Finding Saudi Arabia’s lost women
Toby Jones, an assistant history professor at Rutgers and a former analyst with the International Crisis Group, writes in with a thoughtful rebuttal to yesterday's post about Saudi Arabia: While I applaud the spirit of your critique of Anne Applebaum's take on gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, I'm afraid your rejoinder is wide of the ...
Toby Jones, an assistant history professor at Rutgers and a former analyst with the International Crisis Group, writes in with a thoughtful rebuttal to yesterday's post about Saudi Arabia:
Toby Jones, an assistant history professor at Rutgers and a former analyst with the International Crisis Group, writes in with a thoughtful rebuttal to yesterday's post about Saudi Arabia:
While I applaud the spirit of your critique of Anne Applebaum's take on gender apartheid in Saudi Arabia, I'm afraid your rejoinder is wide of the mark. Applebaum is right to criticize the ruling class, but wrong to say that the fate of women there isn't dictated by religion at all. Part of the challenge is to figure out what is religious about gender in Saudi Arabia and why religion gets invoked to justify women's subordinate status. Rather than seeing the issue as one of doctrine, or as the product of the peninsula's tribal past as you suggest, it would be more helpful to see it as political. More specifically, the kingdom's treatment of women has everything to do with the issue of the political, juridical, and legal structures of authority that flow from the basic contract between rulers and the clergy. Women have been thrown under the bus by the kingdom's rulers to the religious scholars who see control over women and women's bodies as one of the last bastions of their spiritual and social power. Islam does not dictate such treatment of women. We know, however, that the tenets of faith become fuzzy when authority and power are at stake.
On the issue of Saudi liberalism, you've parroted the Saudi state about the fault lines that exist in the kingdom and why we (the United States) should support the political status quo there: It is a place where a liberal leadership routinely squares off against a regressive, tribal, and dangerously conservative (religious) populace. The suggestion that the Saudis know what pace of reform the "traffic will bear" is hard to take seriously. Authoritarian states regularly claim to be "reforming," a process that typically leads to a stronger authoritarianism in the end. Saudi Arabia is no exception. Ask any Saudi reformer, including Abdullah al-Hamid who is in jail for promoting reform while Islamic militants are rehabbed and freed from prison, if the state just needs more time and that it will get there.
While there are plenty of Saudis who would be familiar to American liberals as a result of their having studied here, it is more important to recognize that there are also plenty of Saudis educated in their own system that express values and political goals that we should embrace and pursue more seriously. On the matter of gender apartheid, it is also time to take seriously the voices of Saudi women who have their own thoughts to offer about how to improve their fate. They are not hard to find.
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