I started shouting at my poor sister-in-law with the prison administrator sitting right there, listening. “How could you do this? I’m here in jail and you are outside. You are supposed to keep that up.” During my interrogation, I had promised to remove my name from the campaign. I had promised to step aside. But I didn’t want the other girls to stop. “You’re giving away everything that I had to sacrifice for,” I railed into the phone. “You’re just giving that away.”
“We received phone calls from strangers saying, ‘You should turn the event off, take it down,’ ” my sister-in-law explained. One of the people working on the campaign had already put the YouTube driving video on a private setting, accessible only by a password. The group had also changed the name of one Twitter account from @Women2Drive to @FreeManal. But eventually, the Twitter account was also taken down.
I felt betrayed. My sister-in-law tried to soothe me, saying, “No, no, we’re doing this for your own safety. It’s actually good. Now all we care about is that you leave the jail soon.”
But I was having none of it. “You cannot stop the cause because I was sent to jail. You should continue the cause because you have to pay the price.”
I had half expected those two calls to be my last, but instead, unlike other prisoners, I was allowed to make a phone call to my sister-in-law each day, rather than once a month. The call always took place in the prison administrator’s office. No one told me that I was allowed a daily call per some official policy. It simply happened, like so many other things, made up as we went along. Saudi society is highly rule-bound, but many of these rules are unwritten and, at arbitrary moments, some rules are changed. The same system that allowed me to be arrested and imprisoned without knowing under what authority also allowed me a daily phone call. Somewhere, someone had decided to apply different rules to me. This gave me hope that someone, somewhere else, might suddenly decide that enough was enough and declare me free to go.
On my next call to Muneera, she started to cry when she heard my voice. She told me that Aboudi was in the hospital with a high fever. He had fallen ill at his dad’s. Muneera was at the hospital with Aboudi’s grandmother. At first I couldn’t believe it. I kept asking if he was there for a checkup, saying he had been fine at home. But when my ex-mother-in-law got on the phone, I couldn’t hear her voice. She couldn’t speak at all. She just cried.
I kept calling into the phone, “What’s going on here? What’s wrong with Aboudi? Can I talk to my son?”
She held the phone up to his ear. I couldn’t even hear him.
I kept saying his name, “Aboudi,” and finally, in a voice that barely made a sound, I heard him ask, “Mommy?” I had never heard my son sound like that before. I kept saying, “Aboudi, stay strong.” I have only talked to Aboudi in English. I struggled for so many years to learn the language that I didn’t want my son to have to do so too.
He managed to ask, “Mommy, where are you?”
I never cry in front of Aboudi. When he falls or hurts himself, I don’t run up and fuss all over him. I just stop and tell him, “I want you to be strong. I don’t want you to be crying.” And he doesn’t cry.
“Mommy, where are you?” he said to me again.
I heard him but I did not cry. I said, “Aboudi, Mommy is fixing something and she will come back very soon, baby. I want you to be strong, Aboudi.”
After that, he was too exhausted to speak anymore.
When I turned off the phone, I broke my own rule: I started sobbing. I sobbed until I had no more tears.
By the second and third days, I realized that I would not be leaving prison anytime soon, so I created a routine. Every morning, at 9:00 a.m., when the guards opened the door, I would go to the prison administrator’s office, ask to make my phone call, and say that I needed to see my lawyer. For days, the prison refused to allow my lawyer to come and see me without a guardian or mahram or to speak to me on the phone. Instead, they allowed me to call my sister-in-law. In retrospect, I suppose that I was trading one for the other.
The next day, I learned that Aboudi was improving. He had become ill from a cat parasite. Our cat was completely vaccinated but it must have become infected from another animal in the neighborhood and passed the parasite to Aboudi. No one told me until later about how at the hospital the doctors had packed his body in towels and ice. Even my ex-husband had been down on the floor, on his knees, crying, as Aboudi’s body burned with fever and nothing seemed to bring it down.
Thursday arrived, my first official visiting day. Muneera came to the gates, and so did my mother. There had been no flights available, so Mama had ridden the bus for eighteen hours from Jeddah to Dammam and come directly to the jail. She must have been sobbing the entire time; she was still hysterical when she arrived at the gates of the prison. I was brought into the visitors room, which had two double Plexiglas panes with holes on either side. But the holes didn’t line up. You had to put your ear to one hole to hear and then turn and speak into another hole. Your visitor had to do the same. The room was noisy with so many people, hot without AC, and had a horrible smell of piss and shit. It was the same room where I had been strip-searched. When I undressed, I had not realized there was a clear window behind me.
I did not want Mama to see me like this. I did not want her in this place with these noises and awful smells. Looking back, I think seeing me in prison must have been the most heartbreaking experience of her life. I was determined not to upset her more and kept smiling the whole time. Mama’s face was red, and she was drenched in sweat. She could barely speak; she had lost her voice from crying. She put her ear on one hole, and I put my mouth over another and tried to reassure her, shouting into the hole because there was no other way to be heard. I made up my mind that I did not want her to return. I was starting to feel as broken as she was. All around us, visitors were turning to stare at Mama and me. They were much more interested in me than in the prisoners they had come to visit.
During Friday prayers at mosques across the country, the imams stood up and applauded my arrest. In fiery sermons, they denounced me as a bad influence on other women. They condemned me for “corrupting the society” and they accused me of blasphemy and seeking to destroy Islam. I was referred to as a “whore” and a “prostitute.” According to the imams, prison was the only appropriate place for Manal al-Sharif.
I wrote and signed an official complaint about being denied a visit with a lawyer. After that, the prison head said I might meet with my lawyer in the presence of a soldier rather than a guardian or mahram. So on Saturday, the next official visiting day, I made my one phone call to a lawyer whose number I had been given.
“Is this Mr. Adnan?” I asked, hoping he would not hang up and my call would not have been wasted.
“Yes, who is this?”
“This is Manal al-Sharif, I’m calling you from the women’s jail in Dammam. Is there any chance I could meet with you today?”
“Oh, my God, at last we have made contact,” he said. “I have come several times to the jail and tried to get in to see you. I tried to get them to show me the documents relating to your admission and interrogation, but no one would allow me to see anything without a power of attorney. I’m in Al Hasa [about ninety minutes away from Dammam] now, but I can get over there in no time. Are you sure they will allow me to meet with you?”
“Yes, we will be able to meet this time. Thank you. I will wait for you.”
Our morning break in the sun finished at 11:00 a.m. and, like sheep, we were herded back into the dark, smelly cells. I kept watching the clock on the wall. I calculated the drive, how much time it would take Adnan to leave his office, how much time to show his papers at the gate. I couldn’t take my eyes off the clock. I waited to hear the guard’s announcement, telling me, “Your lawyer is here.” But the hours dragged by and no one came.
At 5:00 p.m., my lawyer still hadn’t appeared. Finally they called my name and told me that my family was here. I had a sudden, nightmarish vision o
f Mama’s tear-stained face looking out at me again from behind those glass windows. “Please, God, not now,” I prayed. I didn’t think I could bear seeing her pain again or watch her face crumple up as she wailed. But the guard didn’t take me to the visiting room with glass windows this time. Instead, she walked me out of the first gate to the second gate, and then the third. “Are they releasing me?!” I thought. She led me to a small room in a building next to the women’s prison.
All she said was, “Wait here.”
I sat down on an aluminum seat next to a small desk, exactly like my teacher’s desk back in school.
A soldier walked in with a pile of papers and a pen in his hand. He asked my name and started interrogating me. There were new questions this time. They all came from the false articles being published in the Saudi newspapers Al Yaum and Alwatan. I had heard the same allegations from my friend at Aramco and later from the prison guards. The articles made it sound as if I was a foreign infiltrator, and that my driving was a plot to destabilize the kingdom.
The man rattled through his list of questions: “Do you have any connections with foreign organizations? Who helped you talk to foreign media? Where are the locations of the demonstrations?”
It seemed that Saudi intelligence was now relying on sensationalist newspapers for information. I wanted to comment, but I held my tongue. I answered everything patiently and signed another statement. Just as I was signing, Muneera walked into the room. Her face was covered and she was completely obscured in black, but I recognized her voice. I felt the most wonderful relief. But when she uncovered her face, I saw sweat on her forehead and that her cheeks were red, as if she had been running.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Muneera assured me that she was fine. “Your mother insisted on coming with me to the jail,” she said. “I remembered how you asked me not to allow her to come in, but what can I do? She cried and shouted hysterically. When we arrived, I asked the guards not to allow her in. I know how painful it is for her to see you like this.” She shuddered just slightly, saying, “I had to keep my face covered, but even so as you pass by the male prisoners’ yard, you feel they are eating you with their eyes.”
“Thank you, Mannori,” I said, using her nickname. “I really owe you a lot.”
As the soldier watched us, we sat there calmly talking about normal things—how the family was doing, if my brother had gone back to work, whether Aboudi was getting better—when I leaned in and took her hand. In my palm was a thin sheet of paper torn from my notebook. While pretending to straighten my abaya and my scarf, I had hastily scrawled a few lines on it with the pen I had used to sign the statement. She felt the paper, cupped her hand slightly, and slipped the note through her abaya. Then, as if making a slight adjustment to her clothing, she maneuvered it through her blouse and into her bra, without the soldier noticing. At least in the prison, the soldiers usually didn’t stare.
On the note, I had written, “Abouya should meet the king. If he doesn’t ask for his pardon, I will be here forever.”
The day I was arrested, almost as soon as he learned the news, Abouya had flown from Jeddah to Dammam. He didn’t know how to book an airline ticket; he had never done so before in his life. My friend Israa got him the ticket and told him that her driver would meet him at the airport. When Muneera told me on the phone that my dad had come, I thought, “Oh my God! Abouya is here. It’s getting bigger. It’s serious.” Now not only was I terrified for myself and my son, I was terrified of what could happen to my dad.
My father did not bother coming to the jail to wait. Decades of living with Saudi customs and unwritten rules had taught him the need for direct appeals. My impulse had been to seek a lawyer; Abouya’s was the opposite. Codes, courts, and even lawyers are very much foreign constructs. In the Saudi kingdom, justice is just as often whatever a person in power decides it is. It varies from situation to situation, and it can be swayed by tribal and family ties and lineages. Accordingly, my father began making a daily pilgrimage to the door of the governor of the Eastern Province, Prince Muhammad bin Fahd, the nephew of King Abdullah and the son of the former King Fahd. Each morning, Abouya would go and wait at the gate to the Imara, the governor’s house in Dammam, until the gates closed at 2:00 p.m. He would be the last person to leave, and each time, he would beg to see the prince, to ask for forgiveness on my behalf and for my release. But the prince refused to see him.
Instead, my father spoke with the Imara’s social worker, a man named Ghazi, with the title of Family Relationship Adviser. He was a religious man with a large beard and he would ask Abouya how he could allow his daughter, a divorced woman, to live alone in a compound with Americans and non-Muslims. “They drink,” he would say. “The women walk around without their abaya.” He would go on to list every religious and cultural transgression to which I was exposed and was presumably also committing. And then he would ask how my father could allow me to live alone without a man.
Ghazi was supposed to be a resolver of disputes and a healer of families, but here he sowed shame. He was also leaking false information to the press. It was Ghazi who said that I had “broken down” and “confessed the names of the people behind [me].” Ghazi was the one who said that there were five charges against me, including driving without a license, inciting public opinion, and operating as a traitor and a spy on behalf of foreign enemies. He called for my trial and said that I had embarrassed the country in the international media.
On my fourth day in prison, Ghazi came to the jail. When his visit was announced, I had no idea who he was. The prison guards told me to cover my face because he was a religious man. At first I refused, but eventually I did pull a veil over it, but a thin one so that he could see through. I also had on red shoes.
In our meeting, he accused me of being “egotistical,” of calling for a second “Day of Rage,” and inciting demonstrations against the king. (The first “Day of Rage” had been in March, when Saudi pro-democracy protestors promised demonstrations: nearly all were squelched.) Ghazi claimed that more than three hundred citizens had come to Imara calling for my trial, and others were prepared to bring cases against me based on my violations of Saudi moral codes. “You want to move your Aramco life outside the compound,” he said.
I listened to this diatribe, and the whole time, I remained very calm. Then I spoke. “You don’t know me,” I said. “We didn’t call for demonstrations. I have a driver’s license. And I love my country. I disagree with you saying that my ego is doing this. The only people involved in this effort are Saudi girls.”
Whatever Ghazi had expected, it wasn’t this. He finally conceded, “You are different from how I pictured you,” he said, “angry and wanting to break the law.” Then he told me that he had called for my flogging in a public place to set an example. When I heard that, I asked to leave.
He did call for my flogging in the press, and that was his undoing. His words embarrassed the Imara and the whole Saudi government in the international media. After that, they shut him up—but they never disavowed any of the earlier lies. Sadly, this is a typical tactic. In Saudi Arabia, when they want to break someone, they spread lies about them, making them appear to be a coward or a traitor. Saudi students in the United States who had put up a Free Manal Facebook page took it down once they read the five supposed charges. I lost supporters because of the falsehoods Ghazi spread.
My father sat at the gate to the governor’s house and I sat in prison while in the press and online, each day, articles, news reports, and postings sought to shame me, to assassinate my character, and to so thoroughly humiliate me that no other girl or woman would want to drive. On social media, Saudis were divided on whether I was right or wrong. It was more than a generation since the drivers of 1990, and yet so very little, if anything, had changed.
Except for one thing. Rather than being a small story, my arrest had become a big one. 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.
As soon as Muneera shared my note, my father flew to Jeddah, where the king lives. My best hope lay on the other side of the kingdom.
I can only imagine my father, the man who had ferried pilgrims in his hot Corolla year after year, now dressed in his cleanest robe, arriving at the lush royal court complex, perched on a corniche that looks out over the glistening Red Sea. The compound stretches for eighty-five acres and includes helipads and boat berths, a vast garden and many tents. Palm trees rise from holes cut into the edges of the vast stone plaza, but even the towering royal palms seemed smaller beside the soaring, futuristic architecture and tall, gushing fountains. Even though the chief of our family’s tribe and two cousins accompanied him, Abouya must have felt small indeed.
Although the Saudi capital is in Riyadh and the king has a palace there, the royal palace in Jeddah was built to receive visitors. In spite of its modern trappings, some traditions remained as ingrained as they were in the days when kings received visitors inside their tents. The king still held a royal majlis, sitting to receive visitors and subjects and to listen to their concerns, which were delivered by formal petitions. The gleaming entrance to the complex was crowded with scribes, men who for 100 riyals would write a petition to the king. It was a tradition no doubt dating back to days when a large majority of the kingdom was illiterate. But even today, the well-educated still hire scribes, who have learned how best to state a case or pose a request. In my father’s case, though, a scribe was a necessity, as he still had not learned how to read or write.
Accompanied by his three fellow tribesmen, my father approached a scribe seated at his desk. He was not particularly interested until my father spoke our tribal name. Then the man raised his head. Abouya had his full attention. Scribes are trained to follow the news, and even the most casual observer could not have missed the story of my arrest. Abouya told my story, the scribe retold it, and after some back-and-forth, they settled on a final version, which the scribe then copied in his best calligraphy onto paper that would be presented to the king. When he had finished, he read the appeal aloud one last time to my father, who pressed his thumb into an ink pad and then pressed it against the paper. That was his signature. It was done. The petition was sealed in a large envelope. My father handed over 100 riyals and received the envelope in return. The transaction was complete. It was still early morning,
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