WOMEN LIVING UNDER MUSLIM LAW
On 9 May 2012, Manal al-Sharif was awarded the Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway. This came shortly after al-Sharif was honored as one of TIME’s100 Most Influential People in the World at a Gala in New York City. Such events have given rise to a pattern: just as numerous pictures and videos of activists attending various conferences and receiving numerous awards surface, waves of criticism pour in. Their motives are viewed with suspicion, worthiness is questioned, and a movement’s progress is reassessed.
The most prevalent criticism of Manal al-Sharif was that she was accepting an award for political dissent when she was only, at most, asocial activist. This criticism was not meant to undermine her efforts but rather to allocate them a bit further down the activist totem pole, so to speak, in order to remove them from the high pedestal they had been placed on. One ought to note, however, that al-Sharif herself stated at the Forum that, “I don’t consider myself a dissident, I had to actually ask what it was.” So, it seems, she may agree with her critics.
Well then, why was al-Sharif being hailed as a dissident? This is what happens when women’s rights are treated as foreign rights to those of male citizens. We now find ourselves caught in this grey area of whether Manal al-Sharif is a women’s rights advocate or a social or political activist. Is a Saudi woman driving a social act, thus allowing for the regime’s claim that it is a matter to be left to society, or is it a political act, leading to its official dismissal as an outright challenge to the state? To some observers, her act was political. It was in fact a challenge to the state. It is true that there is no written law that bans women from driving, but the act of driving in and of itself nonetheless challenged state authority (and its established status quo). What makes al-Sharif’s critics reluctant, and perhaps rightfully so, to agree with this strictly political portrayal of her acts, is that the rhetoric she chose to accompany her actions was anything but political. In her Youtube videos, she praises the King, emphasized the she was not violating any laws in the Kingdom, and, more importantly, she claimed that female driving was a social taboo that needs to be broken and nothing more. This sort of rhetoric maintains the established child-parent relationship that Saudi women have with the state. While talk of demanding full citizenship, a political demand, did come up in al-Sharif’s campaign, it was still cloaked in a request that was social in nature. The campaign used the King’s face for its Facebook page and most of its official statements began by paying some sort of respect to the Saudi regime. As a result, the issue was reinforced as a social one. It was discussed in newspapers for months, people posted many opinion videos, and tweets were widely circulated, but that was it.
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