Four women shaking the corridors of power

• Last Updated: November 20. 2009 12:27AM UAE / November 19. 2009 8:27PM GMT

KUWAIT CITY // When four women won seats in Kuwait’s 50-member parliament in May, it was an important victory for women’s rights in the Arab world and reversed the trend of Islamist gains in the national assembly.




Even though many Kuwaitis expected that a woman would be elected in this year’s poll – the third since political emancipation for women in 2005 – for many, the magnitude of their success came as a shock. Few predicted that four women would burst onto the political stage of one of the world’s most conservative countries, all while taking seats away from Islamist politicians.

Kuwait’s five constituencies elect 10 MPs each. In the first constituency, Massouma al Mubarak received more votes than any other candidate. In the third constituency, Aseel al Awadhi finished second and Rola Dashti seventh. Salwa al Jassar completed the quartet with a 10th-place finish in the second constituency.

The women rode to power on a wave of public anger with the three previous assemblies’ performances, when arguments between the royal family-dominated government and elected MPs led to early dissolutions of parliament by the emir, which severely undermined economic development. In this year’s election a vote for women became a vote for change.

While they all hold PhDs from universities in the United States, the four women have very different backgrounds. Two are Sunni and two are Shiite, and to the great distress of Islamist MPs, one woman of each confession is uncovered – the other two wear the hijab.

Since the four women were elected six months ago, much of their time has been spent in committee meetings with parliament during its summer recess. But as the national assembly got back to work last month, they spoke to The National about their experiences as the newest members of the Gulf’s oldest democratic institution.

@Body-SubheadNew:Aseel al Awadhi

Aseel al Awadhi received an early lesson in Kuwaiti politics when she sent one of her secretaries to a ministry with a piece of paper complaining on behalf of a constituent. The official laughed at her request.

“Only one?” he asked. His office was piled high with folders from other members of parliament with job applications, complaints and demands for job transfers.

Another MP’s folder alone had 170 papers. The demands – known as “wasta” – are favours MPs carry out for their constituents in return for loyalty at the ballot box. Many people say wasta is just another form of corruption.

“I don’t work this way,” Ms al Awadhi said. She said MPs have a budget for 15 secretaries, and most of them spend their days touring the country’s ministries, demanding favours and making sure they are followed up.

Instead, Ms al Awadhi staffed her team with five “high quality” employees, and paid them more each.

“Sometimes people lose their rights because of wasta – because of these 170. Of course they are going to take the place of someone who deserves to be there,” she said.

Ms al Awadhi is a divorced liberal Sunni with a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas in Austin. At 40, she is the youngest of the four women, but already has a formidable reputation. In the 2008 election, she won more votes than any other female candidate and finished in 11th place in her constituency, just missing out on a seat.

She believes that result woke many Kuwaitis up to the possibility that a woman could win.

Ms al Awadhi has bobbed brown hair and is often pictured wearing colourful, long-sleeved jackets that contrast starkly with the male MPs’ white dishdashas in the chamber. She said her colleagues have been “very friendly” so far, apart from opposition early on when some Islamists boycotted the women’s swearing-in. She said they had to do that “for their supporters”.

Outward hostility has been rare, but there have been exceptions. One MP averts his gaze from Ms al Awadhi when he passes her in the corridors, and another “declared me to be infidel during the election campaign. So, you know, I should be killed,” she said, laughing.

“There’s very few – less than a handful – that really cannot deal with us,” she said.

Ms al Awadhi believes women took seats from the Islamists because Kuwaitis are realising that “there are a lot of ideas that fundamentalists are trying to impose on people that have nothing to do with Islam. It’s their own interpretation of Islam mixed with their own political agenda.”

Despite some of the ideological differences that play out in parliament, she said, inept MPs are a greater problem in the assembly.

“Some MPs are not qualified. Some are in the parliament because they’re just representing tribes or an Islamic sect, and they are not necessarily experts ... we lack expertise. I expected more order, more commitment, from other MPs to committee meetings.”

@Body-SubheadNew:Salwa al Jassar

When Salwa al Jassar beat one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s strongest candidates to take 10th place and a seat in the second district, she sealed the women’s unprecedented success. After the swearing-in ceremony, she checked her e-mail and received a taste of how her life was about to change.

“I got so many e-mails asking me from where I got my dress, what brand name it was. I got dozens,” Mrs al Jassar said. “They told me to keep my hijab the same way and that they liked my dress.”

The female MPs are fashion icons now, she said, “but unfortunately, we don’t get any fashion for free.”

“When I go to a public area like a shopping mall, do some walking or go to a fast-food restaurant with my children, people come and want to take a photo with me, and they introduce their husbands, brothers and children,” Mrs al Jassar said. “Now we are celebrities.”

Mrs al Jassar is a petite Sunni who wears colourful hijabs and speaks English faster than most native speakers can think.

The 51-year-old holds a PhD in education from the University of Pittsburgh and was an associate professor at Kuwait University. She rates the experience of being an MP as “equal to all the other experiences I have had in my life combined”.

She said that when she joined parliament, women and men struggled to communicate and make decisions but “day by day” it is getting easier. “In such a short time, we can’t change something that’s been solid for more than 30 years: the attitude, the atmosphere.”

She said some of the conservatives have “convinced themselves that they are not ready to work” with women, but other Islamists, including the leader of the Islamic Salafi Alliance, Ali al Omair, are “very co-operative and respectable”.

With some of the men, she shares a polite “hello”, and that is it, she said, but with others, “we share ideas, have meetings and visit each other in our offices”.

She believes women bring a new perspective to the parliament, because “the brain of men is completely different than the brain of the women: it’s like plus and minus”.

@Body-SubheadNew:Rola Dashti

Rola Dashti has had a mixed reception from the male MPs. “There are the extremist-radicals who cannot [reconcile], from an ideological point of view, that we are in parliament, and there are Islamists who acknowledge the right of people to choose,” Ms Dashti said.

She said there are only two MPs “who want to portray to society that women haven’t accomplished anything, women have failed in their positions.”

“But this is their agenda, and it doesn’t stop us,” she said.

“The rest of the parliament, they have welcomed the idea [of female MPs]. They’re co-ordinating, working and they respect us very much.

“They respect our background and our experience … from tribalists to liberals,” Ms Dashti said. “It’s a positive welcoming.”

Not all Kuwaitis were happy to see Ms Dashti, an unmarried woman, who does not cover her long brown hair, in the assembly.

An Islamist voter recently went to the constitutional court to try and have her and Ms al Awadhi thrown out of parliament for not wearing the hijab. The court ruled in favour of the women.

Ms Dashti, 45, has a PhD in population economics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Her mother was born in Lebanon and political opponents have used the foreign connection against her in the past.

She said in the 2008 election that the media got into “faking stories” about her saying she was connected to Hizbollah.

She was the first woman to chair an NGO dedicated to promoting economic reform, called the Kuwait Economic Society, a position which she still holds.

Ms Dashti used to work 12 or 13 hours a day, but said parliament’s schedule is “a different world” because the hours are longer and she has less control over what she can do and whom she can see.

But such a high-profile public job has its benefits too. She enjoys being deep in the decision-making process and said people listen to her more.

She said: “Our role is extremely important now, to lead the path of the country to sustainable democratic process so that people can see that there is development with democracy,” and it is not just “bottlenecks and regression”.

Ms Dashti said the women have rejuvenated the assembly with a good work ethic. “People notice our discipline; people notice our attendance in the committees, our preparation. They can see that we are serious.”

@Body-SubheadNew:Massouma al Mubarak

Massouma al Mubarak, 60, is a Shiite who wears the hijab and thin-rimmed glasses, giving her a motherly appearance, but beneath the façade is a tough politician who earned her stripes in the difficult arena of Kuwait’s parliament.

Mrs al Mubarak was one of Kuwait’s first female cabinet members in 2005 and went on to serve in three portfolios.

In her last cabinet job in 2007, she resigned from her post as the minister of health after a hospital fire killed two patients.

This year, her political comeback was spectacular; she took more votes than any other candidate in the first district. She believes that voters were attracted by her experience in government and sympathised with her resignation.

Ms al Mubarak has a PhD in international relations and international law from the University of Denver.

Describing her experience in the parliament so far, she said: “Those who believe in true democracy have treated me with respect, but those who are against women’s involvement in politics ... are definitely not happy. Some of the most conservative MPs look at us like we are haram – because we are women.”

She said that some Islamist MPs have asked the parliament to offer segregated lounges in parliament, and have criticised how the women chat and joke with men. She suspects that more MPs dislike the women in parliament than outwardly admit it.

“If you gave them a sheet of paper to express their thoughts regarding [who dislikes] women in the parliament, without mentioning their names, I’m sure there will be a great number,” she said.

When she ran for deputy speaker, she received just nine votes out of 64. “That tells you the whole story,” she said. “Even the liberals who believe in women are not ready for such a move.”

Ms al Mubarak believes that two parallel schools of thought are emerging in the parliament, one that is rigid and uncompromising and one that is open and flexible.

She said: “It makes the relationship between the parliamentarians a bit difficult, and splits the parliament, on almost every issue, into two groups.”

She had a warning for those MPs who would prefer that women stayed out of the corridors of power. “We are not here as decoration or a cosmetic thing. No, we are very highly educated and we know what we’re doing and we know where we’re headed for. We know that will take time; we are not in a hurry.”



As Mrs al Mubarak finished speaking in her office in the parliament, the other three new female MPs burst in to her room, greeting each other with kisses as they prepared to celebrate.

The previous day, Salwa al Jassar had survived a legal challenge from the candidate who finished behind her in the second constituency, ensuring she would remain for the rest of the term.

In the same court session, the uncovered women had won the right to dress as they please, and two of the women were recently elected to head primary parliamentary committees.

As Rola Dashti perused the buffet that was laid out for the four women and their guests outside Mrs al Jassar’s office, she said, smiling: “This is the day for women.”

jcalderwood@thenational.ae