Driving Ban on Women to be Lifted in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia announced Tuesday that women will be able to legally drive starting next year, moving to shatter a longtime taboo seen as a repressive treatment of women in the conservative kingdom,

The royal decree lifting the ban on women driving, is one of a number of measures pushed by the conservative kingdom’s reform-minded young crown prince, who has pledged to revisit some of the kingdom’s most controversial strictures on women and their place in society.

The move triggered a joyous outpouring on social media from women’s activists and their supporters in the kingdom and around the world, with many using the hashtag #women2drive.

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“The rain begins with a single drop,”

Tweeted Manal Sharif, a Saudi author and professor who was arrested for driving in 2011.

For Saudi women, many of whom are highly educated, the driving ban has for long decades dented dignity, thwarted professional aspirations and rendered the most ordinary of daily activities — getting to work, socializing, running errands — an expensive and frustrating ordeal.

Over the years, female activists who defiantly took the wheel faced vilification by clerics, lost prominent positions and endured sustained harassment by authorities.

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“We have been calling for this, and lobbying for this, and expecting this, any day and any year,”

Maha Akeel, a 46-year-old writer from the Red Sea port city of Jidda, said in a telephone interview.

“This gives women more independence and confidence, and empowers women to know that they can manage their daily life.”

The Saudi government announced that a royal decree from King Salman had declared that driver’s licenses would be issued to women beginning in June 2018.

LA TIMES reports that a panel would be formed to look into how to implement the order, with a report to be submitted in 30 days. The eight-month delay will allow the government to create what it described as needed infrastructure for dealing with women on the road, including the hiring of additional female police officers as well as driving instructors.

One Saudi news report said driving women’s driving schools would be opened in the capital, Riyadh, and in Jidda, but did not say when.

Saudi Arabia practices a strict form of Islam, and ultraconservative clerics see women behind the wheel as a gateway to dissolute behavior. In the past, the ban has been justified with “health reasons,” with one cleric declaring it would result in childbearing problems or infertility.

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In Washington, the State Department hailed the news. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, sounding genuinely excited:

“We are happy! We are happy to hear that!

It’s a great step in the right direction.”

Loujain Hathloul, an activist who was detained for more than two months in 2014 for defying the ban, and who was briefly arrested again this year, took to her widely followed Twitter account to express her joy in a heartfelt manner, but in keeping with cultural norms.

“Al hamdu l’illeh,” she tweeted. “Praise God.”