Last week a TV program addressed itself to the results of the last National Dialogue Forum. Among those interviewed were two of the male speakers at the conference, a physician from the Eastern Province and the dean of a private college.
The two main speakers on the program, once again, were men; they kept throwing the ball to each other.
The two men stood for two lines of thought that were represented at the dialogue forum, the first a journalist who had a liberal or more modern approach to women’s issues, the other from the traditional, conservative stream.
Most of the time the discussion was interesting. The journalist focused on the need for major changes in the way women’s affairs are dealt with. He called for more freedom and appreciation of women as part of society and wanted more space opened up for women to move freely.
The other speaker, a university teacher, kept saying that calls for change were overplayed, that women themselves or a majority of them don’t want things to change.
His examples were that a good number of women still refuse to get their own ID cards because they simply do not need them, and driving for women was bad economically speaking and, again, over-hyped since lots of women do not want to drive in the first place.
One thing he said seemed to me to sum up all our problems. In essence he said that men in the Kingdom want to make the life of women easier by taking care of all their affairs, protecting them from the outside world.
That condescending line of thought is the core of so many problems. If a man talks this way about his own family it may be acceptable, but to use this argument as a reason for sidelining all women is both unacceptable and unrealistic.
The facts are that there are more women than men, that a great percentage of them are educated, that in reality most of them are taking care of families on their own or helping financially or socially.
To this man I say: taking care of women means to respect them and to give them the opportunity to be themselves, to be independent creatures as God created them. You can take care of women by trusting them, not by putting them away. It is interesting that in the reports on a conference dealing with women’s issues, we did not see a single picture of women participants. The pictures of the male participants were all over the press.
In the first session of the forum a man said the women should be sitting in the same auditorium, but of course that was immediately shot down by another man, who argued that it was much more comfortable for the women to be taking part via closed-circuit TV. Comfortable to whom, I wonder. Is it because men and women are not used to facing each other? Or is it because they do not trust each other?
But women walk in the street around men, talk to their drivers, to salesmen and doctors. There are as yet no moving TV screens accompanying every woman down the road to make their interaction with men more “comfortable.”
If on the other hand the pretext is Islamic values, I say that during the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him) women used to go to him personally and talk to him about their problems, they went to war with his armies and nursed the male soldiers. There were no TV screens back then, and the Prophet and his companions did not say it was wrong, so what are we trying to prove here?
In Al-Hayat newspaper, another delegate to the forum expressed his frustration at how things were discussed there.
How trivial, he said, were the arguments of those who want to enforce a strict code on women. He said some people reprimanded him at the conference for depending in his paper on the ideas of non-Saudi clerics.
He reported that one of the participants said women’s physical constitution does not allow them to drive, since in his opinion a car is a violent machine which could make women jeopardize their own and other people’s safety.
I cannot believe that this is what we are dealing with in the 21st century. For the sake our mental health I just hope that this discussion will only be the beginning and that more dialogue will open more doors.
