Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  Document in hand, my father walked toward the royal court gate, where a security guard asked him what he wanted. As Abouya told me later, “As if he was expecting me, he eagerly took the envelope from my hands and asked me to wait. He was gone for some time. I was standing there in the sun, just outside the gates, and for the first time I was full of hope. After a while, the guard came back, saying, ‘Oh, good man, His Majesty’s secretary says you may come in today, but you must wait your turn.’ ”

  The king—whichever Saudi monarch is in power—receives people in his palace in Jeddah. Friday is the traditional reception day. Anyone (so long as he is male) can walk into the palace that day without an invitation. Hundreds of people line up in long queues in front of the main gates for a turn to meet the king. But even on a Monday, there was a long line of people waiting to conduct business with the king and one of his chief advisers. My father, his chief, and his cousins took their place at the back of the line.

  When it was time for the al-Sharif tribal representatives to present themselves, the four men moved forward one by one. The green-and-gold meeting room was vast: it was a long walk to the far end of the room where King Abdullah himself sat, supported by cushions on a low sofa covered with green silk. He was wearing a soft brown woolen robe with gold brocade trim, and though his trademark goatee was neatly trimmed and dyed a shiny, youthful black, up close, my father thought that the nearly eighty-seven-year-old king looked tired and rather frail.

  The king did not rise to greet them. He had done away with the old custom of bowing and hand kissing. Visitors were instead told to kiss his forehead and wish him long life and health, the same type of greeting that Saudi children give their fathers and grandfathers.

  As each visitor had before them, the four al-Sharif men approached the king one after the other, kissed his forehead, and wished him a long life. Then the al-Sharif chief spoke. He opened with praise for God and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), which was followed by a reaffirmation of the tribe’s loyalty to the king and to the country. Then came the heart and the purpose of his words: an apology for my actions, which had disturbed the public order, and a promise that this would not happen again. He concluded with one last elaborate formal apology from the tribe for my driving. After the recitation was finished, there was a brief pause, and then the king spoke. Abouya told me that the king uttered two words: “Advise her.”

  He said those same words three times.

  But my father, the chief, and his cousins left with the promise that they would hear good news soon.

  At 5:00 p.m. that same day, Monday, May 30, 2011, I was called from my cell and escorted to the guards’ room. The prison head was waiting for me behind a desk, dressed in civilian clothes. A soldier in uniform stood next to him, holding some papers.

  “Manal,” the general said. “Are you enjoying your stay with us? Would you like to stay here longer?”

  Immediately I was wary. I did not know if this was a trick, but I was determined not to sound weak or groveling. “I don’t like to sound offensive,” I replied, “but if you might join us for one day inside you would know the answer.”

  “I know these buildings are old and falling apart, but this is all we have right now,” the general said. “I promise you, in a few months, we are moving to newer and cleaner facilities. I wished you had delayed your driving campaign a few months. But I can tell you, you are a free woman now. I just received the orders to release you.”

  I had been rehearsing for this moment every single hour I had spent behind bars. I had been imagining it, anticipating it, waiting for it. Every day, I had dressed in my abaya to show my belief that this was the day I would be released. And yet, in that moment, it felt like any other routine bureaucratic transaction; it was as if I had been kept waiting an extra thirty minutes to file a set of official papers. I smiled slightly, and asked, to be sure I had heard correctly, “You mean I can leave this moment?”

  “Unless you would like to enjoy another day here?”

  “No, sir,” I said. My body felt almost weak from the combination of adrenaline and relief.

  “Can I ask you something before you go?” the general added, almost as an afterthought.

  I nodded. “Please go ahead, you have been good to me.”

  “I know you talked a lot to the other prison guards about the prisoners’ conditions here, and I promise to do my best, maybe with your help, too, to make the prisoners’ life better. You can’t blame us for all the limitations we have here—we are trying our best with whatever we have. I know you want to go out and talk about those women, but I ask you please not to, it’s embarrassing to everyone.”

  “Will you allow me to help the women who need plane tickets to go back home?” I asked.

  “If you find people who are willing to buy them tickets, you will be helping us a lot by making this crowded place better. I will do my best!”

  The prison head gave his orders to the female prison guard standing outside to bring me my belongings. Then he wished me luck.

  “Stay away from trouble” were his last words to me.

  After he had walked out, I let fall my tears of joy. I made sujood, a special prayer thanking Allah. I thought of Aboudi’s face. I thought about removing my dirty, filthy clothes, taking ten hot showers, and sleeping with Aboudi in my arms.

  When I lifted my head up from the prayer, my eyes still filled with tears, I saw the prison guard crying, too. She gave me a hug. “Manal, you will be missed,” she said.

  I had to call my brother to ask him to come and sign my release papers. As a Saudi woman, I needed a guardian’s signature to be able to leave jail, but because my release had come from the king, in my case, a mahram was acceptable. He was very quiet when I told him I was free.

  I couldn’t leave without going inside the prison one last time to say goodbye. By then I knew the story of almost every woman—or at least of those who were willing to tell me theirs. I remember the joy and the tears, the goodbyes and the hugs and the requests: “Don’t forget about us, please.” I couldn’t take my clothes with me, so I gave them to Maysara, the woman who had given me her bed on that first dreadful day. I gave her my unused phone cards and my food booklet, too. I later bought her a plane ticket home. I never heard from her again, but I will always remember her kindness toward me.

  When my brother arrived, he was wearing the traditional white thobe, although without any head covering. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen him wearing traditional dress. At Aramco, he always wore Western clothes to work and he did the same at home. He was smiling and gave me a hug, oblivious to the surprise of the male guards around us. (Saudis are not known for showing affection in public.) After signing some papers, the last gate opened. I gave a final look back at those high towers, the guards with guns, and the dirt yard.

  Then I turned my head, and it was gone.

  I asked my brother if I could use his phone. Mine had been returned to me, but the battery was dead, and anyway I was nervous about my number appearing on the recipient’s screen.

  The phone barely had the chance to ring. “Abouya,” I said, speaking as soon as I heard his voice, “It’s me, Manal. I’m out of jail.”

  I paused, waiting for a lecture or the recriminations. Instead, I heard my father’s excited words, “Daughter! Are you fine?”

  “Yes, Abouya,” I replied, “I’m fine.”

  “Then I’m fine. Goodbye.”

  That was it, every word that passed between us, a very short phone call. In my mind, I had prepared myself for a long speech, laced with scoldings and accusations. “How could you do this to your family?” I expected him to shout. I had prepared to defend my actions and apologize. But he was “fine.”

  I leaned back, watching the highway pass on the way to the Aramco compound, watching my brother steer the car. It was not his car, the Azera, which was still impounded by the police. It was my car he was using to drive me home.

  14

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  * * *

  The Rain Begins with a Single Drop

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  * * *

  On Friday, June 17, 2011, about three dozen women drove in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Some drove for less than an hour around the streets of Riyadh, the capital. Others got behind the wheel in Jeddah and Khobar and elsewhere. Many weren’t stopped, even when they passed police officers on the road. Those who were stopped were escorted home and sternly told not to drive again. At least one woman was ticketed for driving without a Saudi license. But none was arrested.

  I did not drive that day, I stayed home.

  The day after my release from prison, I was back at my desk at Aramco. The company had a policy that if you missed ten days of work, you could be let go. I had frantically put in for vacation time, but I was close to the edge of being terminated.

  I returned to work in the same unit, at the same cubicle. But nothing else would ever again be the same. People at work were as divided in their opinions about me as they were in the society outside. Some were carefully supportive, and some were aggressively critical, while the majority were quiet.

  Every person I knew in the office came by my desk, and I said the same thing to each of them, “The vacation was nice, thank you for asking.” I smiled each time. Some female employees left bouquets of flowers and cards saying “We are proud of you” on my desk. Omar al-Johani, my Aramco colleague who had tweeted the details of my arrest from behind the bushes by my house at 2:00 a.m., posted his personal PO box number online and encouraged people worldwide to send me letters and cards. I received piles of them; the most beautiful was a computer mouse in the shape of a car.

  Eventually, after the initial uproar was over, the executive director called me into his office. He asked, “Manal, are you okay?” I told him, yes, I’m fine. He said that for eleven days, he had been getting up and looking at the news. The day I was released was the day that he “breathed again.” Later in the year, I was even nominated to be one of Aramco’s one hundred youth leaders and to sit on a company advisory board. I told the director, “I’m proud to work for you,” and his reply was, “We are proud that you work for us.”

  But many other things changed. I was told that I could not mention Aramco in public—indeed, that I could not speak in public. I was also told that I was under surveillance: my phone, my email, my texts, my home. It was clear to me that the company was watching everything that I did, said, and wrote.

  One colleague accused me of being an agent for Iran and other Saudi enemies and sent an email demanding my termination from Aramco. The email was addressed to Aramco’s CEO, and cc’d a company vice president, the IT executive director, as well as my department head, my group leader, and himself. He cc’d me as well.

  What hurt the most were the people who shunned me. On my team, one colleague refused to speak to me. In every meeting or interaction, he treated me as if I did not exist. One of Aboudi’s best friends was the son of an American woman who lived in the compound. They played together at her house and at my house twice a week. When I got out of jail, I emailed her to set up the next playdate. She said the two boys could no longer be friends. “I don’t feel safe for my son to be around your son,” she wrote.

  I never used the word jail in front of Aboudi. I instructed everyone to say “the vacation” or “Hawaii.” I didn’t want him to know about it; I didn’t want him to worry. But one night, after his bath, as he was brushing his teeth, he suddenly asked, “Mommy, are we bad people?”

  I held my breath for an instant and then asked, “Why?”

  He told me that two boys had hit him and choked him at school that day, adding, “They said they saw you on Facebook and they told me, ‘You and your mom should be in jail!’ ” I could see the bruise on his neck where their angry fingers had left their mark.

  I told him that we were good people, adding, “Sometimes other people don’t understand and say horrible things. You mustn’t listen to those boys.” But there was nothing more I could do. The boys’ school was outside the Aramco compound. I could not enter it. When I complained about Aboudi’s being bullied on the bus, two fathers accused me of violating the rules forbidding women from entering the bus and forced me to sign a pledge that I would not trespass on the boys’ domain.

  A few days later, I told the story to one of my friends at Aramco, whose son also attended the same school. She looked away awkwardly and said that she hadn’t wanted to tell me this, but “my son’s religion teacher told his class, ‘Manal al-Sharif is crazy! She should be locked up!’ ”

  But the person who suffered most at Aramco was my brother. After three months of continuous harassment by his colleagues, he quit his job and moved his family to Kuwait. He was the first casualty of my determination to challenge the system.

  While my brother lived one extreme, my father lived another. Four days after my release on Friday afternoon, my father, the chief of our tribe, and my father’s two cousins returned to the royal palace in Jeddah to wait with the other visitors for a brief audience with the king. They had come to thank him. It was, my father recalls, a warm and pleasant meeting. At the end, the king bestowed good wishes and gifts upon the four men. So it was that my father, a taxi driver with no formal education, was redeemed in Saudi society, even as his children have left, one by one.

  When I got out of jail I discovered that a new group of girls and women had started a Facebook page called Women2Drive—the earlier effort had only been an event, not an actual page. I didn’t know anyone involved, but I contacted the group. We worked together for months without meeting in person. Most lived in Riyadh, and I decided to fly there and see them. One girl was fourteen years old; I met her with her mom and sister. Her mom was separated and had been abused by her husband and brothers. She couldn’t ask for a divorce because she was afraid of losing her daughters. She was fully veiled and I couldn’t see her face, but she gripped my hands and pleaded, “Don’t give up to fight for my daughters’ rights. I lost all hope until you came.” The mom eventually bought a small car. A Sudanese woman taught her fourteen-year-old daughter how to drive. The girl drove her mother and sister everywhere. They were caught several times, but the mother begged for mercy and promised that her daughter would not drive again, so they were released.

  Among all the pledges that I signed was one not to give interviews, not to speak about my driving, and not to discuss my time in jail. And initially I held fast to that pledge. I said no to everyone.

  What I did do was try to help some of the women I had left behind in prison. I had made a promise to God to give away one month’s salary and I did that. I bought a plane ticket home for Maysara, the woman who had loaned me her bed, and gave her money to help her start over. I held a collection among my Aramco colleagues to buy plane tickets for other women who could not afford to leave prison, and we were able to send twelve inmates home.

  But, as the months passed, the story of women driving did not fade away. In September, a woman named Shayma Jastaniah who lived in Jeddah was found guilty of driving through the city streets and sentenced to ten lashes; the sentence was later overturned on orders of the king. And the Saudi press would not leave me alone. The final straw was an article accusing me of being an Iranian agent inside Aramco, working in the company’s most sensitive department, information security. The article contained many pieces of accurate information—my birth date, where I had gone to school, details about my family—so everything else it said seemed true as well.

  I felt I had to respond. I gave one interview to a pro-government journalist, Turki al-Dakhil, with the television network Al Arabiya. One of my friends told me beforehand to stick to the facts, just say what happened, not to make accusations, and not to play the victim. I tried to do that. The government intervened and wouldn’t let the show air in its usual slot, but they apparently forgot to ban the radio broadcast of the audio. It played on a major Saudi radio station, uninterrupted, and thousands of people heard it. When the televised inte
rview was shown for the first time during what was supposed to be a slot for reruns, tens of thousands more people watched it. It was seen in beauty salons, car dealerships, and cafés. My friends texted me to tell me that people had stopped what they were doing and were clustered around the televisions to watch this Manal al-Sharif.

  After the interview aired, I met with the deputy prince of the Imara, Prince Jalawi bin Abdul Aziz. He told me that he saw my interview and that it “shows you are a patriot and an educated woman. We are honored to have you as one of us.” At Aramco, I received a verbal warning for having given the interview. If I did something like that again, I would be fired.

  In the weeks that had followed my arrest, a slew of royal decrees were released. The first in June allowed women to work in shops and malls as cashiers. It took a pronouncement from the king for me and millions of other women to be able to buy our lingerie and underwear from another woman.

  In October, the king gave his annual address to the Shoura council, in which he said, “We will not accept marginalizing women.” He announced that women would be given a chance to stand in municipal elections and to participate in the Shoura, an unelected advisory council for the king. It was the first and last time he spoke about women in this context when addressing the Shoura, and even though he didn’t mention driving, it seemed like a victory.