Where women are left when we talk about sports development in the Middle East.
by Alex Baumhardt
In mid-April, Saudi Arabia’s liberal-leaning newspaper Al-Watan published a satirical article about a hot topic in the country entitled, “Would You Marry a Girl Who Practiced Sports?”
The article was published shortly after Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Education was called upon by the country’s Shoura Council, the consultative assembly to the king, to conduct a study about introducing girls’ physical education (PE) classes in the nation’s public schools. PE was officially permitted for girls in Saudi Arabia’s private schools just last year, to the chagrin of several outspoken conservatives in the country who condemned it as another grade on the slippery slope to irreversible westernization.
What the measure is, in actuality, is an attempt to fight soaring rates of obesity and diabetes in the country and to, at long last, participate in the tidal wave of sports development overcoming the Middle East during the past 10 years.
Obesity rates in the region are slightly higher among women than men. Egypt, with 50 percent of the female population deemed obese, United Arab Emirates (UAE) with 42 percent, and Bahrain and Jordan, both with 37.9 percent, are all among the top 20 countries with dangerous female obesity rates. In Saudi Arabia, 71 percent of women are deemed overweight or obese while 66 percent of men are. Of the top ten countries in the world with the highest rate of diabetes, six are from the Middle East.
In contrast to the region’s health woes, many countries, particularly in the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula, are trying to diversify their economies (or perhaps make their oil economies look less nefarious) by investing in international sporting events and sports academies.
The tiny emirate of Qatar alone hosts several major international sporting events like the Qatar Open Tennis Tournament, Qatar Open Golf Masters and the Qatari International Athletics Championship. In 2006, they hosted the Asian Games, the second largest multi-sport event after the Olympics, and by 2022 they hope to be the first nation in the Middle East to host a FIFA World Cup™.
UAE has hosted the Emirate Dubai Rugby Sevens, the World Football* Club Championships and recently built the Dubai Sports City complex–home to the UAE Ice Hockey Federation and an international cricket academy. Oman has hosted the World Beach Handball Championship, the Asian Beach Games and the Tour of Oman cycling race. In 2004, Bahrain was the first Middle Eastern country to host a Formula 1® race. These sporting events all took place or are taking place in countries that had little notion or care for them just a few decades ago, and it’s notable that most of these events are explicitly for male athletes.
Why women are sidelined
There are a number of reasons that girls and women are still on the periphery of sports participation and development in the Middle East, and it tends to start with parents.
Permission to play is crucial in these countries, especially in Saudi Arabia, where women cannot drive or bike themselves to games and practices, and must often be in the company of family patriarchs outside of the home.
In an interview with Doha News, the current head coach of the Qatar Women’s National Football Team conveyed surprise that two years after the team had been formed, she was still confronting concerned parents who worried about tight athletic clothing, their daughters playing in public, and that the girls on the team would seem less feminine and less desirable.
Other barriers to play include being allowed to wear the hijab while competing (soccer’s international governing body FIFA recently lifted their ban on the wearing of headscarves during league play) and a lack of segregated sports facilities. In much of the Middle East, it is impermissible to have a women’s basketball practice next to a men’s practice. Furthermore, it is typically deemed inappropriate for men to watch women play sports, meaning that women who play outside must play out of sight, and those who wish to play indoors need to find a time and space free of men. Finding a place to play can be stunted by the very layout of a practice area or competition space. Many sports venues in the Middle East lack women’s bathroom and locker room facilities because they were never intended to host women when they were built.
Leveling the field
These impediments and fears seem petty when compared to the benefits sports have on girls and women. Girls who play sports are more likely to do well in school and to stay in school longer, to marry later, and to have higher levels of confidence and self-esteem along with lower levels of depression, according to the New York University Child Study Center. Sports can be a great equalizer, and by allowing women to participate in them, gender equality gaps begin to close. Women who play sports on teams tend to develop strong intrapersonal skills that transcend offices and workspaces.
Where Middle Eastern women are gaining some ground in the sports world is with soccer and basketball. In 2005, decades after organized women’s soccer was lost in Iran to the Iranian Revolution, the women of Iran reformed their national team. In 2006, a Saudi Arabian woman named Lina Al-Maeena created the Jeddah United women’s basketball team by registering it as a company. Jeddah United is a symbol of slow but steady change in Saudi Arabia, where women are working to gain increased rights and access to Saudi society through sports. Today, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine have women’s national soccer teams and even in Saudi Arabia, some women secretly get together to play soccer.
What’s important in the Middle East is that girls and women see other girls and women from the region breaking through traditional stereotypes. Though it’s inspiring for a Qatari girl to see Serena Williams playing tennis in Doha, it’s empowering to see Qatari women from the Qatari national team playing Jordan in an interregional soccer match.
A winning strategy
The combination of unhealthy Western eating habits with traditional values in the Middle East about women engaging in sports is coming to a dangerous head in the region.
To those in Saudi Arabia who believe advancing women’s sports is encouraging unsavory Western ideals, it must be mentioned that Western fast food chains are the most valuable consumer foodservice in Saudi Arabia according to consumer-research company Euromonitor International. There are, arguably, few more irreversibly Westernizing effects on a foreign nation than to make its people obese and hooked on commoditized food.
For parents from the Middle East who are nervous about their daughters participating in sports, it’s worth sharing the expressions of a Qatari father of a female soccer player, interviewed for Doha News, who admitted, “It’s new to us, women playing sports,” but, “parents who have enough education, experience and have seen the world would encourage their children to do sports,” he said.
Given what societies throughout the Middle East stand to gain from including women in sports–and what they stand to lose by keeping women out of them–we have to expect that the question of whether you would marry a girl who practiced sports will shift to soon become, would you marry a girl who didn’t?
* ‘Football’ throughout this article refers to what U.S.-English speakers know as ‘soccer.’
Alex Baumhardt is a freelance journalist with a paper trail from Iceland to Qatar. Her writing has been published in the Reykjavik Grapevine, Alef Magazine, Matador Network and more, and has been recognized by the Missouri Press Association and her grandma. Follow her adventures @AlexBaumhardt.
