Word: faiz
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Though al-Faiz is well known and admired, her appointment also reveals the limits to the changes under way in Saudi Arabia. Al-Faiz meets with her male colleagues only by videophone, asks her minister for permission to appear on television, declined to be photographed for this story and vented her frustration to the press when what appeared to be an old passport-style photograph of her (without a niqab) appeared on the Internet. Al-Faiz told TIME that she brings no special mandate beyond improving education for girls. "I don't like quick action," she says. "I'll have...
...Faiz's caution is understandable. She's being watched by the whole country. "The pressure is huge, not to make a mistake," says Dr. Hanan al-Ahmady, a friend of al-Faiz, and her successor as head of the women's department at the Institute of Public Administration, a government school for civil servants. "You have to prove you are not giving away your religious principles. You have to prove that participating in public affairs and taking leadership positions doesn't jeopardize Islamic values and Saudi identity...
...Read about Norah al-Faiz in the TIME...
...some ways, the official push for women's rights seems like a training exercise, a kind of campaign to prepare Saudis for something new. "If we want to implement a new idea, first we have to discuss it," says al-Faiz. "It's not right to just make the decision." Discussion as a way of making policy can be seen in the development of the National Family Safety Program, started in 1999 by a small group of professional women concerned about domestic abuse. As a measure of how seriously he takes the subject, Abdullah assigned his daughter, Princess Adelah...
Making Haste Slowly Government reformers defend the pace of change, arguing that it is actually quite rapid given the transformation Saudi society has undergone since oil riches first started to transform a nomadic culture. "Fifty-five years ago there was no education for girls," says al-Faiz. "Fifty years ago people didn't accept the idea of women working. Now everyone wants their girls or wives to work or go through higher education. I don't think those kinds of changes have happened in any country as quickly as here." (See pictures of Saudi women...