Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Resplendent in a flowing gown of sea-foam green, the Scorpion Lady of Saudi Arabia fairly floated across the floor to greet her visitors.

Although this was a last-minute lunch she’d been asked to host by her husband, the secretary general of the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce & Industry, Amal Fatani made the duty seem effortless.

After all, she had a message for America: Saudi women are strong and accomplished, not the repressed, pitiable creatures painted by the U.S. media.

“I’m very proud of my religion, I’m very proud of my country, and I’m very proud to be a Saudi female,” Fatani told her guests, the women in a traveling group from the National Conference of Editorial Writers.

Fatani, an assistant professor and head of the department of pharmacology at King Saud University, got her nickname after discovering an anti-venom serum for scorpion bites. Her remarkable accomplishments seem that much more so in a country where women cannot work alongside men, cannot drive and cannot go out in public without being draped from head to toe in abayas, long-sleeved, floor-length robes with matching headscarves.

Westerners focus on the wrong things, Fatani said.

“I think driving is important; I think we need to drive, but I don’t think it’s something to hold against us, that we’re a backward nation because we don’t drive,” she said. “Any one of us has at least one, if not two or three drivers. … We can go anywhere we want. We’re not being shackled to the house.”

Fatani, who declined to be photographed, said Saudi women are frankly fed up with the abaya-and-driving questions, and wonder why people can’t ask about strong family and social bonds, low crime rates, low rates of teen pregnancy, or work opportunities for women.

Fatani said that about half the Saudi work force is female and at her university, women have created their own empire. American businessmen report that women are more like 3 percent to 5 percent of the Saudi work force, and women are even less in evidence at Saudi Aramco, the government-run oil industry.

Where women do work, they must be segregated or incur the wrath of the religious police.

Those police, a separate entity from the regular police, also make sure women are “decent” or nearly invisible in public. The month before we visited, 82,000 abayas were confiscated for being too sheer or too decorated.

But Fatani said she admires the Saudi government for the way it handles the religious police.

“These people tend to try to force the hand of the government, maybe even against what’s good for the government or the people,” she said. “It’s something every, every government is infected with. … You work with them sometimes, you work against them sometimes, you quiet them down with something sometimes, and you survive.”

Saudi Arabia has done that better than Iran, Fatani said, where the shah was overthrown for modernizing too fast, or Egypt, where religious extremists are suppressed and tortured.

“I look at my government and how they handled it, and I take my hat off to them,” she said. The Saudis have effectively co-opted the religious right, given them “police” titles and let them perform tasks such as making sure that women are properly dressed, she said.

“We can live with these kind of things,” Fatani said. “They kept those people busy, so they wouldn’t go into war after war after war like other countries. They kept on building. Universities were mushrooming. Schools were mushrooming. Everything was mushrooming. The infrastructure was being built at a rate no one could imagine.

“So could you honestly tell me that the price we have to pay for all of this is to wear an abaya? I don’t care.”

It’s hard to argue when Fatani talks. But it seems like such a false choice. As much as Fatani and her friends have accomplished in fields such as design and medicine, imagine what more they could do if they were truly free.

Fatani and her friends think Americans ask too much from a country that is only a third the age of the United States.

“Don’t look at it from a Western point of view,” Fatani said. “Look at it from a Saudi point of view.”

Becca Rothschild is the associate editor of the Detroit Free Press editorial page. Her e-mail address is rothschild@freepress.com.