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September 11, 2006
Saudi Arabia: Plan To Restrict Women At Mecca Is Rejected
On August 28 we wrote that Saudi clerics from the all-male Institute for Haj Research were planning to restrict women praying at Mecca. Instead of allowing them to pray as freely as currrent restrictions will allow, the clerics had planned to remove women entirely from the sahn, the area around the Kaaba stone, and segregate them into clearly defined zones. Already women are only meant to be in certain areas around the Kaaba, and are frequently cajoled by the muttawa or religious policemen from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
Yesterday, Arab News reported that women had signed a petition against the measure, which would have excluded them from the mataaf, the area where Muslims mill around the Kaaba in clockwise and anticlockwise rings.
The petition was mounted by 45-year old Aisha Schwartz of the Muslimah Writers Alliance in Washington DC. She gathered 1,000 signatures in an online petition, which is not a particularly high number.
Muslims from Afghanistan, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Dubai, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mongolia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the USA signed the petition.
Schwartz said of the male, government appointed clerics who had planned to remove women from the Kaaba's immediate environs "are not taking into consideration the truest of Islam's teachings on equality and nondiscrimination in reaching their decisions. This leaves us with a critically serious problem; and complacency will never resolve it."
In Saudi Arabia, Suhaila Hammad, research director at the National Society for Human Rights, said: "Only the Qur'an, our Holy Book which has established everything that is right, can solve this matter."
She cited the Koran, Surah 22 (al-Hajj), verse 25, which reads: "Lo! Those who disbelieve and bar (men) from the way of Allah and from the Inviolable Place of Worship, which We have appointed for mankind together, the dweller therein and the nomad; whosoever seeketh wrongful partiality therein, him We shall cause to taste a painful doom." (Pickthall).
It does not appear to mention women, but Hammad claimed that 46% of visitors to the Grand Mosque, where the Kaaba resides, were women.
Now, according to the latest editions of Pakistan's Daily Times and Arab News, the Presidency of the Two Holy Mosques Affairs has announced that it has no intention of changing the existing situation to relegate women into "safe areas".
Muhammad Nasser al-Khozaim, vice chairman of the Presidency told the press: "There is no truth in press reports that the presidency was planning to shift the women's prayer place in the mataaf to other areas inside the mosque. This was merely based on a proposal."
"No change has taken place in the prayer area for women in the mataaf. In fact, we have allocated two more wider spaces overlooking the Kaaba for women to pray."
The official said that women were equally entitled to the prayer complex as men. "Women have the same right as me in the sahn. In fact 53% of the mosque's space will now be for women to pray, which is more than men."
Suhaila Hamma, who lives in Medina, said: "It is simply our right and it is of great joy that we can continue enjoying this right." She still urged for more space for women. She said: "Our Prophet has advised us to pray standing between his grave and his platform, saying it is a garden from the gardens of Paradise. But women are allowed only a limited space in the area to pray."
She said women were only allowed to pray at Mohammed's grave for five hours a day, between 7 am and 10 am in the morning, and for one hour in the afternoon.
Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at September 11, 2006 10:10 PM
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