Saudi Arabia’s royal decree allowing women to drive automobiles is a weeny symbolic change in an overwhelmingly gender-unequal country. It is incapable of opening a wedge in the absolute patriarchal system of laws and enforcement which relegates women to the status of less-than-full human beings. The journey for the emancipation of almost-enslaved Saudi women is long and tortuous, and will require fundamental political and religious transformation rather than token administrative gestures. This is because the system aptly described as “gender apartheid” by Prof.