Mick Hartley

From Arab News:

A well-regarded Saudi religious scholar said that there is nothing in Islamic law that bans women from driving and that the fatwas issued in this regard are based on individual judgments.

“In principle women driving is permitted in Islam,” said Sheikh Abdul Mohsen Al-Obaikan, a member of the Kingdom’s Council of Senior Islamic Scholars.

The ban, he said, has to do with the social complications rather than the act itself. As an example, the sheikh referred to a fatwa from former Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Bin-Baz that said it is permitted for women in rural areas to drive cars, but that they should be forbidden from driving in the cities where, as Al-Obaikan said, “youths (even) harass women accompanied by parents and drivers”.

He said if certain issues are resolved, such as the problem of men’s behavior and traffic safety, then he sees no religiously motivated conflict with women driving.

Sadly the Prophet left no explicit instructions on the matter, so the clerics must do their best to interpret Islamic scholarship for the modern age. One wishes them well in their attempts to resolve the problems of men’s behavior and traffic safety. Perhaps they might consider how these obstacles have been overcome elsewhere: there are, I believe, a number of other countries where the radical step of allowing women to drive has already been taken. How are they managing, I wonder?