Women and The Nationality Problem in the Arab World April 30, 2008
Posted by sacrosanct in Islam, Muslim Women, News and Media, Women.Tags: arab, arab world, citizenship, nationality, politics, Women
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Even though many Arab countries are pretty much secular, in the area of women they go back to being Fred Flinstone.
In Lebanon, women who are income earners cannot go to the \to the bank to open a bank account for her kids. There are 18 family codes.
In this Aljazeera English interview, this Lebanese women talks about how she married an Egyptian man and he left her and her kids are teenagers and they can’t get Lebanese citizenship. Isn’t this outrageous? They have NO health care and no social security and they won’t be able to go to college if they don’t get citizenship.
I am very proud of Morocco, because the nationality law was changed. A woman can now pass on her nationality to her children even if she marries a foreigner yay!. When this law was not in place, women whose husbands abandoned them with kids had many problems and I even know of one that had to forge a Moroccan passport for her son in order ti survive. And we know that Morocco is a country where the women and men alike marry foreigners frequently.
Worse, these women’s groups are subject to harassment by radical political Islamists. In Morocco, they had one of their offices bombed. In Jordan, their websites get hacked and now the website leads people to a website about Saudi Arabia. I don’t know what kind of Islamic law prevents children from basic citizenship rights if their father wasn’t the best of men.
Salaam ‘Alaikum
Speaking as someone who is directly affected by inequal citizenship laws, and has had to talk to a number of gov’t officials about the situation, I can tell you that Islam, at least in Jordan, is never invoked to justify it. Mainly, the “reason” centers around nationalist issues that have absolutely nothing to do with Islam (and no one pretends that they do). The queen did push through an emergency law about 3 years ago that would allow for the bestowal of citizenship through the mother in cases of extreme hardship (widow, abandoned), but it’s not the reality on the ground, and it’s rarely applied (to my understanding). All in all, women who want to assert this have to petition the king personally.
Supposedly, there is a law that is ready to be passed through Parliament giving equal rights, but it’s like a lot of things in Jordan: it’s a talk and it’s a promise but it’s not going to become a reality. There have also been laws “ready to be passed” that also closed honor killing loopholes, and we are also living with the reality that those laws have never been passed and the attitude of ignorance continues to emanate from our chauvanistic, nationalistic parliament (who also justify these things for nationalist / tribal reasons, and rarely, if ever, invoke Islam).
That said, if we have to be fair, not all Arab countries are the same. I don’t feel that I’m pushed back to the Stone Age here in Jordan. Even though there are a lot of problems, I also have a lot of rights, both societally and legally that I wouldn’t have in another Arab country. Strangely, I have the right to run for Parliament. But not to get a passport for my child.
On the street, a lot of people are in support of fairness for women. The hackers, etc. attack people from a broad range of political and religious views, not just pro-women groups. Harassment can come from anywhere and happen to anyone, regardless if they are “Islamists,” feminists, Jordanian nationalists, socialists, etc. There is beginning to be a little more openness, awareness, and acknowledgment of these things. We will see where it leads us.
It’s also interesting to look at how many of these countries treat their immigrants when it comes to citizenship and nationality rights. It’s near impossible, even in places like UAE where the majority of the urban population are foreigners, no matter how long they may be living there, it’s unlikely that they or their families will ever receive citizenship.