Not easy to view Wajeha Al Huweider as a “powerful” woman! We had, always, viewed Wajeha as a great lady and as one of the best “dissidents” in Saudi Arabia. The “powerful” in Saudi Arabia tended to arrest Wajeha from time to time to stop her from writing, demonstrating, or even driving a car! But, to no avail.
Metransparent has been honored to publish Wajeha Al Huweider’s great articles since it went on line seven years ago. The “non-Shiite Shiite” Wajeha Al Huweider (The great Isaac Deutscher coined the term “the non-Jewish Jew”) is living proof of Saudi women’s resistance against the terrible injustices imposed on them by an obscurantist system. But she is, also, one of best liberal and humanist writers in her own country and in the Arab region.
We salute her.
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100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2011: No.46 Wajeha Al Huweider
Wajeha Al Huweider is one of Saudi Arabia’s premier womens’ rights activists and writers, as well as the co-founder of the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women’s Rights in Saudi Arabia.
In 2008, Al Huweider received international media attention when a video of her driving in Saudi Arabia was posted on YouTube, as it is currently illegal for women to drive in the kingdom. “Before that, I knew that I’m a human being. However, in the United States I felt it, because I was treated as one,” she said of her time in the West. “I learned life means nothing without freedom. Then I decided to become a real women’s rights activist, in order to free women in my country and to make them feel alive.”