Step on it to improve Saudi women’s rights

Allowing women in Saudi Arabia to drive is a move in the right direction.

The fiercely Islamic country’s King Abdullah revoked a sentence of 10 lashes to a female driver this week, as part of an apparent new wave of women’s freedoms.

Although this year’s municipal elections were reserved only for men, women will be able to vote and even stand in elections in four years time.

But the ban on women driving is still in force, provoking the June’s Women2Drive campaign, which saw a group of women take to their cars in defiance.

And despite the King’s reprieve in the case of Shaima Jastaina, all those arrested during the protest were apparently warned not to drive again.

The country’s guardianship laws are also still in place, meaning no women can participate in public life without the permission of a male relative.

So say you just want to nip out to get some bread, better check with your husband.

Or you decide to sign up at the local university to improve your education, only if your father will allow it.

This hard line approach to treating women as second-class citizens only serves to highlight the religious right’s own weaknesses.

Take the views of 25-year-old Nawwaf, the Saudi man interviewed by Radio 4’s World at One programme, who believes allowing women to drive will cause them to suddenly abandon their whole belief system.

Talking to the show, he said: “I think women driving is the key to a lot of things. In Western countries, 100 years ago women's clothes were different but now you can see they are a little bit naked.

“If you start now to let women drive, let them go wherever they want, let them do whatever they want, we will be in the same position some day.”

Forgetting the fact that women should be free to do whatever they want regardless of their religion, I’m sure those women following the rule of Islam would be astonished to hear of such a lack of faith.

Women’s rights and Islam do not have to be an oxymoron.

Commenting on the new vote for women, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director Philip Luther, said: “The whole system of women’s subordination to men in Saudi Arabia needs to be dismantled.

 “We can only hope that this announcement on voting will be the first in a long line of reforms that guarantee Saudi women the rights that they have been demanding for so long.”

Better step on it then.