DOHA: A mixed audience at the seventh chapter of Qatar Foundation's Doha Debates held on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favour of equal status for Arab women with men.
At the end of a lively and enlightening debate, the motion "this house believes that women in the Arab world should have equal status as men," was passed with 85.8 per cent votes.
The event was chaired by former BBC presenter Tim Sebastian. Speaking in favour of the motion were Dr Tareq Al Suwaidan, a Kuwaiti presenter of numerous Islamic programmes on television and Toujan Faisal, the first woman elected into the Jordanian parliament.
Shaikh Jihad Brown, an Islamic scholar and a consultant for various Islamic projects in the region and Khola Hassan, an author and outspoken figure on the position of women in Islam spoke against the motion.
Both the sides agreed on one point; the blame for the problems that Arab women face cannot be put on Islam, but on the customs, traditions and the dictatorial political system in the region, which do not conform with Islamic principles. The panelists differed mainly on the definition of the term equality and the solutions to the existing problem.
Jihad Brown argued that equality is a concept that came from the French revolution along with liberty and fraternity and it also comes with a bundle of other western concepts like free democracy, modernity etc. The western concept of equality defines the status of woman setting man as the standard and tends to reject those characters which are peculiar to women. Equity or fairness is a better term to describe the position of women in Islam vis a vis with men, he maintained.
Toujan asserted that in Islam, men and women are equal before God. However, women in the region have been denied this equality by the male-dominated system which has also exploited religion to preserve its monopoly. She also argued that it was not Islam, but the Christian Church in the Middle Ages that degraded the position of women.
Tareq Al Suwaidan, who won applause from the gathering by his plain speaking, said the discrimination that women are subject to in the Arab world is the result of 500 years of backwardness. Nowhere in the world women are getting equal rights with men. In the US a women's salary is not the same as men who is doing the same job. Only 0.5 per cent of the leaders in the US are women, he noted.
"This is a global phenomenon. But in the Arab world their situation is the worst," he noted. He said the solution lies in giving women the right to choose what they feel good and suitable for them, not in imposing on them what the men think right. He urged the Arab women to fight for their freedom instead of waiting for men to give it to them. "Freedom is not given but taken," he said.
He sarcastically noted that not only women, but men also should be given some rights in the Arab world, in a reference about the dictatorial regimes in the region.
Khola Hassan said the solution does not lie in western feminism and emancipation of women as advocated by the west. "There are a lot of good things that we have to take from the west but not this sort of feminism which has created moral degradation and anarchy in the society," she said. She added that the psychological, biological and physiological features that differentiate women from men should be taken into consideration while defining their role in the society.
The panelists' comments were followed by a heated and lively question-answer session where a variety of oft-discussed issues related with the status of women in Islam were raised. Sebastian made the debate even more lively through his prompt interruptions and by challenging the positions of the panelists.
Wednesday's debate was the last in the first series of the Doha Debates. A second season of Doha Debates will begin in September, announced Sebastian.
BBC World will broadcast the debate on June 11 (6.10 pm and 1.10am) and June 12 (1.10pm and 11.10pm).
© The Peninsula 2005
