WASHINGTON, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- Saudi Arabia may be following in Kuwait's footsteps after the country's Municipal Electoral Commission promised citizens women could take part in the next elections -- one small step for Saudi policy, but one large step for women's social rights in the Middle East, said Rachel Bronson, director of Middle East studies at the Council of Foreign Relations.
In a news conference in Riyadh last October, Prince Mansour, chairman of the General Committee for Municipal Elections, explained that Saudi law never banned women from voting, but the government would have been unable to encourage female participation because of the short time available -- October to February. Nail Al-Jubeir, director of the Press Information Office at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said Saudi Arabia was looking forward to women participating in the next elections set to be held in four years.
The Municipal Electoral Commission, the committee created to handle voting in Saudi Arabia for the country's first in a series of national municipal elections that began last February, recently confirmed that women should be allowed to vote in the next election period.
The decision came a few months after Kuwait's National Assembly amended the country's election laws last May to allow women the right to vote and run for office. However, Jubeir said, Kuwait was not the only contributing factor for Saudi Arabia's decision.
"(Saudi Arabia) obviously looked at how Kuwait handled its elections," he said, adding, however, that Saudi Arabia was more conservative with a larger population that made it hard to compare to Kuwaiti lifestyle.
Bronson said the debate was not about a government policy on whether or not women should be allowed to vote, but "a reflection of a higher struggle for Saudi women."
"Voting opens the door for women to be more educated and be given better employment opportunities among other things," Bronson added.
In a meeting at the Middle East Institute last week Saudi Princess Loulwa al-Faisal, sister of Turki al-Faisal, the new Saudi ambassador to the United States, said she wanted to clear misconceptions of Saudi women as "downtrodden slaves to men," something she said, "we are not at all."
She said the Saudi government had made great advances, including allowing women to work, as well as looser divorce regulations, so the possibility of female election participation was no longer a foreign concept.
"The specifics for women participation is not clear," she said. "I don't know if (women) will be candidates or voters."
It is now up to Saudi women to take advantage of any prospects, she. However, she predicted, many Saudi women will not be motivated to accept opportunities because of age-old traditions as well as uncertainty that it abides by Islamic law.
To vote, Saudis need identification cards -- another challenge for women, according to Faisal, because many refuse to have their picture taken.
"Motivating women to acquire ID cards will be the biggest problem in having women vote," she said. "More so than allowing them (to vote)."
"In response, the government and private sector has made it harder for a woman to get a job without having an ID card," she said. "This, in turn, will force them to get one."
"Necessity forces people to adapt and change," she added.
However, Jubeir warned, the government can only go so far.
"There's a clear-cut distinction that Saudi rule stops when you enter the home," he said. "Saudi law stops at the doors of homes and family matters are not a state issue in Saudi Arabia."
Although the Saudi government has implemented mandatory possession of identification cards, the main issue is the citizens' willingness to participate. Women are not allowed to attain ID cards without a family document signed by their father, which some father's will not give their daughters.
Because of what Jubeir has called the "father knows best" model where male rule controls female action, some women are denied the right to have ID cards, not because of government restrictions, but of traditional family law.
"However," responded Bronson, "there are men in Saudi Arabia that want better lives for their daughters."
Jubeir said the clear scholarly opinion in Saudi Arabia is that it is not wrong for women to participate politically. The Saudi constitution does not indicate a gender on who can and cannot vote. The dual gender in the Arabic language leaves that part of the constitution subject to interpretation.
"In the early days, within the tribal family, the woman had the leadership role, not only in the family but within the tribe," Faisal said. However, Jubeir stated tradition overrules progression of new ideas.
"The Saudi society continues to perceive the role of responsibility and relationship between men and women according to the traditional concept, based on the traditional family model -- where the breadwinner heads the family while the woman is a full-time homemaker," Faisal said.
However, Bronson believed this is changing, "especially after the grand mufti in Saudi Arabia declared that there is no reason why a woman cannot vote."
Bronson added the next step for Saudi Arabia was to get the grand mufti to work with religious clerics to issue a statement that would clear confusion on whether women can vote.
"It's important for (the Saudi people) as Muslims to know our God-given rights," said Faisal. "We are open to change and accept new technologies, but we need to ask, is this what we want in our society?"
