May 16, 2009 · 6:39 am

Are you a muttawa?

Katie Couric from CBS News stops a Saudi man on the street and asks him if he is a muttawa. I found that really funny. You don’t ask a religious fanatic if he is a religious fanatic. The way that she stood there and with a matter of fact attitude claimed that women are not allowed to go to the open market unescorted. Couldn’t she have asked a Saudi? I’m speculating here but she probably asked some non-Saudi Arab translator (Lebanese or Egyptian), someone who probably doesn’t even live in Riyadh.

To set the record straight, I could right now go alone to that very same market and shop until I drop and no one would say a thing. It just happens that she was probably filming on a weekday night and hence there weren’t that many people of either sex. And the term muttawa is a colloquial term that should not be used by a reporter and especially not to ask someone who might be a muttawa. It comes from the Arabic word mutatwa and it basically means volunteer because men are not paid that much to monitor morality in society. Now in Saudi slang it has negative connotations and is used to refer to someone (man or woman) who is a self-righteous Islamic fundamentalist that goes around correcting people regardless of whether or not they are employed by the PVPV. A true muttawa would call himself a member of Al Hisba which means ‘those who hold people accountable’. And their over the top religious life style is called Eltizam and so the person would refer to himself as multizim.

19 Comments

Filed under Regional and International

Tagged as , ,

May 2, 2009 · 11:15 pm

14,300 applications per day

On April 23rd newspapers reported that 100,000 applicants applied within one week of first announcing vacancies in women government jobs. While a month before it took three weeks to get 50,000 applicants for men government jobs. And the report quietly disappeared without much fuss about its implications and the hopelessness that Saudi women are going through. Yes it’s true that education is free and the majority of these women never had to pay tuition fees on school or university, actually they were given a monthly allowance (stipend) for studying after high school. Saudis have been paid to study since higher education first opened in the country as a way to get more people literate faster. And it worked because just three generations ago literacy was less than 50%.

 It worked so well that most people younger than forty have a college degree. And even though women studied and graduated in larger numbers than men, yet it seems like they are expected to think of the whole educational experience as a past-time or just something to make them more desirable as marriage material. Now that all the segregated fields (mostly education) are bursting at the seams with all that human resources, the rest of these women have nowhere to go and little money to spend.

To have a hundred thousand applicants in one week in a part of society with which mobility is an issue should be a matter of great concern, especially considering that there are over 5 million migrant workers taking up jobs like selling lingerie, waiters and chefs and even our hotel industry is mostly run by non Saudis. All the while, Saudi women wilt at home waiting for the government to employ them in jobs that are proper for them to take. Because if they don’t take up something proper they are very likely to have our society drag their reputation and that of their families in the mud. Society does this in its own quiet way without much word getting back to the women concerned. The only apparent sign is a dry up in the number of suitors to all the daughters of that family. Just this week a Saudi news website gave this cultural punishment to a group of Saudi women journalists in a much louder form. The website reported that these lady reporters slept with their editors, smoked pot, drank and had so-called red nights at vacation houses on the outskirts of the city. And I’m glad to say that these women are fighting back with a lawsuit against the website. A lawsuit that the ladies are highly likely to win because our courts tend to bring the hammer down hard when it comes to making outright false allegations that tarnish family honor.  

 Financial gain in the form of student stipends and later employment salaries has gotten women over the mountain of family consent to study and then teach. Even the most conservative daddies and hubbies just can’t resist that boost to the family income. With the economy slowing down and the rise in living costs, financial gain might again come to the rescue of women in the form of larger numbers of families no longer being able to afford drivers and in expanding society’s definition of proper jobs for women.

For more on the topic you can read an earlier  post. And this post from the Susie of Arabia blog.

15 Comments

Filed under Gender Apartheid, Informative, unemployment

Tagged as ,

April 26, 2009 · 11:37 am

I am not a bolger!

I’m a blogger. This is what was written in Arab News today, the leading Saudi English paper in an article about women’s sports clubs here. Another thing that I’m not is a social worker. I’m a lecturer. I teach English as a foreign language and for specific academic purposes.  But what I was really disappointed in was that the writer got my viewpoint all wrong. She asked me what I thought about religious people using the government to close down sports clubs. The issue being that these clubs are increasingly becoming popular with Saudi women. Women only sports clubs have been popping up everywhere and their fees are now within reach of the average woman. They offer aerobic classes, self-defense and even salsa dancing. However they have no legal licensing umbrella because according to the government all forms of exercise are for men only. So the owners of these clubs get a license for a salon or a child activity center and then expand from there. Ultra conservatives are dead against these establishments because they believe that they lead Saudi women to sin through the influence of and interaction with unsavory feminist and sometimes they go as far as lesbian women who work there and frequent the clubs (according to the muttawa sexually repressed wild imagination). Moreover they believe that exercise goes against femininity and that it is an exclusively manly domain.

In the eighties and nineties there weren’t many of these sports clubs around and if one does open, the muttawas would camp outside its doors and harass the owner and workers until it closes down out of frustration. Then these muttawas would preach about the sins that they uncovered and led to their victory in closing the club.  

Now that they are all over the place and extremely high in demand the muttawas logistically cannot take the same approach. So what they are doing is taking a top down approach through bureaucratic nonsense. And that is what I meant by their reaction being natural. I do not support the government in closing them down but I do believe that licensing should be done properly. What the ultra conservatives are doing is futile because its too little, too late. It’s the same thing over and over again with satellite TV, camera cell phones, music stores …etc. The general public demands them too much for these conservatives to be able to stop their spread. And now they are taking on womens sports clubs which will only lead them to be legalized and taken off the black market into the light, just like their other “sinful” predecessors.  

15 Comments

Filed under Eman

Tagged as ,

April 25, 2009 · 11:15 am

When truth is hard to digest

The boycott and walk out on Ahmadinejad’s speech at Durban II smacks of hypocrisy. Tariq Al Maeena has a an excellent piece today for those of us not wearing western ideologies horse blinkers. He concludes his article with a quote:

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store stated it best during a news conference. “If we start walking out every time we feel uncomfortable dealing with our ideological rivals, the world would be the one to lose,” he said.

4 Comments

Filed under Regional and International

Tagged as ,

April 23, 2009 · 5:56 pm

Prominent Saudis: Muhanid Abu Diya

muhanid

Muhanid is a 23 year old Saudi physics prodigy. He has 22 inventions under his belt, nine of which are patented, and he’s written three books. He first started inventing when he was in sixth grade. His most known invention is a submarine that can submerge itself underwater to depths lower than any other submarine in the world. Before Muhanid’s invention the Japanese held the record. Another invention of his is a pen for the blind. He is originally from the south-western region of Jezan and grew up in Jeddah. His father is a presenter on the Saudi broadcast channels.

In April of last year Muhanid was involved in a car accident on Al Ouraba street in Riyadh. At the time, he was a newlywed, he had just gotten married five days earlier. Unfortunately he lost his sight, hearing in one ear and a leg in the accident. And witnesses say that the loss of his leg was due to the slow response of the paramedics and later bureaucratic procedures at the hospital he was taken to.

As he was recovering, his wife would sit next to his hospital bed crying and he turned to her and told her that everything was going to be alright. Psychologists that saw him after his accident remarked that they rarely come across patients who were able to deal so well with what he had gone through.

Now Muhanid has beaten the dirt off and gotten right back up. He is currently sponsored by the Saudi Telecom Company and back to pursuing his dreams. He also speaks at local schools, urging students to go after their ambitions. My nephew attended one of Muhanid’s talks and he couldn’t stop raving about him. He says meeting him was inspirational and that Muhanid gave the students his Email and told them that they could contact him if they ever needed support.

12 Comments

Filed under Prominent Saudis, Saudi heroes

Tagged as

April 12, 2009 · 8:48 pm

The child bride of Onaiza

This story has drawn a lot of press. The girl is from Onaiza which is a part of Qaseem, a central region north of Riyadh. It’s the same place that produced Sheikh Bin Othaimeen and it’s most known for how fanatic and social the people there are about religion. And how the women of families there dress and live is the expression of the whole family’s piousness and honour. Just to give you a flavor of how people think of women over there, I’ll tell you a couple of incidents that I’ve come across when visiting. A relative of mine has a daughter who when she was around ten became quite good with rollerblading and would skate in their tiled big yard all day. Once my relative while watching her daughter skating, it occurred to her that the daughter might fall and seriously injure herself. So out of concern for her daughter’s wellbeing, she deprived the girl of her favourite activity. That sounds bad but what was truly crazy was the injury the mother was worried about was not broken bones but rather that the girl might have a freakish accident and lose her hymen.

Another incident was one time when I was visiting for a holiday, an occasion came up for which I had nothing to wear. So I thought I might pick up something from the local stores. My sister in law came with me and we dressed appropriately with the tent style abayas and covered faces. Unfortunately when we got to the mall, a muttawa found fault in that I had neglected to wear thick black socks over my ankles and would not let us shop. He followed us from shop to shop yelling how we should fear God until we went home empty-handed.

So to say that that part of Saudi Arabia is not the norm is a very happy conclusion. To get back to the girl, her case is not uncommon when parents divorce and the father takes custody. Many financially strapped fathers in this case neglect their daughters’ schooling or even pull them out of school and marry then off as soon as they can. But usually that’s around when the girls are 15. All just to spite the ex-wife. But what makes this girl stand out is her brave mother who would not take it. I am not sad that this happened to this particular girl because I know with all the publicity and support behind the mother it is highly unlikely that the 50ish groom will ever get to lay a hand on the girl. All across the Saudi media, there has been an outcry condemning him. I’ve read many calls by average Saudis for his name and photo to be published so they can shame him. Others suggest that the man’s own daughters should be forcefully married off at eight and see how he likes it.

The judge presiding over the case is not all that popular either. In court he stated that it is in the interest of the girl’s welfare that he would not annul the marriage and everyone is wondering what that means. In what way would it be in the interest of the child to stay married to her father’s friend? Just like in the Qatif girl’s case when the judge said that there are particulars concerning the rape victim that only the court knew about, the judge in the child bride case is hiding behind vague statements. Average Saudis have started to question this ambiguity in courts and demand more transparency.

This whole case will through example affect many mothers who will be able to gain strength in speaking out against this happening to their daughters.

Clarification:

For those of you who have not bothered to read the news article linked at the beginning of this post, the girl is NOT with her 50 year old husband and the judge has ordered that she remain with her family until puberty. Then she will be granted the right to choose between remaining married and moving in with her husband or asking for a divorce. The mother and uncle are currently appealing this verdict because they want an immediate anullment.

33 Comments

Filed under Child marriages

Tagged as

April 7, 2009 · 10:12 pm

Divorce in Saudi Arabia

No matter how many reports you read about the rise in numbers of divorce cases in Saudi Arabia, it still remains a dirty word that Saudis are taught not to even contemplate. For my generation and those younger, there is a growing number who rebel. But for older couples it is still very true. No matter how much they hate each other, divorce is not an option. “Real” men and women never divorce. We are taught in schools that it is the most abhorred by God of all things Islamically permitted. Couples have separate bedrooms on different floors and lead chiefly separate lives and yet are still married. A man might take on a second wife and not see his first except twice a month to pay the bills and buy groceries. He does it because he thinks its manly and the woman stays on and is patient because that’s what a good woman does.

This like all other things is changing. After reading a report on this in Arab News, I thought I would write a bit about it. In Saudi Arabia there are two ways to obtain a divorce depending on who initiates it, the first is easy and can be done by the husband and the second is extremely hard and is reserved for the wife. The first can be done by the husband simply by deciding in his heart to divorce his wife and in effect this becomes valid immediately. Then in his own time he can go to the courts and obtain a document of his decision and send a copy to the ex-wife. Alimony and child custody is not a big deal either and definitely not mandated. Several women I personally know have never gotten any financial support from their ex-husbands. And in the case they are allowed child custody, its only because the father is not interested in caring for the kids. So in essence he is allowing the mother to have them. This and most other issues related to family law is only loosely based on Islam and what really goes on is the absolute vilification of the wife in court while the husband is always taken at his word. I know you might be thinking that I’m exaggerating but seriously I’m not.

When it comes to the wife initiating a divorce it is a whole different issue. It’s not even called divorce, it’s called khula which literally means taking off as in taking off clothes or jewelry. What the woman has to do is prove that the husband did something. Abuse whether physical or verbal does not get a woman far in court even with a medical report because the Saudi judges tend to believe that she probably did something to provoke it. The only proof that will absolve the woman and get her treated favorably is one of three; proof that the husband is a drug addict, has AIDS or being a daughter of a VIP. Otherwise the process is stressful, expensive and might lead to her never seeing her children again. In one case the judge and his assistants demanded from the wife that she detail her husband’s performance in bed. Another woman had to pay her dowry back in full after more than a decade of marriage and four children. Some of those years she financially supported her then husband and yet she still had to give back the money he spent on her as a young bride and give up child custody completely. To rub salt into injury, she was hushed in court while listening to the guy tell everyone there including her father and brothers how horny she was and that she wouldn’t be doing this unless she had someone else in mind to marry.

However after everything settles down, within society it is much better for a woman to obtain a khula rather than be divorced. Divorced women are usually viewed as having done something wrong but a woman who obtains a khula is a victim. It’s as if society understands that the difficulty of the process shows in some way that women do not go through with it except as a last resort after being tremendously wronged.

143 Comments

Filed under Culture, Gender Apartheid

Tagged as ,

March 25, 2009 · 3:06 pm

Prominent Saudis: Ms. Wajeha Al Huwaider

wajehaMs. Huwaider started off as an employee at Aramco with an occasional piece published mostly in Al Watan newspaper. She’s a divorcee and mother who had accompanied her then husband for studies in the USA and I believe that life there had had a huge influence on her.  Her presence as an activist snuck up on the Saudi government and the religious establishment until they finally resorted to banning her from all forms of Saudi media in 2003. On August fourth 2006 she took things into her own hands and single-handedly staged a protest by walking on foot with a poster demanding Saudi women rights on the King Fahad bridge between Bahrain and Riyadh. She was stopped and detained for questioning by the Saudi government for six hours. That same year she tried to get a group of Saudi women to organize a protest in the Eastern region where they would all drive cars. Unfortunately they backed out at the last minute. In 2007 she and three other women started a petition for women driving and they even went to the malls and the streets to get signatures. Three weeks into the petition they were able to gather 1100 that they then DHLed to the King’s office in Jeddah. However, what she is most famous for is the video last year in which she drove a car in the Eastern region of Saudi Arabia and at the same time addressed the King in a plea to legalize women driving. Many Saudis criticize her because they believe she is out to air Saudi Arabia’s dirty laundry in front of the world. I think that these people are not aware that she has extensively written about these rights in Saudi media and in Arabic and that she is currently banned from doing so. Her Arabic writing is emotive and seems almost like poetry. She definitely has a talent for it. But that sort of writing in Arabic when writing about anything outside of religion rubs our conservatives the wrong way. They can’t even take logic and science if it disagrees with them.

When I asked a group of my mother’s generation about her, they called her subversive, disobedient, and disloyal to her religion, family and country. They also felt bad for Huwaider’s parents. And a group of women of my generation didn’t know who she is and after telling them, they shrugged their shoulders. I guess they are more aware of whatever they are currently showing on MBC 4. I also asked my husband what he thought of her and he just frowned. I think he’s worried that there might be an inner Wajeha lurking inside of me, squirming to get out. Most likely she won’t be appreciated and celebrated until my daughter’s generation and only as long as a Taliban-like government doesn’t take over and execute her or throw acid in her face.  She told Turki Al Dakheel in a 2007 TV interview that she gets lots of hate mail with prayers that she contracts a deadly disease or at least gets her hand cut off. She also said that websites hosting her writing have been hacked several times.

Huwaider is a woman to be respected for her sacrifices. She had a stable life as an educated married mother and she sacrificed it for the women of her country. If you are interested here’s a link to a BBC radio interview she did in February.

What Huwaider is calling for in women and labour workers’ rights will never take root in Saudi Arabia unless a mass of the population calls for it. Why would the government rock the boat when the heard majority is happy with things as they are?

53 Comments

Filed under Freedom of speech, Prominent Saudis, Women campaigns

Tagged as

March 21, 2009 · 10:25 am

Hayat (PVPV) al Badiah assualts a citizen after he dropped off his wife at a mall

 

al-qahtani

This article was in Al Riyadh newspaper on Thursday and I fully expected it to be translated and published in Arab News on Friday. As it hasn’t been, I thought I would do the honors:

A Saudi citizen, Al Qahtani, has requested that the authorities open an investigation with members of the PVPV, Badi’ah Branch, accusing them of assaulting him and tearing his clothes after he had dropped off his wife at a local mall.
Al Qahtani told the authorities that his wife had wanted to meet up with her family at a mall west of Riyadh and after he dropped her off he went to a nearby grocery shop where he was accosted by a group of men and pulled outside. They forced him into a car that had the PVPV logo on it.

Al Qahtani added that they then took him back to the mall where he had left his wife and during the trip they insulted him and called him names that he alleged should never come from a Muslim man’s mouth. At the mall, they forcefully pulled his wife outside amid her screams and a gathering crowd. They then interrogated us.

The PVPV members then took Al Qahtani to their Badiah offices and confiscated his car, mobile and wallet. They examined and searched the contents of each.
When the PVPV members finally figured out that they were wrong, the assailants warned Al Qahtani to not report the incident to the papers and one of the members even admitted that he had just finished a course in how to interact with the public.

Al Qahtani requests through this article that the General President of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Ahumain investigate the matter and hold the assailants accountable for how they treated him and his wife. He added that his wife is now traumatized since the incident.

It should be noted that the citizen filed an official complaint at the Police Department against the individuals who assaulted him. And in turn, Riyadh Newspaper contacted PVPV  Badi’ah Branch and could not get any response.

The comments on the newspaper website were 951. I glanced quickly through them and noticed a shift in that previously when such incidents are reported the majority of the comments were made by zealous fans of the PVPV who would go as far as blame those who write negatively about the PVPV for the bad weather because God is punishing us for criticizing the PVPV. And there are some who believe that the PVPV are the extension or at the same level as the Sahaba, the Prophet’s (PBUH) companions. These people did ot have the usual strong presence but there were a few who are in denial regarding the PVPV’s behaviour. They write that either the assailants were not PVPV but men posing as PVPV to dirty their reputation and others wrote that Al Qahtani has to have done something wrong, otherwise these men would not have done this. But I was happy to see that even those who seem like extreme fundamentals have started to write that we should hold PVPV individuals accountable.

I don’t know what really happened but I don’t think that Al Qahtani would take it this far if he had been lying or even exaggerating. I do know of a friend of mine who was out at a fast food restaurant with her brother for dinner and the PVPV  refused to believe that they were brother and sister and took them to the PVPVheadquarters where their father had to come and get them. They were not physically harmed but it was distressing to have to prove that they were siblings just because they wanted a quick bite to eat. And a relative of mine has been interrogated several times at coffee shops whenever he takes his wife out. What my friend and my relative’s wife have in common is that both do like to dress in expensive and embroidered abayas and they both did not have young children with them. So maybe that was what caused the PVPV in Al Qahtani’s case to jump to conclusions.

22 Comments

Filed under Culture, Injustice

Tagged as ,

March 16, 2009 · 1:16 pm

Bad day + bad comment =

This is in reply to a comment made by um Maraym in the previous post:

Salam Um Maryam

Just by your “kinya” I can tell you are one of those “reverts” who treat Islam as though it was a cult or an exclusive club that is defined by outer appearances ( tent like abaya) and completely confuse religion and Arab culture.

No those women who you say:

“rather than your religious police, the only people who I find ridiculous are a particular class of saudi woman. One sees them at the Kingdom center or the Faisalyah, aimlessly wandering around, caked in makeup.They way they wear their abyas, would make a western prostitute blush, I’m not sure why they are so shallow, perhaps its lack of education, or its the inbreeding, or perhaps its the free money from the govenrment that has lead to this dysfunctional social pathology.”

These women are never going to be written about on my blog because these women have never banned others from driving their own cars and have never jailed and deported 75 year old widows because they had bread delivered by an unrelated man…etc. It’s your like and your Saudi versions who work against their own sisters. Tell your point of view to the Saudi women who are forced to guard toilets for money while next door in the same mall a foreign man is brought into the country for the sole purpose of selling lingerie for three times the salary she gets. And express your adoration of muttawas to the countless women I know who have been harassed, stalked, traumatized and publicly insulted by them. Why would I write about women minding their own business when I can write about women like you who judge them. Why don’t you say the same about the desperate pathetic men who troll around the malls in the latest designer wear and reeking of expensive perfumes?  Why don’t I write about my cousins who have had to borrow thousands in order to get out of abusive marriages when Islamic shariah law clearly states that women who are abused are allowed divorce. And what about writing about how a friend of mine was asked by a taxi driver if she would like him to pimp her out? A respectable woman whose only problem is that she had to resort to a daily taxi because she is banned from driving her own car. And how about newly appointed teachers who monthly pay half their salary just for a ride to work?

26 Comments

Filed under Culture, Eman

Tagged as ,