Kuwait cancels women’s yoga retreat, calling it ‘an assault on Islam’

“When an instructor in Kuwait this month advertised a desert wellness yoga retreat, conservatives declared it an assault on Islam.” It is more accurate to say that the yoga incident reignited the battle over women’s rights in Kuwait.

Honor murder and violence against women in the name of Islam is commonplace in Kuwait.

Last April, Sheikha al-Ajmi, who was “a parliamentary officer guarding the grand, luxurious halls designed for a constitutional monarchy,” was brutally stabbed to death by her 17-year-old brother because he “did not approve of her donning an officer’s suit capped off with a beret decorated with Kuwait’s seal in its center.” According to the Sharia, women must be covered (Quran 24:31, 33:59) and must remain under the guardianship of men (Quran 4:34).

“For Kuwaitis, it’s an unsettling trend in a country that once prided itself on its progressivism compared to its Gulf Arab neighbors.” Kuwait is not the only “moderate” country that has taken a Sharia turn. So have Malaysia and Indonesia, while Saudi Arabia continues to arbitrarily detain and jail its female dissidents, despite Saudi Arabia hosting “its first open-air yoga festival last month, something Kuwaitis noted with irony on social media.”

“As Kuwait cracks down, a battle erupts over women’s rights,” Associated Press, February 21, 2022:

It all started over yoga.

When an instructor in Kuwait this month advertised a desert wellness yoga retreat, conservatives declared it an assault on Islam. Lawmakers and clerics thundered about the “danger” and depravity of women doing the lotus position and downward dog in public, ultimately persuading authorities to ban the trip.

The yoga ruckus represented just the latest flashpoint in a long-running culture war over women’s behavior in the sheikhdom, where tribes and Islamists wield growing power over a divided society. Increasingly, conservative politicians push back against a burgeoning feminist movement and what they see as an unraveling of Kuwait’s traditional values amid deep governmental dysfunction on major issues.

“Our state is backsliding and regressing at a rate that we haven’t seen before,” feminist activist Najeeba Hayat recently told The Associated Press from the grassy sit-in area outside Kuwait’s parliament. Women were pouring into the park along the palm-studded strand, chanting into the chilly night air for freedoms they say authorities have steadily stifled….

Hamdan al-Azmi, a conservative Islamist, has led the tirade against yoga, accusing outsiders of trampling on Arab heritage and bemoaning the aerobic exercise as a cultural travesty.

“If defending the daughters of Kuwait is backward, I am honored to be called it,” he said….