A Gulf Cooperation Council summit meeting in Riyadh has resulted in approval for King Abdullah’s call for greater unity among the Gulf States.
Arab News reports on the meeting, below. It also reports that a call for a single union has met with popular favor. I think that if such a union came about, it could be good for the various countries’ economies. Some progress, but not a lot, has been made toward easy economic cooperation, but there’s no single Gulf-wide currency, nor are taxes and tariffs unified. There’s discussion of a Gulf-wide electric grid, but it, too, awaits further development, likely not coming about until nuclear power plants come on line. On the security front, though, there’s likely to be far tighter integration of the region’s military and intelligence forces.
GCC leaders back call for union of Gulf states
GHAZANFAR ALI KHAN I ARAB NEWSRIYADH: The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) concluded its two-day summit in Riyadh on Tuesday with the bloc’s leaders vowing to support the historic initiative of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah to transform the GCC into a single powerful regional entity.
The proposal to transform the GCC into a union of Gulf states, which will herald a new era of Gulf cooperation amid changing regional alliances, figured prominently in the final communiqué issued by GCC heads of state.
“A special Gulf authority comprising three nominated representatives from each GCC member state will be set up to study all aspects of the strategic move that calls for forging a single regional alliance,” said GGC Secretary-General Abdullatif Al-Zayani.
Several other significant decisions were taken by the Gulf leaders including a call to Syria to stop the bloodshed in the country.
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Reuters news agency offers its analysis of the move, seeing it as both a reaction to a more belligerent Iran and the discord of ‘Arab Spring’.
Saudi Gazette, in its reporting, offers a brief list of the unity aspirations, the Riyadh Declaration.
Arab News runs a nice op-ed today. In it, Eman Alnafjan argues that the whole issue of women’s driving has become tedious and petty. Thirty years of argumentation have simply driven the issue into the dirt. All the dead horses have been beaten into powder. It’s simply time to get over the objections that are not based on law, not based on religion, and move on to permitting women to drive in Saudi Arabia.
Women driving: Topic is getting tedious
EMAN ALNAFJAN
Supporters and opponents of the ban agree it is a petty issueThe ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia is a topic that has become tedious due to the uncountable times it has been written about since the 1980s.
Saudi Arabia is infamous for its gender discrimination When it comes to who gets to sit in the driver’s seat. The only thing that rivals it in what the country is known for globally is our never-ending supply of oil. What is ironic is that on both sides, Saudis who oppose and those who are calling for lifting the ban, is that they are in agreement that the whole issue is petty.
Both sides, though, come to this same conclusion of pettiness from different perspectives. Those who are calling for the lift of the ban on women driving point out how the ban is basically put in place as an obstacle to women who otherwise would go out into the workplace and most probably compete with men. However, this obstacle consequently extends to obstructing ease of access to education, health care, work in completely gender-segregated environments and even the basic right to socialize or leave the house for a change of scenery.
Another reason that the ban is in place is the argument that a man in the driver’s seat is a deterrent to neighboring cars from flirting with the women passengers. This whole line of reasoning is easily shot down. First of all, who is to say that the employed driver himself won’t harass the women passengers? Secondly, I cannot count the times I’ve come across Saudi men who completely ignored the driver’s presence and dangerously harassed and chased cars that carry women passengers.
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Social media can be a boon or a bane. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice is claiming that someone is using Twitter to defame the organization by publishing, in its name, positions that it does not take. The problem is that the extreme and provocative twits are not outside the realm of possibility. Muslim social conservatives have taken a public stance against things like the immodesty of men’s soccer costumes!
Twitter, Facebook, and the like are full of material posted as parody or critique. These often take the form of counterfeiting the names of individuals or groups. Often, though, it’s hard to tell when a post is pushing a published position to the point of ridiculousness or if that position is real. I don’t know if was intentional, but one definition of the word ‘twit’ – pre-dating the Internet – is: To taunt, ridicule, or tease, especially for embarrassing mistakes or faults.
Haia disowns tweets by impersonator
MUHAMMAD AL-SULAMI | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: A Twitter account, opened by an unknown person in the name of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Haia), drew a lot of attention online.
The impersonator commented on the recent soccer match between Saudi Arabia and Oman, which the Saudi side lost. “Thanks God for the defeat of our team. Our women should not be looking at the players in their shorts on TV screens,” he tweeted.
The strange tweets drew the attention of Internet users. Even those who had no sympathy for the Haia were not amused by what they read. Spokesman of the Haia, Abdul Mohsen Al-Ghifari, disowned the story. “Neither the Haia nor any of its branches have Twitter or Facebook accounts,” he said.
He dismissed what was written on the site as sheer lies and said it was an unjustified impersonation of the Haia.
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Learning a second language is work. It’s usually hard work, so hard that some people simply cannot do it. For others, it comes easily; that’s just the way the individual mind works. But learning English has become necessary in today’s interconnected world. English, whether a byproduct of colonialism or a consequence of the advances of science and technology in English-speaking countries, has become the lingua-franca of the age.
Saudi Arabia spends a lot of money in trying to teach English to its students, but as this Arab News article notes, they’re not doing a very good job of it. Even Saudi English teachers are deficient, according to those interviewed. Part of the problem is just which ‘English’ is being taught. While it is one language, there are many variants that are not always mutually intelligible. Grammar may stay the same across them, and spelling to a large extent, but pronunciations and word choice can vary immensely among, for example, South Asian, American, West African, and Australian forms. Deciding which form should be the focus of education is not a trivial exercise. The choice is fraught with meaning, from what it says politically and how much is ultimately costs. Still, the choice must be made.
The article points out that early learning seems to be more effective than trying to learn at older ages. That’s likely true. Right now, Saudi English teaching starts in the equivalent of the 6th Grade in state schools, but in Kindergarten at private schools. Even those few years seems to make a difference, though it may be hiding other factors – like parental engagement and encouragement – that also have a great effect on learning any subject.
As long as English is seen as suspect, there are going to be problems. If parents can be brought to realize that having competence in English is not a challenge to Arabic and Arab traditions, teaching it can succeed.
Learning English remains a hard nut to crack
ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: Nobody can underestimate or belittle the significance of English as a global or universal language. It is a powerful means of communication and interaction for people all over the world that helps them not only to interact with each other but also with finding a job, doing business, undertaking foreign trips, taking examination, doing research, surfing the Internet and so forth.
Despite being among the most widely spoken and understood languages, English has not yet acquired its customary omnipresent status in Saudi society, where all official work is carried out in Arabic.
Even though the Saudi government is making every effort to promote learning English as a second language at its schools and universities in addition to extending all financial and logistic support to establish this language for over 80 years ever since the Kingdom’s foundation in 1927, is it has not rooted itself yet in society.
There are more than 800 study hours devoted to teaching English from the first grade of intermediate school up to the final year of secondary school. Even then, the standard of English learning is still at the lowest level globally. Most students who graduate from universities are not in a position to speak fluently or write even a letter or paragraph in English.
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The new nitiqat program of Saudization of jobs and hafiz, the unemployment scheme are presenting opportunities for creative scammers and tinkerers, Saudi Arabia’s media report. In the first, from Saudi Gazette/Okaz, it appears to be the government trying to manipulate their own system. Low-paying, low-skill, low-social-status jobs are being taken out of the nitiqat program. Rather than let Saudi women work as maids and nannies, those jobs have been removed, that is, no quota of Saudis filling the jobs, will be required. I suppose that having Saudi women taking those jobs and claiming minimum legal salaries would drive up the price of non-Saudis in the same jobs. It would at least sow dissension among them as foreign workers receive much lower-than-Saudi-minimum wages for the same work. They would start militating for raises and that would create problems.
The problems already exist, of course, due to the multilevel scale of salaries apportioned to Saudi and non-Saudi employees, with gradations among the latter based on nationality. The problem of society’s deciding which jobs are ‘suitable’ for Saudi women, too, is an obnoxious one. If a Saudi woman wants to work in a job that meets her skill set, society should not be telling her that it’s beneath her dignity.
Nanny, female cleaner jobs canceled
Munira Al-Mushkhiss | Okaz/Saudi GazetteRIYADH – Female workers have expressed anger over the removal of low skills jobs from the Nitaqat Program website.
Jobs for female cleaners, nannies and others in these categories have been replaced by vacancies for accountants, treasurers, cashiers and librarians that require a bachelor’s degree.
However, a source told Okaz/Saudi Gazette that the Human Resources Development Fund and the labor and finance ministries are studying the low salaries provided to Saudi nationals in the private sector.
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Arab News reports that a young Saudi discovered that he had miraculously been employed by a company about which he knew nothing and to which he had never applied. He discovered, however, that he had been registered as an employee. Not only was he not drawing a salary for his supposed work, but the fake registration endangered his claim to unemployment benefits while he sought a job he really wanted.
I don’t see how this can be just a mistake. It seems that the ‘employer’ was looking to boost the number of Saudis on his payroll in order to meet nitiqat requirements.
Young Saudi lands ‘job’ without his knowledge
ARAB NEWSYANBU: A young Saudi man has filed a complaint at the labor office in Yanbu against a private establishment, which had employed and registered him at the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) without his knowledge, Al-Madinah newspaper reported Tuesday.
Abdullah Massad Al-Rifaie said the establishment offered him SR5,000 to relinquish his complaint, but he refused.
Narrating his story, Al-Rifaie said he received a text message on his mobile about two months ago that he had been registered at the GOSI by a private establishment in Yanbu for a monthly salary of SR1,500.
“Next day I went to the GOSI to ask about the contents of the message and was surprised to find myself being employed by a private establishment for which I did not apply,” he said. Al-Rifaie said he asked the social insurance staff to give him data about the establishment or the phone number of its owner, but they declined to do so.
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Last week, I wrote about a reality TV program in the US, ‘All-American Muslims’. The program attracted some attention, including the attention of a Christian fundamentalist and Islamophobic organization, the Florida Family Association, sadly headquartered just up the road from me in Tampa.
The group claims that the TV program, by showing American Muslims as mostly ordinary people, hides the fact that some Muslims are terrorists. By not highlighting the bad side of Muslim extremism, the show seeks to deceive and is therefore a danger to America. That’s quite a train of logic, there, but I think it got derailed.
The FFA (not to be confused with the Future Farmers of America, which shares the acronym), decided to get tough. They contacted companies running advertisements during the All-American Muslim broadcasts and threatened to boycott them. Unfortunately, at least some advertisers folded to their pressure. Notable among them was Lowe’s, a major, ‘big-box’ chain selling home improvement goods and services. The company decided to pull their ads. And then the heavens opened…
The company has received tens of thousands of complaints about their willingness to succumb to pressure from a small special interest group. It has tried to explain that it was only being responsive to customer demands, but it really blew the decision. Thousands are also informing Lowe’s that they are cutting up their Lowe’s credit cards because the company acted so pusillanimously. Lowe’s Facebook page is filled with rancorous commentary – including supportive comments –. The Jon Stewart ‘Daily Show’ took an ax to both the FFA and Lowe’s.
The FFA claims that scores of advertisers have fled the show. That seems to be an exaggeration, if not a falsehood.
The action by Lowe’s has ignited a true firestorm. The inter-faith portal Patheos, notes that it has led to a joining of average Americans with their Muslim brothers and sisters in pushing back against bigotry and Islamophobia.
From the standpoint of US law, there’s nothing wrong with Lowe’s deciding not to spend its advertising dollars on this TV program. That is a decision well within its First Amendment rights to free speech. But, just as Danish cartoonists have the right to mock Islam, it was not a smart decision. Actions, both positive and negative, have consequences. But the consequences are (or should be) social and economic, not legal. It’s therefore sad to see some American politicians calling for some sort of law to be written to protect against action’s like Lowe’s dumb one. That would be a misuse of government power.
I’ve yet to see an installment of All-American Muslim. I simply forgot to watch last week as I don’t watch that much TV. I suspect, though, that it’s audience will be at its highest this coming Sunday when a new episode (already filmed) will be broadcast. Controversy, of course, does not equate to quality. The show may not be very good. One advertiser who pulled their ads said they did so not because of the controversy, but because ‘the show sucked.’ Showing the ordinary, non-dramatic does not usually make for compelling viewing, so that’s entirely plausible. I’ll try to watch.
Another day, another fire in a girls school in Saudi Arabia…
Saudi Gazette/Okaz report that a fire at a girls college in Abha earlier this week will be investigated. There were no fatalities in this fire; all 2,000 students and their faculty escaped without major injury.
Emir of Asir orders investigation into Abha college fire
Abdullah Al-Qahtani and Yehya Al-Fifi | Okaz/Saudi GazetteABHA — Prince Faisal Bin Khaled, Emir of Asir region, has ordered investigation into the fire that broke out at the College of Education for Girls here on Tuesday.
Two thousand female students were evacuated from the college after a fire broke out on its premises. The fire sparked panic amongst staff and students, with many fainting and 29 suffering from shock. It is believed to have started in a two-square-meter-area stationary warehouse on the third floor of the school.
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Arab News runs a piece discussing how Saudis, both government and society, react to disasters. People, faced with an immediate crisis, tend to do things to make themselves safe. Government, though, seems slow to react. It appears to wait until something colossal happens, then gets around to fixing the underlying problem, after it’s been well-studied by a commission or two.
What’s a bit encouraging is that Saudi citizens are calling for accountability from the government.
We don’t wake up until we get slapped in the face
DIANA AL-JASSEM | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: In the days following the private school fire, we realized we were not as prepared for disasters as we thought, according to an academic and an author who spoke to Arab News.
Reports show that Saudi Arabia has encountered a large number of disasters over the past ten years. These include the Jeddah floods in 2009 and 2011, several girls’ school fires, and the collapse of a historic building in addition to 8,000 buildings on the verge of collapse in Jeddah alone. Beside these disasters, many Saudi female teachers have died in dangerous traffic accidents with no accurate studies about their number and causes. Arab News asked officials if we had learned any lessons from these occurrences.
Jamal Banoon, a Saudi author and head of the Saudi Center for Studies and Media, said, “We are shocked about the large number of accidents that happened in Jeddah during a short period of time.”
He wondered if we had learned any lessons from the accidents. “Natural and man-made disasters can teach us and the government useful lessons on how to act in the future,” Banoon said.
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Arab News reports on changes in minor cabinet officers reported by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA). The piece gives brief bios of the more important appointmentees.
King appoints new ministers
ARAB NEWSRIYADH: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has reshuffled his cabinet. Tawfiq Al-Rabiah is the new commerce and industries minister in the place of Abdullah Zainal Alireza.
New Haj Minister Bandar Al-Hajjar replaced Fouad Al-Farsy, while Muhammad Al-Jasser replaces Khaled Al-Gosaiby as minister of economy and planning.
Abdul Rahman Al-Barrak is appointed minister of civil service in the place of Muhammad Al-Faiz.
Fahd bin Abdullah Al-Mubarak is the new governor of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency. Khaled Al-Sabti is the new deputy minister of education.
The new appointments also include Abdul Rahman Al-Ibrahim as the new governor of the Saline Water Conversion Cooperation, Muhammad Al-Jefri the new deputy chairman of the Shoura Council and Fahd Al-Hamad assistant deputy chairman of the council.
Faisal bin Abdul Rahman Al-Muammar has been appointed the adviser to the king and secretary-general of King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue.
Hamad bin Muhammed bin Hamad Al-Asheikh was named deputy minister of education for boys.
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Science magazine, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, runs a report claiming that some Saudi universities are gaming the university rankings system. It says the King Abdulaziz University (KAU) and King Saud University (KSU) are both offering lucrative contracts to top-named international scientists for little or no real work. The purpose is to get the universities’ names cited in publications by those scientists who are ‘officially’ affiliated with them.
I wish this were shocking news, but it doesn’t shock me terribly. Universities compete. They compete for prestige. Prestige can come from fabulous campuses, from great job placement and success in graduates, from cutting-edge research. In the various rankings of universities around the world, Saudi universities have little to show for the massive investments the government has made in them. Some enterprising souls at Saudi universities have found a way to boost the prestige accorded them by applying a technical loophole in the ratings system.
In the US, universities game the ratings systems as well. The annual rankings conducted by US News & World Report are deemed extremely important by many American universities. The higher up they are in the standings, the more students are inclined to apply, the more money comes to the schools from alumni, the more likely the school is to receive government grants. Since universities are run by human beings, you can expect human failings and foibles to enter the equation and they do. The past year has seen numerous articles in the American media about how schools hide important factors, misreport job placement figures for graduates.
It seems a sad fact of life that people will do things that give them rewards, whether in prestige or money.
Saudi Universities Offer Cash in Exchange for Academic Prestige
Yudhijit BhattacharjeeTwo Saudi institutions are aggressively acquiring the affiliations of overseas scientists with an eye to gaining visibility in research journals.
At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers.
“I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU’s offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.
Kirshner’s colleague is not alone. Science has learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines—all on ISI’s highly cited list—who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU’s name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.
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The UK’s Telegraph newspaper reports briefly on the execution of a woman in her 60s for the crime of ‘witchcraft’. This is truly benighted.
The woman was perhaps guilty of scamming people out of their money in return for fake claims of medical cures. That is not a crime worthy of death. Were it not for the particular words she used, the package in which she wrapped her con, she would have been given a light jail sentence and flogging. But words have supernatural power in the Kingdom.
Yes, there’s a biblical injunction against witches. Putting witches to death in the West ended in the 18th C., however, as people realized that witchcraft was not a real thing. The continued belief in it, however, also goes a long way to explain the dearth of top-notch Arab science, as noted in the preceding post.
Saudi Arabia executes woman convicted of ‘sorcery’
The Saudi Interior Ministry says in a statement the execution took place on Monday, but gave no details on the woman’s crime.
The London-based al-Hayat daily, however, quoted Abdullah al-Mohsen, chief of the religious police who arrested the woman, as saying she had tricked people into thinking she could treat illnesses, charging them $800 per session.
The paper said a female investigator followed up, and the woman was arrested in April, 2009, and later convicted in a Saudi court.
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In his Arab News column, Abdulateef Al-Mulhim talks about his personal experiences with NASA and the American space program. He then goes on to lament how the Arab world treats science as a black box, appreciating the utility of what a device like a GPS or cell phone does, but not having any idea of how it actually works. Worse, he says, Arab scientists, beneficiaries of considerable government funding, have added nothing to the modern world.
I think he’s right in general, but perhaps wrong to categorically criticize. Egyptian Ahmed Zewail, for instance, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Farouk Al-Baz, another Egyptian, has played a key role in remote sensing, for NASA itself as well as outside it. Various Arab scientists and medical doctors have made breakthrough discoveries that have changed the way medicine is practiced worldwide.
I take is point, however. Given the huge investments made by Arab countries, they do have relatively little to show for it. There’s one Arab scientist with a Nobel Prize in the sciences. Israel, with a fraction of the population of the Arab world, has three. At best, the importance of science appears to be downplayed in Arab culture; at worst, it’s denied and seen as a ‘foreign influence’.
Arabs and NASA’s science fact
Abdulateef Al-MulhimTo us, every new gadget is a fiction, because we know only to buy and use it
In the year 1899, the vacuum cleaner was invented. And after that, Charles Duell, the commissioner of the US patent office declared that everything that can be invented has been invented. And until July 20, 1969, some people confused Nassau (the capital of the Bahamas) with NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Administration). And when Apollo landed on the Moon on that date, a lot of people thought it was a Hollywood stunt. Was it Neil Armstrong wearing the space suit or was it John Wayne? I have seen the Moon landing on an 8 mm film when I was a child at a summer activity center at one of Aramco schools in Saudi Arabia.
NASA stretched the human capability to another limit. I was at Kennedy Space Center (Florida) on April 12, 1981 when the first space shuttle (Columbia) was launched. At that time I was in my mid-20s. And I said to myself: Everything that can be done by NASA has been done. My interest in NASA increased because watching the shuttle lift off is a different experience. And a few years after the shuttle launch, came the mobile phones and the road maps were replaced by GPS. Sextant disappeared from the naval navigators collections. And the American Highway AT&T public pay phones were transferred to antique museums. And we didn’t laugh any time when we watch old episodes of Get Smart and see Maxwell Smart make a phone call using his phone in his shoes.
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There’s a piece in today’s Arab News that I find a bit troubling.
It reports on a speech given by the president of the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, who is also the head of the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs. These two hats, covering different ambits of life, seem to be causing some confusion.
Saleh Al-Hussein argues that Muslim women have different expectation in life, different obligations and obligations owed them. Outside of religious practice itself, I’m not so sure. As women, they have rights that are deemed ‘universal’, not some separate set or subset conditioned by their faith. They may, in practicing their faith, choose to exercise or abstain from exercising those rights. Their rights are not limited by their faith, however.
It is not a ‘Western view’ of human rights, but a view shared by all but the Islamic world. Even in the Islamic world, though, women have and exercise far more rights than they do in Saudi Arabia. What Mr Al-Hussein is arguing, in fact, is for a sort of Saudi exceptionalism, one in which it’s okay that women are second-class citizens because their menfolk will take good care of them.
We know that is nonsense. Spousal abuse, domestic violence, instant divorces, child marriages… all of these prove that all is not well in Saudi society.
Saudi women are not having their heads turned by pretty ideas from the West. They are becoming conscious of the fact that they are deprived rights that the rest of the world enjoys. They are not the victims of a country’s or a region’s propaganda, but by the free flow of information from all corners of the globe. They realize that they’re holding onto the short end of the stick and wonder why.
The answer to that question is not for them to be told all is fine and dandy, that the multi-level patriarchy will take care of all their needs. That patriarchy has failed to do so; it fails to do so daily. Why wouldn’t women look for something better, something different? The same-old, same-old isn’t much of a deal.
Muslims cautioned against looking at women through Western prism
ABDUL HANNAN TAGO | ARAB NEWSRIYADH: The head of the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs argued in Riyadh on Saturday that general perceptions about Western lifestyle and culture have played a major role in influencing public opinion on women’s rights in a Muslim society.
Saleh Abdurahman Al-Hussein’s remarks came at a gathering of more than 1,000 participants attending a forum on the rights and duties of women in Islam.
Al-Hussein, who is also president of the King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, was addressing the first Saudi conference on women’s rights organized by the Researchers’ Center for Women Studies (RCWS).
A large number of prominent Saudi scholars, charitable organizations and human rights advocates participated in the event. The first session was presided over by Yousof Al-Aqeel.
… Pointing out that in Islam men are obliged to take care of their women’s financial needs, he said in this conference they are going to address the issue in line with Islamic teachings and the rights due to them under the existing system.
Al-Abdul Kareem said that imposing Western views on Saudi and Muslim women with regard to their rights amounts to interference.
He added every country has its own way of dealing with issues. “We deal with our Muslim women in our own way and provide for all their needs, including the right to education, health and other expenses within the framework of our religion.”
He said Muslim women in their countries should be left alone to carry out their religious obligations because of the prevalent values of democracy and freedom.
They should not be accused of being backward because of their religion, he added. He said if Westerners want to know the reality about Muslim women, they should read books available on this issue, he observed.
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