Kuwaiti Women Organize

I have often argued that one of the benefits emanating from Bush's freedom imperative has been an increased concern for women's rights in the Islamic world. The evidence continues to mount. AFP yesterday ran a piece about the emerging women's suffrage movement in Kuwait. Excerpts:

Kuwaiti pro-women activists have launched a campaign to collect signatures of citizens backing women’s suffrage....

The petitions declare total support for women’s right to vote and run in parliamentary elections and urge lawmakers to support these rights....

According to [an organizer of the effort], a government-proposed bill granting women full political rights has secured the backing of a large number of lawmakers and “we are only two to three MPs short of an absolute majority.”

The main opposition comes from [a] bloc, comprising 13 MPs, and their tribal allies who are against women’s rights on religious and social grounds.

But the Ministry of Islamic Affairs on Saturday issued a new fatwa authorizing the emir to eventually rule on the controversy over whether to give women political rights.

Emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah favors giving women the vote. In 1999, he issued a decree granting women full political rights but it was narrowly rejected by Parliament the same year.

As an obscure American entertainer once put it..., "the times, they are a'changin'."