Saudi newspapers ran front page pictures on Friday of King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz in a crowd of women with their faces bared, adding fuel to the growing fight over mixing in the kingdom. The undated photograph showed the kingdom’s two most powerful men together with more than three dozen smiling [...]
Saudi newspapers ran front page pictures on Friday of King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz in a crowd of women with their faces bared, adding fuel to the growing fight over mixing in the kingdom.
The undated photograph showed the kingdom’s two most powerful men together with more than three dozen smiling women at a seminar on health and the community in the southwestern city of Najran held several weeks ago.
The photograph was published in several leading newspapers including Okaz, Ashahrq al-Awsat and Al-Watan, each with a close link to senior members of the ruling royal family.
No reason was given for why the picture was published only now; accompanying text gave a routine description of the theme of the conference.
But the photo appeared amid a mounting and increasingly open debate over the country’s harsh ban on unrelated women and men mixing together enforced by ultra-conservative Saudi Muslim clerics.
In the past 10 days the outspoken head of the Mecca branch of the Saudi religious police, who enforce official Islamic morality, was fired and then mysteriously reinstated after he broke ranks to say that there was nothing in Islamic tradition and law banning mixing.
Newspapers reported vaguely that a high-level figure had intervened to save Sheikh Ahmed al-Ghamdi, after the president of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police, signed and published an order naming his replacement.
Most of the women in the photograph on Friday were also baring their faces, against leading clerics’ insistence, often enforced by the religious police, that women’s faces must be covered in public.
King Abdullah has not publicly spoken out on the debate. But last year he opened a new science university named after himself that permits the international body of students and faculty to freely mix together.
When a senior cleric criticised the university, he was summarily fired by order of the king himself.
One Response
The ridiculous thing about the clerics in this news story is that Islam – the religion itself – does not require women to cover their faces (I know what I’m talking about, I’m a Muslim woman from Pakistan). Even the dress code for the holiest pilgrimage of Hajj mandates that women keep their faces uncovered. Covering the face is NOT Muslim law, it is Arab culture. The Islamic code for purdah requires women to wear garments that
1. conceal the figure and prevent attention from being drawn to the body (and nowhere does it say the garment has to be black. The black robes are not Islamic law, they are Arab culture)
2. Provide complete coverage without obstructing the hands, feet, eyes, nose, and mouth. The garment must cover the wrists, but leave the hands free; cover the ankles, but leave feet free, cover the hair and neck, but leave the face free.
It’s a good rule. Dressing in the proper Islamic way means women can live without being objectified by men, or objectifying themselves in order to appeal to men. It curbs body insecurities and lets women focus on the more important things in life, as compared to obsessing over the size of their thighs. However, just because a few men went overboard (fear of losing their power to more capable women, perhaps?) the dress code of common sense has evolved into a dress code of “oppression”.