{"id":129764,"date":"2011-09-26T12:09:17","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T07:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=129764"},"modified":"2011-09-26T12:11:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T07:11:00","slug":"saudi-arabian-women-granted-the-right-to-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/09\/26\/saudi-arabian-women-granted-the-right-to-vote.html","title":{"rendered":"Saudi Arabian Women Granted the Right to Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Sunday granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, the biggest change in a decade for women in a puritanical kingdom that practices strict separation of the sexes, including banning women from driving, <span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/09\/26\/world\/middleeast\/women-to-vote-in-saudi-arabia-king-says.html\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The New York Times reports<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>Saudi women, who are legally subject to male chaperones for almost any public activity, hailed the royal decree as an important, if limited, step toward making them equal to their male counterparts. They said the uprisings sweeping the Arab world for the past nine months \u2014 along with sustained domestic pressure for women\u2019s rights and a more representative form of government \u2014 prompted the change.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is the element of the Arab Spring, there is the element of the strength of Saudi social media, and there is the element of Saudi women themselves, who are not silent,\u201d said Hatoon al-Fassi, a history professor and one of the women who organized a campaign demanding the right to vote this spring. \u201cPlus, the fact that the issue of women has turned Saudi Arabia into an international joke is another thing that brought the decision now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Although political activists celebrated the change, they also cautioned how deep it would go and how fast, given that the king referred to the next election cycle, which would not be until 2015. Some women wondered aloud how they would be able to campaign for office when they were not even allowed to drive. And there is a long history of royal decrees stalling, as weak enactment collides with the bulwark of traditions ordained by the Wahhabi sect of Islam and its fierce resistance to change.<\/p>\n<p>In his announcement, the king said that women would also be appointed to the Majlis Al-Shura, a consultative council that advises the monarchy on matters of public policy. But it is a toothless body that avoids matters of royal prerogative, like where the nation\u2019s oil revenue goes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe refuse to marginalize the role of women in Saudi society,\u201d the king said in an address to the Shura, noting during the five minutes he spent on the subject that senior religious scholars had endorsed the change.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia on Sunday granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections, the biggest&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":129751,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[28144,21450,32499,32500,12260,18451],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129764"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}