It’s amazing how many parts of my life I take for granted on a daily basis.

My wife and I lived in Saudi Arabia for more than 20 years. She drove there for 16 years!

What casual observers here do not realize is that many expatriate and Saudi women drive in Saudi Arabia legally! And on the compounds where Saudi women can drive, a large percentage do not, simply because they hire drivers not only drive for them, they do the grocery shopping, baby-sit and often even do the cooking!

Our compound had approximately 15,000 residents. There were approximately 5,000 women driving, and a majority of the accidents were women. And, if a woman had an accident with a man, the man was always wrong.

Driving anywhere in Saudi is a thrill, because hundreds of thousands of male Third World nationals employed there are driving without licenses and never drove until they moved there to work. If women drivers, many of whom wear vision-obscuring veils, could drive, driving conditions would even be worse. Women in Saudi Arabia believe they have the right-of-way—they take advantage of men, cut them off in traffic, run red lights, etc.

Many Saudi women asked my wife, “Why does your husband MAKE you drive? Can’t he afford to hire a driver like we do?”

Several articles I wrote for a Saudi newspaper and magazines about living in Saudi Arabia and our initial encounters are featured on my website.

>> What casual observers here do not realize is that many expatriate and Saudi women drive in Saudi Arabia legally! <<

That is total rubbish. I am writing this in April 2008 from Jeddah. Dave Kaiser gives the wrong impression, perhaps because he was living in the cultural bubble of an enormous Western compound. It sounds like he might be talking about a sprawling Saudi Aramco compound. Indeed, people rich enough (or who have been given the most premium of residential benefits as skilled Western workers) live in these enormous bubbles, with grocery stores, gyms, pools, all the amenities for a complete life inside the walls of a “Green Zone”-like environment (without the barrage of mortar fire, of course). These people often describe a Saudi Arabia that is not exactly the most accurate picture. The interactions that these “Compound People” have with Saudis are often with liberal or Westernized Arabs. Women might be able to drive around in and around these compounds – outside of these compounds only if they’re foreign, and still with the risk of being stopped by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which recently arrested a American woman for having coffee at Starbucks in cosmopolitan Riyadh with an unrelated man – where she was detained, forced to sign a confession, and strip searched in the local prison. It took hours for her to get out, and only because her husband was a wealthy Saudi (they’re actually both very nice people) and pulled strings to get her out.

No. Women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia. There are reported cases in the rural, sparcely populated areas of indigenous women driving trucks to and from their rural homes. In the Southeast of the Kingdom – in the Abha region – the women are the merchants, and some of them drive. But as far as the overwhelming majority of women in the Kingdom: no way.

A little anecdote: I live outide of any compound in Jeddah. I work with Saudi women. One night I went out with a group and afterwards the guy who was driving went to the bathroom. I went with my Saudi woman friend and joked: “Hey why don’t you get into the driver’s side and pretend like you’re about to drive off.” She though it would be funny, so we did. Nothing terrible happened, but about 25 men who were sitting in the patio of the café were gawking. I could tell my Saudi woman friend was getting nervous.

And I guarantee you had she driven off we probably would have made it to the next police checkpoint (there are lots of them Saudis larger cities) before the police would have caught us, arrested me and detained her to be picked up by her parents (if not also arrested for the crime of “khulwa”,or “illegal seclusion with an unrelated man”).

It’s not peaches and cream and I hate when “Compound People” reply to stories like this because they don’t have much genuine contact with the culture.

There are a lot of misunderstandings by Americans of Saudi culture, to say the least, and I don’t engage in “Saudi bashing” even if there are some things that are seriously wrong here. But at the same time I would never try to be an apologist for women’s issues that the country is dealing with.

There is a lot of bad information in US media stories about Saudi Arabia. And I warn all people who read stories about Saudi Arabia in the US media to take everything with a grains of salt.

But this also includes comments by Compound People who “overcompensate” for the misunderstandings and misinformation by sounding like apologists who say: “hey, it’s not that bad.” There are some serious issues in Saudi Arabia. And, in fact, the women’s driving thing is the most superficial of them all. I forgive the author of this story because it is, after all, a car-related website

See, this is completely FASCINATING!  Thanks for the perspectives on living in Saudi Arabia.

Assalam Alaikum Warahmotu Lillah Rahmon Rohim

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