In a moment that seems out of a Fellini film, Saudi Arabia held a major conference on women in the workplace. The conference attended by religious, government, and business leaders would have been viewed as something of a breakthrough on the issue except for the one group excluded: women. Women were forced to sit in a separate room where they could not be seen out of respect for Wahhabi rules.

Scholar Hatoon al-Fassi has published a study entitled Women in the Pre-Islamic Arabia that makes the shocking finding that women in biblical times enjoyed more rights than today under the modern Saudi state.

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