Saudi Arabia’s women face backlash after driving begins
BEIRUT — From the very first day 31-yearold Salma Barakati got behind the wheel of her car after Saudi Arabia lifted the ban on women driving, the men in her village near Mecca would gather around her and unleash a torrent of insults.
The insults soon turned to threats. Then, less than 10 days after women were allowed to drive, a neighbor woke up Barakati in the middle of the night: Her car was on fire.
“The men of the neighborhood burned the car because they are all against (women) driving, they don’t agree with it,” she said in a video shared on Twitter, her voice shaking as flames engulfed her vehicle.
“Save me from them, take back my rights from them,” she pleads with King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, thought to be the primary force behind a modernization drive that included the ban’s overturn.
Despite months of an intensely orchestrated feel-good campaign by the government, the smoldering remains of Barakati’s car offered the starkest illustration that not all are on board with women in the driver’s seat. Grumbling about the ban also hints at the resistance facing Salman and his son as they upend decades-old social mores and bring changes to Saudi society that much of the world has long taken for granted.
It was last September when the government decreed it would allow women to drive, reversing a policy in place since 1957 and which had become a potent symbol of women’s oppression in the kingdom.
That Riyadh was eager to reap a public relations win from the decree was clear from the preparations around the announcement: a reading of the decree on live television was accompanied by a lavish media event in Washington. It was reported to have used Cambridge Analytica, the British firm notorious for social media manipulation, to massage the blow to the country’s ultraconservatives.
Car companies, eager for new customers, quickly joined in with a raft of ads. Some featured abaya-clad women walking in a desert, their robes flowing in the dusk breeze as they look into the distance. Others urged women to “dare greatly” or assured them “the road is yours.”
But the reversal, which took effect June 24, flies against years of cultural and religious justifications trotted out by the country’s religious clerics. Allowing women to drive, they declared, would invite promiscuity. One cleric insisted driving could damage women’s ovaries, while another justified the ban on the grounds that women possessed only half a brain — and half of that was used for shopping, he claimed.
Despite the government stripping religious authorities of much of their power this year — a move that included rounding up 30 high-profile clerics — those attitudes lingered.
A YouGov survey conducted before the ban was lifted found that nearly a quarter of Saudis opposed its reversal. A video posted on Twitter featured a man swearing he would burn a woman and her car if it broke down. Others tweeted under the hashtag “You will not drive,” suggested creating a women-only lane so they could crash into one another.
Although the driving ban was lifted, the kingdom has far from abandoned tradition and the government maintains strict control on life in the kingdom. Riyadh continues in what the rights group Amnesty International called “an unrelenting crackdown” that has ensnared activists who for decades had fought for the right to drive.
On Wednesday, Amnesty International reported the arrest of human rights activists Samar Badawi and Nassima Sada.
“These brave women represented the last vestiges of the human rights community in the country, and now they too have been detained,” said Lynn Maalouf, the group’s Middle East research director in a statement. The grounds for their arrest are unclear.