Saudi Arabia Discovers School Busing for Girls

Picture the lettering in Arabic, and for girls only (Photo by Isco72 via Flickr)

The first motorized school bus rolled down an American road either in 1912 or 1914, picking up boys and girls. School buses have been rolling about Saudi roads for the last few decades. But it's taken Saudi Arabia until this year to discover that school buses could, in fact, also be used to shuttle elementary schoolgirls to and from school. The realization isn't without its dilemmas and ironies in a country where women aren't allowed to drive and men aren't allowed to drive women they're not closely related to.

Back in February the Kingdom's Ministry of Education had a pilot project in Medina province, shuttling 19,000 schoolgirls in 303 schools. The ministry liked what it saw. It's buying 4,200 new buses expanding the initiative to four provinces, enough to ferry 367,000 school girls. Until now, parents--or, rather, fathers and other eligible men, since women aren't allowed to drive in the Kingdom--were responsible for driving girls to school. As of 2004, Saudi Arabia had 2 girls 15,800 schools staffed by some 219,470 female teachers and 14,500 female administrators. No men need apply.

The logical question at this point is this: If no men are allowed to come in contact with schoolgirls, either as teachers or administrators, and women aren't allowed to drive, who will be driving those 4,200 buses?

Ah. A dilemma worthy of the Prophet Muhammad's wisdom you might say. Then again you might not: the Prophet never had an issue with women driving, having become acquainted with Khadija, the twice-married businesswoman who'd become his first wife, as her employee, shepherding her enormous caravans of camel-borne goods through the Arabian Peninsula and beyond when she herself wasn't in the mood to travel. (She first contracted his services in 595 for a trip to Syria. Always in charge, it was she who proposed her marry her, not the other way around).

The House of Saud claims to be the guardian of the Prophet's memory, but the Prophet's generously liberal attitude toward women hasn't survived Wahhabi doctrine, which predates by about 150 years the advent of the first motorized school-bus. Which brings us back to the Ministry of Education's current dilemma. No women drivers and 367,000 to drive around. The ministry's solution? Well, men will be the drivers. But this is where it gets interesting. Only Saudi men need apply. The kingdom is full of migrant laborers, fuller still with laborers who'd like nothing better than to have a driving gig in an air-conditioned bus all day (yes, the buses will all be air-conditioned). But that's where Saudi Arabia draws the line.

“We have insisted that the school buses should be driven by Saudi drivers in an effort to provide employment opportunities for the locals,” said Othman Abdul Jabbar, deputy minister of education for school affairs. What he doesn't say is that many Saudi men, like many men in Gulf countries rich in oil and imported labor, think certain jobs beneath them. But Saudi unemployment among young men runs high (the overall unemployment figure for Saudi men fell in 2007 for the first time in five years, from 9% to 8%, but it remains higher for young men). And driving buses full of girls might be more appealing than oiling rigs in the desert.

The name the Ministry of Education is giving this busing initiative? “Al-Ameen,” which means "trustworthy" in Arabic--an ironic choice, considering the way Saudi Arabia's religious police infamous broke the trust of 15 girls' parents in 2002: the girls' school was on fire. The police forbade them from leaving the building, and in some bases beat them to keep them from leaving, because the girls' heads weren't properly veiled. The fire consumed them. No word on how the Ministry of Education plans to handle school-bus breakdowns near similarly inclined mad men.