Can a country that refuses to use 50% of its resources be as successful as it can be? If those resources are human brains which are denied opportunities, denied education and the persons to whom those brains belong are treated as property rather than as fully human, can such a society truly prosper?
Mona Eltahawy, writes on SaudiDebate.com:
Families stop Arab women achieving real potential
Dr Khaled bin Jabor al-Thani, deputy chairman of the permanent election committee in Qatar, spent about three years preparing 150 Qatari women to run in their country’s municipal elections in April. Qatar became the first Gulf country to give women suffrage when the small emirate held its first polls in 1999 for the 29-seat council that advises the ministry of municipal affairs and agriculture – but none of the six women candidates who ran that year was elected. It was clear women needed help.
But of the 150 women who were getting that help, only three completed the training and actually contested the elections this year, running against 116 men.
Why?
It was because their families didn’t want them to compete.
Ponder on those numbers for a moment – just three out of 150 women. When the figures are that stark, asking ‘Is the family holding back women’s advancement in the Arab world?’ sounds like a trick question. But it was in fact the subject of a debate I recently took part in during a conference in Doha on women’s issues called ‘Spirit of Empowerment’.
Dr. Khaled was my debating partner and while his shocking anecdotal evidence was quite enough to tip the scales and the audience our way, we had actually won long before we started. In a poll taken before our debate, a resounding 78 percent of those in the audience said that families are holding back women’s advancement in the Arab world. And more poignantly, one after another, young Qatari women got up during the conference with a litany of complaints about their families that could best be summarized thus: their families won’t let them grow up. Whether it was complaints of being barred from traveling alone or being forced to study what their families chose for them, it was clear that these women were being treated like little girls. And the law in many Arab countries colludes to keep them that way.
It is tempting to tell women who complain of being barred from traveling alone to just get up and go, but remember that in many Arab countries a woman cannot apply for a passport without the signature of a male guardian and in some she can’t leave the country without said signature.
How long will the Arab world continue to infantilize half of its population, at the expense not just of their mental and emotional well being but at the cost of its gross domestic product too? As countless studies have shown – the UN’s Arab Human Development Report being just one of many – Arab countries consistently miss the development train because half of their populations remain either illiterate or are held back by the social and traditional factors our conference audience complained about.
The first Arab Human Development Report famously declared in 2002 that the region suffered three critical deficits that kept it off that development train: lack of freedom, knowledge and rights for women. The latest report focuses solely on women and argues that women in the Arab world are not realizing their full potential and are still denied equality of opportunity.
For a closer look at what the family does to women, I refer you to Roses in Salty Soil: A Feminist Ethnography of the Phenomenology of Women’s Depression in Egypt Today, the MA thesis of American University in Cairo graduate Dalia Mostafa that takes an in-depth look at the experiences of 10 Egyptian Muslim women from various socio-economic and educational backgrounds. Seven out of 10 of the women she studied suffered from depression because of pressures from their families. The complaints Mostafa came across were almost identical to those voiced at our conference.
For those who think the wealth of countries like Qatar and other Gulf states translates into greater freedom for women, I remind them of this brilliant observation by Nader Fergany, the Egyptian statistician who headed the team that produced that first Arab Human Development Report:
“A person who is not free is poor. A woman who is not empowered is poor. And a person who has no access to knowledge is poor,” he told Al Ahram Weekly in an interview in 2002.
Many of the women at our conference were either university students or had already received their degrees. Their education and relative wealth might shelter them from what would surely be much harsher complaints were their illiterate sisters from across the region at the conference – and yet the Bachelors and Masters degrees and the affluence of our audience were still not enough to guarantee freedom from family constraints.
So what was there to argue about during our debate? Nothing, really. There were moments when our debate opponents, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Sheikha Aisha bint Faleh bin Nasser Al Thani seemed to be arguing against us for the sake of arguing. But the debate, like the conference itself – organized by Art of Business – was not about ignoring the obvious in the Arab world but rather giving Arab women the chance to argue over their issues and – just as importantly – show the younger ones examples of women whose success was a glorious vindication of the ability to navigate avalanches of “no’s” from their families and to come out with some hard-won experience. For young women, thirsty with the need to hear that it can be done, such role models are crucial.
When I was in my early 20s and struggling desperately with the decision to take off a headscarf I had worn for nine years, it was such older women whose experiences provided the cool hands of grace that guided me out of my feelings of guilt and confusion. And so One young Qatari woman who successfully runs a business in a sector that is dominated almost universally – not just in Qatar – by men, told me her family put their foot down on her traveling abroad alone after an uncle chastised her parents for allowing an older sister to travel alone to the U.S. for a summer course.
“I’m 27 years old and I can’t leave the country by myself,” she complained. I told her I was 28 when I first traveled abroad by myself.
It was equally gratifying to see the women in the audience argue among themselves. When one ultra-conservative woman who wore the niqab, or face veil, said she chose not to travel abroad because she worried that if she got into an accident none of her male relatives would be there to ensure her body was properly covered, another Qatari woman eviscerated her arguments, telling her that there was nothing in Islam that obliged a woman to cover her face and that if she wanted to curb her own horizons it was her loss.
Just a few hours before that exchange, we heard the daring journalist Tawakol Karaman, founder of the media and human rights organization Female Journalists Without Chains, recount how she was one of the very few Yemeni women who removed her face veil publicly to prove that Islam did not impose niqab on women
One young Qatari woman who successfully runs a business in a sector that is dominated almost universally – not just in Qatar – by men, told me her family put their foot down on her traveling abroad alone after an uncle chastised her parents for allowing an older sister to travel alone to the U.S. for a summer course.
“I’m 27 years old and I can’t leave the country by myself,” she complained. I told her I was 28 when I first traveled abroad by myself.
It was equally gratifying to see the women in the audience argue among themselves. When one ultra-conservative woman who wore the niqab, or face veil, said she chose not to travel abroad because she worried that if she got into an accident none of her male relatives would be there to ensure her body was properly covered, another Qatari woman eviscerated her arguments, telling her that there was nothing in Islam that obliged a woman to cover her face and that if she wanted to curb her own horizons it was her loss.
Just a few hours before that exchange, we heard the daring journalist Tawakol Karaman, founder of the media and human rights organization Female Journalists Without Chains, recount how she was one of the very few Yemeni women who removed her face veil publicly to prove that Islam did not impose niqab on women.
More distressing than listening to my debate opponents make arguments that I’m sure they didn’t agree with was to hear some participants lose sight of our discussion and focus instead on the West and what they claimed was its miserable lack of family cohesion. It was classic defend-by-attack mode. And it perfectly wastes our time. Distracting arguments about the West trying to corrupt our societies under the guise of women’s rights are more insulting to Arab societies than they are to the West. And surely we can take pride in our culture without putting down someone else’s? But that culture must be challenged and when it hurts – physically or emotionally – half of its population, what good does denial and attacking the West do?
The wholesale rejection of anything just because the West does it is a ridiculous example of how too many noses are cut off to spite our own face in the Arab world. But talking about women’s rights as if they were an exclusive club for western women is nothing short of ignorant, because it denies the existence of our own women’s rights activists, many of whom were leading by example in the late 1800s and at the turn of the last century.
Denial will never win the head butting contest with reality. What is gained by pretending that despite all evidence to the contrary, the constraints Arab families place on women are not so bad because they save us from whatever disasters women’s rights have visited upon the West? Arab women suffer depression because of those constraints. Our economies lag behind most regions in the world. And what is gained? The ability to point to women and their miserable status as proof that we are “good” Muslims and Arabs? What good are the 10-lane highways of Saudi Arabia if women are forever consigned to the passenger seat or the two back rows of the public buses? What good are the American universities that have opened branches in Doha’s Education City if they only serve to remind the young women who fill their halls of the freedoms they can’t have?
Arab women deserve the freedom to grow up.
I wrote, on January the 3rd of this year, about the 2002 UN Report which attributed all the problems in the Muslim world from poverty to lack of opportunities, to general backwardness in relation to the rest of the world to three main causes: lack of freedom, poor general education and educational emphasis mainly in the area of religion, and an appalling lack of women’s rights. On the last cause, lack of women’s rights, I quoted from the report as follows :
Women’s status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. The report sees this as an awful waste: how can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women’s literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries’ political and economic life is the lowest in the world.
Governments and societies (and sometimes, as in Kuwait, societies and parliamentarians are more backward than their governments) vary in the degrees of bad treatment they mete out to women. But in nearly all Arab countries, women suffer from unequal citizenship and legal entitlements. The UNDP has a “gender-empowerment measure” which shows the Arabs near the bottom (according to this measure, sub-Saharan Africa ranks even worse). But the UN was able to measure only 14 of the 22 Arab states, since the necessary data were not available in the others. This, as the report says, speaks for itself, reflecting the general lack of concern in the region for women’s desire to be allowed to get on.
I then commented, thus: In other words, the Arab World is an area riddled with repressive totalitarian regimes, lack of women’s rights and above all a lack of education that will bring their people into the 21st century. Worst of all… since political freedom is almost nonexistent, since the lack of women’s rights are not the concern of many, and as far education… well… “65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all.” To put this number in perspective… there were 280 million people within the 22 member nations of the Arab League in 2002 as the report says, ranging from 68 million in Egypt to 565,000 in Qatar.
When 42 million Muslim women remain illiterate, that culture is wasting tremendous brain power. In the west, where laws guarantee absolute equality between the genders, even if in real life women may still have some catching up to do, women have been in the forefront of the academic, scientific research and business fields. The west is so much the better precisely because they have made use of those resources so wasted in the Muslim world. Women are not regarded as children in the West, as the father of two daughters and three sons, I always encouraged my children equally. I always taught them that the only force strong enough to stop them from pursuing their dreams was each individual’s self. Then I proceeded to encourage and help them along. Today, my daughters are successful both on their own rights as well powerful partners to their husbands. My sons, also (when it came time to marry) looked for strong and intelligent women. Why? To raise a family successfully, to give each child what he or she needs, to nurture what each has to offer takes two parents who are strong, intelligent and understanding. Aside from the physical differences between genders, both the father and the mother bring different skillsets to the family, lest those skills are utilized to their utmost that family will suffer, the future will suffer, the world as a whole will be so much the worse.
Unless women are recognized as equal, unless they are allowed and encouraged to pursue their intellectual interest, the Muslim world will not rise again to where it was 700-800 years ago. At the time, the Muslim world stood at the very pinnacle of science and math. When education became something only certain elites could pursue, when new and outrageous interpretations of the Quran, became the vogue, the Islamic world started to slide and that was the beginning of the rise of IslamoFascism, that also was the beginning of a heretofore unseen, unheard repression of women’s rights.
Are they wearing a veil because Islam presccribes it…
or because the men demand it?!?!?
Chaim
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June 13, 2007 at 1:11 am |
REGRESSING!! All over the world these cretins are still pushing for global sharia law and countries are considering it!! so they don\’t look un-Islam friendly.
Spare us all.