Let Women Drive, Says Saudi Princess

The most prominent princess in the Saudi royal family has said that her country should allow women to drive.

Princess Lolwah Al-Faisal, the daughter of King Faisal, who was assassinated in 1975, and the sister of the countrys Foreign Minister and Prince Turki al-Faisal, until recently the Saudi ambassador to Washington, made the remark at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Taking part in a session promoting religious tolerance, Princess al-Faisal, who helped found Saudi Arabias first private university for women, was asked what she would do if she was queen for a day.

"First thing, I’d let women drive," she said, to laughter and applause.

Saudi Arabia, ruled by a sprawling and authoritarian royal family, is the only country in the world in which women are forbidden to drive. Nearly half the kingdoms cars are owned by women but a workforce of around 1 million drivers, many of them immigrants from India and the rest of Asia, is needed to ferry them around.

The issue has become fused with wider questions about the rights of women in a society in which contact between women and men outside of their family is strictly regulated if not forbidden outright.

Driving is seen by conservative Islamists as a means by which lone women could be exposed to the attentions of strange men. Although the ban is strictly enforced in towns and cities, it is flouted in rural areas where women must learn to drive to have any mobility at all.

Princess al-Faisal is not the first member of the royal family to speak out against the driving ban, which was instituted by a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) in 1990. In 2005, Princess Adela, the daughter of King Abdullah told the pna-Arab al-Hayat newspaper that women should be allowed to drive and hold jobs on the Shura council, Saudi Arabias unelected advisory body.

Even King Abdullah has suggested that laws will be changed to women to drive and vote in the coming years. "In time, I believe it will be possible. And I believe patience is a virtue," he told American television in October 2005.

But efforts by campaigners to change the law, for instance by Mohammad al-Zulfa, a member of the Shura Council, have foundered against the kingdoms influential clerics and the conservative Interior Minister, Prince Nayef. Last October Prince Nayef said there was a chance that women will be allowed to vote in the next municipal elections, in 2009, but that the driving ban would stay in place for the forseeable future.

"Women have the right to own a car or anything else," he told al-Anbaa, an Arabic newspaper. "But driving a car in our desert regions, where distances are large between one district and another, would expose womens lives to danger, and this we cannot accept."

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