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Winds of change blowing for Gulf women ROME: It seems not a week goes by without some new strategy or drive being launched to improve the political rights of women in the Gulf. In Kuwait the government is firmly behind a bill to give women the right to run and vote in elections there. Bahrain and Qatar are actively trying to get women more involved in politics and the Saudi royal family is under immense pressure after excluding women from its recent landmark elections. Could this wind of change finally bring political equality to women in the region? Alanoud Al Sharekh was one of some 500 Kuwaiti activists who demonstrated outside the Kuwaiti parliament on March 7, demanding the right to vote and run for election. She even entered parliament that day, but was thrown out. As well as heading the English department of the Kuwaiti branch of the Arab Open University, Al Sharekh works for the Middle East Institute in London and has just written a book on women in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)area. It is not the first time the government has tried to get women the right to vote, but previous efforts in 1999 by the emir himself were shot down by Islamist and tribal MPs. This time, however, she is very optimistic, saying the government is “handling it very intelligently”. As well as getting a huge media campaign rolling, “they’re getting the blessing of hugely respected people in the religious community,” she said. By getting the sheikh of the state’s biggest religious institution to say that not including women is against Islam, “they are getting the big guns out. They are using the Islamists’ own weapons,” she said. Al Sharekh believes it is not necessarily a question of gender, but the elite trying to guarantee their seats by limiting the numbers who can vote. “The problem in this area of the world is that women themselves are very complacent because they are very affluent,” she admits. “Kuwait has no problem with women,” she says, pointing out that the country’s UN ambassador is a woman. “In Kuwait there are no fields closed to women, except the military,” she asserts. There is also no gender divide,” she says, “with women just as likely to be working in the science or technology fields as in health or education, and making up 60 percent of university graduates. Al Sharekh points to the quota system Bahrain is planning to introduce as a way of winning that acceptance. Last time women ran for election in Bahrain they had little success. Next time round, a certain number of seats will be reserved for women — a system Yemen is also considering. The king marked International Women’s Day this year by launching a national strategy aimed at raising political awareness among women, and encouraging state bodies to get them involved in the decision-making process. Fatima Ahmed, president of the Madinat Hamad Women Society in Bahrain agrees that a “decisive push from the decision-makers” is needed, by means of a quota system. Another person quick to point to Bahrain as an example is Haifa Al Kaylani, who heads the London-based Arab International Women’s Forum (AIWF). She also rates Qatar and the United Arab Emirates highly in terms of the role women occupy in society. “Practically every Arab government has one or two women at cabinet level,” she says, citing Qatar and Oman’s education ministers. Palestinian-born Al Kaylani is incredibly positive about the Current movement for change in the Gulf, but says many women have already achieved great things in the region. “Saudi women are educated and running many businesses,” she says. Restrictions in countries like Saudi Arabia — where women are not allowed to drive or travel without permission from their “guardian” — are surely responsible for creating misconceptions in other parts of the world. But the limitations placed on these women is not something people should fix upon, Al Kaylani says: “Many of my Saudi sisters say ‘please do not judge everything we are achieving by that criteria’, and I agree with them.” Saudi Arabia has been holding its first elections for some forty years, but women are conspicuous by their absence, with the Saudi interior minister insisting they were excluded for administrative reasons, because there were not enough women to staff female only voter registration centres. “Those municipal elections, partial municipal elections, are a cover-up for the very, very slow pace of reform and for the lack of reforms,” says Dr Mai Yamani, a Saudi expert from the Centre of Islamic and Middle East Law in London, placing special emphasis on the word “partial”. She believes it will be hard for Saudi Arabia not to find itself caught up in the tide of political reform flowing through the Gulf. Alanoud Al Sharekh from Kuwait believes there are two main reasons, starting with the “socio-economic situation”: “The welfare state set up with the oil boom can no longer support the population explosion, so they need to mobilize women to be more active in the economy to support the labour market, which is saturated by very expensive migrant workers from abroad with specialisations the area lacks.” The other reason she puts forward is natural evolution and the impact of the women’s emancipation movement all over the world, adding that many of her and her father’s generations were educated in the West, which is also bound to have been an influence. Not that the West necessarily offers such a good example, argues Haifa Al Kaylani from the Arab International Women’s Forum. “In spite of all the enlightenment and education and legal structure that has preceded that of the Arab world in giving women rights, they still find themselves loners in high government, in Europe for example.” But when it comes to Arab women in the Gulf region she is incredibly confident. “Every country is pushing forward on key fronts and every country still has some challenges to meet,” she says. “But the movement forward is certainly irreversible and is gathering momentum, from down upwards and from the leadership down, and it is coming from within Arab society, and this is why it’s succeeding.”-By arrangement with ADNKRONOS,Rome. Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)
