As Kuwait cracks down, a battle erupts over women's rights

The Kuwaiti Government has canceled a women’s yoga retreat this month in the latest flashpoint of a long-running culture war over women’s freedoms in the Gulf Arab sheikhdom

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 unravelling 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.

For Kuwaitis, it's an unsettling trend in a country that once prided itself on its progressivism compared to its Gulf Arab neighbors.

In recent years, however, women have made strides across the conservative Arabian Peninsula. In long-insular Saudi Arabia, women have won greater freedoms under de-facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Saudi Arabia even hosted its first open-air yoga festival last month, something Kuwaitis noted with irony on social media.

“The hostile movement against women in Kuwait was always insidious and invisible but now it’s risen to the surface,” said Alanoud Alsharekh, a women’s rights activist who founded Abolish 153, a group that aims to eliminate an article of the country’s penal code that sets out lax punishments for the so-called honour killings of women. “It’s spilled into our personal freedoms."