JEDDAH, 26 January 2007 — Thirty years after its founding, the Literary Club of Riyadh has opened a women’s section which will allow the better half of the Saudi population to participate in the club’s activities.
The club will segregate the genders, allowing women to watch via closed-circuit television from a separate area the events unfolding in main halls, which will still be for men only.
Poet Abdullah Al-Washmi, vice president of the club, said that the facility, a small building owned by the municipality, will be set up by the end of March to accommodate a separate women’s section. “In the current state of the building which is quite old, it was impossible to organize any event there (facilitating an exclusive women’s section),” he said.
Literary clubs, located in the Kingdom’s large cities, play an important role in promoting intellectual and artistic events. Riyadh’s Literary Club is the last of the country’s clubs to facilitate women, who have been able to participate in events in Jeddah, Dammam and Abha for years, albeit in gender-segregated settings that provide better seating for men who can be present in the hall where the event is taking place. Women, on the other hand, must watch events unfold in a separate room through a television screen.
In 2005 then-acting president of the Riyadh Literary Club, Abdullah Al-Shehail, said that he wanted to build a separate section in the club for women, but the Riyadh Municipality objected and would not approve the necessary alterations to the building, which required a separate side-entrance for women.
Al-Washmi said that he didn’t receive any such resistance when he brought up the issue of alterations to the building. He said that women would play a key role at the club. “Women will definitely share planning the schedule for the literary events along with us,” he said.
Al-Washmi, who founded an affiliate group called “House of Poetry”, said that he would consult with women members of the club, such as poet Huda Al-Dagfag.
Literary clubs in the Kingdom make sure that their activities are endorsed, or at least tolerated, by the Ministry of Culture and Information, which must approve all books and films that enter the country.
