When they stepped behind the voting-booth curtain, they had company: a female police officer. In order to vote they had to first prove their identity by lifting their veils.
Voting is a peculiar process in Qatar. Men and women vote separately, for one. This is only the third time Qataris have voted at all since the emir decided to open things up in 1999. Unlike in many of the other Persian Gulf countries, women not only vote here, they run for office. The first woman got elected to municipal government in April; she ran unopposed. Many of those who were voting Tuesday didn’t quite get it. The referendum was a simple yes or no to approve the new constitution. Yes was outlined in green. But several people asked what to do with the ballot, and a few were on their way out the door with them before they were told they needed to drop them in the big box.
Practicing democracy in Qatar is just that: practice. The concept of self-determination is still new in this monarchy. One woman I spoke with, Maryam Khalil Al-Hasawi, didn’t see how the new constitution she was voting on would directly affect her. “This is what the emir wants, and we trust him,” she explained through an Arabic translator. She was wearing the copper-colored facemask that many older women wear. But Nadia Al-Khatir, a young teacher at the school who only covered her head but not her face, was fired up about the vote. “Before, we couldn’t make a group and ask for our rights,” she said.
It’s not exactly veil-burning feminism. The new constitution, after all, provides for the monarchy to pass to “male descendants.” But for a region where women are mostly disenfranchised, the changes going on in Qatar are pretty revolutionary. Soon, at least one woman will run for the newly created Parliament. “We educated women in Qatar, this is our duty to change the rules. And we’re doing very well. We’ve changed so many things,” says Moza Al Maki, who plans to run for national office just as soon as the emir calls elections. “The driving license, for example. I used to drive for four years without a license. But then I got it,” Al Maki says with a playful smile. She only recently started covering her head, but she insists on wearing patterned headscarves rather than the ubiquitous black.
The emir, perhaps prodded by his pro-reform wife (one of three), wants to include women in the new Parliament, or Al-Shura advisory council. Of its 45 members, 30 are elected and 15 appointed by the emir. The idea is to give the people the upper hand, but give the emir an ace. If Al Maki, for example, doesn’t win by popular vote, then the emir might appoint her or another woman. “The third he appoints, he might look for a special expertise. What if no woman is elected?” explains the foreign ministry’s Ambassador Mohamed Jasem Al-Kawari. “In the first elections, you never know who’ll be elected. But in the long run the Parliament will elect the right kind of people.”
Qataris first need to get comfortable with democracy. The new constitution, which easily won approval, tries to blend Islamic tradition with Western liberties. “Qatar is an independent sovereign Arab State,” Article One reads. “Its religion is Islam and Sharia law shall be a main source of it’s legislations.” Clearly, separation of mosque and state is not part of their vision of democracy. But the drafters carefully worded the constitution so that Sharia–the sometimes extreme Islamic law–was “a” main source, not “the” main source.
Instead of creating a “Parliament,” they cleverly called it the Al-Shura advisory council because of its historic meaning. As the emir himself explained in a televised address the day before the vote, “‘Shura’ has always been one of the basic vital factors constituting the nature of Arab and Muslim society.” Some schools of Islamic thought hold that leaders can chose to take the Shura’s advice or not. But the emir, who was schooled in England, disagrees. “Islam has laid Shura down as a mandatory principle of rule and an indispensable basic element of good governance,” he said in his address. In other words, Islam not only accepts democracy, it encourages it. Some argue that you can have democracy without women’s participation (indeed that describes the U.S. until the early 1900s). But Qatari women are unlikely to accept that now that the veil has been lifted.
