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Sharia

Women: They Can’t Drive, But They Sure Can Fly

All-Female Royal Brunei Airlines aircrew lands in Saudi Arabia.

BY CounterJihad · @CounterjihadUS | March 16, 2016

This is a fun, light story that points to a serious question about Islamic law.  An all-female aircrew recently completed a flight into Saudi Arabia, where none of them would be allowed to drive.  It was the three women’s first flight together, but when they landed in Jeddah they made history.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner they were flying was a twin-engine, long range aircraft that can carry over three hundred passengers.  It shares a rating with the Boeing Triple 7 (777), such that qualified pilots on either plan can fly both.  The Triple 7 can seat 451 passengers, and is commonly used in long-range jet flight crossing major oceans.

Women in Saudi Arabia are forbidden drivers’ licenses, in spite of the evidence of almost the entire rest of the world that they are not incapable of driving.  Indeed, insurance companies tend to offer female drivers lower rates due to their safety record.  Nevertheless, women in Saudi Arabia who do drive — it is apparently somewhat common in the less-policed areas — are in technical violation of the law.

Saudi Arabia has recently granted the right for women to vote in elections, and even to stand for office.  However, to get to the polling stations they need to rely on male-driven automobiles.

Under the country’s conservative interpretation of Islam, women must cover up in public and are not allowed to drive. Some women — including one who ran for office — have publicly defied this law and were jailed. Most oppressively, Saudi women are governed by male guardians, who must grant permission before they can obtain a passport, marry or attend college.

Now, if you were to take a poll of women in Saudi Arabia and ask them if they’d like to see women allowed to drive, there is no guarantee they might say yes.  A reliable attempt to take such a poll in 2013 suggests that the majority of Saudi women oppose driving rights for women.  It’s a fair point that a nation can choose its own laws if they have democratic legitimacy even if they are laws that might seem very strange to the rest of the world.

Nevertheless, it was also true that female suffrage was long opposed by majorities of women until it was tried.  As late as the time of G. K. Chesterton, he could write in all honesty:

Many voteless women regard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly. Nobody says that any voteless men regarded it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dignity by being part of a political mob. If he did not care about a vote it was solely because he did not know about a vote[.]

Culture has a lot to do with what women think their limits are.  In the Islamic world, women are showing that some traditional limits imposed upon them by their faith and culture are not warranted.

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