The "Right" to Drive for Women in Saudi Villages

Sunday, June 24, 2018, was a historic moment in Saudi Arabia, as women drove their cars for the first time following the end of the driving ban. However, for some of them, the decision to lift the ban in the kingdom was less relevant, not because they are ultraconservatives or anti–women driving activists but because they have been driving for years in Saudi villages, remote areas, and across agricultural cities without facing major reprisals.

There have never been actual provisions in the Saudi traffic rules that explicitly prevent women from driving. Instead, the ban on women driving was culturally and socially constructed, enforced by the traffic police and the Ministry of Interior and morally supported by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (commonly referred to as the "religious police").

Women's-rights activists used Article (32) of the Traffic Law, which stipulates that "no person shall be permitted to drive any vehicle before obtaining the necessary driving license," to defend their right to sit behind the wheel and to prove that they are not lawbreakers but law adherents. Activists argued that, by means of the use of the gender-neutral term person, this provision is not limited to men. Failing to issue driver's licenses to women thus lacks a legal base. This reading of the law encouraged Saudi women to defy the ban for decades, from the November 6, 1990, car demonstration in the city of Riyadh to the 2009 petition and later the well-known 2011 Women2Drive campaign and the October 26 call in 2013. Alongside these actions, intellectuals submitted various motions and letters to the ruling royal family to demand an overturn of the infamous ban.

People in central cities in Saudi Arabia, such as Riyadh and Jeddah, have heard the stories of women villagers and Bedouins carrying handguns for protection and driving pickup vehicles over hundreds of miles through a harsh environment to work on their families' farmland, bring their kids to school, go to grocery stores, harvest crops, and transport livestock to the market. The complex natural terrain in these villages, which often lack good infrastructure, renders driving an important issue for all family members, as it is the only means of mobility through mountains and desert plains. The stories of these women have been rarely covered by local press. One exceptional report was published in 2010 in the Saudi Al Riyadh Newspaper, where they wrote about Norah Hamdan, a fifty-five-year-old woman who told the newspaper that she had been driving big tankers to bring clean drinking water to her village and to other villages for years and that she had never experienced disrespect or harassment (www.alriyadh.com/541008). The report on Hamdan was presented in cautious language, mentioning the stories of women driving outside urban areas yet emphasizing that women in cities would be permitted to drive only when society was ready. Given Hamdan's story, it was initially difficult to fathom how women in Saudi Arabia's most conservative communities were driving their vehicles without backlash, unrest, or defamation campaigns, while women's-rights activists protesting the ban had their passports confiscated or were imprisoned or forced into exile.

Gradually, I realized that women driving in their villages and in small provinces was normal because their family survival depended on the motor vehicle, given the lack of public transportation. Male household members leave home from dawn until dusk to work in nearby cities, leaving Bedouin women responsible for taking care of their families' daily needs. The limited financial incomes of the families prevent them from hiring private drivers to carry the work on their behalf. Moreover, hardworking mothers and their daughters in villages cannot hire drivers, as this puts them in a state of khalwa, or "seclusion" in an enclosed area with a man who is not a relative, which is forbidden according to the Saudi interpretation of Sunni Islam. This leaves women in the hinterlands with no alternative to sitting behind the wheel in order to manage family affairs.

For these reasons the police have...