Women in Working Life

There is an interesting quote by Sultan Qaboos: “Uneducated women can not raise free children, and neglected women can never properly care for other people. If women are not trained for their task, they can not contribute to the progress of this country,” he stated. This shows that in Oman, women are seen in a completely different light than in most other Arab or other Islamic countries. This is thanks to the Sultan, who has opened the country more and more to the values and the views of the West for the last nearly five decades, but without betraying the identity and beliefs of his country. He simply pointed out that women also play an important role in an Islamic state – and that they can do better if they are treated as partners on an equal footing instead of being looked down on from above.

Women in Oman – more successful than in almost any other Islamic country

The Sultanate on the Gulf of Oman, which is the size of Germany, occupies an exceptional position in the Arab world. In countries such as the United Arab Emirates, for example, the outward-propagated cosmopolitanism applies only to strangers, and women in their own country are still in a difficult state of affairs. In contrast, a lot has changed in Oman in recent decades. There are women who run independent companies, women on the executive boards of small and large companies, and women in various positions in the civil service. Even a ministerial office was already filled by a woman. The progress in Oman encourages the entire Arab world, as it shows that an Islamic state does not always have to be affiliated with extreme gender inequality.