Women's Rights

12-year-old Azeera Gul wants to be a teacher when she grows up so she can educate girls in her village and 14-year-old Ludia Bibi wants to be a doctor. “That is the only way I can help people here and make sure women in particular get the care they need” she said. 

These are the brave and determined voices of young Pakistani girls living in remote villages that have been overrun by the Taliban who ban girls from receiving an education. . 

Maria Toor Pakai, 19, grew up in South Waziristan, where women rarely venture out of their homes. She defied tradition by playing squash and now she is a top-ranking national player.

“I knew my daughter was different and I wished to encourage her,” said Maria’s father, Shamsul Qayyum Wazir, who took her to Peshawar in 2002, eager to grant her the opportunity she would have been denied at home.

“We had received threats from the Taliban warning us to stop her from playing,” he said.

Today, Pakai lives and trains in Toronto, her story an inspiration for others. “I always think of the hard rocks of my land, and how tough they made me,” she said.

But while these young women have fought back, others find it harder to do so. “I want my daughters to have a better life than I do, but it is hard,” said Ujala Gul, 40, a mother of three girls who lives in a village near Saidu Sharif. “I am afraid they will end up as powerless housewives just like me, subservient to their husbands.”

Mature far beyond their years, these young girls are campaigning for a better future for themselves and all girls in Pakistan. Their efforts should be applauded and fully supported by the international community. 

Life for Saudi women just continues to get better. 

According to a ‘scientific’ report, researchers claim relaxing the ban on women driving would also see more Saudis - both men and women - turn to homosexuality and pornography.

The startling conclusions were drawn by Muslim scholars at the Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the King Fahd University.

Their report assessed the possible impact of repealing the ban in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world where women are not allowed behind the wheel.  Lifting a ban on women drivers in Saudi Arabia would result in "no more virgins," the country’s religious council has warned. 

It was delivered to all 150 members of the Shura Council, the country’s legislative body.

The report warns that allowing women to drive would "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce." Within ten years of the ban being lifted, the report’s authors claim, there would be "no more virgins" in the Islamic kingdom. And it pointed out "moral decline" could already be seen in other Muslim countries where women are allowed to drive.

In the report Professor Subhi described sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state. "All the women were looking at me," he wrote. "One made a gesture that made it clear she was available... this is what happens when women are allowed to drive."

The astonishing report comes after Shaima Jastaniya, a 34-year-old Saudi woman, was sentenced to 10 lashes with a whip after being caught driving in Jeddah.

There has been strong protest in the country about the sentence - and about the law generally.

But resistance to reform and change remains strong among conservative royals and clerics.

An Iranian government bill which has been sitting on the back-burner of legislation for years has resurfaced and if passed through parliament and enacted will only further impinge on women’s rights in Iran - a country which already regards women as second class citizens. 

The Iranian government calls it the Family Protection Bill, but activists call it the “Anti-Family Protection Bill.” It would give men the right to take a second wife without the permission of the first, and it would enshrine a man’s right to have an unlimited number of temporary marriages, which can last from 10 minutes to 99 years. Those arrangements come from Shariah law and have always existed in Iran, but the Family Protection Bill would make them official.

Two groups - the International Coalition Against Violence in Iran, and the Association of Iranian Researchers - arranged a press conference in London last week to raise awareness of the issue. 

Women opposed to the articles in the bill that pertain to polygamy went on a brave and creative odyssey more than a year ago to confront it, traveling around Iran to talk to women whose lives have been adversely affected by their husbands taking second wives. 

The women wrote their stories on pieces of cloth; if they were illiterate, they had someone else write them down. Then they sewed the pieces together into a quilt.

The quilt is still in Iran, but a digital image was smuggled out.

“Most of the stories are from around Iran, not from Tehran. They are sad stories,” said Rouhi Shafii of the International Coalition Against Violence in Iran.

Here is a translation of one of the stories:

“A few years after my marriage, my husband started telling me, jokingly, that I looked like an old woman. I was five years younger than he. He began beating me and broke my hands several times. When he talked of taking up another wife, I took it as a joke. He wouldn’t do that, I thought. We have two children. But one day he married a young girl and wanted to get a two story building to bring his bride to live with us. I made him swear on the Koran not to do that, and he took his child bride elsewhere. He forgot about us and spent all his earning enjoying his bride. I was providing for the children by working at people’s homes or hairdressing salons. My younger son says: ‘when I grow up, I will kill my dad.’”

A group of women activists also gathered 15,000 signatures from women opposed to the law - signatures complete with their addresses - a very brave action in Iran where so-called “dissidents” are often interrogated, arrested and jailed or worse. The activists brought the signatures and the quilt to Parliament last year, to try to stop the legalization of the polygamy articles as part of the new law. Parliament accepted the signatures, but would not take the quilt. 

The 'Chehel Tikeh' banner tour is aimed at raising
awareness about the discriminatory bill

The activists say they discovered that at least 65 male members of the country’s 290-strong parliament had two or more wives. This is despite the fact that polygamy contravenes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Iran has ratified. Article 23 stipulates that states must ensure that men and women have equal rights when marrying or at the dissolution of marriage. 

Unfortunately, the activists could not count on female Members of Parliament for support as many are as conservative as the men, and support the legislation.

At this point, the two articles of the bill that deal with polygamy are on hold, but they have not been canceled out of the bill. Shafii believes activism has kept those bills from being passed so far.

Take Action!

To learn more about the important work of the International Coalition Against Violence in Iran visit their website.

In yet another example of the extreme oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, a conservative Islamic committee has proposed a law to stop women from revealing their "tempting" eyes to the public. 

Saudi women are already required by law to completely cover up from head to toe when in public with the exception of their eyes, and usually eyebrows. Women caught not strictly adhering to the modesty laws risk being publicly flogged and heavily fined. 

However, Saudi Arabia's Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) found that even women's eyes could sometimes be too attractive for men and drafted a new proposal.

According to the Daily Mail, a report on the Bikya Masr news site suggested the proposal was made after a member of the committee was attracted by a woman's eyes as he walked along a street, provoking a fight. The fight culminated in the woman's husband getting stabbed twice in the hand. A spokesperson for CPVPV, Sheikh Motlab al Nabet, said a proposal aimed at making it illegal for women to be in public without covering themselves up completely, if they happened to have attractive eyes, had been tabled.

In a country where women are not allowed to be in public unless accompanied by a male relative and where they are banned from driving, this latest and utterly absurd development must surely be a wake up call to Muslim women around the world, not to mention human rights groups. What might be happening in Saudi Arabia today could very well be implemented en mass across the Muslim world. When are women finally going to stand up and say, “Stop! Enough!”?

Malaysia’s newest Islamic club, the Obedient Wives Club, has already attracted 800 members since its launch earlier this month. The group was created on the platform that women will be better off if they acknowledge that men are “hardwired for sex”, and support the idea of polygamy. 

The club’s founding member gave the example that if Jennifer Aniston would have been willing to share Brad Pitt with Angelina Jolie, she would still be married to him. 

And despite the struggle for women’s rights throughout the Muslim world, this club is rapidly expanding. A new chapter will be opened soon in Singapore. 

The women in this group believe they are curing rape, incest, prostitution, and sex trafficking – social ills which they claim are the repercussions of wives not sexually satisfying their husbands.

Read more here.  

About 40 Saudi women took to the driver’s seat on Friday, as part of a campaign to pressure the government to allow women to drive. No arrests or violence were reported, although one woman was ticketed for driving without a license. 

This demonstration could bring tough decisions for the Saudi regime, which has so far been spared the widespread protests currently sweeping the Arab world. Authorities can either choose to crackdown on women defying the ban, or give in to their demands and risk angering the clerics, many of whom call the campaign western-backed “female terrorism.” 

Watch the video to learn more:

Manal al-Sharif, the Saudi woman working to organize the upcoming campaign against the kingdom’s ban on female drivers, was jailed for an additional 10 days so authorities could "decide her fate.” She had expected to be released Friday, her fifth day in jail, after posting a video on Youtube and Facebook of herself driving. 

She was freed Monday after growing international pressure for her release.

The campaign was started via a Facebook page called “teach me how to drive so I can protect myself,” which had more than 12,000 “likes” before being removed. The page was soon after replaced with an identical page.

A page launching a counter-campaign calling on men to beat Saudi women, who defy the driving ban, was also removed from Facebook. 

A young girl in Norway was raped and threatened by a Muslim man. He told her that he could do whatever he wanted to her because “this is how it is in his religion.” He said that in his religion, women do not have rights or opinions, and that he was “in charge.”

A group of women in Saudi Arabia have planned to protest the country’s restriction on women drivers, by taking to the driver’s seat on June 17th. 

A counter-campaign has been launched on Facebook calling for men to beat Saudi women who drive their cars during the protest. The page is called “The Iqal Campaign: June 17th Preventing Women from Driving.” Iqal is the Arabic name for the cord used to hold on the traditional headdress worn by men in the region, calling for the cord to be used to beat women who dare to drive. 

Show your support for the women of Saudi Arabia in their struggle for this basic freedom – “like” the Women2Drive Facebook page.  

The head teacher of a girls’ school in Afghanistan was killed by the Taliban after ignoring warnings to stop teaching girls.

Education for women was banned by the Taliban as “un-Islamic” from 1996 to 2001. Women won back some rights after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. 

Many girls have returned to school in the past decade, but the right to education is hard to enforce in remote and conservative areas of the country.