Manal al-Sharif is expected to spend the rest of this week in prison. Her crime? Driving a car in Saudi Arabia.
The arrest on Sunday puts a new and gloomy perspective on all that euphoria surrounding revolutions in the Middle East, doesn't it? Women may have taken to the streets from Egypt to Libya, Tunisia to Yemen, but in the richest and most powerful Arab state, their rights are frankly non-existent.
So great are their demands that some campaigners have criticised Sharif for diverting attention away from what really matters. Does it matter that women aren't allowed to drive if they can neither vote nor live independently in a country where men have automatic legal guardianship? The 32-year-old Sharif and other campaigners argue that without being able to drive women are entirely physically dependent on their male relatives. The issue is also a financial one – campaigners argue that women and their families need about $350 a month to hire one of the estimated 800,000 foreign drivers in the kingdom.
Sharif's stunt – she posted a YouTube clip of her driving a car which can still be seen here on al-Jazeera – was designed to garner support for a national protest on 16 June, when she hopes thousands of women will take on the authorities. Read on and comment » | Jane Martinson |Tuesday, May 24, 2011
