A good piece on Saudi women learning about their rights, & laws related to women, in the kingdom. The article brings forth quite a few issues & I'll analyse 2 of them here:
1. Saudi women, with whom the author spoke, kept saying that there's nothing wrong with the Saudi legal system or Saudi legal system in regards to women's rights is among the best in the world. Saudi legal system is primarily based on Sharia, Islamic legal jurisprudence, which has its bases in Quran, Prophet Mohammad's (Peace Be Upon Him) Sunnah, & the 4 main schools of thoughts in Islam (Saudis follow the Hanbali school of thought). So, the question arises, how can anything be wrong with a legal system, which has been made by the Creator, itself?
Now, yes, the monarchy does have its hand in the molding of the law in the way it likes, but it can only do so to a certain extent, & cannot do too much changes in the legal system, regardless of how much it wants to make laws in its own favour.
Islam gave women their legal & social rights back in 600 AD. They are perfect in every sense. But, today's Muslim women see the West & want to emulate their form of feminism in their homes, in their relationships, in their social circles & in their society. First of all, Western form of feminism & women's rights are not feminism at all. Making a woman dance naked in the middle of street is not akin to giving her freedom to do anything. Absence of clothes does not make a woman more powerful in the eyes of the society. Muslim women who are trying to follow the Western form of feminism are essentially going against the orders of their Creator, God (Allah), who they claim to love a lot (if you love your Creator so much, then you may not want to disobey its orders). That's why, the Islamic countries are being destroyed socially, culturally, & religiously, because women are making the Western feminism as their ideal form of liberation.
2. Now, part of the reason Muslim women are emulating Western feminism is their cycle of thought that Muslim men are so abusive & have so much power, because Islam gives them so much power, & hence, there's something wrong with Islam that it is not moving forward with the changing society & has stayed backward in the 600 AD.
As we can see from the article that even Saudi women have no knowledge of their rights in Islam & Saudi Arabian legal system. Quran is primarily written in Arabic language. The same language Saudi women speak in their society. So, a religious book, which is written in their own language, should be easily understandable to women, when they are reading it. But, it's apparent, that they never bothered to dig deeper in Quran & its legal jurisprudence to learn about women's rights in Islam, in depth.
That's a huge problem with Muslims, nowadays. Be it men or women, Muslims are not reading & understanding their own religious book, Quran, & Sunnah, to understand it in depth & learning what their rights & obligations towards Allah, towards each other in different kinds of relationships, & towards their society are. After all, even in secular / non-religious areas, ignorance of a country's laws can never be used as a defense in committing a crime. It is obligatory for each & every Muslim to learn what the Quran, Sunnah, & jurisprudence says about issues in their lives. As we learn from the article that once these Saudi women came to learn what are their rights in Islam & Saudi Arabia, they are talking about the laws are good, but their application is not, which is due to sheer ignorance.
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In September, 2014, Mohra Ferak, 22 years old and in her final year at Dar Al-Hekma University, in the Saudi port city of Jeddah, was asked for advice by a woman who had heard that she was studying law. The woman was the principal of a primary school for girls, and she told Ferak that she had grown frustrated by her inability to help children in her charge who had been raped; over the years, there had been many such cases among her students. Regardless of whether the perpetrator was a relative or the family driver, the victim’s parents invariably declined to press charges. A Saudi family’s honor rests, to a considerable degree, on its ability to protect the virginity of its daughters. Parents, fearing ruined marriage prospects, chose silence, which meant that men who had raped girls as young as 8 went unpunished, and might act again. And for some of the girls, the principal added, the secrecy only amplified the trauma. She asked Ferak if there was anything that she, as principal, could do to help them.
“I told her, ‘You can go to court and ask the judge to make the proceedings private and save the girl’s reputation,’ ” Ferak recalled one recent afternoon. ... The principal was amazed to learn that Saudi plaintiffs can request closed court proceedings. She began peppering Ferak with legal questions, many of them about how to advise teachers who were in abusive marriages, or whose ex-husbands wouldn’t allow their children to visit. The principal was in her early fifties, which meant that, as a school administrator, she was among the best-educated Saudi women of her generation. Well into the 1980s, according to UNESCO, fewer than half of Saudi girls between the ages of 6 and 11 had received any education outside the home. But, Ferak said, it quickly became clear that the woman knew little about the fundamental principles of Saudi law.
Ferak had been a middling student during her first 3 years at Dar Al-Hekma, an all-female university. A week after talking with the principal, she went to Olga Nartova, who chairs the law department, and described the conversation. Nartova, a 36 year old trade-law specialist from Moscow, had previously found Ferak to be bright but unmotivated, like many girls from well-off families. But Ferak spoke about women’s rights with a seriousness of purpose that Nartova had never seen in any student at Dar Al-Hekma.
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With Nartova’s encouragement, Ferak began planning a series of free public lectures at the university, aimed at women and delivered by distinguished legal scholars and lawyers. The presentations were designed to provide basic information about Saudi women’s legal rights. “Since I was very young, and started noticing how women are treated in this country, I’ve had this feeling about women,” Ferak said. “I don’t like anyone to underestimate us.” But women’s rights aren’t a subject of mainstream public discussion in the kingdom, and she wondered whether anyone besides the principal would attend. She also worried about how the experts would react to being approached by a student.
Ferak compiled a list of topics that she felt were of particular importance to local women, and she began contacting lawyers. The first lecture in the series, which Ferak called Hawa’a’s Rights (Hawa’a is the Arabic version of the name Eve), was publicized on Twitter and took place on the evening of April 15th. Several dozen attendees learned about crimes perpetrated against women on social media, a topic of special concern in a country where single people of opposite sexes cannot spend time together without risking arrest, and where pressure on women to cover their faces in public can be so intense that the most innocent head shot can serve as a tool of blackmail.
The second Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, on April 26th, addressed personal-status law, the category of Saudi law that governs marriage, divorce, guardianship, and inheritance. The lecturer, Bayan Mahmoud Zahran—a 30 year old Jeddah attorney who, in January, 2014, became the first Saudi woman to open a law firm—was scheduled to begin speaking at five o’clock, launching an evening of discussion that would run until nine. Late that afternoon, Ferak arrived at the university to find a long black line of abaya-clad women waiting to be seated.
Institutions and businesses that serve Saudi women are carefully guarded, so as to prevent ikhtilat, illegal gender mixing, and the only male employees of a Saudi girls’ school or women’s college are its security officers, who are stationed at the checkpoint outside, inspecting identification cards and keeping watch for male intruders. The security guards were overwhelmed by the turnout for the second Hawa’a’s Rights event. Ferak corralled several friends, and they spent the half hour beforehand rushing from classroom to classroom, looking for extra chairs to carry down to the space that had been reserved. They filled the aisles and the back of the room with additional seats, straining the hall’s intended capacity of 120.
“There were students, mothers, teachers, lots of workers in shops—really, every kind of woman, even doctors from the university,” Ferak told me. “All of us were just looking at each other, thinking, Is this even possible?” When Nartova came out of her office, a few minutes before Zahran’s talk, she saw women struggling to find standing room in the back and on the stairs, while others sat on the floor by the dais. Ferak texted a photo of the packed hall to her father, who had shared her initial doubts about interest in the lectures. He teasingly texted back, “Are you trying to make women fight with their husbands?” The third Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, a practical introduction to Saudi labor law for women just entering the workforce, attracted a still larger crowd. The university did not schedule a fourth event.
In 2004, Saudi Arabia introduced reforms allowing women’s colleges and universities to offer degree programs in law. The first female law students graduated in 2008, but, for several years after that, they were prohibited from appearing in court. In 2013, law licenses were granted to 4 women, including Bayan Mahmoud Zahran. Journalists and legal scholars in the West wondered if a fresh contingent of female attorneys would champion women’s rights. But, of the dozens of female lawyers and law graduates I spoke with on a visit to Saudi Arabia in early November, only two would admit to any interest in expanding rights for Saudi women. So far, the greatest effect of the reforms seems to be a growing awareness, among ordinary Saudi women, of the legal rights they do have, and an increasing willingness to claim these rights, even by seeking legal redress, if necessary.
The lawyers conceded that, by international standards, these rights might not look like much. According to Saudi law, which is based on Sharia, a Saudi woman’s testimony in court is, with few exceptions, valued at half that of a man. A homicide case, for example, normally requires testimony from two male witnesses; if only one is available, two female witnesses may be substituted for the other. The guardianship system—which requires an adult woman to get permission from her guardian before travelling overseas or seeking medical care—gives Saudi women a legal status that resembles that of a minor. In fact, the male relative with responsibility over a Saudi woman may be her own adolescent son.
A Saudi woman cannot leave her home without covering her hair and putting on a floor-length abaya. She cannot drive a car. Since 2013, women have been allowed to ride bicycles, but only in designated parks and recreation areas, chaperoned by a close male relative. The marriages of Saudi women are usually arranged, and it remains extremely difficult for women to obtain divorces. Husbands, in contrast, may marry up to three other women “on top of them,” as the Arabic expression goes, and in some cases may end a marriage in the time it takes to repeat “I divorce you” three times—or to type the so-called triple divorce formula into a text message.
In December, 2007, I arrived in Saudi Arabia for the first time. Although I had read thousands of pages about Saudi laws and cultural conventions, it was a shock to confront the system as a lived reality. Abundant resources go into maintaining the women-only bank branches, government offices, shops, and other businesses that make up the infrastructure of gender segregation in the kingdom. ...
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Today, several thousand Saudi women hold law degrees, and 67 are licensed to practice, according to justice-ministry figures released at the end of November. ... Two of the Jeddah firms where Ferak has applied for jobs in recent months indicated interest, but then told her that they lacked the license from the kingdom’s labor ministry which authorizes a business to let women work in its office. The labor ministry requires firms that employ women to build separate areas for female workers, allowing them to communicate with male colleagues without the risk of being seen by them. In supermarkets, which have employed women since 2013, low partitions suffice, because semi-public spaces are easily monitored by members of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the kingdom’s religious police. But businesses that operate from enclosed workplaces, such as offices, face tougher regulations. One result of these restrictions, Ferak explained, is that, at present, only the largest Saudi law firms employ women.
Despite her frustrations, Ferak pointed out that women’s efforts to gain more respect and influence in Saudi public life have been progressing rather quickly, considering the country’s relative youth, and especially considering the Arabian Peninsula’s tribal, deeply traditional culture. Ferak appeared to be echoing the “baby steps” theory of social progress, often put forth by Saudi leaders as a way of excusing rights abuses or the rhetorical excesses of government-backed clerics. It wasn’t clear how sincerely she believed it. ...
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Nevertheless, Ferak, like every other female law graduate I spoke with, wanted me to understand that individual Saudis and local traditions, not Saudi laws, were the source of her struggles. Saudi laws, she insisted, were “perfect” (a word that I heard at least half a dozen times, from other women her age, in reference to the Saudi legal system). Saudi women’s woes were merely the result of the laws’ misapplication. The fact that I’d sought her out seemed to surprise her, and to raise concerns that foreigners might misunderstand. Although Saudi men sometimes mistreated women, the solution lay not in changing the system but in educating women about their rights within the existing structure.
Perhaps surprisingly in a country notable for its strict rules, relatively little of Saudi law is written down. The legal system has been augmented, during the 83 years since the kingdom was founded, by royal decrees, many of which overlap, or even contradict one another. This body of law is interpreted by senior clerics, who serve as judges, largely following the Hanbali School, the strictest of the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence. The notion of judicial precedent does not play a role in Saudi law, so judges enjoy considerable freedom of interpretation.
Yet the system’s ambiguities also preserve the need for a monarch with final authority, and this means that the personality, moods, and tastes of the head of state are felt in the lives of his subjects in ways that would be unimaginable to citizens of a modern democracy. Absolute power, Saudis say, has a way of trickling down, of turning ordinary policemen and public officials into petty tyrants. Justice is often situational; the law is what a person in a position of power decides it is. If devout Muslims openly question Islamic teaching, they are vulnerable to accusations of heresy, which is a capital crime in Saudi Arabia. And the risks of questioning have grown in recent months. The current Saudi king, Salman, came to power following the death of King Abdullah. Since then, accusations of heresy and of apostasy—also a capital crime in Saudi Arabia—have increasingly been levelled against government critics. ...
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... Across the kingdom, the atmosphere is newly cautious, and a young law graduate who wishes to speak of her growing awareness of injustice in Saudi institutions knows that she must express herself with enormous care.
Several days after my conversation with Ferak at the Lebanese restaurant, I set out to meet Bayan Mahmoud Zahran, whose law firm has made her the most famous female Saudi lawyer in the world. ...
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Zahran’s firm is expanding, with a half-dozen employees and a fledgling corporate department ... . But women with personal-status cases make up the majority of her client base. The judicial system puts women at a disadvantage, she said. “Women generally are more emotional, and they can’t get their rights because they’re so emotional, and they just cry,” she told me. She seemed to suggest that the main obstacle was not the legal system but a tendency of women clients to become overwrought. Female lawyers can help, she said, because they can “understand the emotion and translate it into something valid for the court.”
Some of the lawyers I met said that women increasingly insist on being represented when inheritances are divided. In early October, at the end of the Islamic calendar year, the Saudi justice ministry announced that in the past twelve months there had been a 48% increase in cases of khula, divorces initiated by women. A Saudi newspaper reported that such divorces now make up a “staggering” 4.2% of the total. ...
Yet in this privacy-obsessed society, with its weak traditions of individual rights, many Saudi women still struggle to obtain legal information. As far as any of the lawyers I interviewed were aware, the Hawa’a’s Rights initiative has been the only organized attempt to educate Saudi women about the law. Eight months after the series ended, Ferak continues to receive messages suggesting new topics and asking when to expect another event. Sometimes, Ferak said, her correspondents plead with her not to give up, telling her that the lectures changed their outlook—even the arc of their lives. During her last year at Dar Al-Hekma, Ferak found a new purpose in her studies, and her grades rose sharply. She told Olga Nartova, “I realized why I was studying law.” She hopes to continue the Hawa’a’s Rights lectures, but has not found a venue. Intrigued by the Western understanding of human rights, she has begun to explore graduate programs abroad, where she might study the subject.
On the afternoon of the first Hawa’a’s Rights lecture, Salwa al-Khawari, a teacher at a girls’ school, was heading home when her friend Nour mentioned the event. On learning that the subject of discussion would be women’s rights within the Saudi judicial system, Khawari rearranged her evening in order to attend, and later rallied friends to go to the subsequent discussions. She told me that it had never occurred to her that Saudi women had any legal rights, and she had resented the way that the legal system treated women. “I always thought that the flaw lay in the laws,” she told me. Now, like Ferak and many other lawyers I spoke with, she expressed new confidence in the justice of Saudi law. “Our laws concerning women’s rights are among the best in the world,” she said.
The real problem, she added, was lack of access to information. After the lecture series, Khawari began reading all she could about women’s rights in Islam, and sharing what she learned with her 12 and 13 year old students. Last spring, she gave up her teaching job to study full time toward a master’s degree in social work, with a concentration in human rights. Since then, she said, some of her former students have initiated discussions of women’s legal rights with older women in their families and among their neighbors, and they have asked Khawari to help them assemble leaflets on the subject. Khawari said, “They tell me they want to do something for Saudi society.”
Katherine Zoepf is a fellow at New America. Her first book, “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World,” came out in 2016.
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