THE CONSEQUENCES OF DRIVING WHILE FEMALE
The story of Manal alSharif’s struggle to drive in Saudi Arabia is also a study of growing up female in a deeply conservative society
There are moments in Manal al-Sharif’s Daring to Drive that are truly frightening. Like when secret service men turn up at her doorstep in the middle of the night and insist she accompany them to the Dhahran police station: In the shadowy darkness, all we could see were men, crowding around my front stoop, pressing forward. They had no uniforms, nothing to identify them. When my brother asked them who they were, there was silence. Finally, one of them spoke. “Is this Manal al-Sahrif’s house?
The opening chapter describing the author’s arrest for the heinous crime of ‘driving while female’ immediately pushes the reader into conservative Saudi Arabian society with its many unwritten codes. One of them is the rule against women drivers, which Manal realises is actually merely a custom and not law:
That night... I sat down at my computer. I read the entire traffic code... I went though each line of the code. There was not one reference to the gender of the driver. Pages 117 to 121 listed all possible traffic violations and offenses. None of them included “driving while female”. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the official Saudi traffic code indicated it was illegal for women to drive.
Manal was to learn the hard way that in Saudi Arabia where men and women are strictly segregated and religion is so central that it governs every aspect of an individual’s life, customs are often more powerful than any written law. It was custom that decreed that she cut off all ties with her male cousins once she began menstruating; it was custom that pushed her father as her mahram or male guardian to ferry her to and from college every day, and it was custom that gave the religious police the authority to yell at her and haul her to prison. If the story of Manal’s struggle to drive is the pivot of the book, its chassis encompasses the whole of Saudi society. The contemporary reader learns of the fundamentalist attack on Mecca in the 1970s that pushed Saudi Arabia into orthodoxy and of how the growing influence of Wahabism led to ever stricter rules governing behaviour. The book, which the blurb pegs as a “visceral coming-of-age tale”, also offers a fascinating picture of growing up deeply religious and female in a society where even listening to music was considered haram, forbidden. Rather inexplicably, Manal’s descriptions of herself as a teenage religious fanatic, who burnt her brother’s music cassettes and her mother’s fashion magazines, lead the less conservative reader to develop a compassionate view of an individual entirely unlike herself. While the book does not gloss over the shortcomings of Saudi society, it avoids degenerating into a rant. The authorial voice is compassionate, constantly attempting to understand herself as a product of that society and the many forces that contributed to making her native land what it is.
The ordeal of Manal’s arrest is the book’s central event but it’s the chapters of her imprisonment that reveal her heroic side: I... began to record the names and stories of the women in prison with me… Saudis employed hundreds of thousands of women, mainly from Asian countries, to do their cooking, their laundry and to take care of their children. Saudi Arabia has no domestic labor codes... We hear stories of foreign women who are mistreated... Now I found myself in a jail cell surrounded by many of these poor, frightened women… My arrest was... an education: I was learning about domestic slavery.
After she’s delivered from prison, Manal helped many of her jail mates make their way back home.
This could easily have become a book intent on “building the author’s brand”, one that panders to Western prejudices about Saudi Arabia. Instead, it is an honest telling of a woman’s struggles in a rigidly patriarchal society that the author clearly has affection for even as she attempts to improve it through activism. Daring to Drive made this reviewer glad that she’s an Indian woman living in what is still a secular state, glad she’s never had to think twice before driving to the supermarket, to the hospital in the dead of night during an emergency, or zipping from one city to the next. Perhaps one day soon, thanks to the efforts of plucky women like Manal al-Sharif, Saudi women too will enjoy the same freedom.