Saudi driving-ban challenge revs up as women take the wheel

RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—It could have been a scene from anywhere in the world. A husband in the passenger seat unable to refrain from telling his wife how to drive.
“Slow down!” Mohammad Al Qahtani instructed his wife Maha. “Move into the right lane. . . . Watch it!”
But back-seat driving was the least of Maha's concerns Friday. She was more worried that a police officer would see her behind the wheel — something forbidden to women in Saudi Arabia.
“Oh my God,” she whispered under her face-covering veil when a police car appeared in the mirror, but whizzed straight on past.
Al Qahtani was among more than 40 Saudi women who violated Saudi Arabia's driving ban Friday as part of a national campaign to pressure the government to allow women to drive.
“Most of my friends said ‘Don't go,'“ said Al Qahtani, 39, an employee of the ministry of education. “But we have to make our point that it's our right and they should respect that.”
Women who drove recorded their civil disobedience on Twitter. And while their numbers are low, the campaign is significant. Launched last March, it is perhaps the largest grassroots campaign by Saudi women to demand a change in the restrictions on their independence and mobility.
Under the guardianship system in force here, women need permission from their father, husband or brother to marry, travel outside the country, work outside the home and have certain kinds of medical procedures.
There is no law prohibiting women from driving. Rather, it is a long-held social custom, overlaid with religious justifications by ultraconservative Islamic scholars who argue that women driving is the first step to losing their society's Islamic identity.
Sheikh Abdulrahman Al Barrak, for example, denounced the driving protest, saying “what these women are determined to do is a sin” and that they would become “keys of all evil” in the country. He also labelled the women “Westernized,” one of the most pejorative terms in the Saudi conservative lexicon.
Many top government officials, including King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, reportedly have no objection to women driving. But they are reluctant to upset the hardline conservatives.
Last month, in a move that scared many women, the government detained one of the campaign organizers for nine days. Manal Al Sharif, 32, was arrested after posting to YouTube a video of herself driving as a way to encourage women to join the protest. According to Saudi sources, she was released on orders of the king, who is seen as a strong supporter of women's rights.
The idea behind the campaign, which was organized by women using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, was that women should go out and do an errand.
They were advised not to gather in one place so as not to violate the ban on demonstrations.
Sabah Al Mustafa, who owns a photographic studio, drove twice in the eastern city of Qatif — once to the grocery store and once to her relatives' home.
Her husband accompanied her.
“As a working woman, I know what women need,” said Al Mustafa, who noted the tremendous inconvenience of having to depend on drivers or male relatives to get around.
It is estimated that the ban on female drivers requires the hiring of 750,000 drivers, most of them foreigners from places like India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Overall, traffic police took a low-key approach to the campaign. They were not out in greater numbers than usual for most of the day, though they did set up some checkpoints in early evening, apparently to check on the gender of drivers.
A couple of women were briefly detained, according to Twitter.
And when Al Qahtani went out for a second drive with her husband later in the day, she was spotted by a police officer who pulled her over.
He reprimanded her husband, and issued her a ticket for not having a Saudi driver's licence.




Saudi driving-ban challenge revs up as women take the wheel