Saudi Arabian women awoke to news of a royal decree permitting them to drive starting next year — and some were already behind the wheel yesterday, even though licenses will not be issued for nine months.
“Saudi Arabia will never be the same again. The rain begins with a single drop,” Manal al-Sharif, who was arrested in 2011 after a driving protest, said in an online statement.
Online videos showed a handful of women driving cars overnight, after Saudi King Salman’s decree was announced late on Tuesday.
Photo: AP
“I wish I could translate my feelings right now. I feel like no one can understand it fully but us,” said Abeer Alarjani, 32, who plans to start driving lessons this weekend.
“Now I’ll finally dare to dream for more,” she said.
The move represents a big crack in the laws and social mores governing women in the conservative Muslim kingdom. The male guardianship system requires women to have a male relative’s approval for decisions on education, employment, marriage, travel plans and even medical treatment.
Saudi Arabia has been widely criticized for being the only remaining country to forbid women to drive.
The royal decree ends a conservative tradition seen by rights activists as an emblem of the nation’s suppression of women.
It is expected to boost the fortunes of 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has ascended to the heights of power in the kingdom in three short years with an ambitious domestic reform program and assertive foreign policy.
A muted response from Saudi Arabia’s powerful clergy, which has long backed the ban, suggested power shared between the Al Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi religious establishment could be shifting decisively in favor of the royals.
Many younger Saudi Arabians regard the crown prince’s ascent as evidence that their generation is taking a central place in running a country whose patriarchal traditions have for decades made power the province of the old and blocked women’s progress.
Sharif described the driving ban’s removal as “just the start to end long-standing unjust laws [that] have always considered Saudi women minors who are not trusted to drive their own destiny.”
The Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington on Tuesday said that women would not need their guardians’ permission to get a license, nor to have a guardian in the car when driving.
Amnesty International welcomed the decree as “long overdue,” but said there was still a range of discriminatory laws and practices that needed to be overturned.
The state-backed Council of Religious Scholars expressed support for the driving decree.
Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh, who has repeatedly opposed women working and driving and said letting them into politics may mean “opening the door to evil,” has yet to comment.
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