[/caption]Ernest Dempsey - Perhaps for the first time in history, women in Saudi Arabia are taking fundamentalist oppression seriously as a real threat to their rights. That’s how we come to see the recent call for allowing women to drive in Saudi Arabia in a time when the Middle East itself, and its women, cry out for their freedoms, in a defiant fashion not unlike what occurred in other regions of the world, including the United States.
The petition at Change.org asking Subaru to pull out of Saudi Arabia until women in the country are allowed to drive a car is the example of Saudi women’s determination of changing, irrational winds of blowing in their faces in this "Arab spring" season of discontent.
The spirit of defiance was stirred in Saudi women by a daring 32-year-old Saudi lady Manal al-Sharif who was imprisoned for driving a car in Saudi Arabia twice and was subsequently arrested for and charged with disturbing public order as well as inciting public opinion. No wonder that in a dictatorial regime, public opinion is the last thing the authorities want to see coming alive. But al-Sharif did it in all the spirit of human freedom. Even when she remains in prison, she has refused to cry and break down, not at least until the ruling Saudi king is holding the throne. What kindled the spirit of freedom in the “Rosa Parks of Saudi Arabia” as she is being called now? How is her behavior like that of other women martyrs in the fight for democracy and freedom for all citizens?
It’s the urge to fight for life as something to be truly livable for oneself and others. One night, al-Sharif failed to get a cab in the street and no one came to drive her home, despite calling on a few relatives, while her five-year-old son was waiting for her at their home. Worse yet, she was harassed by men in cars passing by her in the street. She couldn’t forget the traumatic experience as she walked ahead in the street, crying like a frightened child. But that was that! The oppressed woman and depressed mother had to die and instead give birth to a new Manal al-Sharif – a confident woman who would learn to drive and travel in a car even if the barbarian law didn’t allow it. Not to people’s shocking surprise (they knew it all happens in Saudi Arabia), she was arrested and is now in a government prison. But she is not alone in her quest for freedom from oppression. Others have joined her.
Earlier this month, Saudi women wrote an open letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to press the Saudi government for letting women drive cars in the country. The letter read “now is the time for US leaders to show their support for Saudi women's rights… to show its muscle and make that pressure public.” With international media’s coverage and support from human rights and women’s rights organizations, this budding movement of Saudi women to win the right to drive (read ‘live like a human’), something Islamic traditions (not the self-proclaimed Wahabi version of Saudi Arabia) don’t forbid, has emerged as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise dystopic country ruled by barbaric ideals.
Change.org already has won over 200 campaigns in 2011. This one is crucial to tell—no show—the Saudi dictatorial regime that women are humans and that two and two women don’t always make a man; they make a movement. Rosa Parks, the heroine of the civil rights movement, refused to back down against the powers of the South's discrimination in transportation and would not move from her seat on the bus. Susan B. Anthony's efforts at winning women's right to vote in the United States was hard won, as men, and even other women, assaulted early attempts at this emancipation. The history of America reveals how a "Rosa Parks of Arabia" might make a difference in a culture that propels it even more forward. The problem is that these pioneers often suffer along the way.
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