The religious police in Saudi Arabia arrested five women on Tuesday for driving in defiance of a ban on women getting behind the wheel in the conservative kingdom, according to activists and local media reports.
Saudi Women for Driving, an informal coalition of leading Saudi women’s rights activists, bloggers and academics, said in a statement that the women were arrested in Jidda, Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city.
“If Saudi police think arresting women drivers is going to stop what has already become the largest women’s rights movement in Saudi history, they are sorely mistaken,” the coalition said in a statement released by Change.org, a Web site where members can create and promote online petitions for social change. “On the contrary, these arrests will encourage more women to get behind the wheel in direct defiance of this ridiculous abuse of our most basic human rights.”
The coalition said that the religious police arrested four of the women when they were driving in the Dorat al Arous neighborhood in Jidda, a port city along the Red Sea. The four, ages 21 and 22 and riding in one car, were taken to a police station, where they signed a pledge not to drive again, the group’s report said. A fifth woman was arrested later Tuesday night while driving in the neighborhood of Suleimaniyah.
Eman Al Nafjan, a Saudi blogger and a member in the coalition, said that all the women have been released. “This will not scare us,” she said.
Sabq, a Saudi news Web site, reported one of the women was arrested after residents told the police about an unveiled woman driving a car. The Web site said that the woman was driving with her brother and that they were both taken into custody.
On June 17, a group of Saudi women launched a nationwide right-to-drive campaign, in which 42 women took to the road. They said their campaign was inspired by uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, where street protests toppled the authoritarian governments of Hosni Mubarak and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of the United States and female leaders in Europe announced support for the right-to-drive campaign.
The campaign came a month after Manal Al-Sharif, a Saudi mother, was arrested for driving her car in late May.
The arrests Tuesday were the first to be reported in the oil-rich kingdom since the campaign began.
Saudi Arabian law does not forbid women from driving, but a religious fatwa dictates that Saudi women must be driven by male drivers or male family members.
Women in the kingdom live under many restrictions. They must also have written permission from a male guardian — a father, son, husband or brother — to leave the country, work or undergo a medical operation.
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