Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  My grandfather had also refused to allow Mama to continue her education past the fourth grade because Egyptian schools were mixed. Once she turned ten, my grandfather would not allow her to learn in the presence of boys.

  So Mama left her life of comfort and even opulence in Alexandria to marry a Saudi man with no education and a menial job, to live in a walk-up apartment without regular running water or a telephone. My mother, however, refused to live like a typical Saudi woman. She refused to stay shut up in the apartment. She would go out alone, without her guardian or a mahram. She refused to have no means of employment, so she sewed, which had been her childhood hobby. She sewed dresses for my sister and me, and she made clothes for her friends and acquaintances, earning her own small income independent of my father. It was our mother who took us to get vaccinated at the health clinic, who decided where we could go, what we could do, and what was safe. And it was our mother who was determined that each of her children should receive an education. She was the one who went by herself to enroll us in school, first primary school, then middle school, and then secondary school. She even registered my younger brother in the boys’ school, something almost unheard of for a woman.

  I remember how the school guard at the boys’ primary school stopped her at the gate and barred her from entering, but Mama refused to move until the deputy administrator came out to see her. Again and again, he tried to dismiss her and send her on her way, his tongue clucking against the roof of his mouth, repeating that my father had to be present to register my brother. But my mother refused to leave, and finally, the deputy administrator relented. Almost twenty-five years later, he came to my mother’s funeral and told my brother that Mama was the reason why he received an education. Hearing this story for the first time, my brother broke down in tears. My mother’s persistence is the reason all three of her children graduated from university at the top of our classes. Today, my sister is a medical doctor, my brother a petroleum geoscientist, and I have a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

  In other ways, my mother did become a more typical Saudi woman. She gave up the colorful head scarves and bright clothes that she had worn in Egypt, covering herself in the shapeless black abaya. And she tolerated another aspect of being a Saudi wife: my father was free to beat her. Not all Saudi wives are beaten; as far as I know, none of my aunts were. But that did not matter in our home. For decades, until 2012, Saudi Arabia had no domestic violence codes to protect women or children. And that meant parents could also beat their children.

  I considered Abouya’s bamboo cane the sixth person in our home. The cane was a familiar sight in almost any house in Mecca; very few of my friends were fortunate enough not to know its sting. Abouya replaced his bamboo cane every autumn, to coincide with the beginning of the new academic year. As we covered our new school notebooks in paper wrapping, he covered his new cane in brightly colored chrome tape, and hung it up menacingly for all to see. He didn’t beat us because we were lazy at school; the three of us always ranked among the top students, not only in our classes and our school but in all the schools in Mecca. I had a box of certificates and trophies, yet I was beaten regularly, for reasons that I still do not understand. If one of us knew we were about to be beaten, at first we used to hide the cane, but the trick never worked on Abouya. If he couldn’t find the cane, he would use the water hose from the bathroom. We soon learned that the lashes from the hard, thick rubber hose were far more painful than those of the bamboo.

  When Mama beat us, she used her bare hands. She slapped us and pinched the inside of our thighs, and when we outran her or managed to scramble away, she threw anything within easy reach: a slipper, a plate, even her sharp, pointed sewing scissors. I have two scars on my forehead and a third under my left eye that will forever remind me of my mother’s furious beatings. When a photographer suggested to me that we hide those three scars using Photoshop, I refused. He couldn’t understand why, and told me gently, “You’re strange. Women usually want me to hide every flaw on their face, and you’re asking me to do the opposite!” In fact, to this day he can’t comprehend why I am so adamant. But my view is that while there are some scars that we might wish to hide because the spiritual or mental pain they represent is far greater than the physical pain caused to us at the time of injury, there are also some scars that we want to see whenever we look in the mirror. Because these scars serve as a valuable reminder of our past. My scars teach me that I am stronger than what caused them.

  Whenever I look at the scars on my face, I feel a renewed sense of resolve that my children should have a happy life, full of love and encouragement, free from screaming, scolding, and neglect. That they should never endure a single act of physical violence.

  One of my favorite Arab fairy tales is about a young prince who took lessons from a tutor. Those lessons were designed to prepare him for his future as king by educating him in literature, wisdom, and governmental affairs. One day, at the start of his lessons, without cause or warning, the tutor slapped the small prince hard across the face. Years passed. The prince grew up and became king. On the day he ascended the throne, the newly crowned king asked for his old tutor to be brought before him. Angrily, the king asked the tutor, “Do you remember the day you slapped me without reason?” He continued, “I’ve never forgotten that day. Now, I will take my revenge. But first, tell me, why did you do such a thing?”

  “Your Majesty,” the tutor replied. “I knew that one day you would become king, and I wanted you to taste injustice when you were young. For he who has already tasted injustice will never force others to suffer the same.” The story ends with the coda that the king remembered that slap whenever his power might have led him to rule with oppression, and instead he always ruled with justice. It is too soon to say how many of my generation may have learned to despise injustice as a consequence of the beatings, verbal abuse, and general cruelty that we suffered as children. But I know that I have, and I know that I will carry that lesson with me always.

  The five of us—Abouya, Mama, Muna, Muhammad, and I—lived in a neighborhood of downtown Mecca called Al-Utaibiyyah. Just outside the city, in a nearby cave, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) received the first revelations of what would become the Koran, which to Muslims is the final word of God. If you tell almost anyone in the Islamic world that you are from Mecca, they will exclaim, “You are a neighbor of God’s house.” Even the water that bubbles up from the Zamzam spring inside the Grand Mosque is said to have traveled to Mecca directly from paradise. We were a quick twenty-minute walk from the Grand Mosque, a mere five minutes by bus. But almost no one would want to live in our neighborhood. Our section of Mecca was ringed by slums, and some of what happened there—foul language, bad manners, and trouble—spilled over onto our streets. It was commonplace to hear an insult, followed by a frenzy of beating and punching, biting, and pulling hair. Inside the slums, more serious fights could spark in a second. A brief argument, a flash of weapons, and then one man would inflict a deadly injury upon another right in front of anyone passing by. As a result, my parents would never allow my sister and me to wander the streets. My brother could only go out to buy food and then had to come right back. And the entire time, my mother would be waiting by the window for his return, afraid.

  There were about sixty-six slums in Mecca when I was growing up. They had nothing: no running water, no basic infrastructure, no real sanitation, no schools, just makeshift places to study the Koran. One of my good friends from school lived on the edge of one of them. I was never allowed to go into her house; instead, I could walk with Mama to meet her to exchange something like a schoolbook or schoolwork. Even as Mama and I walked toward her neighborhood, we could smell the horrible odor of the common toilets and waste in the gutter. The kids and teenagers in the streets said all kinds of vulgar things, although my friend was very polite. Many of these teenagers would buy small bottles of cologne for about five riyals and then drink them for the alcohol. There were also drugs. Every time I went
with Mama, she would walk very fast, rushing past the awful sights, sounds, and smells. Sometimes we brought food from our kitchen to the family, and when it was date season, they would sometimes tell us to bring our date box, which they would fill with lush, plump dates that they had picked on a date farm. But we never stayed.

  Although non-Muslims are forbidden to enter Mecca, the city is the most diverse in the entire Saudi kingdom, home to untold numbers of Muslim immigrants, legal and illegal. There are parts of the city where you will not hear one word of Arabic spoken. Each nationality has its own community and its own varied reasons for staying. Some arrived to build buildings and study the Koran. Others came as merchants or even refugees. There are enclaves of people from Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Burma, Turkey, and Yemen, all trying to get by. In various corners of the city, Nigerian men wash cars and Nigerian women sell dried seeds, stored in huge turbans on their heads, or come and work in houses for next to nothing. We had a Nigerian woman who cleaned and did washing and ironing for about 400 riyals, or about 105 dollars a month, and we were a family that didn’t have running water all of the time.

  A sizable number of immigrants came because they wanted to study Ilm (which translates as “religious knowledge,” a key concept in Islam) and the Koran, in the place where both began. Generations ago, before the kingdom was founded, these people were able to remain, and eventually they became Saudi citizens. But in the decades since, hundreds of thousands more have come for the annual hajj or for study and then have simply stayed behind, melting into the city. It is possible to have two families from the same country, and the one that arrived earlier might have Saudi citizenship, while the later arrival must retain its original nationality. Yet many pilgrims still want to stay: even the people who are deported seem to find a way to return. When I was a child, one house in the city might hold forty people, all crowded in together. In some ways, the Dammam Women’s Prison was like a microcosm of the underside of Mecca, a cacophony of languages and nationalities all wedged together inside a single, tiny space.

  We couldn’t afford to move to a nicer section of the city; the rent there would be at least two or three times more. So we stayed indoors. The apartments we lived in were always small. We would have a sitting room for eating, studying, and watching TV, which was also where we slept, on mattresses that we stacked up against the walls in the daytime. In one apartment, my brother, sister, and I slept on the sitting room floor, my dad slept on a bed in the sitting room, and my mother slept in the hallway. In another, my father had a bed in the bedroom, my brother and I slept on the bedroom floor, my mother still slept in the hallway, and my sister slept in the guest room. But compared to some families, we had plenty of room. My uncle, who was wealthier than my father, had nine kids, and they all slept together. We couldn’t believe that there were places in the world where kids had their own rooms like we saw in the movies. Private space was largely unheard of. If you fought with a sister or brother, you couldn’t go off to your own room and close the door. If I wanted to be by myself, I might go to the balcony. When I got a little older, I had a portable, plastic storage closet. I used to put it together in the middle of the sitting room and cover the top with sheets to make a curtain, so I would have part of the room for myself. I could write and read and be by myself, until my brother would come along and demolish it.

  Saudi houses and apartments are usually filled with people: children, aunts and uncles, all kinds of friends and relatives. Neighbors might knock on the door and come in with food, or send their kids back and forth. My mother was known for her North African couscous. My cousins loved my mother’s cooking so much that when she made this dish, she would make two pots, and Abdullah, Uncle Sa’ad’s older son, would come over to get one. My uncle’s house would always be crowded with an endless cycle of coffee and tea and snacks put out for arriving guests. Often, the adults would kick the children out of the rooms because we made so much noise. We would be sent up to the roof to play soccer. Sometimes we would play in the streets. My parents wouldn’t have allowed it, but they never knew. Those are nearly the only times I can remember running around in the streets.

  But my uncle and his wife rarely came to visit our house, even though for a number of years we lived right across the street. Nor would my mother go to theirs. She would only send them her couscous pot. The only one of my father’s relatives who made my mother feel welcome was my father’s oldest sister, Aunt Zein, who was named after an al-Sharif queen and was nicknamed “peace dove.” Even then, my mother would not visit her house when my uncle and his family were expected to be there.

  Family mattered most during the yearly celebration of Eid al-Fitr, the happy end to the monthlong dawn-to-dusk fast of Ramadan. Eid was my favorite holiday. It began at sundown with nighttime shopping, perhaps for fabric for new clothes or shoes, but always ended at Shara’a al-Halawiyyāt, the nickname we had for a street in the Thieves’ Market filled with confectionery vendors, literally the “sweets street.” Beneath the glittering lights and decorations, we would stroll past stall after stall of vendors in white robes, colorful vests, and Aleppo turbans, listening to each seller as he promised the softest, sweetest sweets: “Turkish delight as you can’t find it anywhere else. Whoever chooses to eat any kind except this will break his teeth!” Amid the bustle of the market, the saqa’, or water carrier, would wander by, offering copper cups of cold water to quench the thirst of those who had neither eaten nor drunk during the fasting days.

  After we passed by the chewy halawa, or Turkish delights, there were all kinds of other tempting sweets and candies set out for the holidays: al-limoniyyah, a colored sugar candy with a piece of almond in the center, and al-loziyyah, toasted almonds with a sugar coating. My favorite and the most expensive of all were Mackintosh’s chocolates, sold in a white aluminum tin with pink edges. A man in the famous red uniform and black hat of Britain’s Queen’s Guard clasped the hand of his smartly dressed female companion and beamed out at us from a picture on the tin’s lid. Mama didn’t allow us to eat Mackintosh’s sweets—they were for guests only—but we always managed to pilfer one or two while her attention was elsewhere.

  Eid was a time to make our apartment beautiful, to bring the mattresses and stuffed cotton cushions to the upholsterer to be refurbished, to take down the curtains and wash them. My mother prepared the cups for tea and coffee and infused the rooms with the scent of aloewood, which was too expensive to use any other time of the year. We always spent the night of Eid baking ma’amoul, a shortbread cookie stuffed with nuts, and ghureeba, a buttery cookie. All these years later, the smell of freshly baked cakes and cookies still takes me back to the Eids of my childhood. After we finished baking, Mama applied henna to my palm and my sister’s, and wrapped them in plastic bags before we slept. We didn’t untie the bag until Eid prayers.

  Mecca is the only city in Saudi Arabia in which the holy month of Ramadan and the day of Eid al-Fitr are welcomed with a twenty-one-cannon salute, a custom that survives from the days of the Ottoman Empire, and one of the few Meccan traditions that was not undone by the rising Wahhabi-Salafi militancy, which promotes a fundamentalist reinterpretation of Islam. On the actual day of the holiday, my father would take us to Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque—to attend al-Mashhad, the Eid prayers. We wore our special Eid clothes, and Mama made sure to carry with her a portion of the sweet halawa and a bundle of small change to distribute to the children we passed as we left the mosque after praying. When we arrived home, Mama arranged our own plate of halawa and prepared tea and Arabic coffee with cardamom for any guests who would stop by. She distributed the freshly baked cookies to our neighbors.

  That day, we would begin the formal holiday celebration with an Iftar feast, literally a breaking of the fast, at Aunt Zein’s, then on the second day at Uncle Sa’ad’s, and on the third day at our apartment. But while during the first two days my aunt and uncle’s rooms were crowded with cousins and relatives, my
mother was not among them. And on the third day, although friends and neighbors came by, none of our relatives ever gathered in our apartment, and not one of my father’s family ever knocked at our door. I never asked Abouya why this was, but I could see the hurt in my mother’s eyes. “Mama,” I finally asked her, “why does no one visit us?”

  “Because I’m gharība [foreign],” came her curt reply.

  I was a child, so I didn’t understand the complexity of this particular situation. My mother felt shunned, but in truth my father’s family had not rejected her. Before my father had married my mother, he had been married to the sister of his brother’s wife. The friction that my mother felt came largely from the severing of those multiple ties. And so my mother isolated herself, even though most of my father’s family appreciated her generosity, her many talents, and her perfect etiquette. It was not until her death, not until my father’s extended family came to pay their condolences, not until I was long grown, that I began to understand any of this. For all of my childhood, I felt like an outcast.

  On the second day of Eid, and despite Mama’s objections, we always went with Abouya to eat breakfast and lunch at the house of Uncle Sa’ad, my father’s older—and only—brother. The atmosphere in his house was very different from Aunt Zein’s. Because money was tight, Mama bought my sister and me only one dress each for Eid; in fact, often she sewed them herself. I wore this dress on all special occasions throughout the whole of the following year, since I would outgrow it by the time the next Eid came around. Invariably, when I entered Uncle Sa’ad’s house, one of his older daughters would say with a sneer, “Oh look, the same dress as yesterday!”