GWENDOLYN SMITH

Daring To Drive Manal al-Sharif Simon & Schuster €19.03

Manal al-Sharif ’s memoir may be about fighting for freedom but it begins with her being hauled into prison. It is 2am when the secret police pound at the activist’s front door. Al-Sharif doesn’t need to ask why. The previous afternoon she had been pulled over for driving her brother’s car; women are prohibited from getting behind the wheel in her country, Saudi Arabia.

Despite the injustice of her arrest and subsequent nine days in jail, Al-Sharif ’s tone remains composed, as it does throughout this account of how she defied a ferociously patriarchal kingdom by launching the Women2Drive campaign in 2011 to lobby for women’s rights on the road.

The book is as much a celebration of resilience as it is a critique of inequality.

It is as a child growing up in Mecca that Al-Sharif, pictured, first gets a taste of the way in which her gender restricts her liberties. She and her sister have to live ‘under a kind of house arrest’ after a male neighbour behaves inappropriately; wearing the niqab and accompanying jibab makes her stumble on her journey to school; she is subjected to the horror of female genital mutilation. Yet she overcomes the obstacles in her way to become a computer science engineer, the only woman in her team.

Details of her adult rebellions – from standing up to her husband (now her ex-husband) to making decisions without her parents’ consent – demonstrate how her campaign inspires and is inspired by her growing determination to occupy the driving seat in her personal life.

This is a courageous and revealing portrait of a culture that seems very alien to us in the West. You can’t fail to be uplifted by Al-Sharif ’s journey.