Despite government repression, women in Saudi Arabia are using the tools of the Twitter revolutions to stage their own protest against that country’s stringent bans on basic human freedoms for women.
Manal Al-Sharif, a 32-year-old computer security analyst for the state-run oil company and a single mother of a five-year-old son, remains in Dammam prison after being arrested on Saturday for “violating public order” after making and distributing a YouTube video of herself driving her own car.
The video was filmed last Thursday by Saudi feminist activist Wajeha al-Huwaider in the city of Khobar. Manal Al-Sharif’s brother, Muhammed Al-Sharif, was also in the car. After Al-Sharif’s arrest, the video was deleted by authorities, along with Facebook and Twitter accounts created by Al-Sharif to support a broader grassroots campaign against the driving ban. Her supporters have created new Facebook and Twitter sites.
Despite threats of violence, Al-Sharif and other Saudi women have proposed a mass decentralized act of civil disobedience on June 17 to defy the driving ban. According to a recent Tweet from the group Women2Drive, the status of the June 17 event is uncertain, but other Saudi women activists report that the movement is gaining traction.
The prohibition on women’s driving is not Saudi law but a fatwa from the country’s conservative religious leaders. Even so, say many moderate and progressive Muslims, the ban is a strong misreading of Islamic tradition, pointing to scriptural examples of women riding on donkey and horseback and comparing those forms of conveyance to the car. Maajid Nawaz, founder of the London-based anti-extremism think tank Quilliam, tweeted, “The Prophet Muhammad’s wife Aisha led an army on camel-back.” Others point out the economic injustice of a system that requires women to pay for a driver (at the cost of $300 a month) or else depend on the services of male relatives.
According to Amnesty International, the current fatwa was issued in response to a 1990 protest by Saudi women who drove their cars in a procession in Riyadh protesting what was then only a customary ban on women’s driving.
Last month, Saudi women also organized (again using Twitter as their platform) a civil disobedience challenge after the government reneged on its promise to permit their voting in municipal elections. Eleven women entered a voting center at an elementary school in Riyadh to demand ballots. “Think of us as your mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters,” they pleaded.
As a Mormon feminist, a woman from a conservative religious tradition, I am watching this Saudi women’s movement closely, following messages from hundreds of progressive Muslim women and men on Twitter, and doing it all with a lump in my throat.
