Activist takes the wheel on a woman’s right to drive
In her new book, Saudi Arabian rights advocate Manal al-Sharif details her radical protest
I love to drive. My late mother loved to drive.
We used to talk about it. For instance, why did we both find that getting behind the wheel, for an errand or a road trip, always lifted our spirits? That’s despite growing traffic challenges and a growing sense of responsibility about its environmental impact.
After reading Daring to Drive, a brave and wonderful new book by Saudi Arabian women’s activist Manal al-Sharif, I am reminded of driving’s deeper meaning — driving a car by oneself conveys a special kind of mobility and freedom — you are not only moving forward, you are totally in charge of the direction you’re headed; in fact, of your own destiny. Women have had to perform many radical acts over the course of history to gain their civil rights. But who knew driving would be one of them?
In 2011, al-Sharif was a 32-year-old computer scientist, women’s activist and divorced mother of a little boy. She slipped behind the wheel of her own car — a purple Cadillac SUV — and drove herself through the streets of Khobar outside the westernized compound in which she lived and worked in Saudi Arabia. Not once, but twice.
The first time, she had an activist friend videotape her and the results garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
The second time, her brother drove with her, right past a traffic cop, and after that, she spent nine days in jail — not charged officially, but everyone knew her crime: driving while female.
Shameful, outrageous and terrifying still to this day, Saudi Arabia forbids its female citizens to drive themselves. It is the only country in the world to do so. Besides, of course, Gilead, the fictional dystopian republic in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
There is no criminal law on the Saudi books denying women the right to drive, only religious edicts and societal custom. As the author writes, it is one of Saudi Arabia’s “most enduring cultural taboos.”
Saudi religious leaders, she writes, opened themselves up to worldwide ridicule by maintaining “if women were allowed to drive, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce would surge.”
They argued that, within 10 years of women gaining this perilous freedom, “there would be no more virgins.”
The edict against driving is, in fact, a systemic campaign against Saudi women’s freedom.
Everywhere in this kingdom of men, women must wait for a man — either an approved taxi driver or their official male guardian — to drive them. They can do nothing on their own. No dropping the kids off at school, no driving to work, no — even in emergencies — driving a relative or oneself to the hospital.
In 2011, around the time of the Arab Spring revolutionary movement, al-Sharif decided, as part of a new social-media empowered movement called Women2Drive, she would risk everything and drive.
She lost a lot because of it — her reputation among the more conser- vative members of Saudi Arabian society, her job at the country’s biggest oil company and most painfully, in a roundabout way, custody of her little boy Aboudi, whom she had to leave behind when she moved to Dubai.
Remarried, she now lives in Sydney, Australia, with a second son who has never met his older brother except through Skype.
As she wrote recently in the New York Times, “I had driven with the hope of freeing women in Saudi society — and by freeing women, I also hoped to free men. I had driven so that Aboudi might know a better life. Instead, my protest accelerated our separation.”
Al-Sharif has been honoured all over the world, travelling to Oslo to receive the Vaclav Havel prize for Creative Dissent.
Her book is remarkably touching and even funny in parts. It’s also very intimate, chronicling the life of a young girl growing up in Mecca, who once, in a religious fervour, burned her brother’s Western music cassettes. She also endured female circumcision and was regularly beaten by her parents and her first husband.
A university education opened al-Sharif up to the wider world and her own lack of freedom. Even before her great daring-to-drive moment, she worked for a while in the U.S. where she dared to travel alone and once to skydive with a friend.
In her book, her Ted talk and even in that now-famous YouTube driving video, there is something irrepressible about al-Sharif.
She maintains that she continues to love her country, hopes it changes and still honours her now-late mother and still-alive father, who while shocked at his daughter’s radicalism, petitioned the king to set her free.
When I closed the book, I thought about the fact that American millennials are forgoing, in greater droves, getting their drivers’ licences. Atlantic Monthly magazine reported that between 1983 and 2014, there’s almost a 21-per-cent decrease of 19 year olds with driver’s licences and about a 16-per-cent decrease in the 20- to 24-year-old age group.
That’s their right, too. For them, driving is an unexciting or unnecessary goal. For al-Sharif, driving publicly at 32 in her repressive country was one of the most exhilarating things she could do.
“I knew then that no matter what my future held, I had done something important and meaningful.”
I will think admiringly of her the next time I get behind the wheel. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson