Saudi Arabia's freedom riders: in a country where women's rights are severely limited, some Saudi women are demanding the right to drive.

• Author: Macfarquhar, Neil
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Maha al-Qahtani, an information technology specialist for the Saudi government, got in her car one day early this summer and did something revolutionary: With her husband seated next to her, she took the wheel and drove for 45 minutes around the capital city of Riyadh.

Her defiance is part of a nationwide right-to-drive campaign that involved more than 40 women taking to the road to protest the fact that Saudi women are not allowed to drive. They say their campaign is inspired by the uprisings this year in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world known as the Arab Spring.

Some of the female drivers, like Qahtani, have been stopped by police and ticketed. Others have been arrested. Last month, a Saudi court sentenced a woman to 10 lashes after she was found guilty of driving in Jidda. (The king overturned the sentence a few days later.)

"If Saudi police think arresting women drivers is going to stop what has already become the largest women's rights movement in Saudi history, they are sorely mistaken," the Saudi Women for Driving coalition said in a statement. "On the contrary, these arrests will encourage more women to get behind the wheel in direct defiance of this ridiculous abuse of our most basic human rights."

In September, perhaps looking for a way to placate women's rights advocates, King Abdullah granted women the right to vote and run in municipal elections for the first time, starting in 2015. Ironically, though, political participation for women is less controversial than the right to drive--perhaps because voting isn't likely to have much impact in an absolute monarchy where local elections have little influence.

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The ban on driving is just one of many restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia, which is probably the most strictly gender-segregated country in the world.

As soon as they're considered adults, Saudi women must wear abayas, black head-to-toe cloaks, in public at all times. They attend girls-only schools and university classes, and they eat in special "family" sections of restaurants, which are partitioned from the areas used by single men. Riyadh, the capital, has women-only gyms, boutiques, and even a shopping mall. While many Saudi women go to college, very few get jobs afterward--largely because of the logistical difficulty of maintaining gender segregation in the workplace.

Saudi girls are not allowed to date--or even be friends with boys--and their marriages are arranged. Most Saudi girls meet their husbands for the first time on the day they become engaged.

While Saudi Arabia has taken some small steps toward democratic reforms in recent years...