Everything was expensive. I could not believe that a friend of mine, who was between jobs, had to pay $800 for a visit to the hospital emergency room after he cut his finger. I could not believe that it was impossible to buy only high-speed Internet access without cable. (I hated watching American television: there were so many ads.) You can’t, the cable man told me, it only comes as a package. I could not believe that I had to pay for garbage collection—to pay for the ability to throw something away. And I was very puzzled by the taxes. In Saudi Arabia, we don’t have taxes, but my friends who lived in Boston paid as much as thirty percent of the money they earned in taxes. New Hampshire, at least, had no state income tax. But sales tax surprised me too; the price of what I wanted to buy was never the same at the register as what was marked on the ticket or the shelf. All of these things did not make sense.
Since it was 2009, less than a year after the housing market crash, the economy was really hurting. People were losing their jobs and their homes. Steve, the guy who came to fix my computer, was laid off the very next day. I came into the office and he was gone. That night, I went home and turned on the news. CNN was breathlessly reporting on Tiger Woods’s mistresses. It was like that night after night. When I watched CNN in the States, I would think, is this really the news? It seemed more like gossip. The real problems were completely neglected, and people were kept in the dark. CNN International is entirely different. There I would learn what was actually happening in the world.
But there were other things that truly opened my mind. I read about Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to move to the back of the bus. She had lived for a while on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. Because it was a federal military instillation, it did not permit racial segregation, and Rosa Parks could ride on an integrated trolley. As I read this, I thought about Saudi women and the Aramco compound. Aramco was like Maxwell, a place where outside restrictions did not apply. Of course, when Rosa Parks left, she would want to ride in the front of the bus, just like everyone else. I saw so many parallels between what I’d experienced in Saudi Arabia and the American civil rights movement. Saudi women and African Americans were both victims of segregation, unable to have any say in the most basic aspects of their lives.
When I came to the United States, I was against gays, against Jews, against many other things. Living there forced me to rethink many of my opinions; it opened up my mind. I had conversations with people who likely would never have been permitted to visit Saudi Arabia, people I otherwise would never have met. I had one friend, Naomi, whom I met through dance parties. We really enjoyed each other’s company. Once, when we were sitting in a restaurant, I saw two very obviously Jewish people walking out the door. As a joke, I said, “Those people are Jewish. We know each other from the nose,” because both Arabs and Jews are known to have prominent noses.
She looked at me and said, “Yeah, that’s right, you and I, we are cousins.”
And I said, “Who is ‘we’?”
And she said, “Us, the Jews.”
I could not believe it. I had no idea that she was Jewish. And if I had known she was Jewish at the start, I never would have talked to her. Because I had been taught that all Jews are our enemies.
But the true culture shock occurred not when I landed in America, but much later, after I had returned home.
11
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Driving while Female
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In the United States, I stopped covering my head with a hijab. Before that, in public, at work, or out with friends, I wore my hijab. Sometimes they were brightly colored or white, rather than the traditional black, but I still wore them. My hair was hidden, my face encased in cloth. But in private, things were different: I wore it; I stopped wearing it. I put it back on; I took it off.
When I returned to Saudi Arabia, I decided I would keep my hijab on for work. But outside of the office, I would leave my head free and uncovered. (I later learned that many of my Saudi girlfriends outside Aramco were doing the same thing in secret in their homes.) The last to know was my brother: I didn’t want my parents to find out, because it would cause them tremendous embarrassment and very deep grief.
One day, when my brother and his wife were visiting me at the Aramco compound, I decided to go out with them without my hijab. I wore very modest clothes: a long, flowing blouse with long sleeves and very loose pants. But my brother was still horrified. He told his wife that he would tell me to put the hijab back on. But his wife took my side. “Manal is an adult,” she told him. “You cannot control your sister.” In truth, as my mahram living closest to me, he could control me in many ways. But, with his wife’s prodding, he grudgingly gave up.
It was liberating. I could get in the cool blue water of the pool with Aboudi and dunk my head, toss my hair behind me, and feel the rush of bubbles stream out of my mouth as I exhaled in the watery silence. At night, when the breeze blew, I could feel the air lifting and ruffling the strands of my hair. When I turned, I could feel the hairs plastered against my skin.
Far more than my head covering had changed. When I returned to Saudi Arabia, so many of the old rules, the rules I had once slavishly followed, no longer seemed to make sense. For years, I had blamed Aramco for the restrictions and the discrimination I endured, but now I saw that what I was chafing against was Saudi society itself. Every restrictive rule existed simply for my “protection”: this was the message that had been hardwired into my brain. But that circuit had been broken while I lived abroad. I was no longer so fearful of what people would think or what judgments would be passed. My colleagues said that the way I dressed, the way I thought, and the way I talked were all “totally different.” And it was true. I had never been exposed to the language of women’s rights or feminism. But even without the vocabulary, I discovered the concepts. There is an old Arabic proverb that translates to “If you have a right, you had better be determined.” Inside the walls of the Aramco compound, I found my determination.
In 2010, not long after I returned, I started a Facebook group called Saudi Female Employees of Aramco. It was risky and it was completely underground. To complain about anything at Aramco, or indeed anywhere inside Saudi Arabia, carried the risk of punishment. But slowly we started writing our demands. We wanted day care nurseries for babies in the workplace and to be allowed access to the company cars. We were all employees, but we were not allowed to use the company cars, unlike the men. I took our demands to Aramco’s labor committee: an organization purely for show, without any power. The only thing it did was listen to complaints, but at least this was a way to vent.
I also cofounded the first photography club in Dhahran; we called it Aurora. I had learned photography in the United States from my friend David. Back at home, I got together a group at Aramco. We took nature photographs, made portraits, and did event photography, printing our images and mostly giving them away. We met almost daily, usually in my town house. I didn’t know it yet, but this and the Saudi Female Employees of Aramco group were to become essential to my decision to get behind the wheel of a car.
There was one more thing: on December 17, 2010, a twenty-six-year-old Tunisian fruit seller named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside of a provincial government building. He had gone there to complain after the local police had confiscated his measuring scales when Bouazizi had refused to pay them a bribe. There were reports that a policewoman slapped him and insulted his deceased father. But the authorities denied his request to enter the building and complain. In that moment, in frustration and despair, he became a human conflagration. That incident and the mass protests that followed launched the Arab Spring, a wave of unrest that tore across the Middle East. From Tunisia it spread to Libya and to Egypt, the nation I knew from my childhood visits, where citizens flooded Tahrir Square to challenge years of dictatorial rule.
Like millions of others around the Arab world, I was riveted. I followed the news, I
followed the Facebook posts. I saw raw cell phone photos and videos of demonstrators occupying major streets and squares in their capitals, demanding that their oppressive governments give up power. Seeing their faces, hearing their voices, and reading their eloquent statements, I felt connected to these people. It seemed like change might be possible. It seemed like change might be possible even for us.
In the midst of this upheaval, in April 2011, I found myself in Khobar City, leaving a doctor’s appointment at dusk, with no driver to take me home. I could stand on the corner or I could walk to Al-Rashid Mall, where there would be taxis waiting. I began to walk. Men who passed me rolled down their windows, shouting curses and calling me a “whore” or a “prostitute.” And then came the man in the white Corolla. The driver did not simply insult me and roar off, he followed me. I turned away from the main route, and he followed. As I passed a pile of construction materials, I bent down and felt a rock. Clutching it in my hand, I hurled it toward his half-open window. The rock fell short as his tires screeched and he sped off.
I could feel the adrenaline surge through my veins. I walked a few steps and then began to cry, the salty tears mixing with my salty sweat. I ran to the mall, and with my uncovered, tear-stained face found a taxi and told the driver to take me to the Aramco compound. Once inside the safety of the car, I held my face in my hands and wept. But by the time we entered the compound, my eyes were dry. At my town house, my own car waited, cool, silent, and parked. I had spent hours learning to drive, I had a valid license. I probably had better road skills than many of the male taxi and private drivers.
As I opened my door and stepped inside, I did not hate men in their cars who had seen fit to harass me. I hated the rules that caged me inside my compound, that kept women tethered to the whim of our guardians, that kept us shut inside our homes more effectively than any lock.
The next day at work, I told one of my male coworkers what had happened on the dusky streets. “I am so tired of this,” I said. “How long must we suffer this humiliation?” It seemed almost a rhetorical question.
My colleague looked at me. He was a Saudi, so I expected only perhaps a bit of sympathy, maybe some advice. Instead, he shocked me by saying, “Manal, I know it is unfair. But, you know, it really isn’t illegal for women to drive.”
At first I thought he was mocking me, but then I realized he was serious. “What do you mean, it isn’t really illegal?”
“Manal, technically, there is no rule saying that women cannot drive. Nothing in the traffic code actually states that it is illegal for women to drive. It’s just the custom. You’ll see, I’ll show you.” He left my office and a few minutes later, he sent me a link to the Saudi traffic code. In his email message, he said, “Read page 50, part V, act 36: Driver’s License requirements.”
That night, I fed my son dinner and put him to bed, and I sat down at my computer. I read the entire traffic code. At first I felt nothing but anger. Then, slowly, I began to reread each word, aloud. I went through each line of the code. There was not one reference to the gender of the driver. Pages 117 to 121 listed all possible traffic violations and offenses. None of them included “driving while female.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the official Saudi traffic code indicated it was illegal for women to drive.
Now I was truly angry. I wanted to call someone, to tell someone, but whom? Instead, I went back to my computer and started typing. I searched three simple words—Saudi, women, and driving.
The first formal protest of the ban on women driving occurred in 1990 during the run-up to the Gulf War, about four months after Iraq invaded Kuwait. All through that autumn, American soldiers had been arriving in Saudi Arabia, by the tens of thousands, to prepare for Operation Desert Shield, the invasion that would drive Saddam Hussein’s forces back to Baghdad.
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 had heard about these women when I was eleven years old. They were depicted as sexually loose, un-Islamic, pro-Western women who danced in the streets with the American soldiers without any regard for covering their hair with hijabs. I remembered asking questions about these women, but the adults around me didn’t want to discuss them. Eventually, people began to forget. In my twenties, when I thought about these women, it was only scorn I felt. Having absorbed the government’s version of the story, I believed that they and their protest and the trouble they had caused were why my generation was not allowed to drive. And in fact the cultural taboo against driving was strengthened because of their protest. Their act of dissent had in a sense proven true the dire warnings about what would happen should women drive. But there is another side to the story.
For these forty-seven women, known as the “women drivers,” those thirty minutes have stalked them for the rest of their lives. Immediately following the incident, all the women and their husbands were banned from foreign travel for a year. Those who held government jobs were fired. And they became targets of religious condemnation: in Friday sermons at mosques around the country, their names were read aloud, and they were denounced as immoral vixens, boldly seeking to destroy Saudi society. The late journalist and photographer Saleh Al-Azzaz, who documented this protest, was arrested, jailed, and tortured.
For the women, additional harassment and humiliation followed. In 2008, one told an American National Public Radio (NPR) interviewer that it was impossible to be promoted. No matter how good a job she did, she would forever be that “woman driver.”
But that protest had happened a long time ago; I was barely a schoolgirl then. The world was changing, and I believed Saudi Arabia also was ready to change. So, I decided that for my next birthday, I would do the unthinkable. I would get behind the wheel of a car, outside the Aramco compound, and dare to drive.
Inside Saudi Arabia, there had never been complete unanimity on the subject of women and driving. The Saudi royal family and government officials have argued that Saudi society, not the government, should decide whether it is right for women to drive. After the 1990 protest, the Ministry of the Interior did issue a statement (although not a specific traffic rule) that “driving while female was illegal and subject to a fine.” (The Ministry of the Interior is also not a legislative entity, and a driving ban should technically be issued by a legislative body.) That statement was based on the religious fatwa issued by Grand Mufti Bin Baz immediately after the November 6 protest, in which he called these women morally corrupt and underscored that it was haram for women to drive. But online I found other “grand Islamic scholars,” colleagues of Bin Baz, who questioned the decision to issue a fatwa against driving. One scholar, Al Albani, even suggested that in Muhammad’s (PBUH) time women could ride a donkey, so why not a car? Cars provided more protection for women.
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. Facebook was the chief means of organizing the near daily protests in Egypt and was playing a role in Tunisia and Libya as well. All of us had seen how a Facebook event and post could pick a date and issue a call for action. I wanted this to be a big event, well beyond forty-seven female drivers.
When I told one of my friends about the event, his response was, “Manal, that’s only about a month away. It’s too soon. Change the date.” So we did. We pushed it out to June 17, which happened by accident to be a Friday—most of the Arab Spring gatherings had been on Fridays as well. The friend
also advised me to get on Twitter. Up until now, I had been focused on Facebook. It was how I had made and kept up with American friends. But Facebook is not big in Saudi Arabia—only about one-third of Facebook accounts in Saudi Arabia belong to women, and most women cannot post using their own photos or use their real names online. If it is forbidden to show your face in public on a sidewalk, how can you show it in an electronic gathering place? In 2011, Twitter was the preferred form of social media for Saudis. Saudi Arabia had more than 5 million Twitter accounts and about 2.4 million active Twitter users, defined as people who log in at least once a month. Twitter was the way to get our message out, my friend explained. So I learned to use Twitter.
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.
The movement quickly took on a life of its own. At night, once Aboudi was in bed, I posted items on Facebook. I tried my hand at writing press releases and getting blog posts. I wrote petitions for signatures and designed a logo. The enthusiasm was powerful. People were visiting our Facebook event page and retweeting our tweets. Within a week, people were coming to my house, asking if they could help.
Daring to Drive Page 22