Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  She was pleasant, warm, cooperative. I had been afraid to have Mama come to my university graduation for fear that she would make a scene. Now I could go anywhere with her. She came with me to Dubai, and we went to the movies, to restaurants, to the aquarium. I read the news to her, and we laughed a lot. She played and sang to Hamza. My brother was able to sit with her and talk for hours. We learned all about her past. She told us about her parents—about her own mother, who had died when she was four—and about her grandparents. Without knowing it, I had named both my sons the same names as each of her grandfathers, Abdalla and Hamza.

  I told my brother that I felt as if I was losing Mama twice.

  Mama wanted to go back home, she told me she missed Mecca and the Grand Mosque. It took only a few months for the cancer to grow stronger than Mama. She told us that she had seen a vision of her own mother in a dream and that her mother said, “I miss you.”

  “I’m going to die before the end of the year,” Mama said. The woman who had been unhappy nearly all my life, who had always spoken about how she wished for death, had one last wish: to see my toddler son, Hamza, again. But she was too weak to come to Dubai, and even my father could not persuade the Saudi authorities to grant this eighteen-month-old boy a visa.

  On February 28, 2016, she took her last breath. Her lungs literally collapsed from the cancer. But she was tough to her last day. She woke up, took a shower, did her laundry, and even arranged the guest room for a friend’s visit. When my father called the ambulance because she was suffering, she sent them away, saying she wanted to die in her own bed. She died lying on my father’s arm. The same ambulance came back to collect her body.

  As a Muslim woman, I had one final obligation to my mother: to wash her body before burial. I told my father to have the body stored, that I would come. I remember standing in the Dubai airport, crying, and the passport control man asking me, “What, did you not enjoy Dubai?” and I replied that my mother had just passed away. I washed my mom and saw her dressed one last time in a pink dress with black flowers. Her own mother had been buried in Mecca (she died from heat stroke when she was performing the hajj, sixty-two years before my mom’s own death) in a cemetery next to the Grand Mosque where the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) wife had been buried centuries ago. Mama’s one wish was to be buried next to her mom.

  In the Saudi practice of Islam, women are not permitted to attend burial ceremonies. I could not even ride in the car with Mama’s casket. But I went on my own to the Grand Mosque to pray. The mosque has 2 million visitors a day, so the crowds for prayer are always huge. At the end of my prayers, my brother texted me, “We buried Mama,” and I felt at peace.

  At the same time as her burial, a little baby was being buried. The baby’s father asked if it was okay to bury their baby with Mama, in the same grave. In Islam, babies, unlike adults, are considered to be without sin. A lot of mercy comes to the grave of a baby. Babies can go straight to God and ask for forgiveness for their parents. Mama, who left her oldest son behind in Libya, who lost two babies with Abouya, and who did not get to see her little grandson one last time to say goodbye, was buried with this poor baby. We believe that now she has a baby’s soul with her as a friend.

  For three days after her burial, friends came to Mecca to pay their respects. Mom’s old cell phone didn’t stop ringing with people calling to say how sorry they were. In Libya, there was another funeral for her that lasted three days, and the same in Egypt. In Libya, my oldest uncle’s house was crowded with people who came to offer condolences. The entire time we knew her, Mama gave away everything she had. She always wore the worst clothes and no gold jewelry; whatever she was given by her brother or that she later earned, she gave away. I would bring her gifts, and she would give them away. Now everyone was coming to speak of her generosity. Grown women came and said, “She was our other mother too.” They spoke of how she taught them to sew or to cook. One family that had lost their own mother talked about how Mama would send food to them. She never told anyone about this. She knew my father wouldn’t approve, and she didn’t want anyone to know.

  She was an amazing woman who will always be my inspiration.

  Some things about Saudi Arabia do not change. It is a country roughly three times the size of Texas, with vast natural resources and a strategic position in the Middle East. Today it has a population of about 20 million Saudis, and nearly 10 million of these people are under twenty-five years old. The current king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz, is a son of the kingdom’s founder, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who was born in 1876 and had more than thirty sons who lived to reach adulthood. Every Saudi king since the founding of the kingdom has been a son of Ibn Saud. But King Salman will be the last; when he came to power in 2015, he removed his younger brother from the line of succession. The next king will be either King Salman’s nephew, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, born in 1959, or, some rumors suggest, Salman’s son, Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, born in 1985 and the current defense minister.

  Commentators, journalists, and essayists are now sifting through tea leaves, trying to conjecture if and when a transfer of power takes place, what inside the kingdom will change. There is talk of rolling back religious control; in April 2016, the religious police were stripped of their ability to make arrests. There is an effort under way to privatize a portion of Aramco, creating an initial public offering of up to five percent of the company’s stock. There are proposals to remove government subsidies and to have more Saudis work—somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the men in the kingdom are unemployed. (Women are excluded from unemployment statistics. And while unemployment is a major issue in the kingdom, at least eighty-five percent of the employees working at all levels of the Saudi private sector are non-Saudis, meaning they are foreign-born workers.) Yet there are changes for women. Four female athletes represented the kingdom at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. A women-owned law firm opened in Jeddah in 2014, and four female lawyers are licensed to practice in the Saudi system, rather than simply serving as “legal consultants.” In December 2015, nineteen women won seats in local councils, although with 2,106 total seats, that is less than one percent. Widowed and divorced mothers are finally able to obtain family identity cards.

  There is even talk of one day, far in the future, letting women drive.

  On November 29, 2016, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal took to Twitter and wrote: “Stop the debate. It’s time for women to drive.” He also posted a four-page letter to his personal website, where he stated, “It is high time that Saudi women started driving their cars.” His reasons were primarily economic, particularly the cost of employing foreign drivers, about 3,800 riyals, or roughly $1,000 a month, which is a drain on household budgets. He also said it prevents women from participating in the workforce. But the prince, while he is wealthy and owns considerable business interests, is not part of the official government. Even the young Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has said that he is “not convinced” that women should be allowed to drive. So we wait. (When I moved to Dubai, I shipped my car and I kept my Saudi license plate, because someday, I want to drive my car across the border into my homeland.)

  These are all hopeful developments, but there is still a very long road ahead, literally and figuratively, for Saudi women. Saudi Arabia’s government is now the largest investor in the transportation company Uber, having provided $3.5 billion in funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. The director of the fund, a member of the royal family, was given a seat on Uber’s board. But, while Uber helps Saudi women get from place to place, it is not a way for women to drive themselves. Saudi Arabia is using a modern smartphone app as a means to enforce the long-standing ban. In fact, about eighty percent of Saudi Uber’s users are Saudi women.

  Or consider this story of a Starbucks in Riyadh. Early in 2016 a sign was posted on its door in Arabic and English: “Please no entry for ladies only send your driver to order thank you.” Starbucks’s official reply was that while it “welcom
es all customers, including women and families,” this particular store had been “built without a gender wall,” meaning that it could only accommodate men. Starbucks added that it was working to receive approval from local authorities to build a permanent gender wall. As one American female radio talk show host noted, it’s like in Greensboro, South Carolina, when the Woolworth’s in 1960 said we like all our customers, but the black ones can’t sit at the lunch counter because it’s tradition.

  The third story is of a call I received from a friend of mine. She had been married for eighteen years and had two daughters when her husband announced that he was divorcing her to marry another woman. He took the girls, as is his right under the Saudi divorce code, took the things from their house, and moved to another city. She was left with the loans that he had taken out in her name, unbeknownst to her. At the age of thirty-six, she would have to return to having her father—a drug addict whom she has not seen or spoken to in thirteen years—be her guardian. Now he must be the one to give her permission to travel, to work, to open a bank account, to find housing, to do almost anything.

  There can be no modern Saudi kingdom as long as women are still ruled by men. It may take a long time, but I do believe that kingdom will come. I think of my father, sitting in the mosque in Jeddah, listening to the Friday sermon and hearing the sheikh say, “Manal al-Sharif has committed evil. If we allow women like her to drive, we lose control over our women.” And then I think of another section of Jeddah, home to the Al Shallal theme park, which, one night a week, is open just for women. The most popular attraction at the park? Bumper cars, where for five minutes, women can drive freely, even if it is only in circles, around and around.

  The rain begins with a single drop.

  Acknowledgments

  My very special and first thanks go to my husband, Rafael, who, when I had lost all hope, believed that this book should be finished and seen by the world. Without his belief in me, I would have given up a long time ago. The second person I’d like to thank is Wajeha al Huwaider for putting herself at risk to document my driving in public so that it could be posted on YouTube. You are the most courageous Saudi woman I have ever met.

  After my speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) in May 2012, someone in the audience asked me: “When are we going to read your book?” I was taken aback by the question; I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or meant seriously. I thought, “Why would anyone want to read my story?” To give that speech, I had to quit a job that I had held for a decade. Ten minutes before I stepped on stage, I learned that by quitting, I had forfeited the financing for my house. I was jobless, homeless, and broke. I was overwhelmed to be in Oslo and to have won the first Václav Havel Award for Creative Dissent. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word dissent and didn’t understand why everyone was calling me an “activist.” I was just a mother who worked as Information Security Consultant and was inspired by the Arab Spring to start a movement to gain a basic right: the right of mobility, for the women in my country. I owe the idea of writing this book to the woman who asked me that question, even though I don’t know her name. And my thanks to Thor Halvorssen, Alex Gladstien, and Christian Paul of OFF for giving me a podium to speak.

  This book would not have come to life without the insights, patience, persistence, and guidance of my wonderful, caring agents, Peter and Amy Bernstein. Peter and Amy have been amazing champions, supporting and sustaining this project. I originally wanted the book to tell the story of Women2Drive, but after looking at a sample chapter, Peter and Amy gently but firmly told me that the book needed a personal story, that it should tell my life story. Coming from a private culture where houses are built with small, covered windows and high walls, I thought it was crazy to share the details of my life. In California, Persis Karim agreed with Peter and Amy. Her proposal led Priscilla Painton at Simon & Schuster to offer me a book contract. I’m grateful that Priscilla believed my story was worthy of a book. Without each of these people I would never have been willing to share my world, even though I do not yet know what impact publishing this book will have on my life back home.

  I am deeply indebted to Lyric Winik, who agreed to be my fifth collaborator in three years, when I had all but given up the hope of finding the right writer. Lyric took more than one thousand pages of transcriptions of my interviews with previous collaborators, as well as videos and speeches and lengthy, rough chapters, and then conducted more interviews, read books and countless supplementary materials, and worked tirelessly to transform a badly organized manuscript and materials into a well-organized and finely polished book. I’m deeply in your debt for your care, professionalism, and dedication.

  At Simon & Schuster, I am grateful to the wonderful insights and support from my editor, Priscilla Painton. She had always believed passionately and unwaveringly in this book. My thanks to Megan Hogan for her very careful work on the manuscript and very thoughtful questions. I am grateful as well for the support of publisher Jonathan Karp, for his very kind words and excellent advice on a title. My thanks to the entire talented team at Simon & Schuster, who have worked so hard on behalf of this book, especially Al Madocs, the production editor; Lewelin Polanco, the designer; Alison Forner, who did the cover; Beth Maglione, the production manager; and Kristen Lemire and Amanda Mulholland in managing editorial, as well as Erin Reback and Nicole McArdle in publicity and marketing, respectively.

  My deep appreciation goes to Hannah Campbell, my talented translator, who captured and maintained my voice when translating my Arabic manuscript to English. Your work, dedication, and attention to detail, along with your feedback, kept me going.

  Very special thanks are due my family and my friends. For my mother, Mama, for all the times you gave up the chicken thigh, your favorite part of the chicken, for me and my brother; for how you ate the leftovers of the lunch that you had spent the whole morning cooking for us. For the dresses you sewed for us, for saving bits of money the whole year so that you could take your children to spend the summer in Egypt; for the times that you shut the kitchen door in my sister’s and my faces and told us to spend our time learning physics and math instead of cooking. For all those suitors whom you rejected so we could finish our college educations, for all the things you gave up, the new clothes that you didn’t buy so that you could sew new clothes for us to wear on Eid or take us to the Funfair. For that precious pearl necklace your favorite brother gave you, which you sold to pay our house expenses, for that, and for all the other things we took for granted, forgive us, thank you, and may you rest in peace.

  For my father, who never had a father, but tried his best to be a father, for coming home every night, for never forgetting my school allowance or my favorite magazine every Wednesday, for taking me to buy my favorite books every summer, for the times you let me score a goal while playing soccer when were kids. For trusting me to work away from home and to marry the man I chose. Thank you.

  For my brother, Muhammad, who is always proud to have me as his sister, thank you for giving me your car keys and sitting next to me on the day that I drove, for getting me out of jail, for being my driver, my mahram, and my biggest fan. Thank you.

  For Bahiya Almansour, the girl who started the Facebook event Women2Drive and inspired a movement, for Eman Alnafjan, Najla Hariri, Huda, Eman, Ameenah, Hidayah, Ahmed, Muneerah, Shakir, Talal, and all my first supporters.

  For Maysa al-Amoudi, for believing in Women2Drive and putting us in contact with influential media figures to support the movement. For Abdulla Al Alami, Women2Drive and Right2Dignity’s godfather, for his guidance, for his time and money, for putting us in contact with the officials, for not giving up on me even when I was in jail and everyone else had abandoned the movement. For Omar al-Johani, for risking his own safety and bravely tweeting about my 2:00 a.m. arrest and letting the world know. For Abdullah, Muneera, and Hidaya, again, for being the only ones who had the courage to visit me in jail when everyone else was scared. You are my heroes. For Ahmed, our Twitter ex
pert, thank you for keeping #FreeManal in the Twitter account favorites, forgive me for misunderstanding you. For Abduljalil al-Nasser, the talented photographer and filmmaker who took that photo that went viral online upon my arrest. Thousands around the world used that photo to show solidarity with Saudi women’s rights.

  For Talal al-Ateeq, Tarfah al-Ghannam, Amjad al-Amri, Rasha al-Duwaisi, Madeeha al-Ajroush, Suaad Alshammari, Kholoud al-Fahad, Hutoon Alfasi, Dr. Badrya Albishr, Khalaf Alharbi, Turki Aldakheel, Maysa Almane, Dr. Aisha Almane, Aziza Alyousef, Bashayer Alyami, Geenan al-Ghamdi, Raneen Bukhari, and many other activists, journalists, and writers who supported the movement when everyone else attacked it or stayed quiet. Your courageous voices have made a difference for generations to come.

  For Donna Abu Nasr from Bloomberg and Atika Shubert from CNN, for letting the world know about the movement. For my dear friend and true feminist Constance Piesinger and Pedro M. Burelli, who both helped me craft my TED talk: you made an important difference in my life. For Carlos Latuff from Brazil, thank you for the amazing icons you designed to help make our movement known worldwide. For Mohammed Sharaf from Kuwait, for the amazing posters and banners to support a women’s rights movement in Saudi Arabia. For all my friends and all the people around the world whom I have never met but who changed their social media profile photos to my photo to call for my release from jail: thank you!

  And thank you to my honorable friend and journalist Alaa Brinji, who has been jailed for five years for his honest tweets about extremism. Your article defending my name while I was in jail, when so many had tried to smear me, was a great consolation to my family.