Festival of segregation

[N.O.R.F]

Another Saudi article

 

Festival of segregation

An annual celebration of Saudi 'culture' highlights the kingdom's system of gender apartheid.

Ali al-Ahmed

 

Early spring in Saudi Arabia brings its fair share of natural wonders. But desert sunrises and shifting dunes aside, spring is also the time of one of the few secular festivals held in the kingdom, the Janadriya cultural festival.

 

Janadriya is an annual event that includes camel racing, sword dancing, native craft displays and lectures by Saudi artisans and historians, among other things. International dignitaries are invited to visit or participate in some of the activities; as are some Arab Americans leaders who work in civil rights.

 

From a distance, Janadriya appears as any other cultural festival until one takes a closer look. While men and women mix in the streets and markets of Saudi Arabia, even as women buy lingerie from mostly foreign men, the Saudi "reformer" King Abdullah bars women from joining their husbands and children from visiting the festivals. They must do so on separate days while no men are around, except, of course, for the religious police who appear to have a divine permission to be around women.

 

This "cultural" festival is yet another example of the increasing problem of segregation between men and women in the desert kingdom touted by the Bush Administration as a trusted ally in the Middle East.

 

What makes this most appalling is not that the staff of the US embassy in Riyadh visits such a festival but the fact that for the past few years, droves of leading Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans have travelled thousands of miles to attend a festival of segregation. While they advocate for civil rights of Arab-Americans or Arabs living under Israeli occupation, they seemingly turn a blind eye to the plight of women in Saudi Arabia.

 

Leaders such as James Zogby (founder and president of the Arab American Institute), Khalil Jahshan (former vice-president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee), and Clovis Maksoud (director of the Center for the Global South) among many others have attended and participated in the festival.

 

There are those, however, who have taken a stand against the discrimination of Saudi women. In mid-January the Spanish justice minister, Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar, refused to give a speech at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh after Spanish female journalists were banned from sitting in the same lecture hall in which he was to give his speech.

 

The segregation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia has become more stringent in the last few years and its effects on Saudi women have been increasingly negative. In a society where women are forbidden from baring their faces in mixed company or driving cars even in cases of dire emergency, their autonomy and important role in home and family life can be their only outlet for freedom.

 

Recent Saudi reforms, however, have been aimed at making the role of Saudi women diminish even in their own families by denying them access to events and venues where their husbands and sons can freely go and enjoy a meal at a restaurant or a Bedouin sword dance at Janadriya. And while some advancements have been made in granting higher education and work outside of the home to Saudi women, women are only welcomed in "gender appropriate fields" such as nursing and female education.

 

The international community and the United States responded with great outrage to the imposition of race apartheid in South Africa. American companies and investment banks pulled business and resources out until the apartheid was officially ended and race discrimination was no longer practised. Should gender discrimination be considered any less appalling than racial discrimination?

 

International outrage at the plight of the Saudi woman, which is arguably as severe as those conditions faced by blacks in South Africa, has been sorely lacking. Articles have been written and books published on the subject, but financial divestment and the resultant economic strife in the kingdom is a sure way to induce change in Saudi government and society.

 

The fracturing of relationships between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is one of the cruellest examples of apartheid since racial discrimination was officially abolished in South Africa. Saudi women have lost the rights guaranteed to them under the religion of Islam and are now being relegated such a small societal and family role that the situation is becoming desperate.

 

It is time for the United States and the international community to recognise the severity of gender inequality in Saudi Arabia, look past our economic needs in the region, and let the Saudi government know that the world will not stand for another apartheid.

 

source

[Intuition]

It is very sad the condition women live in that country. But I don’t think they could change it. If they I’m worried it would do more harm then good. Saudi men are known for there love of women. They kidnap them and harass them in the streets like they’ve never seen a woman in there life. Most ladies can’t leave there house with out an escort, not because they are forced to but because they are scared. Very sad situation for a Muslim country