Manal, a driving force behind Saudi women
frankfurt am main — For Manal Al Sharif, who spearheaded the campaign against the ban on female drivers in Saudi Arabia, the time for women to be silent is over.
Overjoyed by a royal decree last month allowing women to finally get behind the wheel in the kingdom, the 38-year-old has now set her sights on the next campaign: abolishing the system of male guardianship.
“There is no time for us to be silent anymore,” Sharif said at the Frankfurt book fair, where she presented the German translation of her bestselling memoir “Daring to Drive”.
The guardianship system requires Saudi women to get permission from a designated male family member on anything from travel to enrolling at university. Like the driving ban, the male guardianship “has stopped a lot of women from pursuing their dreams”, said Sharif.
To show how serious she is about her new campaign, Sharif rolls back her sleeve to reveal a plastic blue bracelet that reads “I am my own guardian”, alongside a picture of a car. “We are not minors. We are capable of driving our own lives,” she said, smiling at the pun. Sharif recounts the hardships she faced growing up in relative poverty in the country and the struggles she encountered later on as a divorced single mum. She credits her strict parents with pushing her to excel academically.
“In this book I was very open, I tried to break every single” barrier, Sharif said.
there is no time for us to be silent anymore Manal Al Sharif, Saudi women’s rights activist
Her top grades eventually led her to become the first female information security specialist at the Saudi national oil company Aramco, where women are allowed to drive within the firm’s compound. But trying to get around outside as a woman “who had no man in her life” was a constant struggle, forcing her to rely on her brother, colleagues or taxi drivers. One day, after failing to find a ride after a doctor’s appointment, she decided to walk home alone. But a car followed her along the way, leaving her terrified — and fed up. “So it was really a personal struggle,” Sharif said. The memoir ends before the ban is lifted, but Sharif is more than happy to update the epilogue.
“I cried, I was so excited,” she said about hearing the news of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz’s decree.
The decree comes into effect next June, and Sharif is already looking forward to getting in the driver’s seat, legally this time.
“I think it will be the most liberating thing,” she said. Her book is due to appear in Arabic in November, and Sharif — who divides her time between Saudi Arabia and Australia, where her new husband works — is bracing for the reaction in her home country.