Queenly activism in Saudi Arabia

Book review of 'Daring to Drive'

Daring to Drive
The Young Saudi Woman Who Stood Up to a Kingdom of Men

Manal al-Sharif

Simon & Schuster

289 pages; Rs 599

Queens don’t drive. That’s what Saudi men tell women. And those women who have the courage to respond do so by posting pictures of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth driving her Jaguar, saying, “Real queens drive their own cars.” Or, by mocking this misplaced title of “queen” by describing Saudi Arabia as “the kingdom of one king and millions of queens”.

But what happens when one of these Saudi “queens” decides to go beyond merely questioning the custom that bars women from driving and dares to get behind the wheel? In Daring to Drive Manal al-Sharif takes us through the fate that awaits a woman who challenges the deeply entrenched social taboos that govern the lives of women in this West Asian country.

This personal and gripping account opens with the sound of loud, hard knocks on Ms al-Sharif’s door at 2 am. On the other side is the secret police come to arrest her for having had the audacity to get in the driver’s seats. It does not seem to matter that she lives and works at Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company, the world’s wealthiest), a world unto itself, where men and women are not prohibited from mingling, where women can drive freely and are not required to be veiled. That there are no legal codes – the term “law” is not used because devout Saudi Muslims believe it is only Allah who can give “laws” – barring women from driving also doesn’t count. Ms al-Sharif had done worse than break a law; she had disobeyed a custom. Not just that, she was also a participant in the “radical” Women2Drive campaign. And so, a filthy, cockroach-infested prison cell awaits her. 

Through this chilling, but also matter-of-fact memoir, Ms al-Sharif, the accidental activist, takes the reader through the lives of Saudi women. She reveals the ordeals they face for something as ordinary for us as getting from Point A to Point B. She exposes the inexplicable paradoxes of Saudi society, which on the one hand requires a woman to be always escorted by a close male relative – father, husband, brother or maybe son – and on the other puts them at the mercy of taxi drivers who harass them, touch them inappropriately, record their conversations and threaten to blackmail them or even attack them.

For every crime committed on a woman and for every punishment meted out to her, she is held responsible. Even when men leer at her or hurl insults at her when she is unable to find a taxi home and is forced to walk back, unattended, she is the one who is blamed. 

Daring to Drive, however, is not simply about an activist lashing out at an oppressive society. All that Ms al-Sharif does is hold a mirror to the society through her life story. Here is a woman who is born to a feisty mother who has her alone and unattended on the floor of their cramped apartment because her husband is out when she goes into labour and Saudi rules and customs will not allow her to be admitted to hospital without a male guardian, or mahram, accompanying her. This is not a rare occurrence, Ms al-Sharaf writes. A woman dies after collapsing from heart ailment in a female-only school that refuses to allow male paramedics to enter. The same story is repeated two years later in another school. It is a world where death is preferred over a violation of codes.

We see Ms al-Sharif’s own transformation from a fanatic teenager, who once burnt her brother’s music cassettes and her mother’s fashion magazines, into a person who would begin to question the restrictions and painful customs with which a woman is forced to live.

Her mother, who is from Libya and who holds a lifelong grudge against her own father for depriving her of education and forcing her to abandon her son from her first marriage, is a powerful figure in the book. Powerful and paradoxical, much like the Saudi society into which she chooses to remarry. She wants her children to get an education and challenges the customs when she goes alone to get her son enrolled in a boy’s school, a taboo for a woman. The guards don’t let her in; the school’s deputy administrator disapprovingly dismisses her again and again. But she persists and ultimately has her way.

Yet, this very same woman would force her own daughters to get circumcised — an operation carried out on screaming little girls by a male barber without anaesthesia. It’s a humiliation that would leave a lifelong mental scar and shatter a child’s trust of her mother.

Daring to Drive is a compelling account of Saudi society through the eyes of a woman who was born in Mecca in 1979, the year when a wave of fundamentalist fervour took hold of the country. Sometimes violent, often bleak but also peppered with endearing moments, such as her visits to the grandparents’ house where life seemed simpler and more free, this is the story of a woman who did not set out to be an activist but who would go on to become a voice of the millions of Saudi “queens”.