So, the big breakthrough for feminism has arrived! Saudi Arabia will permit women to drive motor cars from next spring. Saudi was the last country in the world where women were not permitted behind the wheel (along with some Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan). But a royal decree has opened the road to the female motorist.
The Mrs Pankhurst of Saudi Arabia is Fawziah Al-Bakr, a university professor who has led the campaign for motoring liberation, heading a convoy of 47 women driving around Riyadh back in 1990. Good for her! The protest hampered her academic career, and some of the women drivers were denounced as immoral, but she took a brave stand – or should I say drive – for something she believed to be her entitlement.
It won’t be long before nearly all Saudi women will be driving their vehicles, powered by the cheap petrol available in this oil-rich state. They will then feel themselves free to drive the children to and from school and the family to and from shopping, play dates and after-school activities. Teenage offspring will be expecting their mothers to fetch them from their various social engagements late at night, and it won’t be long before the vehicles of Saudi mothers will bear the slogan “Mum’s Taxi Service”.
Saudi women will soon be driving elderly parents to the doctor and the dentist, and giving Great-Aunt Mariam a lift to the souk to pick up her favourite shopping items.
As Saudi men don’t drink alcohol, Saudi women will be spared the chore of driving sober while the menfolk imbibe, or collecting their spouses from various watering holes. But wives will no doubt soon be picking up husbands commuting from work.
With the increase of traffic occasioned by more people driving, they’ll soon know the joy of trying to find a place to park and the responsibilities of insurance, the equivalent of MOT checks and licence renewals.
Freedom brings responsibilities. A day may even come when some future Saudi grandmother might look back nostalgically on her memories of being driven everywhere by some nice, obedient man.
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According to the Jewish calendar, we have just entered the year 5778. The Islamic New Year, too, has just occurred at the time of the September equinox: the Islamic year is now 1439.
But according to the Christian calendar, we are in the year 2017. Except that schools across England and Wales are to drop formal allusion to the Christian era. Forthwith, they will replace AD (Anno Domini) with CE (for Common Era). BC (Before Christ) will henceforth be BCE (Before the Common Era).
This decision has been taken, it seems, so as not to offend non-Christians.
The style has already appeared in some academic books over the past decade, although I sense that it is not always a success, since its use is patchy.
I would like to know, however, if the educational authorities have done any extensive research on how many non-Christians are offended by the BC and AD convention? I would be surprised if any but a few aggressive secularists – who’d like to obliterate any mention of the sacred if they could – really do object.
The change to CE and BCE is surely linguistically for the worse. “Before Christ” is clear and specific; “Before the Common Era” is vague and confusing.
In language, as Orwell states, it is always better to choose the clear and particular over the vague and confusing.
And our calendar is measured according to the Christian era, whether critics like it or not. Not to acknowledge that is basically dodging the historical fact.
I hope Christian schools will object to this mendacious innovation.
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Some Irish commentators suggest that Spain is making the same mistake with Catalonia that Britain did with Ireland in 1918. Sinn Féin then won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster, and made to establish its own Dublin parliament. Instead of patiently negotiating, Lloyd George sent in more police, and eventually the Black and Tans, thus immediately making the situation worse.
We can learn from history, surely. But Professor Niall Ferguson says that the generation now in power seldom studies history. For which the penalty is repeating history’s errors.
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