Saudi women lobby king for driving rights

The desire for Saudi women to be allowed to drive automobiles is just one more chink in the armor of Islam. The Luddites of Islam cannot hold back the tide of change enveloping the Muslim world. The change is technology driven and cannot be stopped. Cell phones, the Internet, and personal contacts will allow Muslim women to gain access to the birth control pill. Families, the root of tribal culture and Islam, will become smaller and fractured, like western families. "Time makes more converts than reason". Thomas Paine

Charles Tolleson

By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer

For the first time ever, a group of women in the only country that bans female drivers have formed a committee to lobby for the right to get behind the wheel, and they plan to petition King Abdullah in the next few days for the privilege.
The government is unlikely to respond because the issue remains so highly sensitive and divisive. But committee members say their petition will at least highlight what many Saudis — both men and women — consider a "stolen" right.

"We would like to remind officials that this is, as many have said, a social and not a religious or political issue," said Fowziyyah al-Oyouni, a founding member of the Committee of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars. "And since it's a social issue, we have the right to lobby for it."

Committee members want to deliver their petition to the king by Sunday, Saudi Arabia's national day.

The driving ban applies to all women, Saudi and foreign, and forces families to hire live-in drivers. Women whose families cannot afford $300-$400 a month for a driver must rely on male relatives to drive them to work, school, shopping or the doctor's.

The last time the issue was raised was two years ago, when Mohammed al-Zulfa, a member of the unelected Consultative Council, asked his colleagues to think about studying the possibility of allowing women over age 35 or 40 to drive — unchaperoned on city streets but accompanied by a male guardian on highways.

The suggestion touched off a fierce controversy that included calls for al-Zulfa's removal from the council and stripping him of Saudi citizenship, as well as accusations he was encouraging women to commit the double sins of discarding their veils and mixing with men.

The uproar underscored the divisions in Saudi society between the guardians of its super-strict Islamic codes of behavior and those who want to usher in more liberal attitudes.

Conservatives, who believe women should be shielded from male strangers, say women in the driver's seat will be free to leave home alone and go when and where they please. They also will unduly expose their eyes while driving and interact with male strangers, such as traffic police and mechanics.
But supporters of female drivers say the prohibition exists neither in law nor Islam, but is based on fatwas, or edicts, by senior clerics who say women at the wheel create situations for sinful temptation.

Women tried to defy the ban once and paid heavily for it. In November 1990, when U.S. troops were in Saudi Arabia following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, some 50 women got behind the wheel and drove family cars. They were jailed for one day, their passports were confiscated and they lost their jobs.