Saudi women fight for control of their marital fate

Women in Saudi Arabia are fighting back against tribal traditions that make them hostage to the whims of their fathers and male guardians who alone can decide who their future husbands will be.

Faced with a lifetime of being forced to remain single, an increasing number of Saudi women, many of them university graduates with good jobs, are going to court to dispute their fathers’ refusal to sign off on their marriages.

In July, a Medina court rejected a 42-year-old doctor’s petition to override her father and brothers’ refusal to allow her marriage to a surgeon she works with, because he did not belong to their tribe.

The court ruled that the father was justified, and that she was not being obedient by trying to marry someone outside the clan.

“Unfortunately we have a strange paradox in society, where young girls only 10 years old can be married, but an adult woman can be prevented from marrying for illogical reasons,” Suhaila Zainal Abidin of the National Society for Human Rights said.

University professor Amal Saleh agreed.

“We want to eliminate this phenomenon of ignorance,” said Prof. Saleh who has a Facebook campaign supporting Saudi women’s marriage rights.

“In pre-Islamic times they would just kill an unwanted daughter. Now it is killing her as an adult,” she said.

Islamic teachings say that a father must agree to his daughter’s marriage if the potential husband is moral and a devout Muslim. But in Saudi Arabia, a blend of Islamic Sharia law and deeply conservative tribal traditions gives men absolute control over their daughters until they wed.

The result is that government officials and judges will not allow a woman to marry without the permission of her official male guardian – her father, or a brother or uncle if the father is dead.

The most common reason is the tribal issue: the fathers insist their daughters marry someone inside their clan, the key social fabric of the kingdom from which derives significant political and economic power.

Sometimes a daughter is not allowed to marry a man she likes on the basis of having been pledged since childhood to someone else, perhaps a cousin.

Some women must remain single until an older sister gets married first, while others are forced by their fathers to remain unmarried to ensure that any income they earn from working or social welfare stays at home.

Maha is a typical case. When she was 26, she turned down a marriage from inside her tribe set up by relatives and a matchmaker because she considered the husband-to-be “not qualified.”

Since then, family members have found her other candidates for matrimony from outside the tribe, but her father and brothers turned each one down.

“My father and my brothers have continuously refused, and now, after reaching 38, they are pushing me to marry a man of 42 who is addicted to hashish,” said Maha, who asked that her surname not be published.

In the past six years 86 women have resorted to the courts to enable them to marry after being refused permission by their male guardian, including 13 cases in 2010, according to the country’s National Society for Human Rights.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg, because most such victims suffer in silence rather than challenge their own families.

The reasons for the problem vary from town to town and tribe to tribe, said Prof. Saleh, and include objections to marriages between members of different tribes, members of tribes and townspeople, and people from different regions.