, due to its continuous contact with the outside world from its place on the trade routes and the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, visited by pilgrims from all over the world. Also, the fact that some of these pilgrims had always stayed on after finishing their Hajj, gave the area a more cosmopolitan flavor. In eastern Arabia, along the Persian Gulf, there was an ancient Shia population. Sunnis and Shias are the two main branches of Islam. Sunnis are the majority throughout the world, while Shiites are found mainly in Iran and southern Iraq.
Abdul Aziz ibn Saud proclaimed himself King of the new country of Saudi Arabia in 1932. He was king of a country without resources other than a lot of very tasty dates and the revenue from hosting pilgrims to Mecca. However, oil had been discovered in neighboring Bahrain and American geologists were sure there was oil close by in eastern Saudi. Not trusting the British, since they had supported his enemies the Hashemites, Abdul Aziz, known in the US as ibn Saud, signed a concession agreement with Standard Oil of California in 1933.
The Americans finally struck oil in 1938. The first six wells had been dry holes, but well # 7 flowed at 1,500 to 3,000 barrels per day. And well # 7 is still producing at that rate today. You know that Saudi Arabia sits on top a veritable sea of oil. (Read more from Aramco pioneers in our In Search of Oil section.)
Aramco
I want to tell you a little about the company I worked for, the company that was formed to exploit all that oil. There was no infrastructure of any kind in Saudi, and a small, uneducated population. Faced with huge development costs, Standard Oil of California formed a subsidiary with Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Mobil and Texaco, which they named the Arabian-American Oil Company, known as Aramco.
WW II delayed the start-up of production. But in 1946, with American management and professionals, workers were brought in from all over the world. Several company towns were built to house them. All the support services had to be supplied, including medical clinics and even schools for the children of the American employees. The Saudi government saw this and insisted that Aramco provide medical care and schools for the families of the Saudi employees. Aramco already had training programs and schools for Saudi men, to develop a local source of workers. Over time these educational programs were expanded to include technical training and university scholarships. Promising Saudi employees were sent to the US for higher education, through doctoral level. A partnership grew between the Saudi Arab government and Aramco to essentially build a country. Roads, electricity, telephones, schools and medical clinics were all built by Aramco for the Saudi nationals living in the concession area, paid for with oil money. Endemic malaria was eliminated. Trachoma, an eye infection causing widespread blindness, was studied by an Aramco-Harvard University team and a cure discovered.
With a large income, the rest of Saudi Arabia was gradually modernized, even in the face of opposition from the Wahhabis. Public schools for boys opened in the mid-50’s. The first school for girls, a private one, was opened in the late 50’s by the wife of King Faisal. Prior to this, children were educated at home, if at all, or boys went to mosque schools to learn to read and copy the Koran. Some wealthy families sent their children to school overseas. Finally, in 1960, public schools were opened for girls. This was a hugely controversial step. There was opposition to educating girls, other than in religious subjects at home. In an effort to contain some of the criticism, control of girl’s schools was given to a separate religious department, rather than the Education Ministry that oversaw boy’s education. And that remained until 2002. You may have read about a fire in a girl’s school that year, where 15 girls died, supposedly because the guards wouldn’t let them out of the locked building without their abayas, their black cloaks. The uproar and outrage from Saudi citizens allowed the government to finally merge girl’s schools into the Ministry of Education."