A couple of years ago – before the Arab Spring was even a twinkle in anyone's eye – I spent an evening chatting with Nesrine Malik, one of the Guardian's Middle East contributors. Somehow, our conversation got round to the question of why modern Arabic literature, not to mention TV drama, is so preoccupied with the past. Why not the future? And why, for example, is there such a shortage of Arabic science fiction?

We both had ideas about possible reasons, but then we started fantasising about what some futuristic Arab novel could be like, and came up with the idea of a Middle East in which the Saudi regime had been overthrown and the country was ruled by women – a militantly feminist bunch who might, for the sake of irony, be known as the Muslim Sisterhood.

Two years on, though, I'm beginning to wonder if the idea was quite as fanciful as it seemed. Is it really so crazy to suggest that women might one day bring down the House of Saud?

So far, the Saudi regime has escaped the kind of protests seen in a number of other Arab countries. It has declared street demonstrations to be un-Islamic and well as illegal, and is well-equipped to deal with them ... assuming the protesters are men. The one thing it is not prepared for, and would probably have difficulty coping with, is a mass revolt by women.

And why bother preparing for that? Women, after all, are expected to obey their menfolk and not trouble their heads with things like politics.

Saudi women, of course, have plenty to revolt about. They are oppressed, discriminated against and kept apart – excluded from many of the activities that for men would be normal. Paradoxically, though, the patriarchal system that keeps them apart from men also gives them a unique kind of freedom to organise and agitate beyond the gaze of male eyes (which inveitably includes most of the state's surveillance system).

During the long years of political stagnation in the Middle East, mosques provided cover for grassroots organisation and agitation because they were one of the few areas where the authorities' writ was limited. It came to haunt them after 9/11 of course, but that's another story. 

In Saudi Arabia there's a similar situation with women. The patriarchs, through their own choice, have created a vast no-go area by confining half the population – the female half – to a largely separate and private world, a world which up to now has been treated as being of no political consequence and where any stirrings have generally been disregarded or fobbed off with vague promises.

Tomorrow, June 17, marks the official start of the Women2Drive campaign, with the organisers hoping that large numbers of women will assert their rights by taking to the road in cars. A few brave souls have already done so – and have been arrested. Other women have been queuing outside government offices, demanding to register as voters in the pathetic municipal elections scheduled for later this year.

Whether this will achieve anything in the short term remains to be seen but with so many other avenues for peaceful dissent closed off by the authorities, women could by default become the kingdom's most important force for change. If the authorities fail to heed it, they do so at their own peril.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 16 June 2011.