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Two weeks ago, women in Saudi Arabia staged a protest against the country’s ban on female driving.  The campaign that launched the protest, called Women2Drive, began in 2011 and has attempted to place pressure on the Saudi government to lift what they feel is an onerous restriction on women.  Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest oil producers and a key American ally in the Middle East.  Extempers often receive questions about Saudi Arabia concerning terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and oil issues, but the issue of women’s rights may soon factor into those rounds as well.  Saudi Arabia is one of the more conservative states in the Middle East and is still run by a king, with no elected national legislature.  The kingdom staved off the unrest of the 2011 Arab Spring, but the government is worried that issues like women’s rights may harm the kingdom’s international profile and lead to larger protests against it in the near future.

This brief will talk a lot about the Women2Drive protests, but will put that debate in the context of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.  It will explain the status of women in the kingdom, provide an overview of the Women2Drive protest, and then provide some analysis about the future of the Women2Drive movement and Saudi Arabia’s potential handling of the issue.

Readers are also encouraged to use the links below and in the related R&D to bolster their files about this topic.

Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia

As indicated above, the Saudi government is very centralized and autocratic, with a king at the head of the government.  The king is advised by departmental ministers and the Shura Council, which is an advisory body that proposes laws to the king.  This body, also known as the Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia, has 150 members, but the king appoints all of them.  Royal rule in Saudi Arabia is backed by Islamic clerics who emphasize an extremely strict version of Islam called Wahhabism.  Wahhabism emphasizes the literal following of the Quran, the subservience of women to men, and the following of punishments spoken of in the Quran.  It should be noted that there is significant scholarly debate in the West and within Islamic circles about the Prophet Muhammad’s attitudes toward women because the early incarnation of Islam promoted greater equality between men and women.  However, as the Islamic kingdoms conquered other areas they gradually took on the paternalistic qualities of those kingdoms.  For example, the veiling of women is not a traditional Islamic belief and was actually done by Orthodox Christians in the Byzantine Empire before the Muslim conquest.  Within Saudi Arabia, there is a belief that women can acquire greater rights, but only after they bear children, which means that some women who attend universities need to carry out this task before being allowed to attend.

Saudi Arabia also follows what is known as the male guardianship system which, as the Associated Press explains on October 31st, means that women must have the permission of a male relative to travel, get married, enroll in higher education, open a bank account, work, and even undergo surgery in some cases.  The Washington Post on October 28th writes that this consigns women in Saudi Arabia to second-class citizenship because the system makes all of their rights contingent on a man’s permission.  Since women are not allowed to interact with men outside of their family, they have no appeal if they are denied any of the rights listed above by a male authority figure and women are taught this system at a very young age.  The Post goes on to explain that back in the 1980s, the Saudi government issued flyers that warned women against listening to music, going to mixed-gender malls, or answering telephones.  The ban on female driving comes out of this male guardian system and as CNN explains on October 25th, women have sometimes been known to sneak out and drive around the block while their male guardian was sleeping or away, but this carries significant risks.  If a woman needs to get somewhere in Saudi Arabia, they either have to have a male relative take them there or they have to hire a cab company, but as the Wall Street Journal of October 27th notes, even religious conservatives do not favor allowing women to use taxis or the country’s public transportation system.  Still, women in Saudi Arabia use these options if they cannot get a male figure in their household to drive them.  Activists argue in that Wall Street Journal article that this also hurts women because it limits their mobility.  The Christian Science Monitor on October 25th argues that female purchasing power within the kingdom is restricted by the driving ban, since women need to pay large parts of their earnings on these rides.  The lack of mobility also prohibits female activism and economic mobility because they cannot freely travel.

Women in Saudi Arabia also do not have the right to vote, although they will get the right to vote in municipal elections in 2015.  They also cannot establish organizations to fight for their rights, since the government has a strict ban against protests and the operations of non-government entities.  Human Rights Watch on October 30th sums things up well when it says that in Saudi Arabia, women have the legal status of minors.  This explains why the kingdom ranks 131 of 135 nations in the recent Global Gender Gap Report and why the United Nations Human Rights Council provided the kingdom with 225 recommendations on improving its human rights record during its Universal Periodic Review (UPR).  As Middle East Online writes on October 25th, the UN Human Rights Council recommended the lifting of the driving ban and the abolition of the male guardianship system.

The Driving Ban & The Women2Drive Protests

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving.  The Council on Foreign Relations writes on October 23rd that some of the travel restrictions on women are loosening, as women can now ride bicycles and motorbikes for recreation, but the driving ban has remained in place.  While a ban on female driving may not make sense to extempers here in the Western world, the ban is backed by conservative religious clerics.  The Wall Street Journal previously cited explains that clerics warn a lifting of the ban would encourage the free movement of women across the country and lead to premarital sex and adultery.  Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan, a judicial adviser to an association of Gulf psychologists, has recently argued that women should not be allowed to drive because driving damages women’s ovaries and pushes a woman’s pelvis upward.  This argument has attracted widespread global criticism and mockery, with Hisham Fageeh, a twenty-six year old graduate student at Columbia University, posting a video that went viral on YouTube where he sang a song entitled “No Woman, No Drive” to the tune of the Bob Marley song “No Woman, No Cry.”

Extempers should understand that the Saudi government does not have specific legislation that prevents women from driving.  Instead, the ban is enforced by religious clerics, who place pressure on the kingdom to enforce religious edicts.  The reason that women cannot drive legally in Saudi Arabia is that they cannot obtain driver’s licenses from the government.  Women who participated in the recent protests got their driver’s licenses from other Gulf states, which Haaretz notes on October 27th is not an uncommon practice.

The recent protests against the driving ban are also not new to Saudi Arabia.  Al-Monitor on November 1st explains that forty-seven women in November 1990 protested the ban, but they were arrested and punished with job suspensions, travel bans, and were slandered by religious clerics in Friday sermons.  During that protest a man by the name of Saleh al-Azzaz, who photographed and documented the actions, was also arrested and allegedly tortured.  The 1990 protest, as Human Rights explains, was caused by women seeing American servicewomen drive in their country on the eve of the Persian Gulf War with Iraq.  The heavy handed government suppression of the protests, which was assisted by the Grand Mufti, Saudi Arabia’s most senior religious authority, who issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against female driving, made women’s driving activism go underground and stay dormant until 2011, when it returned.  In 2011, the Women2Drive campaign began and it called on women to drive in a sign of disobedience against the government.  The 2011 protest was not that successful, with only thirty to fifty women showing up, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.  Nevertheless, this protest seems to have established a small precedent for the movement’s growth with the latest protests.

The latest protests urged women that had driver’s licenses to drive on October 26th, although some women did so before this date.  The protest is a great way of showing the power of social media, as videos showing women driving and having men teach their sisters and mothers spread through Twitter and YouTube.  The Al-Monitor previously cited explains that the hashtag of the movement has become one of the most popular Twitter hashtags in Saudi history and on October 26th more than twenty videos and dozens of photographs were uploaded.  The Associated Press estimated that at least sixty women participated in defying the driving ban, but there could have been more that were not accounted for.  The BBC on October 26th said that about 17,000 have signed a petition calling for women to be allowed to drive and there are signs that younger men in Saudi Arabia, that are in their teens, 20’s, and 30’s are open to the idea of letting women drive.  The Christian Science Monitor of October 25th noted that some of these men have said that they are tired of driving women around and see no reason why they should not have the ability to drive.

In dealing with the recent protests, the Saudi government has kept a low profile and have opted to refrain from going aggressively after women that defied the ban.  Instead, the government has gone after male relatives of the women involved.  The BBC article previously cited explained that police were instructed to take women and their male guardian, with whom they were driving, to a side street and issue them a warning and make them sign a promise not to drive again.  The Sydney Morning Herald on October 26th explained that government’s strategy as muted and tolerant of open discussion, but the Interior Ministry said that it would not tolerate disturbances of the peace through mass protests.  The government’s concerns about protests are justified because the 2011 Arab Spring was touched off by a fruit vendor in Tunisia setting himself on fire over excessive government economic regulations.  One small incident can become a major problem, but women protests seemed to refrain from staging mass protests during the October 26th campaign and chose to operate in different parts of the country.  Human Rights Watch also noted that more than one hundred clerics visited the king’s office to protest against the “conspiracy of women driving” and that opponents of the ban have tied the Women2Drive movement to an American conspiracy to undermine the kingdom’s religious values.  The New York Times on October 25th revealed that Amnesty International, a human rights group that operates out of London, said that the Women2Drive’s website, oct26driving.org, was blocked.  The Economist of October 26th also noted that opponents have gone to Twitter to tell their side of the story and have spread false rumors that the ban will be lifted to take some of the momentum out of the women’s protests.  Still, it appears that the protesters got what they wanted out of the October 26th display, which was greater visibility of their cause, while the government got what it wanted, which was isolated protests that did not touch off larger incidents throughout the country.

The Future of Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia

I know that I have painted a dire picture for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, but the kingdom is beginning to make some positive changes on women’s rights.  King Abdullah recently named thirty women to the Shura Council and as I said in the last section, has allowed women to vote in the 2015 municipal elections and run as candidates in those elections.  Although the United Nations Human Rights Council recommended further changes for the kingdom, the allocation of 20% of the seats on the Shura Council to women is a positive development and gives women some leverage within the government to push for change.  King Abdullah also dismissed a very conservative religious adviser last year and he has indicated that one day the ban on female driving will be lifted.  However, at present he has said that the ban on female driving is due to the cultural conservatism of his country and that lifting the ban right now would be highly unpopular.

When speaking on the issue of women’s rights it is easy for extempers to condemn the kingdom’s current restrictions.  After all, we live in a country where women have made significant political, social, and economic gains over the last forty years.  Janet Yellen is set to become the first female chairman of the Federal Reserve and it is possible that 2016 may see the election of the first female president in American history, whether it be Hillary Clinton or another candidate.  Extempers may look at the burqa’s worn by women in the Middle East or elsewhere and think that they oppress women, but they should realize that not all women in these nations feel oppressed.  There are millions of women in Saudi Arabia, yet less than one hundred likely participated in the Women2Drive protests.  Granted, more women may have participated if they had the ability to get a driver’s license, but it does not appear that a large contingent of Saudi women are supporting the recent protests.  Analysts have said that when there is a greater consciousness among Saudi women to press for more liberal reforms that these reforms will take place.  Therefore, extempers should be very wary of immediately condemning the Saudi government or any other government in the Middle East for its treatment of women.  Some practices, like whipping women that have been victims of rape or stoning adultery victims, are indeed barbaric, but there are sizeable numbers of Saudi women that support religiously conservative ideas.  It is akin to the current abortion debate in the U.S., where women are largely equally divided between the pro-choice and pro-life camps.

Foreign pressure will likely increase over time on Saudi Arabia to change its treatment of women, but some of this pressure will be muted due to the importance of Saudi oil supplies.  In light of the Women2Drive protests, the United States endorsed the protests and urged Saudi Arabia to increase the rights of women.  The Washington Times noted on October 24th that Great Britain, Canada, and the Czech Republic also pressed the Saudi government for increasing women’s rights in the UN Human Rights Council.  However, even these criticisms appeared small because 80 of the 102 countries in Geneva expressed support, with some, like China, bargaining with Saudi Arabia and supporting them in return for Saudi Arabia supporting its record when it came under review.  The Saudi government recently rejected a seat on the UN Security Council in protest over American foreign policy toward Iran, Syria, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but it will likely take a seat on the UN Human Rights Council next year.  If Saudi Arabia accepts this position, then it could give greater leverage to women protesters because they could call attention to the hypocrisy of the Saudi government occupying a seat on a human rights council and suppressing the rights of women at home.  The election of a female president in the United States in 2016 may also lead to a reorientation of American foreign policy in working with the kingdom to empower women more directly.

In the end, it appears that it will take at least another decade for women in Saudi Arabia to acquire the right to drive.  Women’s ability to run for office and vote is a good first step in allowing women to suggest policy changes by the Saudi government and this “entering wedge” may allow women to gradually broaden the scope of their rights over time.  However, if liberal Saudi women want to enhance their rights, they will need to cope with the country’s conservative religious establishment and overcome some of the conservative leanings by other women in Saudi society.  Immediate change, especially in light of the Arab Spring’s unrest, appears unlikely, but as King Abdullah admits, it is only a matter of time before women in Saudi Arabia earn the right to drive.