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The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has urged the Afghanistan government to lift its ban on women writing university entrance examinations.
This latest decree further tightens the sweeping restrictions on girls’ and women’s access to education and public work, the Saudi Press Agency reported the OIC as saying on Monday.
The ban comes shortly after the OIC executive committee convened on Jan. 11 an extraordinary meeting on the “recent developments and the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan.”
The final communique of the meeting called on the Afghan authorities to “strive toward reopening schools and universities for girls and enable them to enroll in all levels of education and all specializations required by the Afghan people.”
The OIC urged the Afghan government to reconsider this and other earlier decisions, which it said would have far-reaching social and economic ramifications.
Last month, the OIC also voiced its concern over the threat to women’s rights in Afghanistan following a decision by the Taliban leadership to ban women from jobs in national and international nongovernment organizations.
In an order issued on Dec. 24, 2022, the Ministry of Economy in Kabul ordered all national and international NGOs to suspend the jobs of female employees until further notice.
The decision comes hard on the heels of the ban a few days earlier barring Afghan women and girls from studying at university.
OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha said that this move reflects a willful policy by the de facto leadership to further limit Afghan women’s rights.
He said that this “perplexing decision” would not only deprive Afghan women of a source of income for themselves and their families, but also seriously affect humanitarian and relief operations in Afghanistan.
Taha also denounced the ban on women studying at university, saying that “it will seriously dent the credibility of the government in place, just as it will deny Afghan girls and women their fundamental rights to education, employment and social justice.”
LONDON: The Saudi Falcons Aerobatic Team have arrived in the UK to participate in the Royal International Air Tattoo, one of the world’s largest airshows, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Saturday. The event runs from July 14 to 16 at the RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
The Falcons — the Royal Saudi Air Force’s official demonstration team — will perform at the event, flying Airbus 330 MRTTs, BAE Systems Hawks, and Lockheed C-130H Hercules.
The tattoo, which was first staged in 1985, will include hundreds of modern military aircraft alongside classic aircraft from all corners of the globe.
This year’s event is being held under the theme “Skytanker23” and will focus on the vital role of air-to-air refueling in modern military aviation.
“We aim to display the history of air-to-air refueling from its humble beginnings in 1923, evolving through the last century to the modern aircraft which we see in service around the world today,” the RIAT website states.
RIYADH: The Saudi minister of commerce and chairman at the General Authority for Foreign Trade chaired in Riyadh this week a preparation meeting ahead of upcoming Free Trade Agreement talks between Gulf States and the UK, Saudi Press Agency reported.
The meeting, headed up by Majid bin Abdullah Al-Qasabi, aims to prepare for the fourth round of free trade agreement negotiations between Gulf Cooperation Council countries and the UK taking place from July 17-28.
The fourth round will be held in two sessions; remote as well as in-person meetings in London.
During the meeting, deputy governor of the Commission for International Organizations and Agreements, Farid bin Saeed Al-Asali, reviewed the progress of the negotiations.
He outlined the terms of the agreement with the heads of the negotiating technical teams in addition to discussing topics related to commodities, rules of origin, investment, and services, electronic commerce, and general texts and provisions, the SPA report said.
The Saudi negotiating team is working to ensure their compatibility with the Kingdom’s commercial goals and policies, to participate in trade negotiations to include its negotiating positions and coordinate with countries with similar orientations in international trade, the report added.
LONDON: It takes courage and vision to make contemporary additions to precious heritage buildings in a bid to grant them a new lease of life, but the results are almost always successful and dramatic.
London, for example, has the Great Court of the British Museum, the striking turn-of-the-millennium transformation of the 19th-century building by renowned architect Sir Norman Foster, which when completed in 1999 created a breathtaking enclosed space uniting the two wings of the building under a gigantic roof of glass and steel.
In Paris, architect Ieoh Ming Pei’s imposing glass pyramid in the main courtyard of the Louvre was described as “sacrilegious” when the design, sheltering a vast new underground entrance lobby, was proposed in 1984 as a solution to the museum’s inability to handle the ever-increasing number of visitors drawn to the city’s number-one attraction.
Initially, as The New York Times reported in 1985, the design was described variously as “an architectural joke,” “an eyesore,” “an anachronistic intrusion of Egyptian death symbolism in the middle of Paris” and “a megalomaniacal folly.”
Today, however, the Louvre would not be the Louvre without its pyramid, and its attendant three smaller siblings, beloved of Parisians and photographed by tourists almost as much as the museum’s star attraction, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
Less well known globally, but equally striking, is the ancient-and-modern blend that is Moritzburg Castle in Halle, near Leipzig, Germany. In 2008 the crumbling remnants of the 15th-century building, in neglected near-ruin for centuries, were not restored, but recruited as component parts of the thoroughly contemporary modern art museum that appeared to grow up organically out of the remains.
“By this means,” as the Kulturstiftung Sachsen-Anhalt cultural foundation said, “the palace and its colorful history have successfully been artistically brought into the present . . . Moritzburg Castle’s present architectural appearance thus also stands for the museum’s new beginnings at the start of the 21st century.”
Now the same might be said of a bold new plan to build a luxury boutique hotel within the precincts of the Saudi UNESCO World Heritage site of Hegra at AlUla.
The Chedi Hegra, due to open by the end of this year, is being constructed not as a standalone addition to one of the most dramatic landscapes Saudi Arabia has to offer, but by making imaginative use of a number of old buildings, including two outstanding pieces of architecture steeped in history — the Madaen Saleh railway station, a stop on the historic Hejaz railway that ran from Damascus to Madinah, and the adjacent Ottoman fort, one of a series built in the 18th century to protect pilgrims traveling to Makkah.
The history of this region is as rich as it is long. The Hegra archaeological area, which in 2008 became the first property in Saudi Arabia to be inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, is the largest conserved site of the Nabataean civilization south of Petra in Jordan.
At its heart is a stunning necropolis of 111 monumental tombs, most with decorated facades, carved out of the surrounding sandstone rocks between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century AD.
Earlier civilizations left their mark here too. Located in a valley settled from remote antiquity thanks to the presence of ample subterranean water, in this location before the rise of the Nabataeans ruled the sheikdom of Dadan, and then the Kingdom of Lihyan, both of which left traces of their passing in the rocks and the sand.
Ancient Hegra, as the UNESCO nomination document attests, was “at the crossroad of international trade and of different cultures and civilizations, and played a key role in the exchange of goods and cultural traditions between Arabia and the Mediterranean world, becoming a wealthy and important halt for the caravans crossing the Arabian Peninsula carrying incense and spices from Yemen and India.”
And more recent history, no less fascinating, can be found within the UNESCO site, including the path of one of the three great Hajj pilgrimage routes, all of which are on Saudi Arabia’s UNESCO Tentative List as potential future World Heritage Sites.
Alongside the Darb Zubaydah, which linked the Iraqi city of Kufa to Makkah, and the Egyptian Hajj road, from Haqel on the Gulf of Aqaba, runs the Syrian Hajj road from Damascus, which passed through AlUla on its way south to Makkah.
• The Hegra archaeological area is the largest conserved site of the Nabataean civilization south of Petra in Jordan.
• In 2008 the area became the first property in Saudi Arabia to be inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
• The area contains a necropolis of 111 tombs carved out of sandstone rocks between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century AD.
In addition to its Islamic heritage, this is a road that was traveled for centuries by traders and Bedouin, many of whom left their marks in ancient rock carvings along the route.
The square, thick-walled Hegra fortress, which dates from 1744 to 1757 and has an ancient well in its courtyard, was one of the many forts built to protect the pilgrims’ routes to Makkah.
It was partially renovated in 1985, and not for the first time — it is thought that it was previously restored in the late Ottoman period, probably when the railway station was built, in about 1906.
The historic Hejaz railway, which ran 1,300 km from Damascus to Madinah, was built by the Ottoman Empire before World War I and followed the course of the old Syrian pilgrimage caravan route.
The 700 km section of the railway that ran through what is now Saudi Arabia is also on UNESCO’s Tentative List as a potential World Heritage site of universal importance.
One of the great engineering achievements of its day — and all the more significant historically because its construction was funded by donations from Islamic communities around the world — the railway reduced the journey time for pilgrims to Makkah from about six weeks to just a few days.
The railway was also used to carry Ottoman forces south to maintain Turkish control over the Hejaz, but after being repeatedly attacked and disabled during World War I by T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) and the forces of the Arab Revolt, it fell into disuse, never to be restored.
Today, traces of the railway can still be seen all along its route — tracks, half-buried in sand, toppled engines lying where they fell after being blown up by mines more than a century ago, and more than 2,000 bridges and other structures along its total length.
Now, both the railway station and the Ottoman fort are to find a new lease of life as component parts of the new hotel, as part of the broader determination in a Saudi Arabia focused on diversifying away from dependence on fossil fuels to attract visitors by making the most of its many heritage assets.
This is, of course, not the first time that ancient and modern have been brought together as Saudi Arabia pursues its ambitious plans to develop the country’s potential as a hub for cultural tourism.
Until now, perhaps the most striking example of this determination not to treat heritage assets as museum pieces, frozen in time, but to breathe new life into them as key attractions is the preservation of Diriyah, birthplace of the Kingdom, as the jewel at the heart of the architecturally sympatico Diriyah Gate development just west of Riyadh.
But the plan for Hegra, executed audaciously and confidently within the bounds of a World Heritage site, sets a new standard for bold reimagination of heritage assets.
And this is about far more than merely the creation of yet another luxury hotel. The Chedi Hegra, the first hotel planned for the World Heritage site, is part of the wider mission of the Royal Commission for AlUla, working with local and international experts in archaeology, heritage conservation and preservation, architecture and master planning “to deliver an environmentally and historically sensitive transformation of AlUla.”
RCU is building the hotel directly into several existing structures, including the railway station and Hegra Fort, with existing structural and exterior walls, some of which are of historic mud-brick construction, being preserved and integrated with the modern architecture.
The vast majority of the UNESCO World Heritage site, says RCU, “will remain untouched by construction and carefully preserved by RCU to maintain the integrity of Hegra’s incredible human and natural heritage.”
The Chedi Hegra, says John Northen, the RCU’s vice president of hotels and resorts, “embodies the fulfilment of our Journey Through Time master plan, with its deep respect for heritage, sustainable design features, and an authentic luxury experience that celebrates what makes AlUla a special destination for travelers seeking both comfort and adventure.”
READ MORE: The Journey Through Time: A master plan for preserving and sustainably developing Saudi Arabia’s ancient AlUla
Equally important, with the relatively modest but pioneering Chedi Hegra — the construction of which will use local materials, businesses and labor, and when up and running is expected to create at least 120 jobs — the RCU is demonstrating its determination to work hand in hand with the local community and to “invest in education and learning for AlUla’s next generation and create training and employment opportunities for its people.”
In AlUla, thanks to a bold and imaginative blending of the old and the new, Saudi Arabia is demonstrating how its past can play an increasingly important role in its future.
RIYADH: Months ago, Yasmine Idriss saw herself in a dream, surrounded by cascading waterfalls, lush greenery, and the high peaks of mountain ranges. Although it was only a vague vision, she knew it was Iceland.
On Tuesday, Idriss began her attempt to cycle around Iceland’s Ring Road or Route 1, a nearly 1,400 km road that goes around the country, a popular route for tourists who want to explore.
It is a journey of a lifetime and should she complete it, she would become the first Arab and Saudi woman to do so.
She told Arab News: “If I had no obstacles in my way, what would I do? This is what came up. I wanted to take time to be on a real adventure — a difficult one. One that would push me to my limits and force me to grow.”
As a self-supported explorer, she is cycling with around 32 kg of camping gear and equipment, water, and other essentials for the trip.
Idriss plans on using camp grounds for accommodation and will stop at hotels along the way to freshen up.
• Idriss on Thursday began her attempt to cycle around Iceland’s Ring Road or Route 1, a nearly 1,400 km road that goes around the country, a popular route for tourists who want to explore.
• It is a journey of a lifetime and should she complete it, she would become the first Arab and Saudi woman to do so. As a self-supported explorer, she is cycling with around 32 kg of camping gear and equipment, water, and other essentials for the trip.
For the next three weeks, including four rest days, she will be cycling an average of 80 km daily.
However, plans can easily change when facing the elements: “The thing with Iceland is, it’a open. It’s all (mostly) flat, there are no obstacles and there are no trees — which is why it’s so windy, because there’s nothing to stop the wind.
“What people tell you about these things is that you’re never really ready. You can try to simulate the experience as much as you want. But the real deal is always going to be tougher, and there’s nothing I can do to simulate the wind,” she said.
Idriss, who is sharing updates from the journey on her Instagram account @yasidriss, wrote in the first post that she is on the road with peak winds of 24-48 km/h.
As a novice biker, the Nordic landscape serves as the perfect doorway for cross-country exploration. “It’s such a raw country … I’m excited to just be at the mercy of the elements, in a way, as a primitive, primal way of being and exploring a country,” she added.
Idriss dived into the newness of it all with determination. She spent the first half of the year preparing for the adventure with training sessions with a cycling coach four times a week and strength training three times a week.
The training gave her new biking skills like clipping in, riding one handed, and swiftly mounting on and off.
Idriss noted that these are things that someone who grew up riding bicycles could do in their sleep, but she had to take the time to learn.
While new to the pedals, Idriss has previously trekked across Spain, parts of Europe, and Southeast Asia. She described feeling a sense of euphoria when the fatigue would set in after a long day and she would have no choice but to rest for the night.
Recalling that experience, she said: “That’s when something switches. Whether it’s our survival instinct, or something spiritual … You feel something that I can’t really name that takes over. That’s the prize that you win for putting yourself through this kind of stuff.”
She seems to hold a deep admiration for the opportunities that lie in going on adventures, testing the body’s strength, and being close to nature.
“There is something to gain from discomfort, and it is growth. It’s how we’ve survived for millions of years as human beings. It’s how we grow and expand our hearts and our minds. That’s really what I’m after.”
There have been a number of Saudi women who have taken up challenging endeavors in nature. In 2019, Mona Shahab climbed Mount Everest and used the ascent to raise money for underprivileged children in Egypt. In 2016, Mariam Saleh Binladen crossed the English Channel, as part of a series of ultimate endurance challenges to raise awareness of the plight of Syrian orphan children.
“It feels like a Saudi woman today has no obstacles in front of her. If you think about everything from government and businesses to the service industry, women are at the forefront everywhere and I think there’s never been a better time for the Arab woman to shine,” she noted.
Following on the path of the pursuit of one’s own dreams, Idriss’s Nordic Ring Road adventure is to inspired others to pursue their personal goals. It’s like the self-care airplane analogy states: you must put on your own oxygen mask before you assist others.
“I think I purposely am doing this without a cause to encourage people to do things for themselves … I’m just excited to see what’s waiting for me there. I know I’m supposed to learn something I’m supposed to grow in a certain way that I’ll only find out after the trip.”
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Minister of Commerce and CEO of the National Competitiveness Center, Iman bint Habas Al-Mutairi, has highlighted Saudi Arabia’s efforts in empowering women and promoting their participation in the country’s economic development.
Al-Mutairi’s comments came during an “Equal and inclusive representation of women in decision-making systems” event, which was organized by the permanent mission of Saudi Arabia to the UN and international organizations in Geneva, in partnership with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
The event was held on the sidelines of the 53rd session of the UN Human Rights Council, and was jointly sponsored by the permanent missions of Denmark and Nigeria to the UN, the Saudi Press Agency reported on Saturday.
Addressing ambassadors and representatives of permanent missions in Geneva and the UN organizations, Al-Mutairi said Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 has framed the economic transformation process.
The vision, adopted by the Kingdom’s government in accordance with the directives of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, prioritizes the enhancement of women’s participation in various fields at all levels across the Kingdom, she added.
Nicole Emeline, member of CEDAW; Tine Morch Smith, permanent representative of Norway to the UN in Geneva; Eghobamien-Mshelia Esther, vice chair of CEDAW; and UN Women representative Christine Arab participated in the panel session, which was moderated by Lama Ghazzawi, a member of the Saudi Human Rights Commission.
Al-Mutairi said that Saudi women play a significant role in the country’s transformation course and that their participation in development is one of the goals of Saudi Vision 2030 which aims to promote sustainable economic growth.
She added that the Kingdom has established a number of initiatives to support women’s policies, which have contributed to Saudi women holding senior positions such as ministers and ambassadors and members of the Shoura Council.
She said that in 2022, women held 41 percent of senior and mid-level jobs in the business sector, while more than 9,000 Saudi women leaders were registered in Qiyadiyat, the national platform containing a database of Saudi women leaders.
Al-Mutairi said that the Kingdom is working to increase the success rate already achieved and is continuing to address challenges with the aim of supporting women in the business environment.
Initiatives include equal wages, protection measures, and the provision of childcare services, as well as the launch of the Wusool program, which covers 80 percent of transportation costs of working women.
Al-Mutairi had previously met with Emeline in the presence of Abdulmohsen Majed bin Khothaila, the permanent representative of Saudi Arabia to the UN Office in Geneva.
The meeting reviewed the prospects for cooperation between the Kingdom and the CEDAW committee, and emphasized the importance of effective communication between the two parties.
In addition, it discussed the most prominent developments and reforms achieved by human rights legislation in the Kingdom, as well as the initiatives of Saudi Vision 2030 related to enhancing women’s participation in development.