Glad to have given some insight…
**Medstar[\b], sorry first of all if I gave the impression that there was some sort of “mass exodus” of female professionals marrying and leaving the country; though many do, it is still a small percentage. And, as I eluded to, there are many issues, chief among them being that a Muslim woman will rarely, if ever, be given permission (from family, mosque, or government) to marry a non-Muslim. This is widespread among Muslim countries, not just in Saudi. So, what do the men do? Well, they convert; conversion is not seen as trivial in the Muslim world, so if someone simply converted to get married, it is usually met with a large amount of resistance. Most will refrain from calling the “new” Muslim a liar, but they will not be comfortable around him (and by extension, his new wife), either. Now, I do know several Westerners who have converted out of ideological reasons and moved to Muslim countries; they have often married locals, but with a background of having come to Islam before meeting their wife. In such cases, there are no issues: most Muslims accept a converted Muslim as equals immediately, and in fact tend to “parade” or show them off at every opportunity. There is currently a program in Saudi (and there has been for several years), that will actually help “establish” you once you have converted; in other words, you get paid. The amounts were not large (about $10K or so), but to help offset the difficulties in being re-born as a Muslim.
And no Saudi is given free reign to leave the Kingdom; Saudis do not keep passports with them, but they are issued as need be to leave the Kingdom. Women have to have their male “sponsor” get them a passport and exit visa; the male sponsor is a father, oldest brother or guardian (if the father is gone), or husband. Expats usually (not as much now, but previously they were much stricter) surrender their passports to their sponsors on entry to the country; they are then issued with an “iqama,” which is a small identity booklet. To leave, an exit visa must be applied for; you can get these in a few days (maybe longer, depending on your sponsor and the time of the year), at which time your passport is returned to you. If there are any outstanding claims against you (such as parking tickets, criminal or Shari’a complaints, or collection actions), you will not be allowed to leave until such claims are settled; there are usually several stories about people going on vacation that make it to the airport just to find that they owe on a parking ticket.
Didn’t mean to imply that I hobnob regularly with the royals 
; I do know some in the royal family, and many in the 40, but that is due to my job. Most of the people I count as friends and acquaintances are your normal low - to middle class types; many of them are bedu, and some actually don’t own houses, but still live their whole lives in tents. The Saudi government has tried to many schemes to get the bedu housed and out of the tents, so to speak, but there are still many out there; for those of you familiar with Eskan village, it was originally built as a housing project for the bedu. They wouldn’t live there, though, so it ended up being abandoned til the time of Desert Storm, where it made a great housing opportunity for allied forces.
The “istraha” tents (those used by the Arabs for weekends and winter times in the desert) are always fun, and, as you can see on any weekend night, the Arabs in the cities love to go to the desert whenever they can. Most Saudis aren’t too far from their bedu roots; if you see pictures of Riyadh or Jeddah in the 60’s, you realize quickly that most of them are only one or two generations removed from their bedu ancestors. City populations in the 60’s were much smaller; many in Riyadh lived in Dira’iyah until the mid-70’s, which is basically a mud-brick town. Many Saudis still proudly own farms and camels (still a status symbol); during holiday times it was common for our workplace to be full of camel milk and dates from the farms, as everyone who had a small farm or camel would bring something in. BTW - if you haven’t tried it, spiced warm camel milk with dates, followed by Arabic coffee, can be quite an experience.
On Kuwait: most expats find it to be crowded, compared to other Gulf states; most everyone lives in flats or condos in large buildings (not in villas like in Saudi and Qatar, but more like Dubai and Abu Dhabi). Traffic is a bear, cost of living is higher than most Gulf states, and, at least on the government/military level, the personnel are even more exasperating. I have had many opportunities to live there, and have turned them down; I would actually have preferred Riyadh to there. However, I am quite comfortable here in Qatar: nice, quiet, calm place which, up until the whole “war with Iraq” thing, nobody had even heard about. Oh well…
Hope this answers some of the questions…
