Petition urges Saudi king to let women drive - Women

RIYADH -- Saudi women activists plan to send a petition to King Abdullah Sunday urging him to lift a controversial ban on women driving in the ultraconservative kingdom.

The petition, to be sent as the Gulf nation wraps up National Day celebrations, bears the signatures of more than 1,100 Saudi men and women, campaigner Fawzia Al Oyouni said.

"The time has come to give women their natural right to drive a car, a right denied for purely social, and unjustified, reasons," the petition says.

Allowing women to get behind the wheel "in accordance with laws and controls to be set by ... the Shura [consultative] Council and the pertinent government parties has become a necessity at this stage," it says.

The petition stresses that Islam does not put constraints on women such as the driving ban and points out that women already "drive in villages and remote rural areas ... as do women inside some big residential compounds although there are public means of transport available there."

Women in the oil-rich Gulf desert kingdom are forced to cover from head to toe in public, and cannot travel without written permission from their male guardian.

The petition is the brainchild of Oyouni and three other activists - Wajiha Huwaidar, Ibtihal Mubarak, and Haifa Usra - who have formed an association for the protection and defense of women's rights.

In addition to the signatories, another 200 people from abroad have put their names to the petition as a gesture of support, Oyouni said by telephone from the eastern oil hub of Dhahran.

A member of the all-male appointed Shura Council, Mohammed Al Zalfa, sparked a heated debate two years ago when he proposed lifting the ban on women driving, but the advisory body eventually refused to debate the plan.

Although Saudi Arabia has taken small steps toward reform, women were barred from landmark municipal elections in 2005 and remain subject to a host of restrictions.

A group of 47 women defied the ban on driving by roaming the streets of the capital Riyadh in 15 cars in November 1990. They were swiftly rounded up by police and penalized, while their male guardians were reprimanded.

The following year, a fatwa (religious edict) was issued by the then-mufti of Saudi Arabia and head of the Council of Senior Ulema (Muslim scholars), Sheikh Abdel Aziz Bin Baz, prohibiting women from driving cars.