Saudi women’s fight for the right to drive
Saudi Arabia recently lifted its ban on women drivers. Activist Manal al-Sharif describes her bitter fight for equal motoring rights
FOR years it was the only country in the world that prohibited women from getting behind the wheel, but in a landmark decision Saudi Arabia recently announced it was lifting its ban on female drivers. The rule change was largely thanks to a group of activists known as Women2Drive.
Manal al-Sharif became the face of the campaign when she drove her car on the streets of the ultra-conservative kingdom in open defiance of the ban.
In this extract from her new memoir, Daring to Drive, she reveals how this courageous act put her on a collision course with the authorities . . .
THE secret police came for me at two in the morning. The second knock on the door quickly followed the first. They were loud, hard knocks, the kind that radiate out and shake the doorframe. 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-Sharif ’s house?” My brother didn’t hesitate. “Yes,” he answered, his voice firm. “She needs to come with us right now. They want to see her at the Dhahran police station.”
My brother didn’t have to ask why. That previous afternoon I’d been pulled over by the traffic police for the “crime” of driving my brother’s car. The specific citation was “driving while female”.
I never set out to be an activist. I was a religious girl, born and raised in Mecca. I started covering myself with abayas and niqabs before it was even required, simply because I wanted to emulate and please my religious teachers. And I believed in a highly fundamentalist version
of Islam. For years, I melted my brother’s pop music cassette tapes in the oven because in fundamentalist Islam, music is forbidden.
The only thing I did at a young age that was somewhat rebellious was to get a job. I had a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and I was hired by oil company Aramco as an information security specialist. I got married young, at age 24, and had a son. Then I got divorced.
When I turned 30 I started doing daring things on my birthdays. I was working in the United States, in New Hampshire, and I went skydiving. The next year I bought a ticket to Puerto Rico and spent 36 hours travelling alone. And back in Saudi Arabia in 2011, when I turned 32, I decided that I’d start driving.
I’d learned the proper rules of driving when I was working and living in the States – I got a New Hampshire and then a Massachusetts driver’s licence. But in Saudi Arabia I never got behind the wheel, except inside the Aramco compound where I lived.
Saudi women rely on drivers, usually foreign men, some of whom have never taken a driving test or had any kind of professional instruction, to ferry them from place to place. It’s an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females can’t sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who isn’t your relative, with a man who’s a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.
One night in 2011 I had a doctor’s appointment after work in Khobar, outside the Aramco compound. When I left the medical office at nearly 9 pm, I called all the drivers I knew to ask for a ride home, but none were available.
I began to walk. Men who passed me rolled down their windows, shouting curses and calling me a “whore” or a “prostitute”. And then came the man in the white Corolla. The driver didn’t simply insult me and roar off, he followed me. I turned away from the main route, and he followed. As I passed a pile of construction materials, I bent down and felt a rock. Clutching it in my hand, I hurled it towards his half-open window. The rock fell short as his tyres screeched and he sped off. I could feel the adrenaline surge through my veins.
I walked a few steps and then began to cry, the salty tears mixing with my salty sweat. I ran to the mall and with my uncovered, tear-stained face found a taxi and told the driver to take me to the compound. Once inside the safety of the car, I held my face in my hands and wept. But by the time we entered the compound my eyes were dry.
At my townhouse my own car waited, cool, silent, and parked. I’d spent hours learning to drive, I had a valid licence. I probably had better road skills than many of the male taxi and private drivers. As I opened my door and stepped inside, I didn’t hate the men in their cars who’d seen fit to harass me. I hated the rules that caged me inside my compound, that kept us shut inside our homes more effectively than any lock.
The next day at work, I told one of my male coworkers what had happened on the dusky streets. “I’m so tired of this,” I said. “How long must we suffer this
‘The rules kept us shut inside our homes more effectively than any lock'
humiliation?” It seemed almost a rhetorical question. My colleague looked at me. He was a Saudi so I expected only perhaps a bit of sympathy, maybe some advice. Instead he shocked me by saying, “Manal, I know it’s unfair. But, you know, it really isn’t illegal for women to drive.”
At first I thought he was mocking me, but then I realised he was serious. “What do you mean, it isn’t really illegal?”
“Technically, there’s no rule saying women can’t drive. Nothing in the traffic code actually states that it’s illegal for women to drive. It’s just the custom.”
The first formal protest of the ban on women driving occurred in 1990 during the run-up to the Gulf War, about four months after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
On 6 November 1990, as Saudi Arabia simmered with unease, 47 women defied the ban on driving. For 30 minutes they lined up their cars in a convoy and drove around the capital city, Riyadh, until the religious police caught up with them and all 47 were arrested.
Their goal had been to demonstrate to Saudi society that while they were women, they were competent enough to sit behind the wheel of a car. I’d heard about these women when I was 11 years old. They were depicted as sexually loose, un-Islamic, pro-Western women who danced in the streets with the American soldiers without any regard for covering their hair with hijabs.
Having absorbed the government’s version of the story, I believed that they and their protest and the trouble they’d caused were the reason my generation wasn’t allowed to drive. And in fact the cultural taboo against driving was strengthened because of their protest.
But by 2011 I was desperate to drive – and it turned out I wasn’t the only woman feeling this way. Only days after my humiliating walk along the side of the road, a friend invited me to join a Facebook event called “We are driving May 17th”. The event was being organised by a young woman named Bahiya. I discovered that I knew her aunt. I accepted the invitation immediately and asked if I could be added as an administrator.
I wanted this to be a big event, well beyond 47 female drivers, so we pushed it out to 17 June.
At night, once my six-year-old son Aboudi was in bed, I posted items on Facebook. The enthusiasm was powerful. Initially, I was encouraged that a good number of the men I knew – granted, a small circle, and entirely inside Aramco – supported the campaign. They saw it not as threatening but as liberating for all Saudis. Even my brother, the same brother who’d been so horrified when I removed my hijab, supported me.
Now I had only another seven million Saudi men to go. Almost as soon as we started posting to Facebook, men and even some women responded with harsh criticism. They railed that we “would destroy Saudi society” and “destroy Saudi family life”. Women driving “would lead to corruption and moral decay”.
A Facebook page called “By Iqal” was founded to call on men to beat any women drivers they saw. People asked constantly who we were – at this point, none of us were posting using our real names and our real photos. Most ominous of all, they assumed that we were calling for public demonstrations. This was unsettling because public demonstrations are illegal in Saudi Arabia and the punishments for conducting them severe. A peaceful sit-down protest can result in a sentence of lashes, jailtime, and being banned from foreign travel. To make sure that we couldn’t be called a “protest”, I wanted women to drive by themselves, not in groups, and to record themselves alone in their cars.
I decided it was time to take the next step. I made an informational video for Women2Drive, in which I publicly revealed my identity. Unlike the other girls I was divorced and self-supporting. I could take the risk. Looking into the laptop camera, I explained what the 17 June campaign was about and exactly what would happen that day. I was careful not to call it a protest. I concentrated on speaking calmly and smiling continuously. I didn’t wear the full abaya; I made no effort to hide my face. I ended
A Facebook page called on men to beat any women drivers they saw
the video by reminding viewers, “We’re your sisters, your mothers, your daughters. We expect your support, and now we’re giving you the chance to show it.”
My final words were this: “The whole story: that we will just drive.” I posted the video to YouTube, and within days it had more than 120 000 views.
Using my real name – including my last name, my tribal name – and showing my face gave the recording legitimacy and drew more attention to the campaign, and it also made me the public face of Women2Drive. Threatening comments directed at me began pouring in on social media.
The posters attacked me for my “scandalous attempts” to drive and for disrupting Saudi society. I was called a “whore,” “immoral,” “Westernised,” a “traitor” and a “double agent”. The comments hurt. But I always stayed polite. I always kept a smile on my face. I kept saying respectful things, emphasising that I’m a Saudi, that I’m proud to be Saudi, and that I love my country. I just want to change this custom.
Meanwhile I had an idea. I thought that if, prior to the event on 17 June, someone posted a video of a woman driving, it might “normalise” the experience and show Saudi citizens that there’s nothing to fear.
Because my brother was not available, I decided to ask one of my male friends, Ahmed, if he’d accompany me: I needed a male driver to clear the security gates at the Aramco exit.
Another activist, Wajeha al-Huwaider, would be the film crew and Ahmed would be our designated driver until I slid over and took the wheel of my purple Cadillac SRX. I’d spent several years saving for it, a car that I would now, for the first time, be driving on actual Saudi kingdom streets.
Outside the compound, Ahmed drove nervously, looking up at the mirror to see who was behind us on the road. His anxiety was contagious but I also felt a growing sense of exhilaration. After several blocks we reached the café where he would get out and wait for us.
He pulled into the parking lot. After getting out of the car he spent a few minutes chatting with us. Finally I said, “Okay, Ahmed, go drink your tea. We have some places to drive to.”
I moved to the driver’s seat and Wajeha moved to the front passenger seat, laughing. I took a deep breath and sat down inside the car and put my hands on the steering wheel. I still vividly remember the feeling of pulling the door closed and locking it. Although I was enclosed, at that moment, I felt like one of my father’s songbirds, let out of its cage and flying around the room.
I placed the key in the ignition, adjusted the rearview mirror, and pulled my black hijab close around my face to make sure no hair was visible. I reached for my sunglasses from inside my bag, placed them on my uncovered face, and took one last look at myself in the mirror. Then I looked over at Wajeha and asked, “You ready?” I didn’t wait for her reply. My heart began to beat faster as I turned the key, heard the engine catch, put my foot on the brake, and switched the car into reverse. My decision to drive had been made in a moment of anger, but now I felt pure calm rise up inside me.
I let the steering wheel glide smoothly in my hands, looking out so I could make eye contact with any oncoming drivers.
A silver Toyota SUV approached and I saw the male driver lean slightly to his right and speak to a woman seated next to him. They looked at each other and then back at me. I smiled, and Wajeha asked, “Why are you smiling, Manal?”
For a second, I turned to face the iPhone in her hands, smiled even wider, and said, “Because I’m driving.”
Two days later Manal was pulled over by a traffic cop while out driving with her brother. After being detained for several hours she was allowed to go home, but in the early hours of the following day the Saudi secret police came knocking on her door. After being detained for several days she was released.
On 17 June about three dozen women drove in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Although some were stopped, nobody was arrested. Over the following years Manal remained an active critic of the Saudi government on women’s issues.
Last month in a landmark decision Saudi Arabia announced that from June 2018 women will finally be allowed to drive without fear of arrest.
‘My heart began to beat faster as I turned the key and heard the engine catch'