'Menopausegate' and Saudi Women's Shifting Role

(May 6) -- A growing controversy over gender segregation laws in Saudi Arabia, where women can't vote or drive and must be veiled in public, took a bizarre turn this week when an ultraconservative senior cleric allegedly defended his interaction with unveiled women at a recent conference by saying they were "menopausal."

Revelations that Sheikh Al-Najaimi, who supported a death fatwa for those advocating public mixing between men and women in Saudi Arabia, spent "hours" eating and talking with women at an International Women's Day conference in Kuwait last month were reported by Saudi female blogger Eman Al Nafjan. Nafjan said that when Al-Najaimi returned from the conference, he explained that because the women were menopausal, he was not violating Islamic law.

When some of the women at the International Women's Day conference in Kuwait insisted they were not menopausal, Nafjan said he responded: "You are post-menopausal whether you admit it or not."

The incident, dubbed "Menopausegate" by The Media Line, a Middle East news organization, is the latest in an ongoing struggle between Saudi's King Abdullah, 85, and some of the kingdom's conservative and powerful religious clerics over the country's strict segregation laws.

The catalyst for the controversy, which has been the subject of highly charged televised debates and news articles, was the king's ambitious launch last fall of a $10 billion university and research center where both men and women study and interact without restriction.

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) opened in September on the Red Sea coast about 50 miles north of Jeddah. Students from more than 60 countries attend the school, where women do not have to wear the veil and can drive around the 14-square-mile facility.

Although the reform-minded Abdullah hoped to attract top academic talent from around the world, the university has also spurred fierce debate within Saudi Arabia leading to death threats, high-level dismissals and even this week's debate over menopause and how it is interpreted by Islamic law.

Saudi Arabia is governed on the basis of Shariah, or Islamic, law.

"What's happening in Saudi Arabia is a symbol of the change the king is trying to bring to the country and the forces trying to prevent it from happening," said Robert Lacey, author of two books about the country, including the recent "Inside the Kingdom."

Abdullah also made waves recently by appearing in a photograph with his brother, Crown Prince Sultan, alongside 40 women, most of whom wore abayas but did not veil their faces, at a conference in Najran.

"King Abdullah is a bit like the Saudi version of Obama fighting right-wing fundamentalism," Lacey told AOL News on Thursday. "He is up against the enormous religious conservative establishment that still controls a lot of the country, like the courts. His power is still surprisingly limited."

Shortly after KAUST opened, a senior religious cleric, Sheikh Saad Bin Nasser Al-Shithri, criticized the open coeducational school and was fired by the king.

But in a stunning announcement in December, the head of Saudi Arabia's religious police, Ahmed Al-Ghamdi, wrote an article published in a Saudi newspaper in favor of the university and against gender-based segregation, or khilwa -- the very law his organization is dedicated to enforcing.

"The word [khilwa] in its contemporary meaning has entered customary jurisprudential terminology from outside," the 47-year-old sheik said. "Mixing was part of normal life for the Ummah [Islamic nation] and its societies.

"Those who prohibit the mixing of the genders actually live it in their real lives, which is an objectionable contradiction," he said. "In many Muslim houses -- even those of Muslims who say mixing is haram [forbidden] -- you can find female servants working around unrelated males."

Al-Ghamdi was first reported to have been fired after his comments ignited an angry national debate, but he told the Arab News late last month that he was still on the job, and several newspapers reported that he had been mysteriously reinstated.

In February, Al-Ghamdi's remarks caused another senior religious cleric, Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, to issue a fatwa, or Muslim religious edict, calling for death for "modernizers" who advocate a desegregation of the sexes.

It was that fatwa that Sheik Al-Najaimi publicly supported, and that came back to haunt him when it was discovered he had interacted freely with unveiled women at the Kuwait conference.

But Al-Najaima's stance that the women attendees he spent time with were menopausal also backfired. Islamic scholars in Saudi Arabia said that Islamic law in such matters decrees that a woman must be post-menopausal, no longer interested in men and announce it herself.

Dr. Fawzia Al-Bakr, a professor of education at King Saud University, told The Media Line that the king's establishment of the new university and his recent actions are part of a sea change in Saudi policy when it comes to segregation of the sexes."

"I think the king realized that this is a serious problem," Al-Bakr said. "You cannot segregate the two sexes and expect to have a normal, functioning society. So he opened KAUST, supported Al-Ghamdi and had this picture taken with women in the South, in a very conservative area, with the crown prince. There is a totally different ideology slowly taking over, and I really hope, from the bottom of my heart, that they will succeed."