Women's rights Dubai style

I've been saving this topic since I saw a story in Wednesday's Khaleej Times about new money borrowing rights for female Emirati citizens and polygamous men. 

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=theuae&xfile=data/theuae/2011/april/theuae_april770.xml

Women Emiratis who are married to foreign nationals can now get access to housing loans meaning they are able to buy their own homes, rather than take their chances in the rental sector like the Sand Warlock and I with the world's most moronic landlord (of which more another day, if I'm feeling a bit ranty).
There are certain parts of Dubai in which only Emirati citizens are permitted to buy homes.  And, as I'm sure you're aware, becoming a citizen is impossible.  Marrying a citizen doesn't entitle you to citizenship and as an Emirati woman who marries a foreign national, your children, yes, you read that your right, your children are not entitled to citizenship.  Residency the children are entitled to, but the many financial and social benefits given to citizens are denied. 

The fact that woman are now allowed to obtain home loans even if they are married to a foreign national is a bit of a step forward. 

However, it's a bit of a case of two steps foward and three steps back in terms of the advancement of women here as at the same time, a decree was announced that men who have more than one wife are entitled to more than one home loan in order to provide equal standard of living for their two, three or four wives.

Whatever your views on polygamy, and I'm assured by guide material here that although it's legal, it is rare, on the surface this seems like a good idea because it allows for the several wives not to all be forced into living in the same house.  They can each have their own home and to an extent, their dignity.

However, the law states that a man who has more than one wife is legally obliged to keep each wife to the same standard.  Ie, there's no question of one wife having a nice house with a big four by four to drive while the other gets left in a dingy flat with a moped.  Polygamy has therefore effectively discouraged, in my relatively ill-informed view, as I would imagine even for the well off Emiratis, it's still relatively hard to buy more than one house, more than one car etc.

This new law has therefore made polygamy easier which in my personal view is not a good thing.  I'm not knocking it for those who are content to practise it and believe in it.  My view of it just happens to be that allowing men to marry more than wife at once and making the ability to do so dependent on a) wealth and b) ability to obtain credit, turns women into a commodity. 

Polygamy is a very tricky subject here.  It must go on as the new decree would have been fairly pointless otherwise but I have yet to see it mentioned in the press.  The National, an Abu Dhabi based paper, published a story on polygamy in Oman highlighting the fact that women there, particularly those with careers and independent means of their own, saw it as a midlife crisis when their husbands took second wives and therefore divorced them.  I can't see anyone describing it in such strong terms here but I can't help but think that there must be women in polygamous marriages here who feel that way.

Everyone else is pontificating, so why can't I?

Here is a bit of fluff I wrote for my chums at the Khaleej Times regarding some do or other that's going on at home:

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=diversions&xfile=data/diversions/2011/april/diversions_april52.xml

With thanks to my brilliant ex-boss Sally Stevens, editor-in-chief at the Reading Chronicle for the idea.  If you are in the Berkshire area, you may have seen a rather similar story in the Midweek, possibly with a picture of me grinning inanely from a sand dune.

I am sitting in my favourite local cafe watching the whole shooting match on two wide screen TVs tuned to different news channels so there is a rather alarming stereo effect.  I had to forgo the Sherlock Holmes pub unfortunately as I need to count my beans a bit more carefully than that at the moment.

Anyway.  Happy Royal Wedding day everyone.  I hope even those of you who are staunch republicans and think it's one massive huge waste of time and money are enjoying the day off.  Life continues as normal here.  Friday is a non-working day for many anyway so you wouldn't really know it was going on apart from the occasional blast of trumpet voluntaries from people's giant flatscreen TVs through open windows.

I can see that the weather at home is just as miserable as it was for Charles and Camilla's wedding but let's face it, they have had a long and lasting union, have they not? Perhaps it's a good omen.

Toodle pip for now.

1001 blog hits

Well, 1,060 at the time of writing, to be precise.

We have no internet at home for various reasons that I won't bore you with so I am logging in from Dubai Mall.  Hopefully, the technician will be around on Sunday to retrain the hamsters and fill the tank up with camel dung to power up the strange goings on that seem to pass for a broadband internet system here.  After that, we will go and pay our bill into a large white egg using used 100dirham notes and it will all be fine again.

Only parts of that previous paragraph are a joke.

Anyway.

Just to say thanks for reading in the past couple of months and please continue to do so and tell your friends to do so if you like what you've read so far.  1,000 hits is a big milestone for me, even if it's not quite the 22,000 hits in the first hour that Facebook got, as I was repeatedly reminded in an infuriatingly oft-repeated clip of The Social Network that they just kept showing on the TV here, but still, it suggests to me that at least a couple of you are interested in my honking chat.  That's my brother's phrase.  I can't really explain precisely what it means, possibly a combination of pretentious, self-regarding and dim.  The sort of chat that stinks due its wankiness, hence "honking".  You get the general idea.

In other news, I have some work on a quarterly magazine which means I might be a bit less prolific on the blog but perhaps also less annoying to you lot toiling away in the UK than me beefing on about my life of leisure in which I have time to take a worryingly keen interest in matters relating to camels. 

The Sand Witch's global news agency

Here is a story I supplied to the Guardian yesterday:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/26/afghan-christians-deported-despite-death-fears?INTCMP=SRCH

They put someone else's byline on it but that's kind of fine by me for various reasons I won't go into.  It was more for philanthropic purposes than cash and other rewards that I did the story anyway. 

I am told that they were indeed on the flight back to their homeland in the early hours of this morning (UK time) but I haven't had that confirmed. Who knows what fate truly awaits them when they land?  I don't doubt there are some who would take the "people will say anything to avoid being deported" line on this but although I've been well and truly turned over in the past on stories, I don't think I was on this occasion.

As a friend of mine who I told about the story said:  "The world is a terrible place."

The Easter Camel

I completely forgot it was Easter Sunday yesterday morning until the husband came home from the night shift with a chocolate camel.  I'm pretty sure there isn't a sneaky camel of children's folklore who hides eggs for the little scamps to find behind desert roses, palm trees and cacti, but nevertheless, it seems appropriately festive.

The fact that I had forgotten it's Easter isn't exactly surprising in a Muslim country.  Easter eggs are on sale in the shops here but you're not bombarded with advertising for them the way you are in the UK.  The newspapers mentioned Easter a bit but as we don't have a TV at the moment, I can't tell you whether the same goes for TV.  Crucially, people don't automatically get the days off here.  Sunday is a working day because the weekend is Friday and Saturday.  I think non-Muslim companies will often give their workers a long weekend so they get Sunday off but I think most people are back to work today unless they've booked it as holiday.  I imagine when Eid comes around, it'll probably be a different story and we won't be able to get away from it.  They also do Christmas in quite a big way I'm led to believe.  The Sand Warlock tells me that in the run up to Christmas, the shops are full of Arabs in traditional dress buying large amounts of gifts with a look on their faces that seems to say: "What?  I just felt like doing a lot of shopping on December 20th.  Christmas? Christwhat?"

You'll be pleased to know this particular camel is made with camel's milk chocolate.  I have tried camel's milk chocolate.  It doesn't taste all that different from cow's milk chocolate, perhaps slightly sweeter.  The real difference seems to be that it's several times more expensive than cow's milk chocolate which can be said for a lot of things in Dubai.    

If God wills it

I probably don't need to tell those of you who have been on holiday to Egypt or any other Arabic speaking country how frequently you will hear the phrase In sa Allah (pronounced Inshallah) which means, God willing or If God Wills it.

It's pretty catching.  I found myself saying it to a Pakistani taxi driver who was more than usually distracted when I got into a cab on the way to an interview one day.  I got in the back and he was yacking away on his mobile phone and drove the first 100metres at five miles per hour.  When he got off the phone, it turned out that his brother, an engineer, had just been sent to Iran for work and he was worried about him. 

"Don't worry, he will be fine," I said, "In sa Allah". 

"Yes, In sa Allah," he agreed. 

Everyone uses the phrase, not just Muslims.  A Government official used it on the phone to me this morning as I was trying to set up an interview.  "I will speak to my boss and In sa Allah, you will be able to come in and speak to them," he said.

In officialdom, here, things tend to happen very, very slowly so I am sometimes tempted to point out, when someone In sa Allah's me that whether my paperwork is processed is not, in fact, down to the will of God, but whether a progressively long procession of bureaucrats do something at a particular time.  I suppose if you're of a religious persuasion you would counter by pointing out that everything is in fact down to the will of God so I may as well chill out and wait for him to do his glorious work in his own time because it's all part of the wonderful mystery.

Unfortunately, being a hack, I'm not really used to waiting for Him to will it. 

We're alright, Abdul

During my daily trawl through the fug, smut and detritus down the back of the newspapers and internet for scurrilous gossip to flog to newspapers back home, I found this article:

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/tourism/holidaymakers-switching-to-the-safety-of-the-uae

If you can't be bothered to read it, which would be fair enough, it's about the unrest in the rest of the Middle East being beneficial to the UAE because all the tourists who would be going to Sharm El Sheikh, Tunisia, Libya (that well known tourist destination) and Syria are coming here instead.  Lovely safe, clean, quiet and calm UAE where you're not going to get shot in the head by rebel fighters.  Put in prison for being drunk in public or having sex outside marriage, yes, but not caught up in the cross fire of Government vs people.

The newspapers here aren't against printing the odd good news story directly fed to them from the Government-backed WAM News Agency as after all, it's illegal to criticise the powers that be here.  I just thought this one was a little bit "yes, people are dying on a daily basis while our region implodes around us, but we're ok because we're a happy little island making a bit more cash from the tourist industy thanks to it.  All the senseless killing after years of repression was well worth it because our hotels are full again."

It makes me wonder if the authorities here are a little nervier about similar events occurring here than they would like to let on.  I'm not going to utter my famous last words again on how an uprising will never happen. I suppose in the eyes of the rulers, it's just worth reminding people here of how good they have it compared with elsewhere in the region.   

You can see how they would be keen to promote anything good that happens, even if it as at the expense of those elsewhere, as after all, for a while there wasn't a day that went by when someone in the world's press wasn't expounding on the collapse of the Dubai dream.  That's got to be bad for a morale of an Emirate even if the pages have been ripped out of the magazines and newspapers by self-censoring distributors before the maid picks them up with the rest of the shopping.