Too hot to handle: Dina Al-Sabah's fat-torching cardio isn't the only thing causing a fitness firestorm

Muscle & Fitness, August, 2005 by Jeff O'Connell

Martians didn't oversee construction of the Great Pyramids, despite what some extrater-restrialists have suggested. Deserts produce earthly marvels. See: Kuwait, formerly dirt-poor, now among the richest of nations. See: Las Vegas. See: Dina Al-Sabah. A citizen of Kuwait who now lives in the United States, she grew up in the shadows of the Pyramids and became the first female Arab athlete ever to stand on an Olympia stage--in Las Vegas, no less.

Dina is a member of the Al-Sabah family, which has ruled Kuwait for more than 200 years. A beneficiary of the finest schooling, she speaks English, French, Spanish and Arabic; holds degrees in electrical engineering, telecommunications and computers, and business administration; and designs the information systems of a mortgage bank--although something about the way she enters the lobby of a luxury hotel suggests she doesn't need to. The clothes aren't off the rack and neither is the body, with sweeping curves as epic as the dunes of the Sahara.

Chatting moments later in an alcove, sipping tea, Dina is anything but an enemy of the state. The closest she has come to being "threatening" is as a model for a video game based on fighting bikini babes. Who could fear this woman? If anything, Kuwait's tourist bureau should be advertising her image on its travel posters. It's only a slight exaggeration to say Dina is more likely to be seen on a wanted poster in that desert kingdom, where her fitness career and modeling are seen as scandalous. Authorities refuse to renew her passport until she quits the sport and takes down her website. "I can never go back there," Dina says. "For several reasons."

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

At least one of those reasons is rooted in the fundamental differences between colliding civilizations over what a woman can do with her body. For men, the sculpting of one's body for competition's sake is practiced worldwide. The International Federation of Bodybuilders (IFBB) has 173 member nations, including the entire Middle East except Oman. Not all of those 173 nations and their federations sanction women's physique sports (women's bodybuilding, fitness and figure, referred to as "body sport" in some countries) but a vast majority does, especially in Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Each year at the IFBB World Amateur Championships, the federation's largest international event involving women, 40 or so countries participate, most sending competitors in all three women's sports. Yet Africa, for example, has little tradition of organizing women's competitions, save for South Africa. In the Middle East, women's body-building, fitness and figure barely exist, and those individuals who choose to pursue these activities are not looked upon kindly, to put it mildly.

Arab countries, dominated culturally in most instances by Islamic religious traditions, tend to be fiercely patriarchal societies. What most Westerners view as the subordinate status of women there is reflected most obviously in clothing. "In general, women in Middle Eastern countries are expected not to display their bodies," says Sondra Hale, PhD, a professor of anthropology and the chair of women's studies at UCLA. "Women's participation in public 'body fitness' would not be appropriate because they would be attracting attention to themselves and displaying parts of the body that should be modestly concealed. Islam would not prohibit it, although some interpreters might."

UNDER COVER

Needless to say, the bikini required for a women's physique contest would be an unwelcome sight in countries where women dress according to hijab, a scripture-based code requiring Muslim women to conceal all but their face and hands. To further annul the sexual desires of men, this clothing must be loose to prevent even the suggestion of a woman's shape underneath.

Women's bodies are positioned at the center of the tension in the Middle East between tradition and Westernization, contends Jennifer Hargreaves, PhD, a professor of sport sociology at Brunel University in England, and author of Heroines of Sport: The Politics of Difference and Identity (Rout-ledge, 2001). "The concept of modesty is special to Islamic tradition, and it is interpreted in very different ways," she says. "Fundamentalists interpret the Koran and The Hadith, the sayings of the prophets, in ways that really control women, utterly. Look at the Taliban. In more liberal states such as Kuwait, it's much easier for women to negotiate the things that they do with their bodies, and they do so quite skillfully."

Women in the comparatively liberal Gulf nation of Kuwait--a country freed by forces of the U.S. and its coalition after neighboring Iraq's 1991 invasion--enjoy far more social freedoms than women in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Middle Eastern countries, and a Kuwaiti woman will often navigate her way according to the situation. In a traditional Muslim context, she might dress according to hijab; the following day, heading off to a gym in a hotel like the Hilton, she might dress identically to an American woman working out at Crunch in Los Angeles.