OTOTOT
Here is an article that tells about how women don't have equal rights under Sharia law (Islamic law) and how Saudi Arabia is one of the most puritanic of Islamic countries when it comes to Islam (Wahabbism), which is where Osama learned his deadly tricks.
So much for those folks who keep telling us that Islam is a peaceful, modern religion and Saudi Arabia is a freedom loving country. If anyone really believes that, they are so naive, it cracks me up.
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In Quiet Revolt, Qatar Snubs
Saudis With Women's Rights
Qatar Is Eschewing Saudi Arabia's Brand
Of Wahhabi Islam in Favor of Modernization
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DOHA, Qatar -- When Jehan al-Meer was growing up in Qatar, there wasn't much a woman could achieve in the one nation that shares Saudi Arabia's ultraconservative brand of Islam.
Laws banned women from driving, voting or holding government jobs where they would supervise men. Ms. al-Meer was permitted to study in the U.S. only because a male guardian -- her brother -- was there to keep an eye on her.
"Now, this is a whole new country," says Ms. al-Meer, a biochemistry professor at Qatar University and a candidate in recent municipal elections. "You just cannot live outside history." Sipping espresso with a man in a coffeehouse encounter that would be illicit across the Saudi frontier, she adds: "And Saudi women? They think we are lucky over here."
In the past seven years, this tiny emirate has gone through a social revolution that has given women -- and men -- freedoms unheard of in most of the Arabian Peninsula. From lifting the prohibition on alcohol to abolishing censorship, Qatar has gone to great lengths to underscore just how different it is from Saudi Arabia. In the capital of Doha, which the Lonely Planet guidebook called the "dullest place on Earth" just a few years ago, nightclubs advertise happy hours and women cruise down the palm-tree-lined boulevards at the wheels of oversize sport-utility vehicles.
The new Qatar has prompted irritation and dismay in Saudi Arabia, which this month recalled its ambassador. At stake is the nature of Wahhabi Islam, an ultrapuritan strain that was founded by 18th century preacher Mohammed ibn Abdel Wahhab and that Saudi Arabia propagates at great expense all over the world.
In the Saudi version of Wahhabism, the sexes are strictly segregated, women can't go out in public unless covered head-to-toe and other faiths are barred. For many in the West, Wahhabi Islam, embraced by Osama bin Laden, became a byword for intolerance and even terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.
For many Qataris, their country is proof that a Wahhabi society needn't be hidebound. "I consider myself a good Wahhabi and can still be modern, understanding Islam in an open way," says Abdelhameed Alansari, the dean of Qatar University's College of Sharia, or Islamic law. "We take into account the changes in the world and do not have the closed-minded mentality as they do in Saudi Arabia."
That wasn't always the case. In the 1980s, Mr. Alansari, a campaigner for women's rights, was described as an "apostate" by Qatar's Saudi-trained chief religious judge -- a label that, if confirmed by a formal ruling, would have authorized any Muslim to kill him. Now, Mr. Alansari is in charge of training new Qatari judges himself. "All those people who attacked me, most of them have died, and the rest keep quiet," he says with a chuckle.
It took a coup to bring social change to Qatar, a flat desert peninsula that is home to the world's third-largest reserves of natural gas and to one of the most important U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf.
In 1995, the emirate's energetic ruler, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, became the Gulf's youngest monarch at age 45 by ousting his conservative father. The British-educated Sheik Hamad quickly moved to woo Western support and install in key positions young, Western-educated technocrats. His father, the deposed monarch, tried to stage a countercoup by infiltrating supporters from Saudi Arabia, with which the emirate had had deadly border skirmishes in the early 1990s.
The failed countercoup just hardened the young sheik against Qatar's vast neighbor and its conservative ways. In short order, he turned Qatar into a pan-Arab media powerhouse by establishing the relatively free-wheeling al Jazeera satellite-TV station. He permitted the Christians among the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers here to build a church. He promised to create a national legislature. And he lifted many restrictions on women's rights.
Women's liberation really began at home. While most Gulf rulers' wives keep very low profiles, Qatar's first lady, Sheika Mouza, became an eloquent champion of modern education and equality of the sexes. Her photographs, with her jet-black hair partially uncovered in defiance of conservative custom, grace the front pages of Qatari newspapers. In just one week this month, she hobnobbed in Iran with President Mohammed Khatami and presided over the opening of a co-ed Qatari campus of an American college.
Religious Backing
Sheik Hamad's innovations went relatively smoothly because of the critical religious backing of Youssef al-Qaradawi. An influential cleric who settled here in the 1960s, he helped displace Saudi-inspired Islamic orthodoxy with the relatively more-liberal views of his native Egypt. Mr. al-Qaradawi is a leading figure in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and was barred entry to the U.S. for his passionate endorsement of Palestinian suicide bombers. But he is wildly popular across the Arab world for his no-nonsense talk shows on TV stations such as al Jazeera, and for a Web site that offers quick fatwas, or religious opinions, on a multitude of issues. His interpretations of Islam's holy texts challenged traditional notions that excluded women from participating in government affairs.
"Saudi Arabia has Mecca and Medinah," Islam's two holiest sites, says Najeeb al Nauimi, Qatar's former minister of justice and a prominent lawyer. "We have Qaradawi -- and all his daughters drive cars and work."
But the sheik's modernization drive also worked because he didn't tolerate opposition. Government reaction was swift after local newspapers in 1998 published a letter from a Qatari religious scholar, Abdulrahman al Nuaimi, that criticized the government for allowing the "un-Islamic mingling of sexes" and for giving women political rights that make them "lose their proper role and turn into men."
Qatari police arrested Mr. al Nuaimi as a security threat and kept him behind bars without trial for nearly three years, until April 2001. When he was reached this month by telephone and asked to comment about changes in the emirate, Mr. al Nuaimi passed the phone to an assistant who said the scholar's conditions for release from jail include a ban on speaking with reporters.
At Doha's sun-drenched marketplace, where Sudanese scribes write letters for illiterate migrant workers at the edges of a parking lot filled with shining four-wheel-drives, most of the Qatari women wear full-face veils and are shrouded in black cloaks called abayas. The Qatari males, identifiable by their flowing white dishdasha robes and guthra headdresses, either say they are fully behind the emir or refuse to discuss politics.
One man with a bushy black beard summons the courage to say that he abhors the legalization of alcohol as he helps his two wives into the car, but he declines to be identified as anything more specific than "a Qatari citizen." He says he is employed by the government, as are most Qataris, and doesn't want "trouble at work."
Dissent is also muted by the country's unprecedented prosperity. Qatar is experiencing an economic windfall as natural-gas-export facilities come online, providing a surge in income. This sharply contrasts with Saudi Arabia, where rapid population increases have been outpacing economic growth, fueling discontent as per capita incomes have narrowed by nearly two-thirds since the 1980s. "True, some Qataris complain that the emir is going too far," says a Western diplomat in Doha. "But are they going to do anything about it? No. Everyone here is too busy getting rich."
Indeed, the emirate's capital is bursting with life as shopping malls, five-star hotels and multiplex cinemas pop up along the Gulf shoreline. In one beachfront restaurant, Qatari women shrouded in black abayas carefully lift full-face veils to bite fried grouper as a Lebanese belly-dancer in a bikini shakes to roaring applause. In an air-conditioned hotel nearby, an Oktoberfest is in full swing, complete with rivers of beer and a crowd of Bavarians in lederhosen.
Crisis in Relations
Qatar's maverick streak and liberal ways have provoked a serious crisis in relations with Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where the government sees itself as a natural leader of all the Arab Gulf states. In a show of pique at Doha, Saudi Arabia occasionally rolls out the red carpet for Sheikh Hamad's deposed father, who lives in Europe.
Officially, Saudi Arabia's removal of its ambassador this month was to protest criticism of the Saudi royal family in a broadcast on al-Jazeera, which is based in Doha. But diplomats say Riyadh is also angered by Qatar "thumbing its nose" at Saudi Arabia as Doha maintains trade relations with Israel, intensifies military cooperation with the U.S. and takes seriously its role as the three-year chairman of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Even relatively liberal Saudis voice frustration with the tiny emirate. "A small country will always be a small country, and influence can only be gained by cultivating ties with neighbors and working with them as a team," scoffs Abdelaziz al Fayez, a member of the foreign-affairs committee in Saudi Arabia's appointed legislature, Majlis al Shura. The Qatari social reforms, he adds, just "show a willingness to uproot their roots in order to please outsiders."
That makes some Qataris both angry and proud. "It's not important whether our reforms bother the neighbors, it's important whether they satisfy the Qatari society," says Ahmed Ali, editor of the biggest of Qatar's three Arabic-language dailies, Al Watan. "Maybe change in this entire traditionalist region will start right here, in the smallest country."
Mr. Ali shows off the newspaper's brand-new color supplement, which is filled with racy photos of Egyptian actresses and Western pop stars such as Shakira and Britney Spears. Then he pulls out charts of soaring advertising revenue in recent weeks. "This is proof that both readers and advertisers want this openness," Mr. Ali says. "You cannot go on talking that women shouldn't drive cars when we publish things like this."
Women such as Ms. al-Meer, the university professor, who says she is "in the thirties," still remember their struggle for a place behind the steering wheel. Getting a New York State driver's license was among the first things that she did after arriving at Cornell University in 1988. "It was so great to have this freedom of movement," she recalls.
Back home, Ms. al-Meer applied for a license in 1992, knowing full well Qatar didn't issue them to women. She enclosed a photocopy of her New York license with the Qatari application. That didn't help at the time, but Ms. al-Meer felt she had made her point. "Here I was, driving in New York, and I couldn't drive in downtown Qatar. This sounded very strange to me as a Qatari citizen," she says.
Now, Ms. al-Meer aspires to help steer the entire country. She was one of six female candidates in Qatar's municipal elections in 1999, the Gulf's first election in which women could both vote and stand as candidates. In her own district near the Doha airport, 13 men and three women competed for one spot. No women managed to win a seat, as they also failed in later elections in neighboring Bahrain. But in Qatar, women voters outnumbered men. And next year, Ms. al-Meer is considering a run in the first elections to Qatar's national parliament.
"We cannot segregate society into two different parts, women and men. We have to be able to interact together," Ms. al Meer says, adjusting a black abaya that covers her pink, tailored suit. "Wahhabism is a very purist form of Islam. But does this mean go back to the seventh century? No, I want to live in the 21st one."
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
Updated October 24, 2002 |
