The Saudi ban on female drivers is a red-hot issue in the Kingdom, and one that is enflamed on a regular basis these days.
The prohibition of women behind the wheel has been a constant cause of controversy for years and dates back to the establishment of the Saudi state in 1932. Saudi conservatives and religious scholars argue that letting women drive will lead to a “Western-style” erosion of morality and the demise of traditional values.
The ban has forced the Kingdom’s women (native or foreign) to hire designated male drivers or rely on male relatives to get around. It’s a well- known and hushed-up fact that Saudi women drive on farms and in the desert in remote regions, as well as in the large compounds and on school grounds. It’s also estimated that 70% of Saudi women drive when they go abroad.
Driving Home the Message
In January 2008, following widespread campaigns and petitions by women and women’s rights activists, the Saudi government announced it would allow women to drive.
This monumental move followed the delivery of a petition containing 1,100 signatures to Saudi King Abdullah by a women’s rights group, insisting that there was no religious reason whatsoever that justified the ban. In the same week, a United Nations committee monitoring standards set by the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women issued harsh criticism of the ban.
First Gear
Commenting on the government’s decision to move with the times, one government official said, “There has been a decision to move on this by the royal court because it is recognized that if girls have been in schools since the 1960s, they have a capability to function behind the wheel when they grow up”.
Several Saudi newspaper commentators support overturning the ban on the grounds that employing drivers to transport women everywhere drains the economy. Even the government had to agree that spending millions every year employing 500,000 immigrants as drivers wasn’t exactly a wise investment.
A Long and Winding Road
But although the decision to lift (or at least relax) the ban was reached more than 18 months ago, no official decree has followed and it could well be years before women can break through the red tape of the bureaucracies controlling licensing, insurance and vehicle ownership.
A female driver will sometimes make the headlines in the Kingdom for taking the wheel because, say, her husband had a heart attack or because there was no other way of getting a sick child to the hospital.
Sadly, more often than not, if a woman driver is the subject of a Saudi newspaper article, it’s because she had an accident, which further fuels the reticence to follow through with lifting the ban. In January 2008, the same month as the ban was supposedly lifted, a Saudi woman driving a Hummer in Cairo allegedly exceeded the posted speed limit and slammed into a taxicab, killing its male occupants.
In March 2009, a woman in her twenties was arrested for driving in Mecca, violating the Saudi Arabian ban, (which was supposedly lifted over a year earlier.) “The woman tried to escape when she saw a police car and in the process hit another car, which was slightly damaged,” a police spokesman told Arab News. The woman was turned over to the Saudi Prosecution and Investigation Commission for investigation.
A Saudi Woman who Puts Pedal to the Metal
In March 2005 Marwa Mahmood Al-Eifa a young Saudi woman living in the UAE, won first place in the first international women’s rally car race in Dubai. When asked if she thought women should be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, she angered many Saudi women by telling The Saudi Gazette she was against the idea because she thought there were other, more important issues to overcome first.
In the same year, an Arab News article reported that women were to blame for 50% of the nation’s road accidents. The stats were supported by a study, which concluded that women routinely argued with their husbands, interfered too much as backseat drivers or demanded that they stop suddenly at the sight of a nice-looking dress in a shop window, and therefore caused pile-ups!
During the 2004 Jeddah Economic Conference, former US President Bill Clinton came out to support the lifting of the ban, echoing what many Saudi men and women have been saying for years: That the Prophet would have let his wife drive a car, if cars had existed 1400 years ago.
