Saudi Arabia: Driving in a burqa

Are Saudi women finally standing up for their rights? asked Pakistan’s Daily Times in an editorial. Last week, at least 29 women “took to the streets in their vehicles” to defy Saudi Arabia’s unwritten law against women driving. They were following the lead of activist Manal al-Sharif, who was spurred by sheer desperation to call for an overturn of the ban. A graduate of a U.S. university, al-Sharif has a good career at an oil company, but she has to work irregular hours. A married woman could add a driver to her household staff, but since al-Sharif is divorced, she can have only female servants. How, then, is she supposed to get to work? That she must ask such a question at all is an outrage. Women in the 7th century, at the time of the Prophet Mohammad, “had more freedom than they have today in Saudi Arabia,” the only country in the world where women may not drive a car. Perhaps now, in this era when Arabs all over the Middle East are insisting on their rights, “the time has come that the Saudi regime reconsider its support for such a suffocating tradition that has unnecessarily shackled women.”

It’s actually in the state’s own interest to put women behind the wheel, said Tariq A. Al-Maeena in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News. One of my readers pointed out the environmental impact of employing about 1 million men, almost all of them foreigners, as drivers for our women. That’s a million extra people “consuming water and electricity” simply to perform a task that Saudi women could easily do themselves.

Eventually, the state will see reason, said Salman Aldossary in Egypt’s Asharq al-Awsat. Even those conservatives who support the ban admit that there is no specific Koranic argument for it. Their objections stem from “what they call the ‘evil’ consequences associated with the act of driving”—by which, presumably, they mean the increasing independence of women. Since there is no theological underpinning for the ban, it is simply a social, not a religious, tradition, and therefore relatively easy to overturn. “Personally, I believe the question is not whether Saudi women will be granted the right to drive, but rather when this will happen. It is only a matter of time.”

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As a Saudi woman, I’m not so optimistic, said Saudi activist Hala Al-Dosari in Qatar’s Aljazeera.net. After all, this was not the first time Saudi women staged a drive-in. In 1990, a group of prominent women, including some from society’s elite and several top university professors, drove their cars in an act of rebellion. The government retaliated harshly, confiscating the women’s passports, firing them from jobs, and smearing them as foreign agents “trying to westernize the country and break the unity of the people.” This time, it went even further. Al-Sharif, the activist who called for the driving rebellion, was actually jailed for 10 days and released only after her father made a personal appeal to the king. Her treatment has thoroughly cowed other Saudi women: Witness the tiny participation in last week’s demonstration.