Saudi Women Drivers See Progress

Updated Oct. 27, 2013 9:38 p.m. ETRIYADH, Saudi Arabia—A day after dozens of Saudi women challenged the government by driving, the nation watched Sunday to see whether their defiance would be met with arrests or an easing of the country’s broad restrictions on women.
Advocates declared the day of driving a success as more videos appeared online of women who followed the campaign’s call to go out and drive, despite a markedly increased weekend presence of police patrols and police roadblocks in the capital, Riyadh. Saudi newspapers, which tend to follow the government line, either ignored the campaign or called it a failure.
That contrasts with the official response to two previous women-driving campaigns, in 1990 and 2011, when clerics publicly called the drivers prostitutes, and drivers and their families suffered firings and travel bans.
There was no immediate official comment after the day of driving from the Saudi government, and the Interior Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, where political parties, unauthorized civil organizations and all protests are banned. While a large number of women here cover their hair and bodies by choice, religious police ensure that all Saudi women do.
Some of the initial responses Sunday underscored the fine but all-important line in Saudi Arabia between being seen as petitioning King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud for change, and being seen as demanding it.
YouTube videos such as one showing a smiling and only lightly veiled young woman driving, as she was filmed by her father, grated even some supporters of women’s driving, argued Ahmed Alibrahim, an adviser to some of Saudi Arabia’s royals and officials.
So did the international news coverage of Saudi woman’s challenge of the government driving ban, Mr. Alibrahim asserted in an interview Sunday. “If you have an argument in your house, don’t bring attention to it. Don’t put yourself on YouTube, and tell it to every radio channel,” Mr. Alibrahim said. “You have to do it quietly. You don’t put it on CNN.”
Campaigners said more than 100 Saudi women drove Saturday and in the weeks leading up to the grassroots-organized day of driving. Police briefly detained at least a half-dozen women drivers on Saturday and required them to sign pledges not to drive again.
While no law specifically forbids women to drive, the government doesn’t give driver’s licenses to them, making it the only government in the world to effectively ban female drivers.
In Riyadh, psychotherapist Madeha al Ajroush, a self-confessed repeat female motorist, gave up on driving Saturday after failing to shake off men in plainclothes and civilian cars who followed her and another advocate. In the previous campaigns, Ms. Ajroush said she immediately lost her job for taking part.
Most of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent rights activists have been charged or imprisoned in a gradual crackdown since 2011, moved abroad or have been silenced by signing pledges to cease their activism. While no woman has been given a long-term prison sentence for driving, the threat of prison or other punishment hangs over them.
At one point during Saturday’s campaign, Ms. Ajroush crept on to her balcony with a camera to photograph a white car with tinted windows that she suspected contained state security agents watching her house.
Downstairs in her living room, a colleague compiled videos women had recorded of themselves driving. Another switched back and forth from Skype to cellphone, giving interviews on driving to journalists calling from around the world in French, British and American accents.
Sara Haidar, the 32-year-old daughter of one of the driving activists, sat in the middle of the action and marveled. “When you think of the whole planet, we’re the only country” where the government forbids women to drive, Ms. Haidar said, arching her arms over her head in an imaginary globe. “What’s the big deal?”
The most conservative Saudis depict allowing women’s driving as opening the way for women’s liberation and licentiousness, and ending the traditional and tribal way of life here.
King Abdullah said in a 2005 interview with Barbara Walters that Saudi women would drive one day. The king, who is about 90, has introduced the kingdom’s first few coeducational universities and eased a few of the gender restrictions limiting women’s employment.
However, the public and government response was softer in 2011 than in 1990, and so far softer this time than the previous two. “The advocates are just approaching a war of attrition” where “little by little, they wear down the conservatives,” said Fahad Nazer, a Saudi political analyst in Washington, D.C.
The Saudi king “wants to do it slowly, slowly,” said Mr. Alibrahim, the government adviser in Riyadh.
Advocates argue that with just three active driving campaigns in 23 years, they are going slowly indeed.
When she first started protesting the driving ban in 1990, Ms. Ajroush said, “I didn’t think it would take that long” to get it lifted.
Now, she said, “I cannot predict.”
Write to Ellen Knickmeyer at ellen.knickmeyer@dowjones.com

Read more: Saudi Women Drivers See Progress