Showing posts with label Saudi women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saudi women. Show all posts
Saturday, February 16, 2019
Saudi Women, Unveiled
Saturday, January 12, 2019
Rahaf al-Qunun: Saudi Teen Granted Asylum in Canada
Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, 18, had been trying to reach Australia via Bangkok, but was initially told to return to Kuwait, where her family were waiting.
She refused to fly back and barricaded herself into her airport hotel room, attracting international attention.
She said she had renounced Islam, which is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. » | BBC | Friday, January 11, 2019
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Barely three months ago, the world’s attention was drawn to the unprecedented public campaign led by Saudi women activists to be allowed to drive in their own country. This weekend, the octogenarian King Abdullah instead made a concession to women in a different area: they are now to acquire the right to vote, as well as being allowed (by 2015) to stand as candidates in municipal elections.
This still means that the nationwide local elections to be held this week will not see the involvement of women candidates or voters. But at least Thursday’s male-only elections, which have been delayed since 2009, appear to be going ahead – this will be only the second time anyone has voted since local elections were introduced in 2005.
Things may move slowly in Saudi Arabia, but support for managed change and transition appears to be an issue close to many Saudi hearts. Not for them the street protests seen across the rest of the Arab world this year; instead, they have delivered an accelerated series of online petitions addressed respectfully to the King, punctuated by the occasional arrest of a cleric, blogger or intellectual deemed to have overstepped the mark.
Even the campaign to promote the issuing of driving licences to women – which constitutes the main impediment to their legal right to drive – has, with a few notable exceptions, been conducted within certain norms. Most of the women to have taken charge of the steering wheel this year have been veiled and accompanied by a male guardian, as required by culturally enforced tradition, if not the full force of law.
In principle, women’s rights in Saudi Arabia are governed by the Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam and Islamic law (sharia), named after its 18th-century founder, Ibn Abdul Al-Wahhab. For over two centuries, he and his followers supported the ascendancy of the Ibn Saud dynasty as the temporal rulers of what eventually, through conquest, became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Read on and comment » | Claire Spencer | Monday, September 26, 2011
Claire Spencer is head of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House
Sunday, August 31, 2008
MAIL Online: The Saudi Arabian preachers were secretly filmed ordering women to murder gays and ex-Muslims.
Undercover reporters from Channel 4’s Dispatches recorded the lectures in the women’s section of Regent’s Park Mosque in London.
An unnamed Saudi woman is seen mocking other religions – labelling Christianity ‘vile’ and an ‘abomination’. Another, known as ‘Angelique’, claims Britain is a ‘land of evil’.
The investigators attended lectures for two months at the mosque, which had promised a clean-up after another Dispatches probe just 18 months ago exposed it for spreading extreme Islamic views.
During one sermon, a woman called Um Amira says: ‘He is Muslim, and he gets out of Islam...what are we going to do? We kill him, kill, kill.’
In the programme, to be screened tomorrow, she adds that women adulterers should be stoned to death and people who have sex before marriage should get ‘100 lashes’. Revealed: Saudi Women Preaching Hate in the British Mosque that Promised to Clean Up Its Act 18 Months Ago >>> By Tom Harper | August 30. 2008
THE SUNDAY TIMES: Britain's leading Muslim bodies say they are fighting extremism. In one of our most respected mosques, Sara Hassan came face to face with hardline female preachers of separatism. Here, she reports on the shocking results of her investigation
In a large balcony above the beautiful main hall at Regent's Park Mosque in London - widely considered the most important mosque in Britain - I am filming undercover as the woman preacher gives her talk.
What should be done to a Muslim who converts to another faith? "We kill him," she says, "kill him, kill, kill…You have to kill him, you understand?"
Adulterers, she says, are to be stoned to death - and as for homosexuals, and women who "make themselves like a man, a woman like a man ... the punishment is kill, kill them, throw them from the highest place".
These punishments, the preacher says, are to be implemented in a future Islamic state. "This is not to tell you to start killing people," she continues. "There must be a Muslim leader, when the Muslim army becomes stronger, when Islam has grown enough."
A young female student from the group interrupts her: the punishment should also be to stone the homosexuals to death, once they have been thrown from a high place.
These are teachings I never expected to hear inside Regent's Park Mosque, which is supposedly committed to interfaith dialogue and moderation, and was set up more than 60 years ago, to represent British Muslims to the Government. And many of those listening were teenage British girls or, even more disturbingly, young children.
My investigation for Channel 4's Dispatches came after last year's Undercover Mosque, which investigated claims that teachings of intolerance and fundamentalism were spreading through Britain's mosques from the Saudi Arabian religious establishment - which is closely linked to the Saudi Arabian government. In response, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia denied it was spreading intolerance, while Regent's Park Mosque, which featured in the film, urged all mosques to be "vigilant" and monitor what was taught on their premises.
So earlier this year, dressed in a full Islamic jilbaab, I went back to Regent's Park Mosque to see what was being taught there. As a woman, I had to go to the main female section, where I found this circle preaching every Saturday and Sunday, eight hours at a time, to any woman who has come to pray.
The mosque is meant to promote moderation and integration. But although the circle does preach against terrorism and does not incite Muslims to break British laws, it teaches Muslims to "keep away" and segregate themselves from disbelievers: "Islam is keeping away from disbelief and from the disbelievers, the people who disbelieve."
Friendship with non-Muslims is discouraged because "loyalty is only to the Muslim, not to the kaffir [disbeliever]". A woman who was friendly with a non-Muslim woman was heavily criticised: "It's part of Islam, of the correct belief, that you love those who love Allah and that you hate those who hate Allah." Preachers of Separatism at Work Inside Britain's Mosques >>> | August 31, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Dust Jacket Hardcover, direct from the publishers (UK) >>>
The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Paperback, direct from the publishers (UK) >>>
Friday, January 11, 2008
ARAB NEWS: LONDON — Princess Adelah bint Abdullah, the daughter of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, should perhaps take a leaf from the copybook of Marina Mohamed and Nori Abdullah. Marina is the daughter of former Malaysian Premier Dr. Mahathir Mohamed and Nori is the daughter of the current Premier Abdullah Badawi. They are known for giving their fathers “an earful” regarding the rights and empowerment of Muslim women.
Perhaps the reforms which Saudi Arabia has instituted in the last year or so regarding the greater role of women in Saudi society and economy may indeed have had some influence from Princess Adelah.
But, women such as Lubna Al-Olayan, CEO of Olayan Financial Services; Samra Al-Kuwaiz, managing director of Osool Brokerage Company (Women’s Division); Nabila Tunisi, acting manager, projects department at Saudi Aramco, and Soha Aboul Farag, a banker with 17 years of experience who last year was chosen for the “International Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership” in the US, are the pioneers for the new and future generations of Saudi women especially in an era of socio-economic reforms in the Kingdom where the contribution of women to economic development is being increasingly acknowledged.
As professional women in high-powered jobs, they have successfully managed to carve out careers as working mothers while at the same time managing their families and dispelling the oft-quoted stereotype of Saudi women — of a meek, compliant and oppressed section of society. The good news is that the government is actually engaging with women in the Kingdom as part of a speeding up of the reform process. Women ‘Own’ Some 1500 companies >>> By Mushtak Parker
Mark Alexander (Paperback)
Mark Alexander (Hardback)
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