By Jaime Cunningham
For most outsiders, non-Muslims especially, Saudi Arabia is practically a separate universe, walled off by language, culture, and sheer xenophobia. The country’s women are still more enigmatic: their lives are kept cloistered from the eyes of the curious – not only foreigners but Arab men as well -- by the kingdom’s hard-nosed religious police. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, as the force is known, patrols the streets, parks, and shopping malls to make sure no woman ventures into public unless she’s chaperoned by a male relative and concealed top-to-toe under headscarf and abaya.
Photographer Olivia Arthur took on the job of seeing behind the barriers. During three visits lasting a month at a time, Arthur talked, laughed, and lived with Saudi women. She encountered hundreds of women and girls whose lively, outgoing personalities debunked the funereal stereotype of the black abaya. Jeddah Diary, a revealing collection of the pictures Arthur shot inside the kingdom, is available from its London publisher, Fishbar. Here are just a few:
