Yes, in Saudi Arabia, of course, where females aren’t allowed to drive. According to the BBC, a woman named “Shema” will be given ten lashes for having been found guilty of driving while female. And this is not a light punishment, either: lashing is pretty painful. Fortunately, Saudia Arabia also has regulations to prevent the more vicious type of lashing: the lasher, for example is supposed to hold a copy of the Qur’an under his arm to keep the strokes short.
The Saudis love this kind of corporal punishment. According to Slate:
Saudi Arabia metes out by far the strictest lashing sentences in the Muslim world. Both Sudan and Iran employ the practice but usually stick to the more moderate 40 to 80 strokes prescribed in the Quran. The most severe lashing assigned by a modern Saudi Arabian judge took place in 2007, when two men received 7,000 strokes each as punishment for sodomy.
Note the multiple connections to religion here; without Islam, the woman could drive freely.
Curiously, the country just granted women the right to vote and run in municipal elections—in 2015. But there’s nothing in this change about driving; as the New York Times noted, “Some women wondered aloud how they would be able to campaign for office when they were not even allowed to drive.”
Editorial joke heard on the CBC this morning: Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to vote. However, they will have to identify themselves at the poll by showing a valid driver’s license.
Ah, they must have learned that from the Republicans’ “Keep the Poor From Voting” playbook.
I cannot express how incomprehensible and repulsive this bullshit is. I don’t even know where to begin.
And these are the good guys in the Middle East?
b&
Er, good relative to whom?
Beats the Hell out of me. Go ask the Bush dynasty….
b&
“Beats the hell out of me.” Ha, good pun, given the topic of lashing.
I see that the poor lady’s name is Shema. I wonder if she has a brother called Kaddish.
And these are the good guys in the Middle East?
I’m willing to bet that if you poured over US foreign policy documents for days and days, you would never find the word “good guys” applied to the Saudis.
It’s never been about who agrees with our ethics and morals, after all, it was always about who will let us build military bases in their country and give us some ability to project our economic interests there.
and before you say “that’s bad”, I myself can’t judge whether dealing with the Saudis to maintain US economic interests, or the Pakistanis, or indeed any of the various dictatorships and repulsive governments over the entire span of the US has in the end not been in the overall best interests of maintaining the quality of life in the US.
It would be nice, in a purely idealistic world, if ones social policy really drove ones international policy as well, but that has never been the case, really, though I think the US has been better than most at hiding that until say the last 20 years, give or take.
Such is the way we have allowed the world to become.
Maybe not, but it shouldn’t take more than ten seconds of Googling to find picture so Bush publicly holding hands with top Saudi officials and kissing them on the lips.
I also wouldn’t be surprised to find words to that effect in interviews and press conferences and the like.
Cheers,
b&
If I pored over the documents after your poured over them, what would I discover that you had poured over them? ☺
Yeah, that was pretty poor.
thank you for the contribution from the “pedants r us” section.
😛
The sooner we wean ourselves off oil, the sooner we can turn our backs on the the retarded middle east. If it was not for the wealth they have from flogging us oil, they would all still be sitting around in the sand, they have not moved on one iota in the last 500 years. They create nothing and contibute nothing, they just sell oil and cause mayhem. If only we could say “thanks, but we dont need your oil anymore”.
Wouldn’t that be nice?
I’ll add that to the list of uses of a book apart from its being read:
Door stop, paper weight, posture developer, and now “lash limiter”.
also:
club, poor lie detector (hand on bible in court), and firewood.
Of related note, we have all our new students starting this week & for the first time we have one who is wearing a full face mask as I call it – a yashmak or veil or whatever the particular ethnic group would say. In my limited experience, female students from Saudi Arabia are not as strict about wearing the headscarf or veil tightly bound so no whisp of hair escapes as are the British born muslim female students. They have severe cultural pressures on them to emphasise their silly cultural practices whereas the students from Arabia are now living in a liberal society where they can relax from the severity with which they would deal back home. These absurd traditions are even more disturbing when they are forced onto women by the whip hand of men.
I see them in the post office like that occasionally, but so far as I’m aware there aren’t any on campus. But wait till you see one behind the wheel. Fortunately, she was pulling out of a gas station and not headed at me. How that isn’t a public safety issue is beyond me.
Tangentially related, George Beadle (Beadle & Tatum) was once riding with his wife and fellow grad student Barbara McClintock in his Model A Ford roadster. There’s only room for two in one of those (unless rumbleseat-equipped), so George was standing on the running board. That was illegal in CA because it impaired the driver’s vision, and they were pulled over. His wife was driving, and Barbara says, “Oh, it’s OK officer, you see he’s her husband and she can see right thru him.” They didn’t get a ticket. (From Beadle’s autobiography).
The curious thing is that she is studying audiology I think (or voice or vestibular medicine) & I wonder how hard of hearing or deaf patients she will eventually see when qualified will cope without being able to see her lips!
I suppose the car symbolizes an extension of phallic patriarchal power. I’m picturing Sayyid Qutb with hydraulics and a star and crescent air freshener.
“Some women wondered aloud…”
That’s probably punishable by lashing as well.
Driving is dangerous, females shouldn’t be allowed to drive at all. They may be pregnant. Protect the unborn!
Look for it to happen here in the USA.
I’d bet you could check US history and find something similar has been attempted at least once already.
It’s a bit too extreme a position for even the Americans to take.
See comment #12
If a driving ban has to be enforced, I would like to suggest that ban be applied ALL people regardless of age, race, nationality, gender etc. From my observations, it seems like most people are incapable of driving properly.
Perhaps their logic is like this:
Of course the women should be able to drive the cars, but unfortunately they must also wear the head veils in public, and that poses a public safety issue. Since by Allah they must wear the veils, there is no choice but to forbid that they drive the cars.
If these guys were Jews*, they’d come up with a solution, which is easy: re-define the inside of a car as not a public place. After all, it has doors and a roof, so how is it different from a house?
*There’s a concrete example behind this part, but not enough time to go into it now. I’ll try to find a link about it.
Are you thinking of an eruv?
Yes, thanx! Here’s a link.
Those Jews must be pretty smart to be able to outsmart the all-powerful creator of the Universe. He may know how to draft the physical laws of the universe but apparently He can be outsmarted by some tricky word games. Gawd bless.
Every time that we’re told that women are equals and are respected in Islamic countries, and that the prohibitions against driving are just a cute way of treating women like a princess, think of the punishments against violating the laws.
Trying to open the door for a woman might be a gesture of chivalry. Whipping her skin off for asserting herself makes a lie of the chivalry/princess defence.
Actually, today a woman in a Lincoln Navigator ran through a red light, texting!, with two kids in car seats in the back and nearly took out the woman in the car in front of me. When woman #2 hit the horn, woman #1 gave her the finger. Maybe the saudis are on to something.
Wow, way to lighten the mood. Instead of discussing Saudi sexism, now we can discuss Western sexism as well. But hey, at least you are just patronizing and oblivious and not violent.
It reminds me of a very funny time when a man cut me off, slammed on the brakes, got out of his car and threatened to beat me up. Maybe men shouldn’t be allowed to drive either! Ah ha ha ha! Road-rage is so funny, not like crazy women drivers. But seriously, everyone knows it’s only women drivers who represent their entire gender – men always act as individuals. Am I right guys? Who’s with me?
Non-violent, yes!. Patronizing, I doubt it. Oblivious, you’re way off track!
You’re making a joke about a situation where a woman is going to be flogged for driving a car.
“Maybe the Saudis are onto something”?
Ya think?
http://www.corpun.com/counsaj.htm
IIRC, in the early days of sutomotive history in America and Britain, women weren’t allowed to drive. It was due to cultural norms, not religion or government decree. In fact, when they were allowed to drive finally, they couldn’t go over 10-15 mph because they might become hysterical or have a miscarriage.
Automotive, not sutomotive! *sigh*
The King of Saudi Arabia immediately reversed the court decision. He had a month after this lady was arrested (but before she was tried) ordered all Police to stop enforcing this Non-Law. Yes, the law isn’t on the civil law books, just the religious ones. And now, he is enforcing his decision that the law is wrong.
He seems to be entering the modern world slowly. Even if the clerics are still in the 1600s.
“…in 2007, when two men received 7,000 strokes each as punishment for sodomy.” The death penalty by another name? In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful…