Nora Jaber examines the limitations of the liberal rights discourse in addressing the realities of marginalised individuals in Saudi Arabia. By delving into Saudi women’s experiences with ‘petitioning for reform’, the author shows the distinction between their activism and prevailing international feminist agendas.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 59/2024
Women’s struggles for gender justice in Saudi Arabia offer a window into what rights claims can look like when they are made beyond the parameters set by the human rights paradigm. Saudi women’s engagement with Islamic feminism (IF), a rights discourse and practice grounded within an Islamic framework, provides an example of how rights claims can be conceptualised and articulated beyond international human rights law (IHRL), which has been criticised on various grounds, including its colonial legacies, its displacement of other rights discourses and epistemologies, and its compatibility with and facilitation of a neoliberal global order. My analysis of Saudi women’s engagement with IF in their petitions for legal reform raises questions about its liberatory potential and limitations. Drawing on the example of petitions, I argue that while alternative rights discourses can disrupt hegemonic human rights talk and challenge epistemic hierarchies, they, too, must be interrogated concerning what subjects of rights they produce and, in turn, what inequities and exclusions they reproduce when employed to expand the category of legal rights granted by the state.
More Rights, More Freedom?
IHRL is regularly presented as the emancipatory framework with and through which injustices can be challenged and gender equality attained. In human rights discourse, emancipation is wedded to a liberal individualistic conception of freedom in which the ‘free’ female subject accumulates rights that enable her to succeed and flourish under neoliberal capitalism. As noted by Ratna Kapur, she is constructed as ‘unveiled, sexualised, and autonomous’, with the result that those who do not fit within this liberal analytic are deemed unfree and, therefore, in need of guidance and saving by the human rights framework and its agents.
IHRL sustains the image of itself as the path to freedom by foreclosing epistemic alternatives and possibilities for more just forms of living. Its hegemonic impulse is maintained and expanded through the silencing, displacement, and overshadowing of other justice frameworks, such as those rooted in Indigenous and non-Western epistemologies, that do not share its normative commitment to liberalism. Building on the argument that IHRL is not merely a liberatory force but rather a subjectivity-making order and a regulatory governance project, Kapur pushes for a ‘turn away’ from human rights and a turn towards alternative notions of freedom that exist beyond the liberal episteme and that can be more emancipatory than those promised (and regulated) within what she calls the ‘liberal fishbowl’.
Analyses, such as Kapur’s, that capture rights discourses as they are articulated and embodied by marginalised subjects open possibilities for more expansive notions of freedom to be recognised and meaningfully engaged with. However, the example of Saudi women’s petitions shows that while alternative rights discourses, such as IF, may offer different emancipatory possibilities, they can become implicated in the reproduction of certain inequities when mediated through the capitalist nation-state, which is predicated on the production and maintenance of hierarchies and material inequalities. As such, despite IF’s different conceptual and epistemic roots, rights claims that employ IF can converge with IHRL in their engendering and privileging of particular subjects of rights to the exclusion of others. Building on this, it is necessary to complicate the distinction between rights discourses at the so-called ‘centre’ (IHRL) and ‘margin’ (non-liberal/non-Western) by paying attention to what relations of dominance they reinforce and to ask: Who remains at the margins of the margin?
Islamic Feminism: A Framework for More Rights for the ‘Saudi Woman’
Petitions are one way through which Saudi women demand rights from the state. Since 1990, Saudi women have been petitioning against the ban on women driving, which was lifted in 2018, and the Male Guardianship System (MGS), a set of laws and rules requiring Saudi women to acquire the permission of a male relative to make various decisions and obtain certain services. Over the past decade, the MGS has been gradually reduced in scope through a series of legislative reforms, the latest being the codification of a Personal Status Law. The petitions are authored mainly by educated, elite, and urban women in Arabic, circulated for signature, and addressed to government officials, often the monarch. They are then posted online or delivered by hand to the addressee. My analysis of six petitions that challenged the ban on driving and the MGS between 1990 and 2016 shows that they only minimally invoked IHRL in making rights claims.
Many Muslim women reject the label of ‘feminist’ because of the Western connotations associated with feminism
Rather than articulating rights claims through IHRL, the petitioners essentially ground their claims in an Islamic feminist framework. Importantly, many Muslim women reject the label of ‘feminist’ because of the Western connotations associated with feminism. However, for the purposes of this analysis, IF usefully describes a gendered epistemology and set of methodologies that ground women’s rights in Islamic sources rather than in other domestic or international legal sources. It is a transnational knowledge project through which women assert their right to participate in interpreting the Shari’a (Qur’an and Sunnah). That process has been male-dominated in Saudi Arabia, resulting in patriarchal and discriminatory interpretations. These patriarchal interpretations often form the basis of Saudi law, a Shari’a-based legal system. Islamic feminists offer alternative, egalitarian interpretations of the sources used to discriminate against them. In the context of the petitions, the authors speak in the name of the ‘Saudi Muslim woman’ and posit that the restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia are more pervasive and demanding than what the Shari’a requires. They demand that the state legally recognise and protect the rights they claim the Shari’a already grants women. For example, when challenging the driving ban and the MGS, rather than relying on the equal rights provisions in CEDAW, they state that the existing laws ‘cannot be reconciled with legitimate Islamic opinion’ and draw on historical and contemporary examples of Muslim women exercising the rights they demand to highlight the disproportionate patriarchal influence on Saudi law.
Islamic feminists offer alternative, egalitarian interpretations of the sources used to discriminate against them.
While recognising that the conceptual language and the epistemic core of IF are different from that of IHRL, rights claims under both frameworks can converge in their reproduction of material inequities and exclusions based on gender, race, and nationality. To expose this overlap, it is necessary to interrogate what rights claims are being made in the petitions and for whom (and at whose expense) they are claimed.
In the petitions, the employment of IF is underpinned by strong nationalist rhetoric. Rights are claimed for ‘the Saudi woman’. How the Saudi woman is constructed, and how rights claims are justified, changes throughout the petitions engendering subjectivities and subjects of rights that increasingly align with those produced and recognised in IHRL. In the early petitions, the Saudi woman emerges as one whose contextual self is tied to a family unit. The authors disrupt the individualist analysis of IHRL by speaking from their position as mothers, daughters, and wives and justify their demands concerning how more rights would improve their ability to fulfil their family duties. In later petitions, however, the invocation of family values decreases, and the petitions shift to mirror the state’s Vision 2030 narrative ‘with its emphasis on economic participation and individual responsibility’ and its commitment to ‘women’s empowerment’. The state’s women’s empowerment agenda is primarily grounded in a liberal feminist understanding of gender equality espoused by the United Nations. The petitions, whilst still grounding rights claims in IF, begin to construct the Saudi woman as an individualised citizen-subject who requires more legal rights and fewer impediments to facilitate her economic empowerment. The IF framework, therefore, allows for a subject of rights that aligns much more closely with the (neo)liberal subject of rights under IHRL.
This becomes clear in the MGS petitions where the Saudi-ness of the rights bearer (the Saudi woman) is repeatedly emphasised. Demands to end the MGS are presented as demands for full citizenship. The petitions do not acknowledge that citizenship is an inherently exclusionary concept tied to border control and violence and imbued with classed, racial, and gendered hierarchies. Instead, they demand the right to drive themselves instead of being driven by migrant drivers who are portrayed as sexually deviant and immoral ‘others’, perpetuating harmful racial stereotypes. The petitions also describe the expense of hiring migrant drivers as an economic burden on the Saudi family. In doing so, they ignore the class disparities among Saudi women, the majority of whom cannot afford to hire a driver, and reinscribe the dominance and inequality produced through the Kafala (visa sponsorship) system that migrant workers are subject to. The authors of the petitions show no regard for how restrictions on Saudi women’s mobility result in their complicity in the everyday control and exploitation of migrant workers; as well as the double burden women migrant workers are subjected to as women whose internal mobility is equally restricted by the driving ban and as migrant workers whose bodies and lives are more largely and pervasively constrained by the Kafala system. The migrant workers and other non-citizens remain at the margins of the margin.
Towards a More Inclusive Rights Mobilisation
While scholarship that captures alternative rights discourses is necessary for redressing epistemic injustices and for expanding emancipatory imaginaries, it is also important to interrogate the extent to which they, too, might be implicated in the reproduction of specific exclusions and relations of dominance. The analysis of Saudi women’s engagement with IF in their petitions to expand the scope of their legal rights shows that when alternative rights discourses work without challenging the exclusions and inequities that the neoliberal capitalist nation-state model is predicated on, it is necessary to ask what possibilities for more just forms of living they, too, may foreclose. Regardless of whether these discourses are endorsed by the petitioners or whether they are strategic performative tactics to increase the likelihood of the petitions’ appeal and success, it is important to recognise the legitimising effect that the reproduction of hegemonic discourses has. Therefore, the effects of such petitions will remain selective and incremental in the absence of activism and scholarship that go hand in hand with a theory of resistance that works to challenge transnational discriminatory hierarchies and material inequalities, not only based on gender but also on class, race, and nationality.
Endnote: This piece was written as part of my research and thinking process for a more extensive article (in progress), in which I flesh out the argument and include more direct examples from the petitions.
