Women Drivers Banned by Saudis as ‘Portents of Evil’

Facing mounting demands from religious conservatives, the Saudi government has announced that women who drive automobiles in the kingdom are “portents of evil” and will be subject to “appropriate punishment.”

“Women’s driving of cars contradicts the sound Islamic attitude of the Saudi citizen, who is jealous about his sacred ideals,” the Saudi Ministry of Interior said in announcing the kingdom’s first legal ban on women driving.

Although strict Islamic tradition has for years prevented Saudi women from obtaining driver’s licenses, until the ruling announced Tuesday night there had been no law on the books providing sanctions against women who drive.

The ruling followed a storm of religious protest over a demonstration last week in which 50 black-cloaked women drove a convoy of 15 cars through the streets of Saudi Arabia’s conservative capital city, Riyadh.

In the days since the Nov. 6 “drive-in,” several of the women who participated have been suspended from government jobs, and others have received threatening phone calls. Religious leaders at the mosques have linked the driving demonstration to the presence of foreign military troops in the kingdom, and leaflets handed out by Islamic activists listed the women’s names and identified many of them as “communists,” “secularists” and “American agents.”

“Do whatever you think is appropriate under the circumstances,” the pamphlet suggested in what Saudi government officials and Western diplomats have regarded as an ominous warning of more turbulence to come.

“It’s serious. It’s bad. And it’s not over yet,” said one Western diplomat in Riyadh.

The new government ruling is widely regarded as a concession to religious conservatives in the hope of offsetting any more politically troublesome protests against the presence of foreign troops in Saudi Arabia.

“They’re throwing them a piece of meat,” said one angry young Saudi woman of the government’s decision to clamp down on women’s rights to prevent further political unrest.

The uproar comes at a time when Saudi women are seeing U.S. servicewomen driving military vehicles in the kingdom, while a number of women refugees from Kuwait, where driving is permissible for women, have driven their own cars into Saudi Arabia. A U.S. military spokesman said Wednesday that the new ban will not apply to American servicewomen.

The Saudi demonstrators said they were not trying to emulate Americans but were worried that with the threat of war at hand, they might need their cars to protect their families.

“It produces feelings of insecurity, knowing you may have to run and you can’t use your car,” said one woman.

A news release distributed this week and signed only by “a proud Saudi woman” complained that women who participated in the demonstration have been subject to harassment and threats. “Women espousing driving are being publicly attacked and humiliated through slanderous denunciations,” according to the release.

Hundreds of university students in Riyadh signed petitions last weekend saying they did not want to be taught by teachers who had participated in the demonstration, reportedly prompting a scuffle between proponents of driving and the circulators of the petition.

“They had a confrontation, and they started pulling each others’ hair,” said one woman familiar with the fracas. “Women remain women, no matter what. Just give them a chance, and they go for the hair.”

A variety of Saudi professional women who strongly support driving rights for women have complained that those who led last week’s demonstration set the cause back by sparking a public confrontation on the issue.

“This is the wrong timing. We are already involved in some major decisions. Not only locally, but the whole Arab world is split over some of these decisions,” said one Dhahran businesswoman. “It’s a society in a lot of transition with a lot of hesitation and disagreement in it, and by doing something like this, you’re putting the authorities’ backs to the wall.

“I think now the issue has been pushed totally off the burner, at least for the foreseeable future,” she added.

Another Eastern Province businesswoman said government authorities had appeared ready to permit women to drive if the change had come gradually--the way most changes come in the kingdom, she said.

“At the beginning, when women started working in government jobs, or the first girls’ schools, there were so many people against it,” she added. “ . . . Now it’s the other way around. Those who do not send their girls to school are looked down on.”

Immediately after the demonstration, a committee of legal and religious scholars concluded that no religious or civil laws had been violated. But the Interior Ministry, in announcing the ban on Tuesday, cited a ruling from Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, Sheik Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah ibn Baz, who with a council of religious scholars ruled on “the inadmissibility of women driving cars and the necessity of meting out deterrent and appropriate punishment to whoever commits this act again.”

The announcement did not spell out what penalties would be imposed on those who defy the ban.