For Cloaked Saudi Women, Color Is the New Black

Many conservatives see the new abaya as sinful, and orthodox clerics have issued fatwas, or edicts, decreeing that the robes must be dark, loose and shapeless.

The varied views here on women's dress stem from different interpretations of Koranic verses and hadith, anecdotes about Islam's prophet Muhammad and his followers that are considered an important source of religious practice and law. Though there is no consensus among Muslims regarding what constitutes proper dress, most believe that God ordered women to wear loose clothing that covers their contours.

The first verse in the Koran that deals with the Islamic dress code for women says: "O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them (when they go abroad). That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not annoyed. Allah is ever Forgiving, Merciful."

The day that verse came to Muhammad from Allah, according to hadith, women walked to dawn prayers "looking like crows." Ahmad al-Mussaed, a geography professor and the author of several books on traditional clothing, said Muslim women should therefore dress in black abayas to follow the example of women during the time of the prophet.

But some Muslims, including Sharif, the newspaper editor, say the women were said to resemble crows not because they were wearing black but because they were walking in the dark.

Sharif, 39, said it is possible for a woman to flout God's orders even if she's wearing a black abaya. She said she dresses conservatively in hats, long jackets and scarves even when she travels outside the country. "God ordered women to dress modestly, to be respectable and to avoid provoking lust. Many young women here wear the abaya and yet are all about provocation."

At a mall on fashionable Tahlia Street recently, a line of young men trailed three fully covered young women wearing the niqab, or face veil, with slits that exposed only their eyes. The women, who had stopped to look at cellphone accessories, wore tight black abayas, green and blue contact lenses, heavy mascara and eyeliner, and strong perfume.

The black abaya came to Saudi Arabia from Iraq or Syria more than 75 years ago, as did most textiles and goods at the time, said Leila al-Bassam, a professor of traditional clothing and textiles at Riyadh University. The robes caught on in the kingdom after King Abdul-Aziz, who conquered the country's disparate regions and formed a state in 1932, distributed them as presents to various tribal leaders, said Mussaed, the geography professor.

Before that, women wore modest but often colorful regional costumes, and in the more conservative areas did not leave the house until they were married, Bassam said.

As the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice started enforcing the dress code across the country, the abaya slowly supplanted the traditional regional costumes and became the national dress.

On weekends, 20-year-old business student Laila Yamani replaces the abaya she wears in town with capri jeans and T-shirts at the beach resorts where young men and women wear Western clothes and mingle freely, far from official eyes.

Yamani said she was excited when she went shopping with her mother for her first abaya when she was 13. "It was like I was grown up," she said.

Now, like many Saudi women, Yamani unwraps her head scarf and removes her abaya as soon as she boards a plane leaving the country.

Sharif, the editor, called such behavior an instance of Saudi Arabia's split personality. "We act one way in Saudi Arabia and differently when we travel," she said. "As if God is to be observed only here."