Two of Saudi Arabia's leading activists for women's rights were recently sentenced to 10 months in prison — after which they will have their passports withdrawn for two years — for trying to take food to a battered spouse who had been locked in her home with her three young children without provisions. This vindictive, trumped-up case is a symptom of the kingdom's regression on human rights. Several monarchies in the Persian Gulf have reacted to the Arab Spring by tightening their grip.
In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, perhaps under the impetus of the shock of that event, Saudi Arabia experienced small but perceptible measures of liberalization. Universities allowed greater freedom of scholarship. One of the kingdom's most outspoken liberals and feminists, Wajeha al-Huwaider, was invited to write a regular column in al-Watan, a leading newspaper. In 2005, the year the relatively forward-looking King Abdullah ascended the throne, Saudi Arabia's score on the Freedom House scale of freedom — on which 1 means fully free — improved from a worst-possible 7 to 6.5.
It took a little more than a year before Huwaider proved too iconoclastic for al- Watan. Eventually she was barred from all Saudi publications and, instead, found a platform on a few pan-Arab websites that are hubs of free thought. She also found other ways to push the boundaries constraining women in the kingdom. She staged a one-woman march along the causeway from Bahrain, waving a sign that read "Give women their rights." She filed her candidacy for the presidency of FIFA, the world soccer organization, to protest the refusal by Saudi schools to allow sports for girls and the absence of female athletes on the Saudi Olympic team. (In 2012, two women made the team.)
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