Saudi liberals advance agenda with new TV show

By Andrew Hammond

RIYADH (Reuters Life!) - Saudi liberals have added a new television programme to their media arsenal in an ongoing battle against the Muslim kingdom's powerful religious establishment and ingrained social conservatism.

"More Than a Woman" began airing in April on Lebanese channel LBC -- majority-owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal -- with sharp discussions about a litany of restrictions on women in Saudi Arabian society.

Presented by Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Mansour, the show has broken ground in its discussion of the absence of women in Saudi Arabia's unelected parliament, gender segregation encouraging homosexuality and the idea of women entering the judiciary. Judges in Saudi Arabia are in fact religious scholars.

The programme is the latest in several years of efforts in the pan-Arab media to promote a liberal agenda in Saudi Arabia, where clerics of a puritanical school of Islam have free rein to impose their vision on society.

From news channel Al Arabiya to music channel Rotana to LBC -- all owned by prominent Saudis in partnership with Lebanese and Gulf businessmen -- the private media has blitzed Saudi viewers with soft-focus preachers, pop videos, soap operas and women's magazine programmes in an effort to open up.

Saudi state television has taken its own tentative steps in the same direction, employing a raft of women television presenters who show their faces on air, contrary to the stipulations of many leading Saudi religious scholars.

"There is no legal reason why women cannot be in parliament. It's a political question in the hands of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. He could do it tomorrow if he wanted," outspoken historian Hatoun al-Fassi said on the first show.

Clerics, she said, use religion to justify the preservation of conservative customs that prefer women to stay at home -- to the extent that women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive.