Saudi Scholar Finds Ancient Women’s Rights
By REUTERS
Women living under the rule of Shariah in Saudi Arabia
RIYADH (Reuters) – When clerics, ministers and businessmen gathered at a
forum in Riyadh last month to discuss women in the workplace, there were no
women in sight.
Typically for Saudi Arabia, the women who took part were seated in a
separate room so the men could only hear them.
Such oddities are part and parcel of the complex system of social control
maintained by clerics of Saudi Arabia’s austere version of Sunni Islamic
law, often termed Wahhabism. It’s a system called into question by scholar
Hatoon al-Fassi.
In her study, “Women In Pre-Islamic Arabia,” the outspoken rights advocate
argues women in the pre-Islamic period enjoyed considerable rights in the
Nabataean state, an urban Arabian kingdom centered in modern Jordan, south
Syria and northwest Saudi Arabia during the Roman empire.
Most controversially, Fassi says women in Nabataea — whose capital was the
famous rose-red city of Petra in south Jordan and which was at its height
during the lifetime of Jesus Christ — enjoyed more freedom than in Saudi
Arabia today because clerics have misunderstood the origins of Islamic law.
She also suggests some Saudi restrictions on women may have their origins in
Greco-Roman traditions.
“One of the objectives of this book is to question the assumption of
subordination of women in pre-Islamic Arabia,” Fassi writes. “Most of the
practices related to women’s status are based on some local traditional
practices that are not necessarily Islamic. Nor are they essentially
Arabian.”
She argues women in Nabataea were free to conduct legal contracts in their
own name with no male guardian, unlike in Greek and Roman law, and in Saudi
Arabia where the guardian is central to the clerics’ idea of a moral public
sphere.
The Wahhabi interpretation of sharia requires a “muhrim” — father, husband,
brother or son — to accompany women in public, allow them to travel and
attest their legal contracts.
U.S.-based
<http://topics. nytimes.com/ top/reference/ timestopics/ organizations/ h/human_r
ights_watch/ index.html? inline=nyt- org> Human Rights Watch attacked that
system in a report in April as treating women as effectively legal minors.
At last month’s televised “National Dialogue,” clerics insisted women could
work only in segregated female-only workspaces. Their opponents in
government say these rules have kept unemployment among women at around 26
percent.
“I found that with Nabataean women the legal status and self representation
was stronger and more evident than with Greek women who needed always a
‘tutor’, or representative, in order to conclude any contract,” Fassi said
in an interview.
“An adaptation of Greek and Roman laws was inserted in Islamic law,” she
said, referring to guardianship. “I would insist that it’s an ancient
adaptation, that (Muslim) scholars are not aware of, and they would really
be shocked.”
ORIGINS OF SHARIA
The main schools of sharia were codified in the 9th century AD in
territories where a ruling Arab elite mixed with non-Arab and non-Muslim
populations in the aftermath of the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam in
the 7th century AD.
The main body of the law is derived mainly from oral traditions attributed
to the Prophet Mohammad, and viewed by Islamic scholars as divine in origin.
Scholars in the West have seen, in effect, a mix of Arabian, Jewish and
Roman origins.
“The argument about Greco-Roman law having influenced the sharia rules about
women could have some basis if one thinks in terms of Middle Eastern
adaptations — ‘provincial versions’ — of Greco-Roman law,” said Gerald
Hawting, a historian of early Islam at the School of Oriental & African
Studies in London.
Fassi, he said, “is not likely to win many friends among the traditional
ulama (scholars) by arguing that important elements of the sharia originate
from human history and not from God.”
Fassi’s ideas reflect views often expressed by Arab liberals — that
restrictive traditions in the empires conquered by the Arabs found their way
into Islam. Egyptian feminist Nawal al-Saadawi, for one, has often been
attacked for saying as much.
“The deterioration in women’s status is clear. We now live the worst status
imaginable as women,” said Fawziya al-Oyouni, a women’s rights activist who
lobbies for women’s right to drive. “There is no religious text that
stipulates ‘guardianship’ .”
MORE LIBERAL TIMES
Signs are around 2,000 years ago things were not so strict.
Using coins and inscriptions on Nabataean tombs and monuments in Greek and
Semitic languages, Fassi surmises that women’s independent status was linked
to a rise in trade and political exchanges in the ancient world at the time.
“There was a certain economic change in that period that allowed women to
become stronger or more visible,” she said. “I believe it was because of the
economic absence of men … At the end of the first century BC the caravan
trade became intensive, twice a year rather than once in the previous
millennium.”
The last of the Middle East states to fall to direct Roman rule in 106 AD,
the Nabataean confederation’ s power was based on desert trade routes from
Yemen to Greece and Rome.
Nabataean queens had coins struck in their name and showing their face, with
light hair-covering veils. Today, Saudi clerics expound at length on
television and in other forums on the complex rules over when women can and
cannot reveal their faces.
An urbanized Bedouin state, Nabataea has received relatively little
attention from scholars, some of whom question whether it was authentically
Arab. Petra was even forgotten to history until “discovered” in 1812 by
Swiss explorer Johann Burckhardt.
Fassi, banned from teaching at King Saud University since 2001, suggested
one reason for the neglect was that Nabataea defies stereotypes about Arabs.
“(Nabataea) has weakened the idea that Arabians were merely or essentially
nomads, by having an Arabian urbanized state,” she says in her book,
published by British Archaeological Reports.
(Editing by Sara Ledwith)
