40° 24' N , 3° 42' E

In a groundbreaking article (and slideshow), newspaper powerhouse The New York Times, wrote a piece published yesterday on the labor situation in Kuwait, focusing on abuse of domestic female servents. The article also mentions that the US 2010 Department of State report put Kuwait, along with 12 other countries in low ranking for failing to do enough to prevent human trafficking. Furthermore, the article mentions the increased pressure that maids face during Ramadan, when they are expected to work longer hours.

KUWAIT — With nowhere else to go, dozens of Nepalese maids who fled from their employers now sleep on the floor in the lobby of their embassy here, next to the visitors’ chairs.

In the Philippines Embassy, more than 200 women are packed in a sweltering room, where they sleep on their luggage and pass the time singing along to Filipino crooners on television. So many runaways are sheltering in the Indonesian Embassy that some have left a packed basement and taken over a prayer room.

And in the coming weeks, when Ramadan starts, the number of maids seeking protection is expected to grow, perhaps by the hundreds, straining the capacity of the improvised shelters, embassy officials say. With Kuwaiti families staying up into the early hours of the morning, some maids say they cook more, work longer hours and sleep less.

Rosflor Armada, who is staying in the Philippines Embassy, said that last year during Ramadan, she cooked all day for the evening meal and was allowed to sleep only about two hours a night.

“They said, ‘You will work. You will work.’ ” She said that she left after her employers demanded that she wash the windows at 3 a.m.

The existence of the shelters reflects a hard reality here: With few legal protections against employers who choose not to pay servants, who push them too hard, or who abuse them, sometimes there is nothing left to do but run. The laws that do exist tend to err on the side of protecting employers, who often pay more than $2,000 upfront to hire the maids from the agencies that bring the women here.

The French government has refused to grant citizenship to a foreign national on the grounds that he forced his wife to wear the full Islamic veil.

The man, whose current nationality was not given, needed citizenship to settle in the country with his French wife.

But Immigration Minister Eric Besson said this was being refused because he was depriving his wife of the liberty to come and go with her face uncovered.

Last week, a parliamentary committee proposed a partial ban on full veils.

It also recommended that anyone showing visible signs of "radical religious practice" be refused residence permits and citizenship. (link to article here)

'Integration'

In a statement, Mr Besson said he had signed a decree on Tuesday rejecting a man's citizenship application after it emerged that he had ordered his wife to cover herself with a head-to-toe veil.

"It became apparent during the regulation investigation and the prior interview that this person was compelling his wife to wear the all-covering veil, depriving her of the freedom to come and go with her face uncovered, and rejected the principles of secularism and equality between men and women," he said.

Later, the minister stressed that French law required anyone seeking naturalisation to demonstrate their desire for integration.

Mr Besson's decree has now been sent to Prime Minister Francois Fillon for approval.

The interior ministry says only 1,900 women wear full veils in France, home to Europe's biggest Muslim minority.

In 2008, a French court denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman on the grounds that her "radical" practice of Islam was incompatible with French values.

Iranian opposition supporters have launched an online campaign to free a student activist accused of dressing as a woman to try to avoid arrest.

Hundreds of men have posted photos of themselves wearing Islamic headscarves as part of the "Be a man" campaign to show solidarity with Majid Tavakoli.

He was arrested during protests in Tehran on Monday and state media showed images of him in headscarf and robes.

The opposition say the pictures were staged in a bid to discredit him.

They say he was not wearing the headscarf and robes when he was arrested. Iranian state media say Mr Tavakoli was arrested as he sought to leave Tehran's Amir Kabir university "disguised as a woman" after Student Day protests.

He is a leading activist who spent 15 months in jail along with two fellow students after being arrested in 2006 on charges of insulting religion and the country's leadership in student publications, AFP news agency reports.

One US-based website for Iranian expatriates, iranian.com, has posted scores of photos submitted by readers.

"Iranian men are showing their solidarity with Tavakoli by wearing a hijab and posting their photo on the web," reads its appeal to send in photos.

Some of the website's readers argue that the campaign is also a gesture of solidarity with Iranian women, who are obliged by the authorities to wear the hijab in public.

Many of the contributors openly show their faces, in headscarves, while some have all but their eyes covered.

"Life is so short and so many fine, fine men around," one woman reader quipped.

"It is getting harder to be a girl these days."(For article link, click here)

Today the law changed to allow Kuwaiti women to obtain their passports without permission from a husband or male guardian. According to Al-Jazeera English:

Due to my recent (mis)treatment at a service counter at a company that I prefer to remain anonymous, I began to wonder if anyone might know of businesses/workplaces in Kuwait that sponsor gender training workshops to help males and females treat each other as colleagues in the working environment, as well as with how to deal with clients in a more professional manner. Any such example of this kind of training or orientation that anyone knows of?

"Saudi beauty queen Aya Ali Al-Mullah trounced 274 rivals to win a crown, jewelry, cash and a trip to Malaysia, and all without showing her face, Saudi media reported yesterday. With her face and body completely covered by the black head-to-toe abaya mandatory in the conservative Muslim kingdom, 18-year-old Mullah was named "Queen of Beautiful Morals" late on Thursday, newspapers said.

There was none of the swimsuit and evening gown competitions and heavy media coverage of beauty pageants elsewhere when the contest was decided in the eastern city of Safwa. Instead, the winner and the two runner-up princesses had to undergo a three-month test of their dutifulness to their parents and family, and their service to society. This included a battery of personal, cultural, social and psychological tests, Al-Watan reported. It was unclear exactly what Mullah did to pip her rivals in the huge field, but Al-Watan reported that the high school graduate had good grades and hopes to go into medicine.

She raked in a 5,000-riyal (1,333-dollar) prize, a pearl necklace, diamond watch, diamond necklace, and a free ticket to Malaysia with her win. The 20-year-old first runner-up, one of triplets, had already won an education ministry-sponsored "I love you, my country" competition. The second runner-up, a high school student aged 15, was cited for taking care of her home and family during the week because her mother works far from home and can only return on weekends.

Beauty contests focused on physical beauty are non-existent in segregated Saudi Arabia, where women cannot mix with unrelated men, and must appear in public completely covered-even in photographs. Miss Moral Beauty pageant organiser Khadra Al-Mubarak kept the focus on inner beauty, as defined by Islamic standards of Saudi Arabia. "The real winner in this competition is the society. The winners represent the culture of the society and its high Islamic morals," Mubarak said, according to Al-Watan." (for full link click here)

The continuing problem of femicide in Juarez has been a cause dear to my heart for quite some time. I continue to be positively impressed with Al Jazeera's coverage and scope of topics, often times about victims that other media channels just do not talk about. Each year, the tally mark of victims keeps rising, and yet there is silence on behalf of Mexican authorities.

The Al Watan Daily published another leg of their exploratory journey of the niqab. This time, expats were interviewed to get their opinion on their initial impressions/aprehensions of seeing women wear the niqab for the first time in Kuwait. Although most of the responses are common to many foreigners living in Kuwait, some other perspectives were excluded in this talk. There are three that stick out in my head:

This proves there is a market for just about everything. From The Telegraph. On a related note, Sarkozy´s comments about the burka last week stirred quite a bit of controversy. France and the United States at this point seem to be pulling at opposite ends of the abaya in their efforts to reach out to Muslim cultures.

Sarkozy was quoted at Versailles as stating that the burqa would not be welcome in France and that the clothing converts women into prisoners behind a screen-a subservient condition that is incompatible with France´s values of equality of the sexes. Unfortunately, the truth behind these statements is that religious freedom of expression seems to be at dogmatic odds with France´s historical precondition of cultural assimulation for immigrants. In France, Muslim acceptance is strongly linked with the immigration debate and has philosophically backed France against the wall.

While France is stuck trying to draw a logical flowchart between is founding principles of ¨liberté, égalité, fraternité¨ and policies dealing with the veil, US President Obama took a turn in a different PR direction in his Cairo Speech when he stated that he would not interfere with a woman´s right to wear the veil in the United States. The United States, although based on some of the same secular principles as the France, has never hidden its light embrace of faith in the public sphere, feeling less internal conflict than its transatlantic neighbor-albeit normally reserved for the exercise of Christianity. However, with Obama´s speech, he ensured that Islam would and should receive similiar treatment.

Perhaps the most fascinating detail in these two dramatic policy statements/outbursts by these traditional Western ¨frenemies¨ is the CHOICE of garment for Muslim women that was evoked in said presidents´ speeches. While Sarkozy evoked the burqa (the most extreme level of conservatism in Muslim covered dress for women), Obama used the hijaab (with a pronunciation glib) as his frame of reference for a Muslim woman´s right to exercise her religion through her dress. A chance that the choice of images they summon in clothing might be symbolic of their insecurities and respective levels of threat? Perhaps. In any case, abaya blinging out is certainly keeping French designers happy and in business in the meantime.

¨A horsewoman in a flowing, made-to-measure Islamic gown atop a snorting steed opened the fashion show on Thursday at the George V Hotel in Paris.

Abayas are the body-covering black robes some Muslim women don over their clothing in public, usually accompanied by a head scarf or niqab, the face veil that covers all but the eyes.

Designers who tried their hand at making over the abaya, which is required in Saudi Arabia, included Christian Dior's artistic director John Galliano, French luxury labels Nina Ricci and Jean Claude Jitrois and Italian houses Blumarine and Alberta Feretti.

The show began with a bang, as the carrot-topped cavaliere - decked out in a Galliano-designed abaya exploding with firework of coloured sequins and dangling fringe - rode her mount into the hotel's subterranean salon.

Twenty models followed on foot, wearing abayas heavy with rhinestones or airy in gauzy fabrics.

"I realised that most of the Saudi clients are wearing designer brands, but they're covered by a black abaya," said Dania Tarhini, the show's organiser and a general manager of Saks Fifth Avenue in Saudi Arabia. "It is an obligation to wear the abaya there, but let them feel good about it."

The timing of the Paris show was propitious: four days earlier, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, struck a nerve in the Muslim world by declaring that full-body veils such as the burka are "not welcome" in France, saying they make women prisoners. A top Muslim group in Britain called Mr Sarkozy "patronising and offensive." Lebanon's most influential Shia cleric called on Mr Sarkozy to reconsider his comments....¨ (click here for full article)

"Women won four seats in the Kuwaiti parliamentary elections over the weekend, a historic first and one of several electoral surprises that appeared to reflect a deep popular frustration with the political deadlock in the oil-rich gulf state of Kuwait.

Liberal Kuwaitis celebrated the landmark with fireworks and parties after the elections on Saturday. Women gained the right to vote and run for office in 2005, but none had been elected until now. Many conservatives resisted the idea, and in recent weeks Islamists urged voters not to elect women to the 50-seat assembly." (for full link, click here)

KUWAIT: Academics agreed that the relative drop in performance of the former all-male parliament was likely to boost the chances of female candidates getting elected, found a study conducted by KUNA.

"Kuwait University's political science professor Dr. Abdulredha Asiri told KUNA that he expects many more males will be voting for women in this election round, and their choices will likely be more rational and realistic than before.

He said, however, that before focusing on the performance of men, one must admit that women contributed to their gender's failure to reach the parliament because many favored male candidates over females.

Asiri noted that the matriarchal mentality which claims that women are
incapable of representing the nation had driven many women to exert greater efforts to win a parliamentary seat and defend the basic rights of women, who constitute more than half of all voters.

Moreover, he explained that although caring for the home and children were important roles played by many women, political activity is also essential and women need to be included in deciding the country's fate..." (click here for full article)