Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  Outside the kingdom, the driving movement had gained attention and support. In June, six US congresswomen, led by Carolyn Maloney of New York State, wrote a letter to me expressing their admiration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out in favor of Saudi women being allowed to drive. There were sympathetic campaigns in Italy, and in the States a group called Honk for Saudi Women was formed.

  In November, six months after my arrest, I filed a lawsuit in the Saudi courts challenging the government’s refusal to grant me a driver’s license. At the start of December, academics from Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working with a retired professor from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, presented a graphic report warning Shoura members that if women were allowed to drive, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce would “surge.” The report also stated that if women were allowed to drive, “within ten years, there would be no more virgins” in Saudi Arabia. It cited the “moral decline” that has occurred in other Muslim countries where women drive.

  In January, news outlets reported that I had been killed in a car crash in Jeddah, and that I had been driving at the time. My phone lit up with family and friends calling me. I could not believe it. The story of my death on the roadway made headlines around the country and around the world. Of course, it wasn’t true. The woman killed was a member of a desert community. She was driving, but she had not been part of Women2Drive. I believe that whoever distributed this misinformation wanted to prove that driving was too dangerous for women, and they wanted people to believe that God was specifically punishing me.

  Then I made a big mistake. I was still fighting in the system to get a driver’s license. The government kept saying that I needed a mahram or my guardian to prove my identity, but my brother had moved to Kuwait and my father lived on the other side of the country. I brought two male colleagues from work to vouch for me, as well as my phone, which I used to record the audio of the conversation in the Notary Public Service office. Saudi code prohibits recording government officials. But that was not my error. My error was that I posted the entire absurd audio conversation on YouTube and used my Aramco laptop to do it. (When I was released from jail, the first night I was home, I opened a Twitter account under my own name. Almost overnight, I had ten thousand followers; soon it was more than ninety thousand. But I had done that on my personal computer.)

  One of the Women2Drive members reposted my audio on the movement’s official YouTube channel under the heading “Manal al-Sharif records violations against Saudi women.” As soon as our opponents found out that the recording was mine, the audio went viral, springing up like a mushroom on site after site and screen after screen. I took it down soon afterward, but it didn’t entirely go away. Aramco was furious. The company came for my computer. They read every one of my emails; they went through everything. I was hauled off to be interrogated by an American man—I presume he was an ex-CIA agent, judging by his behavior. He hollered at me, asking me who outside the company had assisted me and where else I had sent the video. Finally, I was brought in to meet with the public prosecutor. He informed me that someone had filed an official complaint and they were preparing to file a court case against me; if it went forward, I could face two years in jail. My only recourse was to go to the prince and apologize. Aramco management scolded me, and the personnel department gave me a final, written warning and told me if I ever stepped even slightly over the line, I would be dismissed.

  “Stay quiet,” they added. “This one passed. The next one won’t.”

  Not long after that, Time magazine named me one of its 100 most influential people of the year. The honor included an invitation to a gala dinner in New York City. I had never been to anything like it before. Everyone in the room was famous. I sat next to actress Mia Farrow, though I had no idea who she was because I had never seen her movies. Famous musicians wanted to have their pictures taken with me, but I had never heard their music. I met Hillary Clinton and had my photo taken with her; she told her assistant to get my contact information and “stay in touch.” People were comparing me to Rosa Parks. The evening was incredible. Then I returned home.

  After the YouTube incident and the Time magazine honor, Aramco moved me from information security and dropped my name from the specialist development program. I was placed in the procurement department. My job was essentially remedial data entry. But even that would not last long.

  The Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering of human rights activists from around the world, invited me to speak in Norway and to receive the first ever Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent—I didn’t know what the word dissent meant when I was awarded the prize. I had to look it up. I was named as a laureate, along with Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese Nobel Prize winner, and Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. I asked Aramco for four days off to travel to Oslo. My manager approved it, but the upper-level Aramco executives did not. Their response was swift and sure. “You are not allowed to go,” I was told. “We don’t want Aramco to be associated with you.” The choice was clear: if I said yes to Oslo, I would lose my job. I said yes and resigned, which meant not only leaving my work but giving up my home in the compound by the end of May. And it meant that I was unemployed for the first time since I had graduated from college. But I felt that I had to speak out. I packed up what little was left at my desk and flew to Oslo.

  Appearing at the Freedom Forum involved giving a speech. I was very nervous, but as I spoke, I grew calmer. The speech received two standing ovations, something that had not happened for years. The YouTube video of my speech was watched by 250,000 people in a matter of days.

  My time at the Oslo Freedom Forum was a reminder of how sheltered I had been. I knew nothing about many of the struggles in other parts of the world. The award I received was a replica of the Lady Liberty statue built by Chinese students during their Tiananmen Square protests. Except I had never heard of Tiananmen Square. All my life, I had only read about events in the Muslim world, about Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and especially the Palestinian conflict with Israel. There was so much more I needed to learn, so many more amazing people to discover.

  My seventeen-minute speech in English had gone viral on YouTube, but inside Saudi Arabia, it was mistranslated, with misleading subtitles and commentary that depicted me as an enemy of Saudi Arabia and a traitor to Islam. Almost immediately, I began receiving death threats. People even went to my father’s home in Jeddah and threatened him. A Saudi sheikh condemned me in a fatwa.

  Then a television news segment aired during Saudi prime time, after Juma’a prayer, on the country’s leading channel, MBC. It accused me of being trained by CANVAS (The Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies), a nonprofit organization based in Serbia that advocates nonviolent resistance against dictatorships. I had appeared on a panel in Washington, D.C., with one of the heads of CANVAS, Srdja Popovic—we had both been named on a list of 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. The Saudi TV report used footage from the event and footage of an interview with Popovic, where he praised me as “inspiring,” to “prove [I] was a CANVAS trainee.”

  The pressure became so intense that I locked myself inside my home on the Aramco compound, while packing to move from my town house and trying to figure out what to do next. Vital Voices, an American NGO started by Hillary Clinton and former secretary of state Madeline Albright and dedicated to supporting and empowering female leaders, gave me a global leadership award. But I could not make the trip to Washington, D.C., due to the threats and fears for my safety. I realized I had no choice; I had to leave Saudi Arabia.

  I thought first of Bahrain, which is just on the other side of the causeway from Dammam, but there was too much political unrest and instability. I settled on Dubai. But I would not be going alone.

  In 2010, a Brazilian consultant joined my division at Aramco. His name was Rafael. We were nodding acquaintances for two years until one day when I started talking with a small group of frien
ds, planning a barbecue. He was standing nearby and said, “You should try Brazilian barbecue.”

  I said, “Okay, you come over with us and make it.” We stayed friends, but I never thought he was interested in me.

  Almost every day, I went for walks on the paths around the compound, usually with Aboudi. Rafael started showing up on my doorstep to join us. He was scheduled to leave Aramco in the spring of 2012. On one of our last walks, he told me that he had fallen in love with me “the first time I saw you at that barbecue gathering.” He was moving to Dubai to start a company and he wanted me to come with him. He added, “I don’t treat women like my girlfriend, but like my wife.” But I could not go to Dubai without being his wife.

  Rafael asked what he would have to do to marry me. My answer was simple: become a Muslim. But the reality was more complex. As a Saudi citizen (man or woman) you must have special permission from the interior minister to marry a non-Saudi. I asked for permission to marry Rafael, and the Saudi authorities refused. We could not marry in Dubai, either; its government said I needed permission from the Saudi embassy. So, Rafael took me to his home in Brazil to meet his family. He converted to Islam in the Rio de Janeiro Islamic Center, speaking the required profession of faith. We did not have a formal wedding because there was still no place to get married legally. Instead, a cousin of Rafael’s who is a lawyer in Montreal helped us get a civil marriage certificate from a law court in Canada.

  Rafael’s family already knew about me; they had followed the news of my driving and arrest. They were warm and welcoming. But there was also the pain of leaving my own family and country behind. And my second marriage was stunningly close to an arranged marriage. Rafael and I knew very little about each other; we had to wed because the rules left us with no other options.

  By far, the hardest part was leaving Aboudi. My ex-husband would not allow Aboudi to travel to Dubai. And although he initially said that he would permit Aboudi to visit me in Dubai at least two times a year, he quickly reneged on that promise. If I wanted to see my son, I had to buy a ticket on my own and fly back to Saudi Arabia. Because I had no house, I had to stay with Aboudi’s grandmother in their family home whenever I visited. I did that every or every other weekend, and I do it still.

  After I had moved, my ex-husband took Aboudi to Dubai on a trip, but he did not tell me and he did not allow me to see our son while they were there. Later, I found photos from the trip on Aboudi’s iPad. I was furious. I hired a lawyer to contest the premise that I could not have my son with me in Dubai.

  We spent two years in the Saudi court system, and I spent tens of thousands of riyals. I had to fly my father from Jeddah to appear in court; my own lawyer told me that I shouldn’t attend, saying, “Your presence could create complications.” My father signed a pledge promising that he would go to jail if Aboudi didn’t return after visiting me. In the end, the court’s verdict was no. The basis for their decision was a tenth-century text that denied children’s right to travel because of the “risk of the child dying en route on such a dangerous distance.” That legal premise dated from the time of camels and caravans traveling over hot desert sands. The trip from Dammam to Dubai was one hour by plane. Flights arrived and departed all day long. My lawyer suggested an expensive appeal. I found a woman, Dr. Suhaila Zain Al-Abdeen, who specializes in interpreting old legal and religious texts. We spent a week writing a twelve-page appeal citing passages from the Koran and the hadiths that justified my right to have my son visit. I handed the appeal to my lawyer and waited. But I lost again.

  In the eyes of the Saudi Arabian government, I am also still not legally married. When I gave birth to another son, Daniel Hamza, in 2014, the government would not grant him a visa. I could not take him into the country with me. While I was pregnant, Aboudi won a stuffed animal that he gave to the baby. My two boys have big-brother and little-brother T-shirts, but they have never met. Aboudi cannot leave Saudi with me; his brother cannot enter Saudi with me. They only know each other from photos and from waving on screens across an Internet feed.

  I did not understand the consequences of leaving my job at Aramco until I started looking for work again in Dubai. I went on forty-seven interviews in two years, almost always getting to the final rounds of the application. Then my file would go to Human Resources, they would look me up, and I would not be hired. My name and my history preceded me and negated any other skills on my résumé. In the meantime, I accepted every invitation I got. I spoke at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, gave a TED Talk, and spoke at a UN event, a WIRED summit, Harvard University, and many others. I paid many of my own expenses just so that I could speak out. I wrote in newspapers and blogged. I took up the cause of a five-year-old Saudi girl, Lama, who was beaten with a cane and electric cables. She suffered a crushed skull, broken ribs, and a broken arm and died in a hospital. Her father was a well-known Saudi preacher. He had reportedly been “concerned” that his five-year-old daughter had lost her virginity. After her death, he paid $50,000 in blood money to his wife to avoid punishment; if Lama had been a boy, the sum would have been $100,000.

  I started a campaign called I Am Lama, which helped pass the first Saudi code against domestic violence. Efforts to criminalize domestic abuse had been under way since 2008, but nothing had happened for four years. When a group of young men posted a YouTube video in which they cut off a cat’s tail, an animal cruelty statute was passed within two weeks. I wrote that Lama’s father would have been punished more harshly if Lama had been a cat.

  I also started Faraj, a Twitter campaign to release the Saudi, Filipino, and Indonesian female domestic workers who were being held in the Dammam prison. This activism had become my job; more than that, it had become my mission.

  In the intervening years, there have been other attempts by women to drive inside Saudi Arabia. On October 26, 2013, hundreds of women drove in Saudi Arabia, and an online petition that circulated on Twitter and Facebook received some sixteen thousand signatures in a few days before it was officially shut down. I lent my support to their effort—and drove in solidarity along the roads of Dubai. But women continue to pay a high price for driving. In December 2015, Loujain al-Hathloul, then twenty-five, was arrested as she tried to drive into Saudi Arabia from the United Arab Emirates border—with a valid UAE license. Arrested along with her was Maysa, the journalist who had interviewed and helped me back in 2011. Maysa had rushed to the border to help Loujain. Both were detained for more than seventy days, and their cases were referred to Saudi Arabia’s specialized criminal court, established to try terrorism cases. (They were released several days after Great Britain’s Prince Charles visited the Saudi king and raised the case of a male blogger, Rafi Badawi, who had been sentenced to one thousand lashes and ten years in prison for “insulting Islam through electronic channels.”) After they were freed, Loujain and Maysa were banned from traveling and faced the threat of renewed prosecution. Their travel ban was lifted and their cars returned only after the intervention of Germany’s foreign minister. There has not been another concerted effort by Saudi women to drive.

  As I traveled and lived outside Saudi Arabia, my eyes opened, not simply to all the people and the news that I had missed, but to smaller, more personal things. I watched as a friend flew to Spain to watch his daughter play competitive basketball. All those years when I was studying at the university in Jeddah, my parents never knew that I played basketball. I never showed them my team medals or told them about our tournaments. I never told them because I knew that they wouldn’t have approved. They might even have insisted that I quit. There were so many moments that we missed because the rules didn’t allow it.

  Between visiting Aboudi and traveling around the world, I did not make it back to Jeddah all that often to see my parents. When my second son was born, my mother came to Dubai, but she stayed only three days. As soon as she arrived, she got into a fight with some of the airport personnel. At our apartment, she was fighting, shouting, and driving us crazy. After three
days, she went home. I insisted that she be evaluated by a psychologist, and the diagnosis came back that Mama was bipolar and likely schizophrenic—her illness had gotten worse with aging and stress. All our lives, my brother and sister and I had been told that Mama was possessed by demons. Mama herself often believed that we were the target of witchcraft or claimed that people or cars were following her. Instead, she suffered from a mental illness, one that was treatable and could be controlled. None of us had a clue that this was the problem. But after she was diagnosed, she refused to take the medicine that might help her symptoms. In frustration, I stayed away, longer than I should have.

  On July 17, 2015, the day of Eid al-Fitr, Mama was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. I was visiting my parents with Aboudi for Eid, and when I saw her, I realized the mom I knew was gone. She had lost half her body weight and was lying in bed, too weak to get up and move around. And she was coughing up blood but refused to see a doctor. I was mad at Abouya for not telling any of us how bad her condition was. She couldn’t even take a shower by herself, so I guided her to the bathroom, and for the first time, I bathed her as if she were a child. When I saw her breasts, I started crying. I knew, but it was the emergency room doctor in the hospital who told me for sure. It took me a month to get Mama to complete the medical tests. She would lock herself in her room and wish herself death rather than go back to the hospital. Some days, she accused us of trying to harm her and refused to take any medicine. I spent hours outside her room, crying and begging her to allow me to take her to her doctors’ appointments. It was the most difficult and emotional time of my life. Mama’s cancer was very advanced. Finally, I got her to an oncologist, and we also started the shots to treat her mental illness. After the third shot, she was a changed person. It was only in the last months of her life that I got to know my true mother.