Kuwaiti women continue struggle for rights

KUWAIT - Alternative Staff

January 2003

While Muslim women in the Western world protested secular decisions, women in Kuwait are still organizing their rank and file to win their right to vote.

“We lost the first battle when we could not vote during this year’s parliamentary elections,” said Hasna al-Shorji, a Kuwaiti lawyer.

“Islamist MPs are not willing to give us our rights. They argue that women belong inside their homes and next to their families and it is unfortunate that these MPs enjoy influence inside Parliament,” she said.

“Is it conceivable that we, Kuwaiti women, have not yet reached the status of citizens and are still being treated as subjects? We should be entitled to having our full rights to practice our citizenship no matter what the regressive groups think here,” she told Alternative.

For their part, Muslim fundamentalist said that democracy in itself was an alien idea to “the Arab society. When God said that representation should be a matter of consultation between us, his highness did not mean that women were included among men in this process,” Hajj Salman Abou-Awj argued.

Hajj Salman told Alternative that as long as they enjoyed any kind of influence, they would never allow “this copying of infidel Western principles to infiltrate our believing societies.” He said that this would only happen “on the dead body of believing Muslims.”