Top Quotes: “Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening” — Manal al-Sharif
Introduction
“My five-year-old son was asleep, but I was awake stIll, sitting up with my brother.
Startled, my brother jumped up and rushed to the entry. I stayed slightly behind, feeling the night air rush in as he pulled open the door. It was May, so the air was warm but still pleasant, not oppressively hot. And it was dark. My lone porch light had burned out weeks before and I hadn’t bothered to replace it. I thought about the light, I wondered whether the sudden noise would have woken my son — small thoughts passing through my mind in those seconds before everything changed.
In the shadowy darkness, all we could see were men, crowding around my front stoop, pressing forward. They had no uniforms, nothing to identify them. When my brother asked them who they were, there was silence. Finally, one of them spoke. “Is this Manal al-Sharif’s house?”
My brother didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he answered, his voice firm.
“She needs to come with us right now. They want to see her at the Dhahran police station.” My brother did not have to ask why. That previous afternoon I had been pulled over by the traffic police for the “crime” of driving my brother’s car. The specific citation was “driving while female.” My brother had been sitting beside me, in the passenger seat, and then had sat next to me again for five hours inside the Thuqbah traffic police station, a two-story, nondescript concrete government building with a sturdy fence all around and a detention room where drivers could be held for hours or even days. There was only one detention space in the station, and it was only for men. I’m quite sure that I was the first woman ever to enter the Thuqbah station. It took the police several hours, including a call to the commander and a visit to the local governor’s house, just to produce a paper for me to sign. The paper was a promise to never again drive on Saudi lands. I refused to sign, but they persisted. When my brother read the piece of paper, he realized I would only be admitting to having violated Saudi custom, because there are no specific Saudi statutes or lines in the traffic code that forbid women from driving. All they could accuse me of was disobeying the orf, or custom. I signed, and we were released. My brother and I took a taxi home, thinking that the incident was over, thinking that we had stymied the system, that in some small way, we had won.
We returned to my town house to find the TV on. There were pizza boxes on the coffee table, and three of my friends were clustered in my small living room with their laptops and smartphones. As I walked in, my sister-in-law started crying, and my friends rushed over and hugged me, shouting that they couldn’t believe the police had let me go. One friend had even started a Twitter hashtag, #FreeManal, after I’d texted him from the car when the police first pulled me over. Everyone was talking at once, telling me to look at this tweet or that Facebook page or this news feed. In the six hours, the news of my arrest had gone viral. But I couldn’t look at anything. I was exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally. All I wanted to do was to take a shower and go to bed. But it is against every Saudi custom to ask guests to leave, so I sat and we talked about winning our first battle, about having proved that there is no traffic code explicitly banning women from driving. When they finally left, they were still so excited and happy-and so was I, thinking, Well, now no one can stop us.
But then it was 2:00 a.m, and there were men at my door and my elation from the day was gone. As soon as I heard the words “Dhahran police station,” I was terrified. My brother slammed the door shut and locked the bolt. There was a pause. Then the knocking started again.”
“My town house was not in the holy city of Mecca, my childhood home of twisted streets and thronging pilgrims, off-limits to all non-Muslims. Nor was it set amid the gleaming towers and sky bridges of the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, high on a desert plateau. It was tucked in perhaps the most Western enclave in the entire kingdom, the pristine Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company) compound in the Eastern Province, originally designed by Americans working for John D. Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil, which had helped found Aramco. Today, Aramco is the Saudi state oil company and the world’s largest daily exporter of oil, sitting atop 260 billion barrels of petroleum reserves. It is also the world’s wealthiest company, with a net worth estimated as high as $2.5 trillion. And it was my employer. When the Americans sold Aramco to the Saudis in the 1970s and 1980s, part of the agreement required the Saudis to continue to employ women.
The Aramco compound has long been a world unto itself. With lush green golf courses, lawns, palm trees, parks, and swimming pools, it looks very much like a perfect Southern California town. Inside the gates of Aramco, Saudi rules do not apply. Men and women mix together. Women do not have to be veiled or covered. We celebrated holidays like Halloween, when everyone dresses up in costumes. And unlike every other place in Saudi Arabia, inside the Aramco compound, women can drive. There are no prohibitions, no restrictions. They simply slip behind the wheel and start the engine. And there are protections. Not even the local city police or the Saudi religious police are allowed to venture onto Aramco controlled land. Aramco has its own security and fire departments. It handles its matters internally, like a separate, sovereign state inside the Saudi kingdom.
But the Saudi secret police, I learned that night, could still enter.
I turned to face the sliding glass doors at the edge of my living room. Unlike the traditional Saudi way of covering one’s house the way most families cover their women, I have never liked curtains. I always wanted the light streaming in. Now one of the men stood with his face pressed against the bare glass, his damp breath spreading like fog before the dry desert air sucked it back up again. He said nothing, and he did not move. Only his eyes slowly scanned my room. That night, he did not move from that glass door, did not release his face the entire time. Like the others, he was dressed in civilian clothes. That, however, is the hallmark of the secret police. They do not wear uniforms. They do not even identify themselves as police. They have other jobs, other identities. Yet they are woven through society at every level, and their sole purpose is to inform. They are employed by the kingdom to monitor citizens and to enforce the rules.”
“I was divorced; under Saudi rules, without a husband, my father was my official male guardian. I could not work, attend school, or travel without his permission. But he lived in Jeddah, on the other side of the country.”
“Almost as soon as I hung up, my phone rang again. This call was from Kholoud, a women’s rights activist, who had already been tweeting about my arrest the previous afternoon. In the confusion, I didn’t know that at that very moment one of my colleagues from Aramco, Omar al-Johani, was hiding behind a bush very close to my house. He had read Kholoud’s tweets about my arrest and knew the street where I lived. He drove around until he saw the cars and the security guards. Now he was tweeting about the men surrounding my door. Kholoud was following him online. “Manal,“ she said calmly, “I want you to do something. I want you to go with these guys. It will bring them shame if we announce that they’ve taken you from your house in the middle of the night. This is a violation of your rights. We should expose them.””
“In Saudi society, a woman needs her official guardian (usually her father or husband) or a mahram — a close male family relative whom she cannot marry, such as a father, brother, uncle, or even a son — to accompany her on any official business.
Even a woman in labor will not be admitted into a hospital without her guardian or at least a mahram. Police cannot enter a home during a robbery, and firefighters are forbidden from entering a home during a fire or medical emergency if a woman is inside but does not have a mahram present. In 2014, Amna Bawazeer died on the campus of King Saud University when school officials refused to allow male paramedics to enter the female-only school after Amna collapsed from a heart ailment. The same story repeated itself in 2016 at Qaseem University when male paramedics were not allowed on campus to treat a female student, Dhuha Almane, who subsequently died.”
“I never set out to be an activist. I was a religious girl, born and raised in Mecca. I started covering myself with abayas and niqabs before it was even required, simply because I wanted to emulate and please my religious teachers. And I believed in a highly fundamentalist version of Islam. For years, I melted my brother’s pop music cassette tapes in the oven because in fundamentalist Islam, music is considered haram, meaning forbidden. The first time I ever heard a song, I was twenty years old. It was the Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely, and I still remember almost every word.
The only thing I did at a young age that was somewhat rebellious was to get a job. I had a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and I was hired by Aramco as an information security specialist. I got married young, at age twenty-four, and had a son. Then I got divorced, which is fairly common; some published statistics estimate that the divorce rate inside Saudi Arabia is as high as sixty percent. Both my parents were divorced when they married. But once I turned thirty, I started to do daring things on my birthdays. On my thirtieth birthday, I was working in the United States, in New Hampshire, and I went skydiving. The next year, I bought a ticket to Puerto Rico and spent thirty-six hours traveling alone. And back in Saudi Arabia in 2011, when I turned thirty-two, I decided that I would start driving.
I learned the proper rules of driving when I was working and living in the States — I got a New Hampshire and then a Massachusetts driver’s license. But in Saudi Arabia, I never got behind the wheel, except inside the Aramco compound. Saudi women rely on drivers, usually foreign men, some of whom have never taken a driving test or had any kind of professional instruction, to ferry them from place to place. We are at their mercy. Some families are wealthy enough to employ their own personal driver, but many women rely on an informal network of men with cars who illegally transport female passengers. Women carry lists of these private drivers in their phones, and we call and call until we find one who’s available. Or we take a taxi — taxis and their drivers are at least registered and licensed by the traffic police — but the taxis are old and many of the men who operate them don’t bathe, so the stench is often overwhelming. My friends would text me if they found a clean taxi driver, and I would text them.
Almost every woman I know has been harassed by a driver. They make comments about our appearance or about conversations they overhear; they demand more money; they touch you inappropriately. Some women have been attacked. I’ve had drivers make all sorts of inappropriate comments and tape my calls when I’ve used my cell phone, even drivers who don’t speak Arabic, thinking maybe they could blackmail or extort me. Then there are the cases of drivers who sexually molest the children they are hired to drive to and from school.
It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone. Even women who have personal drivers cannot depend on these hired men. Some don’t show up, others disappear entirely.”
“In Saudi Arabia, harassment isn’t a criminal offense. The authorities, especially the religious police, always blame the woman. They say she was harassed because of how she looked or because of the way she was walking or because she was wearing perfume. They make you the criminal.
When I got home that night, I poured out my complaints on Facebook: the degradation of having to find a driver, of always worrying about being late, or being left somewhere, of trying to cobble together a patchwork of rides from relatives and drivers whose numbers I hoarded in my phone. I ended my post by promising to drive outside the Aramco compound on my birthday and take videos and upload them to YouTube. David, one of my American friends from New Hampshire, wrote on my Facebook wall “troublemaker.” and I replied, “no, history-maker.” But even then, I didn’t believe myself. I thought I was bluffing.”
“”Come on, Manal. You know the king is going through a very difficult time with the Arab Spring and all the things that are happening in the region. Why would you add more burdens to the king? Don’t you love the king?” And there right in front of me was the king’s picture, staring down at me with that half-smile.
In Saudi Arabia, your patriotism is measured by how much you love the king. The king is revered like a father, and we are considered his daughters and sons. And out of all the Saudi kings, Abdullah is the king I have loved instead of feared.”
“The interrogator nodded and said that the problem wasn’t so much with me driving, it was with me posting my video on YouTube and talking to the foreign media and causing so much fuss.”
“In Saudi Arabia at that time, women weren’t given licenses to practice (the first licenses for female lawyers were issued in 2014). I would need a man if I was going to get out of Dammam Women’s Prison.”
Childhood
“Mama left her life of comfort and even opulence in Alexandria to marry a Saudi man with no education and a menial job, to live in a walk-up apartment without regular running water or a telephone. My mother, however, refused to live like a typical Saudi woman. She refused to stay shut up in the apartment. She would go out alone, without her guardian or a mahram. She refused to have no means of employment, so she sewed, which had been her childhood hobby. She sewed dresses for my sister and me, and she made clothes for her friends and acquaintances, earning her own small income independent of my father. It was our mother who took us to get vaccinated at the health clinic, who decided where we could go, what we could do, and what was safe. And it was our mother who was determined that each of her children should receive an education. She was the one who went by herself to enroll us in school, first primary school, then middle school, and then secondary school. She even registered my younger brother in the boys’ school, something almost unheard of for a woman.
I remember how the school guard at the boys’ primary school stopped her at the gate and barred her from entering, but Mama refused to move until the deputy administrator came out to see her. Again and again, he tried to dismiss her and send her on her way, his tongue clucking against the roof of his mouth, repeating that my father had to be present to register my brother. But my mother refused to leave, and finally, the deputy administrator relented.”
“In other ways, my mother did become a more typical Saudi woman. She gave up the colorful head scarves and bright clothes that she had worn in Egypt, covering herself in the shapeless black abaya. And she tolerated another aspect of being a Saudi wife: my father was free to beat her. Not all Saudi wives are beaten; as far as I know, none of my aunts were. But that did not matter in our home. For decades, until 2012, Saudi Arabia had no domestic violence codes to protect women or children. And that meant parents could also beat their children.
I considered Abouya’s bamboo cane the sixth person in our home. The cane was a familiar sight in almost any house in Mecca; very few of my friends were fortunate enough not to know its sting. Abouya replaced his bamboo cane every autumn, to coincide with the beginning of the new academic year. As we covered our new school notebooks in paper wrapping, he covered his new cane in brightly colored chrome tape, and hung it up menacingly for all to see. He didn’t beat us because we were lazy at school; the three of us always ranked among the top students, not only in our classes and our school but in all the schools in Mecca. I had a box of certificates and trophies, yet I was beaten regularly, for reasons that I still do not understand. If one of us knew we were about to be beaten, at first we used to hide the cane, but the trick never worked on Abouya. If he couldn’t find the cane, he would use the water hose from the bathroom. We soon learned that the lashes from the hard, thickrubber hose were far more painful than those of the bamboo.
When Mama beat us, she used her bare hands. She slapped us and pinched the inside of our thighs, and when we outran her or managed to scramble away, she threw anything within easy reach: a slipper, a plate, even her sharp, pointed sewing scissors. I have two scars on my forehead and a third under my left eye that will forever remind me of my mother’s furious beatings.”
“There were about sixty-six slums in Mecca when I was growing up. They had nothing: no running water, no basic infrastructure, no real sanitation, no schools, just makeshift places to study the Koran. One of my good friends from school lived on the edge of one of them. I was never allowed to go into her house; instead, I could walk with Mama to meet her to exchange something like a schoolbook or schoolwork. Even as Mama and I walked toward her neighborhood, we could smell the horrible odor of the common toilets and waste in the gutter.”
“Although non-Muslims are forbidden to enter Mecca, the city is the most diverse in the entire Saudi kingdom, home to untold numbers of Muslim immigrants, legal and illegal. There are parts of the city where you will not hear one word of Arabic spoken. Each nationality has its own community and its own varied reasons for staying. Some arrived to build buildings and study the Koran. Others came as merchants or even refugees. There are enclaves of people from Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Burma, Turkey, and Yemen, all trying to get by.”
“We had a Nigerian woman who cleaned and did washing and ironing for about 400 riyals, or about 105 dollars a month, and we were a family that didn’t have running water all of the time.
A sizable number of immigrants came because they wanted to study Ilm (which translates as “religious knowledge,” a key concept in Islam) and the Koran, in the place where both began. Generations ago, before the kingdom was founded, these people were able to remain, and eventually they became Saudi citizens. But in the decades since, hundreds of thousands more have come for the annual hajj or for study and then have simply stayed behind, melting into the city. It is possible to have two families from the same country, and the one that arrived earlier might have Saudi citizenship, while the later arrival must retain its original nationality. Yet many pilgrims still want to stay: even the people who are deported seem to find a way to return.”
“Saudi families, almost universally, reflect a contradictory combination of extreme intimacy and extreme segregation and impenetrable privacy. We sleep in common rooms and travel in and out of each other’s apartments, but we keep our windows covered, and indeed often have no windows that face the outside world. In many houses, men and women live on different sides, and enter and exit via different doors. We are a culture of peeking, where women peek from behind windows or on the other side of doors to see who might have come to visit.”
Fundamentalism
“Juhayman and a band of his followers, some Saudi, as well as others from across the globe, including even the United States, captured the Grand Mosque. It was just before 5:30 a.m., at the moment when the day’s opening prayers and wishes for peace had just concluded. Brandishing high-powered rifles, pistols, and daggers that they had smuggled inside coffins many Muslim families bring the coffins of their dead relatives to the Grand Mosque so that they may perform the most merciful funeral prayers — one prayer in the Grand Mosque is the equivalent of one hundred thousand prayers offered elsewhere — the attackers chained shut the Grand Mosque’s fifty-one gates and scaled its seven minarets. Looking down nearly three hundred feet, Juhayman’s men had a nearly perfect view of the city and a precise vantage point from which to train their guns.
By birth, Juhayman was a Bedouin; these tribal, nomadic people have lived in the region for thousands of years. He was also an Islamic preacher. He had spent eighteen years in the Saudi national guard, where he never rose above the rank of corporal but had ample time to attend lectures on Islam. His father had been an extremely devout follower of a Sunni sect founded in the mid-1700s by Muhammad Ibn Abdel Wahhab, who preached that Islam had become corrupt, paganized, and Europeanized. He rejected what he viewed as unnecessary cultural sophistication as well as personal luxuries — including silk clothing, tobacco, gold adornments for men, and music and dancing. He wanted a return to the pure form of Islam as first practiced by Muhammad (PBUH) and a rigorous application of even the smallest details of original Islamic law. In Abdel Wahhab found an ally in Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants would become the House of Saud, the future kings of Saudi Arabia. But the alliance partly fractured in the twentieth century. The family of Abdel Wahhab remained a powerful religious force, but the religious militia that had backed the Wahhabis and the House of Saud turned on the Saudi m king after he allowed Westerners into the country. In 1929, King Abdul Aziz of the House of Saud defeated his former military allies in battle. One of the survivors of that defeat was Juhayman’s father.
By 1979, Juhayman had become steeped in this highly fundamentalist Wahhabi-Salafi preaching, which joined the original Wahhabi belief in a strict interpretation of Islam that rejects modern influences with a second, radical, highly Puritanical view of Islam (Salafism) that was being formulated among extremist scholars. The result is a set of extreme Salafist beliefs that is critical of and even downright hostile to modern advancements in technology and human thought. Juhayman also increasingly became convinced that the Muslim world was nearing the fateful end of days, the great cataclysm that would destroy the globe and leave only the most devout standing.”
“Juhayman’s takeover of the mosque and its grounds caused utter confusion. Initial reports suggested that the besiegers were Iranians. Just sixteen days before, on November 4, Iranan militants had seized the US embassy in Tehran and taken more than sixty hostages. Information about conditions inside the mosque came only when an American helicopter pilot who had served in Vietnam made two passes above to snap photos. (The pilot and his crew had to convert to Islam by saying the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger,” in order to be cleared to fly over the site, since no non-Muslims are permitted. At that time the government lacked any of its own pilots capable of undertaking the mission.) The Saudis quickly realized that the man in control of the mosque was part of an extremist group.”
“It took two weeks, the assistance of a contingent of French commandos and Pakistani special forces, a massive fire, pitched gun battles, the shelling of five of the seven minarets, and the deployment of chemical gas in the vast tunnels underneath the mosque (tunnels largely built by the bin Laden construction firm, the family of Osama bin Laden) to end the siege. A fatwa by Bin Baz was written to justify the armed attack by Saudi troops on the Grand Mosque.
In the days following the takeover, the turmoil spread beyond Mecca. The American embassies in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Tripoli, Libya, were violently attacked by local mobs, incited by claims that the Americans were behind the desecration of the Grand Mosque. The US embassy in Pakistan was completely destroyed; the 137 Americans inside barely made it out alive after hiding for hours in the building’s safe-room vault, surrounded by an out-of-control fire. One Marine was killed. Elsewhere in the embassy compound, a US Army warrant officer asleep in his staff apartment on his day off was also killed, his body burned by the mob.
In Mecca, the final death toll was far higher. Officially, the number of dead including Saudi kingdom soldiers, rebels, and pilgrims trapped in the Mosque when the siege began — is listed as 270, but there are other estimates that put the number of deceased at 1,000 or more, with many of those being innocent pilgrims.
On January 8, 1980, a little more than a week after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, the Saudi government publicly beheaded sixty-three of the rebels who had occupied the Grand Mosque. The executions were carried out in eight Saudi cities. Juhayman was the first to die, in Mecca. But his ideology did not. It has become one of the animating forces of contemporary Islamist extremism. The Egyptian army officer who would assassinate President Anwar Sadat eighteen months later was inspired by Juhayman: by chance, his brother had been a pilgrim at the Grand Mosque during the siege. Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, ISIS, and even groups like Nigeria’s Boko Haram are rooted in the same fundamentalist ideology that Juhayman once preached, advocating a strict interpretation of the Koran, the application of harsh Islamic law, and calls for jihad against the infidels, particularly Jews and Christians.
Until “the days of Juhayman,” which is how the siege is still referred to in Mecca, Saudi Arabia had been both increasingly prosperous and increasingly modern, supported by the global oil boom, which had lifted the country out of poverty and turned it into a land of plenty. But afterward, fears of a radical Islamist tide began to pervade the country, prompting the ruling family to meet with senior religious clerics and elders to discuss how this new brand of extremism could be addressed. In an effort to appease those who had gravitated to this ideology, the Saudi state decided to embrace some of their doctrines. Juhayman and his followers might have been driven from the Grand Mosque, but now their extreme beliefs would increasingly occupy the entire Saudi nation from within.
The first group to feel the full impact were women. In the weeks after the uprising, female announcers were banned from television. Pictures of females were censored in newspapers, and the government cracked down on the employment of women. A hard-line Salafist ideology was introduced and taught not only in Saudi schools but around the world by Saudi-funded missionaries. Bin Baz would issue another fatwa, declaring that jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was an individual duty of every Muslim. One of those who left the kingdom to join that fight was Osama bin Laden.
Growing up in Mecca, I would hear veiled references to the days of Juhayman. We never studied the siege in school, and it was never spoken about publicly. Today it has been all but erased from the public Saudi record. Even the hole in the Kaaba has been covered up. But the legacy of Juhayman and his embrace of extreme Salafism would come to impact even the smallest details of my life inside the Saudi kingdom.”
“The first official Saudi government school for girls opened in 1964, two years after the king officially banned slavery in the kingdom. It was far from a universally popular decision. The first man to call for girls to be educated, Abdulkareem Aljuhayman, had been jailed for six months for his views.”
“When the first girls’ school did finally open, Prince Faisal (the crown prince and later the king) had to send soldiers to protect the students, not unlike what happened when schools were desegregated in the American South. It can be so difficult to effect change, so hard to overturn long-standing views.
It was always possible to distinguish the girls’ schools from the boys’. The girls’ schools had the look of detention centers, shut behind high solid walls of corrugated metal (imagine a shipping container cut into pieces) and a solid gate. The only man visible was the guard standing at the entrance. The school windows were bolted shut and covered so no outside eyes might gaze inside. Although we had a large outdoor courtyard in the middle of the school, there were no playgrounds, because girls should not run around or jump.
The school door was opened in the morning so that the students and teachers could enter; then it was locked tight with a single key. It could not be opened again unless the headmistress gave her permission. There were also no emergency exits. In 2002, fifteen girls died in a fire inside Mecca’s Middle School No. 31. The city’s religious police had barred the girls from exiting through the front door because they were not wearing their abayas and were thus not following proper Islamic dress code. When the school door was opened and they were finally carried out, it was as charred corpses.”
“It was forbidden to bring anything to school other than a schoolbook or notebook. Carrying a lipstick, a comb, or a mirror to school — or even an outside book or, as we grew older, a cassette tape or a photograph — was prohibited. The school would confiscate the item, summon the student’s mother, and also send a letter of warning to her guardian.
There was no room in the girls’ schools for any activity that was not directly related to our academic classes — they were forbidden by order of the mufti. No sports, no theater, no music, no art appreciation, no visits to museums or historical sites, no celebrations for our end-of-year graduation. There wasn’t even space for a school library. The only permitted enrichment classes were drawing, sewing, and home economics. We were taught how to make different types of stitches, how to crochet, and how to prepare cakes and pickles: even though we were at school, the expectation was that our ultimate destination was inside a home.
I adored drawing class, though we weren’t allowed to draw living creatures, only plants and inanimate objects; the Saudi clerics’ interpretation of Islamic law prohibits representative art, such as drawing a person. Many times I tried to test the limits of this prohibition. My smiling fruits often enjoyed the use of human hands and feet. But my teacher usually confiscated those drawings, which ended up as shreds of paper in the wastebasket. So I stopped drawing people in my art sketchbook and started instead to draw them in my notebooks at home, which I filled with the forbidden smiling faces and bounding animals.”
“When it came to beatings, Saudi Arabia’s schools were no better than its homes. I remember the expression uttered by many parents when they registered their children, which translates literally to: “The skin is for you, and the bone is for us.”
This meant that the teacher was permitted to hit the child whenever he or she deemed it necessary. The deputy of our school had a fifty-centimeter wooden ruler, somewhat shorter than a yardstick, that she carried everywhere, and each teacher brought a traditional thirty-centimeter wooden ruler with her to class. When a female student was punished, she was required to extend her palm and be smacked by the ruler. But it did not stop there. Teachers might also pinch our ears and slap our faces.”
“In the mid-1990s, a Saudi boy was beaten so severely by his teacher that he later died from his injuries. Finally, after that, official beatings in Saudi schools were banned.”
“In Mecca, even if you had a window, you had to put up a lot of shades so people on the outside couldn’t see what was inside. We live in one of the most sun-drenched countries on earth and most of our lives are spent indoors, in quasi-darkness.
I was also captivated by Sinbad, because he was an adventurer who traveled the world. In my world, physical activity — running, jumping, climbing — was forbidden to girls because we might lose our virginity.”
“The worst consequence of these tight intertwinings of religion and education inside Saudi Arabia would affect boys and girls equally: the radical Islamization of our studies. Anxious to reject the pan-Arab nationalists who were coming to power in places like Egypt and Iraq, the Saudis decided to align themselves with some of the most radical of the Islamists, men who had been jailed in other nations, like Egypt, for their violent ideology. These men had found a political haven in the Saudi kingdom. Now they were also going to find a place of supreme importance in the Saudi educational system. The task of drafting the curriculum for all school stages was entrusted to leaders of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus our books included works such as “Jihad for the Sake of Allah” by Sayyid Qutb, as well as writings by radical Islamist thinkers like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, whose ideology of violent holy war on behalf of the one true Islam is the basis for much of the religious interpretations expounded by Al Qaeda and ISIS. The Ministry of Education printed their books and taught their messages of stringent Islamist education and hatred of differences in its public schools.
There was a suffocating control over everything. Independent thought was discouraged; visual, audio, and print media were equally lacking in freedom. The censorship of books left no survivors. Political writings, historical narratives, even romance novels — any type of book considered to conflict with the prevailing extreme Salafist doctrine — was banned. Students in other countries might rebel against this madness, but the widespread illiteracy of our parents and the manner in which we were taught — dictation without discussion, memorizing and repeating without analysis or criticism — molded and subjugated us in such a way that we became domesticated and tame. We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had imposed upon us. My friends and I believed that the rest of the world, and even less observant parts of the Muslim world, were conspiring against our true Islam.”
“During my childhood in Mecca, the sale of most dolls was forbidden. The only acceptable ones were shapeless cloth things without faces, toys that looked more like pincushions than dolls. There were a few Western-style dolls, but they were treated like contraband. They had to be bought under the counter and you had to know the store owner well.”
“We had an array of sleek, silky cats who would lie around the apartment. In Islam, dogs are haram, forbidden, but not so cats.”
“My thought was: How do I get these sanitary towels without telling Mama? But sanitary towels and telling my mother would be the least of my problems.
After I told Amal my secret, she told her older sisters. They informed me that I could no longer talk to my male cousins, let alone play with them. If one of my male cousins wanted to walk past where I was sitting, or even enter the house while I was there, I had to first be hidden out of sight. This isolation extended to Aunt Zein’s house as well. Her oldest son banned his children, my friends Hammam and Hossam, from having any contact with me. We no longer raced in the yard or read our favorite books. We could no longer assemble LEGO blocks or play Atari games. Muhammad and his pigeon hut were lost to me, and we didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. I saw him once in the hallway by accident and desperately wanted to say hi, but could not bring myself to do so. And he would not speak to me. I visited my uncle’s and aunt’s houses less and less. I felt isolated and alone, and I was angry and confused that people who had been as close to me as brothers had disappeared. I no longer knew what they looked like. I cannot compare the feeling to anything except the empty grief one feels after a loved one dies. I suppose it was akin to death, a severing from half of the people I had known.
Men and women were not always so strictly segregated in Saudi Arabia’s homes, schools, offices, and public places. The wife of one of my older cousins did not cover her face, and she would sit with her brothers-in-law during a meal. Even a woman’s need to have one designated male guardian — a father, husband, brother, uncle, or son — to provide permission for the most basic activities — including travel, particularly outside the country — is a relatively recent development in Saudi society. It was the younger generation, my cousins, who imposed this level of segregation and religiosity on their elders and set these draconian rules for their parents, rather than the other way around. I remember my aunt saying, “I’m so thankful that my kids are teaching me about Islam.”
After 1979, after the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, my generation was brainwashed. In school, we were taught to go home and lecture our parents about prayer and sins, most of which involved the behavior of women. Those born female in Saudi society now pass through two stages in their lives. First, as young girls, they are supervised and monitored; then, as adult women, they are controlled and judged. Their first menstrual cycle is the abrupt turning point. There is no transition into adolescence. Young women in Saudi Arabia do not experience anything like the “teenage years,” that time to experiment, have adventures, and even make mistakes and learn from them.
As soon as a girl reaches puberty, from the moment her breasts begin to show, she is obliged to enter a state known in Arabic as khidr (“numbness”). She must be outwardly devoid of emotions and feelings. In public, she must veil herself from prying eyes and avoid speaking.”
“When you’re stopped at a traffic light, that too is a time to pray. You should say Astaghfiru Allah, God forgive me, God forgive me, over and over, until the light changes.”
“By the early 1990s, the over-the-head abaya and full-face niqab were imposed on all female students, just as they had been on women in other areas of Saudi life. It was the most stringent form of niqab. While the traditional niqab left a slit for the eyes, we were now supposed to lower our head scarves to block out this opening entirely. It was hard to get used to it on my journey to and from school. The full face covering made me almost blind, and I stumbled every day on the steps of our building. One time when I fell, our neighbors’ sons watched and laughed.”
“There was now one completely acceptable place to direct the emotions of my own teenage upheavals and frustrations: into the global Muslim political struggle and calls for an Islamic state or caliphate. As a teenager, at least sixty percent of our time in class was spent studying religion and religious subjects.”
“There are some people in positions of power in the kingdom who have stolen billions of dollars, but their hands and ankles have never been cut off. That punishment is only for the small-time pickpockets.”
“There was no counternarrative. By that time the extreme salafis controlled all media; books that did not conform with their ideology were banned. The fixation on declaring things forbidden (haram), which had begun with girls’ education, now extended to censorship of the printed press, radio, and television. They also rejected anything new that might disrupt official communications, such as satellite channels and the Internet, and innovations like credit cards and insurance. No battle was too small. In their Friday sermons, imams denounced the infiltration of satellite dishes inside the kingdom, declaring a religious war on the dish. People who owned one were branded as traitors to the faith.”
“I remembered what they had taught us at the school lectures: that your religion cannot be complete until you have changed the evil around you. I would have to change not only myself but also my family.”
“As teenagers, we also heard extensive preaching on the requirement to obey one’s husband. This, we were informed, would serve as one way that a woman could guarantee her entry to paradise. Preachers stressed the necessity of women gaining their husbands’ permission for everything, whether visiting family, cutting their hair, or even performing voluntary religious fasting. They emphasized the need for women’s complete subordination to their husbands in all facets of life. As one Saudi sheikh said during a lecture, “If your husband has an injury filled with pus, and you lick this pus from his wound, this is still less than what he can rightfully expect.”
“I had never owned cassettes of music or songs before. Music was one of the great taboos, or forbidden (haram) things, in Saudi culture; religious discourse routinely described it as “the post mail for adultery” and the “whistles of Satan.” What little music I heard was accidental, usually while watching television. I largely stopped watching TV to avoid inadvertently committing that particular sin, and insisted to my parents that we lower the sound whenever any music came on. There were no remote controls. so I would get up and turn the knob myself.”
“I tried hard to dissuade my family from listening to singing, watching television, or collecting magazines with photographs, since we had been taught in school that the presence of photographs in the home would prevent the entry of angels.”
“After my bonfire, Mama hid all the family photograph albums from me to prevent me from burning those as well. She considered our few pictures to be precious. It was two decades before I saw them. I stumbled upon this small treasure trove while cleaning out Mama’s room after she died. And I was grateful. A significant number of Saudis reject the idea of photography for reasons of privacy, so images of relatives and friends are often rare. Many of those, like me, who later renounced their extremism, say they have never regretted anything as much as having ripped up their family photographs.”
College
“My sister had enrolled at the university before me, and when she decided to study at the College of Medicine, she faced strong objections from my father and some of my male cousins over the mixing of the sexes. My cousins categorically told my father not to allow her to attend a “mixed” school. My father, remembering Muna’s flirtations with the Arab boy, listened. This ideological combat soon turned physical; she was severely beaten by my father and imprisoned in the apartment.
Somehow Mama managed to smuggle Muna out of our building and get her to the school to take the acceptance test; I remember Muna leaving that day with a bandage over one of her eyes. She passed the test, earning top marks. Still, my sister needed my father’s consent before she was able to enter the school. To this day, I don’t know how Mama persuaded my father to sign the permission papers. (Females in Saudi Arabia still cannot enroll anywhere without having permission from their assigned male guardian.) But she did.”
“At King Abdulaziz, the girls’ university buildings were completely set apart from the boys’ buildings. We even had a separate gate, where we had to show a university ID in order to go in and out. This meant that for the first time in my life I had a card with my name and picture. At that time, official, government-issued ID cards were available only to Saudi males. They received them upon turning fifteen, whereas women remained dependent on men their whole lives. The names of females were only added, without pictures, to a card known as the “Family ID.”
We were taught by male professors, though we never saw them face-to-face. Everything was done via closed-circuit television; we saw and heard the professors, who were sitting in a classroom in a separate building lecturing the male students, but they couldn’t see or hear us, so we were denied any chance to participate. As if that wasn’t enough of a disadvantage, the CCTV often crashed, and then we would simply miss the lecture. If we wanted to ask the professor a question, the only way to do so was by telephone, which was supervised by a female assistant who sat through the lecture with us to maintain discipline and record our attendance.”
“Because of the separation of the sexes in Saudi society, a female subculture known in Arabic as boyät (boya in the singular) began to thrive. The expression boy is made by taking the English word boy and adding an a sound, used in Arabic to feminize a word. It referred to women who were tomboys. There was also an entire subculture of feminized men.”
Adulthood
“Because no one at work could see my facial expressions, I would even carry a card with a happy face on one side and a sad face on another, so I could display my feelings. Otherwise, the nigab numbed me.”
“Saudi custody rules are murky at best and often depend on whatever individual agreements are reached between the two parents and, sometimes, their families and the judge. In 2007, when I got divorced, the policy was for children to reside largely with the mother until they turned seven. At age seven, a girl would then be taken to her father’s house to live. A boy, however, would be asked if he wished to remain with his mother; the choice was his. Once he became a teenager, that boy would often become his mother’s male guardian. He would have the final say over whether she could work or go out, or must stay in. If a woman remarries, she immediately loses all custody of her children. If they are young, they must be sent to her mother to live or, if her mother is unable to care for them, to her sisters — the oldest first, and if she can’t, then the second-oldest — rather like an elaborate plan of royal succession. A man, however, can remarry at will or even take a second wife, with no impact on his claim to his children. I have friends who wish very much to leave their marriages but cannot, because they know that they will lose their children.
I was determined not to become a second wife. I could not imagine giving up Aboudi. My own family did not have a tradition of taking second wives, but the practice is still strong in Saudi society, particularly in the middle of the country. When women reach the end of their childbearing years, the man goes and finds someone younger. For years, Saudi men also used to bring women back from Syria, Morocco, or Egypt to be second wives. The father of one of my childhood best friends had two wives, who lived on different floors of the same apartment building. Another of my childhood friends became a second wife herself. And one of my other friends, who was married with three children, discovered by accident that her husband had taken a second wife, a woman with whom he worked at Aramco. My friend left her husband for a while and returned to her family home, but eventually she went back. Many women do not know or do not speak about the existence of second wives.
After my divorce, I had some suitors propose, all of whom wanted to make me a second wife. I was insulted to be approached for that, but men assumed I would say yes. After you are divorced in Saudi Arabia, it is very difficult to get a second chance.”
“If we went to a restaurant, they looked at all the prices on the menu before they ordered. I realized that this debt would rule their lives for years, while in Saudi Arabia, I had been paid $300 a month just to study at my university.”
Women2Drive
“On November 6, 1990, as Saudi Arabia simmered with unease, forty-seven women defied the ban on driving. For thirty minutes, they lined up their cars in a convoy and drove around the capital city, Riyadh, until the religious police caught up with them and all forty-seven were arrested. Their goal had been to demonstrate to Saudi society that while they were women, they were competent enough to sit behind the wheel of a car.”
“I was not the only Saudi woman growing desperate to drive. Only days after my humiliating walk along the side of the road, a friend invited me to join a Facebook event called “We are driving May 17th.” The event was being organized by a young woman named Bahiya. I discovered that I knew her aunt. I accepted the invitation immediately and asked if I could be added as an administrator.”
“I registered my account under the handle @Women2Drive, uploaded a photo that one of our supporters had designed, and in the profile bio, I wrote, “We call on all Saudi women to drive on June 17.”
Within days, @Women2Drive had thousands of followers.”
“Public demonstrations are illegal in Saudi Arabia and the punishments for conducting them severe. A peaceful sit-down protest can result in a sentence of lashes, jailtime, and being banned from foreign travel. To make sure that we could not be called a “protest,” I wanted women to drive by themselves, not in groups, and to record themselves alone in their cars.”
“Her father had died before her eyes because when he fell ill, no other man was at home and Maya couldn’t drive him to the hospital.”
“Wajeha was younger than I had expected, and despite all she’d been through, was clearly committed to the struggle for women’s rights. Since 2003, she had faced harassment: death threats, email threats, ugly comments in cyberspace. She’d been working at Aramco longer than me, but because of her activism, she’d been unable to advance in her career. Her boss had made it very clear that if she continued to agitate for women’s rights, there would be no opportunities for promotion; her goals were not “conducive to the policies or the position of Aramco.” She’d accepted these restrictions — she was glad to have a job — and she said that she would “never stop fighting for the rights of women.””
“That week, it became clear that one of the most daunting aspects of our efforts would be logistics. Many women who wished to participate did not know how to drive. When we put out a poll on Twitter, only eleven percent of the women who said they wanted to drive had any kind of license. More than two thousand women said they wanted to learn how. We began trying to locate women who could drive and were willing to teach others, either in parking lots or other safe spaces like the desert. One woman who came forward to help teach was Najla Hariri, a Saudi woman who had lived in Egypt and Lebanon and was licensed to drive in both countries. She not only offered to teach, she began driving herself around the streets of Jeddah. I put a BBC news crew in touch with her.”
“We continued, speaking about women who pay as much as a third of their monthly salaries to hire a private driver. Many of these drivers work for multiple women; what would be a ten-minute trip can take one or two hours as the driver circles the area, picking up all the other women. We talked about the hour-plus wait for a taxi during rush hour, about standing on the roadside as hired drivers humiliate us because they want more money than we are offering. We talked about mothers who cannot drop their children at school when their husbands are away, about mothers who put their ten-year-old sons behind the wheel so they can leave their homes.”
“One of my colleagues walked into my office and, holding on to the lip of my desk for support, he told me that my video was the most watched YouTube video in all of Saudi Arabia and one of the top videos in the world, with more than 700,000 views and a 20:80 like:dislike ratio.”
“I already knew something about the stories of abuse of domestic workers; Saudis employed hundreds of thousands of women, mainly from Asian countries, to do their cooking, their laundry, and to take care of their children. Saudi Arabia has no domestic labor codes, so any rights these women have are determined solely by their employer. We hear stories of foreign women who are mistreated or not paid, making them virtual prisoners in the homes in which they worked. (Ironically, their male counterparts, often employed as drivers for Saudi women, usually enjoy good wages, housing, and benefits.)
Now I found myself in a jail cell surrounded by many of these poor, frightened women, who were completely alone, spoke very little Arabic, and had next to no resources. Maysara, a widow from the Philippines with six children, had not been back to her country for eight years. She had been sentenced to one year in jail because she had run away; her sponsor had not paid her wages for months. She made space for me around her few things and gave me her bed. Other incarcerated women had done nothing more than confront their employers for mistreating them and the employers had them arrested and thrown into jail.
My arrest was in some ways an education: I was learning about domestic slavery.”
“My story was broadcast all over the world, and this international press was causing a great deal of embarrassment for the Saudi state. The flogging comment was the final straw. Even the king was embarrassed when the United States criticized Saudi Arabia for jailing a woman for driving.”
“On Friday, June 17, 2011, about three dozen women drove in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Some drove for less than an hour around the streets of Riyadh, the capital. Others got behind the wheel in Jeddah and Khobar and elsewhere. Many weren’t stopped, even when they passed police officers on the road. Those who were stopped were escorted home and sternly told not to drive again. At least one woman was ticketed for driving without a Saudi license. But none was arrested.
I did not drive that day, I stayed home.”
“By far, the hardest part was leaving Aboudi. My ex-husband would not allow Aboudi to travel to Dubai. And although he initially said that he would permit Aboudi to visit me in Dubai at least two times a year, he quickly reneged on that promise. If I wanted to see my son, I had to buy a ticket on my own and fly back to Saudi Arabia. Because I had no house, I had to stay with Aboudi’s grandmother in their family home whenever I visited. I did that every or every other weekend, and I do it still.”
“In the eyes of the Saudi Arabian government, I am also still not legally married. When I gave birth to another son, Daniel Hamza, in 2014, the government would not grant him a visa. I could not take him into the country with me. While I was pregnant, Aboudi won a stuffed animal that he gave to the baby. My two boys have big-brother and little-brother T-shirts, but they have never met. Aboudi cannot leave Saudi with me; his brother cannot enter Saudi with me. They only know each other from photos and from waving on screens across an Internet feed.”
“I did not understand the consequences of leaving my job at Aramco until I started looking for work again in Dubai. I went on forty-seven interviews in two years, almost always getting to the final rounds of the application. Then my file would go to Human Resources, they would look me up, and I would not be hired. My name and my history preceded me and negated any other skills on my résumé.”
“I took up the cause of a five-year-old Saudi girl, Lama, who was beaten with a cane and electric cables. she suffered a crushed skull, broken ribs, and a broken arm and died in a hospital. Her father was a well-known Saudi preacher. He had reportedly been “concerned” that his five-year-old daughter had lost her virginity. After her death, he paid $50,000 in blood money to his wife to avoid punishment; if Lama had been a boy, the sum would have been $100,000.
I started a campaign called I Am Lama, which helped pass the first Saudi code against domestic violence.”
“In the Saudi practice of Islam, women are not permitted to attend burial ceremonies. I could not even ride in the car with Mama’s casket.”
Conclusion
“There is talk of rolling back religious control; in April 2016, the religious police were stripped of their ability to make arrests. There is an effort under way to privatize a portion of Aramco, creating an initial public offering of up to five percent of the company’s stock. There are proposals to remove government subsidies and to have more Saudis work — somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the men in the kingdom are unemployed. (Women are excluded from unemployment statistics.) And while unemployment is a major issue in the kingdom, at least eighty-five percent of the employees working at all levels of the Saudi private sector are non-Saudis, meaning they are foreign-born workers.) Yet there are changes for women. Four female athletes represented the kingdom at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. A women-owned law firm opened in Jeddah in 2014, and four female lawyers are licensed to practice in the Saudi system, rather than simply serving as “legal consultants.” In December 2015, nineteen women won seats in local councils, although with 2,106 total seats, that is less than one percent. Widowed and divorced mothers are finally able to obtain family identity cards.
There is even talk of one day, far in the future, letting women drive.”
“Saudi Arabia’s government is now the largest investor in the transportation company Uber, having provided $3.5 billion in funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. The director of the fund, a member of the royal family, was given a seat on Uber’s board. But, while Uber helps Saudi women get from place to place, it is not a way for women to drive themselves. Saudi Arabia is using a modern smartphone app as a means to enforce the long-standing ban. In fact, about eighty percent of Saudi Uber’s users are Saudi women.”
“consider this story of a Starbucks in Riyadh. Early in
2016 a sign was posted on its door in Arabic and English:
“Please no entry for ladies - only send your driver to order thank you.” Starbucks’s official reply was that while it “welcomes all customers, including women and families,” this particular store had been “built without a gender wall,” meaning that it could only accommodate men. Starbucks added that it was working to receive approval from local authorities to build a permanent gender wall.”
“A friend of mine had been married for eighteen years and had two daughters when her husband announced that he was divorcing her to marry another woman. He took the girls, as is his right under the Saudi divorce code, took the things from their house, and moved to another city. She was left with the loans that he had taken out in her name, unbeknownst to her. At the age of thirty-six, she would have to return to having her father — a drug addict whom she has not seen or spoken to in thirteen years — be her guardian. Now he must be the one to give her permission to travel, to work, to open a bank account, to find housing, to do almost anything.”
“I think of another section of Jeddah, home to the Al Shallal theme park, which, one night a week, is open just for women. The most popular attraction at the park? Bumper cars, where for five minutes, women can drive freely, even if it is only in circles, around and around.
The rain begins with a single drop.”
