{"id":4962,"date":"2011-03-12T17:06:53","date_gmt":"2011-03-12T13:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=4962"},"modified":"2011-03-12T17:07:39","modified_gmt":"2011-03-12T13:07:39","slug":"hope-blossoms-despair-lingers-for-arab-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/middle-east-life\/hope-blossoms-despair-lingers-for-arab-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Hope Blossoms, Despair Lingers for Arab Women"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image Credit: susiesbigadventure.blogspot.com<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I came across two stories yesterday about women in the Arab world that could not have been more different.<\/p>\n

The first was a press release I was sent from the \u201cNetwork of Free Ulema<\/a>\u201d in Libya. I don\u2019t know anything about them (other than the fact that the press release was in English, which I thought was quite curious. I\u2019m assuming there was an Arabic version too. And the info that they\u2019ve carefully written up in Wikipedia. They are very media savvy. Good for them!)<\/p>\n

The press release was on the occasion of International Women\u2019s Day in order to:<\/p>\n

\u201ccelebrate your heroic political, social, scholarly and economic achievements. We\u00a0congratulate you, and promise you that all of us, women and men, will work together\u00a0towards a Libya of equality and fairness for all.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I haven\u2019t copied out the whole text, but I did like this line at the end:<\/p>\n

\u201cMay the significance of this special day, become an inspiration for a New and Free Libya.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Women\u2019s actions can and should be an inspiration not just for women, but for everyone. I like the recognition of this.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s great to see this worldliness in the Ulema, and their recognition of the importance of women and the status and respect that they deserve. It gives me some hope for change. It also underlines a point I made in an article<\/a> earlier this week that the up-front participation by women in the revolutions of the Middle East has forever changed their status. \u00a0It\u2019s re-iterated in a piece written by Naomi Wolf on The Middle East Feminist Revolution.<\/a><\/p>\n

Contrast this with a heartbreaking piece<\/a> in The National yesterday about the prevalence of women in Saudi Arabia who are being forced NOT to marry by their fathers and brothers. The article writes:<\/p>\n

Amal Saleh would like to marry and have a family, but she needs her father\u2019s permission. And he won\u2019t give it.\u00a0A university professor in her mid-thirties, Amal has had numerous suitors asking for her hand, but her father always refuses. \u201cThey are not rich, or he doesn\u2019t like their fathers or they are not from the same social group,\u201d she says.\u00a0Work colleagues who proposed were turned away because they were not from the same tribe.\u00a0Her brothers support her father, she says, because they fear \u201cthat if I had a partner he would share in my money\u201d.\u00a0For her male relatives, Amal says, \u201cI am like a horse. They don\u2019t treat me as a human being. They treat me as if I belong to them and they should decide what to do with this \u2018thing\u2019.\u201d\u00a0The National<\/em> is not publishing Amal\u2019s real name because her father threatened to kill her if she sought help outside the family.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It seems that a number of reasons lie behind fathers and brothers witholding permission to marry \u2013 permission which is required under Saudi Arabia\u2019s guardianship laws for women to marry. The woman\u2019s salary is lost to the family. They are worried that she will take away her share of the inheritance. They don\u2019t like the family of the intended.<\/p>\n

Even though such behaviour on the part of the family is against Islamic law \u2013 and the country\u2019s chief mufti has stated it to be so, adding that it should bring a penalty of imprisonment, this tribal custom persists. In fact,women who protest against such behaviour are taken to court by their families for \u2018disobedience\u2019, and bafflingly the court upholds this.<\/p>\n

Amal\u2019s words wrench my guts. She uses a similar analogy to the period of jahiliyyah that I\u2019ve used before<\/a>. She says:<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore Islam, they had this practice of killing a girl when she is just a baby [because] they were ashamed of her as they wanted a boy,\u201d Amal had said in the interview. \u201cNow I\u2019m saying that history is being repeated. They kill us when we have emotions and can understand and are aware of our rights. Maybe if they killed me as a child it would be better than now.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two corners of the Muslim world, two very different stories. On the one hand there is hope that respect for women and a recognition of their equality and status is now on the horizon. On the other hand, despair that there is still a long way to go.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SHELINA ZAHRA JANMOHAMED: Two corners of the Muslim world, two very different stories. On the one hand there is hope. On the other hand, despair…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[18332,191,18275,104,2874,133],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}