Saudi Arabia gives women right to vote
USU students react to Saudi Arabian King Abdullah Abdullah’s decree last Sunday that women of Saudi Arabia will now have the right to vote and run for office, a move that worldwide is being called “historical.”
Starting in 2015, Abdullah said, women nationwide will be able to run and vote in municipal government elections. They will also be appointed to positions on the Shura Council, the 150-member formal advisory body of Saudi Arabia that proposes laws to the king. Many believe this decision will have a monumental impact on women’s rights in the country.
Ammar Nasser, a first year USU student originally from Saudi Arabia, said of the vote, “Everything will be changed, because it’s a new idea. Women’s idea is different than men’s idea. It will be a help, I think.”
Saudi Arabia is arguably one of the most conservative countries in the world, and it has been criticized in the past for strict rules regarding women, such as not being allowed to drive, which is still a law.
Nasser said, “When they want to go to anywhere, they call us and say, ‘Hey, come take us to this, and come give us a ride to this.’ We don’t want to do that.”
According to Saudi law, Saudi women are unable to leave the country without being accompanied by a male relative. They are also unable to withdraw money from the bank on their own, and if they need the assistance of the police, the policemen will not enter their homes unless a man is there with them.
Ahmed Alsharit, a USU student from Saudi Arabia who has lived in the U.S. for five years, said he believes these restrictions will eventually become obsolete because of Abdullah’s decree.
“After the voting, I’m sure women will be able to drive. They will be able to start their own businesses in the close future, when they’re in the Shura or other meetings they get involved in. They could complain about their rights, and they could say ‘Why don’t we have the right to start our own businesses? Why don’t we have the right to drive?'”
Alsharit said the women’s rights movement has been big for many years, though progress has been slow for women to get their opinions heard. After the prophet Muhammad died, Alsharit said, his wife wanted to be a leader, and that created conflict and division between different groups.
Alsharit said many people attribute Saudi Arabia’s segregation and lack of women’s rights to Islam. He said, however, that notion is “simply not right.”
“It was mostly men who spread Islam, and it was mostly men who controlled it. But then the prophet — if you just look at the person who brought the religion to the world — he had a wife, and she was one of the people who invited people to Islam,” he said. “He had his wives telling stories about him to others; they would always give him advice to what to do, and he would always listen to what they would say. That’s what Saudi Arabia wants, but then it’s the culture that pulls us back, it’s not Islam. Islam is something that doesn’t change.”
Allia Abu-Ramaileh, last year’s president of the Middle East Club, said the change in Saudi Arabia is a welcome one, but she, too, worries that people misunderstand the relationship between Islam and Middle Eastern regimes.
“I kind of hate the Saudi King — King Abdullah — being the ‘voice’ of Islam to many people. It looks like many people are seeing King Abdullah’s decision to allow women to vote in 2015 as some sort of breakthrough in Islam. But the reality is that while the rest of the world viewed women as second-class citizens, Islam recognized and spelled out the rights of women as wives, daughters, mothers and contributing members of society.
“While the government in Saudi Arabia may follow some Islamic practices and Islamic Law,” she said, “the system, like every political system in this world, is still corrupt and does not follow Islam 100 percent. For there is nothing in Islam that says women cannot vote or drive, etc. Many laws in practice are based (on) cultural reasons, not Islamic justifications.”
Alsharit, using women’s inability to leave the country without a man as an example, said women aren’t denied all rights. If a woman gets a scholarship, he said, she comes with a brother, father, husband, son or nephew — a moral support who gets paid to be there.
“We cannot bring somebody else as our protector or somebody who is just here for us,” he said. “It’s not a strict rule as much as it is an offering that we are going to allow you to be here with someone to protect you. You’re coming to somewhere that’s totally foreign to you, that you don’t know anything about, and you don’t have enough education within Saudi Arabia to know how to act around those people. So, maybe a man would help.”
A lot of influence behind the women’s rights movement came from outside sources, he added.
“We were pressured by the outsiders to have women’s rights, like Saudi Arabia doesn’t have any women rights, and that’s not true. If you come to my mom and ask her ‘Do you want to go vote?’ She would say ‘No.’ So she doesn’t really care. If you ask her ‘Do you want to go to college?’ She would say ‘No.’ She wouldn’t really care, because that’s how her mind thinks. When you come to my sisters, there’s a change. They want to go to college,” he said. “Time by time, it keeps changing.”
Until 2005, men in Saudi Arabia also did not have the right to vote for local leaders, and, Alsharit said, many people still do not vote because the idea is new to them.
“Saudi Arabians are not easy to change,” he said. “They do not like changes. Politically, we’re blinded. We don’t know what we want.”
Despite the presently low voter turnout and excitement in the country, Saudi Arabia is at the center of the Middle Eastern world, and Alsharit said he believes that surrounding states with less rights for women will follow the country’s example and there will be an increase in political involvement.
Of Abdullah and his decisions, he said, “I love my king. I’m not saying this because I’m scared of him. I really love him. He has done a lot to my country.”
Nasser agreed, particularly with regards to the recent decree allowing women to vote. “He made me love him more and more,” he said.
Nasser, in regard to his mother getting the right t
o vote, said, “I feel we are equal now.”
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