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The struggle for women’s rights to engage in sport and attend sporting events in Iran and Saudi Arabia is highlighted by regular contributor James M. Dorsey.
The expected arrival of female fans of Western Sydney Wanderers in Saudi Arabia for the second leg of the Asian Champions League final against Al-Hilal is one of a range of issues relating to sport and women that is commanding increased international attention at the present time.
The reaction of Saudi authorities to unaccompanied female Wanderers fans entering the country and wanting to attend the King Fahd International Stadium in Riyadh, where women are generally not permitted to enter, is likely to put pressure on the Asian Football Federation (AFC).
The AFC requires that a club's fans must be allowed access without prejudice, and competition regulations that state "(the) hosting club and its National Association must guarantee and ensure that access to the stadium will be granted to the AFC delegation, officials and players of the visiting club, sponsors, travelling fans and media without any discrimination of gender, race or nationality."
The issue of female Wanderers fans links with a range of other matters relating to women’s sporting rights in Saudi Arabia and Iran including:
The later incident underlined the fact that women’s rights also includes the right to compete with headwear that meets safety and security standards and is culturally acceptable.
In response to the withdrawal, the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) said it would next year ease the ban.
Football paved the way for accommodating religiously observant women athletes with FIFA’s acceptance two years ago of the principle that women were allowed to wear approved headgear.
The increased attention on women’s sporting rights has put Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two Middle Eastern nations that ban women from entry into stadia during competitions, on the defensive and raises questions about the international sporting community’s forcefulness in opposing restrictions that violate fundamental rights.
International Olympics Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach said after last month meeting Saudi Arabia’s newly appointed Olympic chief Prince Abdullah bin Mosaad bin Abdulaziz that women’s rights was being discussed.
Human Rights Watch last week called on the Kingdom to make clear what steps it was taking to ensure that women are included in international competitions and able to participate in sports generally. Saudi Arabia failed to field women athletes at the recent Asian Games after it was forced by the IOC to allow all of two expatriate women to compete in the 2012 London Olympics.
The degree to which Saudi Arabia feels pressured by increasingly unsustainable restrictions on women’s sport was evident in Saudi responses to criticism. Rather than point to the Kingdom’s long-standing denial of women’s rights rooted in culture and justified by a puritan interpretation of Islam, Mohammed al-Mishal, Secretary-General of Saudi Arabia's Olympic Committee, said that Saudi Arabia did not have women athletes who would have qualified for the 2014 Asian Games.
Al-Mishal however indicated that despite Saudi Arabia’s promise to field women athletes at the 2016 Olympics in Rio Janeiro they would be limited to sports endorsed by a literal interpretation of the Qur’an.
The Saudi official said the kingdom was training women to compete in equestrian, fencing, shooting, and archery Olympic contest which are "accepted culturally and religiously in Saudi Arabia".
Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Director Sarah Leah Whitson dismissed Al-Mishal’s defence as excuses, stating “two years after the London Olympics, the time for excuses is over – Saudi Arabia needs to end its discrimination against women and ensure women’s right to participate in sport on an equal basis with men.
“Limiting women’s participation to specific sports is yet another example of Saudi Arabia’s refusal to allow women to compete on an equal basis with men.”
Despite the restrictions, Saudi Arabia has taken small steps towards expanding women’s ability to engage in sports. The Kingdom’s Shura Council, a consultative assembly, has urged the education ministry to study the possibility of introducing physical education for girls in public schools. The move could lead to a lifting of the ban on female sports in public schools.
Moreover, authorities last year began licensing private sports clubs for women.
Saudi Arabia has further struggled for years with proposals to build separate women’s sections in stadia – a move that has been staunchly resisted by the country’s conservatives. Manal Al-Dabbagh nevertheless became in August the first Saudi woman photographer to be allowed to photograph a football match in a stadium.
Writing on CNN’s website, Lina K. Almaeena, a prominent Saudi promoter of women’s sports, noted that Saudi officials have promised enhanced opportunities for women for years.
Almaeena said those promises remained unfulfilled because of “logistical challenges” such as a lack of profession female professionals and adequate space that would ensure that women are shielded from the view of men.
As a result, the Saudi Government has yet to include physical education in the curricula of girls’ schools and enable women to use neighbourhood facilities and train for international competitions.
With the exception of the Equestrian Federation, women are not members of the boards of Saudi sporting associations. The absence of women board members in the case of the Saudi football association violates a decision of the West Asian Football Federation that obliges its members to put women’s soccer rights on par with those of men and include women on their boards.
The controversy and domestic battles that women’s sports evokes was recently evident on social media in response to a YouTube video viewed by nearly half a million people.
The video (screen shot image below) showed the rare sight of a female Saudi football fan, clad in traditional all enveloping dress, cheering her club, Al Hilal, against the United Arab Emirates’ Al Ain in an Asian Champions League match.
Unlike Saudi Arabia, the UAE does not bar women from stadia, and the woman was seen shouting in frustration at a bad tackle on the pitch. As she shakes her fist in anger, her sleeve rolls up and exposes her lower arm.
Commenters on the video lined up on both sides of the argument with 1,826 dislikes and 969 likes. In support of the woman, one commenter denounced segregation rooted in the Kingdom’s adherence to Salafism, a diverse Islamic trend that seeks to emulate life at the time of the Prophet Mohammed and his immediate successors, as the product of “a sick and obsessed mind.”
An opponent countered with “we do not allow women to have 100% freedom … most Muslim women agree with this ... so I don't understand how most of the world’s women wear tight clothes and walk half naked on the streets and beaches as if it were normal ..! Don’t these women have brothers or fathers???”
A Saudi psychiatrist warned in July that women’s passion for football constituted a need to release pent-up energy and imitate others that endangered a woman’s role in a conservative Muslim society.
With Western Sydney Wanderers to play Al Hilal in Riyadh on 1st November, concerns have been raised as to whether female (as well as Jewish) supporters will be granted visas for the match.
Saudi Arabia has long lifted its restrictions on allowing Jews into the Kingdom and has in the recent past facilitated attendance of sporting events by Brazilian and New Zealand women fans when their teams were visiting the country.
The granting of entry to stadia to foreign women supporting a visiting team has sparked heated debate in Saudi Arabia. Controversy erupted in February when a group of female American Congressional staffers were allowed to attend a match in a Riyadh stadium from which Saudi women were barred.
Saudi Arabia’s failure to forcefully act on repeated promises and follow-up on its concession to pressure to field women athletes at the London Olympics like the imprisonment of 25-year old British-Iranian dual national Ghoncheh Ghavami suggests that achieving women’s sporting rights is a lengthy battle. International pressure will likely have to involve more than efforts at quiet behind-the-scenes persuasion.
Ghavami was charged with spreading propaganda against the Iranian government after she attempted in June with more than a dozen other women to enter a stadium where the Iranian national men’s volleyball team was playing Italy.
However, in contrast to Saudi Arabia, Iran does encourage women’s sport even if it bars women from stadia.
Writing in The Guardian, journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni argued in the case of Ghavami that international pressure on Iran to adhere to human rights standards would be more effective and “seem less a political tool to batter Iran when it is expedient than a permanent concern” if the Islamic republic’s critics “strive for is consistency, including human rights concerns as part of the ongoing political approach to Iran so that it becomes a fixed expectation in Tehran as well.”
That is true not only for Iran but also the struggle for women’s sporting and human rights in Saudi Arabia as well as elsewhere in the world.
28th September 2014 - Qatar women’s basketball team pull out of Asian Games over hijab ban
20th September 2014 - Women’s right to attend sports events at centre of Iran’s culture wars
7th July 2014 - Saudi Arabia announces plans to build 11 stadia
7th April 2012 - Saudi women could miss London Olympics
28th June 2010 - Iran girls barred from Singapore Youth Olympics for wearing hijab
15th June 2010 - Saudi cleric says sport is ‘corrupting’ women
