OK, even more so than usual, I am way, way out of my league on this one. But I have to mention it. One of the gripes I most frequently hear about Islamic countries is that women are deeply suppressed. The accusation rings true to me, I have to admit, based on my limited knowledge and experience. And I wrestle with the subject as I seek to consider how the apparent divide between between Islamic cultures and non-Islamic cultures might be bridged.
Not that I believe the US or Europe has addressed women's rights all that well, mind you. My experience is that women in the West do live and work under very thick glass ceilings (glass, yes, but ceilings nevertheless). And as a guy, I hear much more (subtly) anti-female commentary from other guys in the workplace than I would have thought possible based on the West's superior equal rights mythology. But it does seem to me that the language of equality has come a long way in many parts of the West - that suppression of women's rights has become more marginalized than it was, say, before the 1960s.
Against that backdrop, I was intrigued by links on a Saudi news website, http://www.arabnews.com/. Check out the story from today (June 8) on women's futures, and the links on this webpage from earlier this year on the Top 20 Saudi Businesswomen and their successes. I suppose it is easy to put blurbs on the internet without effecting any real change. But if language and mythology are part of the way to advance a rights agenda, as I submit the West has seen, then perhaps these webpages are to be praised, at least a little? After all, it would be just as easy to effectuate no change without these webpages.
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