SAUDI Arabia announced on Tuesday that it would allow women to drive, ending a long-standing policy in the conservative kingdom.
The change, which will take effect in June next year, was announced in a royal decree read live on state television and in a simultaneous media event in Washington. The decision highlights the damage done to the kingdom’s international image from the ban on women driving and Saudi’s hopes for a public relations benefit from the reform.
Saudi leaders also hope the new policy will help the economy by increasing women’s participation in the workplace. Many working Saudi women spend much of their salaries on drivers or must be driven to work by male relatives.
“It is amazing,” said Fawziah al-Bakr, a Saudi university professor, who was among 47 women who participated in the kingdom’s first protest against the ban in 1990. After driving around the Saudi capital, Riyadh, the women were arrested, and some lost their jobs.
“Since that day, Saudi women have been asking for the right to drive, and finally it arrived,” she said. “We have been waiting for a very long time.”
Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites, is an absolute monarchy ruled according to syariah law. Saudi officials and clerics have provided numerous explanations for the ban over the years.
Some said that it was inappropriate in Saudi culture for women to drive, or that male drivers would not know how to handle having women in cars next to them. Others argued that allowing women to drive would lead to promiscuity and the collapse of the Saudi family. One cleric claimed — with no evidence — that driving harmed women’s ovaries.
The decision won near universal praise in Washington. Heather Nauert, the State Department’s spokesman, called it “a great step in the right direction for that country”.
The momentum to change the policy picked up in recent years with the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed Salman, the king’s 32-year-old son, who has laid out a far-reaching plan to overhaul the kingdom’s economy and society.
Increasing numbers of women are working in a growing number of professions, and in 2015, women were allowed to vote and to run for seats on the kingdom’s local councils.
Ending the ban on women driving is expected to face some resistance inside the kingdom, where families are highly patriarchal and some men say they worry about their female relatives getting stranded should their cars break down.
But, at a small news conference at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, an exuberant Prince Khalid Salman, the Saudi ambassador, said women would be able to obtain driver’s licences without having to ask permission from their husbands, fathers or any male guardian despite guardianship laws that give men power over their female relatives.
Under these laws, women cannot travel abroad, work or undergo some medical procedures without the consent of their male “guardian”, often a father, a husband or even a son.
The ambassador, who is a son of the king, said women would be able to drive alone, but that the Interior Ministry would decide whether they could work as professional drivers. He said he did not expect the change in policy to face significant resistance.
“I think our society is ready,” he said.
Many of the kingdom’s professionals and young people have welcomed the change, viewing it as a step to making life in the country a bit more like life elsewhere.
Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi women’s rights advocate who filmed herself driving in 2011 and posted the footage to YouTube to protest the law, celebrated the announcement on Tuesday.
Manal was instrumental in organising groups of women for collective protests to demand an end to the ban on female drivers.
The royal decree, read by an announcer of state television and signed by Salman, said traffic laws would be amended, including to allow the government to issue driver’s licences “to men and women alike”.
The decree also said a high-level ministerial committee was being formed to study other issues that needed to be addressed for the change to take place. For example, the police will have to be trained to interact with women in a way that they rarely do in Saudi Arabia, a society where men and women who are not related have little contact.
The decree added that the majority of the Council of Senior Scholars — the kingdom’s top clerical body, whose members are appointed by the king — had agreed that the government could allow women to drive if done in accordance with syariah law. -- NYT