Saudi is stalling on the reform of women’s rights

The recent conviction and harsh sentencing of a Saudi man who had called for an end to the country’s infamous “guardianship” system suggests that improvements in women’s rights in the kingdom are not the focus they once were. Contrary to the doom and gloom headlines that always permeate any discussion about Saudi Arabia, progress was being made. A third of its Shura (Consultative) Council members must now be female; new laws on domestic violence and divorce have been announced; the first female editor of a Saudi newspaper has been hired; the first four female lawyers are now practicing; and women are beginning to hold more senior positions in government.

Yet the guardianship system endures. Adult women must still obtain permission from a male guardian to travel, marry or even leave prison. They are sometimes required to provide a guardian’s consent in order to take a job or access healthcare. Renting an apartment or filing legal claims, alongside a host of other day-to-day issues, all rely on goodwill between the woman and her guardian. If she decides that it is all too much and wants to migrate to a country that respects her freedom, she will also – usually – need permission from her guardian to do so.

If, though, reform has been in the air, why has a man been sentenced to a year in prison and a 30,000 riyal fine for putting up posters near a mosque and tweeting in support of ending the system? The answer lies in how reform itself is being handled in the kingdom.

In September, a petition attracted international attention as it gathered thousands of signatures calling for an end to guardianship. In July, Human Rights Watch published a report calling for an end to the system. Still banned from Saudi Arabia, the group was denounced as “an agent of a foreign government” and accused of being paid “by the enemies of the kingdom.” These were extraordinary claims with no basis in fact. The man who was recently sentenced was deemed to be too proactive in his campaign. The basic rule in Saudi appears to be this: progress is coming, and it is even happening, albeit slowly; just don’t ask for it too loudly and too often, or we will crack down.

There are wider calculations at play which speak to a fundamental tenet of how power is dispersed in the kingdom, which can be summed up in one word: appeasement. Many of Saudi Arabia’s most socially conservative policies were only introduced relatively recently. From 1979 onwards, the House of Saud was forced to respond to a serious terrorist attack on the Grand Mosque in Makkah by a group of apocalyptic terrorists not dissimilar in outlook to Daesh. The logic was that, despite their violent methods, the terrorists had a point; oil money had introduced salacious Western mores into Saudi Arabian society which did not befit its role as guardians of Islam’s most holy sites. This was undoubtedly true, but the response was still bizarre, inhumane and overaggressive.

Nobody bore the brunt of these so-called reforms more than women. They were hit again in the nineties, when the clerical classes were outraged to see that female US soldiers were driving freely on Saudi Arabian roads. The infamous ban on women drivers was the result. All this was being done to appease extremists.

Those same extremists exist today – in the form of Daesh — and are even more barbaric. The government in Riyadh is wary of this, and wants to ensure that any young Saudi men who think that their country is not “Islamic” enough are also appeased. That way, it is believed, they will not run off and join Daesh or, worse still, launch yet another terrorist attack within the kingdom. So the appeasement continues.

This policy is not well understood in the West. There are even conspiracy theories floating around that Saudi Arabia is funding Daesh; the reality is that the kingdom is arguably threatened more by the extremist group than the West is. In August 2014, Saudi’s Grand Mufti (senior legal jurist) Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh denounced the “Islamic State” as “enemy number one” of Islam. “The ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism… have nothing to do with Islam and [their proponents] are enemy number one of Islam,” he declared.

Nor does the guardianship system have anything to do with Islam. One interesting element of the Human Rights Watch report was that a former unnamed Saudi judge told its researchers that Islamic laws within the Shari’ah do not exist which would permit the guardianship system to continue.

Across the Arab world, particularly during the “Arab Spring” revolutions, women have played a key role in both Islamist and secular resistance movements, the kind of resistance movements that terrify the House of Saud more than anything else. It is a fear of women that is keeping these women in fear; cowardly male legislators bully and use faux understandings of Shari’ah to do so. It is really sad for these men to feel that they have to do this.

Of course, there are some women who say they don’t mind. “I’m a Saudi woman who has a male guardian,” declared a recent contrarian take on the system in Time Magazine. The author was one of the first two Saudi women to graduate from Columbia Journalism School. “Not all of us are prisoners in our homes,” the writer claimed. This is of course true. “The West needs to realise that not all Saudi women are the same,” she concluded, as she defended the guardianship system.

Nobody has said that all Saudi women are the same. Critics of the guardianship system are merely pointing out that a sufficient number of Saudi women do get rough treatment at the sharp end of guardianship, which makes the system morally and — if the aforementioned judge is correct — legally wrong, even in Islamic law. Just because some women don’t experience this, it doesn’t make it any less wrong. And those who speak out against it certainly don’t deserve to be in jail.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.