There Are Still Places Where Circumstances Are Above People

Following an article published in one of the great national newspapers, why are young women fleeing Saudi Arabia? We find ourselves in political systems in which the control of women’s lives continues to be supervised by men.

To a certain extent, the character of any act depends on the circumstances in which it is done. Some people are forced to discard their interests by impositions emanating from their environment. The same fact – in the same circumstances, but in different countries – make these change the outcome. It is discouraging that there are such disparate realities coexisting in the same time, but in different spaces.

Circumstances are still above people

The image of the young woman parapeted in the Bangkok airport hotel was very powerful. With her poor English, Saudi Rahaf Mohammed pleaded for help via Twitter so that the authorities would not hand her over to her father and brother, from whom she had escaped hours earlier. “They will kill me,” she declared, scared, but firm.

Rahaf was fleeing neither from war nor from misery, but from the customs and norms that continue to weigh down the freedom of women in Saudi Arabia, despite the reforms announced since the coming to power of King Salman and his son Mohamed ago. four years.

After spreading her photo and the one in her passport, Rahaf said that she was fed up with the restrictions imposed on her at home, that her mother had kept her locked in her room for six months for having cut her hair, that she no longer wanted to cover herself with the  No hijab,  no prayer, no Muslim, but I had no choice.

That is why he had taken advantage of a family vacation in Kuwait to escape to Australia where he planned to seek asylum. Upon learning of her absence, the father, a man with connections, had enlisted the help of Saudi diplomats in Bangkok, where Rahaf had to change planes, and had her passport withdrawn while waiting to return her on the next flight. Everyone obviated that at 18 he was already of legal age.

Rahaf is not the first young woman to flee an oppressive family; it happens in all countries. But only in Saudi Arabia are women constrained for life to the authority of the men in their family due to a system of guardianship  (wilaya)  that, according to experts, is the most restrictive in the Islamic world and reduces them to eternal minors.

Human rights defenders have no homeland

The situation of the young woman unleashed a mobilization in the social networks of feminists, defenders of human rights and well-intentioned people from all over the world.

Many recalled the case of Dina Ali, a 24-year-old teacher who two years earlier, when trying to reach Australia in search of refuge for reasons similar to those of Rahaf, was intercepted while stopping in Manila. The Philippine authorities then handed her over to two men posing as her uncles, forcibly boarded her on a flight back to Riyadh, and was never heard from again. The same could not happen.

The Rahaf case is a symptom of the situation of women in Saudi Arabia and the country in general. Despite mainly social and economic reforms, Saudis remain unprotected due to the guardianship system. This means that there are still many who struggle to exercise their basic rights in circumstances that stifle them , explains Dana Ahmed, a researcher at Amnesty International.

Rahaf Al Qunun traveled to Bangkok fearing that her relatives would kill her for apostatizing from Islam. Thanks to people fighting for human rights around the world, and specifically to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, the Saudi has traveled to Canada, where she has been granted more than asylum. In this new life, circumstances will continue to be unpredictable, but she can decide how to deal with them .