Mirror. Signal. Manoeuvre. These are not the standard slogans of a revolution. But hidden among the sand dunes, off the public highways, Saudi Arabian women are learning to drive. Hundreds of them, stolidly grinding gears and mucking up three-point turns in the grave knowledge that they are acquiring a skill that could imperil their jobs and liberty. Not for nothing did a Saudi newspaper cartoon depict car keys attached to a hand grenade.
So why has the ban on women driving become the nucleus of protest? Since Saudi Arabia denies its female citizens almost every imaginable freedom, activists are spoilt for choice. Why not a Facebook campaign for women not to need male consent to be allowed to have life-saving surgery, travel abroad or own a business or to vote in municipal elections or just to keep their kids after a divorce?
But this month Manal al-Sherif, an affluent oil company consultant and mother, with no reason to derail her comfortable life, chose to get into a car, video herself tootling around the streets of Alkhobar, in eastern Saudi Arabia, and post it on YouTube, daring the religious police to arrest her. Which they did. And when they released her after five days, rearrested her for another ten. Pour encourager les autres, no doubt, since hundreds of Saudi women, mostly holding foreign licences, have pledged to become rebels behind the wheel on June 17.
In Girls of Riyadh, a glorious novel by a young Saudi woman, Rajaa Alsanea — banned in her own country — Michelle, a half-American girl, disguises herself as a man to drive her boyfriend to a shopping mall. In a story in which female characters bang against the confines of their indoor, circumscribed, boring lives, this constitutes a Thelma and Louise moment.
Women in Saudi Arabia must employ drivers, something many can ill afford, or have male relatives ferry them around — tricky if you are divorced. This is a land with no public transport, its cities hastily constructed, without pavements. But in any case, it’s too hot to walk and women are forbidden to go outside alone.
Driving is a hugely underrated force for female freedom, taken for granted now that 63 per cent of British women have passed their tests. But in 1976 the figure was only 29 per cent. My mother cannot drive, indeed, growing up, I knew few women who could. The car was the man’s sole domain. He drove to work: wives dragged the shopping back on the bus. In 35 years, women drivers have more than doubled.
Back then the sour jokes about women drivers were ceaseless: fluff-head blondes who thought that rearview mirrors were only for applying lipstick, dim old bats who reversed into bollards. Women were portrayed as clogging up the roads on trivial erands in their silly “runabout” cars, when men had important places to be. (Even now a special green righteous anger is reserved for blondes doing school runs in 4x4s, while male mileage — and mighty boot capacity — is always justifiable.)
Underlying these gags was male unease. But men had reason to worry: if a women can drive, she can leave. Pile the kids into the back at dawn and evade another beating. You can no longer be sure that the missus is waiting for you to come home if she has transportation to fun, friendship, a job, someone else . . . With a car, who knows where she might be — unaccountable, alone, free.
Baroness Warsi once told me that her father endured much flak from more orthodox Muslim men when he allowed her mother to learn to drive. But he was a kindly, forward-thinking pragmatist who knew that otherwise his four clever daughters couldn’t attend their extracurricular studies.
There is nothing in the Koran that prohibits driving for either sex. Scholars have apparently pored over this: a woman can ride a (female) donkey, so she can drive a car.
And Saudi Arabia is alone among Muslim states in banning women from driving. The prohibition is not based upon scripture, or even state legislation: no law actually forbids women to drive. Rather, like so many extremist Wahhabi diktats, which seep like poisonous gas across the world, it is a tribal practice dressed up as universal truth — invisibility and repression branded as piety. In 1990 after Saudi Arabia’s last wave of rebel women drivers were brutally suppressed, their male relatives sacked from their jobs, a fatwa was declared upon all women who took to their cars. “They will die, God willing, and will not enjoy this,” one Wahhabi cleric has said of the June 17 campaigners.
Yet King Abdullah could lift this fatwa in a second if he chose to and thus delight his own daughter, Princess Adelah, along with many other Western-educated Saudi women. In an interview with the American broadcaster Barbara Walters, the king pointed out that in the desert and remote rural areas women already drive. Sometimes survival overrides prejudice.
But in the cities, where women have already won the right to attend university and have careers, the idea that they might be able to go where they please is too much for male insecurity. An anti-driving group called the the Iqal Campaign has been set up by Saudi men, an iqal being the headdress cord traditionally used to whip disobedient wives
The excuses used to justify the prohibition are hilarious, if faintly familiar. A woman likes to be chauffeured, say those who support it, treated like a princess. Driving alone, she would only be exposed, helpless, to the terrifying wider world with its catcalling men.
She might fraternise with male traffic police and mechanics. Women would make poor drivers, although it is hard to imagine that they could be worse than Saudi men: in her memoir In the Land of Invisible Women, Qanta Ahmed, a British Muslim doctor, notes the horrific car accidents in Saudi Arabia, the testosterone-fuelled boy-racer insanity that arises in a kingdom of rich, sexually frustrated youths.
Throughout the Arab Spring, the men of Saudi Arabia were largely silent. They knew that they faced a ruling family ruthless in its repression and indifferent to — even proud to flout — international opinion. Besides, with a bottomless well of oil money, they can bribe away dissent with a burst of public works. Yet the women of Saudi Arabia who just want the right to go shopping, drop off their dry-cleaning, pick up the kids, get to college, will not be frightened or bought off. Freedom of the road is beyond all price.
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