When a society punishes a person for ‘disobeying custom,’ and not just law, it offers infinite opportunities to invent new restrictions.
It encourages mob violence everywhere, against couples on the beach or against Muslims grazing cows, but this particular case is about a woman who drove a car.
Manal Al-Sharif disobeyed custom, so she went to jail and became the target of false accusations, insults, and death threats, and ultimately lost custody of her young son.
Manal Al-Sharif’s Daring to Drive starts with a knock on the door and her arrest. To tell the story of her rebellion behind the wheel, Manal then describes her first rebellion, in which she embraced a fundamentalism learned at school and from all-pervasive propaganda and fought against the ways of her more moderate family.
As a youngster, she fanatically destroyed her elder sister’s novels and her brother’s music cassettes, and her mother hid the family photos to protect them from her. Her life steadily shrank, till she was unable to pursue simple arts or friendship with other women.
The first light broke in when the family installed a forbidden satellite dish. At first Manal deleted the music channels so as not to ‘stray into sin,’ but the world that was let in became irresistible.
Still, it was harder to break down those ideological walls than it was to put them up. What helped Manal was her excellence in school, which landed her a job at Aramco. The company was located in an American-style campus and offered some freedoms, but daily life for the reluctantly hired women employees was still a struggle for basic housing and transport in which they must recruit helpful men.
Often stranded or left at the mercy of predatory taxi drivers, and inspired by the story of an earlier protest by women drivers, Manal posted a video of herself driving a car. The disproportionate punishment for that mundane act made her question almost everything she had earlier accepted as a way of life.
Manal’s story holds the reader from the first page. If we ever put this book down, it is to claw the dispiriting facts off our faces for just a few minutes and breathe. But this daring woman still hopes for better from her people.
In the Saudi Arabia she knows, oppression is not the last word.
Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening ; Manal Al-Sharif, Simon & Schuster, ₹599.
