I’m glad to see the great impact of the Omani social media in tackling at length issues that were not relevant to our conventional way of life, Omanis were not familiar with the concept or the movement of Feminism or its fundamental goals therefore most of the posts & comments were just a tirade of rigid & narrow opinions reaching to the level of becoming a tenet rather than opinions, the detractors were not in a position to understand feminism as it is reasonably justified and understood but to malign and distort it for no reason but mere hatred upfront.

The new born concept into our society has become the most controversial issue ever discussed, some have considered it as the epitome of women’s salvation in the country while others proclaimed its sinful nature and an act of wickedness to be fought.

All that made me wonder why the idea of feminism is locally feared & broadly attacked when the cause itself is just and far away from gender-centrism?

It’s profoundly disturbing to find a long history of women’s sufferings & strife for their rights and indispensability at home & abroad is being aborted in sheer ignorance, just because of some women are crowding out feminism by their individual statements of self satisfaction & actualisation doesn’t give them the right to become stumbling blocks for the rest of women who are still struggling hard to get their rights.

It’s understood that liberating & egalitarian concepts like Feminism is ought to be opposed by the vested interests mostly out of self-righteousness & mansplaining patterns of behaviour but even though considering Feminism as a form of extremism is a far fetched corollary that won’t find a reasonable interlocutor depicting it that way, reason is not common here when it comes to the rights of women’s topics.

The woman is not a lower being made for total submission and menial duties, she is a whole human with enormous capabilities matching & even exceeding in many posts those of men. She doesn’t need a protector to resolve her problems and extricate her congeniality like in Disney Land’s archetypal pictures. We have to understand that Feminism is not ruddered by a sole principle but by a ramifications of values, philosophies and ethics, it unfolds in many forms of justice implementation& rights proclamation. 215 BCE in Rome the Lex Oppia, was enacted; it ruled that women could not wear more than half an ounce of gold upon their persons and that their tunics should not be in different colours, that was the first when women of Rome marched for their rights and presumably the first instance of Feminist movement in action.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the English writer philosopher and advocate of women’s rights in the 18th century said “I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves”, and she one of the greatest proponents of egalitarianism where she said “Virtue can only flourish among equals”, her broad view of rationality was evident in the advocacy of women’s rights, “Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; – that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers” she said, women are not inferior but lacking education a big emphasis on the importance of education for all; “If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?” We are more obliged to ask the same now than ever.

The French Suffragettes is another victory in women’s immortal epic of birthrights. The ME TOO movement echoed in the corners of the globe reaching to our Arab communities to combat sexual harassment & abuse, all that and more testified to the just cause & intrinsic goodness of Feminism for fighting injustice and all kinds of discrimination against women and not what the patriarchal chauvinists say that it came for the destruction of families & societies. Definitely there are extreme stances from some hardcore feminists but the benefits will always outweigh the odds.

There are those who say Feminists are by nature Misandrists calling for the hatred & abandonment of men, it’s the primary libelling that remains the master transgression imputed to feminists when everything else fails to attach Feminism to the source of all ugliness, such trivial and baseless accusation comes from hardliners fearing the forfeiture of their assumed supremacy, however women will not acquiesce to “The Dominant Male” doctrine over their lives, they are independent & indispensable right from birth and no compromises upon that, the community has & ought to change its myopic mumpsimuses towards feminists & women in general.

I and most of my female peers totally disagree with Valerie Solanas the radical feminist who wrote the SCUM manifesto to the end of fixing males intervention in the world by eliminating the male sex, no reasonable mind would agree to that but we sympathise with her troubled childhood that she had been sexually abused by her father, that’s why we have to be rational and differentiate between sound Feminism and the touting of extreme measures to achieve it, abused childhood explicitly justifies its vindictive attitude and that’s something no one could deny just plainly.

Feminism did not come from the thin air putting in front of us all the travails women had to suffer and carry with them throughout history with no hope but them running the gauntlet trying to left it off. Another distinctive example for injustice invoked on women is Susan Sontag the American original author of the book “Freud the mind of the moralist” which she relinquished her authorship right to the book just to get the custody of her son after divorcing Philip Rieff, he remorsefully apologised after 60 years admitting to Susan’s authorship of the seminal book. Marry Shelly the English novelist who wrote the first science fiction in the genre “Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus” in 1818 not publishing her name for no one would believed the author was a woman, women were always underestimated, marginalised & underrated.

To the women who sees everything through rosy vantage points I would love to say; Omani women do not need a special day to commemorate them with pomps & ceremonies but otherwise to look into their contemporary issues in which they are deemed lower than their male counterparts, legally & socially they are not considered to be equal to men just through lip-servicing & sweet spiels the males in-charge claim bombastically & bluntly to empower the distaff side where in reality they do not.

Lots of girls made to abandon their abroad higher education because the local tribal tradition makes it impossible without having free male guardians looking after them, Why Omani women married to foreigners can not pass their nationality to their children?, and why the breastfeeding hour to mothers at workplace are subjected to the permission from the employer and not promulgated by law?, Why FMG is still not incriminated in Oman? In Murder cases Why it’s half the blood-money settlement given if the murdered happens to be a woman?, women’s lives are cheaper than men’s in our Arab Muslim societies. Marital rape is common when wives are not ready or unwilling to fulfill their nuptial duty on bed, lots of exploitations & extortion in the name of men’s rights in calling their wives to submissiveness when the spousal bond is supposed to be of a complementarian nature and based on mutual consent not coercion. Why in the so-called “honor crimes” the penalties are reduced for male culprits? What about the equal vocational opportunities for men & women in the jobs market? The list will go off charts

We can not limit women’s role to housewifery and raising kids, although we do not underestimate the role of housewives and dedication towards their households & children upbringing if they wholeheartedly opted for it, a financially independent woman is a free woman, free from the bondages of alternate sustentation & the control of Svengalis . Quite a numerous women accept miserably the physical & verbal abuses from husbands because the latter are their sole breadwinner so they compromise not by choice but out of fear alone. In my opinion the most miserable of all women happen to be the ones seem financially independent but are not sufficiently free to choose the colors of their own clothes.

The famous French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her magnificent book “the second sex” aligns the fate of the colonized with that of the subordinate woman, riveted to the peculiarities unjustly allotted to her by the conquering force therefore when a woman gets exposed to violence & sexual harassment she must not be taken out from the place of her work or studies etc to appease the oppressor but rather to remove the root-cause that endangers her. Saying that Feminism spoils the souls and minds of the young girls and driving them to commit suicide is a futile lame claim hiding the facts for more lavish persecution under the hood of traditional local conservatism .

Suicide is a very abstruse matter, a package of factors conditions and circumstances much inclined to & coexisting with the instruments of oppression in a society and has nothing to do with a movement that was established and historically verified to be the only unswerving hope for women’s rights & untwisted liberty.

By Huda Hamed, Journalist and Writer

This article was translated from Arabic

In 1994 my mother who is an Omani citizen returned with her siblings from Tanzania to Oman in search of a better life for us. Then I joined her with the rest of my siblings in 1996. We were still young and were seeking a good education. My father did not hold Omani citizenship, but we did not expect the matter to take very long until he obtained it, after he submitted all the applications in Oman, as his origins are Omani. Especially since his brother had obtained Omani citizenship before him. Consequently, at this stage my father had no choice but to stay in Tanzania in order to pursue his own business for he did not have an Omani residence permit while we moved to live with our mother in Oman. My siblings and I also did not have the Omani nationality, we couldn’t receive it under Omani law even though my mother is Omani, we were only allowed to stay in Oman as minors and children of my Omani mother.

But the matter lasted a very long time and remained the same for many years. However, my father did not give up hope and was constantly following up at the Ministry of Interior, to no avail. And when there is something new from the ministry, it was always a refusal. He then started all over again and submitted new applications. We stayed like this for years until I was about to finish my high school diploma.

Throughout the school years, despite my high sense of belonging to this country, I used to feel that I was from a minority, especially when I was asked at school to submit documents to update my students’ records. The strange thing is that I and others like me from the minority of people that are of Omani descent but did not have citizenship looked like the majority. We did not notice differences between us in the educational environment in terms of physical features and the name of the tribe, except for the nationality.

Perhaps this is why the school administration registered us as Omanis, even though we did not have all the supporting documents. Of course, for me as a child and a teenager, I felt great joy and peace of mind because of this mistake, which I do not know if it was intended or not, because I will not have to explain to my schoolmates about my different situation.

Sadly at the end of 2007, when I reached my final year at school, during the exam period for the first semester, we got news of the death of my father in Tanzania, who was the closest person to my heart. But because of the long distance between us and the separation of our family due to the complicated Omani laws which kept us apart as a family, we were prevented from living together until the last days of his life.

I remember now my mother’s words after his death: “I have nothing to give you except education, for I sacrificed to live apart from your father for long years in order to get you an education, and this is your only weapon in this life.”

Our plan, after completing my high school studies, was for my father to take care of the expenses of my university studies abroad. I wanted to study medicine or engineering, therefore we began to look for countries where I could study these disciplines with a limited budget. Despite the traumatised conditions that I went through, I was able to maintain an advanced level in my studies until I finished high school with good results.

The unified admission center system to apply for university was still new, and out of curiosity I said to myself, what will I have to lose if I try to apply to colleges and universities and register my options for the majors that I aspired to study, even though I was almost certain of the rejection and the words of my uncle who always reminded me that I have no right to overseas studies as a non-Omani in order to protect me from having hope and be disappointment. But I was surprised when the system accepted me and it opened the doors for me to register all my options for overseas scholarships, as I later discovered that there was a technical error in the system.

I registered all my 15 options in the system, and I started with the overseas scholarships, such as medicine and engineering, etc. When the time came to announce the results, I found my name published in the local newspapers and that I had obtained an overseas scholarship. It was a moment of joy, filled with uncertainty, because according to current Omani laws, I doubted that I would be granted an overseas scholarship.

Indeed, I was correct with my instinct, when I noticed the extent of shock when I submitted my registration papers to the Ministry of Higher Education. They were insisting that I submit proof of my Omani citizenship, after I submitted my Tanzanian document. My response to them was that these are my only recorded documents at school and I never submit others. I saw their surprise and confusion about how this mistake occurred, being registered in school over the years as an Omani! While I looked at it as a good thing for us, I requested a suspension of the scholarship, justifying that I could get citizenship very soon. At that moment, I decided to set a goal, I decided to fight the whole world in order to obtain this scholarship and overcome this obstacle of not holding the Omani nationality in order to not lose this opportunity and achieve my goals in this life.

In the following months, I intensely followed up with the Ministry of the Interior, often floundering, left and right. Every time the committee met, it rejected my application for citizenship, even though all this happened after my father’s death.

The last resort was to approach some family individuals in Oman with connections to seek help, hoping that they could explain my case to the officials from the humanitarian point of view, given that I am a daughter of an Omani woman, a widow who can’t work. And she is totally dependent on her children in taking care of her and helping themselves.

It is impossible to forget that day in January 2009 when I called, as usual, the Ministry of Interior to follow up and spoke with the person who knows my case. His usual response was: Sorry, your request was rejected again. I sadly thanked him, but later he came back and said to me in a cheerful voice: Wait, congratulations on your nationality and you deserve it.

In fact, I do not have words to describe that moment! I was with my mother and all my siblings standing at the public phone next to the court in Al Khuwair area, finishing the procedures to issue my father’s death certificate. I immediately started following up with the Ministry of Higher Education to complete the registration procedures for my overseas scholarship and travel to study abroad. Thanks God, after that my siblings did not have to suffer as I did.

By: Anonymous

Translated from Arabic by: Habiba Al Hinai

According to one study, girls outperform boys in school. In 2015, for example, girls outperformed boys in a reading competition in 69 of the tested countries. The norm in our societies is that girls are more concentrated in studying. That is why their grades are high, but on the other hand, not a little number of our girls do not go to universities or work after graduation. The number of working women in the Middle East is less than 1: 5 of employees. Now, let’s go further and talk about the status of girls and women in the Sultanate of Oman.

According to the Omani Law, article 13 of the Cultural Principles, “Justice, equality and equal opportunities among Omanis are the pillars of society guaranteed by the state”.

But the gender gap for university seats has widened in Oman. It is no secret to anyone that the first university in Oman, the Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), suffers from clear discrimination in terms of competitive rates, as shown in the table below:

For example, in 2009 the engineering department of the SQU rejected 723 women who could have obtained a seat in the College of Engineering based on their grades in the entrance exam, but unfortunately the problem is not in the grades, but rather because they are females in a university that applies a male system. According to the acceptance rates and the strategy used at the university, the chances of admission for men are more at SQU, as males represent 9 out of 10 students in the academic admission test.

The “male quota” is the system which is followed by the SQU in the distribution of percentages and seats, but the problem we have here is that competition is not between the two sexes, but rather all sexes compete with their peers, so males compete with males and females compete with females.

Accordingly, higher percentages are imposed on females than males. The result is that male students get seats that they do not deserve Although there are more females deserving of the university seat and consequently, females students lose their seats even if their rates are high, and despite fulfilling all the admission requirements for the required specialization!

Isn’t this unfair to female students not to be accepted at a similar rate to males only because they are “females” while we know well that both sexes study the same curriculum ?!

Where is justice in that? Why are not equal opportunities given to both sexes, and each of them can apply for the university seat based on his diligence and competence?

While the common sense says that both sexes are required to prove their competence by competing for the academic seat under the same conditions without discrimination.

It is strange what happened about two weeks ago when the admission results appeared, and the girls demanded their right to obtain seats without discrimination and expressed their objection to the system through the hashtag “no discrimination in the allocation of university seats”:

”#لاللتمييزفيالمقاعدالدراسيه“

A large segment of society justified the inequality of these percentages, and they rejected any change in the system with false excuses and traditional arguments and considered it a normal matter. It is a double standard, when the Omani women demanded a political quota (the Shura Council elections), she was demanded to demonstrate her merit and entitlement to win a seat in the shura council (The Omani Parliament).

I think that the main reason behind this is the excessive pampering for males and the expansion of opportunities for them on a plate of gold, even if they do not obtain high grades, they will enter the educational institution at his low rate – compared to the girls – only for being a male.

Excessive pampering produces a burden. When male students are guaranteed the availability of all higher education facilities, the effort that he exerts will decrease, and his academic level will also decrease.

Not to mention the masculine ideas and concepts implanted in the minds of males and society that justify their neglection, and at the same time parents set high expectations for their daughters. Thus, males become more neglected and perform worse than females. Among the flimsy justifications used to justify discrimination is that “If the opportunities are equal, girls will get all the seats , while boys will get none” and that “the males have more obligations” and the list goes on.

A societal problem cannot be solved with a larger problem, the problem must be solved at its roots. If a boy’s life begins to depend on his masculinity and recklessly studying and ensuring a seat, how he will grow up as a matured and a responsible man who is capable to start a family?

Therefore, equal opportunities must be provided for both sexes. This may cause a drop in the number of males entering the university, but in the long run the outcome will be equal and more fair because they are based on their diligence, competence and entitlement to the university seat.

Meanwhile Institutions are required to study this problem and suggest solutions which causes male students to get low results then girls.

Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/boys-are-not-defective/540204/
SQU official account for admission and registration
Hashtag ”#لاللتمييزفيالمقاعدالدراسيه”

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OAHR

Here is the text of the petition in full:

Read full letter:

TDF is a German non-profit women’s organisation based in Berlin, which supports women and girls through individual personal assistance and consolation, international networking, advocacy and public outreach, campaigning and lobbying, and promotion of individual projects. TDF’s core topics are female genital mutilation, forced marriage, honour crimes, women trafficking and prostitution, sexual and domestic violence.

Habiba Al Hinai, the OAHR executive director joined TDF in January 2019 as a change agent. She was and still is a part of the “Let’s CHANGE” project which is under the FGM department of (TDF). This project is co-funded by the European Union in order to overcome female genital mutilation in affected communities in the EU countries.

Al Hinai was nominated by TDF to be one of the speakers in an advocacy meetings in Brussels with members of the EU parliament to say ‘NO’ to Female Genital Mutilation by adopting a new resolution to end this practice in Europe and worldwide.

The Universal Rights Group, it is an independent, human rights research center based in Geneva. Published on March 2019 its report on women’s rights. The regional workshop on ‘lifting religion-based reservations to the core international human rights conventions as a means of strengthening women’s rights at national level, and the role of women’s rights advocacy groups in that regard.’ was convened in Tunisia on 9 and 10 January 2019, with the support of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Tunisia
The executive director of the OAHR participated in this meeting.
ink to the full report

The Internal Security Service(ISS) continued its campaign against human rights as well as bloggers and Internet activists who supported the Palestinian cause in addition to their opposition to Netanyahu’s visit to Oman in late October 2018.

On January 22, 2019, prominent human rights lawyer and writer BasmaAl-Keumypublished an article in Al-Falaq under the title “I write in defense of my right!” In which she showed that she was harassed while doing her purely human rights work in defending people’s rights in their cases, which they assign to plead for them in different courts. Al-Keumy explained that she has been subjected to harassment for many years by the authorities, in contravention of the Omani constitution. “Why should I write this now?” She asked in part of her article. She answered as follows, “I write, because I have the right to defend myself, my full citizenship, my right to practice my profession, and the right to live in my country without harassment or harm, just because I am different.” She concluded with a sentence reflecting her full commitment to her rights work, “This is my country, this is my profession, and I am there to stay.”

On other hand, on 17 January 2019, activist Bader Al-Arimi has been released. He was arrested on 19 December 2018 for his writings on social media networks, which included his defense of the Palestinian cause.Al-Arimi is also unemployed and has criticised authorities for not creating jobs opportunities for citizens who are qualified to work in various fields.

On 30 December 30, 2018, religious leader and activist Obeid bin Hashl Al-Hinai was arrested for supporting the civil and humanitarian rights of the Palestinian people. He was released only on 10 January 2019.

On 10 December 2018 human rights defender and online activist Hatem Al-Maliki was released. He was arrested on 06 December 2018, after being summoned by the Special Division of the Omani Police Command in Sohar State. The Special Division is the operational arm of the ISS.He was arbitrarily detained upon his arrival and held incommunicado without any access to his family or a lawyer. According to the information circulated, Al-Maliki was arrested for posts on social media networks, including his Facebook page and Twitter, criticising Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Muscat in October and rejecting normalisation between Oman and Israel, as well as for his support for the Palestinian cause.

Reports received also confirmed that on 01 January 2019, security forces detained two journalists from Hala FM while covering a gathering protest organized by unemployed citizens the Ministry in front of Ministry for Labour in the capital, Muscat. The same day, authorities arrested a group of unemployed protesters looking for work in the city of Salalah, the largest city in the Governorate of Dhofar. They were all released on the same day.

The Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) and the Omani Association for Human Rights (OAHR) condemn the harassment of human rights defenders and their rejection of the arbitrary practices of the ISS and appeal to the Omani government to put an immediate end to the systematic targeting of activists, including bloggers and Internet activists.

GCHR and OAHR urge authorities in Oman to:

1. Put an end to the harassment of Basma Al-Keumy immediately as its related solely to her long and arduous work in the field of human rights;
2. Stop targeting bloggers and Internet activists and protect press freedom in the country as well as freedom of expression on the Internet;
3. Ensure in all circumstances the ability of human rights defenders and journalists in Oman to carry out their legitimate human rights work without fear of retaliation and without any restrictions, including judicial harassment.

GCHR and OAHR respectfully remind the Omani authorities that the United Nations Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognised Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, adopted by consensus by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1998, recognises the legitimacy of the activities of human rights defenders, their right to freedom of association and to carry out their activities without fear of reprisals. We would particularly draw your attention to Article 6 (b and c): “Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others: (b) As provided for in human rights and other applicable international instruments, freely to publish, impart or disseminate to others views, information and knowledge on all human rights and fundamental freedoms; (c) To study, discuss, form and hold opinions on the observance, both in law and in practice, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms and, through these and other appropriate means, to draw public attention to those matters”, and to Article 12 (1 and 2): “(1) Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to participate in peaceful activities against violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms. (2) The State shall take all necessary measures to ensure the protection by the competent authorities of everyone, individually and in association with others, against any violence, threats, retaliation, de facto or de jure adverse discrimination, pressure or any other arbitrary action as a consequence of his or her legitimate exercise of the rights referred to in the present Declaration.”

• In riot rallies
Article (37): Any person who participates in a public place with a special gathering of at least ten persons for the purpose of riot or disturbance of public security shall be punished by imprisonment from ten days to one year or by a fine not exceeding 50 riyals. If he remains entangled after an order has been issued by a member of the authority to disperse and leave.