Women In Saudi Arabia- Can Drive, Can't Speak Out

Saudi Arabian women may now be enjoying new rights, but speaking out against injustices or being critical of the establishment is still not acceptable

- Soni Mishra

For 30-year-old Ibtehal Al Shareef, mobility equals freedom. The schoolteach-er-turned-photographer from Jeddah remembers the time when she had to depend on cabs or on her father or brother to ferry her to the workplace and back. She had got her driver’s licence while the family lived in Dubai, but could not get behind the wheel in her home country because of a ban on women driving.

And, then came the moment of liberation. “I felt unshackled, liberated,” said Al Shareef, recalling the time when she steered the family car out of the garage and onto the wide roads of Jeddah. “There were so many other women drivers on the roads. It was freedom at midnight.”

It was at the stroke of midnight on June 24, 2018, that the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia came to an end. There was celebration and jubilation as scores of women burned rubber across major cities. The occasion even saw Princess Hayfa bint Abdullah Al Saud, daughter of the late king Abdullah, appear on the cover of Vogue magazine, in the driver’s seat of a red convertible, glamourously attired in a fashionable abaya, complete with black leather gloves and high heels.

The driving ban was repealed through a royal decree in September 2017, and the first driver’s licences were issued to women in the first week of June 2018, most of them in exchange for driving permits procured in other countries. The lifting of the driving ban is perhaps the biggest sign of the dramatic change that is currently under way in the kingdom in terms of empowerment of women. “It will bring more women into the work force. It will contribute to their feeling of independence and empower them,” said Al Shareef.