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Politics : World Affairs Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2807)	10/16/2003 7:43:41 AM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3959

17 girls suspended from school From correspondents in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 16oct03 themercury.news.com.au AT LEAST 17 expatriate teenage girls in eastern Saudi Arabia were suspended from school for a week for uncovering their faces on the school bus, the school's headmistress said in remarks published today. Malika Al-Duseiri, headmistress of the Eighth High School in Dammam, 400km northeast of the capital Riyadh, told the daily Okaz that 17 girls who repeatedly removed their head covers on the school bus had been suspended. "I noticed that they remove their head covers on the school bus when I did a surprise call," Al-Duseiri said. She said she had asked to see their parents and had the girls sign an agreement that they would not repeat the act. The girls' nationalities were not specified and attempts to reach the school were unsuccessful. Okaz quoted family members as saying that 20 girls had been suspended since yesterday. The families are planning to complain to authorities against the school's decision, the paper said. Women in Saudi Arabia, local or expatriate, must be covered from head to toe in public, where they are also segregated and in most cases must be accompanied by a male family member. The conservative kingdom only issued picture identity cards to women last year after a three-year debate. The powerful religious establishment here holds that women's faces should not be exposed to unrelated men. The new photo ID, seldom used for women, shows the woman's face, though her hair must be covered. Previously, women were registered on their fathers or husbands' papers. Mobile phones with built-in cameras are banned in the kingdom as they may be used to take pictures of uncovered women and send them to other phones or post them on the Internet. Increasing calls for political and social reforms in the conservative kingdom - especially for women's rights - have been countered by religious clerics. Last month, prominent clerics and academics issued a statement warning against calls for equality and increased rights for women, saying such efforts aim to make Muslim women more like "infidel" Western women.