Saudi women just won the right to drive.

By ARCHIT HOODA

Saudi Arabia’s extreme repression of women has long been illustrated by their prohibition from driving. Some women who have protested that restriction — or flouted it — have been harshly penalized or arrested.

Until 27th September,2017.

Late Tuesday night local time, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman issued a royal decree declaring that women will soon be allowed to apply for drivers’ licenses and drive legally.

The decree is a win for women, but it’s also a tactical win for the state. Refusing to allow women to drive has been a public relations disaster for the Saudis for years. Giving them the keys, they hope, will not only ease public international pressure but also give women the chance to contribute more to the economy.

Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam. The ban on women drivers has long been explained by various religious and absurd reasons, for example: a senior Saudi scholar said women in the country should not be allowed to drive because they have "a quarter the brainpower of men", but it is the only country in the world, of any religion, that had instituted such a ban.

The drivers’ licenses won’t be issued immediately — the decree explained that the rollout will take place in June 2018, after government ministries have had a chance to work out the details of implementation.

Of course, Saudi women will still be subjected to the repressive male guardianship system, which requires women to seek permission from a male relative (father, brother, husband, son) to do almost anything, from getting married to working outside the home to even basic freedom of movement within and outside the country. Saudi women were only given the right to vote in December 2015.

The news still urged criticism stating its ulterior motives, a Saudi Arabian academic has argued the decision to allow women to drive in the conservative kingdom is a PR stunt intended to deflect bad publicity. He argued King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was simply trying to avert attention away from his political failures.

She said: “To justify the detentions that took place only a week ago where almost 40 people were detained simply because they were activists and human rights professionals. In order to divert attention from this incident, we will find the women driving is now going to be headlines across the globe.”

But for some time now, there have been rumblings that this one particular form of repression might be eased. Last November, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal tweeted, “Stop the debate ... time for women to drive.”

The tweet was accompanied by a link to a longer argument posted to his website in which he mapped out the monetary benefit of letting women drive. Not allowing women to drive, he explained, has created a fully paid chauffeur class composed of thousands of (largely foreign-born) drivers taking up funds that might otherwise be funneled into the Saudi economy.

The historic victory has been celebrated by campaigners in the kingdom. Manal al-Sharif, one of the women behind the Women2Drive campaign, hailed the decision by posting a photo on Twitter of herself behind the wheel of a car.