Intolerance may have been on a rise in India but its foothold in the Middle East has always been strong when it comes to status of their women.
Not targeting countries like the UAE, which are flourishing when it comes to women empowerment, this one’s especially for the plight of women in Saudi Arabia.
While we sit here reading about this blog on the unfair level Saudi women are held to, they are four Saudi women being arrested in Jeddah for posing with cars at a luxury car show.
As a twenty year old Indian girl, I find it to be an extremely worrisome situation. People in my city pose with luxury cars on street and those cars are not even theirs. No one bats an eye to this sort of nonsense.
So what got on the nerves of those Saudi authorities? Digging in deeper, I tried to gorge out what exactly was the cause behind their arrest.
As per Saudi Arabia penal code, there’s no such law that entitles the women to be arrested but here, listen to this, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia believes that people behind the car show have violated the principles of the Islamic Sharia and Saudi customs by employing young models- statement from the Saudi Authorities, Saudi Gazette.
Listening to such kind of instances happening around the world almost reopens our eye towards the part of the society we almost forgot still exists and that too, blatantly. Such kind of intolerance against women is no less than a blot on the society.
Trying not to cross the boundaries that are drawn upon women due to the religious customs and traditions, it is still beyond prejudiced to penalise women for posing in front of cars in an autoshow.
Not just this, women in Saudi are not allowed to drive cars, not allowed to use public swimming pools, not allowed to interact with men and not even allowed to buy uncensored fashion magazines!
May be you thought that was too much, but hold your horses. They are also expected to wear abaya (a long cloak covering them from head-to-toe) and abstain themselves with any physical or even verbal contact with a man they are not related to.
Sitting in front of our laptop screens or texting on our smartphone we might not ever realise how unfortunate the condition of women in Saudi Arabia is. Yeah India doesn’t seem so intolerant now, does it? This almost makes India look like heaven.
The oppression in the name of religion has being going on for quite a while now and is still going on very subtly.
When are the people going to realise how faulty this concept of ‘doing it in the name of religion’ is? Is this why we uphold religion to such a pedestal? So that we could suppress others?
Prejudiced gender segregation is one of the most commonly practiced forms of discrimination in the world right now. An end should be put to this soon, before it’s too late to even consider a change.
If you liked reading this, you might wanna check out:
http://edtimes.in/2016/10/monarchy-of-saudi-arabia-executes-its-own-royal-prince-sets-a-just-example/
