Duncan Mackay witnesses auspicious changes in the status of Qatar’s women
The approach to the Khalifa Stadium on the edges of Doha, Qatar’s capital city, takes you down a long road past date palms, papyruses and cypresses. Creamy buildings, which seem to have been lifted from either Paris boulevards or Cairo squares, rise steeply from the harbour. If you did not know, you would never have guessed the seeds of revolution were being sown here earlier this month.
But above the amplified metallic voice, quavering and ancient, of the muezzin calling from the mosque, you could almost hear the breaths of astonishment when Mikaela Ingberg, of Finland, the 1995 World Championship bronze medallist, launched her javelin high into the jet-black night air to open the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) Grand Prix II meeting.
Ingberg thus became the first woman to be allowed to compete in an international track-and-field meeting in Qatar, the oil- and gas-rich peninsula sticking out from Saudi Arabia. To many here, it represented sport’s version of the Berlin Wall beginning to crumble.
A strict allegiance to the fundamentalist Wahabi Muslim faith and to local custom has, for more than 15 centuries, required that women be largely invisible outside the home. In the Middle East, Qatar still probably ranks behind only Saudi Arabia in the limits it imposes on what women may do or wear. Most marriages are still arranged, with most social contact between unrelated men and women forbidden. Women are not allowed to drive or vote.
They are not allowed to practise sport except in closed, single- sex, covered arenas where they will not be seen. When Qatar staged an international meeting for the first time last year, women competitors were not invited and the only female spectators in the crowd, a small group of British air stewardesses there to see Linford Christie, were stoned by angry local teenagers.
It seemed a strange decision when the IAAF announced three months ago that it was to launch the Year of the Woman Athlete here. It had turned a blind eye to such blatant sexual discrimination 12 months ago, but made it clear that if it were to sanction the event this year women would have to be allowed to compete. Fortunately for Primo Nebiolo, the IAAF president, he had the perfect negotiator in Nawal El Moutawakel.
The Moroccan, the first Arab woman to win an Olympic gold medal when she triumphed in the 400m hurdles in Los Angeles in 1984, is fluent in Arabic, French and English.
She spent four days after last year’s event unsuccessfully trying to meet Qatar’s Emir, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. But a message was passed to one of the emir’s three wives, Sheika Moza bint Nasser al-Misned. The modern-thinking Al-Misned, who has begun to assume a persona of her own, even as the emir’s other two wives remain virtually invisible, set the wheels in motion for the revolutionary move to allow women to compete.
Qatar was among 35 countries, which included Pakistan, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, who entered male-only teams for the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996.
“It is a giant step forward to be talking about these issues in Qatar,” El Moutawakel said. “I hope I am alive to see women being given credit here. Religion is in the heart, not in the way you look and this athletics breakthrough is a momentous occasion. But we must take things gently and understand the culture we are dealing with.”
Officials were determined to balance the modern with tradition. Athletes wearing revealing running outfits and slinky track wear, common currency at the world’s top meets in recent years, were given a dressing down in a balancing act aimed at honouring Islamic elements in the country.
A few whistles greeted Ingberg but they died quickly in the stiflingly warm air when she stood on the end of the runway. Wearing cycling shorts, a tee-shirt and a bandanna to cover her hair, she had clearly made an effort not to inflame hostility. She was rewarded with polite applause after her victory with a throw of 63,26m.
Women competed in half-a-dozen events, the most impressive performance coming in the 100m where Jamaica’s Beverly McDonald won in a personal best of 10,99.
Many Arabs, even as they cheered, will have found their pride at odds with their religion. In public the devout female Muslim should be covered from head to toe. So to watch bare-legged Western athletes may have been a great show, but for the strictly religious it was a guilty pleasure.
It may be a long time before Qatar produces a champion female athlete or even sends one to the Olympics. At a seminar, where a group of 100 female physical education teachers and lecturers were addressed by a group of experts, including El Moutawakel and the Jamaican sprinter Grace Jackson, it was apparent that they were reluctant to trample on taboos.
Qatar reformers have the discipline of Islam to fuel and inspire extraordinary achievement -and are not alone. It may be that the most renowned examples of personal attainment in the modern Islamic world, from Algeria to Ethiopia, are its runners. They are products of their culture’s toughness and intelligence. They have not rejected the arena. They have mastered it.