Thirty years ago, in 1990, Nourah Alghanem, a thirty-four-year-old elementary schoolteacher in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, held a tea party. Women weren’t allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. They could sit in the passenger’s seat and be driven around by men. But Saudi Arabia was the only country in the world where women could not get behind the wheel. She wanted to change that. Alghanem got together with a small group of women, mainly highly educated professionals, to drive around Riyadh. The police learned about it and quickly arrested and questioned the people involved.

For Saudi Arabia, the act of a female driving became a matter of national security. Who were the organisers? Did they have foreign backing? Had Saddam Hussein—the dictator of Iraq later toppled during the US invasion in 2003—encouraged them in order to destabilise the kingdom? ‘No,’ Alghanem said, ‘we just want to drive.’ Almost all the women lost their jobs. They were smeared, harangued and chased out of their social circles and communities, thanks to coordinated attacks in Saudi Arabia’s censored media. Muslim clerics denounced them as ‘loose women’ who wanted to destroy society.

• Tags: Gozde Deniz Altunkeser, Issue 20, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia