On a scorching day in August, 2006, Wajeha
al-Huwaider threw off her abaya, the enveloping black cover worn by Saudi women, and
donned a calf-length pink shirt, pink trousers, and a matching pink
scarf. She then took a taxi, from Bahrain, to a signpost on the bridge
marking the border with Saudi Arabia. She got out and, with a large
poster declaring, “Give Women Their Rights,” marched toward her
homeland. Within twenty minutes, she was picked up by Saudi security
forces, interrogated for a day, and officially warned. An intelligence
officer, she recounted to me later, had pointed at her mouth and said,
“Control this, and we won’t have a problem.”

Two years later, on International Women’s Day, Huwaider went
out in the Saudi desert and, illegally, drove. She made a
three-minute video of
it—coaching women to claim their rights—and posted it on YouTube. “The
problem of women driving, of course, is not political,” she said, as the
car bumped along a rural road. “Nor is it religious. It is a social
issue.” The video, in Arabic,
was viewed by almost a
quarter million people. Thousands more watched with various
translations. Again, she got in trouble.

Huwaider may finally be able to drive legally next year. On
Tuesday, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman ordered that women be given licenses. The country is the last in the world—by many, many years—where women
are forbidden to drive. In April, Saudi women launched a social
media campaign—with
the hashtag #Resistancebywalking—that posted films of them walking in
the same streets where they can’t drive. The ban has long been a
barometer of the oil-rich but ultra-conservative kingdom’s human-rights
abuses, constantly referenced in the State Department’s annual Human
Rights Report. The shift, on Tuesday, was sufficiently striking that
the Times sent out a breaking-news e-mail about the king’s decree.

There are, however, caveats. The ruling will not go into
effect until June, 2018. Women may have to get the permission of their
male “guardians” to drive, as they do for many major activities in their
life. The biggest issue may be winning the approval of Saudi Arabia’s
Wahhabi clerics, the most conservative of the Islamic faith. The decree
stipulated that new regulations must “apply and adhere to the necessary
Sharia standards,” a reference to Islamic law. What that means was left
unanswered.

In the past, Saudi clerics have opposed allowing women to get behind the
wheel. Just last week, Sheikh Saad
al-Hijri decreed that
women “don’t deserve to drive because they only have a quarter of a
brain.” The sheikh is the powerful head of fatwas in Asir governorate,
in the country’s mountainous southwest. His lecture focussed on the
“evils of women driving.” He also said that women have a quarter of a
brain when they go shopping. One of the kingdom’s most famous clerics,
the former grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz ibn Baz, once declared,
“Driving by women contradicts Islamic traditions followed by Saudi
Citizens.” (He was also the cleric who questioned the U.S. moon landing
because,
he ruled,
the Earth is flat.)

“There are issues with the state’s religious establishment opposing
human rights reforms for a long time, especially women’s rights,” Adam
Coogle, a Middle East specialist for Human Rights Watch, told me.

The new decree established a government body to draw up guidelines for
implementing the rule—leaving open the question of what guidelines might
be necessary for women that are not also applied to men. “What we’ve
seen in the past is more limited proposals: that women can drive if they
are going to work, or if they’re going to the supermarket, but no
joyriding,” Coogle said. “Other proposals suggested that there would be
a curfew for women drivers. We hope this will not be a discriminatory
system with different rules for women—and that’s a possibility, given
the way the rules have happened in the past.”

Middle East analysts peg the timing of the change to both momentum behind reforms aimed to
modernize the country and a growing array of pressures on the monarchy.
In 2015, the kingdom allowed women both to run for and to vote in
local-council elections. The king is still an absolute ruler, however,
and the councils function largely in modest advisory roles at the local
level. Women are also a burgeoning social force. The majority of
university graduates are now women, but they are a tiny percentage of
the labor force.

The Saudis may also be looking for a reprieve. The United Nations Human
Rights Council in Geneva is expected to vote this week on whether to
create a commission of inquiry to document war crimes in Yemen. “This
comes at a time when Saudi Arabia is experiencing a lot of domestic
turmoil around the succession and a lot of economic problems, in
addition to the war in Yemen and tensions with Qatar and Iran,” Coogle
told me.

Over the past two years, the kingdom has undergone a major political
transition, with the ouster of the well-established Crown Prince, who
had successfully quashed most of Al Qaeda in the kingdom. He was
replaced by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the young and largely
inexperienced third son of the aging and ailing king. The former Crown
Prince was reportedly put under house arrest and banned from travelling
abroad. The moves were widely interpreted as carving out a new line of
royal succession from the enormous House of Saud—and limiting the
prospects for thousands of other royals.

“The major takeaway is a P.R. win when they needed it, when
you look at criticisms they have faced recently,” Coogle told me.

A State Department spokesperson called it a “great step in the right
direction.” Saudi women, however, still can’t get passports or travel
outside the country without the permission of their primary male
guardian. (A guardian can be a father, husband, brother, or even a young
son.) A Saudi female can also not get a foreign education with
government support unless she is accompanied by a male guardian. Driving
may be a small step, but it is certainly not a great one.