REUTERS: RIYADH - When clerics, ministers and businessmen gathered at a forum in Riyadh last month to discuss women in the workplace, there were no women in sight.
Typically for Saudi Arabia, the women who took part were seated in a separate room so the men could only hear them.
Such oddities are part and parcel of the complex system of social control maintained by clerics of Saudi Arabia's austere version of Sunni Islamic law, often termed Wahhabism. It's a system called into question by scholar Hatoon al-Fassi.
In her study, "Women In Pre-Islamic Arabia", the outspoken rights advocate argues women in the pre-Islamic period enjoyed considerable rights in the Nabataean state, an urban Arabian kingdom centered in modern Jordan, south Syria and northwest Saudi Arabia during the Roman empire.
Most controversially, Fassi says women in Nabataea -- whose capital was the famous rose-red city of Petra in south Jordan and which was at its height during the lifetime of Jesus Christ -- enjoyed more freedom than in Saudi Arabia today because clerics have misunderstood the origins of Islamic law.
She also suggests some Saudi restrictions on women may have their origins in Greco-Roman traditions. Saudi Scholar Finds Ancient Women's Rights >>> By Andrew Hammond, edited by Sara Ledwith | April 30, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback – USA)
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