Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  As she walked to the front, the class stood, and just as we did every other day, we answered her greeting in one voice: “Peace be upon you, and God’s mercy and blessings be upon you.” But this morning, Miss Sanaa fixed her gaze first on another girl, Yousra, and then on me. Yousra and I possessed an insatiable appetite for questions; we asked about everything. But today, no questions were allowed. “I’m going to explain a new lesson,” she said. “I do not wish any of you to ask questions either during or after the explanation, especially you two, Manal and Yousra. Keep your questions to yourselves for today.”

  Yousra and I quickly looked over at each other, our eyes widening. Suddenly I was even more curious than I had been before.

  The lesson was titled “Menstruation and Postpartum.” Miss Sanaa presented all of it in a vague way, largely beyond the grasp of our still girlish minds; my mother had told me that I was born into this world via her belly button. Miss Sanaa wrote the lesson on the blackboard and recited it aloud without expression, almost as if we weren’t present at all. Listening to her speak was like hearing a new language, one made up of characters we recognized, but words whose meanings eluded us entirely. Then she wrote out the homework assignment, sat down, and buried her head in her papers until the bell rang.

  Unlike in the west, the simple biology of puberty and childbirth had no place in her lesson. The biology and physical changes were lessons that I never got to learn: not at school, nor at home, nor in any of the religious brochures and pamphlets that were distributed to us everywhere we went: mosques, malls, souks, schools, even in airport terminals. But we had no doubt about what “becoming a woman” meant socially: “Have some shame,” our nearly teenage selves were admonished. “You are women now!” Miss Sanaa was there to teach us our Islamic duty surrounding our time of becoming women and then later mothers, saying things such as “Don’t pray or fast during the times of menstruation and postpartum! After the blood stops, you should wash yourself and resume praying.” But where was this blood supposed to be coming from? Most of us still had no basic understanding of what menstruation and postpartum were, and we carried these questions around in our heads, afraid to speak them.

  I knew only one thing about this blood, and that was what Mama had told me on the day my sister and I were propositioned by our neighbor’s son. If she had found blood on our underwear, we would have been ruined. “Do you mean like when a toy gets ruined, and you can’t play with it anymore?” I had asked her. She silenced me with a signal from her hand.

  My sister and I were forbidden from jumping down from high places, and we could not ride bikes on the roof with our brother: physical activity, it seemed, produced blood. But when Mama was busy in the kitchen, I’d sneak up and join my brother anyway. At night, I checked my underwear for blood before I put it in the laundry basket.

  I was thirteen years old, an intermediate school student, when the blood finally came. A group of us had been challenging each other to see who could jump down the largest number of stairs without falling; I had managed the largest number of stairs that day, and I was exceedingly happy about it. But when I returned home, I found bloodstains in my underwear. I washed them out quickly and hid the underwear so my mother wouldn’t see it. Then I crept out on the apartment balcony, sat alone, and sobbed, wishing that I had listened to Mama when she had told me not to jump with the other girls. How was I going to tell her that I was ruined?

  The blood did not stop. After a few days, my fear overcame my shame, and I decided to tell my horrible secret to my cousin Amal. I went to her house that weekend, took her aside, and told her what had happened. “Did the blood keep flowing,” she asked me, “or was it just a few spots?”

  “I found stains the next day and the day after.”

  She laughed. “Congratulations,” she told me, “you’re a woman now! This is the blood of the menstrual cycle.”

  I was completely confused. How could this be a happy moment when I had spent days sobbing? “Amal,” I said, “please help me. Tell me what the menstrual cycle is.”

  Amal told me that she’d eavesdropped when her older sisters discussed their periods. Eventually she learned that women got their periods once a month. She’d found things called “sanitary towels” among her sisters’ things, and taught herself how to use them when her own period came.

  “You’re a woman?” I asked her. “Why didn’t you tell me? You should have explained all this instead of letting me suffer like I suffered this week!” My next 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 too, 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. She must observe a long list of religious and societal taboos.

  It wasn’t until I was in secondary school that I learned about the ritual washing that must be performed after your period, after intercourse, and forty days after the blood stops when a woman has given birth. One of my secondary school teachers began shouting at our class: How could you not know the correct way to wash? After she was done with her scolding, she said that we must start with the right side, beginning with wetting our hair and scalp and then continuing down the body. Once the right side had been cleaned, the same process had to be performed on the left. If you do not wash properly, she told us, our prayers to God would not be accepted. I had not known. After my period
had finished, I had simply taken a regular shower.

  There were other daily ritual washings to be performed. Each day the mouth had to be cleaned, then the nose, then the face, and then the hands and elbows, then you wiped your hair and finally your feet. There were specific prayers to be said before washing and after, which were impossible to forget because of the stickers all around to remind us. There were stickers on the bathroom door with the prayer to be said before entering the bathroom, stickers of prayers to be said before leaving the house or the school. 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. These were on top of our other obligations, such as reading the Koran and the five daily acts of prayer, both of which had their own set of required ablutions. And veiling.

  The first time I wore a veil, I was ten years old. I had seen my favorite teacher, the religious studies teacher, Miss Sanaa, leaving school dressed completely in black, an abaya over her body, a niqab covering for her face, hiding everything, even her eyes. Her feet and hands were covered in black socks and gloves. I went home and told Mama that I wanted to wear the niqab and gloves. She was surprised, but she bought me the pieces and taught me how to wear them. My sister laughed at me, but I refused to be discouraged. Instead, I felt very grown up as I walked to school the next day, bursting with pride.

  But as I made my way home in the afternoon, I discovered that the niqab was a rather difficult piece of clothing for our hot climate. It was hard to breathe through the dark fabric as it drew up against my mouth and nose. The gloves made it impossible to get a proper hold on anything. But I had to keep wearing my new covering; it would be far too embarrassing to tell Mama that I had just as quickly changed my mind.

  As it happened, the end of my adventure with the niqab and gloves came a few weeks later at the hands of two other girls: my sister and my cousin Amal. One day, while the three of us were walking to my uncle’s house on the next street, my sister turned toward me and in a single, swift motion pulled off my niqab. She and my cousin ran away, laughing, the niqab clutched tightly in her hand. Exposing my face in the street felt disconcerting. I felt betrayed, but it was also the perfect excuse to stop wearing the niqab. I could blame it on the two of them.

  That summer, when we went to my grandfather’s house in Egypt, the first thing I noticed was the women, who walked freely in the streets, wearing colorful clothes and uncovered hair. I pressed my nose against the car window, feeling more like a spectator at a Cirque du Soleil performance than a passenger driving through an ordinary Egyptian neighborhood. When we stopped at a traffic light, I looked over and saw a woman seated behind the steering wheel of a car, driving, something I had never seen in Mecca.

  While we were in Egypt, my sister and I did not wear a niqab or a black abaya over our shoulders, or even a hijab over our hair as we were accustomed to doing in Saudi Arabia. We wandered about uncovered. Until we returned home.

  Within a couple years, we had no choice but to take up the veil. 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.

  6

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  My Barbie Is Murdered

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  I know the exact day and event that transformed me at age thirteen from a moderately observant Muslim into a radical Islamist. Until that moment, my shift had been a slower, more cumulative process, a series of adaptations and accommodations. But after this particular afternoon, I became almost unrecognizable to my younger self. I became extremely observant, down to the most minor acts; I renounced nearly every small pleasure I had known as a girl; I brutally enforced my new beliefs upon my family. And I can say with certainty that this happened as a direct result of the environment I lived in, from my schooling and education to the radical preachers broadcasting on TV; the cassettes and VHS tapes of their fiery sermons; the books and leaflets that were distributed for free in common gathering places, like the souk, our local market. 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—including Tajweed, the rules for reciting the words of the Koran; the hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH); the Fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence; and the importance of Tawhid, Muslim belief in the singular pre-eminence of God; and Islamic culture and history. But we were not studying a classical, historical understanding of Islam. We were studying a hybrid Salafi ideology, which decreed that Islam must be returned to its purest form, the form they believed was first practiced by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his Companions (Sahabah). This was the doctrine that Juhayman and his followers preached when they captured the Grand Mosque, the doctrine that the Saudi royal family allowed to dominate much of the kingdom in the aftermath of the siege. This Salafism requires strict adherence to the most literal interpretation of the Koran, believes in no other law but sharia, and embraces the tenets of jihad against nonbelievers.

  Inside Mecca and other cities across the kingdom, sharia was on display most Fridays, when a prisoner would be led into the large square near the Grand Mosque after prayers. One of my very religious friends during secondary school told me about following a great crowd with her father and siblings until she caught sight of a blindfolded Pakistani man being led to his beheading. He was being dragged by his hands and was crying. At one point, she said, he peed himself, the stain adding to his humiliation and fear. Scared and anxious herself, she did not stay to watch his final moments; she begged her father to leave before the man’s head was laid against the stone and severed with a blow from a sword.

  I sometimes saw pickpockets near the Grand Mosque. When the authorities caught them, they would periodically cut off their right hands for stealing, a punishment described in the centuries-old sharia law texts, although contemporary scholars debate how literal or widespread these sanctions were. Afterward, the traumatized stump would be plunged into boiling oil to cauterize the veins and arteries and stop the bleeding. If the person was caught stealing again, he would have his right foot cut off above the ankle. Of course, 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.

  Extreme Salafi beliefs reject any moderation or innovation in Islam. They condemn not only Shiites (members of the sect most common in Iran and the eastern part of Saudi Arabia) but millions of other Sunni believers as well. (Salafis are Sunni Muslims, but the overwhelming majority of Sunnis are not Salafis.) Salafis are confident that only they and they alone will survive the time of judgment. They also believe that they are the true warriors against a centuries-old conspiracy to corrupt and destroy Islam.

  In the 1980s and 90s, as this form of Salafism gained traction in the Saudi kingdom, the overall state of the Muslim world played directly into the Salafi narrative of a war against Islam. The Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the Serbian/Croatian attacks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the massacres against the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, the first Palestinian uprising—these were all cited as proof of a widespread, international conspiracy to exterminate Muslims. According to our teachers and clerics, no one was at greater risk in this global struggle than women. The anti-Islamist forces were determined to deflower women, to bring
them out of their houses and remove their veils.

  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. “O nation of Islam, these satellite dishes are tornado-sized storms of sedition which will pluck our homes from their roots and destroy them. I swear by my God: they are a torrent of sinful desires, designed to swallow up all traces of modesty, chastity and faith,” wrote Sheikh Hamad Aldahloos in one fatwa. Radicalized youth began targeting rooftop satellite dishes with rifles, and a 1990 decree from the Ministry of the Interior officially banned their use. (That decree remains in place today, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia owns the most influential satellite channels in the Arab world—MBC Group and Al Arabiya—is the headquarters for eighty-five channels, and has the second-highest satellite TV penetration in the Arab region, at ninety-seven percent.)