To many local and international observers, the issue of women driving in Saudi Arabia seems a trivial and not a pressing matter. Views on the subject may vary from considering the debate as a mere distraction from other pressing issues such as the economy and human rights concerns, to more extreme views that go as far as believing it to be a western plot to tear down local values and traditions. Perhaps sheading light on some of the activities and timeline of this controversial topic may bring a more moderate perception on the subject.
It has been more than twenty two years now since the first group of Saudi women started demonstrating for their right to drive in the streets of Saudi Arabia. Forty seven Saudi ladies were arrested in November 1990 after driving their cars for a few minutes in the capital city of Riyadh.
Since then only a few women driving incidents were reported by local Saudi press, until the women’s driving movement entitled Women2Drive that launched its first campaign on June 2011. The campaign gained a lot of local and international media coverage and succeeded to encourage more women to go behind the driving wheel.
Last Sunday was supposed to represent the first anniversary of the Women2Drive campaign. On June 17, 2012 a petition signed by more than 800 women was intended to be presented to Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, asking him to grant women the right to drive. On that day also, the campaign was planning to urge women to start applying for their driving licenses in local traffic departments, and to drive around with their families in their cities and towns.
However, due to the sudden death of Crown Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, women activists thought it was best to postpone the start date of the campaign to Friday June 29, 2012, in respect to the mourning period the country is going through. This clearly puts the women’s driving movement into a new phase of political and social reality.
The road for some of these Saudi women activists was not a paved one at all. Apart from being arrested and jailed, many of them suffered slander and smear campaigns by hard-line conservatives. Some were suspended from their jobs and the king pardoned one of them after she was initially sentenced to receive ten lashes.
How these brave women carry of their efforts is best described by one of the main activists of this campaign, Manal Al-Shaif: “Our struggle is not about driving a car, the struggle is about being in the driver’s seat of our own destiny, about being free not just to dream but free to live.”
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