Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia for the very first time will be allowing women lawyers in courts, but with limited powers. The country practices a strict and conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. In this essay I will be relating Feminist theory to explain this phenomenon, and will also be examining the role of religion, specifically Islam in this issue.

From this article, we can see an issue of gender inequality. Gender in this context is a form of social class, with the male class granted privileges over the female class. Feminist theorists will view Saudi Arabia to be that of a patriarchal society, where the dominant male class exerts its power over the oppressed female class through male-biased laws. The society’s structures of power and social convention are such that the men benefit from most of the legal, economic, political and cultural rights. Examples include how opportunities for education and employment are dependent on male guardianship, and how all the judges in Saudi Arabia are male religious clerics. In more extreme cases, there are no specific laws protecting women’s rights with regards to domestic violence resulting in the prevalence of ‘honour-killings’; whereby a woman is punished or even killed by male family members for having put “shame” on the family honour.

Even as reforms seem to be underway to reduce the gap in gender inequality, further limitations have been imposed on these reforms to ensure a reigning dominance of the male social class. Specifically in this article it was mentioned how women will only be allowed to handle the case of other women and are restricted to family-related cases. Feminists will argue for the need to do away with such privileges in order to solve the social problem of gender inequality, which brings us to the sensitive issue of religion.

Many modernists and liberals will share the feminist view that Islam plays a role in encouraging a gender-oppressive patriarchal social structure such as in Saudi Arabia. In Islam, Mullahs (Islamic clerics) are all male dominated. Also in religious scriptures such as the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, contains a Book of Women in which it is written that ‘righteous women are devoutly obedient… …As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, refuse to share their beds, beat them’. This seems to imply that women as the subordinate class must be unquestionably obedient to the male dominant class, or they are not deemed as ‘righteous’ or good, in the eyes of God. This issue of how feminism seems to contradict with Islamic