Hijabs and Hypocrisy: Saudi Arabia's New Driving Laws

One small step for Islam, or one giant leap for Saudi Arabia? This was the question that immediately came to mind last week when I heard the news that women can now legally drive in Saudi Arabia. I was setting up a market stall with my father, who regularly visits the Middle Eastern country. He simply shrugged; "The women don't care. It's politics".

I once visited the Saudi city of Makkah for Ramadan, and my memories of that trip are plagued with a Lynchian ambience I struggled to make sense of for years, until I made the connection: I didn't see any women. Women are erased from my memories of the trip, because the presence of women in public spaces is slowly subtracted the closer you get to Saudi Arabia. As you pass through terminals and airports, the women disappear and the hijabs, burkas and abayas increase. Femininity diminishes. No one even talks about women in Saudi Arabia, and not being able to physically see women disfigures them in your mind. In voiceless, faceless black garments, they become one homogenous foreign concept.

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kurt Gray presents a study about the nature of objectification. He suggests that the kind of objectification that occurs when men only see body shots of women as opposed to face shots, "might not lead to perceptions of women as inanimate objects but as different kinds of humans—ones that are capable of feeling but not thinking." Women in Saudi Arabia, where the chauvinistic male-dominated Wahhabi government rules, are often reduced to a kind of emotional caricature that lacks agency. And that is a lenient interpretation, given the recent scandal in which a Saudi Cleric declared that "women cannot drive because they have a quarter of a brain."

Where are these archaic ideas unfolding from? The Muslim women's movement is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam itself, are responsible for the suppression of women's rights. And in Saudi Arabia, those men are in government. Their ideology is devoid of any coherent Islamic rationale. Wahhabism is an ultra conservative Islamic doctrine that has spread with the petro dollar throughout the Middle East, and it ignores the fact that the Quran's most remarkable feature might be the way in which it explicitly presents women as equal to men. Scholars, of course, come up with new translations and interpretations.

So what do Muslim women think of Saudi's new law? My friend Farida grew up in a very conservative household. She wasn't allowed to go out after sunset, was banned from social media and never watched television. She also has to wear an abaya and isn't allowed to drive.

"As an adult in the West, it's really difficult trying to convince my parents about the essence of our religion," she tells me. And while it's easy to be cynical about the Saudi government's motives, Farida says letting women behind the wheel will change lives in Saudi Arabia and abroad.

"The problem [with being an immigrant] is that as these countries adopt modern views and values, our parents here are still stuck with the politics from the regimes they escaped. So when I tell them that women can now drive in Saudi, they can't use it as an excuse against us anymore. My dad will let me drive now. It's not a significant win for equality but it's an abstract win that might help conversations with older Muslims about how the world and our religion is changing."

Latifa is a Melbourne-based makeup artist. Since moving here from a strict upbringing in Iraq, she enjoys the freedoms of the West by denouncing the veil and offering makeup services for "sisters" who are struggling with the image that is often forced upon them by cultural tradition or misguided family members.

"It's really sad because a lot of these young girls are born here to stricter rules than my cousins have to go through in countries like Lebanon, Turkey or Morocco because their families are blindfolded by Wahhabi dogma. It's sad, they will never enjoy their religion because they will always remember their religion as a set of conditions and rules. I hope by allowing women to drive the world can expose how dated these man-made so called religious laws are."

I remember watching my mother when we got into the van at Riyadh airport. She automatically sat in the back; it was as if she had reverted back to her roots in Taliban-occupied Afghanistan and succumbed to the weight of a forceful ideology.

When I ask her what it felt like when she came to Australia and was told to sit up the front, or better yet drive her own car, she says: "Feels like you have the power for once," she says. "You're on the road and now people notice you."

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