I, too, felt the pressure from family, acquaintances, and even perfect strangers, so I simply kept to myself. That way, I didn’t have to lie or hide the truth; doing so made me feel as if I were somehow living in sin. On one of my trips between Jeddah and the Eastern Province, I was interrogated by a woman sitting next to me on the plane. “You are from Jeddah and you work in Aramco and you live alone?” came her accusing tones. “How can your family permit you to do this? Don’t you fear for your reputation?” Every time I traveled after that, I made sure to bring headphones and a book.
Each day at lunch, I boarded the shuttle bus to the dining hall—unlike the Aramco city bus, female employees could ride the shuttle bus inside the compound—to eat with two women who were working as contract employees. I didn’t know at the time that they were from the Shiite community, but neither I nor anyone around me (or so I thought) cared about the Sunni/Shiite sectarian divisions anyway. One day, however, I bumped into an older male colleague in the mixed dining hall, and he answered my smile with a sullen face.
After lunch, he stopped by my office. “Aren’t you scared what will happen to your reputation from eating lunch in the dining hall?” he asked.
“Excuse me?” I answered. “What does my reputation have to do with the dining hall? Am I supposed to starve?”
“Well, it’s well known that girls who eat in the dining hall go there to look for relationships with men.”
I sent an email to the division planner, Amro, and my group leader to ask them if it was considered taboo for female employees to eat lunch in the dining hall. I didn’t get a direct response, which made me uncomfortable. I decided from then on I’d get a cold sandwich from the Coffee Man, a small shop in our office building, and make dinner my only proper meal, eaten largely alone when I got back to the apartment.
At one point I also decided to stop wearing my abaya in the office. I made sure my outfits were formal and modest, and I still covered my hair. Within a couple of days, the same colleague who had complained about my coffee break habits was at my door, voicing his disapproval. I went back to wearing the abaya and soon found an unsigned letter on my desk thanking me for adhering to a modest dress code. The letter only made me feel more resentful.
I had been under the illusion that my male colleagues were open-minded, since we worked in a mixed environment, but I soon discovered that was far from the case. My Saudi colleagues never introduced me to their wives; I didn’t even know their names. By chance, I met one wife in a training session at Aramco’s Department of Adult Education (these sessions took place outside working hours, and family members of Aramco employees were allowed to attend). My colleague’s wife told him about our meeting, and he was deeply distressed. “Please,” he begged, standing before me in my office, “don’t tell her that we’re working in the same group. Don’t mention anything about me in front of her!” I was very surprised. This man was quiet and calm; he was one of the men who treated me very respectfully. But he was terrified that his wife had discovered he was working with a woman. If a man in the office spoke to his wife on the phone, he never addressed her by her first name but instead as the mother of his oldest child, “Umm Muhammad” or “Umm Abdullah,” just as my mother used to call me by my brother’s name when were in the marketplace. And the men were always eager to end the calls as quickly as possible. Almost daily, I wondered what these men thought of me, the only woman working among them.
The Information Protection Division was brand new when I joined; it had been set up after a computer virus had attacked Aramco’s network infrastructure. In our second year, our administrator decided that each of us should take a series of specialized information security training courses. After completing the three courses, employees would be awarded a title. Information Security Consultant III would be awarded after the first stage, followed by Information Security Consultant II for the second stage, and Information Security Consultant I for the third. It was obligatory for all the employees in our division to attend.
I arrived at the start of one workweek to find everyone gone. They were all in Khobar attending the first training course. I was rushing off to find a driver to take me there when the division head explained that I couldn’t go. “It is not permitted for women to attend.”
I filed an official complaint with all my supervisors. Aramco’s response was that the Saudi Ministry of the Interior did not permit women to be present alongside men for training courses held outside the compound. Only an official waiver granted by the Governor’s House (known as the Imara and responsible for the administration of the Eastern Province) and then approved by the Ministry of the Interior could allow me to attend. Aramco had decided against delaying training for the division’s male employees to wait for permission for me that might or might not be granted.
It was difficult not to feel as if every rule had been invented to ensure that I would fail.
I requested that we petition the Governor’s House to let me attend the training course, but my request was ignored. Then I asked my group leader if I could travel outside Saudi Arabia to attend the same courses, but the answer was no. The only way for me to complete the training was to borrow books from my colleagues and study them myself. And that was what I did. I passed the first three tests on my own, and I was awarded the same certificates as my colleagues. But there was one more test to pass before I could earn my first title.
The fourth test focused on the topic of ethical hacking. Although I had spent my first year at Aramco working with a team of ethical hackers, books alone were not enough: both the training course and the exam assumed that the student had access to a specialized computer lab. The first time I took the test, I failed. It was the first time I’d ever failed anything. I went to the administrator’s office and explained my situation. I showed him the cost of attending the same course abroad and the dates it was being offered. My direct boss was very annoyed with my decision to go over his head, but my diminishing patience had made the decision for me.
The division ultimately decided that it would be cheaper for a training coach to teach me in private at an Aramco office than to send me abroad. It was my responsibility, they told me, to find an appropriate location for the one-week course; if I couldn’t find a spot, the trainer would not come. I booked a meeting room, and I got hold of a portable projector for the trainer to use during the sessions. I was the sole attendee, which made it the most useful training course I had ever attended. I passed the test and received my first title: I, Manal al-Sharif, could now call myself an Information Security Consultant III.
It was 2004; I had spent only two years with the company, and in that short period, I’d already faced many obstacles. But I was determined to beat them, one by one.
The Information Protection Division was not the only department housed in our sand-colored building. One day I was walking down a neighboring hallway when, glancing at the signs outside the doors, I saw a woman’s name, Hanan. I stopped and introduced myself, telling her how happy I was to see another woman. It was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays her department shared breakfast with a third department on the other side of the building, in an area I’d never visited before. “Why don’t you come along?” she asked. “There are other women that will join us.”
At the breakfast, the men and women ate in two separate places, which surprised me, because there was no segregation of men and women anywhere else inside Aramco. But I was very happy to meet other female employees. Two were my age, although I was the only one who worked in a technical field. I sat in the office of a girl named Reem, and we got to know each other. Then, quite unexpectedly, everything changed.
A young man around my age entered Reem’s office, carrying a tray of hot falafel. Reem offered me some food, and we continued our conversation, but the man stayed where he was. He had sleepy, almond-shaped eyes and long, dark eyelashes. In that moment, that was everything I noticed and all that I could remember.
For a second, I shifted my gaze in his
direction, and I saw his eyes watching me. I felt the blood rushing to my face and butterflies in my stomach. Reem was still talking, and I looked back at her, though I couldn’t follow anything she was saying. After a while, a colleague called and the nameless man left the office.
Though I was working in a division composed entirely of men, I’d never felt anything like this for any of them. When I had worked in the hospital, I would have fleeting crushes that lasted for a week and then promptly disappeared. This was different. But there wasn’t to be another breakfast for some time: we had entered the month of Ramadan, where everyone fasts from one hour before sunrise to sunset.
I knew nothing of this young man, but I thought of him constantly. There was no way, however, for me to learn anything more. I didn’t dare enter the other department without a reason. I had always found the month of Ramadan to be among the most beautiful times of the year and the fastest to pass, but this Ramadan lagged and idled.
At the end of each day during the thirty days of Ramadan, when you break your fast, you may ask God to grant you one wish, and that wish will be granted by God. Thirty wishes for thirty days. During that Ramadan, I used my wishes on just one thing. “Your call each day,” my childhood friend Manal later reminded me, “was, ‘O God, make the falafel guy mine!’ How silly you are,” she added, “to wish to marry a man when you don’t even know his name.”
After Ramadan, I gingerly approached my female colleagues to ask about the Wednesday breakfast. Reem assured me it was resuming and said I was welcome. When I saw the falafel man again, I was sure he could hear my heart pounding. After only a few Wednesdays, I recognized his distinctive French cologne.
I gradually found more friends. One of my female classmates from King Abdulaziz University joined my project as a contract employee. She was very religious and wore the niqab, but her intelligence and ambition had made her want to join Aramco regardless. This girl, Reem, Dalia (another female colleague), and I ate lunch together every day. I made sure to go to Reem’s office at lunchtime in the hopes of seeing the falafel man before he left the office to eat with his male colleagues. He, meanwhile, had started walking by my cubicle after lunch on the days that I did not walk into Reem’s section or missed seeing him. My male colleagues’ inquiring glances made very clear what were they thinking. But his visits, although they made me feel awkward, gave me some hope that our feelings were mutual.
I still didn’t know anything about his personal life, so it came as quite a shock to me when out of the blue several months later Reem produced a picture of a young child. “Look, Manal,” she told me, “this is his son.”
I felt suddenly sick. Saudi men don’t generally wear wedding rings, so it’s impossible to know their marital status unless they mention it. “Reem,” I gasped, “really, I had no idea before now that he was married.”
Reem laughed. She and the falafel man, whom I’ll call K., had planned the photo as a prank; he was not married, but now my feelings had been laid bare.
Sometime later, Reem and I ate lunch alone, and she raised the topic of K. without invitation. “K. says he is from a very conservative family, and that he would never marry a girl who works in Aramco.”
I felt foolish. For a year, I had entertained all kinds of hopes about our future together, hopes predicated on nothing more than the glances K. had scattered in my direction. Occasionally, he would speak to me, but he had never said anything about his feelings. I silently scolded myself for even opening myself up to the criticisms that Saudi society visits on women who work among men, convinced that my beliefs about K.’s intentions toward me were nothing more than fantasies.
That morning I had brought in a small plant that I planned to give to K.; it was similar to a plant of mine he had admired the last time he had passed my cubicle. After lunch, I walked quickly to his office, plant in hand. My words were like a stream of bullets: “Don’t worry,” I said, “it wasn’t your fault, it was mine. It was my fault for falling in love with a man who holds this view of women. Thank you for disclosing your true feelings to Reem; thank you for saving me a lot of hardship and for finally putting an end to my confusion! And thank you again for all the words that deceived me. Please, take this plant to remember me, and try to learn that not all women fit the image you have in your mind!” I slammed the plant down on his desk and left before he could catch sight of my tears. Only once I had gone did I realize what I had said. Love? I was mortified.
After work, I went back to my apartment in Khobar. I threw my abaya on the sofa in the living room and collapsed on its cushions. How could I have been so stupid? How could I forget that I was a Saudi woman, that my society shows no mercy toward girls who uncover their faces and work with men? A man could live his life as he wished. If he decided to get married, his past would never return to haunt him. He was free to have relationships outside of marriage, too, and he would never have judgments slung at him simply because he worked with women. I felt as if I was burning up, remembering every look K. and I had exchanged. Lamia couldn’t understand what had come over me, and brought me water and medicine. I spent the night on our green sofa, delirious; going to work the next day was out of the question.
The next day, at five minutes after five in the afternoon, an hour after work at Aramco had ended for the day, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. The caller’s speech was sporadic, timid, rushed: “I’m calling to see if you’re okay. . . . You didn’t pass by the girls today during the lunch hour, so I went to your office to check on you . . . they said you were sick. . . . May God keep you safe, Manal.”
“How did you get my number?” I asked.
“From my friends at the telecom company,” he replied.
The call was over. But he sent me two texts.
I read the messages a hundred times. But I kept my feelings a secret.
At work, our relationship continued as it was before: glances from afar and cursory exchanges in the hallways. But now I looked forward to leaving the office each day, because that was when I’d receive a phone call and have a furtive, heart-racing conversation, conducted just out of earshot of any others. With the help of cell towers and text messages, we grew more and more drawn to each other. Finally, I agreed to meet face-to-face. Still, I was hesitant; I feared that people would see us together, or that the religious police would arrest us and cause a great scandal. So we agreed to meet an hour before sunset on Najmah Beach in Ras Tanura, a part of another Aramco compound about an hour’s drive away and the location of the Arabian Gulf’s largest refinery. I boarded the Aramco bus that traveled between Dhahran and Ras Tanura. Women were allowed to use it, since it traveled from one Aramco compound to another. (Aramco has compounds all over the country, in every city where it has major operations.)
I arrived first, wondering as I stood there what he would think of me. Would he see me as a cheap girl who had consented to speak to him on the phone and now to meet him face-to-face? I took off my sandals and walked barefoot on the white sand, heading for the remote part of the beach where the refinery stood. The flame from one of its chimneys was shooting up into the sky, seeming to consume the air around it. It seemed an appropriate metaphor. A great number of Saudi love stories end not in marriage but in heartbreak. Most men will not trust a woman who permits him to speak with her alone before their engagement. But I was completely enamored with K. I had ignored Mama’s many warnings; I had shrugged off any sense of betraying my father.
For the first time since I had been a little girl, I lifted my scarf from my hair and draped it over my shoulder. The salty sea breeze touched my face and scalp. I sat on the beach alone and waited. Then a text arrived: “I’m here, I’ll see you in minutes.”
I still had time to back out; I could hide between the houses overlooking the beach and explain this day away as nothing more than a delusion. How had I, a proper Muslim girl, agreed to meet alone with this strange man, with my face showing and my hair uncovered? But it was as if I’d grown roots, deep ones th
at stretched down into the wet sand. I drew my knees toward my chest with both hands, took a long breath, and gazed at the waves, hoping their repetitive motion might soothe me.
I saw him first as a silhouette, then I smelled his cologne, and finally he dropped down to sit near me, appearing even shyer than I was. We didn’t talk: he simply reached out and nestled my palm in his. It was the first time my hand had touched a man’s. I left it there. We sat in a silence broken only by the waves crashing before us. I decided that day that he would be my husband.
The following months passed in much the same way. We exchanged calls, texts, and quick, superficial conversations at the office, never progressing further; his conservative background and my religious one would not allow it. But things were not as perfect as I’d imagined. The divide between our two ways of thinking became more evident every time we talked. He was strongly opposed to women working at Aramco and uncovering their faces, not from a religious perspective but from a cultural one. If I were in Malaysia, where women walk about with their faces uncovered, K. would not object to me being uncovered. But he was adamant I follow the most conservative practices inside the kingdom. Saudi society judges you on your adherence to tradition; the requirement that women fully cover their bodies is based more on this than on religious precepts. Facial veiling isn’t a specific requirement for Muslim women in the Koran, which describes women accompanying the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) into battle.
Our arguments were frequent and they often ended in my asking how it could be considered acceptable for him to work in Aramco, but not acceptable for a woman. His response was always “I am a man, and nothing brings shame to a man.” My mind urged me to leave him, but my heart would invariably win. I tried to convince myself that if he asked me to marry him, I could put the niqab back on and quit Aramco. But I wanted to work—and my parents depended on me financially. We could not find a way to agree.
Daring to Drive Page 18
