Coleman: Driving change in Saudi Arabia

Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "Paradise Beneath Her Feet: How Women Are Transforming the Middle East." This is from The Washington Post.

This month's driving protest by Saudi women, despite significant hype and international coverage, was a far cry from the massive demonstrations that have rocked other Arab countries this revolutionary season. Only a few dozen women got behind the wheel, roughly the same number as during the last public driving protest, 20 years ago.

The government looks at the numbers and maintains that women's rights are simply not a big deal to most Saudis. The party line remains the same as King Abdullah expressed to Barbara Walters in a 2005 interview: "I cannot do something that is unacceptable in the eyes of my people."

The problem for him is that many of his people have been looking at YouTube, where the protest is amplified over and over. There, videos posted by protesters show that the world is not upended when women are in the driver's seat. In many of the videos, husbands, fathers and brothers sit in the passenger seat, beaming proudly.

Restrictions on women are not going to melt away. More likely, a growing middle-class acceptance of women's rights will exacerbate the long-simmering tensions between tradition and modernity, between fundamentalist and moderate Islam, that have gripped Saudi society for decades.

Twenty years ago, the first group of intrepid women who drove around Riyadh were roundly denounced in the media. Those working in the public sector were fired by royal decree. Religious authorities quickly issued fatwas formally banning women from driving, saying it contradicts Islam by degrading women's dignity.

This time, Manal al-Sharif, the woman arrested in May for posting videos of herself driving, was quickly lauded as the "Rosa Parks of Saudi Arabia." Her Facebook group, Women2Drive, had more than 20,000 members within a few weeks.

But Saudi critics have mocked the campaign and disparaged its leaders. A dueling Facebook site urged men to beat women if they dared to drive. The site was taken off Facebook for inciting violence, but not before thousands "liked" it.

Some Saudi women have also spoken out against driving and, indeed, any expansion of women's rights. Rawdah Al-Yousif, the Phyllis Schlafly of Saudi Arabia, argues that Islamic law and Saudi customs mandate the rules that require women to have a guardian's permission to do many essential activities, including traveling, studying, seeking employment and getting health care.

Yet several prominent men have urged that women be allowed to drive, and some outspoken members of the advisory Shura Council have criticized the driving ban in economic terms. They decry the need to import nearly 1 million foreign chauffeurs, who send home more than $4 billion in annual remittances, as a drain on the Saudi economy. Important business leaders have stressed the inefficiencies caused by the ban and the embarrassment on the international stage.

Even some moderate Islamic scholars say there is no religious justification for preventing women from driving.

One battle to repress women has already been lost. In the early 1960s, clerics strenuously fought girls' education, arguing that it would start the country down a slippery slope from which there was no return. They were right. Today, some 60 percent of Saudi college graduates are women, and increasingly they clamor for more than the 5 percent of jobs they hold.

The female leaders who fought for those opportunities often said the driving debate was a distraction from their larger concerns. But recent events seem to have changed some minds. Saudi journalist and activist Sabria Jawhar says that while she used to think that the endless driving debate was trivial, now "the driving ban . . . could very well be the centerpiece of our struggle to obtain rights long denied us."

She is right. The clerical establishment will not roll over on this issue or on any others pertaining to women's rights. So Saudi women -- and men -- will have to fight for them, and force the royals to choose sides. The kingdom's octogenarian rulers have aligned with the clerics. The big question is: What decision will the country's next generation of rulers make?