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NY Times, April 22 2017
Cellphones in Hand, Saudi Women Challenge Notions of Male Control
By ROD NORDLAND
Lately a lot of women in Saudi Arabia have been loudly speaking out
against male control over their lives, but as several have recently
found, it is still the men who have the last word.
Last week, a 24-year-old Saudi woman, Dina Ali Lasloom, tried to flee
her home for Australia. Members of her family flew to Manila, a transit
stop, and forced her to return to Saudi Arabia. But before she was
hauled away, she posted a cellphone video, saying that her family would
kill her and begging for help. The video quickly went viral in Saudi Arabia.
Another woman, Alaa Anazi, a medical student, was detained at the Riyadh
airport after she asked the authorities when Ms. Lasloom’s flight was
landing. Protesters had been alerted on Twitter and gathered to support
Ms. Lasloom.
And this week, a women’s rights activist, Maryam Al-Otaibi, was arrested
after she fled her father’s home to live independently in Riyadh, the
Saudi capital. Fellow activists were soon spreading news of her case on
social media sites.
The three cases are part of a campaign by Saudi women, who have been
broadcasting daring videos with their cellphones, using Facebook to
organize street protests and posting Twitter messages to challenge the
very idea of male supremacy in their famously patriarchal society.
The campaign, started by a loose network of activists who have enlisted
young, media-savvy women, has gone far beyond earlier protests against
the kingdom’s reaffirmed ban on female drivers, and has become a
challenge to the pervasive guardianship system. In this entrenched
system of guardianship, a male relative — usually a father or a husband,
but sometimes a brother or even a son — has the legal right to control a
woman’s movements.
What use is the right to drive, the young activists ask, if a woman
still needs a man’s permission to leave the house?
Even among some of the activists themselves, there has been surprise at
the response. “I’m very impressed; a few years ago I thought I was the
only one who thought this way,” said Moudi al-Johani, 26, a Saudi woman
who said she was locked up by her family when she returned from Florida
during a college vacation.
Ms. Johani’s father was angered by her independence and held her at home
against her will for months, she said. She fled last year to the United
States, where she has applied for asylum. She was among those who
started an online campaign, #StopEnslavingSaudiWomen, which she claimed
“has been trending for more than 230 days.”
The online Saudi activists have at times been provocative, with a number
of women apparently within Saudi Arabia posting photographs and videos
of themselves online after removing their head scarves, often in public.
While that would not earn more than a glance in most Muslim societies,
in Saudi Arabia these women risk arrest by the religious police, who
enforce the kingdom’s ultrastrict, Wahhabi version of Islam.
In one Twitter post, a woman held a sign in front of her face: “I’m a
prisoner and my crime is that I’m a Saudi women.”
Others have recorded themselves performing other acts considered
forbidden: driving cars, riding bicycles, wearing trousers.
In the case of Ms. Lasloom, who was trying to reach Australia without
her father’s permission, the Saudi authorities asked Philippine
officials to detain her while her uncles flew to Manila. Before they
arrived, she borrowed a phone from a Canadian woman at the airport and
recorded her plea for help.
“If my family come, they will kill me,” she said in the cellphone
recording. “If I go back to Saudi Arabia, I will be dead.” According to
Human Rights Watch, a security official in Manila reported seeing her
being taken away with her mouth taped shut and her arms and legs bound
with tape. She was put on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight home with her
uncles.
Ms. Lasloom’s video quickly went viral in the Middle East, under the
hashtag #SaveDinaAli.
The Saudi Embassy in Manila issued a statement calling Ms. Lasloom’s
return a “family matter.” The Philippine authorities denied returning
her against her will.
“Cases like Dina’s case are the direct result of a system that keeps
women in a perpetual state of being a minor,” said Ahmed Benchemsi, a
researcher for Human Rights Watch.
In his Vision 2030 decree last year, Saudi Arabia’s powerful new defense
minister and deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, called for a more
open society. He said that women were an important part of that society
and should be allowed to play a greater role.
One of Prince Mohammed’s reforms was to rein in the religious police,
sharply curtailing their powers in recent months, which is one of the
reasons women are starting to speak up more now.
Moreover, women who campaigned for greater rights in the 1990s did not
have the sort of internet tools now so widely available to activists,
said a Saudi historian and women’s activist, Hatoon al-Fassi. “We are
witnessing a different phenomenon today where more young women are
becoming outspoken about deciding their own fates, and going public with
it,” Ms. Fassi said.
But activists are quick to note that the social media uprising does not
necessarily represent what all Saudi women are feeling. “There are a lot
of indicators on both sides,” Mr. Benchemsi said. “You also have
religious preachers with millions of followers on social media, so you
see some signs of a loosening, but you also see signs of the opposite.”
Ms. Johani said that since fleeing last year, her activism has attracted
many other young women who want to free themselves from their male
relatives. “I get tens of messages every day from Saudi women trying to
seek help,” she said, “and every day they literally ask me, ‘How did you
manage, how can we get help?’”
But she also gets plenty of hate mail and death threats, she said, from
both men and women.
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