The House of Saud still doesn’t know how women got the right to vote in Saudi Arabia. But no need to get carried away: they remain without the franchise until 2015 when the municipal elections take place. King Abdullah, whose royal decree gave the green light is 88 years old and ailing. Crown Prince Sultan, 87, his successor is critically ill and currently is in a hospital in New York. The king’s decree surprised almost everyone in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world; most of all the man who is third in line to the throne—Prince Nayef, a conservative Arab who has opposed the campaign to allow women to drive in the country.
However, Saudi watchers give the credit to women’s reform in the country to the monarch’s daughter, Adila. The princess has been campaigning within the royal family for some years, to allow freedom for women to participate in public life, including driving. She is believed to be responsible for persuading her father to make Norah al-Faiz deputy minister of education in 2009—the first woman minister in the Saudi administration. Simon Henderson’s 1994 study of Saudi royals, After King Fahd: Succession in Saudi Arabia, carries a cheeky footnote that “then Crown Prince Abdullah had the full Islamic complement of four wives.” But that hasn’t stopped him from adding to his harem and keeping the family tree flowering. Badr, the youngest prince of Saud, was born when the king was in his late 70s. Meanwhile, his daughter Sahab, who married a Bahrain royal this summer, was only born in 1993.
Abdullah is an enigma, whose unpredictability fits the persona of a powerful royal who is both Saudi yet with Western values. Still, liberating the women of Saudi is a slow, long haul—until now they didn’t have the right to vote, or drive; nor are they allowed to the travel without a male relative. But the King may be the closet feminist who brought about this revolutionary change. Foreign Policy writer, Simon Henderson observes, “Abdullah’s edict is certainly a change. It might even be progress. But some caution is necessary.” However next year, women will be appointed to the appointed consultative council and allowed to serve in the next session of what is known as Saudi Arabia’s parliament.
What’s most surprising about King Abdullah’s unexpected announcement is that his various ailments are believed to have robbed him of the resolve to get the innumerable royal family members to agree on reform and thereby weaken the hold of the Sunni clergy. Henderson writes that Abdullah is “lucid for only a couple of hours a day.” When he announced the vote, he then lucidly argued that his edict was in consonance with Islamic tradition. “All people know that Muslim women have had in the Islamic history, positions that cannot be marginalized,” he announced, acknowledging the importance given to women since the time of the Prophet.
“How did King Abdullah manage to be so (pro)creative?” asks Henderson, tongue firmly in cheek. WikiLeaks has, perhaps the answer. A 2008 cable from the US Embassy in Riyadh reports that King Abdullah “remains a heavy smoker, regularly receives hormone injections and ‘uses Viagra excessively.” So, the answer to the doubting Thomases about how women were allowed the vote in Saudi Arabia may be simple: the king loves women.