Kuwaiti women are angry after the military, having allowed female soldiers in combat roles, decided they need the permission of a male guardian and banned them from carrying weapons.
Women’s rights advocates have decried the policy as “one step forward, two steps back” after the Kuwaiti Ministry of Defense also decided that women in the armed forces, unlike civilians, must wear head coverings.
The moves have sparked an online backlash in Kuwait, usually regarded as one of the most open societies in the Persian Gulf.
Photo: AFP
“I don’t know why there are these restrictions to join the army,” said Ghadeer al-Khashti, a sports teacher and member of the women’s committee of the Kuwait Football Association. “We have all kinds of women working in all fields, including the police force.”
She said that her mother had helped the resistance when then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 1990 invaded Kuwait and occupied it for seven months before being pushed out by a US-led international coalition.
“My mother during the Iraqi invasion used to hide weapons under her abaya and transport them to members of Kuwait’s resistance, and my father encouraged it,” al-Khashti said.
The ministry decided in October to allow women in combat roles, but then imposed the restrictions after the minister of defense was questioned by conservative lawmaker Hamdan al-Azmi.
Al-Azmi, emboldened by an Islamic religious edict, or fatwa, had said that having women in combat roles “does not fit with a woman’s nature.”
Lulwa Saleh al-Mulla, head of the Kuwaiti Women’s Cultural and Social Society, said the ministry’s restrictions are discriminatory and unconstitutional, and vowed legal action by the organization.
“We have women martyrs who defended their country of their own volition,” she said. “No one ordered them to do that, except for a love of country. We are a Muslim country, that is true, but we demand the laws not be subject to fatwas. Personal freedom is guaranteed in the constitution, on which the country’s laws are based.”
Kuwaiti women earned the right to vote in 2005 and have participated in Cabinet and the Kuwaiti National Assembly, although they are poorly represented in both.
The debate about the army’s new rules for women has taken an irrational turn, said Ibtihal al-Khatib, an English-language professor at Kuwait University.
“The army needs to integrate both women and men without discrimination,” the feminist academic said. “Danger does not differentiate between men and women, and neither does death during battle.”
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