Manama: A Saudi columnist has waded into controversy after he published a column in which he said that those who did not support women merely wanted to see them as “sacks of coal.”
Writing for Saudi daily Okaz, Abdullah Omar Khayyat said on Sunday that women in the early days of Islam had major roles in everyday life and in venturing alongside men in promoting the religion.
He added that today, there are people who do not want women to have any role and to appear only clad in dark so that she turns into a sack of coal while they had a shining history in the early days of Islam.
These people refuse that women have any public role, he added in his column published on Sunday.
Khayyat triggered waves of full support and harsh criticism, and his detractors took the social media to accuse him of degrading and denigrating Saudi women by comparing them to sacks of coal.
The columnist rejected the accusation he was targeting women in Saudi society, saying that he could never disparage half of the population as claimed by anonymous Twitter accounts.
“I never compared Saudi women to sacks of coal, and this is a blatant lie that cannot be believed by the Saudi society,” he wrote. In fact, I defended women against those who want to eclipse or wipe out their role and put them in frozen moulds. I never said women were sacks of coal, and what I said was they wanted them to look like sacks of coal. The clothes are the black sacks, not the women. I respect women tremendously and I wish that those who attacked me would read the column again so that they may understand my words.”
