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King Hamad named the country's 40-member Consultative Council on Saturday
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MANAMA,
November 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Bahrain's King Hamad
named the country's 40-member Consultative Council on Saturday,
including a Jew and six women.
The
selections for the appointed upper house, or Majlis al-Shura, were
published in a royal decree, but the process has been opposed by
opposition groups who have called several constitutional amendments
undemocratic.
Along
with representatives of the country's Sunni and Shiite Muslim
population, three members of the Al-Khalifa royal family, a
businessman, a banker and a journalist will also have seats in the
chamber.
One
of the members, Ibrahim Dawood Ibrahim Nonoo, a Jew, was also on the
previous council formed in September 2000.
Nonoo,
whose family hails from Iraq but has lived here for about a century,
runs Bahrain Financing, one of the country's most important foreign
currency operations.
A
Christian woman of Iraqi origin, Alice Samaan, was also a member of
the previous council. Her family came to Bahrain in the 19th century,
and she has occupied several important government positions, as well
as worked for a UN office in Manama and local television.
The
five other women named to the new council were university professors
Fakhriya Shaaban Diri and Fawzia Said Abdullah al-Saleh, health
ministry official Nada Abbas Hussein Hafedh, Naima Faisal Jabr
al-Dusari, an official with a research centre, and Widad Mohamed
Hassan al-Fadhel, an education official.
The
decree named outgoing health minister Faisal al-Musawi as the
chamber's president.
The
Consultative Council along with the elected 40-seat parliament form
the Bahraini National Council, which is to hold its opening session in
December, 27 years after the former parliament was abolished for
"obstructing" the government.
Islamists,
mostly Sunnis, grabbed nearly half the seats in the new parliament
elected in two run-offs last month. Independents took 18 seats, while
liberals took three. None of the women candidates were elected.
However,
four opposition groups including the Islamic National Accord
Association, the main Shiite political grouping, boycotted the
elections.
They
were protesting an amendment to the 1973 constitution stipulating that
legislative power be split equally between the elected chamber and the
consultative council.
Sunnis
make up 40 percent of the Sunni-ruled country's 378,000 native
citizens, and Shiites the rest, according to unofficial estimates.
Bahrain's total population stands at around 650,000.
According
to Islam Online Fatwa editing Desk, non-Muslims are allowed to be
members of the Shura council so that they can voice their complaints
in respect to unjust acts performed by the rulers and/or the
misapplication of the Islamic laws.
The
reinstatement of the parliament scrapped just two years after it was
elected was the main demand of the mainly Shiite opposition during
sporadic troubles that flared from 1994 to 1999, the year Hamad
acceded to power on the death of his father.
The
Bahraini ruler has since set the Gulf archipelago on a path of reform,
launched with a 2001 referendum on a national charter.
