Published in ArchetypeInAction.Org on May 30, 2011
On April 23, 2011, during the period of pro-democracy demonstration and revolts that shook the Arab World, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia opened registration for the second-ever municipal elections, initially scheduled for October 31, 2009, but delayed until Sep. 22, 2011 on the grounds that the authorities “needed time to expand the electorate and study the possibility of allowing women to vote.” The first such elections, from which women were excluded, were held in 2005.
When the epiphany finally struck a year-and-a-half later, it was decided to the chagrin of human rights advocates, that women would not be permitted to vote this time, either.
The ban, however, hasn’t swayed a number of intrepid Saudi women from taking to voter registration centers in major cities across the country to push for their right to register to vote.
“You fear God and you love your country. Why won’t you let us participate?” one of the women asked the male officials in charge of a center in the capital city, Riyadh.
“There is no article in the system denying us the right to cast our vote,” proclaimed another.
Laws and acts discriminating against women must end, say the women, particularly since the Kingdom has signed international agreements prohibiting such prejudice.
In Saudi Arabia, my homeland, women are prohibited from traveling or working without the written consent of their male guardians, banned from the ballot box and not permitted to drive.
Edgy with frustration, my friend once said, “We [Saudi women] should just pack up and leave so they can call it the Kingdom of Saudi Men.”
In concurrence, her sister added bitterly, “Maybe then they’ll start to appreciate us.”
As a Saudi male watching such a quagmire unfold day in and day out, the inequity weighs greatly on my mind and heart. The fact thatthere is little I can do to help rectify the situation amounts to a rubbing of salt into a wound.
To top it all off, my country, the land where the generous Prophet of Islam brought unprecedented rights and status to women, is also burdened by an ever-more empowered religious police force that unfailingly breathes down women’s necks, further and further stifling and eroding the little freedom they might otherwise have enjoyed.
I sometimes spot members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice patrolling malls, making comments and barking out orders typically related to some woman’s appearance or behavior. Such meddling more often than not leads to drama and, sometimes, fistfights.
Last November, it was reported in local newspapers that a religious police official, ordered a woman, who was accompanied by her husband and was wearing a niqab, to cover her eyes too as they looked “too seductive.” The situation soon spun out of control and a brawl ensued between the husband and the official leaving, at its conclusion, the husband wounded by the official’s small knife. On April 27, 2011, a media report said the judge hearing the case acquitted the official of any wrongdoing and sentenced the husband to nine months in prison and 350 lashes.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of fairness, I must also allude to the two serious misconceptions that are ordinarily brought up by the Western media vis-à-vis Saudi women. The first of these is that such sexist practices are relics of the Islamic faith.
However, this notion belies well-known historical facts. During the early centuries of Islam, women were granted the right to participate in the political process and all other aspects of life. But the current brand of Islam applied in the oil-rich kingdom is fueled by an austere, convoluted interpretation of the Shari‘ah, or Islamic Law, an interpretation that at times is at odds with Islam in its pure form.
The other Western misreading of the Saudi social environment is that the authorities are single-handedly accountable for the ostracization of Saudi women, an ill-informed opinion to anyone familiar with Saudi society.
Men and, on occasion women, have been intransigent in their opposition to gender parity, worrying that any hints of compromise, such as allowing women to pilot a car, would open the floodgates of promiscuity in the profoundly conservative kingdom. As an example, when two young women made attempts to register to vote, they were subjected by some locals to a broad spectrum of insults, ranging from “unoriginal/impure Saudis” to “attention seekers” to “whores”. They were told “to stay home and raise kids,” and in some cases thought to warrant legal prosecution.
What, one might reasonably ask, engenders such narrow-minded viewpoints?
As a Saudi Arabian national, I can attest to the extremely narrow interpretation of the Qur’an and the Prophet’s actions (Sunnah) that is inculcated into our children from an early age in schools and Friday sermons, and through fatwas (religious rulings) and lectures disseminated through books and AV media. The doctrines promulgated devoted no small part to the subject of women, their rudimentary role in society and the protection of their honor.
“A modest and decent woman who doesn’t reveal any parts of her body, how could she drive a car?” our eloquent middle school teacher would ask, looking around the classroom, befuddlement written all over his features. “My sons, those calling for women’s “right” to drive are merely a lascivious, Westernized bunch who are striving to see our honorable society spiral into immorality and lechery..”
Notwithstanding entreaties from women’s rights activists to open up more job opportunities for women, a recent fatwa was issued to render impermissible the employment of women as clerks in supermarkets due to “un-Islamic sex mingling.”
Late last month, a woman called a prominent sheikh during his TV show, reporting that her brother had been sexually harassing his own daughter. Rather than advising the caller to immediately report the sexually abusive father to the police, the cleric spared the father ninety per cent of the blame and instead, based on pure conjecture, lambasted the molested girl for the manner in which “she dresses around her father,” for “spending time alone with him,” and for all the sexual provocations that her erogenous actions might evoke within the father who is, after all, “a man” with desire.
Compounded by the 2006 Qatif Girl saga, in which a kidnapped and gang-raped Saudi girl was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail (later to be pardoned by the King), for having been in a car alone with an unrelated male, the sheikh’s response epitomizes the prism through which Saudi women are oftentimes seen-namely, that the presumption of guilt in a wrong committed by a man is usually attributed to some woman’s sinful conduct.
Nevertheless, amid the bleak and ominous clouds of deep-seated misogynic societal convictions, strict policing by the religious establishment, and fatwas further curtailing women’s liberties, a ray of sunshine may be working its way to the top.
Having witnessed the far-reaching ramifications of social media in neighboring Arab countries, Saudi women have begun to organize to make their long-marginalized voices heard.
Protests and demonstrations are, however, not tolerated in the kingdom. As an example of this, on March 11, Saudi Arabia’s so-called “Day of Rage”, I was on my way to an unpublicized stand-up comedy show in the Eastern Province, where a discontented Saudi Shiite minority is disproportionately concentrated. A tense atmosphere was felt in streets swarming with riot police who set up frequent checkpoints and blocked some roads, while choppers hovered overhead. This show of force by-and-large successfully kept protesters at bay.
To date, such actions have not been able to lessen the commitment of some Saudi women to fight for their freedom, in any way, shape or form. Facebook and Twitter have become the platform for these women to discuss problems, resolutions, meeting times and places, and so on.
In a culture where the rights of women remain a fundamentally alien concept, Saudi Women Revolution (SWR), for example, is a fast-growing grassroots women’s rights movement that, while asserting time and again Saudi women’s insistence on remaining faithful to Islamic values and practices, lobbies for equality with their male counterparts.
Their demands, chief of which is an end to the male guardian system, are posted on their Facebook page.
Sara Fatani is a 19-year-old Arabic-English Translation major who, three years ago, established a Facebook group called, “Great Saudi Women” and just recently launched the English page for the “Baladi” (Arabic for ‘My Country’) campaign which calls for women’s right to participate in the current elections. The male guardian system, she says, makes her and other women feel as if they’re “children or subordinates” and also causes delays in their transactions. She recalls being refused admission into a scientific conference until she brought along her brother-who is three years her junior..
Additionally, Saudi women-related Twitter hashtags are also active with one Tweet coming in after another. One tweet under the hashtag #SaudiWomenRevolution, for instance, reads in Arabic, “Ah, how much I wish I could transform all the Saudi males into women for just one day, so they could undergo the disparagement we feel every day.”
The future of gender equality in Saudi society rests first and foremost in the hands of its women. To be sure, it will take considerable time and effort to undo decades of unjustifiably rigid interpretation and application of religion, but if the women don’t stand up for their own right, no one else will.
This round of municipal elections is a good place to start.
