The third National Dialogue Forum, which discussed women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, ended three weeks ago amid a storm of controversy. Most participants were reluctant to discuss what happened behind the scenes, but Dr. Wafa Al-Rasheed, whose clash with Dr. Muhammad Al-Arifi over women’s rights was widely publicized, has spoken publicly for the first time about the dramatic event in an exclusive interview with Arab News.
“I felt abused and insulted as a female. The man was questioning our mental capabilities,” said Dr. Al-Rasheed, a former United Nation Development Program (UNDP) coordinator in Saudi Arabia.
“I couldn’t believe what I heard. I was simply shocked by the level of conversation we were sinking to. It felt like I was being abused and terrorized both mentally and emotionally,” she said.
Dr. Al-Arifi, the conservative head of the Teacher Training College in Riyadh, had lambasted female college professors for providing a bad role model for their students by copying “Western” hairstyles and dress and “wearing their abayas on their shoulders.”
He accused them of trying to impose Westernized views on their students, citing the example of the women who participated in a 1992 demonstration where a group of women drove their cars around the streets of the capital. He said women had gained more rights than they deserved.
“We were basically labeled because we weren’t like” the conservatives, Dr. Al-Rasheed said. “We didn’t think the same way they did and we didn’t share the same vocabulary or the same thoughts.”
“What really hurt was that some of them didn’t have a sense of priorities about what is happening around us. This is the result of extremist thinking,” she added.
Yahia Al-Ameer, another participant, quoted passages from textbooks that denigrate women. One example read, “Men should jealously guard women and take on their hand and sustain them because the female is vulnerable by nature, and leaving her without guidance could lead to depravity for her and others.”
Dr. Al-Rasheed says some hardliners “succeeded in injecting their views into the system. I’ve been thinking for a long time that our education system needs reform. I don’t have an agenda to promote, but I think we are obsessed with minute rules and regulations and we tend to ignore larger issues like Islamic behavior,” she says.
The issue of allowing women to drive predictably raised hackles, with one male delegate claiming women were “incapable of handling cars in open spaces” because they suffer from agoraphobia. Dr. Al-Rasheed says the man went on “as if he was a scientist” to claim that during their periods women become temporarily dyslexic and deaf.
Dr. Walid Fitaihi of the International Medical Center said in an article for an Arabic newspaper all doctors at the meeting were stunned by the statement.
Dr. Al-Rasheed says such remarks showed the conservatives’ “extremism was motivated by a need to feel superior to others.” But “at the end of the day they are just like us, government employees who get paid like others and live just like them.”
But the hardliners were not just men. One female participant called for women-only hospitals and industrial cities, a recommendation that was rejected by the majority of participants.
“Well, why don’t we have women-only cities and men-only cities?” Dr. Al-Rasheed asks. “Perhaps they could assign certain days of the year when we can meet our mates and breed.”
There are real issues to be addressed, she says, and while it is understandable that some people “fear change and they want things to remain as they are now, but new realities must be taken into consideration.”
The participants were hand-picked out of a pool of 700 who were recommended, a task that was undertaken by two different committees — one male and one female.
Dr. Al-Rasheed had praise for the diversity represented by the delegates. “It was really healthy. We now know how some people think.”
Nor did everyone act out an assigned role. “We had support from participants who were counted on the conservative side, because they saw how we were bullied and abused,” she stresses.
According to Dr. Al-Rasheed, the core problem is the inferiority complex of Saudis. “We underestimate ourselves. We are not a hopeless society; we are a very diverse one. The whole world believes that all Saudis think and speak the same way; this is not true. We have people with different accents, backgrounds and cultural beliefs. We have a very rich cultural heritage, and when fusing our beliefs with different viewpoints and ideas, a healthy society can be created.”
She had strong words for the myth of the Kingdom’s “special status”. “It’s an excuse that we have invented for everything for which we have no answer. I think it is becoming a joke. We are not aliens from another planet. We are all humans who eat, sleep, drink and have children like others,” she said. “I don’t think it’s right to detach ourselves from the whole world.”
“Some people think that we Saudis don’t accept the other,” she continued. “The fact is that we can’t even accept each other” in Saudi society. “We have to start at the grassroots and learn true Islamic behavior that teaches respect for religion, ethnicity and gender,” she said.
Yet there is room for hope. The dialogue ended after three days of discussions with 17 recommendations. Participants such as Dr. Fitaihi and Dr. Omar Baqaar as well as some female delegates objected to many of them and asked for a vote on each — their request was ignored.
“There was nothing new to many of the recommendations. We presented six more and they weren’t included. But after an extraordinary meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah, who treated us very gently and listened to our objections, two new recommendations were added and three of the original ones were amended by adding some of our concerns,” Dr. Al-Rasheed says.
She believes there will be “a big shift in internal policy, and this dialogue was a big step toward that,” she says. “The favor that some participants did us was that they demonstrated for all the ugliness of the extremist way of thinking.”
