A Saudi Arabian cleric has declared that women who drive run the risk of damaging their ovaries and bearing children with clinical problems. The comments, made by Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Luhaydan, a consultant to the Gulf Psychological Association, came amidst a campaign to end the conservative Kingdom’s practice of issuing driving licenses exclusively to males.
Activists are calling for women to defy the licensing policy en masse by driving in protest on October 26. In addition, they have launched an online petition to garner support for the protest. At press time, the petition had been signed by over 12,000 people even though it was blocked inside the Kingdom on Sunday.
Luhaydan made the comments during an interview on the Saudi website sabq.org., in which he provided no medical studies to support his comments “If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards,” the sheikh said. “That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees.”
In 2011, a report issued by Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, the Kingdom’s highest religious council, said that women driving would result in there being “no more virgins” left in the country in 10 years time. The report continued to say that women driving would “provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce,” as evidenced by the “moral decline” found in Muslim countries where women were allowed to drive.
Last week, Reuters reported that the head of Saudi’s morality police, Sheikh Abdulatif Al al-Sheikh, said that women are not forbidden to drive according to Islamic Sharia law. Al-Sheikh, a religious scholar, was named by King Abdullah last year as head of the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.”
Since he took the post, al-Sheikh said his police were not arresting women for driving.
The ban against women driving, based solely on custom in the conservative Kingdom, has resulted in a number of arrests in the past with sentences of lashes for charges, among others, of creating a public disturbance. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that bans women from driving.
Reuters reports that Saudi Arabia’s morality police was established informally in the 1930s “to enforce public morals according to the strict interpretation of sharia in the kingdom’s official Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam.” The force now functions as an official governmental body. – The Clarion Project, 1 October 2013
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