Residents of Riyadh. The country has two of the largest airports in the world, and established universities in its major cities. Those cities are linked to each other by superhighways. Business and residential streets are scrubbed clean nightly, and garbage is collected daily before dawn. But if the streams of traffic racing steadily and silently along wide streets resemble some idealized fantasy of the future, the life lived along those streets and behind the thousands of walled mansions marching inexorably out into the suburbs seems stubbornly linked to the past.
Commerce stops five times a day at prayer time.
Women are not permitted to drive vehicles in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world with such a prohibition. Yet virtually all women from the country s ruling elite and burgeoning middle class have learned how to drive and do so annually on long family vacations abroad. Most Saudi women appear fully veiled in public, although they are continually rubbing shoulders in the streets and souqs with bareheaded women not only from the West but from other Arab countries. Further, most Saudi women promptly shed the veil on leaving their country. Foreigners are astonished at the transformation that takes place among Saudi women who board commercial aircraft returning to their country in modest Western dress, but debark heavily veiled and shrouded from head to toe in abayas , the flowing black all-purpose outer garments that resemble academic gowns with hems that extend to the ankles.