The world at large should celebrate that Saudi Arabia, the presumed leader of the Islamic world, at least of its preponderant Sunni component, is, at last, shedding its medieval ways. One of them was to treat women as inferior to men. Though in matters of inheritance, marriage, and work, they still have to gain gender equality, after much cogitation, they have allowed women to drive. Ten women were issued driving licenses to begin with, 2,000 more might be given in a gradual manner. The move has a huge symbolic value in a region which treats its women as chattels, to be kept in purdah and treated like second-class citizens without civic and property rights.
Thanks to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan, modernism is creeping in by the backdoor in the Saudi kingdom, a very good thing since its ripple effect is bound to be felt by the tens of thousands of imams and mullahas who head Saudi-funded mosques and madrasas in the Muslim world where an ultra-fundamentalist way of Islam is practised. Saudi women experiencing a breath of fresh air will certainly bring hope to their sisters equally suppressed in the Islamic world, though then the latter may legally have the right to drive but nonetheless are kept under purdah by their men. What has begun with the grant of driving licenses, albeit only to ten select women, in Riyadh, must be followed up with further reforms in order to grant Saudi women equal rights to men. Gender equality is the essence of modernism.
