RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Almost five months after their bold crime, the women who dared to drive are still jobless and trapped in a country where they have suffered scorn and ridicule.
By driving a convoy of cars through the streets of Riyadh on Nov. 6, at a time when a world on the brink of war focused attention on Saudi Arabia, 49 Saudi women violated longstanding Islamic tradition to press demands for a limited agenda of equal rights and opportunity. It was an unprecedented challenge to authority that shattered the Saudi veneer of tranquil stability and rocked the nation to its core.
The women were quickly arrested. Many lost their jobs or scholarships to study abroad. They were prohibited from leaving the country, and, in some cases, the ban applied to their husbands, as well.
In the weeks that followed, they were denounced by religious leaders and their names and phone numbers were printed in widely circulated pamphlets that labeled them "fallen women" and communists. Their children were ridiculed in school. At the King Khaled mosque, one imam called for them to be beheaded.
"There is no name for what they have done to us," one of the women who participated said in an interview.
Today, bitter and disillusioned, the women feel they are still being punished. In a rare interview, two of the women agreed to talk to The Times on the condition that their real names and some identifying details be omitted. They say they fear further retribution.
The government of King Fahd contends that the illicit drivers violated the "sound Islamic attitude" that forms the basis for the Saudi way of life. Cracking down on the women was seen largely as a concession to outraged religious conservatives; by placating the powerful religious fundamentalists on the issue of the women, Fahd hoped to quiet them on the also controversial and more urgently crucial point of allowing foreign troops on Saudi sand.
Even among liberal intellectuals sympathetic to the women's cause, some felt the "drive-in" was wrong because it provoked a public confrontation at an inappropriate moment--a moment when the country faced war. Change in Saudi Arabia, some argued, must be gradual and slow.
Some Saudi observers believe the women will be forgiven and their status restored, in time. The two interviewed for this article, who will be called Mona and Layla, were not so sure.
"We sit tight and just wait and see," Mona said. "We are prisoners . . . in a different kind of jail."
