Saudi Girls Deserve Sports Heroes, Too
This has been talked about to death in some circles, I know – fortunately this isn’t one of them. As the Beijing Olympics roll on and the Michael Phelpses and Nastia Liukins (or the Cheng Feis and Yang Weis, if you prefer) win medal after medal, it’s almost too easy to forget those left out of the Olympics. No, I’m not talking about the North Korean women’s artistic gymnastics team; although MENA countries on the whole are underrepresented at the Olympics (and, for that matter, aren’t bringing home the proverbial bacon – save for Algeria and Tunisia, oddly enough), we shouldn’t fault them for their performances rather, we should fault only a handful, but for the performances that never happened…those of their female athletes.
A few good women are missing from this year’s competition. Though it’s fewer than ever before, it’s still too many. In 2008, 3 countries lack a single woman competing for their team: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait. Of those three, only one has ever sent a woman to the Olympics (that would be Kuwait, represented in ‘04 by 16-year-old runner Danah Al-Nasrallah). Afghanistan also sent its first female competitor to Athens, while female Omani, Bahraini, and Emirati Olympians are appearing for the first time in Beijing.
While it’s unfortunate for any team to lack female representation, however, Saudi Arabia is the only country which outright bans women from competing. That’s their prerogative, perhaps, but shocking that the IOC, the Olympic governing body which prohibits “any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise” would allow them to compete; that’s the same IOC that barred South Africa from the Olympics in the 1960s during the apartheid era. And South Africa actually offered to send black athletes. It was for their refusal to allow interracial sporting at home that they were barred; Saudi Arabia’s situation is actually much worse, as women aren’t allowed to compete at home or abroad.
What’s worse is the apologists for Saudi Arabia; among them Ray Hanania, who argues:
Newscasters make a point of always saying its team is “all male.” Women are prohibited by Saudi Arabia’s government from participating, but many other nation’s [sic] also have teams that are also only all male.
Many other nations, no. It’s now down to two, in fact – so when will Qatar and Saudi Arabia step up to the plate and join their neighbors? Hijab is clearly not the problem – Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, and Afghanistan all sent hijab-clad athletes this year, and development in athletic clothing for Muslim women is improving all the time.
Little girls in Saudi Arabia (which I will use as an example from now on, given that Qatar’s population equals that of Boston) deserve to have strong heroes too. Girls in Morocco idolize Nawal El Moutawakel the same way young Romanian girls have idolized Nadia Comaneci and Americans Mary Lou Retton. The next generation of young Muslim women might grow up to idolize Bahrain’s Ruqaya al Ghasra (pictured) or Lebanon’s Nibal Yamout.
So until Saudi women are allowed to play sports, and compete in the Olympics, the IOC should hold to its standards and simply ban the country from competition. Full stop.
