JEDDAH, 18 May 2004 — Princess Al-Jawhara bint Ibrahim Al-Ibrahim, the wife of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd, has urged women in the Kingdom to stick to Islamic values and traditions and ignore spurious calls for liberalization.
Addressing female graduates at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah late Sunday, Princess Al-Jawhara slammed “satellite TV stations which wage frenzied campaigns against Muslim women in general, and Saudi women in particular.”
“Islam’s enemies and the fainthearted women who follow in their footsteps do not tire of waging war against our Muslim traditions, trying to incite Muslim women to shed those norms on grounds that they restrict their freedom,” the Saudi Press Agency quoted the princess as saying.
Such spurious claims in fact sought to spur women to drop “ethics and values,” returning them to the state which prevailed in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam came 14 centuries ago to “raise woman’s status, honor her and shield her virtuousness,” Princess Al-Jawhara said.
The princess praised Saudi rulers for giving “utmost importance to the education” of Saudi women while upholding “Islamic traditions that preserve decency and dignity.”
Saudi intellectuals have called for easing a range of restrictions on women that make them dependent on male relatives. Some argue that the constraints should be eased for purely economic reasons at a time when women increasingly need to work to make ends meet.
In an editorial yesterday, Al-Eqtisadiah daily argued that Saudi women, who are largely employed in the teaching profession, should be groomed to take up other jobs currently held by expatriates.
“It’s as if educated women are only fit to teach,” Al-Eqtisadiah wrote, pointing to the “tens of thousands of women who graduate every year” as teachers.
“Medicine, pharmacy, engineering, and all sciences and professions require just brains and studies. They do not recognize gender,” the paper said.
One successful model is oil company “Saudi Aramco which long ago employed and trained large numbers of Saudi women to work in various administrative and technical fields, some of whom have reached senior administrative posts without this violating the ... respect for women in our conservative society,” it said.
Al-Eqtisadiah said Labor Minister Ghazi Al-Gosaibi did not make clear if he was including women when he stated that there were 300,000 jobless in Saudi Arabia.
Gosaibi said on May 5 that the unemployment rate stood at 9.6 percent, adding that his ministry would not heed figures other than those issued by the government’s statistics department.
He was referring to unofficial estimates putting the number of jobless at up to 30 percent of the workforce.
Between six and seven million foreigners live in Saudi Arabia, compared to around 17 million Saudis. The government is engaged in an intensive drive to nationalize jobs.
