Saudi scholar finds women’s rights in Nabataean culture
Andrew Hammond; 2/5/08
When clerics, ministers and businessmen gathered at a forum in Riyadh last month to discuss women in the workplace, there were no women in sight. Typically for Saudi Arabia, the women who took part were seated in a separate room so the men could only hear them. Such oddities are part and parcel of the complex system of social control maintained by clerics of Saudi Arabia’s austere version of Sunni Islamic law, often termed Wahhabism. It’s a system called into question by scholar Hatoon Fassi. In her study, “Women In Pre-Islamic Arabia”, the outspoken rights advocate argues women in the pre-Islamic period enjoyed considerable rights in the Nabataean state, an urban Arabian kingdom centred in modern Jordan, south Syria and northwest Saudi Arabia during the Roman empire.
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Tags: Saudi Arabia, Womens Rights