On April 4, 2006, Kuwaiti women made history by voting and contesting in a local by-election for the first time, after the parliament granted them right to suffrage the previous year. “Today is the biggest feast we have been waiting for more than 40 years”, said Ms Khaledah al-Khadher, one of the two female contestants, to journalists at a polling station in suburb of the town Salwa. “This is the first time Kuwaiti women can show the men that we are capable, it is important that we do our best and leave the outcome to Allah”, she added. In the said by-election, some 28,000 voters, about 16,000 of them women, cast ballots to elect a MP from eight contestants, including two women.

It may be recalled here that in the first week of December, 1999, jubilant mullahs and their supporters in the streets of Kuwait City celebrated the defeat of a bill in Kuwaiti parliament that sought to approve women’s right to vote and contest in parliamentary election. The incident was enough to understand the unwillingness of the chauvinistic Arab men to allow full citizenship to their woman folk. It may be mentioned here that, among the conservative Gulf countries, only Kuwait has an elected legislature, while the rest are ruled by dictatorship in one form or another. While dissolving the parliament in May 1998, Kuwait’s Amir, Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad al-Sabah, issued a decree granting women the same political rights as enjoyed by men. But the newly elected, parliament rejected the decree in the last week of November, 1999, by a narrow margin of 32–30 votes. It took another five years for the bill to be tabled again in 2004; and fortunately, it could gather more supporters this time round as sundry conservative members of the parliament crossed floor, joined the liberal camp and helped Kuwaiti women win their voting right.

It should be mentioned here that Kuwait is not yet a model of democracy either. The head of the state is still hereditary, who appoints a 15-member cabinet and nearly half of these ministers belong to the ruling Al Sabah family. The Parliament has 65 elected MPs, but they don’t have the right to embarrass the cabinet ministers in the Parliament with tricky questions. They, however, have the right to use the Kuwaiti press, the freest in the Arab world, to air their grievances.

Nearly a century ago, the arch-conservative Arab world began to rethink  women’s rights issues as celebrated Egyptian author Qasim Amin published a seminal work  in 1899 blaming oppression of women as the root cause of the Muslim world's backwardness. It should be mentioned here that, in 2001, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) appointed an inquiry commission consisting of Arab intellectuals and scholars for investigating the cause of the dearth of creativity and backwardness in the Arab world. It published the finding of its year-long investigation, called the “Arab Human Development Report 2002” (AHDR 2002), in July 2002. The investigators pointed out that the oppression of women is one of the major causes of backwardness of the Muslim community. “It (the Arab world) does not treat its womenfolk as full citizens and this suppression of women is another vital reason that makes the Arab world backward”, said the report. “How can a community prosper if it stifles half of its production potential”, the report asked.

Last update : 21-02-2009 21:49

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