From Café Culture to Tweets: The Development of Saudi Arabia's Public Sphere and Women's Empowerment

In Saudi Arabia the social segregation of men and women has arguably led to the development of a public sphere that operates, to some extent, separately across gender lines but that is rapidly changing. The important roles played by café culture, khutba meetings in mosques, the dissemination of cassette tapes, and forums such as Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue will be considered in this article. Social media (SM) platforms such as Twitter have added a new dimension to the public sphere, since they have the ability to both empower individuals to communicate on their own terms and to restrict and shape that communication.

The Arab Public Sphere

The literature includes many definitions of the term public sphere. Jürgen Habermas (1989: 231) defined it as "a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens Citizens act as a public when they deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion." From this definition, it appears that two essential components of the public sphere are the formation of public opinion and the inclusion of people from various backgrounds. Habermas, however, noted that "we call events and occasions 'public' when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs—as when we speak of public places or public houses. But as in the expression 'public building,' the term need not refer to general accessibility; the building does not even have to be open to public traffic" (2). Arguably, the Saudi public sphere is "public" in this second sense: because some of its more conservative constituents believe that women's voices are awra (or forbidden for men to hear), it has not been possible to have a public sphere that was truly "open to all" (Makboul 2017). Some authors have viewed Muslim society as divided into separate "subuniverses": the universe of men, the umma, the world of religion and power and the domain of women, the world of domesticity and family. Thus many women wear a veil if they enter a public space where they might come into the view of men, as it shields them and keeps them in their private space (Tadros 2005). This article explores the extent to which this division has changed both because of recent political and economic changes following a royal decree in 2011 that gave women new opportunities to enter into the public workforce (Alshoaibi 2018) and because of the creation of virtual "public spheres."

Café Culture as Public Sphere

Ali Al-Qarni (2004: 215) was one of the very few Arab scholars to investigate the Habermasian public sphere in the context of the Arab society, writing that "Arabs maintained their own private/public sphere through their meetings in mosques, markets, cafés and households where news was deconstructed and analyzed by literate Arabs and explained for the laity." In Egypt cafés served as places where topical economic and political issues could be debated. The Fishawi Café in Cairo was probably the most famous of these cafés, as it was frequented by politicians, writers, and intellectuals (Alotaibi 2017). It should be noted that, due to Arab cultural norms about the mixing of sexes, few women would have used these cafés to meet and discuss. The Fishawi Café, popularized by internationally famous Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, opened in 1797 (Al-Ahram 2010). Since then it has been patronized by a long list of illustrious Middle Eastern and Egyptian customers who varied greatly in their political views. These include Jamal Al-Din Afghani (the nineteenth-century Islamic philosopher who opposed Western imperialism), Sheikh Muhammad Abdou (an Islamic modernist of the 1960s), Abdelaziz Bouteflika (former Algerian president), Jaafar Nimeiri (former Sudanese president), Ali Abdullah Saleh (former president of Yemen who supported Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait), and the Egyptian diplomat Amr Moussa, who occupied the post of secretary-general of the League of Arab States (2001–11) and was political...