Saudi Arabia’s discomfort with the idea of women taking part in sports is well known. The arguments against it are social, though cloaked in religious reasoning. James Dorsey, who writes The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, points out that not even all ‘Wahhabis’ are alike. Qatar, a state also dominated by the strict interpretation of Islam that prevails in Saudi Arabia, is sending women to the Olympics while the Saudi government has all but pulled back its permission for women to participate.
Qatari Olympic women athletes spotlight Wahhabi schism
James M DorseyThe question for Qatari sprinter Noor al-Malki is not whether she will be part of the first group of Qatari women to ever compete in a global sports tournament at the 2012 London Olympics but how she will handle the fact that the competition will take place during Ramadan.
The question whether Ms. Al-Malki would be able to compete was resolved when Qatar, alongside Saudi Arabia and Brunei the only nation never to have been represented by women in a global sporting event, decided last year to allow women to compete in the London Olympics.
The decision was the result of Qatar’s concerted effort to become a sports power and mounting international pressure on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), not to allow countries to compete that discriminate against athletes on the basis of gender.
It saved Qatar, already threatened with a global trade union campaign against its hosting of the 2022 World Cup because of the conditions under which it employs foreign labour, from becoming the target of yet another attack on its reputation, already dented by controversy over its successful campaign to win the right to host the World Cup. The bruising debate over the soccer tournament bid contributed to the International Olympic Committee’s decision to eliminate Qatar as a candidate for the 2020 Olympics.
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It’s not just on the Olympic front, though, that Muslim women face challenges. Al-Arabiya reports that FIFA, the international soccer/football federation, is expressing qualms about the intrinsic safety of the hijab worn in women’s competitions. There is concern that the zippers used to fasten the hijab so that it doesn’t dislodge during active play represents a danger of cutting the wearer if a ball or another player makes contact. There’s also a worry that a hijab, grabbed from behind by an opposing player, could lead to broken necks or even death. FIFA’s expression of concern has riled some:
Mshari Al-Zaydi writes in Asharq Alawsat about how tourists dollars are disappearing from countries riven by Arab Spring. In choosing to avoid areas of political conflict, often accompanied by violence in the streets, tourists end up depriving local economies of major sources of income. Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria – and now spilling over into Lebanon – depend heavily on tourists, not only for their direct spending, but also for the thousands of jobs they sustain. The politics of the region may be getting sorted out, but there is a very real cost being paid while the politicians argue.
The death of Arab tourism
Mshari al-ZaydiOne of the common features that can be seen in Egypt, Tunisia and Lebanon, and perhaps also Syria to a large extent, is that tourism is viewed as a major resource for the national economy.
Another common feature of these countries is the fact that they are experiencing tremors, or rather political and security earthquakes, which means that tourists have fled and there is now a drought in the tourism market; a sector where security is considered an essential requirement rather than a complimentary condition.
Last week was a wretched one for tourists and tourism inside Lebanon, and even outside of it for some Lebanese.
After the unrest in Tripoli and Beirut, the imprisonment of an Islamic activist hailing from Tripoli, the death of a Sunni sheikh, and what was reported about a Qatari national being arrested in the midst of the security tensions there, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait all issued warnings to their citizens about the danger of the security situation in Lebanon, which constitutes a painful blow to the Lebanese tourism market as we enter the summer.
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An example of what’s keeping tourists away is provided by this article from Al-Arabiya:
Development is going on at such a rapid pace in Saudi Arabia that the government has to play catch-up with infrastructure. Two articles in today’s Arab News point to how the government in Jeddah has lagged behind the growth curve.
The first reports on efforts to connect more than 100K homes in the northern part of the city with the municipal sewage grid. Currently, these houses use septic tanks. Septic tanks can be adequate, but cost-cutting builders and the geology of the region make them less than optimal. In fact, they frequently present a major health issue through overflows. But, because there are large gaps in planning and regulation, houses get built before the infrastructure is in place.
Network of sewers to be connected to 132,000 city homes
Jeddah: Badr Al-Qahtani & Naif Al-TurkiThe National Water Company (NWC) has started installing sewer lines at homes in Jeddah’s north-central area and said it would finish connecting 132,000 homes to the municipal sewer system by the end of 2015 as scheduled, when the phased operation of the system is set to start.
The company says it will finish installing sewer lines in 25,000 houses this year.
While residents in the city’s north-central area have welcomed the news they hope the projects will be completed on time, so that the current practice of calling the septic tanker to clean up the tanks could be done away with.
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Similarly, the area’s water distribution system has not kept up with development. Many, if not most houses in the Jeddah region have to store water in individual, roof-top water tanks. The homes may have connections to the municipal water system, but private water company trucks drive around, filling the tanks. During periods of water shortage, houses can go without access to drinking water for weeks or months. Sanitary issues with the tanks present another problem.
Now, the municipality is in process of developing storage tanks for entire regions of the city. Direct pipelines from the numerous desalination plants will connect with massive concrete tanks. Exactly how the water is to be distributed from these central tanks, however, is not discussed. It’s likely that distribution will continue to be done by tanker trucks. This is inefficient, but more easily done than tearing up the city to lay water pipes. It’s a solution, but not a really great one, just one that can be done now.
Strategic water storage plan for Jeddah
Jeddah: Arab NewsThe National Water Company (NWC) has drawn up a strategic water storage project for Jeddah that will store 1.5 million cubic meters. The project will cost about SR 500 million, business daily Al-Eqtisadiah reported yesterday, quoting the director general of the NWC in Jeddah.
According to Abdullah Al-Assaf, the project would be completed within 24 months once the contractor received the land alloted for the purpose. “This is the first phase of an integrated project for storage of about 6 million cubic meters of water in Jeddah at a cost of more than SR 2.2 billion. The entire project will be completed within 3 to 5 years,” he said.
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Seven years ago, Isobel Coleman, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), co-wrote an article about Saudi Arabia’s education system Saudi System Is the Problem. She has a new article for the Council based on her recent visit to Queen Effat University, where she was invited to deliver a commencement address. She reports that Saudi Arabia is indeed fixing the system and women’s education is at the fore. She notes that female literacy is over 80% and near 100% for young women, a far cry from the 5% literacy rate in the 1960s. Women have come along way in a relatively short period of time. They have further to go, of course, but they are determined to get there.
Effat University on the Forefront of Change in Saudi Arabia
Isobel ColemanThis past weekend, I had the honor of being the commencement speaker at Effat University, a private university for women in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was hardly the staid affair I expected. Colorful klieg lights lit the way of arriving parents and dignitaries; forget “Pomp and Circumstance”—the more than two hundred graduates and faculty paraded in to a pulsating techno beat, while stage fog swirled to dramatic effect. The array of high-heeled shoes under the graduates’ sky-blue abayas was breathtaking—everything from six inch high, hot-pink platform wedges, to cowboy boots, to the latest snakeskin and metallic Manolo Blahniks.
What really impressed me was the energy and passion of the graduates. The president of the student government in her speech exhorted her fellow graduates—in a chant of “yes, we can”—to change the world around them. Married at the age of twenty, she also thanked her husband for not “putting her in a cage” and allowing her to pursue her dreams. (She exuded such determination that I can guess he didn’t have much of an alternative.) The alumni speaker, who had been the valedictorian of the class of 2006, spoke of her sense of accomplishment in getting her master’s degree in England and building her career, but noted that she was most proud of passing her driver’s test in the U.K. That elicited particular cheers from the crowd. (Despite last year’s renewed effort to eliminate the driving ban, Saudi women are still not allowed to drive.)
I was also impressed to see Effat graduating a quarter of its students from its College of Engineering, which it established in partnership with Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering. When I first visited Effat seven years ago, it was still in the early stages of establishing engineering as a degree, a first for women in Saudi Arabia. In my book Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women are Transforming the Middle East, I describe the challenges that Effat faced in introducing engineering for women. As Dr. Haifa Jamal al-Lail, the president of Effat explained then, “Those in the business community said to us, ‘Why teach the girls engineering? We won’t hire them.’ Others who were more sympathetic to our goal said, ‘Why don’t you call it something else, so people aren’t so against it?’ But I like the word engineering – I’m not hiding anything!” Her gamble paid off, and today Effat’s engineering graduates are enrolled in top post-graduate programs around the world and are sought-after employees in the Kingdom.
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[HT to SUSRIS]
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 MogahedMona 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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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 NEWSMinister 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.]
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:
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 IbrahimThe 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.
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 NEWSA 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
Saudi Gazette runs a story, apparently from Agence France Presse, reporting that Qatar will allow the formation of trade unions. In addition, it will end the current system of sponsorship for foreign workers.
Saudi Arabia has already mooted about ideas of ending its own sponsorship program, taking the authority and responsibility of hiring and managing foreign workers out of the hands of individuals and companies and instead putting them under the control of a few, specialized companies. Workers’ unions, though, are another matter.
Saudi history in regard to the union movement has been harsh. Unionism first raised its head in the 1950s, at the oil facilities in the Eastern Province. Unionism smacked a bit too much of communism, the ultimate enemy of God on Earth according to Saudi clerics and rulers. It did not help matters that would-be union leaders appeared to have had connections with the USSR as well as the suspect Arab Nationalists running Egypt at the time. Discredited on both political and religious grounds, unionism became a major taboo as well as a readily prosecuted crime.
This attitude has not noticeably softened over time, though there have been calls to reexamine the issue. In 2001, the government authorized the formation of ‘labor committees’ in companies employing more than 100 Saudi nationals, but did not extend membership to foreign workers. International organizations have condemned the ban considering the ability of workers to organize a basic right.
Now, Qatar, a sister member of the Gulf Cooperation Council, is authorize unions. This will put additional pressure on the Saudi government – and it will be harder to ignore because it’s a bordering country.
Qatar to allow trade union, scrap sponsorship
DOHA — Qatar is to allow the establishment of a trade union to protect labor rights and scrap the “sponsor” system for foreign workers, a top official said in local dailies Tuesday.
The union, independent from the labor ministry, “will have the right to receive the complaints of workers and protect their rights,” the ministry’s undersecretary Hussein Al-Mulla told Alarab daily.
The union “will be run by Qataris but as a foreigner you will have the right to vote but not run in the board of directors elections,” he said, adding that the project awaited the emir’s approval.
The Gulf state will also scrap the much-criticized sponsor system for foreign labor, as it aims to gradually recruit one million workers for the 2022 World Cup tournament it is to host, said Mulla. “There is an intention to cancel the sponsor system and replace it with a contract between the worker and the employer,” he told the daily.
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