In it’s “On Faith” section, The Washington Post runs a piece by Dalia Mogahed, Executive Director at the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. She questions the tactics used by Mona Eltahawy in addressing gender inequalities in the Arab Muslim world, finding that in addition to being too sharp, those tactics miss their target. Declaring intellectual war on Islam or Arab culture simply will not win adherents in the region and offer no useful advice to foreign governments concerned about women’s right.

Instead, Mogahed suggests, attention needs to be paid to overall development and overall respect for human rights. Only when there is a substantive change in people’s perceptions of justice and equality and respect for rights can special attention be carved out for women. It’s an interesting piece, worth reading.

Does Mona Eltahawy’s approach hurt women?
Dalia Mogahed

Mona Eltahawy’s Foreign Policy cover story “Why Do They Hate Us” triggered an avalanche of passionate responses. But few have addressed how her arguments impact indigenous Arab women’s rights activists or the article’s primary audience– how American policy makers– can best support the cause of gender justice in the Middle East.

Eltahawy draws attention to crimes committed against women in the Middle East that should outrage us all. Unfortunately, rather than discuss the complex social, economic and political dimensions of these issues (see Max Fisher’s useful analysis), she offers the radically original notion that Arab men, and by extension Middle Eastern culture and even “moderate” interpretations of Islam, are backwards and barbaric.

Well-meaning fans of the piece applaud what they see as Eltahawy’s courage for raising public awareness of Arab women’s struggles.

Critics question not the crimes Eltahawy describes but the causes she assigns, namely Islam and Arab culture’s inherent “hate” for women, alleging that her analysis is not only pedestrian but panders to prejudice.

The real danger however is that Eltahawy’s narrative harms the very cause she claims to champion. Conflating women’s rights advocacy with Arab inferiority or Islam bashing doesn’t empower the champions of change, it aids their enemies.
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Writing in Saudi Gazette, Khadijah Bawazeer offers her qualms about Saudi Arabia’s moves toward nuclear energy. While Saudi demand for energy, particularly electricity, is unmatched in the world, she’s hoping that solar energy might come to the rescue and nuclear power plants be avoided.

Saudi Arabia’s potential for solar power is also unmatched, with some areas showing an insolation of up to 7,000 Watts [9-pg PDF] per square meter. There are several problems, though. The primary one is storing energy collected until it is needed. Battery technology is still lagging behind other aspects of solar power. It’s not as though you stick a solar collector in the ground like a lollipop and suddenly have available electricity. It needs to be transmitted, too. Areas best suited for solar collection aren’t necessarily near the areas where the electricity produced is most needed.

By all means, Saudi Arabia should continue its development of its solar potential. But it cannot devote all its efforts there. It needs to look at nuclear power, no matter the potential problems. A handful of nuclear disasters over the past 50 years should not serve to halt planning.

Alternative power sources
KHADIJAH BAWAZEER

Like all other countries, Saudi Arabia is working toward diversifying its energy resources. One of the popular areas of development is nuclear power. However, we have to weigh the risks carefully before we plunge into something risky while we are naturally given other resources in abundance.

After the disaster of Fukushima, Japan is backing down on nuclear energy as are some European countries under the pressure of popular demand to stop the building of new nuclear plants and to dismantle existing ones. In the current unexpected eruption of volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, a completely safe nuclear power plant can become hazardous. Consequently, people demand a move toward cleaner, safer power.

Furthermore, we have learned from Fukushima and Chernobyl that the radiation from nuclear plants can spread very far within a single country or to other countries as well. In both cases, the wind took nuclear radiation thousands of miles away across land and water.
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Arab News runs a very interesting article about how labor disputes will be settle in the future. Rather than the Ministry of Labor handling matters, as it currently does based on its regulations and customary practices, the Ministry of Justice will take on the resolution of conflicts. It will do so through a series of uniform laws – yet to be written – that will regularize practices and make them enforceable with the power of imposing criminal penalty. This, in addition to being an acknowledgement that the current system has failed, is a major step toward improving the plight of foreign workers.

All will depend on just which laws are written and how well they are enforced, of course.

Justice Ministry to settle labor disputes in future
RIYADH: ARAB NEWS

Minister of Labor Adel Fakeih announced his ministry would transfer labor disputes to the Ministry of Justice within three years after the issuance of the new criminal procedures law.

He also disclosed that the number of foreign workers in the Kingdom has reached 9 million, including 1.5 million domestic workers.

Speaking to Alsharq Arabic daily, Fakeih said the ministry received 9,956 complaints and cases involving workers last year.

“Of these, the majority of cases were related to foreigners. There were 5,715 cases (57.4 percent) involving foreigners while cases involving Saudis were 4,241 (42.6 percent),” he said, adding that the ministry was able to settle 8,628 of these cases.

The minister said transferring labor issues to the Ministry of Justice and subsequently to various courts would be more beneficial.

“There would be a legal basis while settling labor disputes if they are taken to the courts. This would, no doubt, improve the efficiency of the judicial process while handling labor litigation in addition to expediting their settlement,” he said.
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The BBC engages in a bit of plausible tea-leaf reading. It reports that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has relieved Sheikh Abdelmohsen al-Obeikan – one of the more conservative religious sheiks – of his position as adviser to the royal cabinet. The article suggests that this is because al-Obeikan was getting too loud with positions contrary to those of the King, particularly when it came to the proper role of women in Saudi society.

Al-Obeikan became notorious when, a few years ago, he suggested that a way to permit men and women to work in the same offices would be for the women to share breast milk with the males in the office. This would create a relationship under Islamic standards, by which the men became family members of the women and therefore be ‘safe’ to be in the same location. His suggestion drew cries of disgust and ridicule among both foreign audiences and Saudis alike.

Saudi King Abdullah sacks conservative adviser

Saudi King Abdullah has sacked one of his most hardline advisers, Sheikh Abdelmohsen al-Obeikan.

Sheikh Obeikan, who was an adviser to the royal cabinet, opposed moves to relax gender segregation.

The dismissal comes shortly after Sheikh Obeikan attacked plans by “influential people to corrupt Muslim society by trying to change the natural status of women”.

Saudi officials did not give a reason for Sheikh Obeikan’s departure.
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Saudi Gazette runs only a brief report from the Saudi Press Agency stating that al-Obeikan had been relieved of his duties. Arab News runs a somewhat longer, but no more informative article.

[Thanks to reader 'Dakota' for the lead.]

An piece in Saudi Gazette, which originated in the Arabic daily Okaz, wonders why there are no female Saudi Arabia flight attendants, even on Saudi airlines. At present, only foreign women hold the job and not all of them can speak Arabic or are aware of Saudi sensitivities. Customer service, the writer suggests, would be greatly improved, at least for the Saudi passengers who make up the vast majority of all passengers.

The writer is correct, but neglects a few historical details. It was not long ago – and it still may be the case – that some flight attendants worked in the Kingdom for, shall we say, dual purposes. They discovered that they could greatly supplement their airline salaries by taking part in the ‘horizontal hospitality’ business, never mind what the laws or their contracts said. While it was only a very small minority of attendants involved, it cast a rather dark shadow over the job classification. That’s why the writer received such strong pushback when he mused about Saudi flight attendants to a nearby Saudi.

The airlines are going to have to do a better job of ensuring that flight attendants have a good reputation before Saudi women can be expected to take the jobs.

The piece does note that ground crews, particularly ticket counter personnel, are primarily women around the world. This is certainly a job that Saudi women could do without jeopardizing their reputations. I’ve no doubt that Saudis would make competent flight attendants – or even pilots – but the bad reputation developed by the few has tainted the job.

Why can’t Saudi girls fly?
Homoud Abu Talib | Okaz

ON a recent flight I witnessed a foreign air hostess struggling to come to terms with the seating arrangements of a large family. She didn’t realize how serious it would be for a woman to be located next to a strange man. The concerned felt even more frustrated that she did not understand what they were trying to communicate to her given the obvious language barrier.

I told my compatriot in the seat next to mine, “Don’t you think if the air hostess was a Saudi woman, perhaps such problems could be averted? His reply was a sharp and dismissive “You want our girls to work as air hostesses? How dare you!” I thought it wise to stay silent but it did start off an interesting train of thought.
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Arab News reports that beggars are become a problem across Saudi Arabia. While most of the beggars are foreigners, one is five is Saudi. There is a government Office to Combat Beggary, but it sees its role as dealing only with the Saudi beggars, shifting the rest to other agencies dealing with crime and deportation. Most of the begging, the article says, is pure conmanship, with people, including children, being smuggled into the country specifically for the purpose. The government has cracked down on begging near mosques, but, the article points out, stop lights and intersections are where they swarm.

Beggary: More concerted efforts needed to end multipronged evil
MD HUMAIDAN

Jeddah: It is evident from the huge number of beggars who swarm the city streets, public squares, mosque courtyards, and souks in Jeddah and other cities in the western region that there are some serious shortcomings in the Kingdom’s mechanism to combat this growing phenomenon.

Despite the relentless efforts exerted by the agencies concerned in cooperation with the media to rein in beggary over the last decade, it still remains a headache and a threat to the security agencies as some criminals disguise themselves as beggars to engage in organized crimes.

Even though anti-beggary cops nab scores of beggars on a daily basis, there has been a rising tide of beggars in Jeddah. The official figures from the Ministry of Social Affairs and other authorities indicate that Saudis make up more than 20 percent of beggars. However, we can see most of the street beggars are from other Arab countries as well as from some Muslim countries of Africa and Asia. Saad Al-Shahrani, head of the Office to Combat Beggary in Jeddah, said that nearly 99 percent of beggars in Jeddah are non-Saudis.
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Arab News reports that 28% of Saudi women looking for aren’t able to find jobs. On the whole, only 1.2% of all jobs in Saudi Arabia are filled by women. As women represent over 50% of the population as well as over 50% of college graduates, there seems to be an imbalance.

While some impediments to women’s working have been removed – women no longer need permission of the fathers or guardians to work, for example – society throws up many more. The simple inability to drive to work is one. Having to hire a driver, even part-time, cuts into the profitability, or even the reasonableness of getting a job. Having to depend on a spouse or family member for a ride to and from work every day is both a hassle and not always reliable. Some companies (including government ministries) offer transportation, but only when there are large enough numbers for that to make sense.

The wastage of human capital is truly appalling.

28 percent Saudi women are unemployed
DAMMAM: ARAB NEWS

Unemployment among Saudi women has reached 28 percent, while their representation does not go beyond 1.2 percent in the Kingdom’s 5,214 factories, according to a senior official of the Labor Ministry.

Addressing a workshop in Dammam on Wednesday, Assistant Secretary of the Ministry of Labor for development Fahd Al-Tikhaifi revealed that the ministry had about 1.6 million CVs of women looking for jobs, including holders of doctorate and master’s degrees.

Al-Tikhaifi was speaking at the workshop at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry under the title “Feminizing and Saudizing Industrial Jobs.”

He said the current manpower in the factories in the Kingdom is 678,000, of which only 14.1 percent are Saudis.

Al-Tikhaifi revealed that Saudi women no longer needed the consent of their father or custodian to be employed. “The new labor laws have canceled this condition,” he pointed out.
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Al-Arabiya runs a story on research being conducted by Oxford University into the archeology of Saudi Arabia. Using a variety of methods, including satellite photos, the group has identified ancient lakes and river beds and archeological sites alongside them. Some of the sites date back to 75,000 years ago, the report says, and are useful in helping to determine the course of climate change.

Oxford University team conducts archeological and climate studies
in Saudi Arabia

There is an ancient network of rivers and lakes in the Great Nafud Desert in northern Saudi Arabia, Professor Michael Petraglia, co-director of the Center for Asian Archaeology, Art and Culture at Oxford University and head of an international scientific team conducting archeological studies in the kingdom said.

“The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA) has granted a five-year permission to Oxford University to conduct archeological research and we started with the Jubba Oasis in the Nafud,” he told al-Eqtisadiah newspaper.

In Jubba, Petraglia explained, the team found the remains of an old lake that they found out dates back to the Paleolithic Age.

“We also found several buried archeological sites that date back to the Middle Paleolithic Age, around 75,000 years ago.”

For Petraglia, fishermen and harvesters most probably lived around this lake which was also surrounded by trees and grassland at that fertile time.”

Pictures taken by NASA and Google Earth showed that similar lakes and rivers dating back to the same era existed and that the areas around them were populated.
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The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with the close cooperation of the government of Saudi Arabia, thwarted a plot to destroy an airplane in flight. Asharq Alawsat carries this Reuters story reporting that a Saudi-controlled double-agent had infiltrated the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and had been accepted as a volunteer suicide bomber. Once given the explosives, in the form or an ‘underwear bomb’, he reported to US authorities and the plot was ruined.

Saudi intelligence, CIA infiltrated al Qaeda in Yemen: reports

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A bomber from the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen sent to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner last month was actually a double agent who infiltrated the group and volunteered for the suicide mission, U.S. media reported on Tuesday.

Working closely with the CIA, Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency placed the operative inside al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, with the goal of convincing his handlers to give him a new type of non-metallic bomb for the mission, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Western intelligence agencies have identified AQAP as among the most dangerous and determined al Qaeda affiliates in the world, dedicated in part to attacks on the West.

The explosive device was intended to be smuggled aboard an aircraft undetected and then detonated.

The double agent arranged instead to deliver the device to U.S. and other intelligence authorities waiting outside Yemen, the LA Times reported. The agent arrived safely in an unidentified country and is being debriefed.
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Arab News reports that the government of Yemen was unaware of the plot and its thwarting.

UPDATE: Asharq Alawsat reports on the White House’s gratitude toward Saudi Arabia and its counter-intelligence apparatus:

We’re indebted to Saudi Arabia- White House

In his column for Saudi Arabia’s pan-Arabic Asharq Alawsat, Ali Ibrahim makes an important point with direct application to those involved in ‘Arab Spring’. How winners of elections behave is important, of course, but equally important is how losers and their supporters behave. He uses the electoral defeat of French President Sarkozy as his launching pad. Sarkozy lost to François Hollande in a relatively close election: Hollande receiving 52% of the votes to Sarkozy’s 48%. That means that nearly half of the French population did not vote for Hollande. Nevertheless, they accept the defeat of their candidate and do not take to the streets or to their guns. They acknowledge that their candidate did not win the votes of a majority and they will have to do better next time around.

Surely, the defeated are not happy. They will complain. They will find fault in much that the Hollande government does. There will be editorials and screeds decrying the shift in politics and perhaps the economy. But they accept – peacefully and without violence – that they did not win.

How you lose is as important to democracy as how you win.

To the people of the Arab Spring, consider France!
Ali Ibrahim

The speeches of the defeated French President and his newly elected replacement provide an eloquent lesson in the art of practicing political democracy. Following the announcement of the election results which were not in his favor, Nicolas Sarkozy – who is something of a rarity as a French president who failed to win a second presidential term – addressed his audience and supporters, in all humility, conceding defeat and saying: “I have not succeeded…I carry full responsibility for this defeat”. He added that France’s new president had come to power through popular democratic choice and that the French people must be patriotic and united behind him. He finished his speech congratulating his victorious opponent and calling on his supporters to respect the winner, pointing out that the political situation would be different now.

As for François Hollande, France’s President-elect, he did not forget in the euphoria of his victory speech to pay tribute, despite the boos of his supporters, to his defeated rival Sarkozy, who had led the country for 5 years, and as such deserves, according to Hollande, all due respect.

Between the winner and loser of the French presidential election was a difference in terms of votes of less than 4 percent; around 18 million voted in favor of Hollande and 16.9 million voted in favor of Sarkozy. Yet the 16.9 million will not oppose this election result, nor will the 2.1 million who cast blank or spoiled ballots; nobody will object to Hollande being their president for the next five years, even if they disagree with him.
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While it’s great that Saudi Arabian women are continuing to find jobs, it’s a bit worrisome that they’re doing so through the block reservation of certain types of jobs on the low end of the pay spectrum. The government has enforced a new rule that women, and only women, will sell female lingerie. That makes a great deal of sense in a country where sexual segregation has a tendency to lead toward hyper-sexuality on the part of men. Women just didn’t feel comfortable buying intimate apparel from men who were constantly – and literally – sizing them up.

Now, Saudi Gazette reports, on the heels of the success of the lingerie program, the government will set aside the selling of cosmetics for women alone. There is again some sense to this. Particularly when it comes to sampling and demonstrating, having women be the sole contact is reasonable. But again, it’s jobs at the low end of the economy. Better than nothing, of course, but hardly the basis of life-long careers.

Women-only cosmetic shops from June 30

JEDDAH – The successful deployment of women-only lingerie shops has ushered in a new era that not only provides more privacy but opens up thousands of job opportunities for Saudi women. Business owners have also reported a welcome increase in sales.

The Ministry of Labor has now moved on to the next phase of the law whereby all cosmetics and perfume shops will have to employ female staff only. According to Fahd Al-Tekhaifi, Assistant Undersecretary for Development at the Ministry of Labor, the law will come into force on June 30.
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The Saudi Ministry of Labor, the paper also reports, is doing a little work of its own to remove the glass ceiling within the Ministry. Now, the high-level jobs will become available to women. It required a restructuring of the Ministry, but senior jobs in 33 branch offices will become available.

Labor Ministry to employ women in key positions

Saudi Arabia’s efforts to reform its legal system continue to progress, step by step. Arab News reports that the Shariah courts are likely to be the next target of codification. The issue has been a tendentious one, with some judges seeing it as an affront to their dignity and an attack on their powers. Nevertheless, the awkward fact of different courts imposing different sentences for identical behavior needs to be addressed. As the article notes, too, an important part of any justice system is permitting people who might end up before a judge to have some idea of what is criminal and what punishments they might expect. At present, there’s far too great a measure of randomness for actual justice to be found.

Court rulings to be codified
RIYADH: ARAB NEWS

A draft project to codify court verdicts has been submitted to the higher authorities for approval, a local daily reported yesterday.

“The Council of Senior Religious Scholars has submitted a project to codify and document the verdicts issued by the Kingdom’s Shariah courts for the consideration of the higher authorities after completing studies on the project,” Dean of the Faculty of Distant Education at Imam Muhammad bin Saud University Abdul Rahman Al-Sanad, who is also professor of the Sheikh Saad Ghonaim Chair, told Al-Watan newspaper.

Documenting court verdicts has been a topic under study at the Council of Senior Religious Scholars for a long time.

Al-Sanad, who is also professor at the Department of Comparative Jurisprudence at the Higher Institute of Judiciary, said various Fiqh academies had also been studying the matter for the past several decades.

“The topic was studied again about one and a half years ago in detail and then a decision was made to permit documentation in view of its importance and codification to help judges to prepare verdicts on the basis of Shairah Laws,” he said.

He pointed out that the documentation would also help avoid instances of different judges making inconsistent judgments on identical cases.
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In Saudi Gazette, we find an example of the legal randomness. Domestic violence is pretty well understood around the world to be a crime. Different countries do impose different penalties. In a particular case, the miscreant was sentenced to a payment of SR70,000 (US $19,000) to his wife, but also to memorize the Quran and a number of hadith. Perhaps this is an excellent example of matching the punishment to the crime, but it’s peculiar.

Court sentences wife-beater to memorize Qur’an, Prophet’s sayings