Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  At the heart of Salafi ideology is a deep belief in Hell. What I remember most from my own life during this period was the all-consuming fear that I, as a Muslim, wouldn’t reach the level of righteousness and devotion required to escape condemnation from the eternal hellfires.

  No Saudi student could fail to hear the message. During the school day, religious sheikhs frequently visited schools to give lectures via the public address system. Because we were girls and young women, we were not permitted to lay eyes on male clerics, but attendance at these faceless lectures was mandatory. In middle and secondary school, the lectures grew more frequent and were supplemented by speeches from some of our most devout teachers after the noontime prayer in the school’s mosque. It was not mandatory to attend these events, but as a curious teenager, I went.

  These religious lectures were overwhelmingly designed to arouse feelings of guilt or fear in our hearts. They were vivid and mesmerizing, and they terrified us with talk of the torment of the grave. We were commanded to imagine the Day of Judgment, when we would be standing between the hands of God and, for those who fell short in performing their religious duties, the agony of the fire. Similar lines were heard in schools across the nation, such as these words from a sermon about the importance of praying on time: “Whoever neglects his prayers, God will punish to drown thirsty; even if he drinks the water of all the seas in the world, he will not quench his thirst; and God will narrow his grave, pressing on him until his ribs no longer hold their form. God will set fire to his grave, and send to him a snake called ‘The Brave and the Bald.’ ” The preachers would also spew horror stories about the violent, brutal deaths suffered by sinners or even simply negligent individuals. Their voices building to a crescendo, they would recount these happenings as if they were real-life events to which each preacher had been an eyewitness.

  The lecture that forever changed me centered on the ritual act of washing and shrouding the dead. There are a number of death-related rites in Islam. When a Muslim dies, his or her body must be washed in a mixture of three liquids: water, camphor, and a liquid prepared from the leaves of the sidr tree—the same type that grew in my grandmother’s courtyard back in Wadi Fatima. Then the body must be shrouded in white cloth and a prayer offered before burial.

  “Death will act as your preacher today!” began the teacher who delivered the lecture, determined that the gravity of the subject should pass none of us by. The lecture was steeped in melancholy. It described the desolation of the grave and the time we spend alone there with only our deeds for company. “What have you done to prepare for the grave?” the teacher asked us, spitting contempt. And then: “Who will act as the body while I demonstrate the shrouding process?” One girl was singled out and moved to the front of the room. We watched, wide-eyed and frightened, overwhelmed with guilt and feelings of deficiency, as the volunteer’s eyes were covered with cotton and a white shroud brought down onto her face. At once the audience and the corpse were joined together in a collective wave of hysteria. Sounds of plaintive wailing rose around us until every other sense was overwhelmed.

  Then the teacher commanded each of us to seclude ourselves in a dark and quiet place when we went home, in order for us to feel the loneliness of the grave, our grave. “Remember,” she said, “there will be nothing there to amuse or occupy you in that hole except the good deeds you did during your life. So ask yourself today: Are your prayers on time? Are you complying with the conditions of the religious veiling? Are you being complacent with regard to haram things like singing, wearing tight clothing, and plucking your eyebrows?” She went on to recount the rest of the long list of forbidden things and actions.

  The idea of death pursued me and tore at my insides as I walked home. When I got back to the apartment, I hid myself away. I took out the cassette tape we had been given after the lecture: Throes of Death. The teacher had told us to play it whenever we became lazy with our acts of worship or our souls tempted us toward sin. I put the tape in the player, placed the headphones over my ears, and listened to the earth-shattering yells of a preacher: “Have you prepared for death?” Plaintive moans swirled around him as the tape wound its way forward; the image of the girl in the shroud passed through my head, and I began to cry. I promised to God that I would reform myself and be a good Muslim. 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.

  Growing up in a conservative, religious society had already made me multazima, compliant, with the central Muslim rites: prayer five times a day, fasting, reading the Koran, performing the daily religious recitations, and wearing the facial covering that we had been obligated to wear since the beginning of middle school. Basic religiosity had been imposed by my family as well, on both my father’s and my mother’s sides. My father’s side had separated me from my male cousins. My mother’s side, during one of my visits to Egypt when I was ten years old, had insisted on my participating in the ritual of five daily prayers.

  But after the lecture on death, I felt that all my previous attempts at being a good Muslim were woefully insufficient. From that day forward, I embraced religious fanaticism. This story is in no way unique to me; it’s the story of an entire generation brainwashed with extremist discourse and hate speech, an entire generation who grew up being imprisoned, first by the constraints of our society and its religious leaders, and then by our own actions—by our own thoughts and minds.

  It is difficult to convey the number of duties and prohibited acts that we as young women had to contend with. They became exhausting and overwhelming, and ultimately suffocating. Independent thought was all but impossible. We simply followed the course set before us, afraid of stumbling, just as I had been afraid of stumbling with my face shrouded in the niqab.

  Every public and most private spaces were saturated with radical books, brochures, and cassette sermons; almost all focused exclusively on death, the torture of the grave, and the hereafter. Throughout Mecca, these materials were distributed free of charge in the markets, the schools, and the mosques, and they were exchanged among family and friends. These pieces of religious propaganda were overwhelmingly intended to ensure the compliance of women.

  I still have one such booklet, printed on stock paper the size of a playing card, so that it might easily be carried in a pocket or a purse. Entitled “A Gift to the Muslim Woman,” its focus was the full veiling of the body, head, and face. It reads in part:

  My Muslim sister: today, you face a relentless and cunning war waged by the enemies of Islam with the purpose of reaching you and removing you from your impenetrable fortress. . . . Don’t be tricked by the ideas they are promoting. One of the things that these enemies of Islam are trying to discredit and eliminate is the niqab. The facial covering is what distinguishes a free woman from an infidel woman or a slave and avoids her being confronted with the wolves that walk among us. As the scholar al-Qurtubi said: the whole of the woman—her body and her voice—is a’ura (sinful to put on display) and should not be revealed unless there is a need for her to do so.

  One of the conditions of veiling is that it acts as a container for the entire body, without exception, and it should not be incensed or perfumed. This is demonstrated by the hadith which tells us that any woman who applies perfume and passes by others so they can smell her scent is an adulteress. Veiling is not imposed upon you to restrict you, but to honor you and give you dignity; by wearing the religious covering, you will preserve yourself, and protect society from the emergence of corruption and the spread of immorality. . . . My Muslim sister, keep this booklet and give it as a gift to your sisters after reading it.

  Other taboos included wearing pants, styling one’s hair, and even parting one’s hair on the side—because doing so causes a woman to resemble the infidels. Nail polish is forbidden, because it prevents the ritual waters of ablution from performing their task. In fact, the things most
frequently cited in religious lectures, which preoccupied most of our efforts and consumed most of our time, were often not only superficial but also incomprehensibly trivial, such as the prohibition against eyebrow plucking. Even though the hadith that the religious scholars used to justify this prohibition was not an actual hadith at all but rather a statement by the Prophet Muhammad’s companion Abdullah ibn Masud (PBUH), the argument was still put forward that plucking a woman’s eyebrows represented an interference with God’s creation, and that whoever plucks her eyebrows is a cursed woman destined to be banished from God’s mercy.

  To comply with this decree, women’s beauty salons affixed notices over their entrances declaring that eyebrow plucking was excluded from their services; many even specifically added that plucking was condemned and was a religious violation. But women with unruly eyebrows often circumvented this prohibition simply by dyeing their unwanted hairs.

  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 comforted myself with the promise that these arduous duties would pave my way to paradise. And I imagined the alternative, a hell fraught with sinful desire, which I would avoid. Each day I wore gloves and black socks, along with a niqab that completely concealed my eyes. I stopped visiting my aunt’s and uncle’s houses to socialize or have fun and went only out of the obligation of kinship, a very important concept in the Saudi world. Ignoring the ties of kinship and duties to one’s relatives is grounds for being denied entrance to paradise. But in my newly religious eyes, not all kinship ties were the same. By the time I was in secondary school, I refused to accompany my mother on her trips to Egypt, since Egypt was a sinful country where women were not veiled, people went to the movies, and men and women mixed together. I considered it impossible to be in such a country and not to object to the sins of its people. And I never forgot to advise my mother about continuing to wear her facial covering when she traveled there.

  A key component of our school curriculum was the Doctrine of Loyalty and Disavowal. The first stage of disavowal, as we were taught, is to hate and to become an enemy of the “infidels,” in this case meaning anyone who is faithful to a religion or creed other than Islam, including atheists or anyone who follows another version of Islam, such as the Shiite sect. We were instructed to express our hate and enmity in a myriad of ways. We were not to smile at these infidels or greet them. We were not to reside in or travel to their countries. We were not to participate in their holidays or wish them well or attend important occasions of theirs like weddings and funerals. We were not to copy the way they dressed or talked, nor to record our history using infidel systems like the Gregorian calendar. We were not to appoint them to any positions of authority in Muslim countries. In primary school, we even had a lesson titled “The Impermissibility of Standing by One Who Turns Away from God and His Prophet,” where we read these lines: “God almighty, cut off the friendly relations between Muslims and infidels. Even if a Muslim lives far away, he is your brother in religion; and as for the infidel, even if he is your brother by blood, he is your enemy in religion.” We were, however, to seize any and all opportunities to invite infidels to follow the religion of Islam and pray for their guidance.

  On one of my last trips to Egypt, I had already put these Salafi teachings into practice. While I was visiting my grandfather’s familial house in Egypt, a neighbor named Umm Mina came by one morning. My uncle’s family was living there—Umm Mina was their friend—and we all shared breakfast together. After we’d been eating for some time, my cousin offered her a plate of eggs. She refused them politely, saying, “No, thank you, I’m fasting!” For Muslims, fasting means completely abstaining from all food and drink, even water, so I was puzzled by her response. “Did the guest forget that she was fasting?” I asked my cousin later. I was shocked when she explained that their neighbor was a Coptic Christian and that, in the Coptic doctrine, fasting means only abstaining from animal products. I became furious, vehemently protesting against my cousin’s willingness to receive an “infidel” in the house, let alone be friendly with her and share a meal. After that, I refused to greet Umm Mina whenever she came to the house or even sit in the same room with her. And of course, soon after I avoided traveling to Egypt altogether.

  Even in Mecca, I avoided going out of the apartment, and when I did, it was only to go to school or the Grand Mosque. I was eager to go to the mosque once a week with Mama, who still fasted each Monday and Thursday without fail and then broke her fast in the Grand Mosque, where she would obtain the maximum religious gain. My reason for going was to meet Muslim girls and women from other countries like Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran; I wanted to preach Salafi ideas to women who had journeyed to Mecca for Umrah, a non-mandatory, lesser pilgrimage to the Holy City, which, unlike the hajj, may be performed at any time. But before I left home, I now requested my father’s permission.

  On the occasions when I went with Mama to the souk, the local market, I completely stopped talking with the sellers because an unmarried girl should not be heard. I also stopped reading the detective novels and science fiction novels that I had adored so much: my Agatha Christie books and the Arabic novels The Impossible Man and The Future Files were banished to the scrap heap as immoral works. I replaced them with religious books and cassette recordings of overwrought sermons filled with threats and intimidation and cries of lamentation and grief.

  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.

  The only acceptable form of “music” was religious anasheed, a form of a cappella chanting that occasionally included a bit of percussion to keep the words on a consistent beat. The themes centered on the tragedies Muslims faced around the world. They urged support through “jihad of the soul” and monetary donations. In the early 1990s, one of the most famous and popular of these religious chants, whose lyrics we memorized, can be translated as:

  Kill me and tear me apart, drown me in my blood

  You will not live on my land, you will not fly in my sky

  You are filth and debauchery, you are the cause of the plague

  You are infidelity and treachery, your way is to conceal the light

  My healing is in killing you, you will not live serenely

  You sold the Afghani people peacefully, without shedding blood

  O swords of God, raise yourselves from slumber to light

  Teach these grown men a lesson, banish them to nothingness

  Exhaust the infidels with beatings and condemn them to wander in the desert

  Raise the flags of the religion and rule with the Sharia of Heaven.

  My extremism did not remove all music from our home. My father still kept his tapes of Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez and Farid al-Atrash. My brother held on to the tapes of his favorite boy bands, the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. But 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 t
he entry of angels. During this period, Islamist magazines and newspapers also appeared, distinguished from regular publications by their lack of photographs. Particular attention was paid to excluding all photographs of women. Mama, however, had a big collection of fashion magazines that one of her brothers, Uncle Ali, had brought her from Italy, and she used them to find designs for the clothes she made.

  One time, when I was alone in the house, I gathered up all of my mother’s magazines and all of my father’s and brother’s tapes that featured singers. My sister’s possessions were locked up, so I couldn’t reach those. Then I climbed up to the roof of our apartment building and set everything on fire. As the flames consumed the glossy pages and charred and melted the plastic covers, I thought of the gains I would make in God’s eyes for destroying these evil things with my bare hands. I felt glad to be rescuing my family from sin. After that, I deliberately recorded over any new tapes that my brother bought: rather than hearing his favorite bands when he played them, he would be greeted by the voice of a cassette preacher’s sermon instead. This preacher would talk about the contempt of singing and warn of God’s intention to pour molten iron into the ears of anyone who listened to instruments.

  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.