Saudi scholar finds ancient women’s rights
Reuters, 01-05-2008 When clerics, ministers and businessmen gathered at a forum in Riyadh last month to discuss women in the workplace, there were no women in sight. Typically for Saudi Arabia, the women who took part were seated in a separate room so the men could only hear them. Such oddities are part and parcel of the complex system of social control maintained by clerics of Saudi Arabia’s austere version of Sunni Islamic law, often termed Wahhabism.