Rizana Nafeek: The girl without blanket

BY OLGA PITCAIRN, NEW HOPE

COURTESY: ARAB NEWS

(November 17, Riyad, Sri Lanka Guardian) I read with great interest Abdulateef Al-Mulhim’s article, “At $150 a barrel, a young Saudi girl had no blanket” (Nov. 14) and also a previous one regarding Rizana Nafeek.

People who travel and see the world have a different perspective of events and people than those who never leave their shores. Al-Mulhim is fortunate!

Is Saudi Arabia the only country where lingerie shops are run by men? My guess is that the owners are men and engage only men as they aren’t allowed to have “close contact” with female employees. Solution: Lingerie shops can only be owned by women.

From my perch, it seems that universities in Saudi Arabia and the UAE were built in response to parents’ requests to educate their daughters “at home.” In the past, all students desiring a higher education went to study in Europe or the US. I heard from a very reliable source that a Muslim female student is applying for US citizenship so she can work (no need for male guardian) over here. I think most Saudi parents want their daughters to be better educated than themselves so they can be of real value to their “spouses and children.”

It’s an irony of life that Saudi Arabia imports uneducated foreign household workers and may have to export their educated women to sustain their own families “at home.” A Shakespearean tragedy/comedy (depending on perspective) created by fatwas?

I don’t have to read tea leaves to predict what will happen.

RELATED ARTICLE

BY ABDULATEEF AL-MULHIM | ARAB NEWS

At $150 a barrel, a young Saudi girl had no blanket

To this day, I could not take out of my mind the image of a young girl from a northern city of Saudi Arabia who froze to death in her own bed some years ago. Her house was a simple makeshift shack.

Such tragedies could happen anywhere. Poverty is not confined to one country. The irony of the case is that when I read the piece of news in a Saudi newspaper (Alwatan, I guess), I had two other newspapers with me — the Arab News and The Christian Science Monitor. There was one common piece of news in the economic section of all the three newspapers — the news that oil was now $150 a barrel.

Is it possible the girl died because she could not afford a blanket? How could I relate this to the news item about the $150 price for a barrel of oil?

And just two months ago, a Saudi supermarket in Jeddah, feeling concerned with the very high rate of unemployment among women, decided to hire 16 young ladies to work as cashiers. I am sure they would not have accepted this job if they or their families had enough money.

But just a few days ago, we heard about a fatwa from our ulema, for whom I have only the highest respect, banning women working in a mixed environment like a supermarket or mall. This piece of news came out one week after the announcement by our oil minister that our Alghawar oilfield holds 88 billion barrels of oil reserves. In this case it will be very hard for any government agency to persuade and say it is OK for ladies who are going to be fired or the thousands of highly qualified Saudi women who have been looking in vain for job for a very long time to sit idle at home and at the same time bring thousands of women instructors from abroad. They say our new graduates have no experience. How can they get experience if they are not given the chance to work? They could be trained and be assistants to lecturers until they master it or someone else will be chosen. Saudi Aramco has been training Saudis from scratch since the 1930s.

When I grew up in Al-Hassa, I used to go to Al-Hofuf central market in the 1960s and 70s and there is always a place for ladies called (Bastah) where they would gather to sell various items. And the favorite customers, especially for Bedouin women, were the American ladies from Aramco. Thirty percent of Al-Hassa’s Thursday market used to be run by women. And they would go back home with whatever little money they could earn with their valuable sweat. Then nobody spoke of or heard about sexual harassment. The word was not in the dictionary.

Poverty is the worst enemy for any society. Unemployment is the top of the pyramid when it comes to crime, family breakdowns, drugs and men and women remaining unmarried.

In the foreign press we read that Saudi Arabia is a G20 country and in the local press we read that unemployment in Saudi Arabia is about 30 percent among men and about 70 percent among women.

If we don’t make serious efforts to solve the unemployment problem, our women will have no choice but to work in neighboring countries. As for the fatwa regarding those women who are working in the supermarkets, what is the alternative for them?

In the last two years we have been hearing that only women will be allowed to work in lingerie shops, but this also failed, even though we are the only country where lingerie shops are run by men.

In the US and Europe, Saudis are known to spend thousands of dollars on lingerie every summer and Americans and Europeans wonder why our women do that. They don’t know Saudi women buy a year’s stock so they do not have to deal and argue with men regarding the quality and size of very piece of lingerie.

We fully know that the government is doing its best, but the sooner we solve the unemployment problem, the happier will be the faces we seen in this country.

— Abdulateef Al-Mulhim is a commodore (retired), Royal Saudi Navy. He can be contacted at: almulhimnavy@hotmail.com