Nicola Sutcliff - 21 Mar

One day in my mid-twenties, my father sat me down for a talk about my future. By this time I had worked as a teacher, a translator, a logistics coordinator and a research assistant and had lived in several countries. Nonetheless, my father was concerned for my professional and financial stability it was time, he said, to settle on more gainful, long-term employment.

I took his words to heart. Three months later, on my next visit, I proudly informed him that I had been offered a permanent contract with a healthy salary and the opportunity to contribute to two of the fields that most inspired me: womens empowerment and transformative education. I had accepted a role at the first university for women in Saudi Arabia. And with those two little words, his delighted smile froze.

My parents concerns were understandable. We can only make judgements based on the information available to us, and Saudi Arabia had become the pantomime villain of the international media, rivalled only perhaps by North Korea.

It was a negative narrative cemented by its repetition. Every news article I read on the country seemed to follow the same copy-and-paste formula. The first paragraph outlined the headline issue, the second regardless of the articles topic offered commentary on the female driving ban, and the third helpfully informed the reader of any executions ordered by the state during the preceding months.

Sensationalist coverage of the region has been legitimised by the difficulties encountered by reporters in entering Saudi Arabia, combined with the lack of media output released by the country itself. Ironically, perhaps, it is the Kingdoms attempt to lay low, reinforced by the deep value attributed to privacy in Saudi society, which has made the country such an object of fascination; an interest that revolves primarily around the lives of its female citizens.

But, despite being the focus of so many column inches, the women around whom such articles centred were invariably reduced to two-dimensional stock images of black-veiled figures. The only female voices regularly emerging seemed to be those of state-sanctioned spokeswomen or frustrated activists and those who had escaped especially abusive circumstances.

My own interest was piqued, not by what we were told of the lives of women in Saudi Arabia, but by what we werent. I have always believed that life is formed far more by shades of grey than the utopian or dystopian narratives that may be comfortably contained by the black-and-white print of the news column.

I also felt that, while I claimed to be a feminist and an ally of women in their struggles worldwide, my own experience of womanhood had, until this point, been very narrow and very sheltered. Who was I to judge another womans way of life when I had never walked a mile in her shoes, or indeed, her veil?

So I packed a single case, purchased a black abaya and niqab , the body-concealing cloak and face veil habitually worn by Saudi women in public, on eBay (both of my choices I was later to learn were shamefully unfashionable) and collected my ticket to Riyadh.