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| "NOT
WITHSTANDING HER CONDITION, whether as a peasant in
Algeria, a doctor in Cairo, or a secretary in Beirut, a
student in Baghdad, a worker in Syria, or veiled in a
Harem in Saudi Arabia, the Arab woman shares with her
sisters a common fate: a life of renunciation, of
captivity, during which she will have to atone for her
sin of having been born a woman in a hyper-male society
where the ever-present feminine remains synonymous with
shame and threat. To begin with, her birth is already
perceived as an occasion for mourning rather than for
festivities. She is received in an atmosphere of barely
suppressed disappointment. They hoped for a boy. Her
coming will bring opprobrium on her mother, a shock to
her father: 'Men beget men,' we always say in our
culture; 'She has given birth to a girl, he has produced
a boy,' they proclaim, totally ignorant of the laws of
reproduction. What happens on the day when the baby girl
leaves her mother's womb is only a foretaste. It is the
beginning of a life to be endured as a 'blameful
condition' which will be continuously punctuated by
steady and heavy repression and intolerance towards the
social and economic changes deriving from our 'modern
times'. A repression which may on the one hand end up in
a death sentence, when the honor of the males is
discredited by the non-virginity of their daughter, or,
on the other hand, more often, a kind of life sentence
in jail-behind a dark veil, behind the thick walls of
the family house where the men act as jailers."
These were the words that I once read in a book, 'Women
in the Middle East' whose excerpts can be found at: The
Arab Woman-A captive being.
Washington
Post adds in it's issue of December 8-2000––
" Five Saudi women sat in a coffee shop chatting
animatedly about their lives over cafe lattes and
sandwiches. Suddenly, they heard a commotion outside.
Fearing that the 'mutawwa', religious police, had come to
throw them in jail for being in public without a male
relative, they hastily grabbed their long black scarves
and covered their hair and faces as they cast wary looks
around them. The 'mutawwa' did not show up, but the women
decided to leave. Their outing had been spoiled. Ten
years after a group of women defied a ban on driving and
drove around the capital for 15 minutes, women in Saudi
Arabia are still prohibited by law to drive their own
cars." - AP
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"The
problem with other people is that they have a certain
way of life, and they think if you don't live like them,
there's something wrong with you. These
self-styled liberators of women have this arrogant
attitude and goes around imagining to their own fancy as
to what will be the condition of women in Saudia and
other Muslim countries if nobody is watching or putting
pressure on them to be more civilized, and show some
kindness?"
"Why
should a Muslim or any other Eastern Muslim woman for
that matter, dress the way an American or European
woman does? I
for one am not being inconvenienced by being unable to
drive in public but also believe that Saudi women should be
given a choice as they have in Emirates or other Arab
countries. On the brighter side, If
I can have someone drive me around, why should I say
no? In Paris, you have to be a
princess to afford a driver. Here, every woman is a
princess because she has one, and for those who cannot
afford one, can always ask their relatives to drive them
around, after all, not every woman gets a license in
western countries either. For us in Saudia, women
problems are LESS compared to some hypocrite nations
acting as torch bearers to the Eastern world. They themselves
are home to 40 million prostitutes with 10% carrying
AIDS virus & almost 4 million of them suffering from
full blown AIDS. For most of the women in Saudia,
problem is whether to have blue carpet in the home or
green & buy BMW or BENZ. Is this what the western
countries prefer to call a suffering compared to
children being sold for $5 or less or worse, 50 million
female fetuses getting purged of their existence while still
in their mother's wombs for either unwelcome sex or
cultural taboos in most of the South
East Asian countries? People want Muslim women to take
off their scarves and long coats and dress more
'modernly', preferably, 'skimpily' - if that's the right
word. You might agree, seldom men fantasize about women
of loose characters, who might strip in front of them
for a fee but a more titillating thought would be to see
an educated cultured women walking with mini skirts and
tight tops acting like a bimbo."
Ms.
Bassma, head
of the culture and heritage committee at Al-Nahda
Women's Charitable Society in Saudi Arabia.
Maybe it is a natural
human perversion to drag decent things into the gutter
and then leave them there to rot. Some men will
employ all means at their disposal. The lure of money,
instant fame or blackmail borne out of her distressed
condition. If all that fails or conditions are inapplicable,
professing of true and undying love might be used as a
resort. A good example in
recent times is self proclaimed and misleadingly
portrayed, champion of Muslim women rights, Jemima (30) (nee
Haiqa Khan). Her almost naked pictures in various
stages of undress, being lustfully treated like an
object of desire, caressed and squeezed all over her
body in a
staged photo session on the French beach by her (old
friend) Hugh Grant(45), comes as a cruel reminder of the
same perversion by most men. A once dignified wife of
Imran Khan(51) and a mother of two kids(5 and 9yrs), who once covered her head as a symbol of
resistance to such human tendencies was finally made to
strip to her essentials for the benefit of millions of
lustful eyes around the world. That's surely a feat by
Hugh Grant that might have made a million men jealous as
well thankful to him for pulling it across and quench
the thirst of their eyes. That Jemima did
it willingly for her new found love or other women get
paid for doing it, the end result is the same. They get
used but they are made to love even this aspect of being
abused. If the trophy is a pretty women who had a husband and a
family, the temptations to destroy her are increased
many fold and in the today's culture of a free society which
gives an aura of legality for extra marital affairs, it hits at the very foundations of a peaceful and a civil
society which needs to rear it's children in a loving environment.
Those from broken homes being reared by divorced
parents living with his/mine and our kids is not the apt
generation next. Whether Jemima regains social
respectability or ends up as being another 'ex' in the
long list of Mr. Grant, would be fun to watch in the
coming 5-6 years time.
The feminists in the
west have taken their battles to Congress and the
courts, and they have also won. They still say that
women are not treated equally in the workplaces, and
indeed they aren't. They also say that women are being
sexually harassed daily by boorish men, and that there
should be laws to prevent this, and American Congress
agrees.
No doubt, In recent years in the West,
we've seen women make tremendous strides in the
workplace. They have worked hard to hone their talents
and skills and earn the respect of their male peers but
perversion in male minds remains as it was and that's
where 'hijab' makes a difference. What else explains the
luring and enticing of ten highly qualified female employees of Enron mega firm
by a soft porn magazine in US to strip in front of the
camera? Some of these women later talked a
lot about their new found liberation or having come a long way
from the medieval society where women have rightful desires to be different but Hey
Ladies!!...The only
reason you posed naked is because you were paid a lot of
dough and you were paid a lot of dough because a lot of
men wanted to see you stripped of your modesty, to see
you in a state where your brains mattered the least.
They were ready to shell out any amount to satisfy their greed,
lust and moral dishonesties. And that's not worse in the
liberated western society? Sexual
harassment is widespread in the most unanticipated
places of US establishment. The US Military. In one
1995 Pentagon survey of 90,000 female soldiers in
various branches of the military, 60 percent said they
had been subject to such abuse, and nearly 10 percent
reported being sexually assaulted. Most of those abused
were young recruits, under 20yrs of age, who were sent
for training under their supervisors.
So we see, that men have seldom
treated women in a respected manner or respected their
actions that would show them in a more humane and
intelligent form. It's true for a majority of men in
every society, be they are dealing with the women of
their own community or any other. The
catch becomes all the more prized if the net is laid out
towards a community of Muslim women. Gives some arcane
rush of adrenaline in the minds of non-Muslim men. On
the contrary, if you get to lay your hands on June 2001
issue of the magazine GMR- The Gulf Marketing Review,
you will find that women hold 34% of all private sector
businesses in Riyadh and 25.6% in Jeddah, which alone is
a house to 4000 Saudi business women, holding bank
accounts worth $11.5 Billion. Saudi women owns 20%
Public company shares, 15% of Privately owned and 10% in
Real Estates. These are the facts, which the magazine
wanted to highlight so that the vendors can target this
women group by making their advertisements more women
oriented and appealing." |
Bassma's arguments
sounds convincing to me. It
was recently shown in BBC program ASSIGNMENT titled: 'Let her
die!', the reporter Emily Buchanan revealed that almost 3000
abortions take place daily in India, when parents find out
that the fetus is that of a female child. These alarming
statistics goes to depict that we have more than a million
female infanticide cases taking place in India alone.
The Telegraph of London reported a conservative estimate of
250,000 child abusers in UK of which already 110,000 have been
convicted. Scotland Yard admitted to these figures which goes
on to depict that almost a quarter of a million Britons - more
that one in every 200 adults, is a paedophile and most often
the victims of these unnatural desires of perverts are female
kids/children. With such statistics, every kid's parent living
in the U.K. would be frightened to death to leave their wards
alone, almost anywhere. The upholders of Muslim women rights in
the west or elsewhere, might
advocate that whatever minimum tolerance exists in Islamic
countries or Muslim minds, is due to the indirect fear and pressure from the countries
of the west and other progressive people of the world. It's
surprising that they always seem to neglect to mention that over 50% of university graduate students in Saudia
are women which is far higher ratio even when compared to our India or most western
nations. A Saudi woman has also just been appointed head of a UN
agency - but such facts are of no interest to these writers.
If nations like India
and the rest of the third world (in fact the elite's in third
world countries) want to follow the ways of the west and
become morally and spiritually bankrupt, let them - the Muslim
countries should not follow them down the path to hell.
Moreover, I wonder, why these people seem to care so much
about Muslim women suffering in the hands of their
illiterate/intolerant husbands or society. No one ever seems
to care about Muslim men or try to uplift their social status
in terms of financial or educational help? If we look at it
from political perspective, it would seem like Americans have
a long way to go as in it's over hundred years of independent
history, it's yet to elect a women premier, which has almost
become a norm in some Muslim countries of South East Asia and
has happened once in Turkey.
The reason I
decided to write this article because, living in an Arabian
country and looking around my surroundings, the passages
mentioned above came out to be as a work of fiction, and far
from the truth. I haven't had a chance to visit Saudi Arabia
till now, but looking around the society in Arab Emirates, I
see a totally different view of the women in this region. Of
few, I will write below and they are only a few amongst the
thousands of Arab women you will come across in your daily
life while you visit any office or establishments in the UAE.
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Lubna Al Qasimi
,is a woman who has broken new grounds, as Managing Director of Tejari.com and as head of the UAE's e-government team.
"Several people have at conferences accused the region of having kept its women behind the veil literally and
metaphorically, but my position contradicts the prevailing norm" and she
is quick to defend her nation by stating that things are changing.
On being queried if this generalization of women of the
region hurts her? she quips, "Why should I be angry with
them for their ignorance? I need to correct their
knowledge and correcting it by showing them that what I am is the way to do it. To
go into an argument and say they are wrong, I don't think I win. Let them
admire you for what you represent and what you deliver and then it's a
different story." |
| Upon
receiving the VISA Arabian Business.com 2000, award for
the best entrepreneur of the year, Lubna said, "I am a role model for women. I am out there as a woman who achieved so
much in life. People respect us (women) highly seeing us what we represent
for our country For them, it is a phenomenal representation of our country. All
they know is that ours is a very tight culture very conservative society. But
when we go out there, we become ambassadors for ourselves in here."
When asked to comment upon how she tackles male
prejudices? Her reply was, "Women in senior
positions have always had to deal with the egos of male
colleagues. Gender conflict has always been perceived as
a universal global problem. I have to pay extra
attention to demonstrate to them where I come from …that
I am not there to fight their egos. I am there to create
a future for them and let them carry on their path and
forget about me. It's not their fault. It's the way they
have been raised. I would have been extremely
narrow-minded if I was out there to correct them. Then
it's my ego. You can't blame them for it. I know where
their distrust comes from. It is lack of knowledge. They
don't know. You have to give them the time to trust you.
You have to deliver before you demand their acceptance.
"You have to have the patience. You have to have
the discipline." Surayya
Al Aridh, a Saudi woman columnist once wrote:
"There are still some of those in this world, who
maintain that female employment is a luxury and that it
creates unnecessary complications. The women themselves
are, however, disproving these people everyday."
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That
is definitely the case here in the Emirates, where local
Arab women make up 11.4 per cent of the workforce. The
percentage is higher only in Bahrain, where they have a
relatively strong education. Naheeda Abdulla, a
UAE national, is a shining example of what true success
is. As a remedial management unit manager for a leading
bank in Sharjah, Naheeda is an extremely confident and
independent woman. She has seven years of banking experience,
and though she works in an industry that is
predominantly male, she has managed to hold her own and
excel. Set to receive her MBA in Finance and Banking
Law, she says, "Social science affirms that a
woman's place in society marks the level of civilization." |
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She says that she loves taking risks and likes
challenges which boost her self-confidence. What advice would she give to young woman who are
pursuing degrees and careers? "I
would tell them to decide for themselves what is
important in their lives
and in their careers. You must work hard. We have to try
for our children. Come up with new ideas, be innovative
and continue doing research while you are in university.
And continue to study. Go for higher challenges and
obtain an advanced degree if you can." |
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Her
groundbreaking research and contributions to science in
her home country were finally recognised earlier this
year in January when Professor Samira Ibrahim Islam
became the first Muslim and Arab woman to be nominated
by UNESCO as a distinguished Scientist of the World For
the Year 2000, at their For Women in Science Awards.
The award, first instituted in 1998, selects female
scientists who have made a major contribution to their
area of expertise. Of the 100 women scientists nominated
globally, the UNESCO award committee in Paris chose 32
in late 1999 as final nominees. Saudi Arabia was one of
the six Asian counties from which nominees were selected
along with China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and India. As one
of the 32 scientists on the shortlist, Professor Islam
was invited by UNESCO
and sponsored by L’Oreal, Helena Rubinstein to
attend the scientific meetings, symposia and ceremonies
held in Paris between 6th to 12th January 2000. From
1996 to ‘98 Professor Islam was appointed to the post
of Regional Advisor (Essential Drug Program in the
Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean - WHO),
which covers 23 countries of the Region.
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In
the framework of Islam, Woman
is primarily considered as a Home maker and not a housewife because she is not married to a
house. She
can also work and is entitled to get equal pay if she
does the same job as that of a male. There is no text in
the Qur’an or the Sunnah which makes it unlawful for
women to work or to do any lawful job or profession. If she is married she should
take the permission of her husband. She cannot take up
jobs which are based on exhibiting her beauty and body,
such as modeling, dancing, acting in films, taking part
in beauty pageants etc. (Not to mention, we can find a
lot of Muslim girls in these *so called* professions
these days and pretty proud at that) |
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| Many
jobs which are forbidden for women are also forbidden
for men, for example serving liquor, working in gambling
dens, dealing in corruption and dishonest businesses,
etc. A true Islamic Society should have some women as
professionals such as women physicians (doctors), women
nurses, women teachers, etc. Women have no financial
obligations in Islam. It is the duty of the man in the
family to look after the financial aspects of the
family. Therefore under normal conditions a woman need
not work and is not required to earn her livelihood or
that of her family. However in certain genuine cases due
to financial crisis in the family where both ends do not
meet, she has the option to work with the permission of
her father or husband or any other elder of the family. Even in such conditions no one can force her
to work and if she takes up a job it is by exercising
her own free will. The best example we can quote is that
of Prophet Muhammad’s (Pbuh) wife, Bibi Khadija (R)
who was a very successful businesswoman. She transacted
through her husband Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh).
Hence, it becomes incumbent upon every Muslim, boy or a
girl, to acquire knowledge through education. The first
guidance given to the mankind in the Qur’an was "Iqra"
i.e. to read, recite or proclaim. Surah
Iqra and Surah Alaq Chapter 96, Verse 1-5. "Read!
Recite! Proclaim! in the name of thy Lord and cherisher
who created - created the human, out of a congealed clot
of blood . Read and thy Lord is Most Bountiful. He who
taught (the use of) the Pen- taught man that which he
knew not
(96 : 1-5). The
first instruction in the Qur’an was, not to pray or
fast or to give charity, but to read. This
instruction was to both male and female. Islam gives a
great deal of importance to education.
Even according
to Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) "It is obligatory for
every Muslim, male or female, to acquire knowledge (Al-Bayhaqi).
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