sports<\/a>. However, that all began to change during the 400-meter hurdles at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Muslim Olympians Games.\u00a0 It was then that, as she entered the home stretch, a curly-haired runner quickly glanced left and right. \u00a0She wondered to herself where the other runners were. Then, with a beaming smile soon replaced by her look of disbelief, she realizes what\u2019s happened. She has beaten the competition.<\/p>\nIn 1984, Nawal El-Moutawakel, was the only female athlete on Morocco\u2019s team at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that year. Still, it took her only 54.61 seconds to win the gold medal women\u2019s 400-meter hurdles event. With tears in her eyes, the 22-year-old Casablanca ran a lap of honor, waving her country\u2019s flag. And who could blame the tears? After all, she was the first Arab woman to win a gold medal at the Olympics. \u00a0Little did she know that she would also inspire future female Muslim Olympians to achieve even further sports milestones.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Other Olympian Arab Women Athletes<\/h2>\n
One example of an Arab Muslim female athlete who followed in El-Moutawakel\u2019s footsteps is Algerian Hassiba Boulmerka. At the 1992 Olympic Games, she became the first Arab\/African woman to win gold in the women\u2019s 1,500m event. It was also Algeria\u2019s first-ever Olympic gold medal. However, this win came at great costs. Hard-lined Islamist condemned both how she dressed and competed in shorts and a tank top and how she carried herself. This, in turn, only served to open doors to another debate on Muslim female athletes and the hijab.\u00a0 Nevertheless, for others, Boulmerka became a symbol of a new Arab woman and a feminist hero.<\/p>\n
Along with El Moutawakel and Boulmerka, there\u2019ve been others in the ever-growing line of Arab women who\u2019ve won Olympic medals. Of late, fourteen women from\u00a0Muslim-majority countries\u00a0won medals at the\u00a02016 Summer Olympics in a wide range of sports. That\u2019s the most Arab females who\u2019ve took part in and won medals in the Olympics 126-year history.<\/p>\n
Most notable out of those was a female Egyptian athlete who competed in the \u201cmanly\u201d sport of weightlifting. Yet, Sara Ahmed won bronze in the women’s 69kg weight class on Wednesday, lifting a combined weight of 255kg.\u00a0 (She would finish behind China’s Xiang Yanmei who took gold and Kazakhstan\u2019s Zhazira Zhapparkul, who claimed silver.) Still, the 18-year-old became the first woman from an Arab country to win an\u00a0Olympic\u00a0medal in weightlifting.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Future Looks Bright for Arab Women Athletes<\/h2>\n
These days, more and more Arab nations are letting females enter the Olympics. Sarah Attar was one of the first two Saudi Arabia female Olympic athletes the country sent to the 2012 Olympics. The only other one from Saudi that year was judo\u00a0entrant\u00a0Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani.<\/p>\n
Further, there\u2019s a possibility of the Olympics taking place in the Arab world someday sooner than we may think. For example, Qatar made a bid for the 2020 Olympics, but was rejected until they do more for women athletes. Ever since then, Qatar has been striving to improve its image. As such, it has made a recent move to send more female athletes to the Games. Could an Olympic venue in the Middle east be far off?<\/p>\n
So, in the end, who knows? Maybe in the next few years we can see an Olympic gold medal winning team of female Muslim soccer players from Bahrain. Even female Muslim badminton players at the Olympics would be a start.<\/p>\n
Do you have Olympic-sized dreams when it comes to learning Arabic?\u00a0 Then look no further than the Kaleela Arabic language learning app. It helps you train your Arabic language skills at your pace, anywhere and anytime that\u2019s convenient for you. See what it\u2019s like to reach your goal and cross- the finish line of Arabic language learning today! Go to kaleela.com<\/a>\u00a0 for more info on how you be a champion at the Arabic language!<\/p>\nKaleela \u2013 Learn Arabic the Right Way<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the 2022 Winter Muslim Olympians now underway in Beijing, it also marks Saudi Arabia\u2019s\u00a0debut at the Winter Games. With that in mind, we thought we\u2019d take a look at some of the region\u2019s most famous Arab athletes. More specifically, we\u2019re going to focus on female Arab Athletes and how far they\u2019ve come in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-7905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-arab-culture"],"yoast_head":"\n
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