No Woman, No Drive

There’s a moment in Hischam Fakih’s parody video where, dressed in full traditional Saudi robes and performing over Bob Marley’s reggae pulse, he sings: I remember when you used to sit in the back of the family car, so your ovaries would be fine and you’d have lots of babies. He’s mocking, almost verbatim, an actual warning issued by an actual cleric—who had recently gone on record claiming that driving damages women’s ovaries and leads to children born with clinical problems. You read a sentence like that and your brain briefly stalls, like a computer encountering a file type it doesn’t recognize.

The song was Fakih’s response to a coordinated protest in Saudi Arabia, where women activists had organized a driving day—a symbolic act of getting behind the wheel in a country where no official law technically prohibits it. The ban isn’t a statute. It’s a fatwa from 1990, a religious ruling that hardened over decades into something with the force of law. On the day of the protest, police stopped at least sixteen women. They paid fines and had to sign written pledges—along with their male companions—promising future compliance. The country was, at that point, the only one on earth with this particular prohibition in effect.

The song works because Fakih doesn’t argue. He just holds the cleric’s logic up to the light and lets it rot there. Satire at its most efficient: borrow the oppressor’s words, set them to a rhythm the whole world knows, and let the absurdity do the rest. Bob Marley would have had something to say about it.