Ayoon Wa Azan (Do You Want Women to Be Inside or Outside the House?)

During a long session in his office at the interior ministry, before he became the crown prince, I told the late Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz that I was against capital punishment, even if the charge was high treason. I said that I only accepted the death penalty in cases of sexual assault and murder of minors. Prince Nayef told me that my problem was that I was thinking about the killer, while he thought about the victims and their families, and the orphaned children or the bereaved mothers. I still hold this view. I remembered my conversation with the then-Saudi interior minister as I was reading in London’s newspaper the coverage of the missing 5-year old girl April, who was last seen being taken by a man in his car before disappearing. The police interrogated a man suspected of being the owner of the car, but did not reach any conclusion. He was since arrested and charged with her murder. We are talking about a 5-year old child. If what happened turned out to be kidnapping, rape and then murder, then the perpetrator is a monster and not a human being, and he deserves to be executed. But there is no capital punishment in the UK, the EU and in many states in the U.S. If this human monster were to be sentenced to serve a given number of years in prison, and was then released for ‘good conduct’, then he will most likely rape and murder again. For this reason, the death penalty is what he really deserves, not to mention the fact that it would prevent him from perpetrating a similar crime in the future. Maybe I would not have written about the child April, were it not for the fact that her disappearance happened after a gang of Britons of Asian descent had been sentenced to prison for child trafficking, and days after two young British policewomen were murdered. The policewomen went to investigate a robbery, but were received with the bullets of a criminal who also threw a grenade at them, and it turned out that he was wanted for another crime as well. This criminal also deserves the death penalty, because policemen and policewomen in England do not carry any weapons. This criminal no doubt knew that, and could have fled without committing a double murder. Another scandal recently erupted in London meanwhile, with the villain this time being the recently deceased Jimmy Saville, a star of BBC Radio and Television. Many women have come out to say that he had sexually assaulted them, or even raped them, in his private dressing room at the television studio, when they were minors. Saville was a friend of singer Gary Glitter, who was jailed in Vietnam after assaulting two underage girls. I had not started writing this article to argue for the headscarf or the veil, or Suzanne’s Law. I do not intend to express solidarity with women in Britain either, as British women have their full rights and do not need my support. Instead, I chose to write about non-Arab women, in the hope that this would inspire us to act – as writing about their women is safer and causes fewer headaches. I say this but then I admit that what inspired me to write about this topic was the controversy over the catalogue of the Swedish furniture maker IKEA, after it turned out that images of women were edited out of the Saudi version of IKEA’s catalogue. I am confident that the company made a mistake, because no Saudi official asked IKEA to edit out pictures of women. Nevertheless, I found myself facing this riddle: Arab women are not desired to leave the house, and yet when the subject is about the home, they were still thrown out with only the men portrayed inside. To these brave men I say: Make up your mind, do you want women inside or outside the house? I also ask, why can’t Arab women, who are superior in education to men, be mothers, sisters or grandmothers at home, and also employees outside it, who can double the family’s income by working? I hope that I am absolutely clear in that I am not calling for Arab women to have Western-style rights, which sometimes border on the indecent, but for equality with men in rights and duties. I admit that after living in the West for longer than I have lived in Lebanon, I still reject some manifestations of so-called Western freedom, which I consider to be vulgar rather than liberal. An example of this would be Naomi Wolf’s most recent book. Wolf is one of the most prominent feminists in the West, but the book’s title is of the kind that I can’t even mention here. And yet, it was published and well received, with accolades given for its author. Finally, I was pleased to hear that the President of Tunisia Moncef Marzouki apologized on behalf of the State to a young woman who, although she had been raped by two policemen, ended up being charged of the crime. If I heard later that the police officers were tried and sentenced to life imprisonment or even the death penalty, then I will not protest it. All I ask for Arab women is personal freedoms and equality. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.