SABRIA S. JAWHAR ARABNEWS

Monday 4 March 2013

.IN THE “hey-this-is-kinda-funny” category of newspaper reporting, the Saudi media published articles recently about Saudi women taking scuba diving lessons in the Red Sea and how they face the usual obstacles to practice their sport.
One reader remarked that there are more important issues facing Saudi women than whether they can scuba dive.

Believe me, Dear Reader, I once agreed that the trivialities of swimming and driving cars pale in comparison to equal rights in domestic courts, obtaining employment and having the freedom not to have money a woman earns stolen by lay-about brothers and sons who have a sense of entitlement.

But that was then and this is now. There are no longer baby steps toward equality, but big, leaping strides. And if a woman wants to scuba dive, play football or take a job as a cashier at Danube, then it’s a meaningful step that shouldn’t be minimized by Saudi society.

According to press reports, Saudi women want designated areas to scuba dive in the Red Sea. The Coast Guard bans female divers who don’t have mahrams with them.

Perhaps equally important is the fact that there are few places that women can practice their sport. Further many women divers can’t find boats to take groups because PADI-certified women divers are so few. It makes such trips cost prohibitive.

There is a fair and equitable way for women to participate in recreational activities in a discreet and Islamic way. The answer is to allow women to form clubs that allow them to build memberships to provide private space for women to practice their sport without the interference of local authorities or busybodies who have nothing better to do than to say “no.”

Since safety for women is a the top concern among the men in the family, private clubs provide a way to ensure diving suits, tanks and masks are safe and appropriate for the sport. There are a number of female scuba diving instructors in Saudi Arabia that can provide instructors without indulging in mixing.

In this case, mixing is not really the issue unless the sharks in the water are male. All-female group outings under the supervision of certified female instructors make sense. It does not contradict our Islamic principals.

read more here:

http://arabnews.com/columns/recreational-outlets-women-more-important-ever