At dawn on October 30, 2005, our son Abdalla (Aboudi, I called him) was born in Jeddah. K. named him after his father, who had passed away years ago. I had not planned to give birth in Jeddah, on the other side of the country, but on October 29, nine months pregnant, I left our house in Dammam after another big fight. I had a small belly and so I managed to be allowed to board a plane. I gave birth the next morning.
I was scared, knowing that I was giving birth to a baby who would have to endure unhappy parents, to hear shouting and screaming as his first words. I even wondered if I could love this baby in the midst of so much pain. I berated myself for listening to my husband’s demands that we have a baby at the start of our marriage. “All my friends who are married had their babies in their first year of marriage, you make me feel like a failure,” he would scream at me. But when the nurses laid Aboudi’s tiny body down on my belly, he looked at me with his puffy eyes, matted hair, and wrinkled skin as if he knew that I was his mother. At that moment, I fell in love. His life was what mattered most to me from that day on.
It was the twenty-seventh day of the holy month of Ramadan, the busiest time of the year to find any flights to Jeddah. When my mother gave my in-laws the happy news, they couldn’t find a flight to come to see the baby. My husband, who could now call himself Abu Abdalla (father of Abdalla), drove eighteen hours from Dammam to Jeddah to see his son. Hearing that he was driving all that way was enough to make me forget the fight we had had.
When Aboudi was born, I hoped things would change, that our relationship would mature, that the baby would unite our hearts. But that did not happen. Instead, once more the pressure mounted on me to leave my job.
One day, about two years later, as my husband unleashed a string of curses upon my father and mother, I decided that he would also taste the bitterness of an insult to his family. I began to heap slurs on his parents. It was the first time since the beginning of our marriage that I had responded to these sorts of insults in kind.
I don’t recall the details of what happened next; I only know that I was severely beaten in front of my child. Aboudi was almost two, and both he and I were screaming in horror. It was not the first time I’d been beaten by my husband, but it was the first time Aboudi had watched it. I begged my husband not to hit me in front of our son: “Hit me in our room,” I cried. “I don’t want Aboudi to see this.” I remembered the time I watched my father hitting Mama in front of us, and continuing to hit her despite our pleas. I had cried hysterically as I watched her being beaten.
In that moment, I knew one thing: I could not allow my husband to hurt me in front of my son.
It can be difficult for people living outside of Saudi to understand why so many in our culture, women in particular, submit, stay, and suffer this kind of physical violence. But the price of resisting can be even higher. As I grew up in Mecca, there was another family on our block whose daughter wanted to attend college. Her father was enraged at the thought of her leaving home to study. They beat this girl so severely that she ran away. The family could not find her. Days passed, and they were forced to contact the police. But this seventeen-year-old girl had gone to the police first. She had filed a complaint against her father. The complaint was ignored, but the girl refused to leave the police station and return home. There were no shelters for abused women, so the only option was for the police to lock this girl in a juvenile correctional facility—a prison for women under age eighteen. Weeks later, her aunt intervened and took the girl into her house to live. I later heard that this girl did go to school and made it out of the country to study, although she was disavowed by Saudi authorities because she was living and studying abroad without a permissible mahram.
I cannot in any way call her “lucky,” but many female victims of abuse have limited skills and education and have even fewer options. There are stories of women who are starved, stabbed, burned, kicked out of their houses, and even locked in psychiatric institutions by male family members. Some are the victims of “honor killings,” murdered by fathers, brothers, or uncles simply because they are suspected of having a relationship with a man and thus bringing shame to the family. When I hear these stories and meet some of these women, I wonder in my heart how so many can claim that they are only following the rules of our religion. What has happened to the two fundamental principles of being a Muslim—living in peace and showing compassion?
It was summer. I asked my brother, who was now also working at Aramco, to accompany me on a trip to Europe. My husband wouldn’t let me take Aboudi with me, but I was willing to compromise on anything so long as I could get away from the house. I wanted to think, alone.
When I returned, I told him, “I want a divorce.” It was ironic that I was the one to say it after all the times he’d used the word to threaten me.
He refused. He ignored me, then insulted me, then beat me. Finally, he requested my father’s intervention. Abouya didn’t understand my request for a divorce; I had told no one in our family about the problems in our marriage, and my father had rarely visited. But now I explained everything to him in detail. He was very upset, but he remained strongly opposed to a divorce. He said, “You are the one who chose him, and you gave birth to his child. For the sake of this child, you should be patient.”
Abouya returned to Jeddah, believing he had set me straight, but I had made up my mind. I realized that K. had fought to keep me only three times during our entire history together, and each of these times was when I had decided to leave him: once during our romance, once during our engagement, and once during our marriage. When Aboudi was still a baby, K. had even kicked me out of the house. I’d taken Aboudi with me, but of course I couldn’t find anyone who would rent us a place to live. My brother was forced to rent a furnished apartment for us under my father’s name, using a copy of our family ID card. It was humiliating; I couldn’t stand the looks the employees in the building’s reception area gave me. Each time I passed, their eyes said, “Look, a lone woman with her child.” I soon returned to K.’s house, apologized, and begged him not to throw me out again. I didn’t have any other place to live.
Then, in late 2006, Aramco permitted women to live in its internal compound.
It happened in October 2007, on the twenty-seventh night of Ramadan, the holiest month for Muslims and the greatest night of the year. Aboudi had been born on this same night two Ramadans before. There was no one at home; everyone except Aboudi and me had gone to the special Taraweeh prayer. I gathered my things and Aboudi’s in two suitcases and left the house forever.
The divorce was even faster than the marriage. Several days later, I was attending a special summit hosted by Aramco to discuss the computing technology needed to support the new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). There were two hundred people in the audience, and the speakers were experts and chief technology officers from big companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Amazon. I was representing the female IT professionals working at Aramco. I decided to forgo my abaya for the first time in years.
I was listening to the speakers when I got a text from my husband. “Manal, you are divorced,” it read. “Your papers are in the court of Khobar.” I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.
Although I wanted this divorce, when I read that message I felt as though part of my soul had been extinguished. My eyes filled with tears and I left my seat. Standing outside, I called my best friend, Manal. When she answered, the only sounds she heard were my sobs. “I wanted this, but why does it hurt this much?” I choked out into the phone.
“Because the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him, said divorce is the woman breaker,” Manal replied. She started crying with me.
But I could not stay outside. I had to go back in and act as if nothing had happened. I dried my eyes and returned to my seat.
When lunchtime arrived, one of the organizers approached me and asked if I was Manal al-Sharif. She told me that I would be at a table with Mr. Abdullah Jum’ah, the
CEO of Aramco. I didn’t believe her until I saw the CEO sitting there with a group of top Saudi IT executives.
I told our CEO what an honor it was to be seated next to him. “Manal, the honor is all mine,” he answered, holding out the hummus plate. “Hummus?”
I was astonished at how humble and easygoing he was. For the entire lunch, I chatted with Aramco’s CEO, and also with the Saudi leader responsible for the country’s ICT infrastructure and regulations, and with the technology adviser to the US president. I wondered if this was a sign that I was right to choose a promising career rather than a failing marriage.
10
* * *
* * *
Live Free or Die
* * *
* * *
I grew up afraid to fall asleep. My mind simmered with genie tales and stories of Al Si’elua, the witch who would come and eat you if you ventured out beyond the confines of your home. My grandmother was full of such stories, stories of women eating children and witches who would kidnap you or cut off a leg or an arm. She told us these stories before we fell asleep, so they were the last images to pass through our minds as we closed our eyes.
During the daytime, it was the genies we feared, although we were too scared to utter the word genie, and so we would say “Bismillah” instead. (Bismillah means “in God’s name.” We say it before starting anything, from a meal to a project. Saying “Bismillah” will cause any genie coming your way to vanish.) As children, we were told that genies would possess you if you failed to say your prayers before performing any of a host of daily tasks: using the bathroom, looking in the mirror, getting dressed or undressed. Forgetting to pray before changing clothes meant that angels might see your aura. We needed to pray before we ate, before we started a new class in school, a new job, or a new day. There were prayers for starting a trip, even a prayer for taking an airplane or getting into a car. All these prayers were designed to protect us from the genies, who were as real to us as our own families. The genies lived in their own genie cities, had their own tribes, and had names, wives, and children. Where angels are made of light, genies are made of fire, and humans of mud, or so we are told in the Koran.
Many women, including young women, believe that they are possessed by genies. Some even pay money to have the bad genies removed from their bodies, and countless others worry about being given the evil eye and thus having their blessings destroyed. I have close friends who did not share the news that they were getting married, that they were pregnant, or that they were building a new home until after the fact, out of fear of being cursed with the evil eye. I have learned never to say, “Oh, you have a beautiful child” to certain friends, because if anything ever happened to the child, I would immediately be blamed for having given it the evil eye. Women become conditioned to say only the bad things, to complain about their lives, for fear of otherwise inviting the evil eye, and create rituals and obsessions to avoid it. For example, after you have spent the day at someone’s home, your hostess might drink the last dregs of your coffee from your cup, believing that it will offer protection in case you have coveted anything while you were there. A bad grade on an exam, a food stain on an expensive leather purse—anything at all—can be blamed on someone else’s evil eye.
My mother believed. When we got our hair cut, she would insist on taking the clippings with her so that no one could bewitch them. If she thought my sister or I had been given the evil eye, she would take us to a man in Mecca who sold water designed to drive off evil spirits. Some women even think it is necessary to spit this water on the afflicted to drive away the genies. Even very personal items, such as women’s menstrual pads, have to be disposed of in a special way—and never in someone’s home—so that no one could use them to perform black magic.
As I grew older, I stopped believing in genies possessing us and in the evil eye. But I am sure there were more than a few women who saw me, a newly single mother, and believed I had been struck by the worst of the evil eye. When I crossed the threshold into my tiny company studio room in the Aramco singles’ building, there was no familiar prayer that I could utter as a divorced Saudi woman living alone.
My own family didn’t know I was alone. My father had already been to visit me and had forbidden me from divorcing. My twenty-four-year-old brother had told me, “We don’t have girls who get divorced.” My mother was in Egypt when the divorce happened; she did not know for a year. The only people I told were two men who worked at Aramco: one because he had to sign my housing papers, and the other because I could not move without a man’s help.
The axiomatic thing about Saudi society is that while there are a seemingly infinite number of rules, it is also possible for people in authority to go outside those rules, and, if not break them, at least bend them quite a bit. So it was that in 2007, when I left my husband, I moved into a small studio living space, only a few hundred square feet, inside the Aramco compound under a provision known as “out of policy.” This section of the compound provided housing for single Saudi female employees whose families lived more than eighty kilometers (about fifty miles) away and who had no children. I was not yet single and I had a toddler, but I had told a member of Aramco’s housing department that I was getting divorced and I had nowhere to live. Within a week, I had been assigned to a unit, living among female nurses and clerks. If Aboudi made too much noise, or if anyone complained, I would be removed and be without a home. Each time I drove into the housing cluster, I passed a sign that read: “No pets allowed, No men allowed, No children allowed.”
A few months later, I appealed for a larger living space. My request was denied. Then one day I was at a small lunch with a senior executive, and I thought, Why not ask him? I made my request, and I was granted a town house. But I hadn’t realized there was a difference between single townhomes and family housing, so I was merely transferred into a bachelors’ area with slightly more space. There was only one bedroom for Aboudi and me to share: if my neighbors complained, I could still be kicked out.
The year of my divorce, I was assigned three new hires as my mentees. And I also told one of them, a recent university graduate, that I was divorced. I needed a man to help me get furniture and with other basics, such as opening a bank account. Like almost all Saudi woman, I could not leave my awful marriage without the help of a man—and my own family would not help me. My mentee and I remained good friends until he got married. Then, perhaps at the insistence of his wife or just the culture at large, he stopped speaking to me. Such are the ways of women and men.
Otherwise, I kept my divorce secret. I did not tell my coworkers or my boss. But the upheaval showed in other ways. I had a hard time concentrating on projects. For the first time, my performance review at work was dreadful. And I cut my hair.
I had worn my hair long for years. My ex-husband in particular did not like even shoulder-length hair, he wanted me to stop cutting it entirely. Whenever I got a haircut, he would fly into a rage and scream insults at me for touching my hair. Without a husband, there was no one to tell me how short I could or could not wear my hair. I cut it very short, as short as a boy’s. It was a symbolic act; I could not tell people I was free of my marriage, but at least I could be free of my hair.
After I left our house, my now ex-husband refused to speak to me, and we communicated only through his sister. We had agreed to share our time with Aboudi; he would be with me during the weekdays and with his dad on the weekends. I did not know until much later that I could have asked to have my son some weekends, since I was not free during the week. Instead, Aboudi went to his grandmother’s each weekend and I stayed home alone.
Saudi custody rules are murky at best and often depend on whatever individual agreements are reached between the two parents and, sometimes, their families and the judge. In 2007, when I got divorced, the policy was for children to reside largely with the mother until they turned seven. At age seven, a girl would then be taken to her father’s house to live. A boy, however, would be asked
if he wished to remain with his mother; the choice was his. Once he became a teenager, that boy would often become his mother’s male guardian. He would have the final say over whether she could work or go out, or must stay in. If a woman remarries, she immediately loses all custody of her children. If they are young, they must be sent to her mother to live or, if her mother is unable to care for them, to her sisters—the oldest first, and if she can’t, then the second-oldest—rather like an elaborate plan of royal succession. A man, however, can remarry at will or even take a second wife, with no impact on his claim to his children. I have friends who wish very much to leave their marriages but cannot, because they know that they will lose their children.
I was determined not to become a second wife. I could not imagine giving up Aboudi. My own family did not have a tradition of taking second wives, but the practice is still strong in Saudi society, particularly in the middle of the country. When women reach the end of their childbearing years, the man goes and finds someone younger. For years, Saudi men also used to bring women back from Syria, Morocco, or Egypt to be second wives. The father of one of my childhood best friends had two wives, who lived on different floors of the same apartment building. Another of my childhood friends became a second wife herself. And one of my other friends, who was married with three children, discovered by accident that her husband had taken a second wife, a woman with whom he worked at Aramco. My friend left her husband for a while and returned to her family home, but eventually she went back. Many women do not know or do not speak about the existence of second wives.
Daring to Drive Page 20
