Asked by a journalist what I thought about women participating in the coming municipal elections, I gave him the most pessimistic answer I could come up with. I told him society was not ready for women to participate and my answer — when I saw it in print — shocked me. I felt that my pessimism had reached a new high, which could be dangerous to my mental stability.
So I decided to reason with myself about why we women should be able to vote and to be candidates for office. Reading the election law, I could not find a specific phrase that said women could not participate. That is a good sign — or is it? Because it did not say women could or could not participate, I was confused.
After all, there is nothing in our religion that says women are ineligible. Examples abound of early Muslim women participating in municipal affairs, both during the time of the Prophet and those of his successors.
And if we look at the Muslim world today, we’ll see thousands of women doing the same, so what is our situation here? We are going through a stage where there is support for women’s issues in the Kingdom; furthermore, the Kingdom has signed the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women so it looks as if we are heading in the right direction.
Reading more official responses to the specific question at hand, I found that not one of those responses gave a clear answer.
In one popular women’s magazine, the reporter had tried to contact the deputy minister for municipal and rural affairs to confirm what he said on TV, which was that women would not participate in the elections. The reporter, however, was unable to speak to the official and had to talk to a lower-level bureaucrat who would not comment on the matter. Speculations fill our newspapers but so far, there had been no official statement to clear the fog.
While we are in this limbo, let us discuss the importance of having women in the electoral process. After all, women are citizens; many of them work and participate in the development of our society while others do their duties as mothers and housewives.
They are all affected in a variety of ways by the municipality. If society can accept women as participants in social development, it would be only fair to accept their opinions and active participation in decision-making. Imagine a woman taking care of a family, responsible for doing a job, which — if she is a doctor or a teacher — means she has an influence in other people’s lives. Surely when it comes to deciding who will represent her in the municipality, she should have a vote.
Her own vote. Not the vote of her son, brother or husband who might agree or disagree with her. Denying women the vote or a chance to run for the elections as a candidate just does not make sense to me.
A few days ago there were reports in the media — it is not clear that they were accurate — that prisoners were to be given the right to vote and stand in the elections. If imprisoned law-breakers are given the right to vote, shouldn’t law-abiding women have the same right? Just a question!
