While the unemployment rate for Saudi men is troublesomely high, that for women is appalling. Arab News reports on a human resources forum in which Ministry of Labor officials express concern about the levels of unemployment and point out that most work is being done by expats. The Ministry is giving itself 25 years to fix the problems. I don’t think they have that long before unemployment becomes an immediate and political crisis.
Employing women at a higher rate will not solve the problems of male unemployment. It might buy a bit of time, by raising family incomes, but even that comes at a price. Particularly in patriarchal societies, it’s difficult to have women earning as much as or more than men. It’s not an economic issue, but a psychological one. Those are much more intractable problems.
Still, it is incredible that over half of half of the population is not able to find work for a complex of reasons, most of them irrationally based on some idealized concept of the perfect Islamic society that never existed and never will.
65% of Saudi women are unemployed
HAYAT AL-GHAMDI | ARAB NEWSABHA: Only 35 percent of qualified Saudi women are employed, said Mufrej Al-Haqabani, deputy labor minister for planning and development.
“This is a low rate and does not augur well,” he said.
Presenting a working paper at a forum on human resources here, he said expatriates accounted for 53 percent of the workforce in the private sector in 2009 while Saudis represented 47 percent.
Al-Haqabani emphasized that fighting unemployment among Saudis is a joint responsibility, adding that it does not fall on his ministry alone.
He said the Council of Ministers approved the Kingdom’s employment strategy last year and gave 25 years to fulfill its objectives.
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After my unanticipated health break, I think I’m back to regularly blogging.
As is not utterly unusual, whatever hit me is still lacking a diagnosis. I presented myself in the hospital with a slew of symptoms, each of which was treated as it occurred. I had eight or nine doctors working on me. Each doctor, a specialist, was seeing something that seemed to be within his/her bailiwick and ordered treatment s/he thought appropriate. At times, those conflicted, to my distress. Diagnoses changed by the day, but I eventually found myself being discharged at an hour that had previously been scheduled for surgery. Certainly it was all a bit confusing. Even more certainly, I was happy to avoid the surgery!
I’m now at home and doing well. The last of the major tests have been done, but there’s still no clear picture of just what happened to me. I’ve a mass of medication I’m taking, and luckily the course of antibiotics prescribed me has now finished. They were annoying because of the way they changed the taste of food most unpleasantly.
I’d say I’m 90% fine now, but I’m not pushing things. I’ll take it easier than I ordinarily would, but do hope to be posting daily for the foreseeable future.
I thank you all for your comments and e-mails wishing me well.
As reform of Saudi Arabia’s legal system moves slowly along, Arab News reports that efforts are being made to regularize—codify, if you will—punishments that are currently left to the discretion of judges. While hudud punishments are spelled out specifically in the Quran and Sunnah, and cover serious crimes like murder, lesser crimes are liable to ta’zir judgments. These, the article reports, have become excessive over time. While it’s not unusual to see a contemporary judge levy a punishments of thousands of strokes in a flogging, history shows that 100 strokes was the maximum during the early days of Islam.
Saudi religious scholars point out that there are serious restrictions on how lashes can be applied, but that there seems to be no effort to enforce requirements. These scholars also note that the purpose of flogging is not to torture the miscreant, but to help him/her reform. Excess punishments do not serve their intended purpose. It goes without saying, I think, that excessive punishments also blacken the face of Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabs, and the Saudi legal system worldwide.
Scholars abhor stringent penalties for Ta’zir crimes
ABHA: Shariah has legislated certain punishment for serious crimes. These punishments, collectively known as Hudud, are mentioned in the two sources of Shariah — the Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
As Hudud punishments are sanctioned through the core sources of the Islamic faith, a person found guilty of a Hudud crime is never shown leniency, Al-Riyadh newspaper reported.
In Saudi Arabia, a person found guilty of a crime for which a punishment has not been mentioned in the Qur’an and the Sunnah is usually handed a form of punishment known as Ta’zir. This form of punishment usually includes lashes but can also — depending on the person’s character and the severity of the offense — involve a prison sentence, a formal warning, house arrest, and a court injunction ordering the person to avoid certain areas, towns and people.
Ta’zir punishments are up to the discretion of judges and rulers, something that in practice leads to a disparity in judgments with some judges handing out stringent punishments.
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The Saudi Board of the Senior Ulema has come out to condemn ‘vigilante vice police’, individuals who take it upon themselves to enforce their own interpretations of ‘proper behavior’ on society. Saudi Gazette/Okaz report that the actions of these vigilantes usurps the authority of the official Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, but worse, casts the officials in a bad light when the vigilantes are wrong or excessive in their actions.
It’s not as though the Haya is, in its official guise, a paragon of tolerance and understanding, after all. But the cowboys acting on their own make Saudi Arabia a worse place for all and overly complicate an already complex society.
Unofficial vice fighters ‘have no authority’
Abdullah Al-DaniJEDDAH – Ali Bin Abbas Hakami, a member of the Board of Senior Ulema and the Supreme Judiciary Council, has said that setting up any unofficial bodies to practice “ihtisaab” – promoting virtue and preventing vice – trespasses on the authority of the government.
“No individual is entitled to take upon themselves the jurisdiction of the government,” Hakami said. “Only the government has the authority to establish departments and appoint staff, and no individual has the right to tackle vice by force, as this is for those who are granted a certain sort of authority, such as parents over their children.”
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