Why Saudi women do not drive

Tasnim Saleh, Common Ground News Service -- Partners in Humanity, Kuwait City

Recently, while meeting with women in Saudi Arabia, Karen Hughes, Undersecretary of State and latest Bush appointee to the position of American cultural ambassador to the Muslim world, was reported to be taken aback by the lack of desire on the part of Saudi women to obtain the right to drive. This probably strikes most Americans as odd, if not irrational. The Islamic ideals behind this attitude are difficult to understand, even for some Muslims.

The roots of this Saudi conviction lie in simple brainwashing. Saudi girls are brought up, to a greater extent than many Arab girls, to believe that, by not allowing certain rights, men are protecting them, nurturing them, and even pampering them. When I, a citizen of Kuwait, was eight years old, my school textbooks informed me that a Muslim woman is so precious and so dear that male dominance is a way of protecting and showing how valued they are. It is a privilege for women to be submissive, and an honorable duty for men to protect them.

Many Saudi women, even middle-class women, are quite wealthy in comparison to Western women, much less Arab women elsewhere. When a Saudi woman wants to go to the mall to do some shopping, and her husband is not around to drive her, she rarely needs to fall back on a simple cab, instead she calls, or often has, a limo! No wonder then -- anyone would be hard-pressed to want to drive if they had a chauffeur and limo at their beck and call.

Indeed, the Saudis did not have laws forbidding women drivers until 1990, when daredevil feminists drove through town and were arrested, an incident that led Saudi authorities to issue an official ban. However, bureaucracy and erroneous interpretations of Islam have always combined to create additional obstacles for potential women drivers. For women to drive, they would need to have identification cards. But Saudi women usually do not have them, even though they have been permitted to obtain them since 2003.

Most often, Saudi women use what is called a family card, which simply lists the names of the females and their relationships to the dominant male. If a woman is married, the family card will identify her as the wife, and if she is not married, no matter how old she gets, she will be listed under the family card of her father. To Saudi women, getting an I.D. card means first of all getting their picture taken, and even worse, taking the risk that a man will see their picture, which is absolutely unacceptable to Saudis of either sex. Most Saudi women remain covered up all their lives when outside their homes.

At the heart of the matter is an Islamic injunction that women must have chaperons when traveling. While more moderate Muslims believe this restriction applies only to long trips, many conservative Saudis believe that, for a woman, driving a car for an hour is the equivalent of driving the car for 10 or 12 hours. Thus, any length of time in a car is "travel." Again, the problem lies in the interpretation of Islamic law.

All these obstacles are to blame for Saudi women seeing little to be gained from fighting for the right to drive. These may not be legitimate or logical reasons, but this is the way Saudi Arabia works, for better or worse. Karen Hughes should not have been so stunned -- if she had known anything about Saudis, she would not have expected a Saudi woman to admit to an American that she is suffering from oppression. Saudi women are not fond of public display of dirty laundry, and they will not admit that an American, a non-believer, could be correct, right or better than they are in any possible way. They may, in fact, secretly hold different ideas, but they will never admit them to a foreigner, especially an American.

Nevertheless, quiet movement for both women's rights and democratization continues. Women even presented themselves as candidates for the recent, controlled elections in Saudi Arabia, in expectation that they would be allowed to vote. Mohammed Al- Zulfa, a pro-reform legislator on the king's Consultative Council, even publicly called for a lift on the ban, though he faced widespread condemnation. But what happens next will have to be a result of action by Saudi women themselves.

Tasnim Saleh is a student at the American University of Kuwait.