Here is my first set of notes on the status of Women's Rights in the Middle East. These notes aren't focused on a specific country.
-In May 2005 a survey ranked 16 nations in the Middle East
on a scale from 1-5 in various categories: freedom, economic etc.
-Tunisia=highest score of 3.24 while Saudi Arabia had the
lowest score of 1.26
-In Iraq women live in virtual terror b/c women activists
and those who were “dressed immodestly have been attacked and killed
-Afghanistan: teacher was beheaded b/c he was a educating
girl, which is considered by some un-Islamic
-Saudi Arabia=Women=not allowed to vote or drive a car
-In Jordan girls die each year in “honor killings” while
their perpetrators, usually their parents, receive light/no sentence
-Some good new though: Morocco: new family law=easier for
women to divorce and keep custody of children
-In 2002-2003 over 50% of students in universities in Iran
were women
-Some shocking situations: Under Saddam Hussein Women had equal
rights, of course people in general didn’t have many rights to begin with
So from these first notes, it is obvious that Women's Rights in the Middle-East are abysmal at best.
Hey Dalton, I'm Zach, a sophmore at Friends. I really liked this post and thought the statistics were interesting. I didn't know about the new divorce law in Morocco and it's nice to see them take a step in that direction. One thing I would like to add is that in Iran if a noniranian woman marries an Iranian man, she is considered an Iranian citizen in Iran. There was a situation like that in the 80's where an American woman and her daughter were stuck in Iran after her Iranian husband held them there. They could not legally leave Iran and if the husband had divorced her she would have lost custody of her daughter. They managed to escape by hiring people smugglers to Turkey where they were sent back to the US. She wrote a book about this called "Not Without my Daughter" which was later made into a movie of the same name.
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