Baby you can drive your car!

Wednesday October 5, 2011

Rania Hafez celebrates the freedom and pleasure of driving

The battle for freedom has taken a new turn – of the steering wheel. Women in Saudi Arabia are joining the Arab Spring by taking to their husbands’ cars. It is illegal for women in Saudi Arabia to drive or own a car (having a driving license is a prerequisite to owning a car). But, on 17 June, a handful of Saudi women in Jeddah, Saudi’s second city, defied the country’s ban on women diving as part of the Women2Drive campaign. The women and their husbands were arrested and questioned, and recently one woman received the sentence of 10 lashes which was promptly ‘cancelled’ by King Abdullah.

But the story is not just about women wanting to drive. The women’s protest action, the court ruling and the King’s decision are part of the struggle for freedom in the Kingdom. The King, who genuinely seems willing to introduce more democracy and widen suffrage, finds himself in direct conflict with the religious hardliners who want to maintain the status quo. It is unlikely the latter will succeed as easily as they did in the past. The genie of freedom is out of the bottle and into the driving seat!

That the car finds itself once more a symbol of liberty and democracy may shock the car hating, carbon reduction obsessed, environmental fundamentalists. Their condemnation of motoring has made us forget that when Ford made the first mass-produced affordable car, driving became a symbol of a new found freedom for everyone to go beyond their restricted horizons and discover the world.

For women in particular cars and driving were a way to assert their independence and freedom from the start. Victorian ideas about the incapacity and fragility of women that led to them being denied the vote also saw them being deemed incapable of operating a car. They were held not to be rational or logical enough. A view that many still hold in Saudi, where the more backward see women driving as a step too far from the control of men that will lead to immorality.

Even in Britain there is a growing view of drivers as incapable of making rational judgements and too dangerous to be in charge of technology. That is why in the current debate over raising the speed limit on British motorways to 80mph, images are conjured up of mad speeding drivers leaving carnage in their wake. Admitting to enjoying driving these days has become almost as guilt ridden as admitting to planning a murder!

I love driving and make no apologies for my passion. The freedom to drive is a social and personal freedom; a freedom that comes from the beauty and power of the car – the sleekness of its chassis, the intricacies of its engine, and the sheer pleasure of putting your foot down and feeling that surge of machine power giving you the freedom to go wherever you want, whenever you want to. That freedom is what a few determined Saudi women risked the lash for and reminded us of.

Rania Hafez is Director of the professional network Muslim Women in Education