MEMRI has reported that Saudi historian Saleh Al Saadoon stated that women should not be allowed to drive on the grounds that they could get raped if their car broke down on the side of the road.
“Women used to ride camels, so one might ask what prevents them from riding cars,” he pondered. “In Saudi Arabia, we have special circumstances. The city of Arar is 150 km away from Al Jawf. If a woman drives from one city to another and her car breaks down, what becomes of her?” After the interviewer noted that women drive in America and Europe, Al Sadoon replied: “They don’t care if they are raped at the roadside, but we do.”
The interviewer asked Al Sadoon who told him that western women don’t care if they are raped at the side of the road. He replied, proclaiming, “It’s no big deal for them beyond the damage to their morale. In our case, however, the problem is of a social and religious nature.”
Throughout the Islamic world, a woman being raped not only causes emotional damage, but also adversely affects the social standing of the woman, as the loss of virginity outside of marriage is considered a shame upon the whole family, clan, and tribe, even if the loss of virginity was not the woman’s fault. Numerous Muslim women fall victim to honor crimes every year for the crime of being raped. Many others face social ostracism.
The interviewer, shocked by his focus on the shame of being raped instead of the emotional damage caused to the woman, stressed that a “rape is a morale blow to a woman” and that “goes deeper than the social damage.” Unmoved, Al Sadoon declared that in the Islamic world, it also affects the family. Stunned, the interviewer asked, “Society and family are more important than the woman’s morale?” He answered, “Perhaps morale is part of the problem, but it is not the problem itself. There is also a religious aspect.”
Al Sadoon did not provide a religious justification for caring more about the shame of being raped than the woman’s emotional health, but he did glorify the lives of women in Saudi Arabia. “Saudi women are driven around by their husbands, sons and brothers,” Al Sadoon noted. “Everybody is in their service. They are like queens. A queen without a chauffeur has the honor of being driven around by her husband, brother, son and nephews. They are all at the ready when she gestures with her hand.”
“You are afraid that a woman might be raped at the roadside by soldiers, but you are not afraid that she might be raped by her chauffeur,” the interviewer told Al Sadoon. “Of course I am,” he answered. “There is a solution, but the government officials and the clerics refuse to hear of it. The solution is to bring in foreign female chauffeurs to drive our wives.”
During a TV show, Saudi historian Saleh Al-Saadoon said that women should not be allowed to drive on the grounds that they might get raped if their car broke down on the roadside. “[Western women] don’t care if they are raped on the roadside, but we do”, he said on the January 11, 2015 show on the Saudi Rotana Khalijiyya TV: