Category Human Rights

Royal Mixing

King and Royal Prince with women

Amidst the current debate and controversy over gender mixing that is taking place in the country, this picture made it to the front pages of some local newspapers today. The picture shows King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan surrounded by female participants at the National Dialogue in the southern city of Najran. Although the photo was taken on April 11, it was only published today which may indicate the green light to publish it was only obtained recently. Al-Watan daily published what they called the story of the picture, along with the full names of the women who appear in it.

CPVPV in KSU, Discrimination at KAUST, Limits on Lashing

  • During a meeting between KSU female students and the spokesman of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, an attendant asked the all important question: “When are we going to see female hai’a inside KSU?” It’s not like KSU is already dominated by hai’a sympathizers or anything. Let’s remember, the aforementioned meeting was conducted through the closed tv circuit of the university. The CPVPV spokesman was in one place, the students were in a different place, far far away from him. They could see him, he could not see them.
  • Nathan has a disturbing blogpost about discrimination at KAUST. “[T]he injustice and prejudice against foreign workers runs deep here,” he says. I agree. Saad Al Dossari has a good follow up.
  • I somehow missed this quote by Mufleh al-Qahtani, head of NSHR, who said there is a need to set minimum and maximum limits for lashing sentences. Obviously he is taking the typical Saudi approach of trying not to offend anyone. How about going 300 steps further and stop lashing once and for all, except for those very few cases explicitly specified in Quran?

Ahmad al-Ghamdi sacked (or maybe not), Quarter to Nine news cast

  • Ahmad Qassim al-Ghamdi, the head of CPVPV in Makkah was sacked. No, he wasn’t. Yes, he was. No, he wasn’t. Well, apparently nobody knows for sure. The grand mufti came out with a strong statement few days criticizing al-Ghamdi, practically telling him to keep his mouth shut. Confusion is still dominating this matter. Will update you as things clear up. UPDATE: a spokesman for CPVPV sent a message to al-Hayat daily saying the news are inaccurate.
  • Arab News reports on Sah, a local internet channel that has gained some more attention lately. I have been following their satirical news show “Quarter to Nine,” and I have to say that I find it pretty nice. I think they could do a better job finding bizarre stuff in Saudi newspapers to make fun of, but for now they are doing okay. It’s a good example of what good content the new generation of Saudis can create using new media tools.

Women’s driving, woman ambassador, a pretty happy girl

  • Elaph quotes unnamed sources saying Saudi women will start driving their cars within two months. Watany mobile news service also quoted unnamed sources saying a meeting took place last week between a senior decision-maker and the Grand Mufti indicates that women’s driving is imminent. Also last week, al-Riyadh daily published a feature discussing how to implement women’s driving, which marks a transition from the typical “is it time for women to start driving or not?” Last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the minister of foreign affairs, told NYT columnist Maureen Dowd to bring her driving license next time she visits the country. However, Dowd told me in an email that she knows he was being sly and that driving is not going to be forthcoming.
  • Abdullah Aboul-Samh praises the Republic of Georgia for appointing a woman ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It is a clear evidence on our civic advancement,” he adds. I’m sorry dude, but Georgia appointing a woman ambassador says nothing about us. Please wake me up when Saudi Arabia appoints a woman ambassador in Georgia.
  • Sabria S. Jawhar: “Like all Saudi women I appreciate the efforts by American and European human rights organizations to protect us from bad Saudi men and to help grant us the freedom we deserve. Without the help of Americans and Europeans my life would have no future. Okay, I’m lying. If Western do-gooders minded their own business I’d be a pretty happy girl.”

I’m Not My Mom’s Guardian

Last year, I drove with my family to Qatar to see the Museum of Islamic Arts that was recently opened in Doha. On the Saudi border, the conversation went something like this:

Customs officer: who is the woman with you?
Me: that’s my mother.
CO: where is her travel permit?
Me: why does she need a travel permit? She is traveling with me, her eldest son, and as you can see my two little brothers are in the back seat as well.
CO: okay, but you still need to show a travel permit for her.
Me: she is traveling with me. You think she would travel with me without my permission?
CO: these are the rules.
Me: well, I don’t have a travel permit for her.
CO: I will let you go this time, but next time you have to bring a travel permit if she is to travel with you or you can’t cross the border.
Me: okay. Thank you.

We have not traveled outside the country since then, but my mom has been nagging me to get a travel permit so we don’t have to go through this next time we are about to go somewhere. I have been putting that off, partly because I’m lazy, but more importantly because of my despise to the male guardianship system. I do not believe that my mother needs my permission to travel, or do anything she wants for that matter. My mom is an adult woman who is capable of making her own decision. I am not her guardian. I simply reject this notion.

But my politically motivated procrastination came to an end yesterday, as I went to the passports department here in Hofuf to get the damn paper.

Me: I would like to get a travel permit for my mother, please.
Passport officer: can you show me the Family ID card?
Me: I don’t have a Family ID. My father has passed away. Here is my ID card. Here is also a paper from the court to prove that I’m the eldest son.
PO: Is Bebi your sister?
Me: No, she is my mother.

The officer took a glance at the papers. He signed the travel permit and stamped it, and gave it to me along my mom’s passport and the other papers. I was glad that it did not take long, but I left the building with mixed feelings. In one hand I felt ashamed because although I hate the male guardianship system, I had to accept it and practice it like this. I felt as if I was a complicit in a crime. On the other hand, what could I have done? Backward and ridiculous as it is, in the end this is the system which governs us and you have to deal with it. Refusing to deal with it would only make life more difficult for mom, and everyone else.

Saudi Arabia has signed CEDAW, with two reservations. But as with all of these sorts of treaties, there is no mechanism to force the government to abide by its protocols, especially that some people in the country still see this as a huge international conspiracy to change our social and religious values.

Saudi Liberal Forum to Shut Down

The Saudi Liberal Network, one of the biggest local forums, have announced today that the website will be shut down due “extraordinary circumstances and expensive costs.” In a short message posted on their homepage, the owners apologized for the sudden closure.

Earlier today I spoke to one of the forum moderators, who told me the decision to close the website was very difficult. “The owners have come under a huge pressure. They had no choice but to shut it down,” he said. The moderator did not reveal who was behind the pressure, but he said it was from “high above.”

However, this sudden closure could be temporary as we have seen in the past when the forum was closed for 8 months during the year 2008 and then reopened again. The website has also gone under many cyber attacks over the past five years. Such attacks have been a well-known feature of the war between liberal and conservative forums in the country.

My source tells me that the owners are currently looking into passing the ownership to a new group of people who can continue to carry the torch. But until a further announcement, the future of the Saudi Liberal Network remains unknown.

MOE hiring process, al-Nujaimi mingling saga

  • The Ministry of Education (MOE) is hiring. Out of the 34,000 people who applied for teaching jobs, only 21,000 managed to score more than 50% in the Qiyas test aka the Saudi SAT. Today, those 21,000 candidates were interviewed by MOE in order to “inspect their ideological tendencies.” What MOE means by the words between quote marks is actually this: make sure those teachers-to-be are not extremists who will spread their poison in schools and produce future terrorists. Sounds like a good idea, right? Not really. I mean, can’t those extremists conceal their extremism for a brief interview just to get the job? Can’t they pretend to be tree-hugging, peace-loving, dialogue-embracing, upstanding citizens for the duration of a short encounter with their potential employers?
  • Shiekh Mohammed al-Nujaimi, who once described segregation as one of the fundamentals on which the Saudi state was built and then took a U-turn after al-Shethri fiasco, was recently rumored to be mingling big time with unrelated women during a conference in Kuwait. Interestingly (or maybe not) al-Nujaimi has praised the infamous al-Barrak’s fatwa in which he called for opponents of the kingdom’s strict segregation of men and women to be put to death if they refuse to abandon their ideas. After pictures and videos of his mingling made their way to the web, he first denied what the pictures and videos suggested, and said some of them were photoshopped, which is something the organizers of the event considered so insulting that they threatened to sue him.


    Today, al-Nujaimi finally admitted that he mingled, but he said he did it for all the right reasons: to prevent vice and help those misguided women find the righteous path. This should go well with those women, I guess.