Women in Saudi Arabia: Change from Within

Our discussion this month (as is often the case) took us to some unexpected places, and expanded our knowledge of women's rights issues.

A key theme this time was complexity.

Women's issues in Saudi Arabia are nothing if not complex.

In the middle of this complexity is the undeniable fact: male guardianship laws and sex segregation in Saudi Arabia are so extreme that women face massive insecurity, lack personal autonomy and experience violations of even the most basic human rights. They are Perpetual Minors in the eyes of the law.

Qanta Ahmed, the author of In the Land of Invisible Women (a moderate Muslim and a British-born, American-trained doctor of Pakistani descent) was a particularly helpful guide through some of this complexity. This is because she was well-positioned to confront a lot of this complexity in a very personal way-she was both an outsider (a foreigner, with no real knowledge of Wahhabism) and an insider (a Muslim, highly educated, a doctor) in the relatively elite social context of the military hospital ICU where she worked.

Imprisonment and Empowerment
One of the most contested and complex issues is obviously the (often violently enforced) extensive covering of women in public. Even before the author, Qanta, lands in Saudi Arabia, she is worried about the appropriateness of her clothing. The first thing that she does after settling in her apartment is to go shopping for an abbaya with her secretary. Qanta passionately declares:
"... polyester imprisonment by compulsion is ungodly and (like the fiber) distinctly man-made."

But as soon as she puts the abbaya on, Qanta also recognizes the safety and empowerment that it lends her as a woman who must navigate exceptionally predatory and aggressive male-dominated public space. For a beautifully crafted personal statement by one woman about choosing to cover herself in public, watch the video-poem "The Shield". And still, there is the opposite experience of emotional and physical illness about being compelled to cover.

At the same time, men are not as free as they may initially appear: Qanta notes the emotional imprisonment of many privileged and relatively empowered young Saudi men, who seem to be caught in an impossible struggle for a sense of purpose. Many of these young men from privileged backgrounds have unlimited access to cars and material things, but are faced with a weak sense of social belonging and too much freedom. She called them "lost boys" and treated them in the hospital when their drug-taking, alcohol consuming 120mph recklessness landed them in the emergency room.

Identity and Belonging
One of the main threads in this story is the question of the shifting personal identity of the author: she is challenged to confront her identity at multiple levels throughout her time in Saudi Arabia. This may be familiar to those in the book club who read Lipstick Jihad, several years ago, and is familiar to anyone who has struggled with hybrid or multiple identities based on religion, heritage, ethnicity, citizenship or language. Qanta gives us a lot of clues about the divisions of class and race in Saudi Arabia, and how qualified the sense of belonging can be in the face of so much pressure for conformity and homogeneity in public spaces.

Social Change  
One of the most challenging and hopeful elements of our discussion recognized the very sensitive issues of human rights critique and enforcement that comes from "outsiders"and acknowledged the importance of change happening from inside Saudi Arabia itself.

In reading about many human rights abuses all over the world (including in the US) we can often see education as the key to ending violence and suffering. But the people Qanta describes are highly educated. In many cases, the lack of basic economic security appears to be a related issue: with better access to shelter, food and health care, human rights will improve in many situations: but in spite of class disparity and some economic vulnerability, basic needs are not the main issue in the Saudi case. The end of civil war, violent rebellion, or occupation is another common solution to human rights abuse in many countries, but not in Saudi Arabia where the country is at "peace" and the violence that is most rampant is domestic violence.

In Qanta's description of Saudi Arabia, we see a wholehearted embrace of consumer culture, a country that has mastered modernity and is also highly resistant to external pressure to adopt liberal democratic concepts such as multiculturalism, religious tolerance, universal suffrage. The power of the traditionalists' arguments for cultural/religious 'exceptionalism' rests on a foundation of resistance to the erasure of difference and a defense of identity. Outsiders trying to criticize and change things are not going to be very helpful here. But there is a lot of hope for improved women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and it is coming from inside the country:

• There are many men in Saudi Arabia who support women who strive for more autonomy by owning businesses and professionals, and are their supporters and allies. Samar Badawi's lawyer and husband Waleed Abu Alkhair helped her challenge Saudi guardianship laws that allowed her father to continue abusing her: she recently won a 2012 Woman of Courage award.
• There are organized movements of women in Saudi Arabia who are pushing for change, and who have made progress. The movement to allow women to legally drive, for example.
• Saudis understand the dynamics of "religious conservatives... (who) emotionally blackmail Saudis by preying on their weaknesses to always be good Muslims" (Sabria Jawar), and have found ways to resist this, with impressive results. The focus seems to be on incremental change, although impatience is mounting.

March: In the Land of Invisible Women

This month, we will read a book about Saudi Arabia. The author, Qanta Ahmed, is a Muslim woman, a Pakistani who was born in Britain and trained as a doctor in the United States. Her book, In the Land of Invisible Women, she describes her choice to go to work in a hospital on a military base in Saudi Arabia.

The main reason we are reading this book right now is because of the recent campaign that Human Rights Watch launched in Los Angeles: Let Them Play. The February 2012 press release that launched the campaign was on the report, Steps of the Devil, which documents the broad discrimination against women in Saudi Arabia- from girls in public school not getting any physical education to no official sporting events for women athletes anywhere in the country to no Saudi sportswomen supported by the government to compete abroad in any competition- and links this discrimination to the International Olympic Committee's responsibility to hold member countries to account when they fail to live up to the values and rules of the Olympic Movement. Along with Qatar and Brunei, Saudi Arabia is the only other country that has never nominated a women to compete in the Olympic Games.

The fantastic news is that this campaign has made some waves!  Now, a Saudi Arabian female sports commentator will run with the Olympic torch in London. Not only that, the IOC is actively encouraging the government of Saudi Arabia to send women to the Games; Qatar is sending at least two women, and Saudi Arabia has apparently submitted a list of four women, and Brunei has submitted a list of female athletes to the IOC to compete in London as well.

We chose the book by Qanta Ahmed so we could get some more perspective on the country of Saudi Arabia. Some of the interesting things to look for in this book are:

•  the oppressive and liberating aspects of the hijab and abaya (this may contain some links to our discussion of Orhan Pamuk's book).
• the complexity of belonging- the author assumed that she would fit in and understand a lot more in Saudi Arabia because she was Muslim, but she discovered that it was not that simple. At the same time, when she was in Saudi Arabia, she went on the hajj to Mecca and found a deeper connection to her religion.
• the complexity of oppression and rebellion in a highly controlled and traditionalist society; the racism and other complex divisions in a society that from the outside is usually seen as monolithic; also the dramatic complexity of consumer culture and conservative social norms.

Elizabeth and Hazel: The Legacy of Little Rock

For February 2012, we are reading Elizabeth and Hazel, written by David Margolick. It explores desegregation and the civil rights movement--and particularly the desegregation of public schools through Brown vs the Board of Education--by examining the lives of the two girls in a famous photograph taken when nine African American students first entered the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

This book builds on a growing interest of book club members in the work of HRW on human rights and specifically women's human rights in the US. In the past, we have read about incarceration of war on terror suspects in Guantanamo from the perspective of a young woman law student and first generation American from a Pakistani family; we read about young women in New York City pressured or forced into prostitution (the issues of child prostitution and the criminalization of juvenile prostitutes is a pressing one in the Los Angeles area, too), and following up on that, we read about the history of the juvenile justice and incarceration system in the US.

Following up on that topic, at the beginning of January, HRW released a report on youth offenders serving life without parole in the United States, Against All Odds. Young people, because of their age, physical size and lesser experience in the corrections system, are more vulnerable to violence and coercion; female prisoners are particularly vulnerable, and juvenile female prisoners are extremely vulnerable. For more, check out this (below) video, and share widely.

Issues of race, class, and toleration of difference are pressing issues in the US.  We know that race and poverty shape incarceration and punishment patterns in the US. The effect of these patterns of prejudice extend far beyond issues of policing, prisons, and juvenile justice: they shape immigration policy, the US tradition of religious toleration, and importantly, general respect for human rights, civility and international law. These issues have a long history, and hopefully, we will be able to explore this a little through the story of the relationship between Elizabeth and Hazel.

This story also brings up serious questions of responsibility and the use of visual documentation in the media. Both of these women's lives were dramatically changed because of this one photograph. They became symbols of a painful and violent time in US history, and it is a useful and important lesson to revisit that when we look at dramatic photos of human rights abuse, of 'anonymous' victims and perpetrators and bystanders, these are also photos of real people--whose lives may be changed in unforeseen ways because of our gaze and because this moment in their lives has now been documented in a specific and powerful way.

For some background on the story, watch this PBS video. Importantly, Elizabeth and Hazel were only 15 years old when the photo at Little Rock Central High School was taken.  

Education and Human Rights
Education is a human right: in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is Article 26. The idea that everyone has the fundamental right to education is still questioned and challenged, however. A new documentary on the Baha'i in Iran, Education Under Fire, addresses how the Iranian government has methodically excluded Baha'i Iranians from technical and higher educational opportunities, and has repeatedly disrupted the Baha'i community's attempts to educate themselves.

In a 'back to the future' sort of serendipity, recent reports of white students bullying Hispanic students have emerged recently, in the wake of the Alabama law HB56 that was designed to encourage "self repatriation" by requiring that state residents deny illegal immigrants access to any social service or business transaction.

HRW has recently issued a document specifically on the way that schools have turned into battlegrounds in many countries including Afghanistan, Thailand, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India. This kind of violence can permanently disrupt and destroy access to education for entire communities. More recently, HRW has reported on the Separate and Unequal access of handicapped children in Nepal to education. A quick search of the 2012 World Report reveals:

• ongoing segregation of Roma from schools in eastern Europe (p46, 431, 448);
• that only one in 45 child domestic workers in Indonesia is attending school (p62);
• the use of schools in Ethiopia for political indoctrination (p124);
• attacks on schools in Somalia and the forced recruitment of children into militias (p161);
• a general inability of accessible education in south Sudan, where less than half of all children are in school (p176);
• the worsening of access to education in Haiti after the earthquake (p156);
• the ongoing targeting of schools, and particularly school girls, in Afghanistan (p291-2);
• China's closing of private schools that catered to illegal internal migrants in cities like Beijing (p323);
• insurgent attacks on schools in the border regions of India (p330);
• Malaysia's practice of taking 'effeminate' schoolboys out of school and putting them into correctional camps (p345);
• inaccessibility of schools in Tibet to children with disabilities (p353);
• expulsion of students because of their religious affiliation in Pakistan (p365);
• a serious lack of investment in education in Papua New Guinea (p394);
• the use of children as soldiers and the use of schools for military purposes in the Philippines (p380);
• the killing of government school teachers by insurgent groups in Thailand as well as the use of schools as barracks (p397-8);
• the blocking of migrant workers' children from school in Kazakhstan by Philip Morris Kazakhstan (p469);
• the exclusion of girls who do not wear the headscarf from school in Chechnyya (p485);
• Uzbekistan's policy of forcing children to miss school for months to work the cotton harvest (p426);
• the exclusion of minority Bidun children from government schools in Kuwait (p584).

Clearly, access to education is a serious problem all over the world. And it is often something that is taken away based on gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality.

For December: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

By special request, we are reading something about Turkey. You can listen to an interview of the author by NPR's Steve Inskeep. The main character of the novel is a man named Ka, who is a poet expat living in Germany. He comes back to his hometown in Turkey after a long time away, in part because he is curious about a suicide "epidemic" among local young women. The book touches on politics, religion, the headscarf issue, religious fundamentalism, East and West relations. It is a challenging book - not entirely linear - but should be satisfying to read and we should learn something about Turkey, which is a country we have not read about yet.

For HRW's work on women's human rights in Turkey, see He Loves You, He Beats You.

October: The Honor Code

Type "honor" into a Google images search, and you will see page after page of military medals, soldiers, more medals, more soldiers. There are a few other images sprinkled in there: a kid pledging allegiance, an academic honor code insignia. Honor is about integrity, respect, high esteem. We think of a man of honor, honoring our word, bestowing honors, honoring our parents, our heritage, our nation, or god.

In his most recent book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, Appiah writes about how moral revolutions happen, and he suggests that there is an important role for honor to play here.

Specifically, honor is important to the processes by which human societies manage to travel from conflicting moral arguments to coherent moral actions. Appiah explores how socially accepted practices such as the duel, slavery, and footbinding came to be unacceptable practices. The basic idea is that opinions and behavior change when the practice is understood to be shameful or to damage the honor of the community-- behavior does not change because the practice is against the law, or because there are good arguments against the practice on moral or practical grounds.

This makes sense, and there are a lot of people who have spent a lot of time researching how shaming, peer pressure, and framing all influence social behavior that is harmful to others (for example, social psychologists have written on genocide in these terms The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence). Appiah suggest some interesting things in his book: for example, that modern cultures (such as ours in the US) tend to discount or underestimate honor- in our own society and in others'. He also goes into a lot of detail about honor.

Honor in Detail
Appiah begins with two simple points: Honor is about respect. The power of honor is partly in the threat of public shame if one fails to live up to standards of honor.

Respect can come from "esteem" for specific achievement: Competitive honor; or respect can come out of "recognition" of a particular quality (power or weakness) for which a person demands certain treatment: Peer honor.

Honor is part of personal networks of responsibility; it shapes collective identity, and the specificity of honor is specific to historical, social, and cultural contexts. Honor is socially defined, and it can change. Appiah suggests that we can use honor to frame morally problematic practices (such as honor killing) as shameful, dishonorable. This can displace an established belief that the practice protects honor, thereby weakening the force of the practice by undermining the most basic purpose of the practice for people.

Appiah does recognize the fact that peer and competitive honor overlap, in that people must work to retain their status in a peer group, just as they must work to attain status through achievement. I think it might be interesting to explore this in more detail. I have a feeling that these two types of honor interact quite a bit. Even within a peer group, certain achievements of men (for which they could earn high regard and competitive honor) would help solidify their class status and therefore their peer honor, while the very same achievements if accomplished by the sisters or mothers of these men would almost certainly not earn the women the same sort of high regard and peer honor, and might not even be recognized as a competitive achievement at all but rather a dishonorable and shameful thing. As long as we accept that men and women should "compete honorably" at different things, the framework seems to work reasonably well, but is this satisfactory? If the recognition of a person's human dignity is contingent on the person abiding by these standards of honor, then the danger is that they can lose the right to that respect if they unsettle those standards. It seems that human rights work still needs to rely on a deeper claim to respect. Even deeply dishonorable people have basic human rights, and although they can be detained, for example, they should not be tortured or detained indefinitely.

Looking at honor and shame as tactical elements is interesting, and important: the Justin, the Director of HRW's office in LA, recently pointed out how useful it is to have a specific and detailed understanding of honor codes and honor systems in human rights work: "in June 2010, we did a report on Female Genital Mutilation in Iraqi Kurdistan. Because Nadya Khalife, the researcher, is a Muslim woman from Lebanon, she had a particular grasp of the situation which led her to understand that women allowed it to be done to their daughters b/c they were convinced it was required by Muslim religion.  Since Nadya understood it is not, she went to the Kurdistan Islamic Scholars Union, the highest religious authority in the region, and persuaded them to issue a fatwa saying that the practice was not required by Islam.  Speaking to the clerics from within their honor system made her the persuasive advocate."

Honor in our Lives
In our discussion, we talked about different examples of honor in our own society:

• familial status (marriage, motherhood)
• professions (professor, doctor)
• associations (gangs, clubs)

We talked about gay marriage and how the respect  that is given to married couples is part of what makes marriage such an important issue: a married relationship and a married person carries a specific social value because it is honorable (we also talked about how marriage is different when we take into account race and class). At the same time, women who have children earn a certain type of feminine honor (and we are talking here about the honor gained from mothering children, not just having them).

Specific professions bestow honor: in a society with some educational and social mobility, this is a way of amending race, class and gender restrictions on how much honor/what type of honor is owed to people because of what class they belong to... but only amending. For example, if you are a woman in a predominantly male field of work, you will gain some access to the respect demanded by the profession but you are likely to have to work harder to "protect" and legitimate your professional honor and will often have to repeatedly "prove" that you deserve that respect. The same goes for class and race... we have specific codes for who automatically qualifies for honorable careers, based on background. Others can work hard and earn a place of honor, but it is often harder.

This brings us to the final example in our discussion: gangs. Gangs, we thought, could reveal a lot in terms of how important honor really is in our modern society. All three of these examples certainly illustrate social patterns in honor that lead us to ask:

Can honor ever be purged of its prejudices of race, class and gender?

The trouble, even discomfort, some of us have with honor as a social tool for change is in the gendered, classed, and raced implications of honor codes. We aren't the only ones who see this link between masculinity and honor: there are entire university courses dedicated to the subject! Appiah suggests that honor can overcome these problems, as society matures and embraces broader definitions of humanity and ethical responsibility...

Just as a thought experiment, what would it take for our society to look at successful diplomatic negotiations for peace with the same deeply motivating sense of communal honor as we look at successful military operations? Or to honor a new curriculum developer for their work on nonviolent conflict resolution in high schools to the degree that we honor inventors of cutting edge military technology? As a side note, on a Radiolab episode on Falling, poet and author Joan Murray talked about about the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel- it was a 63 year old woman- and who did not get the fame and fortune that she expected in part because she did not fit the popular assumptions of what a hero worthy of such admiration and honor should look like. The second person -a strapping young man- got that honor, and the money and fame that goes along with it. How different are we now in terms of our expectations about heroes?

Honor is part of personal networks of responsibility; it shapes collective identity. This is what Appiah calls an "honor world", in that people share a set of honor codes. The centrality of collective values and standards and identity are important, and I think it is very interesting that Appiah is attempting to deal with these issues as they influence morality. It is not so clear, however, that we can draw such a clear line between honor and morality nor between honor and oppressive practices as Appiah seems to suggest. We agreed, though, that honor and shame are often misunderstood, underestimated, and overlooked, and that they are still powerful social forces.

Nobel Peace Prize Awards

How exciting. There are three women this year who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Incredibly, the first woman to be awarded was Wangari Maathai, the environmental activist who did amazing work in Kenya. We just watched a film about her work, which won her the Peace Prize in 2004. The film makes powerful and effortless links between civic duty, participatory democracy, education, grassroots activism, community building, human health, environmental consciousness, human rights, and women's participation at all levels of society. Wangari Maathai, who recently passed away, fought hard and long and wisely for environmental justice.

These women follow in this tradition, fighting peacefully and powerfully for human rights: the first woman elected to the presidency in Africa (Ellen Johnson Sirleaf), the leader of the interfaith women's peace activism that brought an end to civil war in Liberia (Leymah Gbowee), and a pro-democracy activist in Yemen (Tawakul Karman), are the first women to be awarded the prize since it was awarded to Maathai in 2004.

The book club has touched on the work of all of these women except Karman. Human Rights Watch reminds us that the work is not over, and that with the Prize, more dangerous and important work awaits. Here's to the possibility of more women being recognized across the world for their incredible work for peace by taking on important challenges in human rights, justice, women's equality, democracy, health, the environment, education, conflict resolution, the arts... and more.

First Ever Film Night

We watched Taking Root, and the film was really great. It covered so many topics, and was entertaining and inspiring as well. A full review will be be written up and posted here in several days, but just to give you an idea- this film is about a woman who grew up in rural Kenya, became the first East African woman to earn a PhD, became a professor, and chair of her department. She started the Green Belt Movement, encouraging women to plant trees to fight deforestation, soil erosion, food scarcity and fuel scarcity. This simple idea turned into a platform for the formation of women's groups all over the country, which supported confidence, community, democratic practices, civic participation, environmental protection and restoration, political protest, and much more.

Next we will try something else new: author Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher well known for his writing on cosmopolitanism, and his new book is about how the sense of honor plays into what he calls "moral revolutions", in which an ongoing cultural practice shifts from being acceptable to unacceptable.

More soon!