I did read about that. That's just one of the many things I read and immediately try to forget.

That's just... I am speechless.
Evil.

Does anyone else find this more horrific than having to cover your eyes?

The "Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice... refused to allow female students out of a burning school in the holy city of Mecca because they were not wearing correct head cover [in 2002]."

This was "thought to have contributed to the high death toll of 15".

These women burned to death because 1. they dared try to get an education (if you stayed at home you wouldn't be in that burning buildng) and 2. a bunch of wackos decided it would be better for these women to die a horrible death than to emerge in public partially visible.

Just...wow.

I definitely will when they finish high school. I am saving all my money for their future education. And I home when they graduate they will not make the mistake I made and come back wasting their life waiting for change that will not come this century.

Abdul

I am not entirely surprised that women support this, it gives them identity, purpose, however shitty, plus they don't have to fight for anything but just be passive.

I think you should move your children abroad, for their future and their education.

It has always seemed a curious thing to me that Saudi women would willingly support a system that essentially reduces them to property of a male relative, but I was raised in a country where women have achieved equal rights in theory, if not fully in practice. The American way of looking at things must seem equally strange to the Saudis.

Sounds hellish. I'm sorry to hear that. Have you ever considered moving out of your country, if that is allowed?

Hello, fellow atheists,

In my country I would like to point out that it is the society at large under the iron grip of the imams that is demanding this conservatism and mysoginy, as per the literal word of the Quran and the Hadiths (the sayings and acts of Muhammad), and not the government that is pushing this line.
At every step since the ruling family took political power in the 1920s all modernisation drives were opposed by both society and the imams. When education was introduced they opposed it, when female aducation was introduced they opposed it even more, when television, radio, internet, blackberrys, mobile phones, mobile phones with cameras etc were introduced they opposed it. It took great bribes, and pressure and convincing to acquiesce.

On the topic of female driving, my wife drives, but only in the country side where the religious police does not function. The general population and the imams oppose this. The females are actually more fanatically fundamentalist than the men. While you may find it hard to believe, this is the reality. My wife reported me to police for purchasing and e-book on Darwin. She said i am bringing the devil in the house. I was whipped and worse and had to explain that i bought it show to my son the errors in the "infidel" ecucation system. And a couple of big bribes and donations to the local mosques to get them to accept my explanation and not to "disappear" or "suicide" me.
And also most women actually oppose female driving in the cities. The government wanted to introduce it but the imams, which have far more social influence than the king, blocked it with massive societal opposition to female driving. As a matter of fact there is no law against it, but the imams do not approve it and I doubt it will happen until the society changes, say 30 years from now.

Unfortunately most of our females are even more fanatical than the average man. You may find it hard to believe, but this is what I observe. It takes time to remove this Quranic literalism and the extreme fear of hell fire. You will find a larger % of moderate men than women.

The country is ruled by the Quran, and all the laws have to be Quran compliant and approved by the imams. Until they do no law can be passed. This is the truth, sad as it is. And most of the public follows these old goats blindly.

Abdul

This kind of approach to women go hand in hand with being a religious fundamentalist. We see similar attempt to keep women down and this fixation on "modesty" in ultra orthodox jews and in fundamentalist christian and mormon groups just as much as in muslim extremist societies. We hear more about the muslim version is that there are some in US politics that think (unfortunately, with some justification) they can gain something by portraying all muslims as scary and evil, In addition in places like Saudi Arabia the crazies are in control and can impose their medieval ideas on the entire country not just their neighborhood or cult compound.

@ursa: Your last 2 sentences explain it perfectly. Docs make more in the US than they do in many other countries. We also have financial incentive to fill residency programs. There aren't enough American grads for all the spots, so we recruit around the world. And there's a generous Visa situation for doctors. Medicine-wise we're a brain-drain on a good chunk of the world. We don't have near as many foreign docs from areas that pay well and have their own top-notch technology.

@Noelle:

I have never to my knowledge met a Saudi, but I have met Muslims from many other countries. None of them have had anything positive to say about the Saudi approach to Islam or women's rights. Or about the Iranian or Afghani approaches, for that matter.

Islamic culture has no monopoly on arranged marriage, BTW. 100% of the arranged marriages that I know of personally are Indian, of the Hindu persuasion. I've seen some stuff that is heartbreaking by Western standards, like a guy I used to work with who said good-bye very suddenly to the woman he was madly in love with when his parents called him home to get married to a woman he'd never met. It goes against my cultural upbringing, but I would be a lot more offended by the idea if the statistics showed that arranged marriages were less successful than ones contracted for romantic reasons. They are not, so I can't object to the practice on those grounds.

Doctors do indeed seem to come from a much wider range of ethnic backgrounds than the population at large in the U.S. I wonder if this is an artifact, though. We have access to every medical advance and every expensive new diagnostic technique, and (correct me if I'm wrong here) you can make more money practicing medicine in the U.S. than you can in most other countries. The U.S. seems like a natural magnet for anyone with a medical degree and a desire to practice cutting-edge medicine free of budgetary constraints, and/or a desire to be personally well-off financially.

"Now a man's status is determined by how young and sexy his latest wife is."

As someone who had the hot young wife, but who has watched her grow into a powerful and educated middle aged woman (still hot, though), I take much more pride in my wife's educational and career wins than I do in her perky rack (still way perky, though).

I'm not the only guy like this. You can find one too. :)

@JonJon: I don't find the implications particularly flattering to our species either, but one does better to approach the universe as it is without sugar-coating it.

Ursa, no, I think they're both really excellent explanations, although that wasn't exactly clear from what I wrote. I just think that's not a particularly nice fact.

Huh. The first Muslim women I came into contact with were highly educated and upper middle class. One from Pakistan did cover her hair. The rest wore regular western clothing. None were the subservient types. A few were in arranged marriages, but they were equal partnerships. This puts an entirely different spin on the way I view the Muslim ladies. Have any of you taken a look at the ethnic range of doctors? We have everybody. All the smarties of all the skin colors from all over the world.

From now on, whenever I see one of these stereotypes, I think of my friends and collegeues. Little boils my blood like bigotry. And really, in the US, immigration from most of the world still means we get the best and brightest and hardest workers. What are other people seeing that I'm missing?

Oh, and most of my Muslim friends don't agree with Saudi Arabia either.

Lovely. So depending on who you ask, then, this all has to do with either the proclivity of people to screw anything that moves (or doesn't move fast enough), or it's due to the ownership of private property, and a desire to keep it in one's family.

@JonJon: Do you feel that either of these hypotheses lacks explanatory power?

Replace "screw" with "eat", and you will also have a very serviceable third hypothesis that might explain the obesity epidemic.

Yes, it definitely evolved from child-bearing. It went to dowry, cook, and housekeeper. These days it's mostly sex object. Now a man's status is determined by how young and sexy his latest wife is.
Still, I'd rather be a trophy wife than a form covered in a black sheet. Especially since I can choose whether or not to be a trophy wife.
This makes me so grateful that I was born with more choices.

I would only add to this account that once women became property for the purposes of (attempting to) guarantee male parentage, women gained additional utility as property in the more practical sense: an asset, the investment of which controlled the disposition of a family's fortune through marriage, either through offering a dowry or attracting a bride price.

Yes, both of those things are true. And keep in mind that when I said, "cultures that didn't have paternity test," I meant EVERY culture before about fifty years ago.

This is why nearly (but not all) every culture on Earth treated women as property, strictly controlled their sexuality, and in many cases had strict rules about them being alone. If you want to pass your shit along to blood descendants, you control the woman making them so that there's no question.

And even prior to the concept of property, raising a human child is an enormous investment. Don't want to waste your hard won gazelle meat on some other guy's kid.

Lovely. So depending on who you ask, then, this all has to do with either the proclivity of people to screw anything that moves (or doesn't move fast enough), or it's due to the ownership of private property, and a desire to keep it in one's family.

"Ah, I think the real question might be "Why do men feel compelled to define women as property?" After all, this impulse isn't substantially different from Saudi Arabia to many other places. And, in fact, it used to be the norm in western culture. In fact, modernity is a bit of an aberration in this, based on the vast majority of human history."

Because these attitudes developed in cultures that didn't have paternity tests, and the one way to guarantee that the babies you were raising were actually yours was to treat the woman having them like property.

I wonder how much of the rise in restrictions in Saudi Arabia is a reaction to the women's rights movement there? Those uppity women are demanding driver's licenses! And the right to travel unaccompanied! Quick! We must tighten the specs for the size and opacity of the niqab, or before you know it, we'll wake up one morning and find them in the voting booth!

I think this makes a heckuva lot of sense.

If the religion itself doesn't support the decision, how do they justify the proposal?

I think the history of religion is replete with examples of people "finding" things (always consonant, somehow, with their preferences) not explicitly forbidden to be mandatory, and also "finding" things (always consonant, somehow, with their sense of disgust) not explicitly approved to be forbidden. When the vast majority of the members of a religion do not know the texts upon which their religion is based (either because of illiteracy, or simple time pressures, or because they are told by the powers-that-be that they shouldn't; always my favorite), you could tell them pretty much anything and get away with it.

There are a lot of women in Saudi Arabia (+11.8 million according to Wikipedia). This proposal was from a spokesperson for Saudi Arabia's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. If it were to pass, would it not apply to all women in Saudi Arabia?

Quite so, and that's ghastly. However, there are 110 million Muslim women in Indonesia who wouldn't think twice about slapping a guy for even suggesting it. Hence, it is a "Saudi cultural" problem, not an "Islam" problem.

To be clear, my objection is not that such a notion isn't immoral or retrograde or misogynistic, nor is it that Islam doesn't, quite on its own time, present all of those unseemly habits (unethical, backward-looking, and woman-hating) in other ways. It's only that this particular example isn't a very good one if the intended target is Islam and not the peculiar idiosyncratic backwardness of one (comparatively) small part of the Islamic world.

[Tried to post this last night; server wouldn't let me. :( ]

Granted, the equality of women is largely a modern Western phenomenon, but not entirely. The ancient Celts were fairly egalitarian, for example. And there are many extinct cultures for which we simply have no data. I will agree that the dominant pattern in Eurasia for the past 2000 years has been some variant on men-as-owners, women-as-property, with varying degrees of power imbalance between the genders.

It has certainly reached an unusually high level of expression in Saudi Arabia. I'm wracking my brains for other examples that are or were this restrictive. We have the burqa culture of Afghanistan under the Taliban, but AFAIK women were still free to move about without a male relative chaperoning them if they were properly wrapped up. My guess is that this freedom was allowed because in a relatively poor and low-tech country like Afghanistan, it is not practical to keep 50% of the labor force under house arrest. Having freedom of movement so that you can haul water from the public well is a pretty poor consolation prize, though, when you can be killed with impugnity by any man who sees you accidently exposing an ankle while doing your chores.

I wonder how much of the rise in restrictions in Saudi Arabia is a reaction to the women's rights movement there? Those uppity women are demanding driver's licenses! And the right to travel unaccompanied! Quick! We must tighten the specs for the size and opacity of the niqab, or before you know it, we'll wake up one morning and find them in the voting booth!

Ah, I think the real question might be "Why do men feel compelled to define women as property?" After all, this impulse isn't substantially different from Saudi Arabia to many other places. And, in fact, it used to be the norm in western culture. In fact, modernity is a bit of an aberration in this, based on the vast majority of human history.

Isn't the real question here "Why do Saudi men feel compelled to define women as property?"

Hmm...I get the sense that being American kinda limits the way I see the world. I'm trying to break free of that.
Nuns do wear head coverings, but at least they have the choice of whether or not to become a nun in the first place.

@julie42: a century ago Italian women, especially in the south, could have not gone out without a headscarf.
Nuns still do to this very day.
Islamic girls that I met from Turkey and Indonesia did not wear a scarf and could not care less.

Consider that the muslims you are more likely to see are migrants, so they are poor and less educated, that those you are more likely to hear are those that do something bad, and those you will NOT notice are those NOT wearing a headscarf.
Socially, religion is just a tool of control: you can use it to enforce everything and its very opposite.

This said, Saudi Arabia is a brutal, chauvinistic monarchy and Islam there is barely better than in Afghanistan or so, and indeed Islam is more pervasive and controlling than Christianity.

It is way too sad.

@Elemenope: I agree that this specific incidence isn't 100% brought about by Islam because most other Islam countries wouldn't go to that extreme. However, most of them do enforce some ridiculous dress code on women that does stem from Islam. In some really horrible cases, fathers or other male relatives will abuse or even kill their daughters or wives if they refuse to wear the traditional clothing.
These people were from Pakistan:
http://www.realcourage.org/2010/06/aqsa-parvez/

@Justice Gustin: It doesn't say that it would be a law for all women to cover their eyes, just the ones with "alluring" eyes. But I'm guessing most women would end up covering them as the men realize they can command them to.

Even a "very small proportion" is too many.

You are right though, the government is using religion as a tool, but, if the religion itself doesn't support the decision, how do they justify the proposal?

There are a lot of women in Saudi Arabia (+11.8 million according to Wikipedia). This proposal was from a spokesperson for Saudi Arabia's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. If it were to pass, would it not apply to all women in Saudi Arabia?