
Saudi Arabia's Jeddah United warm up before their friendly basketball game against Jordan's Al Reyadeh in Amman April 21, 2009. Due to the strict version of Islam the Saudi kingdom follows, women cannot drive or vote and have few legal rights. Despite this, women have quietly formed soccer, basketball, volleyball and other teams throughout the kingdom in the past few years, though they face an uncertain future. (Ali Jarekji/Reuters)
No sporting chance for Saudi women
One government-appointed mullah believes sports may cause young women to lose their virginity.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Joseph Heller would have smiled. It’s another absurd predicament.
Government officials have begun notifying female-only sports clubs that they must shut down because they don’t have licenses, according to Saudi press reports.
And they don’t have licenses because ... ?
That’s right! No government department is authorized to issue licenses for female-only sports clubs.
The catch-22 situation is another illustration of the barriers placed in the way of Saudi women who want to exercise and participate in sports. Their opportunities to do so are extremely limited because the prevailing view among the country’s influential religious leadership is that it is “un-Islamic” for females to be involved in athletic activities.
This bias against exercising women remains despite the medical community’s warnings about rapidly rising rates of obesity and diabetes among Saudi youth.
"The idea of female fitness is non-existent within our government," Fouziah Alouni, a prominent women's rights campaigner, told Reuters. "Depriving women of this is yet another way of marginalizing them.”
The deprivation starts early. Government schools for girls do not offer physical education classes as part of the curriculum. There are no official sports teams at state-run women’s universities. Females do not ride bicycles in public, swim in pools outside their homes or participate in sports tournaments.
They also are not allowed in public stadiums when Saudi’s beloved soccer teams play.
Last year, when King Saud University in Riyadh announced that it would sponsor an all-female walking marathon on campus to promote health awareness, the country’s most senior religious official, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al Alsheikh, ordered the university president to cancel the event.
Also, Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries in the world that has never had women in its official Olympic teams. Last year, the kingdom was permitted to send five all-male teams to Beijing although the Olympic charter states that “any form of discrimination” is “incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement."
Clerical opposition to women doing sports does not stem from Islam. Rather, it arises out of cultural attitudes long discredited in most other societies. Some clerics have Victorian-era ideas that such activities are “unfeminine.” Others display ignorance about the necessity of exercise to maintain health. And some have suggested that exerting themselves in sports would be detrimental to women’s honor.
Shame on some of these so-called "sheikhs" of Saudia. They are an embarrassment to Islam, and Saudia. They are blind, and they hate the light. The problem is the influence they have on the state. May the King follow through with reforms and get rid of these ignorant ones - truly the "Jahil" of today.
You two ignoramuses are the ones who havent studied. The only embarrassment is when people who arent students or scholars of islam put their 2 cents in on issues. Saudi Arabia is a religious country if your looking for western activities then GO to the west. It's not hard to get a visa. Anyone who thinks they will dismantle KSA to resemble secular muslim arab coutries or western kufr societies, will pay a big price in this life and the afterlife.
Shameless, no it goes beyond that, it's ignorance and plain stupidity. Where did Sheikh Al Manee and Muhammad Al Habdan get their education from? Go back and study what is so badly needed. There are more obese, diabetic sick women/girls in Saudi because they are prohibited to take part in any form of activity, wonder if they are going to care for them. Hopefully the king will be able to get some sense into these people who are so blind to reality. Wake up and see what is going on around you - stop being with your heads buried in the sand.
I have a friends from Saudi-Arabia ,they told me that this article are not the most correct because it's true that their culture can't allowed woman wear short pant or shirt but they have a indoor place for womans go to exercise or do the sports. I am not their culture but I have some knowledge of their culture and that is my comments for this article.
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