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They
were arrested, suspended from jobs, shunned by relatives and denounced
by clerics as loose women out to destroy society. Their offense? They
did what many in Saudi Arabia considered unthinkable: getting in cars
and driving.
Their
protest in 1990 against the kingdom’s ban on women driving failed, and
the women paid dearly for it, with the stigma of being “drivers”
clinging to them for years.
So last month, when King Salman announced that the ban on women driving would be lifted next June, few were happier than the first women to demonstrate for that right — almost three decades ago.
“I’d
thought maybe I’d die before I saw it,” said Nourah Alghanem, who had
helped plan the protest. Now she’s 61 and retired with five
grandchildren. “What’s important is that our kingdom entered the 21st
century — finally!”
The
backlash against the 47 women who protested illustrates how deeply the
driving ban was embedded in Saudi Arabia’s conservative society,
reinforced by the state and its religious apparatus.
But
since then, globalization, social media, economic pressures and
leadership changes finally created the conditions for the ban to end.
These are dizzying days in Saudi Arabia.
Carmakers are now targeting advertisements toward Saudi women, and a women’s university is planning a driving school.
And the changes are not only related to the prospect of so many new drivers on the kingdom’s highways. At a public celebration last month, crowds of men and women danced together as a D.J. played music. An end to the ban on cinemas is expected soon.
But
in 1990, when the four dozen women took an extraordinary risk by
fighting the driving ban, conditions in the kingdom were notably
different.
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Controlling Women
At
the time of the protest, Ms. Alghanem was 34, with a high school
degree, a husband, four children and a job at an elementary school.
“I didn’t have anything interesting in my life,” she recalled.
At
the time, Saudi women were severely restricted. The culture was highly
patriarchal, and clerics, thanks to their alliance with the royal
family, had tremendous power to defend the kingdom against what they
considered to be corrupting influences.
Much of that meant controlling women, and they saw the driving ban as necessary to prevent adultery and other social ills.
“Allowing women to drive contributes to the downfall of the society,” the kingdom’s top cleric at the time wrote in a fatwa that was removed recently from a government website. “This is well known.”
Women
who chafed under the ban saw an opportunity when Saddam Hussein, the
Iraqi strongman, invaded Kuwait in 1990. American forces flooded the
kingdom, including American servicewomen who drove military vehicles.
Kuwaiti women who had fled the invasion also drove.
Ms. Alghanem took note.
“I saw that we as Saudi women were powerless,” she said.
She
invited other women to her home to discuss the issue, and they later
decided to take action. They sent a letter to Salman — at the time the
governor of Riyadh Province — telling him that they planned to drive.
They
never heard back, they said, so on Nov. 6, 1990, they met near a
supermarket in Riyadh, piled into 14 cars piloted by women with valid
foreign licenses and drove around town.
They
were social outliers, backed by no political party, and other Saudi
women did not rush to join them. Many came from affluent families and
had studied abroad. They included teachers, professors, a social worker,
a photographer and a dentist.
Most
were married with children; at least two were pregnant. One woman
joined late, with her two daughters, one of whom was breast-feeding.
Some had defied their male relatives to show up. Supportive husbands and
brothers dropped off others at the meeting place.
Word
spread, and the women were stopped by both the traffic police and the
religious police, some of whom furiously banged on the cars.
“‘I
want to dig a hole to bury you all!’” Fawziah al-Bakr, an education
professor, recalled one man shouting at her. “They were thinking that we
were going to destroy this country.”
They
were taken to the police station and released around dawn, after they
and their male relatives signed pledges that the women would not drive
again.
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Furious Backlash
The
next morning, Asma Alaboudi, a school social worker who had
participated, overheard her colleagues saying that the women at the
protest had burned their clothes, worn bikinis and danced in the streets
— all grave acts that had not happened.
Soon, the women’s names were distributed, inflaming public anger.
King Fahd issued a decree suspending those who had government jobs, and preachers excoriated them during Friday prayers.
“At that point, the society revolted,” Ms. Bakr recalled.
Monera
Alnahedh, who later became an international development worker, said
her father quit praying at his local mosque after the preacher said the
women had been inseminated by 10 men.
Officials from the Interior Ministry came to the home of Madeha Alajroush, a photographer, to confiscate and destroy all her negatives — 15 years of work.
“That was a way of punishing me,” she said.
Some friends and relatives shunned the women.
“It was a very, very scary environment,” Ms. Alajroush said.
‘A Decade of Silence’
The harsh response from the state and society buried the issue of women driving.
“It
was a very heavy blow on the women who drove, and it was perceived by
the society as a very heavy blow,” said Ms. Alnahedh, the development
worker. “There was a decade of silence.”
The suspended women struggled to find work, with some choosing to pursue advanced degrees.
About two years later, a princess intervened with the king, who returned them to their jobs and paid some of their lost wages.
Many
of the 47 faded into private life, while others looked for ways to help
women at girls’ schools, women’s universities and in programs for
abused women and children.
Continue reading the main story
Slowly, society changed.
University
enrollment for both women and men rose, and in 2005, King Abdullah
created a scholarship program that sent hundreds of thousands of young
Saudis, including many women, abroad, broadening their perspectives.
He added women to the Shura Council, an advisory body, and social media spread among the kingdom’s youth, giving them freedom online that they lacked in real life.
The
internet eroded the monopoly Saudi clerics had on religious
interpretation, and many Saudis realized how differently Islam was
practiced in other countries.
The government allowed women to work in new jobs, making their daily commute an issue.
Younger activists started to revive the struggle to let women drive.
In 2011, Manal al-Sherif posted a video of herself driving online and was detained. In 2013, dozens of Saudi women drove to protest the ban.
In
2014, Loujain Hathloul tried to cross the border from the United Arab
Emirates into Saudi Arabia in her car and was jailed for 73 days.
Few of the women who had driven in 1990 joined the new protests, but they cheered the younger women.
“We
were very angry,” Ms. Alajroush, the photographer, said of Ms.
Hathloul’s detention. “But inside of me, I thought that was a big step
forward because finally we were taken seriously.”
‘Driving a Life’
In 2015, Salman became king, and he empowered his young son, Mohammed bin Salman, who is now crown prince.
As the price of oil sank, sapping the economy, the crown prince laid out a sweeping plan to reform the economy, including increasing women’s participation in the work force.
Other steps followed. Women voted and ran for seats on local councils in 2015 for the first time, and some won. Public schools were told to offer physical education for girls, which clerics had argued threatened their femininity.
Then
late last month, Ms. Alghanem, who had held the first meeting on the
driving ban in 1990, was playing cards when her phone suddenly began
overflowing with messages, she said.
Her husband called, shouting, “Congratulations!” and told her the ban was being lifted.
Ms. Alghanem — who had merely ridden along in 1990 and still cannot drive — now plans to learn.
“I must get a license and drive,” she said.
The
government has played down any role the women activists played in
prompting the decision, and some of the women say security officials
have told them in phone calls to keep quiet.
The Information Ministry denied such calls were being made.
Many
Saudis argue that the women exacerbated the issue by provoking the
conservatives. In the kingdom, they argue, rights are given by the
ruler, not publicly demanded by the people.
Continue reading the main story
“It
is natural that they are happy that they have been given their legal
right that they had demanded before,” Prince Abdulrahman bin Musaid, a
businessman, wrote on Twitter. But he called the idea that the women’s “struggle” had influenced the decision “a great fantasy.”
The women believe the government will not acknowledge them so as not to encourage other activists.
Many
restrictions on women remain, including so-called guardianship laws
that give Saudi men power over their female relatives on certain
matters. But the original protesters are overjoyed that their daughters
and granddaughters will have freer lives than they did, thanks to the
automobile.
“That
I am driving means that I know where I am going, when I’m coming back
and what I’m doing,” said Ms. Alaboudi, the social worker.
“It is not just driving a car,” she said, “it is driving a life.”
Correction: October 7, 2017
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified a Saudi woman who took to the road in 1990 to demand the right to drive. She is Meshael al-Bakr, not Fawziah, who is her sister.
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified a Saudi woman who took to the road in 1990 to demand the right to drive. She is Meshael al-Bakr, not Fawziah, who is her sister.
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