High Tea and High Hopes in Riyadh
We met for high tea in the Globe, the restaurant with a panoramic view of Riyadh atop the Faisaliyah Center, in the heart of the Saudi Arabian capital.
I was the guest of two Saudi women — professionals in their early 30s, one a journalist, one a hospital administrator, both with advanced degrees from Saudi universities, both married, one with children, the other not. Neither was veiled.
This was the first time in more than 30 years of visiting Saudi Arabia that I had a social encounter with any Saudi woman outside her own home, and it dramatized the contradictions and absurdities that Saudi Arabia faces in trying to maintain its rigid old social rules in an increasingly modern and educated society.
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Thomas W. Lippman is a former Middle East correspondent and a former diplomatic and national security reporter for The Washington Post (1966-1999, 2003). He covered the war in Iraq for The Washington Post’s online edition in 2003. He appears frequently on radio and television as a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs.
