Cross-posted at Daily Kos. 
Today, the Kuwaiti parliament approved in principle a law “giving women in the conservative emirate the right for the first time to vote and stand in October’s municipal council elections.” The Kuwaiti prime minister said, “Thank God, the first step towards women’s rights has been completed.”
One of the few countries where women can’t vote is Saudi Arabia. Tonight, PBS Frontline airs “Death of a Princess,” a docudrama about a Saudi princess’s execution for adultery. The docudrama was shown in 1980, reports the New York Times, “over the objections of the Saudi government, the State Dept., members of Congress and Mobil Oil, a major PBS sponsor.” It has not been seen since. More below:
More about “Death of a Princess” below.
First: The BBC has organized a list of the status of women’s rights to vote in Mid-East countries:
- Women can vote and be elected: Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Palestinian territories, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, Iran
- Women cannot vote or be elected: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
- There are no elections: Syria (holds presidential referenda in which women can vote), UAE, Libya
The “vote in principle” to give Kuwaiti women passed by 26 votes to 20, with 3 abstaining. The law gives “women in the conservative emirate the right for the first time to vote and stand in October’s municipal council elections.”
Those who voted in favour included 13 cabinet ministers present during Tuesday’s session [PHOTO: where women were allowed to attend and observe], as well as liberal and Shiite MPs. All tribal Islamist lawmakers, who are staunchly opposed to women’s rights, voted against the bill.
“We are waiting for the major step [a second and third round of voting within the next two weeks] and I am sure it will be approved like this one,” Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah said in reference to granting women the right to vote and contest parliamentary polls.
“I congratulate my sisters for obtaining their rights in municipal elections and they will get their other rights in voting and standing in parliamentary elections,” he told reporters after the vote.
The premier said he was confident Kuwaiti women would get their full political rights during the current parliamentary term which ends in June and said he would appoint a female cabinet minister once women are enfranchised.
“This is the first step towards women’s full political rights,” said Rula Dashti, chairwoman of the Kuwait Economic Society.
____________________________________________________
About a new postscript added for the airing of “Death of a Princess” tonight on PBS stations, the New York Times writes:
“So it’s this paradox,” Ms. Eltahawy says. “The more open and modernized you become, the tighter you must hold onto women in particular, and children, to show what a good Saudi you are and what a good Muslim you are.”
The NYT piece reveals the difficulties that the docu-drama makers encountered in trying to ferret out the facts behind the accusations of adultery:
“Death” remains a thoughtful, engrossing film, though in retrospect it is as telling about the journalistic process as it is of life behind the veil. After hearing reports that a Saudi princess and her lover had been executed for adultery in 1977, a British journalist, Antony Thomas, decided to investigate. He stumbled across so much fear and secrecy from sources that he concluded he would never be able to make a conventional documentary. He turned his reporting into a docudrama, hiring actors to re-enact the interviews he conducted in London, Paris, Beirut and Saudi Arabia.
By today’s standards, his is a fairly tame look at a horrifying act. The execution, conducted in public (men only, that is) in a sandy lot, is only briefly shown. The princess, wrapped in a chador, was shot. Her lover, a young Saudi, was beheaded. The camera pulls away before the first blow of the sword.
Mr. Thomas calls himself Christopher Ryder (played by Paul Freeman) in the film, and most of the action is the reporter’s journey past red herrings, misinformation and other frustrations that make investigative reporting so rare. He cannot nail down even basic facts: where the princess met her lover, how their romance was discovered. Sources are mysterious and misleading, and not just in the Middle East. Ryder’s toughest interview is with a German named Elsa Gruber (Judy Parfitt) who served as a nanny for the royal family and knew the princess a little. Miss Gruber is in turn coy, volatile and paranoid, worried that Ryder is trying to steal information she could sell as a book.
The Princess (Suzanne Abou Taleb) is left an enigma and is shown only a few times, usually as described by Ms. Gruber: dancing wildly at an all-female party in a palace.
After a very long road, Ryder is introduced to a woman who is referred to only as the Emira, and who seems to have most of the facts of the story as well as a firsthand knowledge of how Saudi high society really works. She explains to Ryder how rich married women find lovers. “There’s a road in the desert,” she says. “Women go there to look men over. Every evening, at about 5. When they choose a man, if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, they just move on.”
In the 1980 film, one of Ryder’s closest Arab friends tells him that his story is “the whole Arab predicament: How much of our past must we abandon? How much of your present is worth imitating?”
About the mystery, the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail writes that as “you watch Death of a Princess you realize that the narrative muddle is the point. The journalist, Christopher Ryder (Paul Freeman), traipses around the Middle East and hears all manner of variations on the story of the Princess.”
On its Frontline site, PBS talks about the tremendous difficulties encountered 25 years ago:
“It was a bald question: would the journalistic enterprise be defended against the powerful political and economic opposition?” recalled Peter McGhee, the former head of national production at WGBH. “If we hadn’t stood fast, we would have had nothing. We would have been reduced to a morning children’s service. So we had no alternative but to either prevail or be destroyed. And in the end…[the decision to broadcast the
film] put a chock behind the back wheel of public television.”
After its initial controversial broadcast in 1980, “Death of a Princess” disappeared from view and hasn’t been seen in the U.S. in 25 years.
It’s back tonight. And I’m looking forward to watching.
And I hope that, someday, Saudi women are given the right to vote and to hold office, as have their sisters in Kuwait and around the Middle East.
Women have a rough lot there, to be sure, but so do the men. From a western perspective it is easy to say what they do wrong without analyzing the whole picture, not that I am coming to the defense of these laws, but rather to look at the causes. The ruling family is one of the worst, most abusive regimes there is. They are complete and utter hypocrites in that they have everything, including the rights to abuse their own laws within their four walls as well as blatantly taking advantage of freedoms offered elsewhere, while their people have nothing. Poverty is staggering – though the figures of this vary depending on the source, but the lowest number I’ve come across is 25% (and as high as 50%) for the general population. It’s a society that breeds abuse to those who are weaker. (Mohammed’s wife had her own business, for instance – which puts those who repress their women at odds with the prophet of their religion.) My point is that this is a socio-economic problem, and just treating the symptoms without treating the underlying disease especially from the outside is not the best remedy.
The events described have nothing to do with Islam, the most conservative interpretation of the texts pertaining to women and adultery require 4 male witnesses to penetration, as well as the failure of the accused woman to swear her innocence. Even then, the penalty is lashes for both man and woman.
The “laws” in Saudi Occupied Arabia, the Hudood ordinances imposed by Zia in Pakistan (and left there by every pres since, including Mush) is un-Islamic bullshit, based loosely on pre-Islamic bullshit, and its purpose is to maintain draconian control over a society, not increase piety. Subjugation of women is the best way to do that, it works, it has stood the test of time, whether it is sati in India, bukake in Japan, “Hudood” crap in various US client states or sexual objectification in the west.
And it will continue, I’m afraid, until women themselves take up arms against it, figuratively and literally, depending, and raise their sons and their daughters to do the same.
turned it on, I’m 20 minutes late.
Did you watch it all? I fell asleep halfway through. Enjoyed it although I had a lot of trouble hearing what people were saying, because of the accents and because the sound quality seemed poor to me.
Court awards hand of girl aged two to 40-year-old
Declan Walsh in Kutcha Chohan, Pakistan
Wednesday April 20, 2005
The Guardian
Chewing on a biscuit and gurgling with laughter, two-year-old Rabia plays with her elder brothers outside their mud-walled farmhouse, amid a sea of green wheat. The barefoot toddler flashes a smile as her first words tumble out.
But that innocence will be shortlived if local elders have their way, because Rabia is already promised in marriage – to a man 38 years her senior.
A village court determined her fate after her uncle, Muhammad Akmal, was accused of sleeping with another man’s wife. After an hour-long deliberation, the elders found him guilty and fined him 230,000 rupees (£2,070). They also ordered him to marry his niece to the wronged man, 40-year-old Altaf Hussain, once she passed her 14th birthday. …
have lobbied hard and long for their right to vote, a right that was guaranteed to them in the Kuwaiti constitution, and blocked by a Parliamentary ‘Voting Rights’ bill.
This didn’t just pop out of nowhere. The past Rector of Kuwait University (where more than half the students are women) was a woman. There is at least one woman Ambassador. Kuwaiti women are all over the board in business, education, medicine, and the arts.
My financial advisor is a Kuwaiti woman, as is my husbands’, and we are both quite pleased with their work,TYVM. 🙂
I believe that the Sabah family has come under some rather sharp criticism of late regarding what many Kuwaitis feel is their history of pandering to the hard right religious groups. (Sound familiar?)
The women in Kuwait lobbied, and marched, and organized, and formed alliances….and even before all that, they, with Kuwait society behind them, educated themselves with a vengeance. They are admirable in many ways.
A LOUD Huzzah! to the women in Kuwait. They are a potent force in Kuwait society, and it will be very interesting to see just how they organize their voting power. (As an aside, there were quite a few people who worried that, b/c of population trends -higher birth rate for the tribal sector- once women could vote, the conservative women would vote … to take it away!)
It is good news, Susanhbu, though I do wish they had their own diary, as the awfulness of Saudi reality for women is bound to overshadow the good news in Kuwait.
I went and did a quick google search for some info. (names,dates,etc..) Kuwait Info.
has a short general info page.