RIYADH Women members of Saudi Arabia's influential Shoura Council which advises King Abdullah have proposed allowing women to drive, challenging a tradition upheld by the deeply conservative clerical establishment. 
 
 The council is the nearest the kingdom has to a parliament, though its members are not elected but appointed by the king and cannot make laws but only issue recommendations. However, these recommendations have often in the past prefigured Saudi reforms. 
 
 Conservative Saudis say letting women drive would encourage the sexes to mix in public unchaperoned and thus threaten public morality, but it is an important demand of many women who now rely on expensive private drivers to perform basic daily tasks. 
 
 There is no specific law to prevent women from driving in Saudi Arabia, but they cannot apply for driving licenses and have previously been arrested on charges relating to public order or political protest after getting behind the wheel. 
 
 Hanan al-Ahmadi, one of 30 women appointed by King Abdullah to the Council in January, said the issue of letting women drive came up on Tuesday, apparently spontaneously, during discussions about the transport ministry's performance. 
 
 "Men and women members were discussing the obstacle of women's transportation and how it's a burden for women working with families and the lack of other options like public transport," she said. 
 
 Then one of her female colleagues, Latifa al-Shaalan, stood and proposed that the Shoura Council's transportation committee should include a recommendation that the Transport Ministry make preparations to allow women to drive. 
 
 "Nobody raised their voice or opposed it. I think people were expecting it. I believe she received many notes of support afterwards from other members," Ahmadi said. 
 
 WOMEN ACTIVISTS 
 
 The Shoura Council's transport committee must now decide whether to accept the recommendation and put it to the Transport Ministry, something not likely to happen for several weeks. 
 
 If it rejects it, the speaker may ask members to vote on whether to discuss the ban as a separate issue, Ahmadi said. 
 
 A group of women's rights activists have called for a new campaign on October 26 to push for an end to the ban. Previous campaigns, in which women have defied the law to drive in public, have ended with arrests of participants. 
 
 Under Saudi Arabia's rigid Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam, women fall under the legal authority of a male relative, known as their "guardian", who can stop them travelling abroad, getting a job or opening a bank account. 
 
 The proposal on women drivers follows other cautious moves by King Abdullah aimed at giving women more say, including the decision to appoint them to the Council. He has also urged the government to improve job opportunities for women. 
 
 The ban has long been debated in private circles in Saudi Arabia but rarely in public by senior figures or officials. 
 
 Religious leaders no longer argue, as some have in the past, that women are not allowed to drive under Islamic Sharia law. Opponents of change instead cite fears about public morality. 
 
 Last month the head of the powerful morality police, Sheikh Abdulatif Al al-Sheikh, told Reuters there was no text in Sharia that forbade women from driving. 
 
 Ahmadi, who used to drive in the United States when she lived there as a student, said she welcomed the recommendation but would probably not drive herself if it were permitted. 
 
 "Some who are more courageous than me might do it. But it is not an easy thing," she said. 
 
 "For a society that took so long to discuss this issue and has been subjected to so much preaching on the harm women driving might do, we are programmed to reject it rather than accept it," she said. 
 
 (Editing by William Maclean and Gareth Jones) ||||| (CNN) -- Many women in Saudi Arabia remain defiant after they put keys to ignitions Friday to drive home a point: challenging the conservative Islamic kingdom's prohibition of female drivers. 
 
 Among the dozens of women in the country who challenged the status was well-known female Saudi blogger Eman Al Nafjan. 
 
 "This is only the beginning," Al Nafjan said. 
 
 Sitting on the passenger side for her 15-minute ride through Riyadh, Al Nafjan captured the journey on her cell phone while a female friend drove. 
 
 "The whole idea behind the campaign was that June 17 is the start date. It's not the only day. It's the date when women will start to drive," she said. 
 
 Fueled by Women2Drive, a campaign demanding the right for women to drive and travel freely in Saudi Arabia, women commanded streets and roads normally reserved for men. 
 
 There are no specific traffic laws that make it illegal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia. However, religious edicts are often interpreted as a prohibition of female drivers. Such edicts also prevent women from opening bank accounts, obtaining passports or even going to school without the presence of a male guardian. 
 
 Authorities stopped Manal al Sharif, 32, for driving a car May 21 and detained her the next day. She said she was forced to sign a form promising not to drive again and spent a week in jail. 
 
 Al Sharif has not been charged, but the case remains open, and she may be called back, according to human rights activist Waleed Abu Alkhair. Her name has become a rallying cry for women demanding their rights. 
 
 The "Women2Drive 17th June" Facebook page includes a banner that reads "We are all Manal Sharif" and a quote from King Abdullah stating that "the day will come when women will be able to drive." 
 
 Al Sharif said before her detention that she was determined to speak out. 
 
 "We have a saying," she said. "The rain starts with a single drop. This is a symbolic thing." 
 
 The Women2Drive campaign was expected to be a test of wills between the government and half of the nation's citizenry. However, campaign organizers were explicit in laying out conditions for participants. 
 
 Women were told to adhere to full Islamic dress. Wave the Saudi flag and plaster a picture of the king to show patriotism. It was best to have an international driving license if you planned to drive. And have a man with you. 
 
 The campaign said it would not be responsible for any women who breached a list of 14 such principles. They were asked to show defiance but within societal confines. 
 
 A Riyadh man who went out to document what would be an unusual scene in Saudi Arabia said that the streets were typically empty for a Friday morning but that there were many fewer police officers than in March, when online organizers had called for mass demonstrations. 
 
 "I'm thinking that the government is turning sideways," Ahmad Alafaliq said. "They don't want to see it. They don't want to deal with it." 
 
 "It's a disadvantage for us," said Sulafa Kurdi, who lived in the United States once and got her driver's license when she was 18. 
 
 "It's something that we want to do, and hopefully, it will happen," she said after driving to a Riyadh restaurant with her friends and cousin. 
 
 A Saudi woman said her mother drove her and her sisters down Riyadh's main street Thursday. 
 
 The woman, who asked not to be named because she was worried about harassment and possible reprisals, said no one bothered them. 
 
 "This is important for women here. This is one of our rights," she said 
 
 Nadya Khalife, a Human Rights Watch women's rights researcher for the Middle East and North Africa, said the freedom of movement is a basic right. Saudi Arabia, she said, is the only country that bans women from driving. 
 
 Strict segregation by sex means women in Saudi Arabia can't travel without a male relative or take public transportation. Ironically, many women are forced to hire expensive private drivers or taxis to get around, forcing them to be in the company of unfamiliar men, which, said activists, does not make sense from a religious standpoint. 
 
 Khalife said that what separates the latest campaign from other efforts to get women to drive is the degree to which it has relied on social media. Women who got behind the wheel were encouraged to shoot videos of themselves. 
 
 But Saudi women face challenges, Khalife said. 
 
 "They're up against society as a whole," she said. "Some women may even face harassment or pressure from their families. Some women have clearly been in support, but others are saying they don't want to 'shame.' " 
 
 Osamah Alluaidan, an opponent of female drivers, posted on Facebook, "It is not a sin for women to drive but when women drive and disobey the Kingdom's guardians, that's the problem, this is unacceptable." 
 
 Khalife noted that some men have been supportive of their daughters, wives and sisters taking part in the driving campaign. 
 
 Alkhair, speaking Thursday from London, said he encouraged his wife to drive in Jeddah on Friday. 
 
 "I think after what the police and the interior ministry did to Manal al Sharif, a lot of women became afraid," he said. "The Interior Ministry has put a lot of police on the street. They want to send a message to all women." 
 
 But on Friday, Saudi women defied tradition, no matter how bumpy the road. 
 
 CNN's Eve Bower and Atika Shubert contributed to this report. ||||| The odd restriction is as much cultural as religious. 
 
 Saudi women walk past cars in Riyadh. (Hasan Jamali/AP) 
 
 Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan, a judicial adviser to an association of Gulf psychologists, recently told a Saudi website that "If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards. That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees.” 
 
 It seems he might be confused about the definition of “drive,” and “medical study,” but regardless, the sheikh’s comments point to a major point of tension in Saudi Arabia today: Women aren’t allowed to drive, and many of them desperately want to. 
 
 It seems like a bizarre limitation: Unlike in Afghanistan under the Taliban, for example, Saudi women aren’t prohibited from getting educated or even working. And women are allowed to drive in other, conservative Islamic societies such as Iran. 
 
 So of all things, why can’t Saudi women drive? 
 
 The Kingdom has long adhered to a particularly strict brand of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism, which insists on segregation of the sexes and the veiling of women. In 1990, Saudi women began demanding social reforms, including the right to drive, but instead the religious police cracked down harder, formalizing a driving ban that had previously been unofficial. 
 
 “The incident catalyzed a moral campaign meant to reinforce the feminine ideal of a pious secluded wife and mother,” Jaime Kucinskas, who teaches a course on religion and society at Indiana University, told me in an email. “The state-funded media released a television program showing little girls singing how they were women and did not drive cars.” 
 
 Today, not only are the country’s women prohibited from chauffeuring themselves around, they’re also discouraged from traveling alone or using public transportation. Driver’s licenses are issued only to men. 
 
 Women’s-rights groups have staged several small demonstrations to push for driving rights in recent years, but they’ve so far made little headway. The newest campaign calls for women to drive on October 26 in protest, but the Saudi government shut down the campaign’s website. 
 
 More broadly, there is strong resistance to Saudi women participating in public life, including working jobs that would put them in contact with men. At least 34 percent of Saudi women who say they want to work are unemployed, a rate that’s just 7 percent for the country’s job-seeking men. 
 
 This is in spite of the country’s opening dozens of new colleges in the past decade and providing scholarships for thousands of Saudi women to travel overseas to study. 
 
 Once these women return home, they face a severely restrictive environment. In many families, women are not able to leave home without a male guardian or to mingle casually with the opposite sex. 
 
 Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah promoted some reforms in the country in 2009, appointing a female deputy minister and opening a mixed-sex university. However, the country’s clerics decried his actions as too progressive. 
 
 Sheikh Salman al-Duwaysh said women had “abandoned their basic duties such as housekeeping, bringing up children ... and replaced this by beautifying themselves and wantonness,” to name just one example uncovered by Wikileaks. 
 
 Some women-only businesses that don’t involve direct customer contact have since been created, and in a first, the Kingdom licensed its first four female lawyers yesterday. Still, it’s rare to see women working in public, and many stores and restaurants are divided by sex. 
 
 Women are expected to have the consent of their guardian (a husband usually, or otherwise a father or close male relative) for virtually every activity—including work, school, and travel. 
 
 Driving is a direct extension of this type of religion-based segregation. As one Saudi man explained to a Christian Science Monitor reporter, “What would happen if a woman got in a car accident? Then she would be forced to deal with the male driver of the other car, a stranger, with no oversight." 
 
 “The ideal of feminine piety is associated with home, the need for protection and subsequent seclusion,” Kucinskas said. “Driving symbolizes the opposite: freedom in the public sphere.” 
 
 Furthermore, even some women endorse the ban as a way of differentiating the Kingdom from more liberal nations and possibly even of staving off Western influence. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, only 66 percent of Saudi women and 55 percent of Saudi men said women should be allowed to drive a car by themselves, far fewer than the numbers who said women should be able to work outside the home (82 and 75 percent, respectively). As the Washington Post reported in 2006: 
 
 Faiza al-Obaidi, a biology professor, says she thinks the attempts at Western-style female emancipation are part of a religious war being waged by the United States, "an intellectual rather than physical colonization." Sitting at the food court at the Basateen Mall in the coastal city of Jiddah one weekend, lifting her veil to take bites from a tuna sandwich, she said the West was targeting women, the core of society, as a means of eventually controlling the whole country. "They fear Islam, and we are the world's foremost Islamic nation," she said.” 
 
 In response to the pro-driving campaigners, one woman even started a counter-movement called “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me,” as the New York Times reported: 
 
 Within two months, they had collected more than 5,400 signatures on a petition “rejecting the ignorant requests of those inciting liberty” and demanding “punishments for those who call for equality between men and women, mingling between men and women in mixed environments, and other unacceptable behaviors.” 
 
 Part of the reason the ban has proven so hard to overturn is that it’s so deeply rooted in not only religion but in the country’s uniqueness. 
 
 “The public separation of men and women is a particular element of Saudi national identity,” Kucinskas said, “and is seen by Saudis as a trademark of why their particular society is superior to both Western countries and other predominantly Muslim nations.” ||||| A female activist who was jailed for 10 weeks for violating Saudi Arabia’s ban on women driving is running for office after a surprise U-turn by the government. 
 
 Loujain al-Hathloul made international headlines last year, when she filmed herself driving from the United Arab Emirates to the Saudi Arabian border in protest against the restrictions on women drivers. 
 
 Police forced her to wait in the car overnight after confiscating her passport. She and a friend who drove supplies to her from Dubai, Maysaa al-Amoudi, were arrest after being ordered to cross the border in their vehicles. 
 
 They were referred to a Saudi terrorism court because of their posts on social media and jailed for 10 weeks and have not stopped their campaign to overturn rules forbidding women from driving and stipulating that they must be accompanied by male chaperones. 
 
 Ms al-Hathloul announced her intention to run for a seat on the local council in Riyadh earlier this year but was swiftly blacklisted among several other women by Saudi authorities. 
 
 But the move was reversed on Wednesday following an appeal, clearing the way for her name to be on Saturday’s ballot in the city. 
 
 Ms al-Hathloul told the Washington Post she lobbied against the ban and conducted media interviews and a social media campaign to put pressure on the government. 
 
 My appeal has been accepted, I'm back on the candidates' list. I'm back in the game! pic.twitter.com/poJ68NOUvt — لجين هذلول الهذلول (@LoujainHathloul) December 9, 2015 
 
 “Basically, I annoyed them,” she said. “I guess it worked. It’s amazing news… The municipal councils have nothing to do with the driving ban. 
 
 “The councils are just about fixing up the community. The driving ban is another fight.” 
 
 Her husband, a Saudi satirist named Fahad Albutairi, helped produce a viral video called “No Woman, No Drive” taking a light-hearted look at the law to the tune of a famous Bob Marley song. 
 
 Women will be running for office and voting for the first time after being granted limited rights in 2011 by the late King Abdullah – there are thought to be more than 900 women are among the nearly 7,000 candidates.
– With female driving in Saudi Arabia effectively banned, mass transit not that great, taxis unreliable and dirty, and private cars expensive, women can have a hard time getting around in the country, the Los Angeles Times reports. "If you can't find a driver, you have to wait for your husband," Hala Radwan, a 29-year-old resident, tells the paper. "If not your husband, then your brother. … Sometimes everyone is just so busy that going from point A to point B is really difficult." The increasingly popular way now for ladies to get around town? Uber, local service Careem, and a handful of other ride-sharing services, the paper notes. The app companies there say more than 80% of their single-rider users are Saudi women, per the Times, while a regional GM for Uber notes that the number of users in the kingdom has multiplied by 20 since the company ventured in last year. Technically there's no law prohibiting women from driving in the kingdom, but because of cleric-issued fatwas, women can't get driver's licenses, the Times notes. Other reasons conservatives spout for not letting women get behind the wheel in the gender-segregated state range from their ovaries getting damaged to increased chance of rape if their cars break down to coming into contact with male medical staff after car accidents. So ride-sharing it is, for now, for working women stuck in the system. That includes Radwan, who coughs up $700 or so a month to Careem to get back and forth to her marketing job. She says the GPS technology in Careem's cars makes them safer than taxis, and no one can tell she's not in a private vehicle—important since women using public transportation solo in Saudi Arabia are also seen as "lacking morals," the Times notes.