Your hands grip the steering wheel, your foot is tapping while you anxiously wait in weekend traffic. Maybe you’re heading to the shops or playing taxi for your children’s sporting activities. Across the Indian Ocean, women are defying a ban on female drivers, fighting for their right to do the exact same thing.
On Saturday 29 March, in line with Obama’s visit, women in Saudi Arabia will once again take to the streets to call for an end to the driving ban. Although there is no official law, women who attempt to drive continually face arrests and intimidation because of customary law and a ministerial decree.
To head to the shops on a Saturday, women do not have the option of public transport (only in Mecca can you walk to the corner and catch a bus or take the subway). Their only choice is to have access to a car and then to convince a male relative or employ a man to drive that car. While we sometimes dream of a chauffeur, this day to day ban has proven to be an obstacle for many women to pursue an education, a career and to seek medical advice.
For decades women have been fighting to get this ban lifted. In 1990, around 40 women drove their cars down a main street in Riyadh. They were stopped by police and a number of them were suspended from work, issued travel bans and widely condemned in religious sermons and social circles.
In 2011 women activists, including Manal al-Sharif, re-launched the campaign calling on women with international driver’s licences to take to the roads in defiance of the ban. Scores of women got behind the wheel to support the campaign. Some were arrested as a result, and were made to sign pledges that they would refrain from driving in the future. Men who supported the campaign were also targeted. Shoolteacher and activist Tariq Al-Mubarak, who was among those detained, was held for more than a week without charge and interrogated about his involvement with the group.
