Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  Because of the separation of the sexes in Saudi society, a female subculture known in Arabic as boyāt (boya in the singular) began to thrive. The expression boya 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.

  At my university, there were a considerable number of boyat. They wore men’s hairstyles, men’s shirts and even men’s fragrance. Each boya had a close female friend with whom she’d walk hand in hand and from whom she was rarely apart. Some of them went to the sports club. My classmates and I often met in our free time to work on projects or homework, and I remember their reactions when I suggested meeting at the club. “I’m afraid of what the sports club will do to my reputation,” they’d say. “I don’t trust that place.”

  The aspersions cast on these female friendships took their toll on one of my own friends. Rana was also from Mecca, and we studied together in the College of Science, though we were in different departments. We both adored basketball, and we always played on the same team—we understood each other perfectly. We wore the same clothes, read the same novels and books, and later on listened to the same music. It was a treasured friendship, and her company helped me feel less sad about the childhood friends I missed: Manal, Malak, Jawahir, and my female cousins, Amal and Hanan.

  One day, a member of the sports club threw a veiled comment in my direction. Her barb implied that because Rana and I spent so much of our day together, we must be lovers and lesbians. It was only a throwaway comment, but it hurt and humiliated me deeply. Homosexuality is explicitly forbidden under strict sharia, and the punishment for homosexuality is death. Stoning and other forms of execution are still carried out today against gays and lesbians in some Muslim countries. I stopped talking to Rana completely, and I didn’t explain why. I liked her very much, but I couldn’t allow anyone to call her morals or mine into question, even if just in passing. What other people thought was very important to me in that period of my life. I stayed away from Rana until we graduated and never explained the reason. Years later, when I’d stopped worrying about what people expected of me or what they were saying, I told her that I owed her an explanation. I visited her and we talked as if we’d never been apart. She forgave me, and we resumed our friendship. She’s someone I turn to when things are darkest. I’m still saddened to think that such meaningless words and opinions controlled my happiness, my unhappiness, and even my choice of friends for so many years.

  The friends I met at the sports club came from all parts of the university. Another of my friends was a girl named Sara, who was born in Jeddah and had lived there all her life. We studied together in the College of Science, and we coordinated our schedules to be able to meet in the sports club and play basketball. One day, as I waited at the university gates for my father, I saw Sara leaving the campus and was surprised to see that she didn’t cover her face. I was astonished and disappointed at the same time. How was it that Sara could expose her face like this to the outside world? How could God accept her prayers when she was unveiled? Sara wasn’t one of the girls who used makeup, but she had a natural, radiant beauty that could easily capture a man’s interest.

  I found myself facing a huge dilemma. Sara was among the nicest of all my friends. She welcomed me with a wide smile whenever she saw me, and she always performed her prayers on time. At the end of the month she collected money from the girls at the sports club to tip the cleaning lady, Aunt Aisha. One time, when Sara and I hadn’t seen each other for a while, she welcomed me with a warm hug. I wasn’t used to receiving such gestures from anyone. In my family, the only time I had been hugged was when my aunt consoled me after the death of my grandmother.

  Despite Sara’s kindness, I didn’t know how I could possibly continue our friendship after seeing her expose her face. I tried to stay away from her: she was disobeying God, I told myself, and she deserved His wrath. Sara tried to ask me why I was avoiding her, and I made endless excuses instead of telling the truth. This was the first real test of my radical beliefs. I remembered what we had been taught: that we should base our love and friendship for another person solely on her level of piety. But Sara made this hard to do. I decided to continue our friendship in the hope that someday I’d be able to sway her beliefs, but that someday never came. Sara didn’t change. I did.

  The first Saudi television channel began broadcasting Arabic-speaking programs in 1964, and the second, an English-speaking channel, debuted in 1983. There were no others, and this lack of choice led us to refer jokingly to the two channels as Compulsion 1 and Compulsion 2. Still, they were not entirely useless. I owe the beginnings of my English education to Compulsion 2, which included the program Sesame Street in its schedule.

  Then the haram satellite dishes arrived. Though only a few satellite channels were available inside the kingdom, all owned by other Arab governments, the differences between the types of programs they showed and the ones shown on our two channels were easily noticeable. Conservative religious shows dominated the Saudi channels’ lineup. Our news broadcasts were largely preoccupied with banal updates on the royal family: “His Highness received a guest, His Highness waved goodbye to a visitor, His Highness has traveled.” Despite the bans on the sale of satellite dishes and receivers, there was a black market for these contraband goods. Although this made the dishes and receivers astronomically expensive, it didn’t stop people in cities like Jeddah from installing them on their roofs. I would listen to my university friends talk about the Arabic-dubbed serial dramas from Mexico—one called Guadalupe was particularly popular. They would talk about the news channel Al Jazeera, too, and how it was a different type of news broadcast. This caught my interest. But in more conservative Mecca, it remained a social taboo to have satellite channels; friends and family might even shun you. I knew that my father, who had been swayed by the religious rhetoric warning of the dangers of the dish, would flatly refuse to have one in the house.

  But I also noticed that our neighbors in our apartment building in Mecca had their own dish on the building’s roof, so I asked them to help me get another dish for our apartment and implored them to keep it quiet. I spent part of my government-sponsored university allowance to pay for our dish—which was ironic, considering the dish was banned by the government. I placed the receiver on top of the video player, and I was careful to cover everything with an embroidered cloth cover so Abouya wouldn’t see it. Then I made sure to delete all the channels showing music videos, so that none of us would accidentally stray into sin.

  Mama was very happy to have the Egyptian satellite channel. When Abouya was out, we gathered around the television to watch old Egyptian films, amazed to be seeing them in Saudi Arabia. For a long time, we kept our secret from my father. But one day, while waiting for us in the car outside the building, he noticed a thick black wire running down from the roof and ending inside our balcony. “Is this the wire from a dish?” he asked me.

  What was there to say? What could possibly excuse our deception?

  “We’ll settle this when you get back from university,” he told me.

  I spent that day’s classes dreading the coming altercation, but, shockingly, he never broached the subject with any of us ever again. I felt comfort in the fact that he knew, and that we knew he knew, and that there was now an unspoken understanding that none of us would ever mention it. Gradually, Abouya began to follow the Al Jazeera broadcasts just as we did, and the dish became an open part of our household. It was our electronic window to the outside world.

  I didn’t realize it then, but the satellite dish was a slippery slope. Even though I had deleted the music video channels, I could not escape the haram sounds of music. In April 1999, I wrote in my diary: “The final match of the inter-faculty basketball league ended in the victory of the team from the Faculty of Home Economics, led by captain Rania K., over the team from the Faculty of Medicine, led by captain Tara F., and the score was 3
0–44. My team, from the College of Science, took third place. I tried to sit outside the club when music was being played for the break in the middle of the match, but I had to go in when they were giving out the medals.”

  The first song I ever purposefully listened to started as an accident. One day I walked into the living room as my brother was listening to the Backstreet Boys. I stopped, struck by the beauty of the words and the music. But I was too embarrassed to tell him that I wanted to stay and listen. I waited until he left the house and then put the headphones over my ears and pressed Play on the tape recorder.

  Show me the meaning of being lonely . . .

  There’s something missing in my heart

  To my ears, the music flowing through the headphones was the dreamiest, most beautiful thing that I had ever heard. I could not understand how something so beautiful could be the work of the devil. The lyrics struck a chord with me; I felt truly lonely in my closed-off world of rigid beliefs, and I too felt there was something missing in my heart. Yet I remained torn: I loved the music, but I felt guilty whenever I listened to it. As the Backstreet Boys sang about loneliness, I imagined the pain of molten iron flowing into my ear, because that was what the clerics had preached would happen. Whenever this guilt became too much to bear I would renounce music for a while. But then my brother would buy a new tape, and I would listen to it on the sly.

  To live your life with such constant guilt is torment. But that wasn’t the only feeling I experienced. Inside my mind, there was a growing sense of contradiction between what I heard in sermons and what I saw all around me. Despite the prevailing rhetoric that condemned music ever more aggressively, both of the public television channels opened their programs with the national anthem, and their shows were accompanied by music. There was a store that sold musical cassettes near our building. Photography was labeled as haram, but there was a photography shop near our building. A picture of the king was printed on all the banknotes, and his picture hung everywhere, on the streets and inside buildings. It was haram for men and women to socialize and shake hands, but the television showed clips in which men from the government welcomed mixed official delegations from other countries, and the Saudi men chatted and shook hands with the women.

  I had three choices. My first option was to commit the sins of listening to music and watching television in spite of my religious convictions, which would mean ignoring my feelings of guilt and accepting these contradictions. But this would make me a sinner, something I knew I could not live with. My second choice was to reject everything I had been taught about music and television, but this too would have big consequences: outright rejecting the tenets of my faith would place me in the same category as those who had been excommunicated from Islam, even if I continued to pray, fast, and read the Koran. The third option was to look for an acceptable way out of my dilemma. But how would I know where to look for the answer when I couldn’t tell anyone what I truly felt?

  My plan had always been to study physics. After three terms of general study, I enrolled in the physics department, only to discover that it was very small and unpopular; there were six other students and me. I hadn’t come this far in my education to study something no one cared about. One of the largest and most popular departments in the university was computer science, and it was also the hardest to join. Fifteen hundred girls had taken the departmental admissions test, competing for two hundred available spaces. I asked to switch my enrollment to computer science: my academic record was good enough that the university said I did not need to sit for the admissions test. By the time I graduated, only sixty of the original two hundred girls remained in my cohort, because computer science was more rigorous than most of the other scientific departments.

  I bought my first computer with a loan from my uncle and my grown-up cousin Miss Fayza. Initially, I only used it to complete my homework. But that changed with the introduction of the Internet. We were supposed to use email to submit our homework and to communicate with our professors, so it was essential for me to have working Internet at home. The obstacle was convincing my father. He had come home one Friday after weekly prayers and the imam’s sermon talking about a new evil, the Internet, and we heard him repeat the same rhetoric about it that had been previously used to vilify the satellite dishes.

  My father even handed me a cassette tape with a sermon describing the dangers of the Internet. The evil of the Internet, proclaimed the tape, is that it helps girls and boys to date and exchange messages without being watched or held accountable by anyone. Chatting on Messenger was to be avoided at all costs. The Internet also provided an open door for ideas and beliefs that would pollute our pure, extreme Salafi doctrine. I promised myself that if I managed to get access to the Internet, I wouldn’t use these chat rooms or read anything that would affect my beliefs. (The government has had a similar reaction to other widespread technological innovations. When cell phones with cameras first appeared, they were banned in Saudi. I had to smuggle an early Nokia camera cell phone into the country from Bahrain in 2004. There was a large black market for these banned phones, with smugglers hiding them inside car bumpers or car door frames, while customs officials and police used ultrasound devices to ferret them out.)

  To subscribe to the Internet you had to have a landline, but Abouya had disconnected our home telephone line after the incident with Muna and the Arab boy. In order to get a new landline, the telecommunications company required proof of the apartment’s rental contract. This made the situation more complex than I’d anticipated, so I asked my mother for help. I explained that I needed the Internet to do my homework, and that I’d take care of all the expenses from my university allowance. Mama got hold of a fake rental contract from a local real estate office for a small fee. We applied for a landline: once again, we had no choice but to keep this secret from my father.

  At first, with the cassette sermon fresh in my mind, my willpower was strong. I resisted visiting chat rooms and websites that railed against Salafi ideology. Instead I spent my time doing homework or strengthening my faith by reading postings on the pro-Salafi sites. But I couldn’t resist following political analysis and world news, and as I explored, click by click, I stumbled on a number of sites opposing the Saudi regime. And, though these sites were later blocked and censored, I always found a way around the obstacles.

  I began reading articles and postings that criticized extremist Salafi ideology. I read opinions on the niqab, on singing, on drawing animate beings, and also on loyalty and disavowal. My whole life, I’d known only one perspective on these subjects, and as far as I’d been concerned, it was the right one. Now I felt increasingly troubled by everything I read. Gradually, I realized that the ideas I had embraced and defended blindly all my life represented a singular, and highly radical, point of view. I began to question everything. I began posting in forums, discussing these radical ideas and rejecting them. I started drawing again, and I stopped judging Sara for revealing her face. Nothing did more to change my ideas and convictions than the advent of the Internet and, later, social media. When social media began to flourish during the Arab Spring of 2011, I found myself in possession of a voice—a miraculous thing in a country where women are almost never heard.

  But a decade before that came September 11. That was the date of the complete transformation in my beliefs, the start of my rebellion against the teaching of hatred and hostility toward non-Muslims. It was an event that divided Saudi society into two sections—those who were shocked and those whose contempt of the West, particularly of America, was heightened. Hatred for Americans was prevalent in Saudi Arabia for many reasons. A central factor was the presence of US military bases, which had been used during the First and Second Gulf Wars. Other factors included the strong bias against Israel in the Palestinian conflict with Israel; the sanctions against Iraq, which were seen as a form of siege and starvation; and America’s support for dictatorial regimes in the Arab world. But on that day, we were glued to the television scre
en, watching the replays of the buildings falling.

  We had grown used to watching bloodshed, massacres, and destruction in Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq; now, for the first time, we were seeing the same thing in America. As I watched thick plumes of smoke rise into the sky and saw the Twin Towers burn, my feelings were a mixture of shock and deep sorrow. The scene that etched itself in my memory more firmly than any other was seeing victims jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. “This is madness,” I said to myself, in tears. “Neither mind nor conscience can accept what we are seeing here.” When I went to sleep that night, I prayed to God that Muslims had no role in the tragedy.

  I woke to news that the attack had been carried out by Al Qaeda, which was led by a Saudi, Osama bin Laden, and soon after, that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The heroes of yesterday’s Afghan War were the same monsters who had perpetrated this attack. It was a shock, and it changed my convictions about what jihad for the sake of God really meant. I could not believe that God would demand the killing of innocent people. The atrocities of September 11 were followed by a series of terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia, in which hundreds of civilians and military personnel lost their lives. The name Al Qaeda popped up every time.

  I was done with Salafism.

  I entered my own period of mourning that fall. On October 25, my aunt Zein died. She had devoted years of her life to caring for her mother, my grandmother Sitti Alwa (God rest their both souls) after she developed dementia. She would wash her mother, clean the urine and waste away from her body, and change her clothes, just as one would do for an infant. She did this even though Sitti Alwa would insult her and rant and rave at her, and even throw her out of the house. My aunt was patient and dutiful to the end. “Lord, let me die a quiet death,” she used to call out in prayer. “Let me cause no trouble to anyone.” God answered her prayer; she left this world peacefully, in a diabetic coma, without giving anyone a chance to bid her farewell. I loved my aunt very much, and spent days crying because I hadn’t been able to see her before she died. I saw only her body, lying on the ground, a colorful pink head scarf with red flowers and green leaves surrounding her peaceful face. A golden stud adorned her beautiful nose, and her gold bangles had been placed in her soft, caring hands. It was as if she were sleeping. But this was a sleep from which she’d never open her eyes, no matter how much I wished to see them and to hug her one last time.