Daring to Drive Read online

  I 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 license. But in Saudi Arabia, I never got behind the wheel, except inside the Aramco compound. 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. We are at their mercy. Some families are wealthy enough to employ their own personal driver, but many women rely on an informal network of men with cars who illegally transport female passengers. Women carry lists of these private drivers in their phones, and we call and call until we find one who’s available. Or we take a taxi—taxis and their drivers are at least registered and licensed by the traffic police—but the taxis are old and many of the men who operate them don’t bathe, so the stench is often overwhelming. My friends would text me if they found a clean taxi driver, and I would text them.

  Almost every woman I know has been harassed by a driver. They make comments about our appearance or about conversations they overhear; they demand more money; they touch you inappropriately. Some women have been attacked. I’ve had drivers make all sorts of inappropriate comments and tape my calls when I’ve used my cell phone, even drivers who don’t speak Arabic, thinking maybe they could blackmail or extort me. Then there are the cases of drivers who sexually molest the children they are hired to drive to and from school.

  It is 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 cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone. Even women who have personal drivers cannot depend on these hired men. Some don’t show up, others disappear entirely. The Saudi men call women “queens,” and say that queens don’t drive. Women often mock this title by saying “The kingdom of one king and millions of queens.” Or they post a photo of Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth driving her Jaguar, saying “Real queens drive their own cars.”

  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 9:00 p.m., I called all the drivers I knew to ask for a ride home, but none was available. They were off-duty, or busy driving other Saudi queens. When the clinic locked its doors, I started making my way down the streets. There were plenty of men in their cars out that night, and they all saw me, walking alone, my face uncovered. (Most Saudi women cover their faces.) It was an invitation for them to harass me, and they did. Some cars whizzed past; others slowed to a crawl. The drivers honked their horns and screamed slurs and cruel names and other vile things. I kept looking straight ahead, but it was terrifying. I called my brother, but his phone was turned off.

  One of the cars followed me. There were shops lining the street, but it was night, so they were closed. And they were all set back, with wide parking lots in front. This guy would slowly pull his car into one of the lots. Then he’d lower his window and look at me, as though inviting me to get in. I’d keep walking, and he’d pull into the next parking lot, lower his window, and look at me again. I was so mad. I felt violated, all because I couldn’t find a driver and I couldn’t do what he could: drive myself home. When I passed by what must have been a construction site, I picked up a loose rock from the ground and held it in my hand. As soon as he saw me with the rock, he shot me a furious look and sped off, tires squealing. But I threw it anyway, as hard as I could, toward him and his car. Then I stood there in the street, tears running down my face, crying like a little girl. I’m not a girl. I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m educated, I had a car that I bought and had been making payments on for four years—it was sitting with its stone-cold engine, parked next to my town house—but I still couldn’t stop things like this from happening to me.

  In Saudi Arabia, harassment isn’t a criminal offense. The authorities, especially the religious police, always blame the woman. They say she was harassed because of how she looked or because of the way she was walking or because she was wearing perfume. They make you the criminal.

  When I got home that night, I poured out my complaints on Facebook: the degradation of having to find a driver, of always worrying about being late, or being left somewhere, of trying to cobble together a patchwork of rides from relatives and drivers whose numbers I hoarded in my phone. I ended my post by promising to drive outside the Aramco compound on my birthday and take videos and upload them to YouTube. David, one of my American friends from New Hampshire, wrote on my Facebook wall “trouble-maker,” and I replied, “no, history-maker.” But even then, I didn’t believe myself. I thought I was bluffing.

  Fahad, the Aramco government affairs man, the person who had promised to bring me home, who had told me over and over that we were going to the Dhahran police station, had lied. But I couldn’t call him a liar to his face. Instead, in what I hoped was a calm voice, I asked where we were going. He had said the Dhahran police station, I reminded him.

  He brushed off my question, saying, “Yeah, yeah. Well, they waited so long at Dhahran and you didn’t come, so now they’ve asked for you to go to the Khobar police station.” His style was smoother and softer than that of the religious police, who used to carry sticks for beatings and now just scream and yell at women. But the message was the same: it was my fault for not grabbing my bag and my abaya and going straight away with a group of strange, unidentified men at two o’clock in the morning.

  Khobar is a sprawling city with almost 1 million residents. Like most newer Saudi cities, it is a collection of skyscrapers and shopping malls, located on what was an ancient port bordering the Persian Gulf, which we call the Arabian Gulf. In the West, it is perhaps best known for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, when a massive bomb hidden inside a tanker truck by extremists killed nineteen American military service members.

  The sky was just turning light with the first streaks of pink as we arrived at the station. It was a big, cinder-block building on King Abdullah Road, not far from the waters of the gulf. I had already passed this very same station in my car two days before. That day was the only other time that I had driven on public roads inside the kingdom.

  Inside the station, everyone was nice to me at first—even solicitous. They asked my brother and me if they could get us juice or water, maybe some coffee. They apologized for bringing us in so early. “We just need to finish this paperwork,” they said. “We will let you go just after we finish this paperwork.” My brother and I were led into a small room with one window. There was a desk and some chairs and a very large picture of King Abdullah framed and hanging on the wall, looking down at me.

  The man from the police station started off by saying that they didn’t want to scare me, and he began with the simplest of questions: “You are Manal al-Sharif?” I nodded. Then he turned to my brother and asked him some questions as well.

  It was hard to tell how much time had passed. Eventually, a young man entered and offered me a sandwich and orange juice, but I refused to eat. I tried to cooperate with the questioning as much as I could, hoping that they’d get what they needed and let me go home to my son.

  There was a second man in the room, sitting behind a desk. He too began to speak. He wanted to know who was behind the Women2Drive group, of which I was the public face and one of the leaders, and also whom I had spoken with in the foreign press. He asked me about my relationship with Wajeha al-Huwaider, the woman who had filmed me driving. Wajeha was a well-known activist in Saudi Arabia, but I had no idea about the depths of her troubled relationship with the government. The second man would ask me questions, and then the first man would ask me questions, over and over. I kept smiling the whole time.

  All of a sudden, the man behind the desk closed the interrogation file.
He looked at me and said something very much like, “Come on, Manal. You know the king is going through a very difficult time with the Arab Spring and all the things that are happening in the region. Why would you add more burdens to the king? Don’t you love the king?” And there right in front of me was the king’s picture, staring down at me with that half-smile.

  In Saudi Arabia, your patriotism is measured by how much you love the king. The king is revered like a father, and we are considered his daughters and sons. And out of all the Saudi kings, Abdullah is the king I have loved instead of feared. He is the only one to start opening doors for women, to speak up for women or to allow more freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So it was not hard for me to tell the interrogator, “No, of course, I love King Abdullah so much. I wouldn’t want to do anything that would cause him any more burdens.”

  The interrogator nodded and said that the problem wasn’t so much with me driving, it was with me posting my video on YouTube and talking to the foreign media and causing so much fuss.

  I tried to follow his lead and started apologizing. I told him that if my participation in the Women2Drive campaign was what was causing all these problems, I’d just stop. I told him that I never imagined I’d have all these problems with officials, and I was so sorry. My purpose, I added, “was not to inconvenience anyone.”

  He nodded and then left. My brother and I were alone. Fahad, the Aramco guy, was already gone. Just as the first interrogator had finished, Fahad had stuck his head into the room and said: “I think you’re fine now. Sorry, I have to go to work. It’s seven a.m. and I have to report to my office.” He told me we could take a taxi back, or call him and he would come pick us up.

  I sat in silence with my brother, texting the girls who were putting up the feeds on Twitter. I asked them to please stop tweeting about me and my arrest, telling them that I did not want any more attention. It was just something minor, I added, just the video that was the problem. I would be released soon.

  About thirty minutes passed and then another man came in. The first thing he did was order my brother to leave. My brother was swiftly escorted out and, in his place, they ushered in a woman. She was called the prison guard. No name, just “the prison guard.” She was fully veiled in a black abaya and black niqab with black shoes, black socks, and black gloves on her hands. Even her bag was black. I couldn’t even see a glimpse of her face, just a thin slash through the cloth where the whites of her eyes glowed. She sat next to me, saying nothing. Her gloves were so old and worn that there were holes in the fabric and along the seams where the threads had come loose. I could see down to her dark skin. Her bag was old too, battered, with a strap that was barely hanging on. But then I stopped looking at her because the new interrogator was not done.

  He took my bag with my wallet, my cell phone, and everything I had. My papers and my identity were gone. Even my ability to tell time was gone; there was no clock in the room. On any other morning, I would know when my neighbors began to move about their houses, when the Aramco buses would begin their morning loops around the smooth asphalt streets of the compound. I would know when my five-year-old son woke up. On this morning when he opened his eyes, he would discover that his mother was gone.

  Now I was truly frightened.

  The new interrogator asked me all the same questions, what’s your name, what’s your age, where do you work? He continued to ask me for the names of the people I had talked to in the foreign media. Everything was the same as the previous rounds of questioning, except he spoke in a harsher tone. Then he left and I sat there, with my silent guard, waiting.

  Then another man came in. He sat down right in front of me, and the first thing he said, in a concerned voice, was, “Tell me your story.” So, I told him my story again, and he listened, and then he left the room. I didn’t know until much later that all of this was a standard pattern: to use multiple interrogators, to alternate between cajoling and being sympathetic and then firm and harsh, to repeat the same questions again and again, to keep the detainee waiting. Each time, they were trying to see if I would change my story. Would there be inconsistencies? Would I inadvertently say the wrong thing or give something away?

  I don’t know if I would call myself a calm person by nature, but the effect of having been up for more than twenty-four hours, of having eaten so little, and of having expended so much adrenaline, first in the car and then at the traffic police station the previous afternoon, made me calm and methodical. My story was my story. It did not change.

  At some point, one of my interrogators had brought in a copy of Al Yaum newspaper. He held it in his left hand, his fingers gripping the paper like a vise, until it buckled and creased around the edges. With his free hand, he pointed to my picture and the headline about my arrest on the front page. Afterward, he threw it on the desk. He wanted the names of people involved with the driving campaign. I gave him only two names, names he already knew: Bahiya al-Mansour, the girl who had started the Facebook event for Women2Drive, and Wajeha al-Huwaider, the activist. (Both were later picked up and interrogated as well.) But I kept my answers short, as King Abdullah’s bespectacled face gazed down from his portrait. Then once more the prison guard and I were left alone.

  It was work to keep my body in the chair. I had never thought of sitting as tiring, but it was taking every muscle in me to keep myself in that position, to keep my head from folding over into my lap. I hadn’t been to the bathroom yet, and I knew that at some point soon, it would be time for midday prayers. I kept asking this woman if there was a place I could go for some privacy.

  Suddenly the silence broke. There was big flurry of activity. The door opened, people motioned, speaking in fast, clipped Arabic, without any of the usual pleasantries or greetings: “Come with us.” I followed and found myself in another area, surrounded by a lot of men. My face was uncovered, and I was the only woman, except for the prison guard, who followed mutely along.

  I started speaking, asking, “Where is my brother? Where is my bag? What’s happening?”

  We were led to a metal door and motioned through. I could hear the metal close hard behind us. I kept asking the guard: “Why are we in here? What’s going on?”

  She was as terrified as I was. I could hear her voice shaking as she said, “I don’t know.”

  The room was the filthiest thing I had ever seen. It was crawling with cockroaches, their hard shells racing across the floor and up the walls, the scurrying of their legs making a low, clicking sound. The room stank of piss and sweat and every foul odor possible to imagine. I took small breaths through my hand, my stomach clenching in revulsion. There was another, smaller room attached. It had no door, but it was supposed to be the bathroom. There was no toilet, just a hole in the ground and human shit all over the floor.

  On the floor, amid the cockroaches, was a sponge mattress. Nomadic Arabs don’t have traditional beds, just these roll-up mattresses. Even now, when many people live together in one house, we often sleep on these mattresses at night and then roll them up for the daytime. This was a small mattress, and it was filthy, shiny with sweat and dirt that had been worn into the covering. There was nowhere else to sit. We were inside the detention room of the Khobar police station, and I did not know for how long. I felt tears well up in my eyes, but I shut them. I was not going to cry in this place. I was not going to cry in front of this woman.

  Finally, the woman told me her name. Halimah. I kept saying to her, “Halimah, what did I do? Where is my brother? What’s going on? Why did they take my bag?” I was like all those interrogators, but in reverse.

  Halimah kept saying, “I don’t know.”

  I started banging on the metal door, my fist pounding and then stinging. “Please, please, where’s my brother?” I would call out. “Can I just talk to my lawyer? Can I talk to my son?”

  I stood for a long time, but I was so tired. I had been awake for the better part of two days. My head was throbbing, and I had to sit down on that disgusting matt
ress. I had to close my eyes. But I started talking to Halimah. I asked her about her husband, I asked if she had children. She told me that her husband was a security guard. Being a security guard is usually the lowest form of work that a Saudi man can accept. Most guards work long hours and earn low wages, maybe 1,500 riyals a month, which is only about $400, not even enough to pay rent in most places. Halimah said she had two kids. She told me their names, but in my exhaustion, I forgot them. I asked her question after question, the way you try to forget about your own situation by involving yourself in someone else’s.

  As she spoke, I looked at my fancy shoes and my fancy, well-made abaya, which cost the equivalent of her husband’s salary for at least one month. The bag that they had already taken from me would have cost her husband three months’ wages. Her phone was an old phone, black and white, the kind that could only hold about ten messages before it ran out of storage. I looked at her and thought of her having no other options than to work in this place, thought of what must have driven her to take this job. Sitting in that cell, I pitied her, even more than myself.

  Suddenly the door was wrenched open. Two guards told me to come out, and as I walked through the doorway, they told me to show my hands. One of the men was holding a large roller covered in blue ink, which he proceeded to slide across my hands until they were thickly coated. He told me to press my fingers and hands to a series of papers, first my thumbs, then my fingers, then my whole hand. Because I am a woman, it was taboo for him to touch my skin. Methodically, I followed his instructions. I placed my hands on the papers, and when I looked up, I recognized one of the other men in the room—the head of the Khobar police station. He had also been present at the Thuqbah traffic police headquarters when they had detained me the day before.