Letter from Saudi Arabia-Re: how women in Saudi Arabia are treated.

Hello Caroline Glick, I am a 20 year old female living in Saudi Arabia. My family and I used to live the United States for 13 years, until we decided to move back to be closer to our relatives. The other day, I was searching for articles on Google and I came across your op-ed on Laura Bush's recent visit to Saudi Arabia.

I am sorry to say but I was very disappointed with your article. You said things that are not true about my country. For instance, you mentioned that women in Saudi have no choice on who they marry, and that men can marry up to four women and divorce them just in a matter of words.

We do have a choice on who to marry. You do realize we live in the 21st century?! Both my sisters and brother knew their spouses before they were married, and I come from a relatively religiously committed family. My mother and father met through family outings in Saudi Arabia in the 50's. While it is true that men can marry up to four women, there are still consequences that comes with it.

First, this is a part of our religion which gives no one the right to mock us about it. Second, no sheikh (the equivalent to a priest) will allow a man to marry a second or third wife without conducting an interview with him to see what his reasons are. For instance, my uncle recently married a second wife. This second wife was a woman who's husband died and was in financial debt. My uncle did what he thought was right, after asking for his wife's blessing. If he had not received this blessing he would not have done it. Nor would he have done it if he had not realized how bad the situation this woman was in.

You also mention how no other religions can be practiced in Saudi Arabia. I want to point out this is the land that Islam was introduced in; the land the prophet was born in, the same land that contains Mecca and Medina, two of the holiest sites in Islam.

It makes sense not to allow another religion to be practiced in such a sacred place. As far as I know there is no mosque in Vatican City. I respect the fact that it is a sacred place for a religion, and I would expect to receive the same respect from others about my country.

AS FOR OUR education, it is well on its way to becoming one of the best in the world. We have a wide range of opportunities. The college I attend has marketing, accounting, media, nursing, special education, electrical engineering, architecture, management, finance, and psychology. Another college here offers law, graphic design, interior design, banking, Management information system and fashion design. Our public universities offer all departments of medicine, physical therapy, economics, media, sociology, religion, literature, translation and so on.

As far as I can see we are well-off, it is just a matter of what interests people. And no, contrary to what people assume, we are allowed to leave the house. Even without our brothers or fathers. It is a cultural choice whether a mother of father permit their daughters out without male supervision. Perhaps one in 15 families take a stringent position. I go to the beach, restaurants, parks, cafes, bowling...with my friends - males and females. Yes I do wear an abaya, but we do not necessarily have to cover our hair or faces; again this is a personal and cultural choice.

To be frank, abayas are not a big deal to us, we actually embrace it and design lovely abayas that portray our personalities. And yes, it was ridiculous for the French government to try and ban women from wearing scarves. Where is the freedom of choice there? Was this to protect the country from terrorists? Anyway, how did it transpire that head coverings came to be seen as symbols of oppression? I wish the world would stop judging us.

America is not perfect, Europe is not perfect, Israel is not perfect and yes even I admit the Arab Middle East is not perfect. We all have our flaws! What is the use of learning about the world if we all had the same way of living.

My advice to you, Caroline, is to befriend a Saudi. This is the best way to get to understand our culture. Or better yet, visit Saudi Arabia.

I did not write this to offend you or the Jerusalem Post, but to set the record straight. I live in Saudi Arabia. I laugh in Saudi. I am happy in Saudi. My life is not any different that it was in the United States.

One day my country will rise and shine above all, and I am sure when that happens the world will suddenly want to befriend us. Until then, I will do my part to correct misperceptions about our image. Thank you.

For people around the world, the United States is not merely a country, and not merely a superpower. The United States is also a symbol of human freedom.

Because their country is a symbol, the way that American officials behave is rarely taken at face value. Rather, their behavior is interpreted and reinterpreted by friend and foe alike.

Because she has no statutory power, the American First Lady's actions are wholly symbolic. So when last week First Lady Laura Bush embarked on a visit to the Persian Gulf to promote breast cancer awareness in the Arab world as part of the US-Middle East Partnership for Breast Cancer, she traveled there as a symbol. And the symbolic message that her visit evoked is a deeply disturbing one.

As a Washington Post report of her trip to Saudi Arabia from last Thursday noted, there is a dire need in the kingdom to raise public awareness of breast cancer and its treatments. Due to social taboos, some 70 percent of breast cancer cases in Saudi Arabia are not reported until the late stages of the disease. It is possible that the local media attention that Mrs. Bush's visit aroused may work to save the lives of women whose husbands will now permit them to be screened for the disease and receive proper medical treatment for it in its early stages.

And this is where the disturbing aspect of Mrs. Bush's visit enters the picture. During her public appearances, the First Lady limited her remarks to the issue of breast cancer awareness. Yet in the Persian Gulf, it is impossible to separate the issue of breast cancer or for that matter the very fact of the First Lady's visit from the issue of the systematic mistreatment and oppression of women in the Saudi Arabia specifically and throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds generally.

IN THE context of the regional degradation of women, while the consequences of Mrs. Bush's visit remain mixed, the overall effect of her mission was negative.

Women in Saudi Arabia do not have human rights. As Amnesty International puts it, "The abuse of women's rights in Saudi Arabia is not simply the unfortunate consequence of overzealous security forces and religious police. It is the inevitable result of a state policy which gives women fewer rights than men, which means that women face discrimination in all walks of life and which allows men with authority to exercise their power without any fear of being held to account for their actions."

For instance, women in Saudi Arabia cannot choose whom they marry and they have no real power to divorce their husbands. Men on the other hand can lawfully marry up to four women and divorce any of them simply by announcing that they have divorced them. And once they are divorced, they are by law and practice denied custody of their children.

Marital rape and physical abuse are not generally considered crimes and therefore women have no legal recourse for dealing with abusive husbands, or fathers or brothers. Since they are legally barred from serving as lawyers, and Islam weighs a woman's court testimony as worth half the testimony of a man, even if they were able to press charges against their male tormentors, Saudi women are effectively denied recourse in the local courts.

Women of course are not the only victims of the Saudi regime. Non-Muslims are denied the right to worship. Shi'ite Muslims' right to worship is subject to draconian limitations. Jews are officially barred from entering the kingdom. Then too, there are no real elections in Saudi Arabia, no press freedom, no freedom of assembly. Yet even against this totalitarian backdrop the position of women stands out in its severity.

Take education for example. As the State Department's 2006 Human Rights report notes, there is little academic freedom in Saudi Arabia. For instance, "The government prohibited the study of Freud, Marx, Western music, and Western philosophy." Yet women's educational opportunities are even more constrained. Due to gender apartheid, women may only study in all female institutions. There they are prohibited from studying fields like law and engineering and petroleum sciences. In 2005 the BBC reported, "Although women make up more than half of all graduates from Saudi universities, they comprise only 5 percent of the kingdom's workforce."

Saudi women have no freedom of movement. They may not drive. And they may not move around in public unless escorted by their husband, father or brother. Women found in public unescorted by suitable males are subject to arrest and corporal punishment.

The limitations placed on public appearances are mind boggling. As Freedom House reported in 2005, "Visible and invisible spatial boundaries also limit women's movement. Mosques, most ministries, public streets, and food stalls (supermarkets not included) are male territory. Furthermore, accommodations that are available for men are always superior to those accessible to women, and public space, such as parks, zoos, museums, libraries, or the national Jinadriyah Festival of Folklore and Culture, is created for men, with only limited times allotted for women's visits."

TO THE extent that women in Saudi Arabia are allowed leave their homes, they are prohibited from actually being seen by anyone through the rigid enforcement of Islamic dress codes. As the State Department 2006 report explains, "In public, a woman was expected to wear an abaya (a black garment that covers the entire body) and also to cover her head and hair. The religious police generally expected Muslim women to cover their faces and non-Muslim women from other Asian and African countries to comply more fully with local customs of dress than non-Muslim Western women. During the year religious police admonished and harassed citizen and noncitizen women who failed to wear an abaya and hair cover."

Perhaps it is because it is so offensive to the Western eye to see women covered like sacks of potatoes, the abaya has become a symbol of Islamic oppression and degradation of women. Although outlawing their use, as the French have attempted to do in recent years, is itself a form of religious oppression, the sentiment informing their ban is certainly understandable. The fact is that a free society should not be able to easily stomach the notion that women should be encouraged, let alone obliged to wear degrading garments that deny them the outward vestiges of their humanity and individuality.

Due to the fact that the abayas convey a symbolic message of effective enslavement of women, Mrs. Bush's interaction with women clad in abayas was the aspect of her trip most scrutinized. In the United Arab Emirates, Mrs. Bush was photographed sitting between four women covered head to toe in abayas while she was wearing regular clothes. The image of Mrs. Bush sitting between four women who look like nothing more than black piles of fabric couldn't have been more viscerally evocative and consequently, symbolically meaningful.

The image told the world that she - and America - is free and humane while the hidden women of Arabia are enslaved and their society is inhumane.

But then Mrs. Bush went to Saudi Arabia and the symbolic message of the previous day was superseded and lost when she donned an abaya herself and had her picture taken with other abaya-clad women. The symbolic message of those photographs also couldn't have been clearer. By donning an abaya, Mrs. Bush symbolically accepted the legitimacy of the system of subjugating women that the garment embodies, (or disembodies). Understanding this, conservative media outlets in the US criticized her angrily.

Sunday morning, Mrs. Bush sought to answer her critics in an interview with Fox News. Unfortunately, her remarks compounded the damage. Mrs. Bush said, "These women do not see covering as some sort of subjugation of women, this group of women that I was with. That's their culture. That's their tradition. That's a religious choice of theirs."

It is true that this is their culture. And it is also their tradition. But it is not their choice. Their culture and tradition are predicated on denying them the choice of whether or not to wear a garment that denies them their identity just as it denies them the right to make any choices about their lives. The Saudi women's assertions of satisfaction with their plight were no more credible than statements by hostages in support of their captors.

As the First Lady, Laura Bush is an American symbol. By having her picture taken wearing an abaya in Saudi Arabia - the epicenter of Islamic totalitarian misogyny - Mrs. Bush diminished that symbol. In so doing, she weakened the causes of freedom and liberty which America has fought since its founding to secure and defend at home and throughout the world.

Vatican “City” is a “City”, not a country.
Are people allowed to enter Vatican City carrying a Koran? I think so.
Are muslim people allowed to enter Vatican City?
I think so.

Are Christian people allowed to enter Saudi Arabia with a Bible?
I think not.
Are Jews allowed to enter Saudi Arabia?
I think not.

Are any non muslim people allowed to enter Mecca?
I think not.

Yes I do wear an abaya, but we do not necessarily have to cover our hair or faces; again this is a personal and cultural choice.

Without it you risk the old men on the corner flicking acid on you. Tell me again how free you are honey. You choose to do the things your religions demands because the consequences can be ugly.

Vatican “City” is a “City”, not a country.

It is technically a Sovereign City State, but in practice it is a walled enclave.

It is only 0.17 square miles big! That's just over 100 acres. And it attached to the largest Christian church in the world.

And it's population of 800 are all Catholic. Where the hell are you going to put a Mosque in there and who is going to use it?

The woman is a moron.

>>This does not jive with what I witnessed while living in Saudi<<

Do you perhaps mean that it does not JIBE with what you witnessed?

“Don’t gimme that jive!”

Dear Ms anonyHAMASmouse,

I'm a Christian Jew and would very much like you and your family to sponsor me on my first Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca to see that black rock you folks worship...what happened to the 359 other gods that were there by the way? Should my wife wear an abaya...maybe red so it doesn't look stained after the stoning? I'd very much like to consider buying some property fro my Jewish friends, maybe say in Medina? Can I bring my Bibles, my Torah, my kippah? and play Matisyahu in the streets where the sultan don't swing? Awaiting your loving reply,

Baruch atah

Moshe

>>Vatican “City” is a “City”, not a country.<<

Um, actually, the Vatican City (Holy See) IS a country.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/vt.html

Your welcome!

Still hosed? How long till those cables are repaired?

I wish I knew. I can get into FR from my room, but none of the other systems on base are allowing it because of the outages. They've blocked access to everything that is not mission-critical.

Oh, well...things have been worse here. ;-)

"HOSED" being a technical term?

From the Free Online Dictionary of Computing:

hosed Jargon
A somewhat humorous variant of "down", used primarily by Unix hackers. "Hosed" implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. It is also widely used of people in the mainstream sense of "in an extremely unfortunate situation". The term was popularised by fighter pilots refering to being hosed by machine gun fire (date?). Usage in hackerdom dates back to CMU in the 1970s or earlier.
"Acronyms and Abbreviations" from UCC, Ireland expands it as "Hardware Or Software Error Detected", though this is probably a back-formation.
The Jargon File version 4.1.4 1999-06-17 says that it was probably derived from the Canadian slang "hoser" (meaning "a man, esp. one who works at a job that uses physical rather than mental skills and whose habits are slightly offensive but amusing"). One correspondant speculates about an allusion to a hose-like body part.
Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic difficulties crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed. See also dehose.
See also: hose. (1999-10-28)

Um, my point was, compared to Saudi Arabia, Vatican City, though a “country”, is the size of a “city”

Mr Spellcheck is our friend-

You’re welcome

I want to point out this is the land that Islam was introduced in; the land the prophet was born in, the same land that contains Mecca and Medina, two of the holiest sites in Islam. It makes sense not to allow another religion to be practiced in such a sacred place.

By that logic, islam should be prohibited from the Holy Land, as this is where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born and where Christianity began.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, honey.

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