A group of about 150 clerics and religious figures gathered outside the Saudi king's palace Tuesday, protesting women in the country who are looking to gain the right to drive.
Many of these prominent religious leaders said the United States was responsible for bolstering a campaign that urges the Saudi government to allow women to operate motor vehicles, according to the Washington Post. The Oct. 26 measure has gained around 16,000 signatures of support thus far.
Saudi women have posted videos and photos online of themselves behind the wheel, following the campaign's launch last month. There is no official law in Saudi Arabia that bars women from driving, but they're not given licenses in the kingdom. In the recent past, no women have been taken into police custody for trying to drive, but some females have faced charges of disturbing public order.
The religious scholars who assembled in the Red Sea City of Jiddah Tuesday told local news outlets that the Saudi kingdom is not working to stop the campaign.
A Saudi cleric advised women in September that they could damage their ovaries and pelvises if they got behind the wheel, which might put them at risk of having children with "clinical problems," inciting backlash from activists.
"If a woman drives a car," Sheikh Saleh Al-Loheidan told Saudi news site sabq.org in an interview, "it could have a negative physiological impact...medical studies show that it would automatically affect a woman's ovaries and that it pushes the pelvis upward.
"We find that for women who continuously drive cars, their children are born with varying degrees of clinical problems," Al-Loheidan continued.
Critics of the cleric, including Saudi women's rights activists Aziza Yousef, told CNN that Al-Loheidan was scrambling for rationale to justify the ban.
"This is his answer to the campaign," Yousef told CNN at the time. "But it is an individual opinion. The clerical establishment is not behind this. He's making a fool of himself. He shouldn't touch this field at all - the medical field is not his field at all."
