Nisaa FM: - They call each other meddlers, warmongers, religious hypocrites, zealots and sponsors of terrorism. Now Iran and Saudi Arabia, the archrivals of the Middle East, are competing in a surprising new category: gender equality.

Saudi Arabia and Iran are on opposite sides in many ways — in their divergent branches of Islam, the wars in Syria and Yemen, Lebanese politics and relations with the United States, for example. They have clashed over oil production, religious pilgrimages and who is a terrorist. But both countries are responding to domestic and international pressure over women’s rights.

What has changed politics in Iran and Saudi Arabia?

Roya Hakakian, an Iranian-American poet and journalist who co-founded the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in the US, wrote in an opinion column published in The New York Times that women in Iran and Saudi Arabia had benefited from “competition between the two regimes to earn the mantle of the modern moderate Islamic alternative.”

Others attribute the changes in Iran to other causes. They say Iran’s young population has proved far more resistant to the government’s societal restraints compared with their parents. The relaxed enforcement of a women’s dress code in Iran may be partly rooted in the impracticality of prosecuting, fining and imprisoning violators. “Arresting the women and trials in court proved to be too time-consuming,” said Nader Karimi Joni, an Iranian journalist in Tehran. The law has not changed, he said, but now, “cash fines and lashes are at times substituted by 'educational classes.’”

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia has obviously been watching the other. “Any advancement in any country will really affect the situation in the neighboring countries,” Suad Abu-Dayyeh, a Palestinian who is the Middle East and North Africa consultant for Equality Now (a global women’s advocacy group) said. “It will have perhaps an indirect effect on Iran to advance women’s rights, because they don’t want to be seen as an oppressive government to women’s rights, especially in front of the international community.”

Gender equality improvements in Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2017

Tehran’s police chief announced just before New Year’s that the so-called morality police who patrol the capital would no longer automatically detain and punish women seen without the proper hijab head-covering in public. They will be given counseling instead.

This does not mean, thus, that Iran will stop requiring women to wear head coverings in public. Shahrzad Razaghi, a 24-year-old Tehran artist arrested in 2012 for not wearing her hijab properly, said the new enforcement policy “doesn’t mean I can go on the streets without a hijab.”

In late October, Iran said it would allow female weight lifters to compete in international competitions abroad for the first time.

In Saudi Arabia, the authorities in the week before New Year have allowed female contestants at an international chess tournament to play without the full-body garb known as an abaya. That decision is the latest in a string of liberalizing moves by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the young Saudi ruler, which includes letting women drive not only cars, but also trucks and motorcycles. And Saudi women will soon be allowed to attend soccer matches at public stadiums.

However, Saudi Arabia is still one of the most restrictive countries for women, e.g. when it comes to what to wear. “I am sorry to say, we are in 2017 and we are still talking about wearing and not wearing,” said Suad Abu-Dayyeh from Equality Now. Still, she said, “we’re hoping that what is going on in Saudi Arabia will be continuing.” While she was cautious about concluding that the changes in Iran were related to the Saudi relaxation, she said each was obviously watching the other.

Even with the strict gender separation rules imposed after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Iranian women historically have enjoyed more liberties than their Saudi counterparts. That distinction, however, has become less pronounced with the ascent in Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince Mohammed, whose agenda includes loosening the severity of religion in everyday life.

Source: www.nytimes.com