As with previous elections, this one followed a . The story goes like this. The parliament deadlocks over disputes about who the emir has appointed as his prime minister and cabinet. Allegations of the ruling Al-Sabah family’s corruption and unruly MPs playing to their tribal and sectarian constituencies add to a toxic brew of simmering resentment between the ruling family and the elected parliament. After months of wrangling, with important legislation left swinging in the wind, the emir dissolves the parliament and goes to the electorate hoping to end yet another impasse. Instead, the cycle of parliamentary deadlock, bitter wrangling and another election ensues. Naturally, the Kuwaitis are getting tired of this sordid saga.

Understanding the Recent Election

Earlier this year. Crown Prince Sheikh Mishaal Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah standing in for his ailing half-brother Emir Nawaf the parliament after it refused to approve his choices for the prime minister and cabinet ministers. He was hoping that voters would elect a parliament more amenable to his decisions.  The people have voted in a parliament that is bound to disappoint him. The opposition, a disparate grouping united only in their visceral dislike of the Al-Sabah family, secured significant gains. With a gain of 27 new MPs, the primary were Islamists.

The result sets up further confrontations and the promise of more deadlock at a time when the parliament needs to pass legislation enabling the government to borrow from global markets. And while the bounce in oil prices as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided financial relief, it is only temporary.  Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) hydrocarbons-rich neighbors, Kuwait is in efforts to diversify the economy away from near total dependency on oil.

Jenan Mohsin Ramadan Boushehri (l) and Alia Faisal Al Khaled (r) were elected as representatives of the Kuwaiti National Assembly, the national parliament. While most commentaries have focussed on Islamist wins and the likelihood of further deadlock, passing reference has been made to the election of . Note that no women were elected in the previous parliamentary election of December 2020.

Two Women MPs, Islamists and Implications for Women

Boushehri ran as an independent in the 3^rd constituency and comfortably.  She had previously served in the 2018 cabinet as the minister of public works and the minister of state for housing affairs. Joining her is the secular writer and thinker Al-Khalid who was in the 2^nd constituency.

Kuwaiti women have long campaigned against domestic violence and honor killings. Having two women in parliament may help to turn the tide but there remains a long way to go. After a wave of honor killings had rocked Kuwait last year, the women’s rights activist Nour al-Mukhled, writing for had this to say:

, which passed in Kuwait’s National Assembly in August of 2020, calls for the establishment of a National Family Protection Committee that would put measures in place to tackle the spread of domestic violence in Kuwait.… Despite the fact that the law was passed more than a year ago, the law remains nothing but merely ink on paper, continuously failing to protect women who end up being victims of domestic violence.

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The new law replaced the notorious which effectively enabled honour killings by treating the murder of women by their husbands or other male relatives as a misdemeanour punishable by a maximum three year jail term and/or a maximum fine of 225 Kuwaiti dinars, a little over $700.

The Family Protection Law also called for training for those assisting survivors of domestic violence and provision for shelters, rehabilitation and advisory services. A parliament consisting entirely of males, as Nour al-Mukhled noted, did nothing to put teeth into the legislation as they bickered with the ruling family.

It is high time for Kuwait’s parliament to act on honor killings and domestic violence. With two women back in parliament, change may come. But Kristin Smith Diwan, a senior resident scholar at Washington’s Arab Gulf States Institute, makes an regarding the victory of Islamists: “If those candidates come forth with conservative social positions it will divide those who are pushing for reforms.” Ominously Diwan added that 17 of the newly elected MPs had signed a “values pledge” calling for, amongst other things, gender segregation in schools.

Last October, al-Mukhled concluded:

More than one year and six lives later, we still see the offhand attitude in parliament and society toward violence against women, a convenient way of condoning this tragedy without condemning and holding accountable those responsible.

To see off that offhand attitude will take more than two women MPs, it will require an almost entirely male parliament to find its mettle and begin to bring to an end attitudes and practices that shame Kuwait.

[ first published this article and is a partner of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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During the past two years alone, six women have had their lives taken by either their male kin or other men. The women have been reduced to mere statistics thrown around to point out the rise of killings, without investigating the cause of their murder or providing insight into these high-profile cases.

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The Family Protection Law, which was passed by Kuwait’s national assembly in August 2020, for the establishment of a national family protection committee. This committee would put measures in place to tackle the spread of domestic violence. The law stipulates that those taking part in the family protection sector should undergo the necessary training. It also calls for the activation of a domestic violence shelter, which would offer rehabilitation and advisory services to survivors of domestic violence.

At the time, these measures were  as a victory, one that abolished Article 153, which treated honor killings as a misdemeanor with a maximum three-year prison sentence and/or a small fine for the perpetrator. Experts argued that Article 153 all but  honor killings. Yet despite being passed more than a year ago, the Family Protection Law remains nothing but merely ink on paper. The failure to protect women from being victims of domestic violence continues unabated.

Violence Against Women

The absence of such protection is what  Farah Hamza Akbar’s life. In April, Farah was gruesomely killed by a man she had previously filed two cases against for kidnapping and attempted murder. The perpetrator, Fahad Subhi Mohammed, who had been stalking the victim but was not known to her or her family, crashed into Farah’s car, kidnapped her and her two daughters. He stabbed Farah in the chest before dumping her body in front of a hospital, leaving her there to die.

Dana Akbar, Farah’s sister and lawyer, shared a  on social media saying she had warned the prosecutor several times that her sister’s life was in danger. According to Akbar, her sister’s perpetrator attempted to kidnap and harm Farah on multiple occasions. He was detained twice but released on bail each time. Mohammed was out on bail when he killed Farah.

The heinous crime sent shockwaves across Kuwait, resulting in a large  during the height of summer in the holy month of Ramadan. Protesters called for reforming existing laws, putting in place better protection mechanisms for victims of violence and actually enforcing the Family Protection Law.

The debate following Farah’s death served to amplify the anti-sexual harassment movement that was brought into prominence early in the year by Ascia al-Shammari. The influential fashion blogger posted a powerful venting her fury about the horror of being car chased by men, a common form of harassment in Kuwait. She called for a mechanism to report sexual harassment, saying “it is a necessary step in this country … So I don’t understand when you say you are against it.” The video went viral on social media platforms, provoking many women to comment and leading to “culturally sensitive” conversations about sexual harassment and gender-based violence.

Following Shammari’s video, a social media awareness campaign dubbed  (I will not be silent) was launched by medical doctor Shayma Shamo. It served as a virtual safe space that gave women the opportunity to share anonymous testimonies of harassment or abuse, encouraging more women to speak up.

Empty Promises

But the outrage that took place and the different hashtags only resulted in empty promises made by several members of parliament. Former MP Yousef al-Fadhala, who resigned from parliament in April, a government-sponsored mobile app designed to document and register instances of harassment. MP Abdulaziz al-Saqabi for an amendment to the penal code, adding punishments that include up to a year in prison and a fine of 3,000 Kuwaiti dinars ($9,940). Lastly, MP Abdullah al-Mudhaf adding punitive measures to the penal code, with a three-month window for the executive branch to activate these laws.

Almost eight months later, none of the proposals has been acted upon. However, in late September, the minister of commerce and industry and the chairman of the Public Authority for Manpower, Abdullah al-Salman, directives to end discrimination in the private sector and criminalize harassment in the workplace. While this step is long overdue, it is a promising one toward establishing a safer work environment for women. Yet there remains much to do.

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A recent  from the male-only Women, Children and Family Affairs parliamentary committee suggests that femicide is not a legislative issue but a societal one. The committee added that preventing violence against women is the responsibility of the government. This muddled and inadequate response, especially when Kuwait is witnessing a disturbing increase in femicide, is not nearly enough.

Despite having a vocal parliament and a free press, in comparison to its Gulf neighbors, Kuwait lags behind when it comes to enacting legislation to protect the lives of its women. More than one year and six lives later, we still see the offhand attitude in parliament and society toward violence against women, a convenient way of condoning this tragedy without condemning and holding accountable those responsible.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner organization of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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During the war, soon to enter its second decade, women were able to break into male-dominated professions — a development well known from other conflicts. However, this progress did not stem from social emancipation but rather due to the dwindling numbers of working-age men as a result of death, imprisonment, displacement and flight. Women’s new responsibilities came with multiple burdens of unequal pay coupled with housework, parenting and increased domestic violence as some men struggled to come to terms with their wives’ new roles.

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A 2017 survey among women living in Syria and abroad identified that 81% thought that the in Syria “truly impede women’s success.” Indeed, many Syrian women living in other countries experience new social conditions that allow them to break free from traditional gender roles. 

Newfound Freedom

Since 2014, Syrians have been the largest group of in Germany. As of December 2019, about 790,000 had fled to Germany, starting in 2010, and the proportion of women among Syrians seeking protection has increased over the years. Many  from Muslim-majority countries have little or no work experience. In numerous cases, they take their first steps to pursue a career in the country where they settle, with nearly 80% of female refugees expressing a desire to be gainfully employed.

A similar picture applies to Syrian women in Germany. According to a , 60% of them “definitely” want to work, and 25% are tending toward doing so, yet only 40% have any work experience. Most Syrian female refugees in Germany belonged to the upper social classes back home. They are well educated and already harbored values closer to those of their new home country. Hence, many of them are more inclined to embrace new freedoms and opportunities.

While the issues facing Syrian refugees may be underrepresented in German media, some have shared their experiences. Mai Zehna, who fled to Germany at the end of 2012 from Syria, where she already worked as an art teacher, Deutschlandfunk Kultur: “I grew up in an open family and was raised the same way as my brother. … Where I was born and raised … women look European. Of course, there are women with headscarves, but many are also unveiled.” Yet according to Zehna, women’s rights in Syria were a far cry from what she is now experiencing in Germany: “The laws in Syria don’t support women. There are written laws, but in reality … society looks at men and women differently. There is more support and freedom here than in Syria.”

Ghada, a 44-year-old from Aleppo, lived a very different life. She fled to Germany to escape her strictly religious family and husband, leaving two of her three children behind: “Women’s rights are suppressed in Syria. … I’ve had enough of it. … In Syria, I was forced to wear a headscarf and a long black coat. … Here in Germany, I have more freedom. I am far away from the oppression.”

Relationships at Risk

Unlike Ghada, who deliberately left her husband behind, many Syrian women have chosen to divorce their husbands in Germany, putting an end to their traditionally preordained roles as housewives. In Syria, women are legally allowed to file for divorce, albeit with more restrictions than men. But besides this discriminatory legal setup, they face pressure and intimidation from their families, neighbors and friends. Character assassination, social exclusion and slander are just some of the repercussions for divorced women who are still condemned by most segments of society.

Najat Abokal, a family attorney in Berlin, noticed an above-average proportion of Syrian women coming to her office and filing for divorce within the first year after the peak of refugee arrivals in 2015. As Abokal the Frankfurter Allgemeine, divorce was the only option for many women to escape domestic violence and begin an independent life. The divorces were often preceded by a period of separation before being reunited with their husbands who had stayed behind in Syria.

During this period, women learned to make decisions that they would have previously left up to their husbands. The unforeseen, long separation has helped many women develop self-confidence and awareness of their new rights. Social psychologist Bita Behravan, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, that women’s respective socio-economic backgrounds are secondary in terms of how they take in their new life in Germany. Women who lived in both modern and traditional roles in their countries of origin cannot help but notice their higher status in Germany.

Hence, the process of integration for Syrian women is an entirely different experience to that of men. Women can see the new values and norms as an opportunity. Men, on the other hand, might perceive it as a fall from grace. From the day they are born, they are used to being taken care of by women. Conversely, they traditionally play the role of providers. After arriving in Germany and reuniting with their wives, these men have to cope with the fact that they are  to take up work instantly, that their salaries are not enough to support the family and that their wife’s second income is required to make ends meet.

Besides, they often depend on their wives’ better German skills in daily life. This initial feeling of helplessness and discontent considering the intra-familial role reversal puts an immediate, and sometimes insurmountable, strain on marriages.

Worth It

Single  in Germany face similar fears of judgment as those trying to escape their marriages. In Syria, relationships outside of wedlock remain taboo — at least publicly. Underneath the surface of religious rules, premarital sexual relationships certainly exist, particularly in late adolescence and early adulthood. However, they remain an unspoken secret and are hushed up in the family and the public sphere. This spiral of silence does not vanish into thin air as soon as Syrian women cross the border into Germany. Even if they intend to leave behind the dominance of family and religious rules in favor of a liberal approach to love and sexuality, the fear of condemnation from their families or tainting the family honor looms large.

Speaking to , 24-year-old Syrian student Hana opened up about the different approach in her new home country: “Here in Germany … people don’t look into your personal life and they don’t require a certificate of marriage for a couple to live together. I feel more freedom and confidence to make my own decisions.” Nonetheless, she decided against telling her family that she now lives with her boyfriend.

In addition to fearing condemnation at home, women who embrace a more Western lifestyle worry about the judgment of men who have sought refuge in Germany but have retained patriarchal social attitudes. “Many immigrants come from patriarchal cultural contexts in which male dominance and female subordination are considered normal,” Susanne Schröter, director of the Global Islam Research Center in Frankfurt. Young refugee men often lose their former dominant role. Hence, some tend to revert to patriarchal practices of their homelands “to prevent these unruly women and girls from gaining freedom through violence.”

Very few women manage to resist this pressure and the weight of religious traditions and expectations. Yet despite these obstacles, many Syrian women in Germany have caught the independence bug. Through prior experiences, they have learned that winning their freedom and shaping their own lives requires strength and effort. Having endured oppression in Syria and taken on the dangerous journey to their new homes, those remaining risks seem worth taking. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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They speak about that which was previously forbidden: concerts with pop stars from the West, movie theaters, cultural exhibitions and sporting events such as the World Wrestling Entertainment  at the Mohammed Abdu Arena in Riyadh in February and the just-concluded inaugural Aramco  golf tournament, all with mixed audiences of men and women. And, of course, seeing women driving — a right that was granted in June 2018.

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The relaxation of the male guardianship system in August of this year has also been hailed as a  for women. At the time, the decision was celebrated by Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. Gathering together a group of female employees in the embassy, she said: “You have unalienable rights now, the right to your own identity, to move, dream, work.”

Correcting the Narrative

Speaking on November 19, the ambassador the importance of gender equity and women’s advancement as a cornerstone of Vision 2030, Mohammed bin Salman’s ambitious and audacious program of economic and social transformation. She also took up a theme often expressed by Saudi authorities: Hers was a country “too often misunderstood, our remarkable progress, reform and change too often overlooked.” She added, “We need to do a better job of correcting an inaccurate and distorted narrative.”

That was what the G20 summit was designed to do — to shift the narrative away from the negative. But COVID-19 intervened, and what was to have been a glittering showcase of Saudi innovation, creative drive and women’s empowerment became a flat Zoom reality. The opportunity to press the flesh and wow their guests with trips to sites like the $500-billion futuristic Neom city now under construction morphed into a dull screen of faces. Still, there was one moment of technical wizardry projecting a group photo of G20 leaders onto the walls of the historic ruins of the city of Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh.

But haunting that moment was another image, cast onto the Louvre museum in Paris. It was of three women activists detained in Saudi prisons: Loujain al-Hathloul, Nassima al-Sadah and Samar Badawi. Their plight and the plight of other women prisoners is the subject of a just-released  by Baroness Helena Kennedy, QC. She cites multiple Saudi and international laws and agreements that have been violated during the arrests and detention of the women. She details credible allegations of torture and names two individuals very close to the Saudi crown prince either directly engaged in or presiding over torture. The torture, the report says, included beatings, electric shock, sexual assault and threats to rape and kill family members.

The two named individuals are Saud al-Qahtani, implicated in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018, and Mohammed bin Salman’s younger brother and the former ambassador in Washington, Khalid bin Salman. Al-Qahtani escaped prosecution in Saudi Arabia for the killing of Khashoggi but remains on the US sanctions list he was put on shortly after the murder; in July, his name was added to the UK sanctions list.

Khalid bin Salman, while serving as ambassador to the US, reportedly encouraged Jamal Khashoggi in the belief that he could return safely to Saudi Arabia. Prince Khalid left the United States shortly after details of the killing began to emerge. He returned briefly, then quit his post. In February 2019, he was appointed deputy defense minister. His older brother, the crown prince, is defense minister. As Helena Kennedy’s report states:

“Al-Qahtani personally tortured Loujain on a number of occasions. Al-Qahtani’s involvement is also attested to by the former female inmate of Dhabhan, who stated that one of the Women’s Rights Activists had told her that Saud Al-Qahtani was present at the unofficial facility for much of the time she was there, directed a number of both individual and group torture sessions, threatened her with rape, and sexually abused her. She also told the former inmate that she had witnessed Saud Al-Qahtani sexually assaulting several other Women’s Rights Activists in their rooms, including Loujain Al-Hathloul and Eman Al-Nafjan.

Additionally, the former female inmate of Dhabhan reports that Khalid bin Salman was occasionally present at the unofficial facility, and would sometimes attend interrogations. One of the Women’s Rights Activists told her that he would threaten rape and murder when overseeing interrogations, and would boast about his position and power, saying ‘do you know who I am? I am Prince Khalid bin Salman, I am the ambassador to the US, and I can do anything I like to you’, or words to that effect.”

These are very serious allegations. However, they are not proven and the Saudi authorities have consistently denied the claims. But rather than have an independent investigation, the authorities have chosen to take the view that those detained and the manner of their detention are internal issues for the Saudi courts to deal with. It’s a position they took in  eight individuals and sentencing them to between seven and 20 years in jail for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Saud al-Qahtani was not among those charged.

“People Have Not Been Fair”

In an  with the BBC’s Lyse Doucet, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, said, “Our judiciary is independent and we do not allow people to lecture us or tell us what we should or shouldn’t do.” The minister claimed that Loujain al-Hathloul was not detained for her women’s rights activism but because she was being investigated as a national security risk. In 2018, Mohammed bin Salman called her a spy and said he would produce evidence “the next day” to prove it, but no such evidence has emerged.

Al-Jubeir also complained, as has Princess Reema, that Riyadh is a victim of unwarranted criticism: “I think that people have not been fair when it comes to dealing with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” he told Doucet. “I think they always look for the negative part of it rather than the positive part of it.”

Had US President Donald Trump secured reelection earlier this month, telling that “positive part” would have been less challenging. As it was, with the Saudis attempting to focus the summit on the global battle against COVID-19, Trump made a  via Zoom to extol his administration’s efforts at combating the pandemic and then left to play a round of golf. Joe Biden  Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” state in 2019, stating in October that his administration would “reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

The Saudis are hoping that was just electioneering talk. Speaking to  in a virtual interview on the sidelines of the G20 summit, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, said: “I’m confident that a Biden administration would continue to pursue policies that are in the interest of regional stability.” The foreign minister is likely correct in that assessment. But with the current abysmal state of human rights in the kingdom, it is far less likely that the Biden White House will buy into the positive narrative of reform and change Princess Reema has been deployed to sell in Washington.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Saudi Arabia’s Mission to Correct “Distorted Narrative” appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Many countries have seen higher levels of domestic violence reports since mass worldwide outbreaks began. The World Health Organization noted a 60% spike in calls to European domestic violence hotlines in April, and the US is no exception. States including New York and California declared up to 20%-30% in hotline calls about domestic violence cases. Even in places where reporting rates had not increased, such as , activists feared this was due to a lack of victims’ ability to report violence rather than no increased rates of violence.

In response to these trends, the United States dedicated $45 million for emergency shelter and $2 million to the National Domestic Violence Hotline from the $2-trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. However, it lacked targeted measures to provide resources for sexual assault. proposed this past March would have provided an additional $350 million in funding for domestic violence survivors, but was not passed by the House. While a second stimulus package has not been put forward yet, more support must go toward legislation that specifically addresses increased levels of domestic violence through additional funding and support.

In spite of the knowledge that increased funding does not ensure best practices because the current situation is so fluid, it is critical to take all immediate avenues available to address the major upticks in domestic abuse.

Even as stay-at-home orders are removed, shelters and organizations need greater support in assisting victims. Many victims will no longer be in an economic position to leave abusers, and the long-term impacts of trauma will not disappear overnight. Within the US, centers and support hotlines need more staff and training, vulnerable communities like immigrants and those in poverty need increased protections, and greater enforcement of gun ownership by known abusers must be regulated given the ever recorded in the US.

Another measure that needs to be accounted for in any future stimulus package is the accessibility of counseling services. Even with insurance, copays can be prohibitively expensive, and up to are unaware of their access to services. Shelters will likely be in greater demand as more people feel secure enough to leave toxic situations and makeshift shelters (like hotels) become unavailable. Organizations will need long-term support in helping those affected by domestic violence regain stability, including rehabilitation programs for offenders. Particularly critical is if there are multiple waves of shelter-in-place orders, which will endanger victims, survivors and the organizations that work to serve them.

A new House proposition, , would require the attorney general to issue guidance to law enforcement agencies as they respond to increased levels of domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It would also better inform agencies of how to address domestic violence crises. This is critical, as many victims are wary of law enforcement. It would be advantageous to allow for court hearings to be held virtually nationwide as well as automatically extending restraining orders, as have done. Programs being shifted online could expedite processes to help victims, not just for the short-term, but also provide alternative options long term for survivors of domestic abuse.

There is no one easy fix to deal with the ramifications of increased domestic violence amidst this pandemic. However, efficient government responses help mitigate the negative impact on current victims and protect others from future violence. Managing the impacts of domestic violence is critical as it affects people at all levels, but particularly those already vulnerable to society’s hardships, including, but not exclusive, to those living in poverty, LGBTQ-identifying individuals, immigrants and communities of color.

Domestic abuse is not an issue America can afford to sideline. It is an ongoing systematic problem with long-term, traumatic consequences that affects the entire nation. The United States needs to respond accordingly in the face of dire circumstances.

*[In the US, you can contact  on 1-800-799-7233 to report domestic abuse.] 

*[Young Professionals in Foreign Policy is a of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Since the Saudis announced Vision 2030 in April 2016, this plan for economic diversification has been MBS’ flagship initiative. The crown prince has gained a significant amount of popularity among Saudi youth who have welcomed the social changes that Vision 2030 has ushered in, from the reopening of cinemas, pop concerts, football matches and car shows. Some of the social changes that have granted some limited personal freedoms to the kingdom’s male and female subjects, highlighted by the curbing of the authority of the religious police, have been significant by Saudi standards.

In fact, only 10 years ago experts on Saudi Arabia would have been shocked to learn that in 2018 there would be female drivers on the streets of Riyadh or a partial revision of the internationally controversial guardianship system.

New Future

The social transformation carried out by the ruling elite has been functional in shaping a new lifestyle model consistent with the innovative vision of the urban citizenry conceived by MBS and exemplified by , a mega project for a smart city announced during the Future Investment Initiative conference held in October 2017. In this regard, by combining the two words “neo” and “mostaqbal,” meaning “new” and “future,” NEOM’s name explains the plan. As a matter of fact, the initiative’s purpose is to define a new future for Saudi Arabia by designing a cutting-edge city, extended for more than 10,000 square miles in Tabuk province on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea shore.

NEOM is a $500-billion project aiming not only at developing a for the hi-tech sector, hosting next-generation technology startups, wealthy investors and fintech, but also at creating from the scratch a new kind of urban center entirely powered by renewable energy. NEOM is branded as “the futuristic city,” where the transport system is based on automated vehicles, robots are devoted to accomplishing a wide array of everyday functions and tasks, and people’s daily lives are supported by digitalization and 5G technologies.

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Secondly, the urban environment design and the offered facilities represent a key element in attracting creative and innovative individuals who will find in this city the perfect place to define, implement and optimize their cutting-edge projects. In addition, thanks to its own laws, tax system and regulations, NEOM will be an independent economic zone able to stimulate a consistent inflow of capital and investor funds.

As a matter of fact, it is important to highlight that several — such as Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of the SoftBank Group Corp. of Japan; Stephen A. Schwartzman, chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group; Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics; and Klaus Kleinfeld, former chairman and CEO of Arconic Alcoa Inc., and Siemens AG — have conspicuously financed NEOM’s plan. The crown prince himself has staked a considerable amount of his chips, in terms of legitimacy and international credibility, on this multibillion-dollar project that represents one of the most significant economic diversification initiatives implemented by the Saudi government and is the keystone of Vision 2030.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

A consistent part of MBS’ diversification plan relies on the progress achieved by the (4IR), which has been described by Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum, as a new phenomenon where technological advancements influence and integrate themselves with the physical, digital and biological spheres. In this context, cutting-edge emerging technologies are bound to have a significant effect on both the economic output and people’s daily lives.

Saudi Arabia decided to bolster its commitment to the 4IR by establishing, in November 2019, the (C4IR), which is the fifth research facility in the world focused on these issues. Schwab and Mohammed al-Tuwajri, the Saudi minister of economy and planning, established the C4IR with the aim to create a hub for developing pilot projects on artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things, robots, smart cities, automated mobility, future airspace, unmanned aerial vehicles and blockchain technology.

The technological achievements aim at boosting industrial productivity, cutting unnecessary costs and reducing risks in dangerous working environments such as pipelines or natural gas and oil processing plants. In this regard, the represents the Saudi crown jewel in terms of manufacturing facilities that integrate and adapt their production to pioneering 4IR technologies. Moreover, according to estimates made by the consulting firm AT Kearney, a growth of $266.6 billion in output is expected as result of investments made on the 4IR between 2017 and 2030.

More precisely, the inflow of funds financing AI solutions is to add 12.4% to GDP in this time frame. Therefore, the initiatives represent the first significant steps taken by Saudi Arabia to diversify its economy from oil-based revenues and to overhaul its economic and production systems.

Besides a climate of moderate social relaxation and an innovative urban environment marked by artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles, the third pillar of Vision 2030 relies on a of the Saudi public sector. The reforms are focused on the partial privatization of public services and state-run firms, the introduction of a more pervasive taxation system and the reduction of public sector employment. Indeed, between 2016 and 2018, Mohammed bin Salman implemented a pronouncedly neoliberal economic agenda aimed at cutting salaries for public sector employees, slashing subsidies for energy and water utilities, and introducing a 5% value-added tax on several essential staples, goods and services.

The appealing rhetoric perpetuating a narrative that depicts Saudi Arabia as a modern, tolerant and open-minded country is not only functional to winning the hearts and the minds of the Saudis youth, but it also serves to persuade international investors that Vision 2030 is reliable, promising and worthy of their funds.

In a country where is under the age of 35, many young people are eager to escape the restrictions imposed by the conservative elites and ready to play a new role in Saudi Arabia’s dynamics. As a matter of fact, by strengthening nationalistic rhetoric based on a renewed patriotism, by sidelining the previously dominant role of the religious establishment and by promising that a prosperous future is coming, MBS has promoted a . This fashionable narrative is not only likely to overthrow the two key pillars of the Saudi Arabian Kingdom, Wahhabism and the Al Saud family, but to substitute them with a new one, consisting of the cult of personality of the crown prince who presents himself as the only person able to fulfill the expectations of the Saudi youth.

No One Is Immune

However, even though Vision 2030 constitutes a crucial pillar of MBS’ strategy to secure his stance, recurrent purges seem to represent the crown prince’s favorite tool to secure the reins of political power in the kingdom, and the last that occurred earlier in March is the latest example of it. Under the threat of an attempted coup, high-ranking members of the royal family like Prince Ahmed bin Abdul Aziz, the younger brother of King Salman and the last member of the “Sudari Seven,” Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the former crown prince, and his brother Nawaf bin Nayef have been arrested. Indeed, this purge could be seen as only another one of the numerous actions undertaken to consolidate MBS’ hold on power.

First, King Salman amended the 1990 Basic Law of Governance by substituting the horizontal line of royal succession with a vertical one, from father to son. Second, the , which occurred in the Fall of 2017, silenced the dissenting voices of several religious scholars, intellectuals, economists, entrepreneurs and roughly 300 members of the royal family, including Prince Miteb bin Abdullah, at the time the head of the Saudi Arabian National Guard.

The periodic purges are the result of a that aims to replace the old royal establishment that stands accused of being corrupt with a new array of institutional figures loyal to MBS, such as Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the minister of energy, Ahmad al-Khatib, the minister of tourism, Prince Abdullah bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the minister of the National Guard, and Prince Khalid bin Salman, the former Saudi ambassador to the US and deputy minister of the Defense Department.

In addition, the campaigns of mass arrests have been functional to strengthening the crown prince’s personal control over the essential branches of the state apparatus like the Ministry of Defense, the Higher Council for Saudi Aramco and the boards of the Military Industries Corporation and the Public Investment Fund (PIF). In this way, the latest arrests confirm MBS’ commitment to perpetuating his grip on the backbone of the Saudi state.

Between the Coronavirus and an Oil War

With the free fall of oil prices due both to the price war between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman and to the plummeting demand for oil on the global market, the ability of Saudi Arabia to raise the revenues necessary to implement Vision 2030’s economic measures has come under scrutiny by several financial institutions. Even though the pandemic and the initial Russian opposition to cut oil production could be blamed for having caused considerable disarray in Saudi finances, it is essential to highlight that the kingdom’s downward path dates back to several years ago.

As a matter of fact, the country’s GDP per capita from $25,243 in 2012 to $23,338 in 2018, and since the proclamation of Salman bin Abdelaziz Al Saud as king in January 2015, the fiscal reserves held by the central bank in foreign exchange reserves declined from $732 billion to roughly $500 billion at the end of last year. What emerges is that (FDIs) dramatically dried up since 2010, when they stood at around $29 billion, to just above $3 billion two years ago.

Nonetheless, under the hammered out by OPEC+, the meeting which gathers 24 OPEC member states plus several other leading producers of crude, Saudi Arabia is bound to experience a consistent shortage in its state revenues. With an imposed reduction of oil production amounting to approximatively 10% of the global supply — equivalent to nearly 9.7 million barrels a day between May and June — the kingdom up to $40 billion in earnings by the end of 2020, lowering the predicted oil revenues for the year from $136.4 billion to $91 billion. Economic losses will probably increase as a result of the of 1 million barrels per day in June, recently announced by the energy minister.

In order to address the potential problem of a cash crunch, MBS and his advisers have already taken some fiscal measures by raising the country’s debt ceiling from 30% to 50% of the GDP by cutting five percentage points from the government budget for 2020 and by requiring ministers with a portfolio to draft spending review plans for additional contractions that may achieve a 20% reduction of the total budget. Nevertheless, at this moment, it is difficult to predict whether these measures will be sufficient or if further actions will be required. Besides, it is important to point out that several conditions give Saudi Arabia some room for maneuver in the attempt to shore up its financial outlook.

Undoubtedly, the almost finalized granted by a bank consortium led by HSBC and the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation is one of them. It should provide Saudi Arabia with the necessary financial backing to secure its acquisition of the vast majority of stakes in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, which represents a crucial step in the crown prince’s agenda toward economic diversification.

Secondly, the long-awaited and hyped of Saudi Aramco that took place last December enabled Saudi Arabia to raise a revenue of $29.4 billion, which would allow the crown prince not only to channel funds towards the PIF — the Saudi sovereign wealth fund devoted to economically sustain the Vision 2030’s initiative — but also to provide fresh liquidity necessarily to address immediate needs.

Despite the ongoing uncertainties due to the coronavirus outbreak and the state of the global crude market, there is a that oil demand could optimistically level off and recover by the end of the year. If a similar situation does materialize, Saudi Arabia would certainly benefit from it. However, even though several scenarios should be considered, for a country like Saudi Arabia, where comes from crude, such predictions are not an option but a necessity, especially if one thinks about the vast amount of investment and funds required for the functioning of Vision 2030. In this regard, the new political, economic and social contract shaped by MBS is firmly based on a massive influx of capital without which the regime will be neither able to sustain its legitimacy nor gain popular support.

Cosmetic Reforms

However, as far as Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms seemed to usher in effective transformation of the Saudi social and economic environment, four years since their implementation, they have revealed to be nothing more than a mere exercise in superficiality that has left the political, social and economic structures almost unaltered. Indeed, even though some restrictions on women’s freedoms have been lifted, the overall condition of is far from acceptable.

Not only do several female activists like Aziza al-Yousef, Loujain al-Hathloul and Nouf Abdulaziz remain incarcerated and accused of “undermining the security and stability” of the nation, but also the male guardianship system continues to substantially prevent women from a full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

When it comes to the hyped economic reforms, these have been almost entirely halted due to the they have provoked among the Saudi middle and lower classes. It is fundamental to highlight that the implementation of such a political and economic framework in the Saudi context, which is almost unprepared to deal with an non-paternalistic free economic market, will likely result in anything but a worsening of the employees’ conditions. Indeed, not only is the perception confirmed by the fact that at least 20% of the Saudi population is believed to be living in chronic poverty but also by the absence of adequate labor protections for workers in the private sector that is likely to leave the workforce in unsafe conditions, condemning workers to a vicious cycle.

The Saudi youth needs an economic policy aimed firstly at tackling the structural poverty affecting the country; secondly, at providing them with the tools necessary to deal with an even more competitive private sector; and, finally, at training Saudi employees to a gradual and prepared transition from a labor market dominated by the state to a liberal one.

The Fourth Saudi State

Undoubtedly, MBS’ economic and political agenda has begun to erode the pillars of the Saudi Arabian identity that identifies as the “strict observance of the Islamic faith and, of course, the loyalty to the House of Saud.” In this regard, Mohammed bin Salman is walking a tightrope because, by refusing the two traditional tools used by the Al Saud family to build up its political support and by replacing them with a promise of modernity and economic growth, he has anchored his legitimacy directly to the success of Vision 2030.

Therefore, in a time where Saudi Arabia’s capacity to attract investment is highly questioned, and an oil-based economy seems to be a less reliable source of revenue, what it is at stake is certainly Saudi economic growth, but also the capacity of the crown prince to secure the funds necessary to maintain endorsement of the middle class and to stop his rivals from attempting to loosen his grip on power.

Mohammed bin Salman, nicknamed the “,” has introduced a consistent degree of unpredictability and insecurity to the Saudi Kingdom previously marked by domestic political stability and a smooth transition to the throne. However, it is difficult to assess if the crown prince’s latest conduct has strengthened or weakened his position. Nevertheless, what is certain is the fact that MBS has several members of the house of Al Saud.

Moreover, the economic policies undertaken by MBS are not likely to achieve the promised results. In fact, , such as those in Uber, Lyft, Snap, Tesla, Lucid and Masayoshi Son’s Softbank Vision Fund made by the PIF, struggle to drive the Saudi economy toward a reliable, well-run and efficient diversification path. Besides, the death of a civil activist protesting the government’s decision to relocate the 20,000 inhabitants of Tabuk province in order to make place for NEOM, has put the project under close international scrutiny.

In conclusion, the crown prince’s strategy is based on a of the Saudi political, social and economic structure, but his vision is highly dependent on a constant and substantial influx of foreign investment and revenue. On one side, MBS challenges the traditional rentier state apparatus and its unwritten social contract, but on the other, he refuses to seriously tackle the unaddressed structural challenges of Saudi Arabia.

In addition, a cut in the state budget recently announced by the Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan and the introduction of an austerity package based on the suspension of the living allowance by June, the increase of VAT from 5% to 15% by July, and the slashing of from the NEOM project seem to add a further burden on Saudi households. However, whether the house of Salman will be successful in replacing the house of Al Saud is something that remains to be seen.

*[Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly referred to Prince Khalid bin Salman as the current Saudi ambassador to the US. Updated on 6/12/2020 at 10:30 GMT.]

*[ is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Recently, I conducted an independent study on hostels in Morocco through the School of International Training, seeking to add context to the dilemma of local investment versus tourist intrusion in the country’s rapidly gentrifying medinas. Hostels in Morocco are a recent phenomenon, an institution in early 20th century Germany and brought to Morocco in the past two decades alone. There is an unfortunate dearth of data on Morocco’s hostels, though their establishment has paralleled the rapid development of guesthouses in the old cities.

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Since the late 1990s, numerous riads — traditional homes built around a central courtyard — have been converted into tourist accommodations or second homes. The process has been swift. In the Marrakech medina, there were merely a handful of guesthouses in 1997, and still under 50 in the year 2000. By 2008, the University of Warsaw’s Maciej Kalaska that there were approximately 450 guesthouses in the medina, 70% of which were owned by foreigners of European origin. 

With Open Arms

Most of the critics of gentrification in Morocco, however, don’t come from inside the country’s medinas, but rather from national media and middle-class Moroccans living outside the old cities. Professor Sadik Rddad, of Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, said in an interview that the converted riads are “working wonderfully” for the Fes medina, which was in a state of decline before an influx of foreign investment in the 1990s. In his view, it is vital that the people of Fes benefit directly from tourism — and tourists are able to experience Fes more in a more immersive way. 

This is not to say that the whole community embraces tourists with open arms. Fes is known as Morocco’s spiritual capital, and tourist presence has had a particularly acute impact. Economic and cultural reshaping aside, the presence of tourists on hostel and guesthouse terraces has entirely disrupted the city’s rooftop culture. Rooftops are a conservative and female space, sacred under traditional norms of privacy. As Rddad puts it, “It’s going out without going out.”

Women do not expect to see men in this space or have their privacy violated by tourists, and can no longer use the roof as they have in the past. The disturbance of conservative spaces is more than just a side effect. Rddad says that the government uses tourism as a vehicle for modernization and to open up society.

And, of course, gentrification pushes residents out. According to Rddad, you used to be able to rent a room in the Fes medina for about 100 dirhams per month, or just over $10. Its affordability was part of what made the city attractive. By 1995, however, a beautiful old house Rddad’s family was selling could go for around $13,000. Now, he estimates, that the house could be worth $70,000 or more.

The Price of Conversion

Cultural tourism has been evolving in Morocco for well over a century, and was further by an international tourism campaign during the French Protectorate. The new phenomenon of converted riads, however, is bringing tourists into residential spaces where hotels are not necessarily present. This facilitates global gentrification in a similar way to , driving up housing prices, raising standards for luxury amenities and high internet speeds, and propping up food and entertainment businesses over those that cater to permanent residents.

According to scholars Rachele Borghi and Claudio Minca, other of riad conversion include the modification of urban cultures, economic segregation, a lack of regulation in renovation and the sexual behavior of tourists. Yet 57% of residents surveyed for a study cited by Borghi and Minca asserted that the gentrification of the medina was a positive trend. Foreign investment in tourism in the medinas creates jobs, supports local craftsmanship and has resulted in the rehabilitation of many deteriorating riads.

The World Bank and the Moroccan government have played a key role with strategies such a in the 1990s, which opened up the medina to private, national and international investment. The state has long promoted tourism as an engine for development, Morocco as an accessible Oriental ideal. In 2011, the industry for 8.9% of the country’s GDP and directly contributed to 7.8% of total employment. However, scholars have the possibility of reverse causality, arguing against the blind promotion of mass tourism as a driver of long-term economic growth. 

This is due in part to economic leakage, which is a predominant issue for the tourism industry worldwide. Often, of the total cost of a trip actually remains in the host destination. By importing building materials, supplies and human resources, hotels and resorts — particularly international corporations — are the primary culprits. Though these establishments might employ residents of the host country, their salaries will be lower than top management staff, many of whom are expatriates.

Tourist gentrification results in inflation and increased land values in the host economy, as well as over-dependence on this economic sector, making communities vulnerable to natural disasters and even seasonal changes in demand.

To an extent, hostels are an antidote to this superstructure of Western Orientalist exploitation. Establishments geared toward budget travelers are arguably more sustainable than other forms of accommodation. Timothy and Teye that these places are “more likely to be locally owned, employ destination residents, and utilize locally produced goods and services.” Furthermore, a larger percentage of budget travelers’ expenditure directly benefits the host community, and they often spend more time, and therefore more money, in the host country.

Local Communities

But it isn’t quite this simple. Foreign ownership of converted riads still removes capital from the local market and into the hands of foreign intermediaries. The Moroccan government a “friendly investment climate” that allows foreign investors to hold up to 100% of share capital and transfer all profits to their home country. According to a New York Times by Roxana Popescu on real estate in Morocco, foreigners comprise 70% to 80% of Morocco’s luxury real estate buyers. With a nice riad in Marrakech or Tangier costing between $240,000 and $360,000, the startup costs are simply too high for most Moroccans to enter the hostel industry. 

Regardless of ownership, each of the four hostels I studied had a predominantly Moroccan staff. Only five of 11 interviewees offered any criticism of foreign ownership, and only one of these was a hostel owner or employee. Interviewees were largely indifferent or even supportive of foreign ownership and acknowledged without fail that it is necessary due to high startup costs.

My research indicated a perception that most hostel owners are generally either foreigners or wealthy Moroccans who have traveled abroad. Not only is the concept of hostels new to Morocco, but so is the idea of internal tourism. In the past, Moroccans would travel to stay with family, and now they either opt for the home of a family member or a hotel. There are plenty of cheap hotels, and they are easier to find. 

“Hostels are not part of our culture,” Professor Rddad said. “People do not think of hostels when they travel.”

I conducted 11 interviews in Fes, Tangier, Rabat and Essaouira, and the perceptions of interviewees reflected Rddad’s assertion that hostel culture is rather uncharted territory for many Moroccans traveling domestically. However, in some cases, the relative scarcity of Moroccan guests in hostels is a result of overt exclusion rather than unfamiliarity.

Article 490 of Morocco’s Penal Code sexual relations outside of marriage, and unmarried Moroccan couples are not allowed to stay together in a private room. There is no law, however, that bars couples or solo travelers with Moroccan passports from staying in hostel dormitories. Early in my research period, I stayed in a hostel that is owned and operated entirely by Moroccans, but does not allow Moroccans to stay in its dormitories. In subsequent interviews, I was told that this is sometimes a business orientation that hostel owners subscribe to for the purpose of appearing more attractive to foreign tourists. 

This was not always the case, and I also encountered business models that explicitly include and give back to the communities in which they are based. One hostel involved in this study even reinvests revenue into training local youth how to surf. But such a racist and exclusionary policy adds another dimension to the complex social dynamics of Morocco’s burgeoning hostel industry, on top of the ubiquity of foreign ownership. 

Though my research was limited in scope, it is clear that not all hostels are created equal. As Morocco’s tourism industry expands, it will not only cope with a dominant superstructure of multinational corporations but also the social implications of a changing industry with pervasive undercurrents of essentialization, exploitation and exclusion. 

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Statistics reveal that Egyptian women have been battling sexual harassment for decades. A revealed that 99.3 % of Egyptian women and girls have experienced some form of sexual harassment. In 2017, a Thomson Reuters Foundation named Cairo as the most dangerous megacity for women, citing verbal and physical harassment as some of these dangers.

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Such statistics disclose why Egyptian women had no choice but to embark on an anti-sexual harassment battle much earlier than the start of the #MeToo campaign. Over the years, female activists, and many male supporters, have fought to end the sexual harassment epidemic in Egypt.

No Choice

“We have accomplished many legal and societal gains,” confirms Egyptian journalist , referring to changes in sexual harassment laws, prosecutors handling sexual harassment cases at a much faster rate, in addition to more social awareness and more open discussions on sexual harassment. Egyptian female activists have also been successful in bringing public attention to sexual harassment and transforming it from a private, taboo issue to a public one.

One of the most successful women-led initiatives in Egypt is Harass Map, founded by a group of activists in 2010. Harass Map allows women to report specific sexual harassment incidents by pinpointing on a virtual map the exact location of the incident and describing the perpetrator as a way to warn others and to expose assaulters.

Following the 2011 Arab Uprisings, the Facebook page, , was founded in 2012. The initiative is run by anti-harassment activists who monitor and document harassment incidents. They train volunteers, conduct awareness workshops and offer a safe space for Egyptian women to share their harassment experiences. The page has had significant impact, encouraging many women over the years to open up about their experiences and their success stories with fighting their harassers.

Additionally, Egyptian women’s online and offline activism prompted amendments to sexual harassment laws, twice in Egypt’s recent history. The most came in 2014, with modifications to Article 306 of Egypt’s penal code, to enhance penalties for sexual harassment offenders. It is because of these accomplishments that Mahfouz insists that “#MeToo revived what was already there, but it did not create the Egyptian movement.”

Inspiration and Trauma

While many agree with Mahfouz, others argue that the #MeToo movement managed to inspire select groups of women within Egypt. “For me personally it [#MeToo] has helped open a debate amongst similar-minded men, who are open to learning and improving their behavior,” says human rights activist .

For trauma psychotherapist Yasmine Madkour, the #MeToo movement inspired her personally. “It was the peak moment for me to talk freely and publicly about my personal experience with sexual assault on my personal blog,” Madkour reveals. “For years before the #MeToo campaign, I was writing my experience with no details, for healing purposes and also for awareness and empowering purposes. The #MeToo campaign was some sort of trigger for me to talk about my past experience in detail.” 

Madkour argues that the campaign also affected some of her patients, largely comprised of sexually-traumatized women. For some, the impact was damaging, as #MeToo news stories triggered traumatic memories. “I advised many of them not to follow the news; it is not healthy for them to keep following what triggers the trauma,” explains Madkour.

Yet for other female patients, Madkour argues the #MeToo impact was positive: “With campaigns like that, every one of them can feel that she is not alone in her battle and that she is not the reason her sexual harasser approached her.” Madkour, Sami and Mahfouz all agree that #MeToo inspired some Egyptian women to go public with their sexual assault and/or harassment experiences.

And they are right. Encouraged by the #MeToo movement, a number of Egyptian women have made public accusations against their offenders. In February 2018, former presidential candidate and human rights lawyer, , resigned from the Bread and Freedom Party, which he co-founded in 2013, following allegations by a former colleague that she was sexually harassed by Ali in 2015. 

In August 2018, an Egyptian woman named Menna Gubran posted a video online of a man harassing her on a Cairo street. The video went viral overnight. Then, in September 2018, a prominent Egyptian TV presenter and Deutsche Welle (DW) employee, Yousri Fouda, was following sexual harassment allegations by three DW colleagues. Days later, Egyptian activist published a Facebook post accusing Fouda of unwanted sexual advances.

Finally, in October of last year, Egyptian Fashion Editor, , filed a sexual harassment complaint against her boss, which was the first time for an Egyptian woman to file a complaint against a superior.

Disappointment

Despite these promising stories, Sami points out that victim blaming continues to haunt women who speak up. Both Gubran and el-Shamy lost their jobs after they exposed their harassers publicly. Mahfouz and Sami add that the #MeToo campaign had minimal impact on the most vulnerable groups of women, including factory workers and women who rely on public transportation, which is where harassment commonly ensues.

Disappointed that #MeToo has so far failed most Egyptian women, Sami adds, “I hoped it would tackle more serious situations where women are extremely vulnerable to attacks and have no channels to expose or seek help.”

The #MeToo campaign may not have affected all Egyptian women, but the good news is that they continue to grow increasingly vocal and more forceful in their anti-harassment battle. There is no doubt that campaigns such as #MeToo help empower and inspire some, even if they do not reach all women. After all, such diverse campaigns and social media hashtags add more voices to the struggle against sexual harassment. “The voices against sexual harassment and sexism in the workplace have a better chance to be heard through the various campaigns and social media trends,” says Madkour.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post In Egypt, the Me Too Movement Is Falling Short appeared first on 51�Թ�.

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While the major onset of women’s activism is often to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when women in the US and Europe organized around issues of equality in mass numbers, there are numerous examples of over the centuries. The movement of women in the 1960s, often referred to as the — the first being the push for suffrage and other opportunities for women at the turn of the 20^th century — is important because it represented a wide-spread, mass-based movement. But it is imperative that we have knowledge and understanding of the larger historical context of women’s activism so we can better understand both what hinders as well as facilitates activism.

Putting the Stereotypes to Work

When and why do women’s movements emerge? emerge for many of the same reasons that any emerges. There are often numerous reasons for people to organize for change, and yet not that many people do. Among the conditions that help enable social movement emergence are: an event that seriously disrupts life, such as an economic depression, a war, an environmental catastrophe; the presence of in terms of leaders, money and supplies; a sense of relative deprivation — that your group has less relative to another group that you see as your equal; and the existence of that open up a space for your grievance to be heard.

Throughout history, across the globe, these conditions have coalesced at times to help foster movements of women seeking to change their own lives, those of their families and of their communities. For example, in 1929, thousands of women in the provinces of Calabar and Owerri in southeastern Nigeria, organized and led a protest against colonialism, an event which came to be known as the . The colonial administrators had imposed a tax on Igbo market women that the women feared would make selling unfeasible, which in turn would disrupt the food supply. The women utilized traditional practices of all-night song and dance, as well non-traditional practices such as attacking European-owned stores and Barclays Bank.

The tax — on top of other colonial injustices — which threatened the food supply, the presence of a women’s network created by the tight bonds these women in the community shared, and the opportunity to utilize traditional protest all help explain this important, early example of feminist and anti-colonial mobilization. So, what makes women’s movements different from other social movements? Can we even talk about a “women’s movement”?

Can we define women’s movements? The answer is both yes and no. There is no worldwide women’s movement, per se. Cultural, religious, ethnic and class differences result in too many varied interests, concerns and needs. Even within countries like the US we cannot speak of a unified women’s movement. There are women on the side of the political spectrum who organize, as well as women on the left, and they do not often see eye to eye. That said, worldwide do tend to mobilize around issues important to women, and though some may not necessarily challenge broader societal impediments to women’s equality, the issues they mobilize around are focused on women, have female leadership and are organized and developed by women.

Thus, in this way we can think about women’s movements across class, culture, ethnicity and ideology, all in the same breath. Additionally, women’s movements have a few commonalities. Many issues are across cultures, ethnicities and ideologies, thus prompting women to join movements for similar reasons, such as sexual violence, unequal pay, unequal treatment in the workplace and the home, and more.

Further, women have a tactic at their disposal that is not available to men: The preconceived notions and stereotypes about their sex allow them to do things that men cannot. For example, one afternoon in 1977, during the brutal military dictatorship in Argentina, women organized in the Plaza Del Mayo to protest the mass disappearances of their children, grandchildren and husbands. This group came to be known as the . The dictatorship was stymied by the women’s actions — it did not feel it could stop them. The women were mourning the loss of members of their family every afternoon for months, years, then decades (the organization is today) in the Plaza de Mayo, and the government could do little to end something that was seen as a traditional display of womanhood.

The dictatorship did abduct, and presumably kill, a few of the group’s founders, but it did no more. The junta feared the public backlash that would come from harming women en masse.

This display, undertaken intentionally by women, drew worldwide attention to the issues in Argentina and helped affect change. Women have smuggled bombs and munitions, held “knitting circles” where they plotted and planned protest and were never suspected for a moment because of societal stereotypes about women. These are just a few examples of tactics available to women that are not available to men, and which unite women in their attempts to affect change.

Why Join?

Why do women join women’s movements? While there are many reasons that women, or anyone, for that matter, a social movement, there are a few key ones that explain most calls to activism. One key reason is that a trauma or disaster has occurred in their life, has “woken” them up. Encouragement from friends, relatives or one’s church can also spur someone to take a step that they may not otherwise take. The removal of barriers to participation — having time, money, free time, etc. — can also enable participation. Feelings of solidarity, of comradery that may come from working together also help motivate someone to join and remain committed. Purposive benefits, that feeling of doing the right thing, also help encourage people to action.  

Finally, material benefits matter. If joining can help protect or improve one’s economic well-being, this is a powerful incentive to join, to overcome the fear of stepping forward. While women join social movements for reasons similar to men, often their gendered identities further define what issues mobilize them. And often the main reason for mobilizing as women, especially in the developing world, is because their practical gender needs have been threatened. Thus, historically, movements in the developing world have been focused around interests traditionally associated with women’s realm: health, education, children, access to food and water — practical gender interests.

In South Africa, the group organized, in part, to protect seeds, soil and indigenous ways of life. The vast majority of farming throughout much of Africa is done by women. Thus, women see first hand the impacts of the destruction of the environment and often organize around interests that have practical impacts on their lives.

On the other hand, women in the advanced industrial world often organize around those interests related to women’s subordination and gender inequities: equal rights, reproductive choice, sexual violence and access to decision-making — strategic gender interests. This helps explain why #MeToo movements in the developing world may struggle at times, as ���Ի徱��’s has, for example. Where women’s access to power and resources is narrow, their ability to act on strategic gender interests will be more difficult.

Impact on Society

Women’s movements . Just 75 years ago, and sometimes even more recently, women in much of the advanced industrial world, including the United States, Europe and Australia, did not have: equal pay legislation, access to equal credit, no-fault divorce, access to abortion, access to birth control, equal access to higher education, and more. Up until 2015, women in Saudi Arabia were not allowed to vote. Women’s movements have led to the passage of that directly benefits women, not just in the US, but across the , from equal pay laws to laws regarding sexual harassment, quotas in legislatures, and . And while one might argue that legislation doesn’t always have teeth, it is an imperative first step.

Women’s organizing has also led to women’s ministries and bureaus at the national and international level. Public officials cater to women more, actively seeking their . Women’s movements have created a cadre of motivated, skilled and politically active women in their wake. Women who can alter the way politics, business, education and more are done. Research has clearly shown the importance of the in legislatures. Women legislators are more likely to introduce women’s issue legislation (bills about women, children, health, education, the elderly), women’s issue bills are more likely to pass than similar bills introduced by male legislators, women legislators are more likely to work across party lines, are less likely to interrupt witnesses during legislative hearings and are more consensus oriented.

Finally, women’s movements worldwide have had a transformational effect — they have altered how societies view women. Women were once commonly seen as having less intellectual capacity than men, incapable of voting or engaging in politics, seen as physically weaker, easily frightened and in need of the protection of men. While there are certainly still people today who may hold those views, by and large in advanced industrial societies today it is accepted that women have the same intellectual potential as men, do not need to be protected from the “nasty” world of politics, can serve in the military and do not need to be the property of men. While there is clearly room for growth, especially in the developing world, this transformation cannot be ignored.

Where does #MeToo fit in to this larger picture? The #MeToo movement is consistent with the types of movements traditionally seen in the advanced industrial world, organized around strategic gender interests. Women — and men — joined the #MeToo movement because they had experienced a traumatic event, and there were leaders like Tarana Burke, Alyssa Milano and other celebrities who stepped forward and encouraged women to take action. There was a collective sense that something could be done and had to be done, and the was ripe.

Women and men were incensed that a president of the United States had blatantly talked about violating women, that powerful men like Harvey Weinstein have been assaulting women unpunished, there was a cadre of educated and trained women who could lead the charge. Enforceable legislation existed, and there were material incentives to join — a chance to change the environment in many industries, an environment that has held women back from access to power, leadership and jobs. The #MeToo movement fits into a rich and deep history of women organizing worldwide, women taking control of their lives, women not waiting for someone else to fix it — women taking charge.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Other changes announced relate to employment regulations that extend work opportunities for women, who represent a big proportion of unemployed Saudis. Under the new ruling, all citizens now have the right to work without discrimination based on gender, disability or age. Another welcome amendment is that employers cannot fire a woman or give notice to fire her while she is pregnant or on maternity leave.

Changes to the law were announced on August 2 by royal decrees and published in the kingdom’s official weekly, Um al-Qura gazette.

There’s Still Work to Be Done

Although these important advances in removing long-standing social restrictions are to be applauded, much still remains to be done to protect and promote the rights of women and girls in this deeply conservative Arab state. Saudi Arabia was ranked 141 out of 149 countries in the , an annual index released by the World Economic Forum that measures how women in countries around the world fare in economic and political participation, education and health.

Women in the kingdom still require male consent to marry, live on their own and leave prison or a domestic abuse shelter. In addition, women are barred from passing Saudi citizenship onto their children, nor can they provide consent for their children to marry.

The male guardianship system is extremely repressive, treating adult women as minors under the legal control of their guardians, who could be a husband, brother, uncle or even a son. Women in Saudi Arabia require permission from a male family member to do many things, such as enrolling in school, filing a lawsuit, opening a bank account and accessing some medical procedures. Women and girls are also subject to strict dress codes and gender segregation.

This creates an oppressive society, both inside the family environment and within the country as a whole. Such wide-ranging restrictions have curtailed the human rights of women, depriving them of the freedom to make essential decisions in their daily lives and preventing them from participating fully in society. Treated as second-class citizens, every Saudi woman and girl is impacted from birth to death.

The new laws announced by the Saudi government have been a long time coming, and it is unclear when the order will take effect. It is vital that these advances are implemented in a way that complies with the international conventions that the country has committed itself to. Saudi Arabia is a member of the UN Human Rights Council and has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. As such, it is obliged to uphold the highest standards for the promotion and protection of human rights and to take action that ends discrimination against women in all its forms.

Women’s Rights Defenders

Despite this, Saudi Arabia continues to detain women’s rights defenders who have advocated for an end to the discriminatory male guardianship system and for changes to the deeply patriarchal society. This has included the right for women to drive, which was finally granted in June 2018 with some restrictions to their access to driving schools and the fees that are triple the price for women.

Numerous activists have been imprisoned since mid-2018 solely for peacefully campaigning for the protection and promotion of human rights, including women’s rights, in the kingdom. This has been accompanied by horrifying reports of torture, sexual assault and other ill-treatment perpetrated by the authorities against those who have been detained. Whilst some campaigners were temporarily released on bail earlier in the year and are still awaiting trial, others remain in prison. This includes Loujain al-Hathloul, the prominent campaigner who this week spent her 30th birthday languishing in a Saudi jail.

In April 2016, Saudi Arabia announced its ambitious Vision 2030 plan to diversify the country’s economy, reduce dependence on oil and develop its public service sectors. This included programs to promote and strengthen women’s rights. However, the arrests of women’s rights defenders by the government have created a toxic environment where many have effectively been silenced by fears that if they express views that could be construed as critical of the state, they could face reprisals by the authorities.

Saudi Arabia’s citizens should be free to exercise their civil rights in their own country, including advocating for gender equality without the threat of intimidation, arrest or torture. Calling for greater women’s rights should never be treated as a crime.

This week’s sweeping reforms denote a tangible advance in the dismantling of Saudi Arabia’s deep-rooted system of male domination and are a significant testament to the positive impact that brave activists within the country are having, often at huge personal risk and sacrifice.

The world’s gaze is firmly fixed on the Saudi authorities to ensure that the promised repeal of discriminatory legal provisions translate into tangible improvements for women and girls on the ground, and that all women’s right’s defenders who have been charged and imprisoned are immediately and unconditionally released, all charges dropped and they face no further persecution.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Saudi Arabia Eases Male Guardianship System appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Over 12% of humanity to one of the 3 million cooperatives on the planet. Cooperatives not only stimulate local economies, but also act as a vehicle for bringing opportunity and profit to people worldwide, who otherwise would not be actors in the formal sector of the economy. This tangible empowerment is perhaps best embodied by the Cooperative Aboghlo Women of Ourika in Morocco.

Cooperative Aboghlo

Just a 30-minute drive outside of Marrakech to Tnine Ourika in the Al Haouz province, situated across the street from a furniture retailer is a deceivingly unremarkable storefront. Peering through the glass display case you will find packages of couscous and dried herbs sitting alongside bowls overflowing with chocolate, pistachio, almond and walnut cookies. All of which is made from local Moroccan ingredients.

But this is not the real gem found inside the Cooperative Aboghlo. The true beauty is hidden away on the second floor of the co-op, where 23 women sit in circles and talk back and forth. They are not making casual conversation. Instead, they are debating various aspects of the internal and external marketing for their cooperative enterprise. For hours, these women engage in conversations about how to better spread the word about their product, how to enforce the timeliness of each respective worker, and how to resolve problems of communication and organization — issues every business must grapple with.

This in itself is remarkable, but it is even more so when one is reminded of the context. The discrepancy in opportunities and education of women compared to men is widely experienced throughout the world. This creates an uneven playing field for women. From the time they are little girls, females are not given the same support as their male counterparts.

The consequences are crippling. Unemployment among young women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are 80% higher than that of young men. This is compared to the average gender differential of 20% worldwide, according to Brookings.��Most women in Cooperative Aboghlo could not read or write, but now they are taking literacy classes at the co-op and are able to write their names and read street signs.

When considering these astonishing circumstances, it is obvious these women, who are successfully managing their own well-established cooperative, are extraordinary exceptions. But that should not be the case. It is just and right to commend the women of this enterprise, but the ladies of the Cooperative Aboghlo are a much-needed reminder not only of what is possible but of what should be.

The cooperative started in October 2016 with 10 women from one village. Now, there are 33 women from five different villages actively participating. In addition to selling various products from their brick-and-mortar site, the co-op exports directly to internationally-recognized cosmetic companies. These women set an example of what is possible when given education and opportunity.

Women and the Economy

Women’s active participation in the labor force can have a tremendous, positive impact on the developing economies of Morocco and other MENA states. In 2015, McKinsey Global Institute found that supporting women’s could add $12 trillion to global GDP by 2025 and grow the MENA region’s economy by 85%. Closing the gap between men and women in hours worked per day could lead to a 47% increase in the annual GDP of the Middle East and North Africa.

The root of the issue of female participation in the workforce lies in cultural obstacles. Family opposition and traditional gender roles create rigid barriers for women. This is especially the case in rural regions, where their domain is often confined to that of domestic life.

However, globalization and increased pushes for equality have ushered in a new wave of changes. Moudawana, the Moroccan family code, addresses gender equality and rights by raising the minimum legal age of marriage and limiting divorce and polygamy terms, thus giving back the innate rights of women that have long been forgone. Morocco has reduced the barriers to entry for cooperatives, further encouraging women’s involvement in the economy. This is a huge step forward for Morocco in addressing the systemic inequalities that are so deeply integrated.

This progress, though commendable and remarkable, is just the first step. The path to sustainable development and equality is one that is not easily achieved. Through its partnership with the High Atlas Foundation, a Moroccan nongovernmental organization, Cooperative Aboghlo was given a platform and the skills training necessary to grow tremendously. The cooperative embodies what is possible with this support and facilitation of development.

The time for these changes is long overdue. The time for these changes is most certainly now. It starts with the simplest action. It starts with the women of Cooperative Aboghlo Women of Ourika taking initiative and, most importantly, with the education of marginalized people.

The future should not be a mere continuation of the past. It takes a single lifetime of empowered women to spurn generations of empowered girls.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Hidden Gems of Morocco appeared first on 51�Թ�.

“I always wished I was a man, always, since I was a child.” In her home country of Saudi Arabia, Loujain al-Hathloul is a controversial figure. Her habit of speaking, and acting, out in support of women’s rights has caused her to be labeled abrasive, a troublemaker and even an attention seeker among more conservative elements of her society — by women as well as men.

The woman I meet in a bright modern apartment is warm, vibrant and unexpectedly gentle in manner. She is also quick to defend the men in her own life. “My male guardians have been angels to me,” she says smiling. “I know I’ve had it much easier than most Saudi women … but it didn’t make me any less aware that I could have everything faster, more directly, if only I were a man.”

Her courage in fighting to secure the same rights as male citizens in Saudi Arabia has won her international acclaim. It is also the reason why I cannot sit with her today to talk about the country’s new driving schools for women or congratulate her on passing the master’s program in sociology she had undertaken in Abu Dhabi since we met. Loujain never saw the women of her country drive, nor did she graduate.

Almost exactly a year after our meeting in her Dubai home, Loujain was on May 15, 2018, without warning in a sting operation that also claimed a dozen other peaceful women’s rights activists. Today marks the one-year anniversary of her imprisonment.

The Struggles of Loujain al-Hathloul

Loujain’s struggle against the patriarchal restrictions of her society began almost as soon as she could talk. “My father was in the navy,” she began that day, describing her early childhood living on coastal military compounds while she poured me a thimble-sized cup of bitter, Arabic cardamom coffee. “He had this fear of his children being surrounded by water but not knowing how to swim. The only public swimming pool was for men, so when I was 3 years old, he put me in a pair of my brother’s swimming trunks and brought me along.”

His act, predictably, caused a scandal among fellow swimmers: “How dare you bring a half-naked girl in here!” she mimicked with mock sincerity. “But my dad just looked at them and said, ‘If you’re aroused by a little kid, then you really need to get yourselves checked. That’s a pretty serious problem,’ and threw me in.”

After a few weeks, other fathers started bringing in their own little girls. “That was my first experience of a feminist movement,” Loujain chuckled. “I guess I learnt pretty early on I couldn’t just sit there and wait to be given my rights.” Neither could she wait for others to be given theirs.

Her younger sister, Lina, recalls her own childhood dream of learning to box — a request that was firmly opposed by both her parents. She remembers her older sister’s response. “Loujain marched downstairs to confront our mother. ‘Why isn’t it acceptable for a girl to do boxing?’ she asked … ‘Who made these rules?’ Why can’t they be changed? … a few weeks later, I was ducking between the ropes of a boxing ring,” she says proudly, “but I never learned to fight like my sister.”

Like many female Saudi activists, Loujain’s platform grew dramatically with the boom of social media in her country. From her dorm room in Canada, where she completed her undergraduate studies, she started vlogging. Her hair and face uncovered, she caused a sensation, talking about subjects such as female freedom of expression, abuses of male guardianship and especially on women’s right to drive. But not all her fellow advocates welcomed her input.

Illustration of Loujain al-Hathloul © Merieme Mesfioui

“People said I was a hypocrite,” she explained. “They said it was wrong to push women to participate in such a dangerous activity while I was being protected by a Western country. I had to agree with them.” In 2013, she flew to Saudi Arabia and drove herself home from Riyadh airport; her father filmed her at the wheel.

Loujain was not formally punished for her act. Instead, it was her guardian, her father, who was called into a meeting at the Ministry of Interior and reprimanded for her transgression. It is an episode that still infuriates her. “It’s an indirect way of disregarding women’s existence and their movement,” she said, her usually cheerful expression momentarily darkening.

Loophole

A few months later, Loujain stumbled on an idea for a more ambitious plan. “While I was working in the UAE, I got a driver’s license,” she said. “When I looked at it carefully it dawned on me that it had the GCC stamp on it.” In theory, any document bearing this stamp is valid in all six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Saudi Arabia included. “I had found my loophole.”

She didn’t tell anyone what she was going to do until she was already at the border. “It was only a week after I got married by the way,” she added as an aside, “my poor husband.” After 26 hours of confusion and communication with officials in Riyadh, she was arrested. This she had anticipated. What she had not expected was the severity with which her “crime” was treated.

She was charged under new domestic antiterrorism legislation and spent three months in jail. She didn’t know if she would be held for days or decades until she was suddenly released. But, she said, she had no regrets.

“I really enjoyed my time in jail,” she told me brightly. “I got to spend time with women from a different social circle, a different region, a different sect. I decided to take as much as possible from it, to face it with a positive attitude. Since I had nothing else to do, I thought I might as well look on the bright side.”

Loujain’s relentless positivity has become something of a trademark. Google her image and she beams back at you from a hundred formal portraits and family photographs, even those over which the word “traitor” has been inked in red . Her refusal to give up hope is grounded in an unwavering love for her country.

It is important to note that Loujain, like almost all of the others she was arrested with, is an educated woman from a supportive family, who could easily have made a home for herself elsewhere, in a country where she wouldn’t have to fight to secure the basic rights of citizenship. She insists this was never really an option.

“There is a really beautiful side to Arab life,” she told me serenely, “you see it in our social life. We are a warm people, we are welcoming … I lived for a time in Vancouver and I had the most wonderful experience, but I couldn’t stay any longer because, to me, the people are too closed. I feel I belong more to the East than the West.”

Loujain told me how she dreamed of returning to Saudi Arabia and to her home province of Najd, the country’s most conservative region and home to the capital, Riyadh. “After being released I was on a travel ban,” she told me, “so I was forced to stay in Saudi for a year. And that was such a blessed year, I really loved staying there, I love the life there.”

Arrested in Dubai

When I met her in the UAE, she was making do with a life in the country next door, peppered with low-profile weekends back to see relatives and other activists. In the end, she did make it back home, but not in the way she had hoped.

According to accounts shared by her siblings, Loujain was kidnapped from the streets of Dubai by government officials, forced into an airplane and flown back to Saudi Arabia against her will. There she was held, first in an apartment at a secret location and later in a state prison.

This time it may be hard even for Loujain to add a positive spin to her experience behind bars. Lina recounts what happened the first time her parents were permitted to visit their daughter in jail: “My sister could barely speak normally. She couldn’t grip a pen, yet she smiled her dazzling smile and assured them she was OK.” In a later visit, she broke down in tears and told them the truth.

“These are the things my brave, resilient sister has endured in prison,” Lina recently told an audience at the Women in the World’s New York summit. “She has been beaten until her thighs were black with bruises, subject to whippings and water boarding, tormented with electric shocks, threatened with rape and murder.”

The refusal of her brothers and sisters to keep Loujain’s plight secret, as they had been instructed, make uncomfortable publicity for a nation working on an international media makeover. In the past year, Saudi Arabia has been rightfully proud of the leaps forward it has made in terms of women’s liberties: the first has been appointed, women’s sport has lost its stigma and the infamous has fallen. But what does all this mean if the very people who campaigned peacefully for such rights are denied their own freedom?

It has been a distressing year, not just for Loujain and her family, but for all those affected by this latest, and unexpected, crackdown. There has been relief for some in the past few weeks. Approximately seven of the jailed activists have been released “temporarily” pending the results of their ongoing trials. But of Loujain in such headlines, there has been no sign. The date of her last hearing was canceled abruptly without explanation. Since then, there have been no updates on her case and no news of when proceedings might be resumed.

As the country unites in the familial atmosphere of Ramadan, a month of compassion and forgiveness, her loved ones retain a flicker of hope that these virtues might yet be extended to their daughter, sister and friend. Today marks an unhappy anniversary for Loujain al-Hathloul and all those who care about women’s rights everywhere. Let us hope there will be no second.

Loujain was recently been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. At the time of her arrest, she was training to work as a sociologist, “in the hope of taking part in the change that is happening in my country as a researcher and a consultant,” she told me. I hope that by the next May 15, Loujain’s name will still be spoken often in Saudi society, not accompanied by whispers of “troublemaker,” but by the more worthy title of “change maker.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Unhappy Anniversary of a Saudi Activist appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Middle East and North Africa continues to reverberate from the 2011 Arab Spring protests that rocked the region eight years ago. The protests, which have also been referred to as uprisings, revolutions and revolts, led to the overthrow of lifelong dictators in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. While Tunisia emerged from the Arab Spring with new competitive elections, consensus politics and a series of democratic reforms, Egypt entrenched authoritarian rule with the election of the military commander Abdel Fattah el-Sisi after he led a coalition to depose President Mohamed Morsi.

Sisi has since ruled with an iron fist, limiting the number of opposition candidates allowed to compete in elections and cracking down on any form of dissent. has described Egypt under Sisi’s rule as “an open-air prison for critics” and “more dangerous than ever” for activists.

Libya, meanwhile, is fragmented between two rival governments split between the eastern and western parts of the country. The political vacuum created in the wake of the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi enabled the rise of armed groups that gain significant influence over political factions, further complicating the peace process and prospects of a unified country. General Khalifa Haftar, who heads the Libyan National Army in the east with the support of Egypt, the UAE and France, has begun advancing on Tripoli in a bid to expand his power to the west, threatening to ignite another full-blown civil war with the UN-backed government.

Then there’s Syria. President Bashar al-Assad responded to peaceful protests in 2011 with a brutal crackdown that threw fuel on the fire, which grew into a brutal civil war, now in its ninth year. The conflict is being fought on multiple fronts, from a civil war between the Assad regime and the opposition, a sectarian proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a war against the Islamic State (IS) and other Islamist groups. The has left over half a million Syrians dead and over 12 million displaced both internally and around the world. With IS losing its last remaining stronghold of Baghouz in March, many are speculating whether the conflict is coming to an end in Syria.

The Arab Spring has also helped alter political dynamics throughout the region, at the forefront of which is Saudi Arabia and Iran’s cold war over competing spheres of influence. Iran has undermined Riyadh’s ambitions to position itself as the region’s leader by bridging its Shia sphere of influence across Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. The two countries have transformed Yemen into a sectarian battleground to swing the pendulum of power in their favor. Under the Trump administration in Washington, however, Iran has found its regional influence and power waning as the US has thrown its support behind the kingdom.

While President Donald Trump has sent mixed messages with his Middle East foreign policy — from withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal to calling for a complete withdrawal of US troops from Syria to bolstering the US’s support for both Israel and Saudi Arabia — his actions have had, and will continue to have, a profound impact on the region.

Gilbert Achcar is professor of development studies and international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Professor Achcar is an expert on the Middle East and North Africa, and has written profusely on the region, particularly on the Arab Spring and the regional order. His published work includes and .

The region is a fluid environment and constantly shifting, and our interview with Professor Achcar took place prior to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika stepping down in Algeria, Haftar’s advance on Tripoli and the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, all events that transpired over the span of the past two weeks. At the same time, much of the region is static between Saudi Arabia and Iran’s relentless power struggle and the Syrian conflict. You can find Professor Achcar’s most recent take on the revolution unfolding in Sudan .

In this edition of the Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Achcar about the ongoing turmoil in the region, his vision for its future and reasons for hope, if not optimism.

The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Dina Yazdani: Last December, President Trump announced that the US had defeated the Islamic State in Syria, and that he was withdrawing all US troops from the country. Last month, after agreeing to keep 400 US troops in Syria, he claimed again that US forces had reclaimed 100% of IS territory. Is the Islamic State truly defeated — can it ever be defeated?

Gilbert Achcar: That’s a good question indeed. The very nature of such networks makes it very difficult to suppress them. ISIS is the continuation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which had morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and then re-emerged in Syria during the civil war, turning into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, then the Islamic State tout court after it spilled over back into Iraq. This kind of terroristic enterprise will carry on as long as there are factors breeding violent hostility to the United States and the local regimes. We will keep seeing various brands of terrorist networks popping up as long as the underlying causes are there.

Yazdani: Since IS lost the territory it managed to conquer in Iraq and Syria, do you anticipate them resorting to more guerrilla warfare or splintering into smaller groups that will make it harder for US and other forces to crackdown on them?

Achcar: Well, it wasn’t difficult to foresee that in the face of overwhelming power — the whole world is leagued against ISIS — they wouldn’t be able to hold on for long to the vast territory they controlled at their peak. That they managed to keep a portion of it until very recently is what is most surprising indeed. It is a testimony to their determination, enhanced by the sense of being trapped in their last recesses.

The potential exists.��There’s a new generation that is not willing to be subservient as previous generations have been, a generation of young rebels who will keep fighting, especially when their own future and even their own present are at stake.��

But otherwise the logical response by fighters in the face of such circumstances is to abandon the territory under their control and resort to guerrilla warfare and/or terrorist attacks, whether in the same region or at large. One shouldn’t forget that ISIS, or IS, has spread to other regional territories such as the Sinai and Libya, as well as territories beyond the Arab world in sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere. So how can one claim to have terminated them when they have managed to form an extensive international network still active in several territories?

Yazdani: Trump has made it clear that defeating IS was America’s only mission in Syria in his view. Since he claimed that the group has been defeated, at least territorially, what is his strategy in Syria? Do you believe that US troops are going to be gradually withdrawn, and who would replace them if they do? Does this not play in the hands of Iran, which has been pressuring the US to leave?

Achcar: There is a fundamental contradiction in Trump’s position on Syria. It is manifest in that many of those who are usually very much in agreement with him are for once rather unhappy with the position he took on Syria. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, sees eye to eye with Trump on practically everything, except on this issue. That’s because Trump’s desire to remove troops from Syria clashes with Netanyahu’s anti-Iranian priority, for the one key function of US presence in Syria is precisely to make sure that the vast territory east of the Euphrates, which is now controlled by the US-backed Kurdish troops and their Arab partners of the Syrian Democratic Forces, doesn’t fall under Iranian control.

If US troops leave northeastern Syria, Kurdish troops won’t remain in the Arab parts of that territory. They will withdraw into the Kurdish areas, into what they call Rojava. The major threat for them is Turkey, not Iran. The Turkish president is seizing every opportunity to promise that he will invade the Kurdish-dominated territory in northeast Syria. The Arab-populated territory east of the Euphrates would thus become open to Syrian regime control, which means either Russian or Iranian control, or both, since the Syrian regime as an independent factor is but a fiction nowadays — it depends fully on its two backers. The withdrawal of US troops will inevitably be an invitation for other powers to get control of that large swath of territory.

For Iran, this would be a very important opportunity because it would allow it to complete the corridor that goes from Tehran through to the shores of Lebanon, which has become the main axis of the Iranian regime’s expansionist drive. That’s why some of the closest people to Trump on the issue of Iran were very disappointed by his announcement of US withdrawal from Syria. They exerted pressure on him, which led him to compromise and agree to keep a reduced number of troops.

Yazdani: What’s next for Syria?

Achcar: Very difficult to tell, not only for Syria, but for the whole region since it entered a protracted period of destabilization starting from the 2011 Arab Spring. The explosion was long overdue after the accumulation of so many economic, social and political problems in the region. It took a very tragic character in Syria, unfortunately. What we are witnessing now is not the Syrian regime’s victory over the Syrian opposition, but indeed the victory of the alliance of Iran and Russia on the ground in Syria.

The big question, at least for the foreseeable future, is, therefore, What will happen between the two partners of this victory? How will the relations between Russia and Iran in Syria evolve? That’s the big question because, although the two countries converged in shoring up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, they have quite different agendas. The issue of Iran is a major card in Vladimir Putin’s hand: He is in the best position to prevent Iran from consolidating its presence in Syria. He wouldn’t do any of that just for the sake of controlling Syria because he already controls what is of any need to him there. It would rather be a bargaining card in his relations with Europe and the United States.

For Europe, the refugee issue is the most serious outcome of the Syrian tragedy, the millions of Syrians who had to flee their country and take refuge either in adjacent countries or in Europe. They are concentrated in such large numbers in some countries, especially Syria’s neighboring countries, that it can’t be contemplated that they could remain there for many years without becoming a major source of tension.

Many countries have a major stake in getting those refugees back to Syria, and Russia holds the keys to that because it is the only power that can provide a credible safety guarantee to the refugees and entice them to go back to their homeland. Russia is seen by the Syrians as a pro-regime power, for sure, but one without a stake in the sectarian or ethnic revenge wars that unfolded in the country. Iran, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of that. A major part of Syrian refugees would not contemplate going back to parts of Syria that are dominated by Iran, a power motivated by a sectarian political agenda.

This said, the only safe prediction one can make about Syria, or the whole region for that matter, is that the situation won’t stabilize in the foreseeable future. The turmoil is not going to cease there for many years to come, if not decades.

Yazdani: Earlier this year, you wrote in Al-Quds al-Arabi (an was posted on the Jacobin website) that the old Arab regimes’ despotic order will eventually collapse. Can you explain what you mean by despotic order and what will it take to precipitate these regimes’ collapse?

Achcar: The despotic character of the order that is prevailing in the Arabic-speaking region is obvious, with very few exceptions. One of them is today’s Tunisia, the only one of the six countries where the Arab Spring did peak that managed to maintain its democratic gains. Another is Lebanon, a country which has a long-standing different political tradition because of its multi-confessional political system. But beyond that, most of the states in the region are either autocracies or military dictatorships in the sense that the military controls the regime, as is the case in Egypt and Algeria, for instance. The eight Arab monarchies are all absolute monarchies, even those with a constitution and parliament. Sovereignty belongs to the king, or emir or sultan in all eight cases, not to the people. All remaining countries have authoritarian regimes.

This despotic order cannot remain in place forever. Of course, the question is, After how many years will it end, and after having done what kind of damage and caused the death of how many people? What I meant, however, is what I have been saying since 2011, from the very beginning of what was called the Arab spring: I have been emphasizing the fact that it was not going to be a smooth, peaceful and brief phase of democratic transition as the label Arab Spring did convey. The 2011 revolutionary shockwave affected the whole region. A major surge in social protest occurred in almost all its countries during that year, with six countries witnessing major uprisings. This was not a coincidence or merely a result of linguistic contagion. It was the product of the accumulation over decades of several explosive factors, most crucial among which were low rates of economic growth leading to the world’s highest rates of unemployment — especially youth unemployment, male and female.

The same explosive ingredients are now being produced massively at higher speed. Unemployment, youth unemployment, and all sorts of social and economic problems are only getting worse. They are not at all on their way to ease off in the region. That’s why I emphasize the fact that it is a major structural crisis that can’t be solved short of radical change in the region’s social, economic and political order. Of course, such a change is not easy to obtain, especially in the face of regimes that are resolved to massacre in order to remain in power.

It takes exceptional leaderships to be able to steer through such a change, and they are nowhere on the horizon for now. This means that we are facing the prospect of many years, probably several decades, of turmoil in the region. And there’s no guarantee, to be sure, of a happy end. If a radical change for the better doesn’t happen, the alternative is more chaos and violence, and more descent into barbarism of which ISIS was a such a crude illustration.

Yazdani: You mentioned earlier that the Arab Spring has shaken the entire region. Are the protests that we are witnessing today in Sudan, Algeria, Jordan and Gaza a second wave of the Arab Spring? I think it is also interesting to note that these countries did not undergo massive upheavals in 2011, unlike the six countries that you mentioned earlier, nor did they see any significant political transformation during that period.

Achcar: But you should have added Tunisia to the list. Tunisia was the country that opened the way to the Arab Spring when the movement started there in December 2010 and achieved a victory in January 2011. Since 2011, there has been a setback for the whole wave on the regional scale: In 2013, a shift occurred from revolutionary upsurge into reactionary backlash with a partial restoration of the old regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and reactionary violence turning into civil war in Libya and Yemen. Despite that, the underlying structural crisis kept getting worse everywhere, leading to social and political struggles starting, or resuming, in various countries.

The ongoing upsurges in Sudan and Algeria are not lightnings in a blue sky. Sudan had witnessed a wave of protests in 2011, and then again in 2013, and a new round last year before the present upsurge. In the face of harsh repression, it took time for the movement to gather momentum into the kind of massive mobilization that we have been seeing in recent weeks. In Algeria, there were limited protests in 2011, and the regime quickly offered economic concessions, like the Saudi kingdom did. They managed to buy the people’s quiescence by injecting oil money in the form of increases in wages and social spending. In Algeria, there was an additional factor that is now at play in all Arab countries, which is the fear of getting into the kind of tragic situation that developed in Syria over the last few years or the one that Algeria has been through in the 1990s.

But as we can see now, even such a deterrent as the terrible decade of war that Algeria has witnessed 20 years ago was not enough to deter indefinitely its people from rising. The young people now came to the fore. They want to change the regime. It won’t be easy, for sure. But the fact is that the Algerian people have joined in its turn the regional aspiration of the people to affirm its will. “The people want…” is the slogan that you hear everywhere. The people want to overthrow the regime, or the people want this or that. This is very important, and it will certainly carry on. Whatever defeats there may be, repression won’t solve the core problems. Even in Syria itself, and despite the magnitude of the tragedy, social protest has been recently on the rise. This is to say that it is a revolutionary process for the long haul, and that more countries will join the fray sooner or later.

Morocco is another country that has already witnessed important waves of social protest. The crisis is simmering there, and sooner or later it will explode. Anyone believing that Egypt has reached long-term stability under Sisi’s dictatorial rule is fooling themselves. That’s another country where the boiling point will be reached again, rather sooner than later, because the social and economic conditions are becoming unbearable.

Yazdani:�� There’s increasing scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — his growing litany of human rights abuses, from the Saudi-led war on Yemen to the brutal killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and, more recently, the mass detention and torture of high-profile activists, particularly women rights activists. Do you think that the kingdom is feeling any pressure either politically or economically from the international community to reverse course, especially as it is positioning itself as a regional leader and even as a global player? And is the Trump administration’s close relationship with MBS helping or hurting human rights in the country?

Achcar: Reversing course in the Saudi kingdom would take the dismissal of the crown prince from his position — he is basically a spoiled brat. He grew up in an environment where he believes everything is permissible to him. And he is very ambitious and without scruples. He’s the product of a rotten monarchy where a few thousand princes have almost unlimited access to state resources. What we see today concentrated in one person does not represent such a major change in the situation of the country. It’s just that MBS has become the single embodiment of the ruling elite at the expense of the other members. But for the rest of the people, the climate of terror has always been there.

The fact that MBS is backed by Trump and his family — Jared Kushner being in a central position in this regard — played a key role in limiting the domestic impact of the damage that resulted from Jamal Khashoggi’s botched assassination. The Saudi kingdom is so closely linked to the United States that if Donald Trump were to leave the scene and be replaced by a president with a different attitude, it might well lead to the dismissal of the crown prince. It is certainly a problem for a regime that is so dependent on the United States for its security to be ruled by a person who, aside from Trump and Kushner, is loathed in the US and the rest of the world.

Yazdani: I would like to ask a question that would invite some optimism or flowery picture of the future of the Middle East, but I don’t want to manufacture any optimism if it doesn’t exist. So instead I’m going to ask, What is the biggest threat to stability in the Middle East today?

Achcar:��Well it’s not a threat —��it’s a reality. The main factor of destabilization is the socio-economic blockage of the region. Add to that several factors that are pouring fuel over the fire. One of them is, of course, the Israeli state. Netanyahu’s provocative policies have tremendously increased anger at the regional level, not only among the Palestinians. The war in Yemen is a major source of tension in addition to its being the worst humanitarian crisis of our time. Iran’s behavior in the region and the Saudi-Iranian sectarian rivalry are also key factors in increasing tensions all over the region. So, there are many factors of destabilization and hardly any at all working in the opposite direction.

But as you said, we can’t manufacture optimism, and it would be utterly artificial to end on an optimistic note when dealing with such acute and immense problems. I make a distinction, however, between optimism and hope. Optimism is, of course, the belief that the best will occur, but hope is different — it is conditional. Hope is the acknowledgement, while hope exists, that there is a potential for something better.

And from that point of view, I would assert categorically that there are reasons for hope. The potential exists. There’s a new generation that is not willing to be subservient as previous generations have been, a generation of young rebels who will keep fighting, especially when their own future and even their own present are at stake. The key issue is that of leadership, as I mentioned earlier. Will we see the emergence of organized movements and leaderships capable of coping with the immense task of transforming this part of the world? If the young generation manages to produce an organized movement able to channel their formidable energy into bringing the needed transformation, the region could get out of this very dark tunnel and back on the track of modernization and development.

This is a big “if,” for sure, but in the face of the pessimism that prevails today, it is important to emphasize that the potential exists. When optimistic euphoria prevailed in 2011, I sounded pessimistic to some, and today I would sound optimistic to others or even the same. But I’m neither pessimistic nor optimistic: It’s just a matter of recognizing the scale of the problems and the existence of a potential that has not been crushed and would be very difficult to suppress.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post There Is No End in Sight for Turmoil in the Middle East appeared first on 51�Թ�.

First to the good news, at least from the perspective of the government of Bahrain and its supporters:��Despite an opposition call to , turnout, at 67%, was impressively . The government did not release the number of spoiled ballots, but one observer estimated it to be around 5%. The banned political society, Al Wefaq, claimed the turnout was 30%.

The number of women elected to the 40-member council of representatives doubled to six, with one, Fawzia Zainal, expected to be named speaker. The significance of that should not be overlooked or underestimated. In a region where women still face huge obstacles, Bahrain has taken a big step forward. Sixteen political societies participated in the election, which would seem to justify the government’s claim that voters had ample choice.��However, neither Al Wefaq nor the other banned society, Waad, were allowed to enter the election, and in Al Wefaq’s case its leader, , has been jailed for life on charges that independent analysts regard as utterly specious.

Earlier this year, the outgoing parliament passed a law that prohibited anyone from the banned political societies from running. Additionally, several who may not have had connections to Waad or Al Wefaq were disbarred. In one case, a candidate who put himself forward was told that an anti-regime comment he made in 2004 warranted his candidacy being disallowed. “We could not forget your past,” he was told. Given how the regime carefully managed the election, it is unsurprising that the campaign was run without controversy. “Troublesome” candidates were excluded, and those who ran discussed little of substance. As one observer put it: “It was very polite and low key. There was no noise.”

No Noise

In many ways, this was a vote designed to impress Bahrain’s Western allies, and by and large it worked. In a region where there is little democracy —��and what there is struggles to move forward — this tiny Gulf kingdom can boast of an elected parliament and one where women have achieved historic firsts. It can point to an historically high voter turnout despite opposition calls for a boycott. It can say, as the long-serving justice minister and head of the Supreme Elections Committee, Sheikh Khalid bin Ali al-Khalifa , “Bahrain is living a new chapter in democratic development.”

All of that may well be true. But behind this truth lies another one. You can find it within the walls of Jau Prison, where thousands of regime opponents are detained.��Among them are the human rights activists Nabeel Rajab and Abdulhadi Alkhawaja. In manifestly unfair trials, Rajab received a five-year term, and Alkhawaja was sentenced to life imprisonment.

This other truth can also be found at the entrances to the towns and villages outside the capital Manama, where residents are required to show ID cards at police checkpoints to go to and from their homes to get to work and school. You could also point to the number of Bahrainis who have been :��It is now creeping close to 1,000 in a country with an indigenous population of 650,000. To put that figure in context, were the same policy applied to the UK, one million Britons would be made stateless.

You could reflect the views of those who did vote but did so in a mood of quiet despair: “The opposition is crushed, the democratic process is being rolled back, it’s business as usual,” was how one person put it. Or you could note the views of someone who chose not to turn out: “After everything that has happened to us, I did not feel that I wanted to vote.” The despair is palpable.

Before the election, the outgoing speaker had issued a threat that those who did not vote could see their housing opportunities affected or access to early retirement benefits denied through the passage of a law forcing all eligible voters to cast a ballot.��According to the justice minister no such law was being considered, but it took him a week to make that statement. And in a country where so many have been arbitrarily detained and otherwise abused by the state and its security forces, the threat continues to hang in the air, even after his belated denial.

Implied Threats

On social media a campaign was run suggesting that those who failed to vote were complicit with Iran. It is a longstanding claim of the regime that anyone who calls for democratic reform or criticises the ruling al-Khalifa family is serving the interests of Teheran. Voters were required to bring their passports, which were stamped opposite the photo page you need to show immigration officers when you are leaving and entering the country. Bahrainis who are deemed critics of the regime may be refused permission to travel, and it often happens only after arrival at the airport. A passport without the voting stamp could be enough to prevent a traveler from boarding a flight.

It was subtle and nuanced — a managed language of veiled and implied threats. But that alone does not explain the high turnout.��Voters who had previously supported Al Wefaq ignored the boycott call. As one put it, “there is respect for Wefaq but the times have changed.” Put simply, Al Wefaq has lost the street. The Bahrainis who in their tens of thousands took over Manama’s Pearl Roundabout in 2011 to call for peaceful reform no longer believe that meaningful change is possible. After nearly eight years of draconian repression and political and economic stagnation, they have lost hope.

In the short to medium term the regime has prevailed. It has satisfied its Western allies and solidified its grip on power through the mechanism of a highly controlled parliamentary election. While doing so, the ruling family has made no concessions to its critics. The hardliners within the family, including the justice minister, remain in the ascendancy. But it is hard to see how in his words Bahrain is “living a new chapter.” For many Bahrainis, repression is nothing new, and it remains a dark and troubling story.

*[This article was originally published by .]

��The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Bahrain Election: New Chapter or Old Story? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Invisible Women of the Middle East: True Stories is a by Moroccan author Sana Afouaiz, exploring the deepest layers of women’s lives across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region under the shadow of patriarchal culture.

The book, which narrates true stories based on the life of several women in different MENA countries whom the author interviewed during her trips to these nations, illustrates how women grapple with misogyny and discrimination in various forms, and how gender realities are shaped across the region.

Afouaiz is a gender expert and public speaker on women issues in the Middle East and North Africa, who touches upon a number of themes in her book and depicts the life of women in the region while struggling with the impact of virginity, sex, hijab, prostitution, honor and emotional abuse on their lives.

The 83-page book tells the reader how radical and self-serving interpretations of Islam by oppressive men complicate the lives of defenseless women and undermines their independence and dignity. Ranging from women being forced to wear a hijab to those who submit to sexual slavery, Invisible Women of the Middle East puts the reader in a mentally challenging situation to relate to the bitter realities of the lives of women who fall victim to patriarchy and religious extremism.

In this edition of The Interview, 51�Թ� talks to Sana Afouaiz about her book, the impact of religion on the lives of women in the Middle East and the male-dominated values of the region.

Kourosh Ziabari: When did you decide to travel to a host of countries in the Middle East and North Africa and interview women with intriguing and thought-provoking stories? Had you thought of writing a book before starting these trips to the region, or did you come to the conclusion to write the book after collecting all the stories and doing the interviews?

Sana Afouaiz: I grew up in a traditional environment. I’ve always questioned the norms of my society. At the age of 5, I witnessed injustice inflicted on women in my immediate surrounding. I wondered if this situation was similar in other places or unique to my environment. This pushed me to travel and explore misogyny across the Middle East and North Africa.

It was then that I was exposed to the decadence and the extraordinary contradictions of the Arab and Muslim society: the dichotomy between what it preaches and how it behaves. Men would force their sisters and daughters to never engage with men outside the immediate family, yet these limits are never enforced on them or the male siblings. I also found that hymen reconstruction is the rage, as much as the virginity test. I discovered a hypocritical society.

I started my journey as a story collector with one objective: exploring the situation of women in this region. Five years later, I thought to myself: It’s time for the world to know about these real stories and start a revolution of ideas and beliefs upon which gender realities are constructed in this region.

This was not an easy book to write. Sometimes I would walk away from my laptop. Most of the stories it narrates reflect the brutal side of the long history of misogyny in the Arab world.

Ziabari: What are the main causes of the suffering of women whose stories you’ve retold in your book? Where does the unchallenged patriarchy and male domination culture in these countries come from?��

Afouaiz: We live in societies which dictate on us how to behave, how to feel and how to think. The ideas and behavior we grow up in as individuals influence the way in which we perceive the female gender. As a woman, your image and your destiny were already carved in the minds of others. What was handed down was all you knew. You had no say in it. Your self-image, your worth, your future were mapped out by your family and by the ideas, beliefs that governed the society you were a member of. Your hymen is the indication of your purity and worth.

Where do these ideas and beliefs come from? Religion. Mainly religion. The power religion has on the minds of the people is incredibly unimaginable. It has shaped a culture that dominates and treats with disrespect everything else that is not a man. It reinforces behaviors, conditions and attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex. These ideas and belief systems are kept alive for no reason other than that “it is what it is” and that they are what “the sacred scriptures allegedly confirm.”

Of course, there are other factors — resource dependency, historic colonization, traditions, the class and urban, rural divide and repressive political conditions that may contribute to the discrimination against women, but they are not as potent as religion.

Ziabari: Women in the developed world easily and freely raise their voice in protest against whatever causes them discomfort and restricts their freedoms. There are feminist activists and advocacy organizations who champion the cause of women. Why do you think the women of the Middle East cannot act similarly and have their voice heard when they’re unhappy with their social status?��

Afouaiz: I do not agree with the mistaken belief that women in the MENA region cannot speak up. I also don’t look at the Western feminist movements exclusively championing the cause of women. It took women like Angelina Jolie, a human rights advocate and ambassador of gender equality, 20 years to report the sexual harassment she encountered with Harvey Weinstein.

Women of the MENA region led revolutionary movements during the Arab Spring, fought against laws that allowed rapists to marry their victims in Morocco and Jordan, called for women’s rights to vote in Kuwait and to drive in Saudi Arabia, although some were imprisoned, raped and assaulted.

The only difference between women in the West and the MENA region is the establishments and the spaces available for women to voice their concerns and be heard and respected as humans. At the region, possibilities, spaces or opportunities for women to speak up are censored at home, society and even internally.

I believe that a unifying start for women whether in the West or the East is to examine and question their role, impact and actions in their societies. Questioning their behaviors and thoughts��— independence begins in our minds.

Ziabari: Many men in the Middle East and North Africa push for their superiority and dominance over women by citing the religious mantra that women are lacking in mental and spiritual capacities and are created to only serve, feed and breed. Does Islam actually say such a thing?

Afouaiz: The majority of monotheistic religions described Eve, allegedly the first woman on earth, as merely man’s spare rib. All religions, including Islam, told us imagined stories that women are inferior to men and they should be assigned less social status because God said so. Islam positions itself where to question it is like to question God. If we shrink down the religion of Islam, we will find that it is all about controlling women’s thinking, behavior, attitudes, sexuality and bodies.

According to Islam, women should be treated as commodities who must submit to the will of men. Women are given only half the share of property compared to men. Islam claims to treat women equally, but allows no mobility if not accompanied by a male guardian or mahram. Men are allowed to marry four wives, but only one husband to women. Even in heaven, Islam gives the devout woman a man, but 72 virgins to the man. This is just to name a few of Islam’s instructions on how women should be viewed in society.

Religion is the opium of equality, censuring any possibility of critiquing Islamic teachings and doctrine regarding women. But we should not shy away from dialogue and debate. This how we evolve.��

Ziabari: One of the pains many of the women whose stories you’ve narrated in your book suffer is emotional abuse and neglect. How do you think this can be tackled in practice while there’s understandably no government ruling or regulation on how men should treat their wives or how the damages caused by emotional abuse and neglect can be compensated?

Afouaiz: Emotional abuse and violence are an expression of patriarchal oppression against women that is socially sanctioned and normalized among men and women. Socially and culturally there is no recognition of “emotional abuse” as a crime. It is an intimate terrorism that is rooted in the patriarchal tradition of men controlling their women and treated as a “norm.” I believe the first step to tackle this issue is to further our knowledge on emotional abuse and its effects on human psychology and our societies.

Ziabari: Do the women whose stories you’ve recounted in your book represent a big majority in the Middle East and North Africa and the Arab world? Do you think the majority of women in the region are grappling with mistreatment and violation of their rights and liberties?

Afouaiz: Oppression is not the same for all women in this region. Women are individuals, not merely one homogenous group. They belong to society, but their experiences are unique to them. They experience life through their own lenses, thus they create their own realities. Their social class, education and access make their views on subjects like honor, hijab, religion, freedom and so on, sole and distinctive.��

Ziabari: It was interesting to me that you didn’t include the stories of Iranian women in your book. Iran is not an Arab country, but at the heart of the Middle East with women who have many important stories to retell. They are also fighting for their rights. Is there any reason you evaded or ignored Iran?

Afouaiz: The only reason I didn’t cover stories of women from Iran is because of the difficulty of entering Iranian soil.��I’m an admirer of the Iranian furious feminists who have inspired my feminism. I remember reading about Taj Al Sultana, the Iranian historical feminist figure, when I was 10. I hope one day I will have the honor of visiting the country and hearing from its own women.

Ziabari: You have retold the story of several embattled and troubled women, but there are certainly women who have resisted the difficulties and made striking achievements in patriarchal societies. Will the MENA region change for better in favor of women? Are you optimistic about the future?

Afouaiz: Will MENA change for better? I believe that MENA’s better future depends on creating a peaceful revolution in the ideas and images we utilize to drive our actions and govern our behaviors.��The salvation is in examining the root causes of our maladies and not only in trying to suppress the apparent symptoms. The ultimate solution lies in our minds that store our ideals and our images of the future. As far as women are concerned, our worth is not a couple of inches deep.

Am I optimistic about the future? I have to be optimistic.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Invisible Women of the Middle East appeared first on 51�Թ�.

There is a link between the disappearance and murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the terrible war in Yemen that, after more than three years, continues to grind on relentlessly. The link is the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

When MBS, as he is known, decided to launch a war against Yemen’s rebel Houthis together with the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, he assumed that with massive air power he could bomb the Houthis into submission within a few weeks. A quick win would burnish his reputation as a warrior prince in the mold of his grandfather, the great Ibn Saud, founder of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

More than three years on — with over 10,000 civilian casualties, many of them caused by indiscriminate bombings, infrastructure destroyed, families shattered and the country on the cusp of the world’s worst humanitarian disaster — MBS persists in his aerial campaign. It was a heinous and fundamental misjudgement, but this arrogant young man, still only 33, refuses to admit his blunder. And the Yemeni people continue to pay an appalling price, attacked on the ground by the Houthis, caught in the splintering of rival militant factions, bombed in the air by the Saudi coalition — with weaponry sold to the Saudis by Britain and America.

Were this to be one error of judgement, it would more than suffice to condemn MBS. But the world, seemingly mesmerized by a cleverly spun narrative that he is a visionary modernizer, has chosen largely to allow him a free hand in Yemen.

No Bounds

When MBS pushed aside his rivals to the throne — Mohammed bin Nayef, the once powerful interior minister, and Miteb bin Abdullah, the head of the Saudi National Guard in 2017 — his ambition knew no bounds. Encouraged by US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner (with whom MBS had formed a very close bond), the crown prince launched into a wave of reckless and ill-thought-through actions.

In June of 2017, he and Mohammed bin Zayed declared a land, air and sea blockade of fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member Qatar. Again, the assumption was that the Qataris would surrender in quick order. Instead they stood their ground, using friendly relations with Turkey and Iran, their own vast hydro-carbon wealth, as well the initially laggard but ultimately crucial support of the United States to weather the assault. Today the dispute goes on and the GCC is ruptured. Iran — the avowed enemy of MBS’s quest to seize the mantle of hegemonic regional ruler — has, without so much as lifting a finger, emerged as the only clear winner.

In September of last year, MBS began a roundup of moderate religious leaders, including Salman al-Awdah, now facing the death penalty. He arrested young online activists and bloggers, most of whom had offered only mild and temperate criticism. It was another blunder, because these are precisely the people who would have helped him to realize his radical and revolutionary transformation of the Saudi economy and society — Vision 2030.

Announced to great fanfare in 2016, Vision 2030 is intended to wean the kingdom off its oil dependency and to invigorate the private sector by, amongst other measures, creating opportunities for women — all laudable goals and ones that Jamal Khashoggi supported. But Khashoggi, sensing he was next on the list to be taken, left the country in September of last year and took up his journalistic mission at The Washington Post. There he continued his trademark of writing journalism that was thoughtful, balanced and constructive. And while he became a harsher critic of MBS as the crown prince reinforced a campaign of fear and repression inside the kingdom, he never lost faith that Vision 2030 had within it the potential to achieve great and good change.

Blunder after Blunder

Mohammed bin Salman’s next gambit was to round up over 200 leading businessmen and senior members of the ruling family. They were held at the five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel in Riyadh. At about the same time, the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, effectively held prisoner in Riyadh, appeared on Saudi television looking haggard and drawn to announce he was resigning. Hariri was saved by the intervention of the French President Emmanuel Macron and ultimately returned to Beirut, where he promptly withdrew his resignation. The prisoners of the Ritz Carlton were not so fortunate. In order to secure their release they were forced to turn over most of their assets to the government. It was a classic, mafia-style shakedown.

However, these were individuals with close ties to Western business, exactly the sort of people you would want at your side as you pitched for foreign investment to power forward Vision 2030. Instead they were cowed and humiliated, their passports, as well as their businesses, taken away.

MBS garnered huge international acclaim by allowing women to drive. He then began to arrest the women who had led the campaign because he did not want to give the impression that women were in any meaningful way gaining power in the kingdom. That would have threatened him.

When, in the summer of 2018, the Canadian foreign minister decried the arrest of Samar Badawi, the sister of the jailed blogger Raif Badawi, the Saudis reacted with fury, sending the Canadian ambassador home, recalling theirs and pulling thousands of Saudi students out of Canadian universities. A bemused world watched and said little. Donald Trump’s spokesperson said America was not going to take sides. The Canadians, to their credit, stood their ground and reiterated their support for fundamental human rights.

When in late August the Saudis announced they were shelving the IPO of Saudi Aramco, it was a belated acknowledgement of what had long been suspected. Selling off shares in the world’s largest energy company would require the sort of transparency that the Saudis simply could not provide. The ultimate boss of Saudi Aramco, a company supposedly independent of the ruling family, is Mohammed bin Salman.

Yet even with all these unforced errors and strategic blunders MBS, aided and abetted by the Trump administration, was still able to project a modernizer image. He was looking forward to another glittering Riyadh conference, the so-called Davos in the Desert — the second annual Future Investments Initiative; the first one took place just ahead of last’s year’s Ritz Carlton arrests had been an enormous success.

And then came the disappearance and brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Finally the world recoiled in horror. Major sponsors, powerful politicians and corporate leaders have pulled out of Davos in the Desert. It is a political and financial catastrophe for MBS and a personal humiliation.

I began this column by writing of the link between Yemen and Khashoggi’s killing. His death has galvanized governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally serious questions are being asked about British and American involvement in that war. Jamal Khashoggi, whom I first met in 2002, was a kind and gentle man, a brave journalist and a great Saudi patriot who loved his country deeply. Would that his murder helps bring an end to this awful Yemen conflict and thereby helps make some sense out of his awful and senseless death.

*[This article was originally published by .]

 The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Can the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi Help Bring an End to the War in Yemen? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul has sparked a media frenzy in much of the world. The New York Times has published vast amounts of coverage examining in detail a host of angles, from the incident itself to the political and corporate fallout in the US and abroad, and even an opinion piece , Hatice Cengiz.

In total, the newspaper has devoted some 50,000 words (and counting) to the story in the two weeks since it broke. This is roughly equivalent to the quantity of coverage in the same newspaper for the previous four months of Saudi-related issues combined — and those four months were hardly uneventful. During that period, the Saudi regime launched a major offensive on the strategic port of Hodeidah in Yemen; , killing 40 children and 11 adults; lifted a ban on driving for women; dramatically broke off relations with Canada over a tweet; put on hold the initial public offering for its massive oil company, Aramco; and called for the death penalty for a female activist, among other things. So what is it about the disappearance and possible murder of Jamal Khashoggi that has made it so particularly newsworthy?

Mixed Messages 

The US media’s recent coverage of Saudi Arabia has been a combination of (apparently largely unfounded) optimism regarding political and social reform, cold strategic analysis of how the country fits in the region and its relationship with the US, and a rather matter-of-fact description of human rights abuses and potential war crimes.

A massive lobbying and public relations campaign by the regime has certainly helped promote a perception in the news that Saudi Arabia is liberalizing, and that the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, frequently referred to as MBS, is a reformer who deserves admiration. Coverage of the Saudi charm offensive seems to have been relatively positive, while to some it appears “.” A 2017 in The New York Times announcing the arrival of a Saudi Arab Spring is a case in point. This was by no means the first time that the paper has suggested that change was coming to the kingdom.

This is not to say that the media has failed to report Saudi atrocities and human rights abuses. It is no secret, for example, that Saudi Arabia has led a devastating air and ground offensive in large swathes of Yemen, along with an even more devastating land, air and sea blockade that has contributed to huge numbers of deaths, a record one million cholera infections and has left three-quarters of the entire population in dire need of humanitarian aid, much of which cannot be delivered.

While all parties in the conflict share responsibility for the suffering, a strongly suggests that war crimes have been committed and singles out the Saudi and Emirati actions as causing the greatest civilian casualties. Nor is it a secret that Saudi Arabia locks up, and at times publicly beheads, critics of the regime on highly suspect charges — or sometimes no charges at all. These stories have been covered by The New York Times and its colleagues, and they can certainly be critical.

But coverage has tended to be rather limited in quantity and often tame in tone when compared to atrocities committed elsewhere, not least in cases in which the perpetrator is a perceived “enemy” of the US government. Since his rise to de-facto power, MBS has careened from one foreign policy blunder to another — from the full-scale military intervention in Yemen to the blockade on Qatar and the apparent kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri and, finally, to the Khashoggi incident it currently faces. And yet the tendency in the media on the whole has been to gloss over this, which can perhaps best be explained by the narrative around MBS as a young, bold and dynamic reformer, and by the country’s status as a key US ally, buyer of weapons and provider of oil.

The Deal-Breaker

In 2017, when the kingdom held its first Future Investment Initiative, nicknamed Davos in the Desert, a had nothing but praise for the event and the future of the country. The trend continued as MBS visited the UK and the US accompanied by a supportive media, offering happy photo opportunities with a host of famous billionaires, including Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post. The constant stream of atrocities in Yemen and horrific repression within Saudi Arabia were no impediment to this support — it was business as usual with the kingdom.

When the second Davos in the Desert event was planned for October 2018, The New York Times had committed itself as a media sponsor, and other media partners included CNN, the Financial Times and Bloomberg; the owner of The Los Angeles Times was scheduled to attend. All that abruptly changed in the wake of the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. Representatives of all of the aforementioned media corporations, along with a host of other current and potential investment partners, that they were no longer willing to take part in the event. CNN Business quoted a researcher at Chatham House calling the incident a . The word applies equally to the news media and its dramatic change of heart in covering Saudi Arabia.

So why the change? Joseph Stalin allegedly once remarked that the death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic. Millions of suffering, yet faceless Yemeni civilians are indeed all too often reduced to a statistic. On the other hand, Jamal Khashoggi was not just any ordinary individual. Since fleeing Saudi Arabia, he became a columnist with The Washington Post, was frequently interviewed by US and other media outlets, and was close to people in power both in the media and political circles. Surely, it hit close to home for the American media.

A Sudden Bout of Selective Indignation?

The shock and sensationalistic news value of what appears to be a gruesome murder mystery certainly has also played a role in the heavy coverage. Is Jamal Khashoggi alive or dead? Was he killed and then dismembered in the consulate? Where is his body? Then there is the cloak-and-dagger mystery of the so-called hit squad that flew in from Riyadh, the (unlikely) possibility that the murder was secretly recorded by the victim via his Apple Watch, or that the consulate was bugged by Turkish spies.

The Turkish authorities’ piecemeal leaking of information also kept interest high, including allegations that the Saudi team was carrying a bone saw, that there was torture and that there are recordings. The fact that so many unknowns remain after two weeks also serves to inflate the coverage. When US-made Saudi bombs were dropped on a bus killing 40 children, however, there was no mystery about it. The facts of the matter were quickly established, so there was little interest in pursuing the matter further.

The deliberate and brazen nature of the act (if proven true) also helps account for the indignation and resulting coverage. Bombings of hundreds of civilians can be explained away as a targeting accident of war, and even mass famine affecting millions of people can be portrayed as an unfortunate consequence of conflict and weather, for which blame can be spread around. A human rights activist beheaded in a public square can be labeled a terrorist or a drug dealer, if any explanation is required.

But the murder of a journalist, who was a known public figure in the US, at a consulate in a foreign country without taking the trouble to invent charges or hold a trial, is not something that can be simply explained away. , writes that if the murder were indeed true, it “would be an unfathomable violation of norms of human decency, worse not in numbers but in principle than even the Yemen war.” This incredible feat of moral gymnastics tells us so much about the lens through which atrocities can be viewed by media agenda-setters.

Finally, media access has also meant that reporters can be on the ground and gather information. Journalists are rarely able to enter Saudi Arabia or Yemen, and although grainy images of public beheadings do emerge from time to time, they are usually lacking in terms of context, and follow-ups are rarely possible. In the case of Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, journalists have been able to set up cameras in front of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — at times broadcasting live — and have been given access to a range of video clips associated with the incident, including footage of Khashoggi and his fiancée at the consulate, and the movements of the alleged hit squad.

Whatever the reasons, the sudden rise of selective indignation regarding the actions of the Saudi regime raises some serious concerns about how the news media handles atrocities throughout the world. The media’s response to the Khashoggi incident, both in terms of the quantity and content of coverage and its participation in events in Saudi Arabia, is clearly not of a straw that broke the camel’s back nature, but marks an abrupt turnaround. It should be examined and questioned.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Boris Johnson’s�� about women who wear the burqa have sparked outrage and fierce debate on an issue that was already highly emotive. Since the 2016 referendum on EU membership, community relations between Muslims and non-Muslims have become increasingly fraught across Britain. There has been a rise in , many of which have been����in nature, with the targets mainly being women of Asian ethnicity,�� to be Muslim.

While some have��tried to ��the former foreign secretary’s comments — he referred to burqa wearers as����— this is not the first time he has made statements with��. Some commentators have argued that Johnson’s words are an attempt to remain at the forefront of politics, amid the possibility of a Conservative Party��.

If this is an attempt to grab headlines, Johnson’s tactics are a copy and paste of what worked so successfully for US President Donald Trump and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Their campaign focused on��evoking a sense of ��that had apparently been lost and making contentious statements in the media that would�� angry responses. Johnson appears to be��in ,��who has�� him as a possible future Tory leader.

The success of the Trump campaign and the��continued ��the US president enjoys have illustrated that if politicians are able to create a shared scapegoat that can be blamed for all social ills, then it doesn’t matter what the facts are. The narrative just needs to be repeated without pause. The Trump administration’s ongoing criticism of Muslims and his����from certain Muslim countries have��had an ��on the��lives of . It has also led to an increase in hate crimes and�� of Muslims across the country.

At the heart of all of this are the communities being used for collateral in the furthering of political aspirations. When politicians make statements like Johnson’s, they����or, at the very least, ridicule and harassment.

Often these comments��are taken to much darker actions. For those who already despise Muslims, the comments of a senior public figure who likens Muslim women to criminals could be an invitation to do harm. Earlier this year, a young man was to a��minimum of 20 years in prison��for repeatedly running over a Muslim woman in a hate crime. He reportedly said��he was ��and tried to blame the London 7/7 bombings for his actions.

Muslims in the UK are feeling besieged by the constant threat they are under. The face covering veil — the , which leaves the area around the eyes visible and��is often referred to as the burqa in the media and popular discussion — that has come to define Muslims in Europe is only worn by a tiny proportion of Muslims. Numbers are almost impossible to garner as generally statistics on women’s clothing are not collected widely. But�� available from other European countries it can roughly be estimated that with a UK Muslim population of 2.8m, around 836 women (0.001% of the UK population) will be wearing a niqab/burqa.

It is staggering that such a tiny proportion has created so much consternation and the need to fight so much negativity. At least 100 women who identify as wearing the burqa have�� to the Tories��demanding action against Johnson, and women who wear face veils have�� about their choices��following his comments.

What has been interesting to note is that despite the growing rates of attacks on Muslim women, there is some anecdotal evidence of a rise in��. While this might seem inimical to welfare given the situation, this act demonstrates a well understood phenomena of groups under threat. When a group feels that its identity is being challenged, it works hard to protect it, often by��reinforcing and reproducing acts that clearly it. In the aftermath of 9/11, the global backlash against Muslims resulted in more young American Muslims�� more visible Islamic dress��— the hijab (headscarf) for women and beards for men.

Now, the ongoing and resurgent Islamophobia requires a more elevated step in identity affirmation. And that may be one of the reasons why the niqab is becoming more visible in society. This points to the ironic fact that it is relentless attacks on Muslims that are creating a more visible Muslim presence in the UK. And as this visibility grows, so do attacks and further tensions. It is imperative for community relations that this destructive cycle of attack and defiance is broken soon.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Change is usually measured in decades in the conservative Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That’s what makes the revolution triggered by its young, impatient crown prince so noteworthy. showed his hand in October during a to an investment conference in Riyadh when he said, “We are returning to what we were before — a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and to the world.”

Alluding to the usual slow pace of change in his country, he added: “We will not spend the next 30 years of our lives dealing with destructive ideas. We will destroy them today.”

It’s a risky gambit for the 32-year-old crown prince, who was just appointed to the post in June by his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz. The speech comes amid a series of reforms that are shaking the foundations of the Saudi monarchy, bringing its very legitimacy into play. Not just the prince’s own survival is at stake, but that of the entire regime.

Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy rests on Islam as its foundation: Its constitution is the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad; its legal system is based on Islamic law. The king’s official title is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and his legitimacy rests on his ability to be a custodian of the land where Islam began and its holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Saudi royals have historically protected themselves from threats to that position by appeasing more conservative Islamists with strict adherence to Islamic values and rituals at home and millions of dollars in funding for the spread of the faith abroad, including to extremist groups that have metastasized into serious terrorist threats such as al-Qaeda. But this process has broken down in recent years, starting in 1990 when the kingdom’s willingness to accept US and other Western troops on its territory to beat back a threat from Saddam Hussein made an enemy out of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, scion of a rich Saudi family close to the royals.

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States accelerated the breakdown to the point where the Saudi regime became a target of extremists. Since 15 of the 19 attackers were Saudi nationals, Riyadh found itself under pressure to choose sides, and it chose closer ties with the United States. Attacks on Saudi soil have not only targeted US troops and other foreigners, but also Shia Muslims and members of the royal family. Meanwhile, the prognosis for Saudi Arabia’s oil-based economy worsened, while the Arab Spring prompted unrest among a population where 70% percent are under the age of 30.

Prince Mohammad’s program is as pragmatic as it is revolutionary: In order to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy away from oil and provide a sustainable future for its youth boom, the nation must be more open to the secular world. Open hostilities with Islamist extremists have made appeasement unworkable and victory essential, but that doesn’t mean it will succeed.

Since Prince Mohammad was elevated, his father has decreed that — a reformist priority for years — and watch public sporting events. But the most ambitious of the reforms is aimed at rewriting the rules of Islam itself: A royal decree of October 17 to examine the examples and teachings of the prophet Muhammad to screen out those considered fake or that have been interpreted to justify extremism and terrorist violence. The center will gather Islamic scholars from around the world to participate in the effort. Its establishment comes in the wake of within Saudi Arabia that included the and proposed changes to religious education.

In a statement, the the center will “eliminate fake and extremist texts and any texts that contradict the teachings of Islam and justify the committing of crimes, murders and terrorist acts.” If successful, the effort will help relieve concerns that the reforms would detach the Saudi regime from the Islamic sources of its legitimacy.

But the top-down nature of the reforms carries a huge risk. None of the reforms are aimed at easing the regime’s iron grip on its population, and there’s no sign of a relaxed tolerance of dissent. Liberal dissidents who might otherwise provide valuable support for the reforms, such as remain in prison. Meanwhile, there are plenty of centers of Islamic scholarship outside the control of the Saudi state that could compete for the loyalty of Saudi Muslims disappointed by the regime’s reforms — most notably in Iran, Riyadh’s regional rival.

Previous top-down efforts in the Middle East have not produced sustainable change. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reformist policies helped spark the clerical revolution against him in 1979 that established the current Islamic Republic of Iran. In Turkey, the secular reforms established by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk’s iron fist are systematically being rolled back after nearly a century by Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the apparent support of a majority of his fellow citizens.

Crown Prince Mohammad has described himself as being a man in a hurry. But, if he doesn’t rush the development of a system in which his people can share the political and economic benefits of his reforms, the whole endeavor might ultimately fail.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In October, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) unveiled , a futuristic desert city that he hailed as a “civilizational leap for humanity.” Situated next to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, the NEOM zone is close to major maritime trade corridors via the Suez Canal and has potential to further deepen economic links between multiple continents. NEOM will feature the future King Salman Bridge, connecting the city, which is expected to become , with Egypt and, by extension, all of Africa.

The will encompass roughly 10,000 square miles, stretching into Jordan and including the Red Sea islands Sanafir and Tiran, recently ceded to the kingdom by Egypt. Despite the challenges of making this project a success, the Saudi leadership envisions NEOM becoming a centerpiece of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR) and innovation, ensuring that the kingdom completes a necessary social and political transition.

NEOM comes from the Latin word for “new” (neo). The final “m” stands for the Arabic word for “future” (mostaqbal). The project, which MBS stated will be built by “people who live in the desert” who possess “colossal will, determination and drive,” will be a part of a new Saudi framework. In addition to domestic and foreign investors, the Saudi government will back NEOM with more than $500 billion, and the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund — the Public Investment Fund (PIF) — will the futuristic project. MBS spoke of a , seemingly based on .

NEOM, which is to open by 2030, will rely heavily on the food, entertainment, energy, water, manufacturing and biotechnology sectors, but most importantly the city is promised to feature state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI), drones, nanobiology labs, solar panels, hyperloops, luxury retailers and first-rate restaurants. In line with MBS’ plans to address climate change, with clean energy powering the urban landscape.

to purchase a large stake in the Saudi Electricity Company that will provide the energy required by NEOM. Saudi Arabia’s government began investing in Softbank Vision Fund to the tune of $100 billion to pave the way for the information revolution’s next chapter.

Planning Ahead

NEOM fits into MBS’ plans for leading Saudi Arabia on its “return” to “moderate Islam,” with a less strict version of Sharia law and gender mixing encouraged under this new city-state model. The , situated south of NEOM on the kingdom’s Red Sea coast, will be made up of luxury resorts, covering as many as 50 islands and 13,127 square miles. This area between the cities of Umluj and al-Wajh is larger than Belgium and is set to become a tourist hotspot. RSCR and NEOM, which will be Saudi Arabia’s largest construction projects to be achieved in progressive steps set for 2022 and 2030, promise to make the Red Sea locale in Saudi Arabia a vibrant and busy regional trade hub that attracts tourists and businessmen from all corners of the world. To make the zone more attractive internationally, there will be looser social rules, with alcohol legalized in RSCR.

Both NEOM and RSCR have the potential to transform the Red Sea into a thriving regional hub that boosts the Hijaz’s regional and international standing as a travel destination for tourists and business entrepreneurs alike. Also, with Saudis making major investments outside the kingdom, NEOM represents an opportunity to counter the decline of the oil-rich country’s GDP, as oil prices remain controlled by the Saudi-Russian agreement, by encouraging domestic investment to minimize GDP flight that has resulted from minimal opportunities to invest in Saudi Arabia. Added to the equation is the Hajj and Ummrah industries, which will fuel further revenue and economic growth, helping to diversify the Saudi economy beyond its traditional hydrocarbon sector. By 2030, no matter what the path, the kingdom sees its geo-economic center in these three projects.

Naysayers are recalling Saudi Arabia’s past attempts at grand projects. In the mid-2000s, King Abdullah recognized that to succeed in the future, Saudi Arabia must adopt visionary policies, break with the country’s ultra-conservative tradition and dispense with the shackles of oil dependency. The construction of six “” under his leadership was designed to enhance economic competitiveness, create new jobs and diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy. However, even before the plummeting of oil prices in 2014, these cities’ progress came slow, primarily due to the kingdom’s lack of an efficient economic model capable of reversing Saudi Arabia’s ministerial inertia enough to make grand objectives set forth by King Salman’s predecessor a reality. The announcement of NEOM raises serious questions about how realistic such dramatic change can be in the kingdom while also drawing attention to the plethora of issues that continue to plague it.

Yet, in the NEOM case, MBS and his team are setting out a vision for the fourth Saudi state. The aptly named NEOM stands for a new operating model, a fundamental adaptation to new realities. The kingdom’s new operating model is Vision 2030, which foresees Saudi Arabia both as the epicenter of the Middle East’s economic future and also as a global leader in embracing the FIR’s fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres. For having the tenacity to embrace NEOM as the centerpiece of the kingdom’s future, MBS deserves credit, for he sees NEOM not only as a near-term objective, but also as a springboard that he hopes will secure a strong position for Saudi Arabia in the global economy for the long term.

Challenges and Realizations

Due to the Saudi youth bulge, NEOM raises major social questions regarding the social ramifications of high unemployment rates amid an era of accelerated automation jobs. Naturally, the issue of labor under the kingdom’s National Transformation Plan is to be dealt with as , with greater centralized authority placed in the hands of individual leaders and more capital being directed at public programs with the aim of improving the overall economy and standard of living for the kingdom’s citizenry. The , according to Saudi officials.

The FIR is already disrupting national economies worldwide, but not every country has the financial resources to take advantage of advancements in technology that are drastically changing the international economic system. Despite being the world’s oil-richest country, NEOM’s price tag will be steep even for Saudi Arabia. Given the project’s grand objectives, the $500 billion MBS has already committed to making NEOM a reality is a conservative estimate. Indeed, financing NEOM may prove immensely difficult as the kingdom, which depends on the hydrocarbon sector bringing in 90% of national revenue, is already burdened by a persistently low��price of oil, substantial entitlement obligations to its citizens and financial commitments to existing projects.

Although in the future, funding for NEOM could come from sources of wealth outside the hydrocarbon sector, for at least the near term the futuristic city will be financed by petrodollars. Thus, the price of oil in upcoming months and years will determine how easily the Saudis will finance the first stages of this grand project. Other factors that will undermine Riyadh’s ability to finance NEOM and other pillars of Vision 2030 include the Saudi Aramco IPO’s recent setbacks and the costly quagmire in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia is promoting international investment to fund NEOM, and a number of investors have already expressed interest. On the heels of King Salman’s visit to Moscow in October, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the , said it will commit billions of dollars toward bringing Russian companies that specialize in AI, port infrastructure, high-speed transportation, health and education to NEOM.

Yet where this money may come from remains to be seen. British business magnate , and Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund is already active in the kingdom. Yet to secure sufficient amounts of foreign investment and successfully position NEOM as a global hub, the Saudis must make their country an attractive destination for international businessmen and investors. Security risks stemming from the Yemen crisis’ spillover into the kingdom’s territory and problems with Saudi Arabia’s brand in Western countries will challenge the Saudi leadership to do so in an effort to achieve NEOM’s full potential.

NEOM is a dream that adds excitement and impetus to Vision 2030. Of course, there is risk involved throughout numerous areas, from finance and insurance to construction, in addition to the multifaceted impacts that this project will have on Saudi society. Even if rocky, the path will be necessary as Saudi Arabia embarks on a revolutionary transformation.

*[Gulf State Analytics is a of 51�Թ�. The article was updated on November 1, 2017.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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As per the , an honor killing is “the murder of a person accused of bringing shame upon his or her family.” The act but is particularly prevalent in Asia and Africa. An honor killing or crime — with violence but not murder — often occurs with young girls and women. Victims are “killed for refusing to enter a marriage, committing adultery or being in a relationship that [displeases] their relatives.” The origins of the act are believed to stem from tribal customs.

Jordan has one of the highest rates of honor crimes in the world. According to , around 15 to 20 women are reportedly killed each year in the name of family honor. As a countermeasure, Jordanian authorities place women and girls who are at risk into “.” This often means imprisonment without charge for an indefinite period of time. These victims are left with no choice but to accept their fate.

Under the law, which dates back some 60 years, around are detained for this reason. They can be incarcerated with drug addicts, thieves, murderers and prostitutes, according to one woman who spent 22 years in prison without charge.

Instead of being protected by the state, these women are effectively punished and remain in limbo. If they want to get out of protective custody, they either have to return to their violent families or choose the other exit strategy: an arranged marriage.

*Watch the video above from the Thomson Reuters Foundation to find out more.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It’s 2017 and Muslim women across the globe are breaking stereotypes. No matter where they are located or what industry they are involved in — sport, fashion or politics — they are getting themselves known and setting a powerful example for Muslim women everywhere.

If you are not aware of them already, now is the time to be inspired by these successful Muslim ladies.

Saufeeya Goodson

Based in Dubai, is known internationally, appearing in many fashion magazines. She is also the co-owner of — previously known as @hijabfashion — which is a popular Instagram fashion page with over 2.9 million followers. If you haven’t already spotted her in or , then she is one to check out. Her outfits are bold and daring, ranging somewhere between contemporary and . Usually spotted wearing her signature sunglasses, she is making fashionable and very much on-trend.

Linda Sarsour

Linda is a Palestinian-American civil rights activist, mostly known for her part in helping to organize the , a protest movement led by women that brought . They all had one common goal and that was to make it very clear that women’s rights are just as important as human ones.

Ruma

Known for her fashion blogs, recently found herself on the Twitter page of H&M, applauded for her very special panache and stylishness. Named Mahmuda but called Ruma by everyone, her dream is to be so much more than just a regular fashionista. Looking to inspire her followers with stories and lessons learned from her life, she uses social media and the art of fashion to stimulate and motivate. Seeing haute hijab as the essence of traditional modesty, she sees what she does as being much more akin to a women’s movement rather than simply a fashion statement.

Halima Aden

Halima is a model known for being the first Somali-American Muslim to take part in a Minnesota USA pageant wearing a hijab and go on to reach the semifinals. To top this, she hit the runway when she modeled for Kanye West at his Yeezy season 5 fashion show. Disposing of all Muslim stereotypes, she also appeared on the , wearing the Nike hijab with a caption saying, “This is American Beauty.”

Shahd Batal

As a YouTuber and vlogger, Shahd’s focus is mainly on providing viewers with her own original tips to attain healthy skin and apply makeup. Sudanese by birth but now living in Minneapolis, her videos have been hitting the internet since 2014 and were recently rehashed and showcased via her new sleek channel. Her focus is on honesty and pure simplicity. Here you will find on how to wear a classic head-wrap and pen the perfect eyebrows, all held together with her very personal stories with regard to the hijab.

Carolyn Walker-Diallo

Carolyn hit the headlines when she was back in 2015, becoming the first New York City Civil Court judge to do so. She bravely stood up to the backlash that resulted and, because of this, she has become an inspirational figure for many Muslim women around the world.

Behnaz Shafiei

Something you may not expect is a Muslim woman road racer/motocross rider, but is exactly that. Born in Iran, she is the sole Iranian female to be involved in road racing professionally. In a country where women are ridiculed for their driving skills, Behnaz loves the fact that many men are scared to do the things she can on her motorbike.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Sharmeen has been named by magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. A Muslim filmmaker, journalist and activist born in Pakistan, much of her work focuses on highlighting the inequalities that many women face. So far she has received two Academy Awards, six Emmys and a Lux Style Award. Even the Pakistani government has honored her, presenting her with the second highest civilian honor of the country, the .

As you can see, there is no shortage of Muslim women to inspire, encourage and motivate. By breaking the mold and showing themselves to be powerful, influential and compelling, they are setting a great example for Muslim women of today.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Saudi Arabia’s long-awaited lifting of a ban on women driving will likely serve as a litmus test for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s ability to introduce economic and social reforms despite conservative opposition.��It also distracts attention from international criticism of the kingdom’s war in Yemen and charges by human rights groups as well as some Muslim leaders that Saudi Arabia is fostering sectarianism and prejudice against non-Muslims.

If the recent national day celebrations — in which women were for the to enter a sports stadium — are anything to go by, opposition is likely to be limited to protests on social media. To be sure, thousands welcomed this move as well as the lifting of the driving ban. reported that senior Islamic scholars, who for decades opposed expanding women’s rights and some of whom have criticized Prince Mohammed’s efforts to expand entertainment opportunities in the kingdom, said they saw no religious objection to women driving.

Conservatives, however, have made their rejection of enhancing women’s rights in response to the national day celebrations. “Patriotism does not mean sin. Of course, what is happening does not please God and his prophet. Patriotism is not dancing, free mixing, losing decency and playing music. What strange times,” said . A����of a man telling celebrating crowds that they have “no shame, no religion, no tribe” was widely shared on social media. Hundreds of thousands of Saudis used an Arabic hashtag demanding the restoration of powers to the kingdom’s religious police, whose ability to strictly enforce ultraconservative Sunni Muslim moral codes was curbed in 2016.

A 24-year-old Saudi student, speaking earlier this year to��, noted that ultraconservatism maintains a hold on significant numbers of young people. “You know that the top 11 Twitter handles here are Salafi clerics, right? We are talking more than 20 million people who hang on their every word. They will not accept this sort of change. Never.”

Talal Salama, a Saudi singer, was�� this week for singing a text from the Quran��during the national day celebrations. “The disaster is not just that he is sitting singing the Quran, the disaster is that it was a party approved by the government that is allowing him to sing, said lawyer����on Twitter.

CONSERVATIVES IN A CONSERVATIVE NATION

Prior to the driving ban reversal, Saudi authorities prevented Saad al-Hijri, head of fatwas (religious legal opinions) in the Asir governorate, from preaching. He previously declared that����to a quarter the size of a man’s when they go shopping. The suspension was the latest measure in a crackdown in which scores of Islamic scholars, including some of the kingdom’s most popular ones, judges and intellectuals, were arrested. The arrests were likely made to ensure that conservative opposition to the lifting of the driving ban would be muted.

The kingdom’s decision to delay implementation of the decision until June 2018 gives the government time to neutralize opposition and serves as an indication of what it would take to ensure Saudi women’s rights. To enforce the policy shift, Saudi Arabia must first eliminate����that prevent women from obtaining driving licenses, create facilities for women to learn how to drive, and train policemen to interact with female drivers in a country that enforces gender segregation and in which men largely interact only with female relatives.

The lifting of the ban is part of Prince Mohammed’s����plan, which seeks to diversify and streamline the economy and introduce limited social reform but avoid political liberalization. With women accounting for half of the Saudi population and more than half of its university graduates, Vision 2030 indicates the limits on granting women’s rights by saying that women will account for only 30% of a reformed kingdom’s workforce.

While the lifting of the driving ban, which was issued in a decree by King Salman on September 26, allows women to apply for a license without the permission of their male guardian, the����that subjects women to the will of their menfolk remains in place. There is also no indication that last week’s use of a stadium as a test case will lead to a lifting of restrictions on women’s sporting rights, including free access to attend men’s competitions and the ability to practice and compete in a majority of sports disciplines that are not mentioned in the Quran.

The public relations value of the reversal on the driving ban was evident in the fact that it temporarily drew attention away from news that reflected badly on the kingdom, including mounting international criticism of Saudi conduct of its war in Yemen that has pushed that country to the edge of the abyss. Saudi Arabia has desperately been seeking to����of a United Nations resolution and defeat calls for an independent investigation.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT

Riyadh has also put on the news backburner a 62-page����that, despite the banning of al-Hijri, documented that Saudi Arabia has “permitted government-appointed religious scholars and clerics to refer to religious minorities in derogatory terms or demonize them in official documents and religious rulings, which influence government decision-making.” Anti-Shia, anti-Sufi, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish sentiment is evident in the Saudi education system and in the judiciary, the report published on said.

Saudi Arabia adheres to a puritan interpretation of Islam that views Shia Muslims as heretics and advocates avoidance by Muslims of non-Muslims. The kingdom has spent an estimated $100 billion in the last four decades to propagate its austere vision of Islam in a bid to establish itself as the leader of the Muslim world and to counter the revolutionary appeal of Iran following the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In doing so, it has contributed to Muslim societies like Malaysia and Indonesia becoming more conservative and intolerant toward minorities. Saudi ultraconservative influence was visible earlier this week when an owner of a self-service launderette in the Malaysian state of Johor��.

“Saudi Arabia has relentlessly promoted a reform narrative in recent years, yet it allows government-affiliated clerics and textbooks to openly demonize religious minorities such as Shia. This hate speech prolongs the systematic discrimination against the Shia minority and — at its worst — is employed by violent groups who attack them,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Just two months after the United Nations elected Saudi Arabia into the newly established Commission on Women’s Rights, the long awaited memoir, was finally released. Al-Sharif details the extent to which women are subordinated by men on every level of Saudi society. Intertwined with it is a story of transformation — from a young devout Salafist to a champion of the women’s right to drive campaign and, finally, to a dissident in exile.

in May 2011 from a YouTube video of her driving through a thoroughfare of her occluded country. The video was uploaded later that night and by the next afternoon was met with a mixture of support from moderates and reprisal from votaries. There are no legal statutes forbidding women to drive, nor is it prohibited by sharia law. Rather, the ban is based on a issued by the late Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz in 1990. Few attempts have been made at defying the driving ban, but all have been subdued. Refusal to abide by Saudi orf, or tradition, results in arbitrary abuse and imprisonment, as was the case with Manal al-Sharif.

Her memoir starts with the night she was taken from her residence into an all-female prison days after the video became public. The author then begins the story of a young girl raised in a strictly religious family. If her younger self was told that before the age of 40 she would already have written a political coming-of-age memoir, she may have responded with incredulity. In her own words, the 38-year-old wrote: “I had never set out to be an activist.”

She may never have set out to be an activist, but throughout her memoir al-Sharif offers the reader many intimations that the woman she later evolved to be was not a product of mere coincidence. She was born in 1979, the same year of the Grand Mosque siege in Mecca. After Juhayman al-Otaybi’s two-week occupation of Islam’s holiest shrine came to an end, the ruling family’s relationship with Wahhabism began. Women stopped appearing on television. Imams began delivering their sermons on the radio. The young al-Sharif subsumed the radical teachings that she was given.

As the author enters adulthood, her faith begins to lose its fervency. She tells of the unsettling sense of how the words the imams sermonized conflicted with her actual experience. She enjoyed listening to music and reading news from the outside world on the internet. It all became untenable after the attacks of 9/11. While many were galvanized to have learned that the Western infidels were punished by the hands of their own compatriots, al-Sharif’s reaction was instead one of stunned horror. Here she writes:

“We had grown used to watching bloodshed, massacres, and destruction in Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq: now, for the first time, we were seeing the same thing in America. As I watched thick plumes of smoke rise into the sky and saw the Twin Towers burn, my feelings were a mixture of shock and deep sorrow. The scene that etched itself in my memory more firmly than any other was seeing victims jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. ‘This is madness,’ I said to myself, in tears.”

Readers will come to learn more of al-Sharif’s heroism, determination and moral conviction through the succeeding chapters. She entered an abusive marriage, gave birth to a son and went through a divorce. After being hired as one of the few female employees at Aramco, she took a company-paid trip to New England where finally she was able to see the United States without the slant of Saudi propaganda.

Her story ends with vindication, but also personal loss. Her imprisonment lasted only nine days, but the routine attacks from colleagues and strangers after al-Sharif’s release prompted her to leave the country with her second husband. She lost her personal hero, her mother, to breast cancer. After divorce, Saudi laws deny women full custody of their children. When she left, her first son stayed behind with her ex-husband.

Today, she has found safety in Sydney and has given birth to a second son. While it is still illegal for women to drive in her country, Manal al-Sharif’s bravery has not been in vain. Women continue to defy traditions so that freedoms for both sexes can eventually prosper in Saudi Arabia. If there is any hope, then it lies with rebels such as al-Sharif and her supporters. And if there is any small part that we can contribute, then it is to laud and support their efforts to enjoin freedoms that we so easily take for granted.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In May, India waited with bated breath for the verdict on one of the most brutal and horrifying cases in the nation’s recent history: the gang rape that led to the death of 23-year-old , who earned the moniker “Nirbhaya” (fearless). While the outcome was what most people expected — the Supreme Court of India upheld the death sentence for the four accused — what raised a debate was the way the court approached the verdict. In sentencing the perpetrators to death by hanging, the judges called Jyoti Singh’s case “,” and hoped that the verdict would speed up the process of justice for other rape victims and survivors.

Jyoti Singh and her family got justice after five years in an extremely rusty Indian judicial system that has more cases to solve than lawyers to solve them. But has her verdict really changed things in India? A few days after the verdict, a 20-year-old woman was in Rohtak, in the northern Indian state of Haryana; her head was smashed to pieces, her body crushed under a car. In July, a 16-year-old girl was in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Protests erupted across the state after the incident, with police stations in outpouring of anger.

Despite general awareness about how heinous rape is, punishment is not deterring the crime. Women still get gawked at, stared at and in urban and rural cities alike. ���Ի徱��’s economy is developing at a rapid pace, but the social problems are yet to be solved. Despite increasing foreign direct investment and the creation of more industries, women all across the country continue to feel scared to venture out at night.

Women continue to be more likely to remain and , while patriarchy continues unabated in Indian households. Girls are (a study by estimated that 12 million female fetuses were aborted between 1980 and 2010), and if they are born, they are subjected to a life of subservience to the overarching male figure in the family.

Patriarchy needs to be dissolved at the root, from within the familial system. It’s no surprise that the prominent owner of a popular magazine can a woman in a lift of a hotel, since consent as a term is hardly taught to men in Indian society. Marital rape still , as the law states that only forced sex on women over the age of 15 can be considered a crime. This rules out child marriages. According to ���Ի徱��’s 2011 , a shocking 12 million child marriages were recorded in the country.

Why India Needs a Feminist Discourse

Jyoti Singh’s case was not the rarest of the rare. The degree of violence toward a rape victim should not be the gold standard for issuing capital punishment. However, this does not mean popular opinion should be discarded in such cases. Rather, the punishment for rape should be made harsher than a life sentence, to factor in other rape cases that are currently pending in the courts.

Rape cases are being reported in Indian media more widely than ever before. Every day seems to be bring more horror, with neither , nor being spared the wrath of rape. It is time now, more than ever before, to let ethics and feminist values permeate the Indian classroom — a building block for children’s ethical consciousness. Remedial classes in prisons and feminist teachings in schools and colleges need to be introduced with immediate effect.

is commonly looked at as a strand of Western feminism, one that does not fit into the “standards” and particularities of Indian society. More than a foreign concept, the use of feminism needs to be understood first. Feminism is about equality across all genders. It is about viewing people as human before anything else. Strong-headed women with opinions are treated as anomalies in Indian societies and feminists are shunned for their “radical” opinions. The Indian concept of tradition is restricting women and creating more barriers around them. Little or no interaction between genders and viewing rape as an on a woman’s “honor” are just some of the myriad problems behind the psychology of rape.

Rape is a continuing problem across the world, but that doesn’t mean the system should give up on working to prevent it. India needs to accept the innate problem it has with patriarchy and conduct an in-depth analysis of the areas, age groups and social sectors rapists belong to before proceeding with further law-making. The situation on the ground needs to improve.

Petty regional politics and bad administration are letting crime go unchecked. Corruption within the police in many areas disrupts case proceedings, and political mud-slinging tends to garner more attention than justice for the victim and her family. ���Ի徱��’s laws still continue to marginalize victims and create divides between them. Rape victims from lower castes and strata of society are to get justice.

While those rape cases that get airtime in the media need to be dealt with, the Indian administration has to understand that the media always doesn’t need to publicize an event for it to take action. The Nirbhaya verdict should create a domino effect in taking swift action to solve the situation for women across the country rather than waiting for protests after yet another rape to take corrective action.

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On July 25, police in northern Iraq found the body of a young woman, 25, who was murdered, burned and dumped on a rural road between the villages of Hizob and Grtik. It is reported that she was newly married and that her husband allegedly shot her after another man had passed by twice while they were having a picnic near Sulaymaniyah.

This is not the only news that shook our world in Iraq. Apparently, more is yet to come. According to local police, “each day a woman is … murdered,” but families often avoid reporting it as they are afraid of ruining their reputation or being dragged into family feuds.

To be frank, after a while things start to sound normal to locals. Today you hear one story, tomorrow another brutal one, and then eventually everyone just stops reacting as such stories become the norm.

Violence against women is not just about murdering them. These crimes go as far as physical and emotional abuse that takes place over time.

Even if police arrest the perpetrator, it will not change much. Many murder cases are claimed as “honor killings” and then shut for good. In the end, the crime is added to the murderer’s profile as a source of pride and honor, not something to feel guilty or ashamed of.

WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN IRAQ

Iraq has been torn apart by decades of war. Religious, political and economic conflicts have destroyed everything. People no longer feel safe. Stories of Iraqis being kidnapped and murdered have become everyday events.

Women are the biggest victims of such conflicts and crimes. In some places in Iraq, they are not even allowed to work or go outside their home without wearing a niqab or being accompanied by a male family member. Some are deprived of their basic rights, including the right to vote, study or love. Many have become dependent on men. Those who lost their husbands in the war against Daesh (Islamic State) are forced to look after the family. They will not have mastered any skills or received an education because they were not — and will not be — allowed to.

Early marriage is another issue that women often face, as well as domestic violence with all forms of physical and mental abuse. Few women manage to report it or live in a shelter that is provided by humanitarian organizations or the United Nations. If these women do report the abuse, they would be shunned due to social stigmatization and their families would never accept them back.

There are many local nongovernmental organizations (NGO) that serve women and work on gender-based violence. These NGOs cooperate with the courts and local law enforcement to follow the few cases that make it through. But while many organizations have started to work on these issues, there is a lot left to do. Women’s rights activists must work specifically on the cases of murdered women. Different social classes should be targeted as the mentality of society and their vision about women’s rights should be subjected to a radical shift.

Shokhan Ahmad, the director of Women Legal Assistance Organization, stated: “Every day a woman is killed in [the] Kurdistan region of Iraq, [and] sometimes the number [doubles] and the authorities are not really interested in handling the murderer. The court system and honor killing-supporting laws should be amended and renewed.”

THE “HONOR OF THE FAMILY”

It is really hard to be a woman in Iraq. You are said to be the honor of the family, but instead you are treated like a big, dangerous nothing. There is always emptiness in every corner of your life, and you feel like a doll that your father, brother or husband has to direct.

For some, you don’t even have the right to be depressed, much less fall in love with a man of a different culture or religion.

Indeed, it’s hard to be a woman in Iraq.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In discussions of conflict and its associated processes of resolution, women are often defined by their relationships to their male counterparts or as tokens representing the brutality of war. Women are either the sisters, mothers or��daughters of both perpetrators and peacemakers, or they are mere poster children of victims caught up in battles over power, land and ideology.

When we think of war and armed conflict, we envision traditionally masculine traits such as aggression, power and strength. So why is it that we do not envision opposing traits such as trust, cooperation and fairness when seeking peace? As seen worldwide, when it comes to peacebuilding women are often relegated to more traditional notions of gender roles while their largely untapped capacity to wage peace is left ignored.

Before discussing exactly how to challenge these notions and to incorporate female actors into peacebuilding processes, we must first ask if women do in fact contribute to greater peace and stability. According to a number of research studies, women’s participation and equality are both contributing factors to successful conflict resolution efforts and strong predictors of a state’s peace and stability.

A Case for Women

One study found that resulted in peace agreements that were 20% more likely to last at least two years and 35% more likely to last for 15��years. As for predicting peace, research indicates that states with higher levels of are more likely to undergo internal conflict and that gender equality indicators are stronger predictors of peace than more traditional indicators such as GDP, religion or democracy.

Currently, we see that women are drastically underrepresented in peace processes worldwide. In 2012, a of 31 major peace processes since 1992 found that women comprised “4 per cent of signatories, 2.4 per cent of chief mediators, 3.7 per cent of witnesses and 9 per cent of negotiators between 1992-2011.” Furthermore, found that from 1990 to 2010, only 16% of peace agreements worldwide contained specific references to women.

So why exactly are women being left out of peace processes across the globe? In short, sexism is both a cause and an underlying contributor to other obstacles to inclusion as women and their interests are not seen as priorities. When it comes time to sit down at the negotiating table, who do not want to diminish their authority through the inclusion of other actors.

Furthermore, institutional constraints such as timelines and deadlines make peacebuilders wary of actor proliferation and the task of identifying legitimate and influential parties. Finally, the effects of conflict greatly differ when it comes to men and women. Research shows that while men make up the majority of those killed directly in armed combat, women suffer much more from the and may in fact have a higher mortality rate due to indirect factors such as infectious disease, domestic violence, economic devastation and human rights abuses.

Due to this dichotomy in victimhood, peace negotiations often ignore continued threats against women once negative peace, or the cessation of violence, has been established.

These concerns are not entirely new to the international community and a number of efforts have been made to promote women’s participation in peacebuilding activities. Passed on October 31, 2000, is perhaps the most widely mentioned expression of support for women’s involvement in peacebuilding. It highlights the fact that in the post-Cold War era, civilians, and women especially, are more frequently the targets of violence and it outlines a number of principles for increasing women’s participation in peacebuilding and decision-making. Since 2000, have established national action plans to support the implementation of UNSCR 1325 and mentions of have increased from 11% to 27%, likely as a result.

Iraq Needs Women Peacebuilders

Iraq, which recently adopted its own (INAP) and was the first in the MENA region to do so, is poised to present an interesting test for such plans in reconciliation efforts leading up to and following the demise of the Islamic State (IS)��within its borders. Despite increased hopes in the wake of a series of recent military victories there is growing concern about what exactly post-IS Iraq will look like.

Land disputes between the central government and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), the presence of and allegiance to multiple security actors, reprisal attacks and tribal conflict, difficulty in IDP returns, tensions between IDP and host communities, an ongoing economic crisis and numerous minority and ethnic conflicts provide enormous hurdles for future reconciliation and stability.

Research by found that barriers to women’s inclusion in peacebuilding processes in Iraq largely fall in line with the rest of the world. In a focus group discussion, participants emphasized lack of women’s capacity-building measures, family and social pressure to conform to traditional gender roles, pervasive use of negative stereotypes in the media and a lack of civic and human rights education programs as important contributors to women’s continued exclusion.

Displaced Yazidis enter Kurdistan, Aug. 9, 2014 © Ali Arkardy

Additional constraints, many of which are irreparable in the near future, also threaten overarching inclusion efforts. For instance, UN Iraq found that only 41.5% of Iraqi women believed that and only 10% reported joining a clubhouse, social club, union, political party or a women’s association.

Furthermore, male biases against women’s social inclusion were further identified. found that only about half of men aged 10-30 in Iraq supported women’s right to work. Finally, Iraqi women and girls currently have much lower literacy rates in comparison to their male counterparts, and the figures are much larger in rural areas. In 2013, the ��aged 12 and older was 28.2%, which was more than double the male rate of 13%. The illiteracy rate of women and girls aged 15 to 24 in rural areas was 33.6%. All of these figures constitute considerable impediments to women’s capacity and social willingness to support and participate in peacebuilding processes.

While there is a vast array of boundaries affecting both women’s inclusion and peacebuilding efforts in Iraq, a number of strategies may help mitigate their effects. First, the use of actor mapping, or the identification of influential actors, may help eliminate concerns regarding interest proliferation and representativeness.

Next, relevant entities are encouraged to provide trainings to increase women’s peacebuilding capacities across numerous roles and modalities on the peacebuilding spectrum. Finally, rates of women’s participation and their effects are virtually unknown in Iraq due to lack of gender disaggregated data from the government, local and international NGOs and international entities. The collection, use and examination of such data provide opportunities to have a better understanding of both gaps and opportunities.

The use of these strategies is paramount in central institutions such as the in the prime minister’s office. The establishment of a monitoring framework in line with INAP, and the corporation of women in the committee’s stabilization mechanisms in areas such as Nineveh, Saladin, Anbar and Diyala will provide unique opportunities to capitalize on the crucial role that women play in society and to pave the way for women’s future inclusion both in Iraq and in other conflict areas.

Furthermore, women should play a role in the design and implementation of trust-building mechanisms given women’s vital role in communities nationwide.

The Iraqi National Action Plan has certainly provided a framework for women’s inclusion in peacebuilding mechanisms moving forward. However, a conscious and concerted effort from the central government and KRG, local and international NGOs and international agencies needs to also be put forth in order to supplement the objectives of INAP. Otherwise, women will lose crucial opportunities to not only determine their futures but the future of Iraqi society as a whole.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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With over 100 million young people making up the largest proportion of the Arab world, it is a stratum of society whose needs and aspirations cannot be ignored. Yet in 2015, according to the , unemployment for those under 25 in the Gulf was at 25%, while more than two-thirds of the region’s youth would prefer a government job to the private sector, as the found.

In 2010, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) launched a program for socioeconomic development aimed at creating a healthier, more sustainable future. From investing in health and education, like the initiative to combat among children, the government is fostering the next generation of Emiratis who will help bring Vision 2021 to fruition. The country’s current youth bulge—15-34 year-olds make up over 40% of the population, some 400,000—has made the creation of the a key to the national vision’s success.

In 2016, Shamma Al Mazrui, a 22-year-old Oxford graduate, became the world’s youngest politician when she took over the post of the UAE’s youth minister.

In this video, she talks about her aspirations and the challenges ahead not only for young people of the UAE, but anywhere in the world.

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Three years ago, technology services conglomerate Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) opened an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that was unlike any of their other offices in the world: It had an all-female workforce. Former Tata Group Chairman Cyrus Mistry explains the reason for this workforce decision: “The Tata Group has a long history of encouraging women to achieve their potential and contribute to the community.” In 2016, rival Wipro followed suit. “Over 50% of the university graduates in Saudi Arabia are women and the aim is to increase the participation of women in the workforce to 30%,” says Soumitro Ghosh, president of the India and Middle East Markets at��Wipro.

But altruism, of course, is not the only motivator. As Saudi Arabia shifts toward a digital economy from one dominated by oil exports—especially with oil prices staying stagnant—it is waking up to the value of contributions by women. “In the past few years, the kingdom has been focused on a transformative journey, one in which it aims to move from an oil-based economy to a knowledge-based economy,” says Amal Fatani, head of the All-Women Business Process Services and IT Center in Saudi Arabia. “One of the key enablers of this transformation will be increased participation of women in the private sector and the involvement of organizations in paving the way for the same.”

Ghosh adds: “We are looking at supporting the kingdom and aligning closely with [the country’s] Vision 2030 and the national transformation program where diversification of the economy and employment of Saudi women are key priorities.��These are early days and we are building the funnel, which looks reasonable as of now and is growing at a reasonable pace.” Wipro expects to create nearly 20,000 jobs for Saudi women over a 10-year period. TCS says its all-female office is now 1,000 strong but started with 20 female employees and two anchor customers: GE and Saudi Aramco, who are TCS’ partners in the venture.

The one-gender office is their solution around cultural practices in Saudi Arabia, where men and women cannot work together unless they are closely related. They also often use separate entrances. Recently, a KFC outlet in Riyadh was closed down when a crack appeared on the wall between the men’s and ladies’ sections. Also, most women find it difficult to get jobs even though they are actively encouraged to get an education.

Thus, the solution to employing more women, at least for now, is to have an all-female office. This is an important step toward true equality. “If history is any guide, getting more women into the workplace in Saudi Arabia will be necessary before gender equality measures are put in place,” says��, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. “But the speed at which this will happen is impossible to predict.”

While gender equality goes far further than offering more jobs to women, at least it mutes criticism from religious authorities on the mingling of men and women. And when foreign companies such as TCS and Wipro change their employment practices to cater to a country’s culture, it can speak volumes. “I think it does have an effect when a foreign company does something in response to the peculiarities of a home country’s culture or laws.��If nothing else, it helps point out the absurdity of those practices,” says Wharton Management Professor��.

Oil Price Drop Prompts Changes

Economic realities are prompting Saudi Arabia’s leaders to rethink their financial strategies, which has spilled over to cultural practices around women. “Historically, Saudi Arabia has relied on revenues from oil exports for over 90% of its budget,” says Bellace. However, oil prices have been in a����because of increased global supply, particularly due to US shale oil, highlighting the need to review the nation’s budget. Vision 2030, unveiled in March 2016, aims to wean Saudi Arabia off its dependence on oil—especially since petroleum has paid for many benefits.

“The citizens of Saudi Arabia have become accustomed to generously subsidized health care, education and other key items such as gasoline,” Bellace says. “One way for the government to trim expenditure is to reduce the extent of subsidization. Another way is to increase the productivity of its adult population. At present, the labor force participation rate of women is extremely low, only 10%. Yet females are well-educated, comprising 60% of university students.”

Ironically, TCS and Wipro are promoting equality in Saudi Arabia when India itself could improve its own gender parity performance. ���Ի徱��’s Bharatiya Mahila Bank was set up in 2013 to cater to female account holders and it was run by female staff. But the bank failed; mounting losses led to its proposed merger with the State Bank of India. In 2007, British banking giant Standard Chartered opened an all-female branch in Kolkata, India to much fanfare, but there has been no news about it since then.

“These are among the few examples we have of such initiatives,” whether they failed or not, says diversity consultant Nirmala Menon,��founder and CEO of Interweave Consulting. US power systems manufacturer “Cummins has an all-women assembly unit near Pune (India). There is another manufacturing unit in Madhya Pradesh, which has only women employees. They are from backgrounds where they cannot be seen in public wearing their factory uniforms. These are organizations that are looking to meet practical needs so women can be in the game. As a way to get women [to participate more in] economic activity, these are very welcome initiatives.”

Cappelli adds that there is a “continuum of issues” in equality. “A century ago, it was about getting the right to vote, then about getting the right to certain jobs. The bigger issues come first, and in countries with more inequality, those issues are already dealt with, so they move onto other issues.” He notes that IBM once operated in Japan with a workforce that was heavily female, “in part because discrimination against women in Japan at the time made it easier to attract top-flight talent to a foreign company.”

Impact of Women-only Workplaces

The big question is whether women-only workplaces cause more divisions rather than break down walls. “Probably not, if the experience of other countries is any guide,” says Bellace. “Women have to be in the labor force before there is a widespread movement complaining about the lack of gender equality. This is the experience of Western countries. In many, the widespread movement for women to be granted voting rights occurred during or after major wars, as women went to work and took men’s places in factories.”

Bellace adds that in most countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the first demand by women was for equal pay, not for equal opportunity. “Women in factories, where jobs were sex-segregated, realized they were earning a lot less than equally skilled men. Once the pay issue is settled, women’s attention turns to the issue of access to higher-paying ‘male’ jobs.”

While developments in Saudi Arabia for working women are welcome changes, the experience of other countries shows that it will take a while for gender equality to take hold. In the US, the call for equal pay was heard during World Wars I and II, but it wasn’t until 1963 before equal pay for both genders��.

*[This article was originally published by , a partner institution of .]

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Feminism has got its work cut out for it when it comes to Arab countries. are still used in Libya, Jordan and , where a member of parliament provoked an outcry in 2016 after calling for girls to be screened before being admitted to university. In , women are not allowed to drive a car, travel or marry without permission from a , or even read an uncensored fashion magazine.

is still widespread , with some 200 million girls and women alive today who have been subjected to the procedure in 30 countries worldwide. In Iraq, less that in Egypt and 44% in Morocco.  has no minimum age for marriage, with nearly 10% of girls married by the age of 15. In Egypt, nearly , usually blamed on the victim’s behavior or attire. Many countries have only recently criminalized marital rape and domestic abuse, whereas some still don’t consider these a crime.

This is what a 19-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian blogger, Laila Hzaineh, has set out to combat. When she spoke out against sexual harassment on social media, the vitriolic response she received—including threats—only made her more determined. With every ugly message she got angrier, feeling empowered to speak out for so many women who cannot.

Raised in a liberal Muslim family, Laila realizes that her path is not for everyone, but her aim is to give women the freedom to choose their own way in life without fear or persecution.

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Many in France are jumping like cats on a hot tin roof and making much ado about burkinis. This week, the dapper James Creedon from Ireland and his thoughtful English colleague reported on����that Cannes and two other towns banned burkinis on the beach. A fourth town is planning to do the same and the��.

Before we carry on, what may you ask is a burkini? Simply put, it is a swimming garment for women that covers the whole body. Some call it a swimsuit version of the��burqa. It is a bit like a wetsuit except that you wear it not to save yourself from icy waters, but the prying eyes of lustful men.

The burkini is a dress designed for modesty. Conservative and religious individuals and societies have long prized modesty. Not for them the Dionysian revels of unabashed indulgence, these fine souls prefer curbing their desires, ordering their lives and creating a society of restraints. In the villages of northern India, Hindu women cover their heads. In much of the Middle East, the sight of women in a hijab is commonplace. Even in Europe, Catholic nuns can still be seen in coifs from time to time.

Until very recently, even men had to cover their torsos when they went to the beach or swam in pools. The legendary Johnny Weissmuller, whom the����calls “swimming’s first superstar,” won five gold medals in the 1920s in suitably modest attire. It goes without saying that society expected women to dress more modestly than men.

Articles in the nostalgic��, the trendy����and the respectable����chronicle the evolution of bathing suits over time. Suffice to say, Europe and the United States have come a long way from bathing machines and bathing gowns. It was none other than France, the land of revolutions, which launched the itsy bitsy bikini revolution. Louis Réard invented this risqué apparel and named it after Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Then, this was where the US was conducting atomic tests. In the words of Emily Spivack, Réard thought “this new suit would have the same explosive effect as splitting the atom did on its island namesake.”

Réard turned out to be right. The bikini was scandalous. It was banned in a number of places on the planet. In places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, that ban continues. Clearly, the way women dress is a big deal in most societies. Why?

The answer to this question is entangled with people’s deepest values. If they believe life is about modesty, chastity, restraint, obedience and service, then the bikini is indubitably provocative. This author is certainly not alone in almost involuntarily gazing at girls in bikinis. In contrast, women in��burqas��barely garner a glance. If sex is sin or tinged with sin and Eve’s proverbial desire for an apple led to the fall of man, then bikinis are satanic temptations to lead us astray.

On the other hand, if people believe in����or��, they might find����oppressive and ridiculous. The same holds true for����that prescribe modesty for both men and women. Spivack tellingly points out that the modern bikini was present in ancient Rome before the Judeo-Christian faith conquered the city. Other parts of the world have traditions far more scandalous than the humble bikini. This author’s grandmother comes from a clan that built the��. These magnificent architectural masterpieces are famous for their erotic sculptures, which have long scandalized conservative Muslims, Christians, Hindus, puritanical atheists and even doctrinaire feminists.

While this author does not agree with Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations, much of the world is certainly experiencing a clash of values. In France, hedonistic values that celebrate the senses are clashing with traditional norms that prize piety. Burkinis are a classic case in point.

The burkini brouhaha began when a group announced a seemingly innocuous event at a��. This private event was scheduled for September 10. It was meant for women wearing a swimsuit that covered their bodies from their chests to their knees. Two-piece swimsuits were prohibited. In other words, burkinis were in, bikinis out. This caused outrage. Politicians from both the left and the right declared this event a threat to France’s haloed secular values.

The event was perfectly legal because a private group can decree dress codes for its members. The Cosmos Club in Washington, DC, the Gymkhana Club in New Delhi and countless other institutions constantly do so. Even licentious night clubs in Las Vegas often ask men to wear leather shoes and bar entry to those in sneakers or flip flops. The issue here was not legality but symbolism. For many in France, the innocuous burkini was a sinister challenge to their way of life. Emotions ran high and the organizers had to cancel their burkini party when they received bullets in the mail.

Like most controversies, this episode has a backstory. In 2009, a French convert to Islam was����in a public pool because she was wearing a burkini. Officials cited hygiene concerns as reason for the ban. France followed banning the burkini with a��. In 2011,��la grande nation��became the first European country to adopt a law prohibiting the complete covering of one’s face in public. With 5 million Muslims, France has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe. Yet most experts estimated that barely 2,000 women wore the now .

In keeping with this gallant Gallic tradition, the mayor of Cannes, a ritzy town famous for its film festival, frolicking on the beach and a rollicking nightlife,����for August. While the veil and the kippah were fine, he argued the burkini was a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism and a threat to the security of his town.

In Napoleon’s Corsica, the mayor of Sisco banned burkinis after a����between locals and North African immigrants, after the latter reportedly objected to tourists photographing their burkini-clad women. Different versions of the story reveal the same fear of the other that pervades this island. The ban in Sisco aims to prevent the rising tension between locals and immigrants breaking out into another riot.

Laurence Rossignol, France’s minister for women’s rights, has jumped into the fray and supported the bans. She does not see the link between burkinis and terrorism or see burkinis as leading to riots. The feminist minister finds the burkini “profoundly archaic” and the struggle against it a “battle for the emancipation of women.” Rossignol is����and believes that burkinis “hide women’s bodies in order better to control them.” She has strong views on the subject and, earlier in the year, Rossignol inadvertently kicked off a ferocious row by comparing women who wear headscarves to “.”

It is obvious that the French ban on burkinis is based on a range of reasons and excites deep passions. More importantly, the ban raises a number of infernally tricky questions.

First, can the state tell people what to wear and what not to? Many argue the state has no right to do so. Yet the state has long done so. Most states in the world do not give people the freedom to walk around naked. There are laws against outraging public decency not only in conservative Malaysia, but also in supposedly devil may care California. What constitutes public decency is notoriously hard to define and changes with time. Besides, when the state bans nudity or women going topless, then the reaction is not quite the same as the ban on headscarves or burkinis.

Is this because by banning burkinis the French state is intruding upon religious freedoms?

Catholic nuns and Muslim women often cover their heads because of religious conviction. Some women may not be terribly religious, but still cover their heads for cultural reasons. For them, the headscarf or even the burkini is a part of their identity. In the liberal and multicultural UK, headscarves,��burqas��or burkinis do not cause much of a fuss. This is a land where the queen still heads the Church of England but everyone knows she is just a ceremonial figure. This pragmatic land with an unwritten constitution and a long nonconformist tradition has gradually become comfortable with different religions despite no��de jure��declaration of secularism.

On the other hand, France has been deeply Catholic for most of its history.��Huguenots��paid with their lives in the��. Reformers had to fight long and hard to separate church and state. The French want to keep it that way. That is why the very first article of their constitution declares that “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.” This means that��, the French version of secularism, is fundamental to the state.

����������makes the state neutral toward all religious beliefs. Its operative assumption is that the complete isolation between religious and public spheres is a worthy and desirable ideal. Many argue that this separation of religious and public spheres is a touch too rigid. As the BBC pointed out in 2005,��. For many Muslims, their faith permeates all aspects of their lives, and French restrictions on religious expression in public spheres are profoundly antithetical to Islam. The ban on burkinis is one such example and is wrong. Some in France argue that, if devout Muslims have a problem, they can move to the UK or another country where the law is more to their liking.

Second, does banning the burkini enhance security? Sisco’s mayor might argue that the ban on burkinis keeps conservative Muslim women away from the beaches at a charged time. It avoids unnecessary riots that can lead to loss of life and limb. Furthermore, it saves both public spaces and costs to the public purse. Others argue that the ban enrages an already alienated minority living in����where riots erupted in 2005.

In any case, France is experiencing new threats to its security. In November 2015, along with Beirut and Baghdad, Paris suffered��. On July 14, 2016, the day when France celebrates the fall of Bastille and the start of its bloody 1789 revolution, a Tunisian deliberately drove a truck into crowds in Nice killing 85 people. Thereafter, two French Muslims slit the throat of a Roman Catholic priest. Banning the burkini might add fuel to the fire by giving reactionary clerics a new injustice to rail against and boost their recruits. Furthermore, it is generally radicalized young men who launch terror attacks, not women on the beach in burkinis.

France is a deeply divided country. When Manuel Valls, whose parents were Spanish and Swiss, was prime minister, he declared that “tensions that have been brewing for too long and that we hardly mention …����in our country.” Valls went on to say that people face “social misery and discrimination on a daily basis due to having the wrong name, the wrong skin color, or even simply for being a woman.” The “reality of France,” in his words, includes “mass unemployment, long-term unemployment, youth unemployment, and parents’ anxiety for the future of their children.”

Banning burkinis might make that reality of France uglier for Muslim women from traditional families and conservative communities. They might find this ban a great intrusion into their liberty of belief, faith and worship. It puts them between a rock and a hard place. If they venture to the beach in the burkini, the state might impose penalties on them. If they do not wear a burkini at the beach, they might face friction within their families or ostracism in their communities. They might end up abandoning public spaces altogether to the safety and security of their miserable ghettos.

This raises a third question. Does the burkini ban help women in any way? Rossignol would emphatically say yes. This author has just pointed out how it may force many Muslim women into the confines of their ghettos. Is the suffering of such women by banning burkinis a worthy price to pay to achieve Rossignol’s cherished ideals of women’s emancipation?

To answer this question, we have to examine what Rossignol means by emancipation. Is it women enjoying equal rights and opportunities as men in society? Is it improved career choices and professional advancement? Or is it merely the freedom to dress sexily? France may have been at the forefront of the bikini revolution, but it��, more than two decades after its��. France is no Scandinavia and has a rich history of��. Banning the burkini is not going to improve the chances of the likes of Rossignol to be��Madame Presidente.

Bikinis can often be as problematic as burkinis for women. Marcie Bianco argued earlier this year that “.” The fashion industry, advertising and Hollywood have defined female beauty in utterly unrealistic and unattainable terms. Even in southern Christian states that oppose abortion, American football games begin with cheerleaders jumping up and down in skimpy clothes. France may have invented the bikini��, enabling��.

Finally, modesty, chastity and piety provide meaning to many women’s lives. Creedon has produced a����on his cousin who left Ireland for Japan in 1935 to become a missionary nun. It serves to remind secularists like Rossignol and this author that women must retain the right to pray to gods we may find ridiculous, keep their heads covered and even wear burkinis on the beach.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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