'Worth 100 men': women don colourful robes at guardian-free hajj
With her husband back at home in Tunisia and draped in a national flag, Laila al-Qarni urges all Muslim women to attend Saudi Arabia’s hajj without a male guardian, after the requirement was shelved last year.
The Saudi authorities’ move has brought a whole new dimension to the annual pilgrimage.
“Why do women have to be accompanied by a male anyway? Why?” she said, speaking near the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, in western Saudi Arabia.
