April 07, 2007
Tough questions in Riyadh
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been asking some tough questions during her trip to Riyadh. For example, why doesn’t Saudi Arabia have any women in political leadership positions?
It’s about time we started asking questions like this. The horrendous treatment of women in the Muslim Middle East is an uncomfortable topic that Western governments have been mostly ignoring until now---partly due to geopolitical concerns, and partly due to a misguided sense of political correctness. But the mistreatment of women in Middle East didn’t stop with the overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime in 2001. For example:
In Jordan, hundreds of young women are killed each year in a practice known as “honor killing.” An honor killing occurs when a woman is murdered by a male relative (usually a father or a brother) over alleged sexual misconduct. The act that precedes the murder could be something as innocuous as meeting with a potential suitor whom the father of the family has not approved.
In most cases, the perpetrators of honor killings are given a slap on the wrist or acquitted outright. Although Jordan’s King Abdullah is a moderate, Islamist factions have made considerable headway in Jordan in recent years. They have consistently blocked legislation that would make it easier to prosecute men who commit these crimes.
Thousands of women languish in Pakistani jails for the “crime” of accusing a man of rape. The Pakistani judicial system requires rape victims to prove that they were raped by producing either four male witnesses, or eight female witnesses---which is almost always impossible. (The law exists because sharia (the Islamic legal code) is practiced in Pakistan.)
If a Pakistani woman accuses a man of rape and can’t produce the witnesses, the authorities throw her in jail for “adultery.”
Saudi Arabia has a system of sexual apartheid, in which women are forbidden to drive or travel freely without a male relative. Women must wear the abaya (an uncomfortable full-length body covering) when venturing out in public.
In 2002, Saudi Arabia’s religious police (the mutawain) allowed 14 schoolgirls to perish inside a burning school building for failing to wear their abayas. When the fire began, the girls left their classrooms without putting on their abaya overgarments. This would seem to make sense given the emergency; but the Saudi religious police arrived at the school right after the firemen did. The mutawain would not allow the girls to leave the school building without their abayas. They forced them to return to their classrooms to retrieve the garments, and 14 of them died as a result.
The above points are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Let us hope that other Western political leaders follow Pelosi’s lead.
Notes: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/04/05/pelosi.trip.ap/index.html