veiled4allah: women in Kuwait seek the vote

October 10 is the anniversary of the founding of the first major women's suffrage organization in Britain and columnist Natasha Walter looks at the only country where women still don't have the vote: Kuwait (there are also some countries where neither men nor women have the right to vote, but these aren't included on the list).

Yet given the vibrancy and justice of their campaign, why don't we hear more about the struggle of the women of Kuwait? Why aren't they given more support by women from other countries? Many women in the west seem to believe that it isn't a great idea to be too vociferous in support of women's rights in Muslim countries, in case we should be seen to be interfering in a culture that we don't understand. But the women activists in Kuwait see their situation as something created not by their religion, but simply by the same bog-standard patriarchal chauvinism that has dogged women in all cultures and all times. "When they say to us, it is not in Islam that women should have political rights, we say, what about Jordan, what about Turkey, what about Iran, what about Egypt? Aren't the women there Muslim, and don't they vote?" says Abdali.

Indeed, women got the vote in Jordan in 1974, and in Iran in 1963, Egypt in 1956 and Turkey 1930 - just two years after women did in the UK...

...Although they are yet to get the vote, women in Kuwait are in other ways quite liberated. They have long enjoyed the right to education - more than 70% of university graduates are now women, and Abdali says proudly, "It is impossible to find an illiterate Kuwaiti woman." They have complete freedom of dress and movement, so they can walk down the streets in a veil or jeans, and they can drive and travel without men giving them permission or escorting them, which is certainly not the case in neighboring Saudi Arabia. What is more, Kuwaiti women can work in any field, so that more than a third of the workforce in Kuwait is now female.

So the situation of Kuwaiti women, in its contradictory mixture of growing power and continued powerlessness, is not so different from other cultures.

A useful article from the Muslim Women's League provides historical examples of Muslim women's political involvement as well as responding to arguments raised by conservatives against it. It's well worth reading the whole thing to see the arguments that can be brought from within Islam to support women's political participation, but I'll just quote the conclusion here:

The Quran, sunnah, and Islamic history provide ample evidence of women undertaking various forms of political involvement from the bai’ah [authorizing the new leader] to fighting in battles to influencing political decisions. Ignoring the contributions of Muslim women deprives our Islamic heritage of valuable role models while continuing the stagnation of Islamic thought. To exclude women from political involvement simply because they are women is an act of tribalism based on gender. The Prophet stated: "He is not of us who proclaims the cause of tribal partisanship..."

Aside: The Walter article contains some interesting factoids at the end. For instance, women in Switzerland only got the vote in 1971, two years before I was born.