France24 reports: Women wearing niqabs ride bikes, rollerskate and roll down the street on scooters, play basketball or go bowling, dance like nobody’s watching, and sing about dismantling the patriarchy. Pretty incendiary stuff — at least when it’s the video clip for a new pop song in Saudi Arabia.
The song “Hwages” (“Concerns”) by the Saudi singer Majed Al-Esa is making waves in the Wahhabi kingdom, having hit over 2 million views on YouTube in just over a week.
In the first part of the video, women wearing niqabs (a veil, usually black, that covers the face while leaving the eyes uncovered) get in the back of a car, leaving the passenger seat at the front empty, while the vehicle is driven by a young boy. The women clap their hands and sing an Arabic expression that roughly means, “If only God would rid us of men!”, a somewhat obsolete phrase that is mostly used in the very conservative region of Al-Qassim, north of the capital Riyadh.
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