Contemporary Authors

• Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017

1. Daring to drive : a Saudi woman's awakening LCCN 2016041017 Type of material Book Personal name Sharif, Manal, 1979- author Main title Daring to drive : a Saudi woman's awakening / Manal al-Sharif. Published/Produced New York : Simon & Schuster, [2017] Description x, 289 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9781476793023 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER HQ1730.Z75 S47 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia -

  Manal al-Sharif
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Manal al-Sharif
  منال الشريف
  Manal al-Shraif face.jpg
  Born Manal Masoud Almonemi al-Sharif
  25 April 1979 (age 38)[1]
  Mecca, Saudi Arabia
  Occupation Computer Scientist,[2] Saudi Aramco[3]
  Known for Defying female driving ban in Saudi Arabia[4][5]
  Children 2
  Manal al-Sharif (Arabic: منال الشريف‎; born 25 April 1979) is a Saudi Arabian women's rights activist who helped start a women's right to drive campaign in 2011. A women's rights activist who had previously filmed herself driving, Wajeha al-Huwaider, filmed al-Sharif driving a car as part of the campaign.[6] The video was posted on YouTube and Facebook.[4][5] Al-Sharif was detained and released on 21 May 2011 and rearrested the following day.[2][7] On 30 May, al-Sharif was released on bail,[8] on the conditions of returning for questioning if requested, not driving and not talking to the media.[9] The New York Times and Associated Press associated the women's driving campaign with the wider pattern of the Arab Spring and the long duration of al-Sharif's detention due to Saudi authorities' fear of protests.[10][11]

  Following her driving campaign, al-Sharif remained an active critic of the Saudi government, tweeting on issues including imprisoned female foreign workers, the lack of elections for the Shura Council, and the murder of Lama al-Ghamdi. Her work has been recognized by Foreign Policy, Time, and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

  Contents
  1 Background
  2 Women's rights campaigns
  2.1 Women's driving rights in Saudi Arabia
  2.2 2011 women driving campaign
  2.3 2011 women prisoners campaign
  3 Post-campaign
  4 Personal life
  5 Recognition
  6 See also
  7 References
  8 External links
  Background
  Manal al-Sharif graduated from King Abdulaziz University with a Bachelor of Science in computing and a Cisco Career Certification.[3] Until May 2012, she worked as an Information Security Consultant[2] for Saudi Aramco,[3] the Saudi national oil company. She also wrote for Alhayat, a Saudi daily.[12] al-Sharif's first book, Daring to Drive: a Saudi Woman's Awakening, was published in June 2017 by Simon & Schuster.[13] It is also available in German, Arabic, Turkish and Danish.

  Women's rights campaigns
  In addition to her professional career, al-Sharif has campaigned for women's rights in Saudi Arabia for many years.[2] According to The New York Times, al-Sharif "has a reputation for drawing attention to the lack of rights for women".[10] Regarding the 2011 women driving campaign, Amnesty International stated that "Manal al-Sharif is following in a long tradition of women activists around the world who have put themselves on the line to expose and challenge discriminatory laws and policies".[14]

  Women's driving rights in Saudi Arabia
  Main articles: Women's rights in Saudi Arabia § Mobility, and women to drive movement
  As of 2013, women in Saudi Arabia have limited freedom of movement and in practice are not allowed to drive motor vehicles.[15] In 1990, dozens of women in Riyadh drove their cars in protest, were imprisoned for one day, had their passports confiscated, and some of them lost their jobs.[16] In September 2007, the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia, co-founded by Wajeha al-Huwaider[17] and Fawzia al-Uyyouni, gave a 1,100 signature petition to King Abdullah asking for women to be allowed to drive.[18] On International Women's Day 2008, Huwaider filmed herself driving and received international media attention after the video was posted on YouTube.[16][17][19] Inspired by the Arab Spring, a woman from Jeddah, Najla Hariri, started driving in the second week of May 2011, stating "Before in Saudi, you never heard about protests. [But] after what has happened in the Middle East, we started to accept a group of people going outside and saying what they want in a loud voice, and this has had an impact on me."[20]

  2011 women driving campaign
  a woman waving victory sing while driving the car
  A political cartoon by Carlos Latuff about the Saudi women movement to lift the ban on their right to drive titled "New Saudi Arabia's traffic sign"
  External video
  Q&A interview with al-Sharif on her book Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening, July 16, 2017, C-SPAN
  In 2011, a group of women including Manal al-Sharif started a Facebook campaign named "Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself"[4] or "Women2Drive"[5][2] that says that women should be allowed to drive. The campaign calls for women to start driving from 17 June 2011.[5] By 21 May 2011, about 12,000 readers of the Facebook page had expressed their support.[4] Al-Sharif describes the action as acting within women's rights, and "not protesting".[2] Wajeha al-Huwaider was impressed by the campaign and decided to help.[6]

  In late May, al-Sharif drove her car in Khobar with al-Huwaider filming.[6] The video was posted to YouTube and Facebook. In the video, al-Sharif stated, "This is a volunteer campaign to help the girls of this country [learn to drive]. At least for times of emergency, God forbid. What if whoever is driving them gets a heart attack?" She was detained by the religious police (CPVPV) on 21 May and released after six hours.[4][7] By 23 May 2011, about 600,000 people had watched the video.[7]

  The YouTube video of al-Sharif's drive became inaccessible at its original location, the Facebook page for the campaign was deleted, and the Twitter account used by al-Sharif was "copied and altered". Supporters republished the original video and Facebook page and a summary of al-Sharif's five recommended rules for the 17 June campaign were published on a blog and by The New York Times.[21][22]

  On 22 May, al-Sharif was detained again[5][7] and the Director General of Traffic Administration, Major-General Suleiman Al-Ajlan, was questioned by journalists regarding traffic regulations related to women driving. Al-Ajlan stated that the journalists should "put the question" to members of the Consultative Assembly of Saudi Arabia.[23] RTBF suggested that al-Sharif had been sentenced to five days' imprisonment.[2]

  The New York Times described al-Sharif's campaign as a "budding protest movement" that the Saudi government tried to "swiftly extinguish".[10] Associated Press said that Saudi authorities "cracked down harder than usual on al-Sharif, after seeing her case become a rallying call for youths anxious for change" in the context of the Arab Spring.[11] Both news organisations attributed the long duration of al-Sharif's detention to Saudi authorities' fear of a wider protest movement in Saudi Arabia.[10][11] Amnesty International declared Al-Sharif to be a prisoner of conscience and called for her immediate and unconditional release.[14]

  The day after al-Sharif's arrest, another woman was detained for driving a car. She drove with two women passengers in Ar Rass and was detained by traffic police in the presence of the CPVPV. She was released after signing a statement that she would not drive again.[24] In reaction to al-Sharif's arrest, several more Saudi women published videos of themselves driving during the following days.[11] On 26 May, authorities said that al-Sharif would remain in detention until 5 June 2011, according to Waleed Abu Al-Khair.[11] Al-Sharif was conditionally freed on 30 May. Her lawyer Adnan al-Saleh said that she had been charged with "inciting women to drive" and "rallying public opinion".[9] The conditions of Al-Sharif's release include bail,[8] returning for questioning if requested, not driving and not talking to the media.[9] As possible reasons for al-Sharif's early release, The National cited al-Sharif having written a letter to King Abdullah, 4,500 Saudis signing an online petition to the King, and "an outpouring of indignation and disbelief by both Saudis and critics abroad that Ms al-Sharif was jailed for something that is not a moral or criminal offence."[9]

  Al-Sharif filed an objection with the General Directorate of Traffic in Riyadh on 15 November 2011 because of officials rejecting her driver's licence application.[25][26] Samar Badawi filed a similar lawsuit on 4 February 2012.[27][28][29]

  2011 women prisoners campaign
  Following her 30 May release from prison, al-Sharif started a Twitter campaign called "Faraj" to release Saudi, Filipino and Indonesian women prisoners in the Dammam women's prison who "are locked up just because they owe a small sum of money but cannot afford to pay the debt".[30] Al-Sharif said that the women prisoners were mostly domestic workers who remained in prison after completing their prison terms, because they could not pay their debts and because their former Saudi employers did not help to release them or fund their flights to return to their countries of origin. She referred to 22 Indonesian women and named four women needing help and stated the amount of their debts. She called for donations to be made directly to the director of the Dammam women's prison in order to reimburse the women's debts and free them.[31]

  Post-campaign
  On 23 January 2012, al-Sharif was mistakenly reported dead in a car crash in Jeddah.[32] On 25 January, The Guardian confirmed that she was in fact alive, and that the actual victim was an "unnamed member of a desert community" who was not involved in the female driving campaign.[33]

  Following al-Sharif's arrests, she reported being increasingly marginalized by her employers at Aramco. She quit following a dispute over her trip to Norway to receive the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent.[34]

  In December 2012, al-Sharif criticized an initiative by the Saudi government to inform husbands via SMS when their wives or dependents leave the country, in accordance with a law making men the legal guardians of their wives. "The small fact of the SMS story gives you the idea of the bigger problem with the whole guardianship system", she wrote on Twitter.[35] When King Abdullah appointed women to the advisory Shura Council for the first time in January 2013, al-Sharif criticized the reform as too small, noting that the Council was still not an elected body and could not pass legislation.[36] In February, she worked to bring international attention to the case of five-year-old Lama al-Ghamdi, whose father Fayhan al-Ghamdi fatally raped, beat, and burned her; he served four months in jail and paid 1,000,000 riyals (roughly US$267,000) in blood money.[37] On October 7, 2013, it was announced that Al-Ghamdi had been sentenced to 8 years in prison, plus 800 lashes. [38][39]

  Personal life
  Al-Sharif has two sons. The first son lives in Saudi Arabia with his grandmother and the second son is in Australia with al-Sharif.[40] They have never met.[41]

  She first married in Saudi Arabia and had a son in 2005.[5] The marriage ended in a divorce and based on Saudi divorce rules, her ex-husband retained full legal custody of the child.[41] Al-Sharif moved to Dubai after the separation and was forced to travel back to Saudi Arabia when she wanted to see her son because her ex-husband refused to let him travel. Al-Sharif went to court to contest the travel restriction but the court refused and cited a 10th-century Islamic text about the "risk of the child dying en route on such a dangerous distance."[41]

  Al-Sharif had another son in 2014 from her second marriage.[41]

  Recognition
  Foreign Policy magazine named al-Sharif one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2011,[42] and she was listed in Forbes list of Women Who (Briefly) Rocked in the same year.[43] In 2012, al-Sharif was named one of the Fearless Women of the year by The Daily Beast,[44] and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2012.[45] She was also one of three people awarded the first annual Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum.[34]

• Sydney Morning Herald - https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/how-manal-alsharif-became-an-accidental-activist-for-saudi-arabian-women-20170809-gxsj4m.html

  How Manal al-Sharif became an accidental activist for Saudi Arabian women
  When Manal al-Sharif got behind the wheel in Saudi Arabia – a taboo act for a woman – authorities were far from impressed, and she paid a big price for her defiance.
  By Hilary Rose11 August 2017 — 4:12pm
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  Manal al-Sharif is an accidental activist. She doesn't want to be one and it has brought her nothing but trouble. Her misfortune was to be born a woman in Saudi Arabia, and there comes a point in a woman's life when not being able to do anything without the permission of a man starts to get you down.
  For al-Sharif, now 38 and living in Australia, that moment came when she was 32. She had been to the doctor's early one evening in al-Khober city, a 15-minute drive from where she lived in Dhahran, and was walking down the street trying to find a taxi. Men driving past jeered at her and harassed her. One man followed her for so long that, terrified, she eventually threw a rock at his car, before bursting into tears. She had a driver's licence (from the United Arab Emirates) and owned a car, but Saudi custom forbade her to drive it. She was an educated adult with a job and a child. Enough was enough.
  When Manal al-Sharif told a friend of her plan to post a YouTube video of her driving in Saudi Arabia, “He said, ‘Ooh, troublemaker.’ I said, ‘No history-maker.’ ”
  When Manal al-Sharif told a friend of her plan to post a YouTube video of her driving in Saudi Arabia, “He said, ‘Ooh, troublemaker.’ I said, ‘No history-maker.’ ”

  Photo: Courtesy of Manal al-Sharif
  "Why do I have to be humiliated?" she says. "Why can't I drive when I have a car and a licence? Why do I have to ask colleagues to give me a ride, or my brother, or look for a driver to drive my own car?" Why indeed? She had bought the car when she was married and could afford a driver. When she divorced, she couldn't. It was May 2011, and while Saudi clerics were advancing the not-especially-compelling argument that driving could damage women's ovaries, the Arab Spring was unfolding. Al-Sharif watched videos on social media and told a friend that she was going to organise her own day of action. She was going to film herself driving and post it on YouTube.
  "He said, 'Ooh, troublemaker,'" she says. "I said, 'No, history-maker.'" As it happened they were both right. The video was viewed 700,000 times in one day. A train of events had started that would change the lives of her whole family. Her father heard his daughter condemned in the mosque. Her brother and his family received so much harassment that they eventually left the country.
  Manal al-Sharif: 'I'm 38 years old, I am a mother, I pay my own bills but, legally [in Saudi Arabia], I'm a minor. I can't do anything. I have to go to my father to get my passport. It's outrageous.'
  Manal al-Sharif: 'I'm 38 years old, I am a mother, I pay my own bills but, legally [in Saudi Arabia], I'm a minor. I can't do anything. I have to go to my father to get my passport. It's outrageous.'

  Photo: Courtesy of Manal al-Sharif
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  As for al-Sharif herself, the secret police came for her at 2am and she spent a week in a cockroach-infested prison. The offence on the charge sheet read: "Driving while female."
  Al-Sharif was born in 1979. She says her story is that of an entire generation. "We were indoctrinated. At school, 60 per cent of what we studied was religion. We were told only one side of the story of Islamic faith, the Wahhabi side. We were lied to. We wanted to be good Muslims. I was brought up to follow the rules and listen to the man.
  "They said covering our faces was to please God, but if you cover a woman's face then she becomes invisible. She loses her identity. It's got nothing to do with being devout, it's about controlling women's bodies. It's about men being seen to be in charge. When a man asks his wife to cover her face, it says, 'You belong to me.'"
  The only non-academic subjects that girls were permitted to take were sewing, drawing and home economics. If girls went to the souk, men handed out leaflets saying that wearing the veil was for their own good, that it preserved their honour and dignity. A woman's duty was to subordinate herself utterly to her husband. She couldn't study, travel, marry, work or get medical treatment without the consent of a male relative.
  By the time al-Sharif was a teenager, she believed it. She burnt music cassettes, seeing them as sinful, and experimented with wearing the face-covering niqab. However, she also continued with her education, graduating in computer science from university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's second-largest city. She was awarded an internship at Aramco, the state-owned oil and gas company, for which her father had to sign a consent form. At 24 she married a controlling and abusive man, and two years later gave birth to her first son, Aboudi, now 12. She divorced her husband when her son was two after the former beat her up savagely.
  If education started her journey to becoming an activist, travel cemented it. Posted by her employer to the US for a few months, she was astounded. She could open a bank account, get in a car, do anything she liked. She stopped wearing the hijab and, once back home in Saudi Arabia, wore it only at work. "I'm proud of my face," she writes in her book, Daring to Drive. "I will not cover it. If it bothers you, don't look. If you are seduced by merely looking at it, that is your problem. You cannot punish me because you cannot control yourself."
  Of all the forms of oppression faced by Saudi women, why was it the driving ban that irritated her the most? "Because I believe that when women drive in my country, that will liberate them. We don't have pedestrianised cities; there's no proper public transport. Driving is the key. It means that women are independent, they can leave the house, they don't have to wait for a male guardian.
  "Guardianship is the source of all evil when it comes to binding women. I'm 38 years old, I am a mother, I pay my own bills but, legally, I'm a minor. I can't do anything. I have to go to my father to get my passport. It's outrageous.
  When women drive in my country, that will liberate them.

  "Once women can drive, all this evil will fall."
  She set up a Facebook page, Women2Drive, where young women who wanted to learn to drive could contact women who could teach them. Then, on June 17, 2011, she and about 35 Saudi women did something radical: they got behind the wheel, something that was forbidden, although not, al-Sharif had discovered, technically illegal. She was called a whore, a traitor and a spy. Colleagues shunned her and Aboudi, then six, was bullied. After three months of harassment from his colleagues, her brother moved his family to Kuwait. The online comments beneath the YouTube videos were so offensive that she had to delete them.
  Manal al-Sharif with her Emirati driver’s licence (Saudi Arabia doesn’t issue licences to women).
  Manal al-Sharif with her Emirati driver’s licence (Saudi Arabia doesn’t issue licences to women).

  Photo: Supplied
  Her girlfriends, meanwhile, told her she was creating a scandal and shaming her countrymen. They warned her not to write her book. They were scared. She may be a rebel to her own generation, she argues, but millennials are on her side. "They talk the same as me. Finally I don't feel like I'm ostracised. How long do we have to shush each other?"
  She dismisses claims by the ruling royal family that Saudi society is too conservative to accept women driving as "rubbish nonsense" and rails against the hypocrisy of Western governments in not doing more. She suspects, like many observers, that the UK was one of the countries that voted in April for Saudi Arabia to become a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. The British Foreign Office refuses to confirm or deny this, but her outrage is palpable.
  "We were like, 'What? A country that is proud to have women's rights, that has a woman PM, would vote for Saudi Arabia to join this commission?' Saudi is ranked 141/144 on the Global Gender Gap Index. It should not be a member and should not have been voted in by countries like the UK that support women's rights.
  "It happened exactly seven days after one of our prominent activists had been jailed for disturbing the public order. That was a stab in the neck for me. If you won't put some pressure on your ally for women to drive, at least don't support them and put them in such powerful positions."
  She is equally disdainful of Ivanka Trump, who recently said how encouraged she was by the advancement of women's rights in the kingdom. The West, al-Sharif argues, has an obligation to use its freedoms to advance Saudi women's liberty by applying more diplomatic pressure. She was thrilled when the Saudi Arabian Olympic team were told that they had to include female athletes if they wanted to compete at the 2012 London Games. "That was huge," she says. "Historic. We need more things like that."
  Sarah Attar at London 2012: the first Saudi woman to compete in athletics during the Olympics. 'We need more things like this,' says al-Sharif.
  Sarah Attar at London 2012: the first Saudi woman to compete in athletics during the Olympics. 'We need more things like this,' says al-Sharif.

  Photo: Anja Niedringhaus
  Saudi women may not attain equality in her lifetime but she thinks it will eventually happen, and warns that change can only come from within. "You cannot ask for your rights if you don't believe you have rights. Women need to believe that they deserve to be treated equally and that they deserve to be full citizens in their own country."
  Simple economics are on her side. The oil price collapse and two years of conflict with Yemen has meant that Saudi Arabia is no longer quite as wealthy as it was. The state oil company is due to be partially floated on stock exchanges next year, and al-Sharif thinks the Saudi government may make concessions to avoid any negative headlines. She is also jubilant at talk of the government having to levy taxes for the first time.
  "Only 11 per cent of women work today. You cannot have that if you want people to pay taxes, you need them to go to work and be productive. There are all these women who are highly educated with no jobs, because they don't want men and women to mix in the workplace, and they don't want women to drive. That's a luxury they can't afford any more."
  Al-Sharif's struggle has cost her her job, her country and her son Aboudi. When she was invited to talk about her struggle at the 2012 Oslo Freedom Forum, Aramco forbade her to go, so she resigned. When she wanted to remarry, to a Brazilian man she met at Aramco, the government refused her permission. She married in Dubai in 2012, at which point she automatically lost custody of Aboudi. He now lives with his paternal grandmother, while al-Sharif has moved to Australia for her husband's work. "My first impression on arrival here was, 'What beautiful nature.' I have got my Australian driver's licence and am excited at the thought of driving around the coast of this continent. And in co-operation with an Australian professor and students at [Sydney's] Macquarie University, I'm starting a social enterprise called Drive for Freedom, to help Saudi women studying or living abroad to gain their driver's licence."
  Manal al-Sharif with older son Aboudi, who she can only see when she visits Saudi Arabia.
  Manal al-Sharif with older son Aboudi, who she can only see when she visits Saudi Arabia.

  Photo: Supplied
  She sees Aboudi only two or three times a year, and he has never met his two-year-old half-brother, Daniel, her son with her second husband. The Saudi authorities won't allow her to take her younger son into the country or her older son out. "I want to go back to Saudi Arabia, of course I do," she says. "I want my children to be together. I thought I'd get government approval for my marriage in a few months and I'd be back, but it's now been five years. That's being an activist in my country. Welcome to my life. Welcome to Saudi Arabia."
  Daring to Drive by Manal al-Sharif (Simon & Schuster) is out now.

  Edited version of a story first published in The Tmes (UK)

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/12/i-felt-like-one-of-my-fathers-songbirds-let-out-of-its-cage-driving-as-a-woman-in-saudi-arabia

  I felt like one of my father’s songbirds, let out of its cage’: driving as a woman in Saudi Arabia
  It began as a protest and became a national talking point. A women’s rights activist reveals what happened when she filmed herself behind the wheel

  Saudi Arabia’s king issues order allowing women to drive
  Manal al-Sharif

  Mon 12 Jun 2017 17.35 BST Last modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017 02.52 GMT
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  Manal Al-Sharif … ‘I felt I was driving for all Saudi women – and, in a sense, I was.’
  Manal Al-Sharif … ‘I felt I was driving for all Saudi women – and, in a sense, I was.’ Photograph: Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images
  In 2011, as the Arab spring brewed, I began a campaign to allow women to drive in Saudi Arabia, mobilising them via Twitter and Facebook. I thought that if someone posted a video of a woman driving, it might “normalise” the experience and show Saudi citizens there was nothing dangerous about it. I also wanted to prove that many of us already knew how to drive – that we had licences and even cars. And I wanted to prove that the Saudi authorities would not stop a female driver.

  I asked another activist, Wajeha, to accompany me when I made the video. Because my brother was not available, I also decided to ask a friend, Ahmed, if he would come too, since an unaccompanied woman would raise suspicions. Wajeha would be the film crew and Ahmed would be our designated driver until I slid over and took the wheel of my purple Cadillac SUV. I had spent several years saving my money for the car; a car that I would now for the first time be driving on actual Saudi kingdom streets.

  Ahmed honked the horn outside Wajeha’s house, and she practically ran out the door. Her hair was neatly concealed beneath a black hijab, but she had on a bright pink abaya [a loose, robe-like dress]. Saudi women rarely wear anything but black abayas in public. When I saw Wajeha in pink, I giggled, thinking that she was even more fearless than me. No doubt, she was thinking that if we got arrested, at least she would look stylish.

  Ahmed looked in the rear-view mirror and turned the key in the ignition. Outside the compound where I lived, he drove nervously, looking at the speedometer, then over at me and then up at the mirror to see who might be behind us on the road. His anxiety was contagious, but I also felt a growing sense of exhilaration. After several blocks, we passed the local police station, and then, at last, we reached the cafe where Ahmed would stop for a lemon and ginger tea. He pulled into the car park but didn’t park until we were well behind the building, out of sight.

  Manal al-Sharif … ‘You’ll find a woman with a PhD, and she doesn’t know how to drive.’
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manal al-Sharif … ‘You’ll find a woman with a PhD, and she doesn’t know how to drive.’ Photograph: Simon and Schuster
  Finally, I moved to the driver’s seat and Wajeha moved to the front-passenger seat. I took a deep breath, sat down inside the car and put my hands on the steering wheel. Although I was enclosed, at that moment, I felt like one of my father’s songbirds, let out of its cage and flying around the room. “Thank you, my friend,” I said to Ahmed out of the rolled-down window. “We’ll be all right – don’t worry.” As I fastened my seatbelt, I could feel my hands shake slightly. I placed the key in the ignition, adjusted the rear-view mirror, and pulled my black hijab close round my face to make sure no hair was visible. I reached for my sunglasses from inside my bag, placed them on my uncovered face, and took one last look at myself in the mirror.

  As the car glided down the street, I began to compose my thoughts for the video’s introduction. I wanted to declare in a clear, loud voice: “This is my right, the right to drive.” But instead, I turned the wheel of the car and gazed straight ahead, feeling the iPhone hovering close to my face. After chatting casually for a few minutes in Arabic, I said: “There’s something to be proud of in this country. There are people doing voluntary work without pay to help the women of this country. We are ignorant and illiterate when it comes to driving. You’ll find a woman with a PhD, and she doesn’t know how to drive. We want change in the country.” Like other people of my generation, who had been gathering in city squares and on street corners across north Africa and the Middle East, who were raising their voices and their hands and using their mobile phones and cameras to stand up to repression, authoritarianism and tradition, we were at that moment pushing back against one of Saudi Arabia’s most enduring cultural taboos.

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  I looked left and turned towards the supermarket where I shopped for groceries each week – and where previously I could only go with a male driver. I let the steering wheel glide smoothly in my hands as I made the turn, looking out so I could make eye contact with any oncoming drivers. A silver Toyota SUV approached, and I saw the driver lean slightly to his right and speak to a woman seated next to him. They looked at each other and then back at me. I smiled, and Wajeha asked: “Why are you smiling, Manal?” I turned to face the iPhone in her hands, smiled even wider, and said: “Because I am driving.”

  The car park was crowded with male drivers, standing outside their cars, waiting for their female clients. Their eyes widened and followed us; I could hear several of them whispering to each other in Hindi or Urdu. But no one confronted us. I felt a bit like a child breaking the rules, but I also knew this was far more serious than a childhood prank. “Wajeha, let’s get some groceries,” I said. “I’d like to get my son a treat.” We moved through the aisles, placing items in our shopping basket: a bottle of water, a piece of fruit and a chocolate bar for my son, Aboudi. At the checkout counter, the two of us stood side by side, saying nothing as I pulled out my wallet.

  We walked proudly through the parking lot, opened the car doors, and got back in. Only then did Wajeha and I look at each other and break into spontaneous laughter, calling out together, “We did it!” I placed my slightly sweaty hands on the wheel, turned on the ignition, and said, “Come on, Wajeha, let’s keep driving.” She began to film again, but I barely spoke. Instead, I took in the space and power of the car and the undeniable sense of victory. I knew then that no matter what my future held, I had done something important and meaningful. That day, I felt I was driving for all Saudi women – and, in a sense, I was.

  As I drove, I contemplated the route my driver usually took after leaving the grocery store. But I also knew that I did not yet have that freedom. After a few more miles, I guided the car back in the direction of the cafe where we had dropped off Ahmed. I drove neither fast nor slowly, but I could feel myself looking at the familiar streets and buildings that I had never seen from a vantage point other than the passenger seat. I couldn’t help glancing in the direction of the police station as we passed. It was the same place where two days later I would be detained.

  Daring to Drive by Manal al-Sharif is published by Simon & Schuster, RRP £16.99. To order a copy for £14.44 with free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

• RNZ - https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201850823/manal-al-sharif-daring-to-drive

  Manal al-Sharif: daring to drive
  From Jesse Mulligan, 1–4pm, 3:08 pm on 12 July 2017
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  Manal al Sharif is an outlaw. Her crime; driving as a woman in Saudi Arabia.

  In 2011 in the shadow of the Arab Spring, she organised protests to support women's rights to drive and was arrested for getting behind the wheel.

  She now lives in Australia. She writes about her decision to fight the law that limits the independence of women in Saudi Arabia in her memoir, Daring To Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening.

  Manal al-Shraif Manal al-Shraif Photo: wikipedia
  One day in 2011, as a 30-year-old woman with a car and a license in a country without public transport, al Sharif got in her car and drove.

  The video she subsequently posted of herself driving on Facebook led to her being arrested twice and inspired many other women to stand up for their own independence in a country where women are classed as minors under a system of male guardianship.

  Listen to the full interview with Manal al Sharif duration 21′ :11″ Add to playlist Download
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  Listen to the full interview with Manal al Sharif
  Mecca - where she grew up - is an international city yet has 66 official slums, no parks and no public transport.

  Fundamentalist Islam thrived in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and 1990s, and when she was growing up her family adhered to very conservative rules to fit in.

  Voicing doubts about the system got you into trouble, yet she always questioned it.

  "When we are taught things in schools or at home or in mosques, it's been always told to us 'This is the only truth and nothing else is true but this'."

  She says her decision to get in get car and drive was an act not of bravery but of encouragement to other women.

  The video took off, but it brought online abuse and eventually arrest for al Sharif.

  The second time she was arrested she went to jail with no trial, but after Amnesty International and other human rights organisations got involved she was released after nine days, when it was determined that legally it was a custom, not a law that she broke.

  "I was amazed when I got out of jail to see the country was really divided. Even the people who were against women driving were against putting a woman in jail for driving."

  Saudi's new 32-year-old crown prince, who has a more progressive attitude, is a positive signal for her country, she says.

  "We finally have someone who understands the youth."

  Saudi Arabia has one of the youngest populations in the world but previously had leaders three times the average age of the population.

  Millennials are changing the game in Saudi Arabia, she says.

  "They're the ones who are changing the country and they're the ones who are breaking all the rules and changing all the rules that we've been taught."

  When she returns to Saudi Arabia from Australia she has to be prepared.

  "I'm always ready to be arrested. I always have extra clothes with me, I also have my husband's number on speed dial and a lawyer's number."

  Despite that she hasn't give up on change coming to her country.

  "I know it's happening and it's coming."

  And she's uncomfortable being described as an activist.

  "We should not label people who speak up because it should not be the exception, it should be the norm. When you see something wrong, you speak up. When you see corruption, when you see injustice, you speak up. You don't just shut up and say it's none of my business … I think it's very important to not label people who speak up."

• Fresh Air, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2017/06/08/532068532/for-one-saudi-woman-daring-to-drive-was-an-act-of-civil-disobedience

  < For One Saudi Woman, 'Daring To Drive' Was An Act Of Civil Disobedience June 8, 20173:03 PM ET 36:32 Download DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's busy preparing for tomorrow's onstage interview with Seth Meyers, which we hope to broadcast next Wednesday. We're going to hear the interview she recorded yesterday about women's rights in Saudi Arabia, where there are restrictions on women's ability to do nearly anything unless they're given permission by a male guardian. In 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring, our guest, Manal al-Sharif, challenged the Saudi ban on women driving. At the time, she was the first woman to work in the information security division at Aramco, the Saudi national oil company. She lived on the Aramco compound where Saudi rules don't apply. So she was allowed to drive on the compound, not outside of it. She organized a mass protest against the driving ban, and on a day leading up to it, she posted a YouTube video of herself at the wheel, driving outside the compound. The video went viral, and she was arrested. After expressions of outrage from around the world, she was released. She now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and son. She has a new memoir called "Daring To Drive." It's about growing up in Mecca, becoming a devout Islamic fundamentalist in her early teens and evolving into a women's rights activist. TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Manal al-Sharif, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we talk about your driving protest, would you describe some of the major restrictions on women's rights in Saudi Arabia? MANAL AL-SHARIF: So we have the guardianship system, and that is the one that employs a lot of restriction on me as a woman. Imagine giving birth to your own guardian. Yes, your guardian can be your own son. And that means... GROSS: So a guardian has to be a man. AL-SHARIF: Yes, only a man GROSS: And it could be your son (laughter). AL-SHARIF: Any man. GROSS: Any man. AL-SHARIF: It could be any man. GROSS: OK. AL-SHARIF: So when you buy a car and there is a registration paper for the owner, this car, when you sell it - the registration - the owner on the registration paper change - exactly woman change her guardian throughout her life. So that's the first one. And because if the guardianship... GROSS: Wait. So you change your guardian the way you would change the registration for a car. AL-SHARIF: Exactly. GROSS: So you actually have to sign a paper saying, I designate this person as my guardian. AL-SHARIF: It's not - no. You don't choose. I wish you choose. GROSS: Oh. AL-SHARIF: A woman cannot choose her guardian. So when you're born, your father is your guardian. When you get married, it moves to your husband. If you get divorced, it either moves back to your father if he's alive. If he's not alive, it could move back to your brother. If you don't have a brother, it could move back to your adult son, as young as 18 years old. He could be your own guardian, issuing you permissions to do anything in your life. GROSS: When you say anything in your life, what does the guardian have to give you permission to do? What are some of things? AL-SHARIF: Important things like going to school, getting a job, leaving the country, getting - going to the court and filing a - even going to the police and issuing - and complaining. They always ask for a man consent and permission. GROSS: What about just leaving the house? AL-SHARIF: You need his permission. GROSS: To leave the house? AL-SHARIF: Yes. If you don't get his permission - if you want to leave the house, you need to give him - you need to tell him that I'm leaving the house. You cannot just leave without taking his permission. GROSS: OK. What are some of the other restrictions, not - like, this is kind of everything already, but what are some of the other restrictions on women's rights? AL-SHARIF: The one that we're famous for - we're the last country that don't allow women to drive. We don't play sports. We don't have sports in the school, so women cannot play sports in Saudi Arabia. You cannot, for example, swim in public. You cannot go to a swimming pool and swim or go to the beach and swim. You cannot do this. GROSS: Do you have to use special entrances in public buildings, like women's entrances? AL-SHARIF: Yes, yes. So all the government organizations, all the banks, even the mosques, most of our homes who can afford it - they have separate entrances for men and women because the segregation between the sexes. All schools, all colleges, everything almost, you cannot have men and women mix. GROSS: OK. And we've just, like, scratched the surface of all the restrictions. There's many more, I'm sure. AL-SHARIF: Many more. GROSS: So of all the restrictions on women's rights, why did you choose to protest the taboo against driving? AL-SHARIF: Interesting question. I think it chose me. I didn't choose it. As a single mom, I was divorced with a son. And I had a car. And I had a driver license, but I couldn't drive my car. And I was paying the installments for this car for five years, and that was very frustrating. It's a daily struggle to find a car, to do anything in your life in a country where there's no public transportation. And our cities are not pedestrian friendly. And when I knew that there is no law, I was thinking, if there's no law, so why are we not driving? GROSS: So there isn't actually a law, but it's custom. AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: And it's an observed custom... AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: ...That women can't drive. And you learned how to drive because you were living on the compound of Aramco, where you're allowed to drive because the Saudi rules don't apply. And also, you had worked for at least a year in New Hampshire, and you got your driver's license there. So that's how you learned. So you were allowed to drive on the Aramco compound but not off the compound. AL-SHARIF: The compound is inside Arabia. But once you leave the compound, all rules change. You have to put on your abaya. You cannot ride a bike or drive a car or mix with men. You cannot work with men even outside. In Aramco, we can do all these things. And the contradictions were really, really screaming when I was working there. GROSS: So another thing - in talking about why you chose driving as your protest - your women's rights protest, you write in your memoir that Saudi women rely on foreign drivers to take them around. And why are these drivers foreign? AL-SHARIF: In Saudi, we don't - when you need to hire a chauffeur or a private driver, we call them, you cannot hire another Saudi. They get paid around $500 a month. No Saudi would accept this salary. And no Saudi will be 24-by-7 available for you to drive you around. So the only way to do it is when you hire someone who would accept these low salaries. And they work long hours with you because dropping - they drop the kids in the school. They drop you in a work. They - when you need to go for grocery shopping - all these things. You will not find Saudis accepting these jobs. Actually, the private sector itself in Saudi Arabia - 90 percent of the people working there are non-Saudis. So also the contradictions here are very - I would say make me mad because you don't allow me to mix with Saudis or men in general in all my life, but then you enforce a total - a perfect stranger to be living in my house, to be driving my own car and have my own phone number. And it's unfair for those drivers and unfair for us as women. GROSS: And sounds like... AL-SHARIF: Most of them - they don't even know how to drive. GROSS: Oh, great (laughter). And it sounds like... AL-SHARIF: I had to teach my first driver - I had to teach him how to drive. He didn't know even the signs. He didn't know the (laughter) - how to drive. He didn't know the city. He didn't speak Arabic. It was - it's a hassle for both sides, really. It's a hassle. GROSS: And it also sounds like if you're sexually harassed by one of... AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: ...The drivers, the driver will not be punished because it's considered to be the woman's fault (laughter). So... AL-SHARIF: Always, yes. GROSS: Great, OK. AL-SHARIF: What did you do to provoke him? Watch how you dress up. What did you say? It's always the woman fault. GROSS: Right. So let's get back to your driving protest. So you've explained some of the reasons why you chose to protest the driving ban for women because you could drive. You were allowed to drive in the Aramco compound but not outside of it. In order to get around, you had to hire a driver who didn't necessarily speak your language, who you didn't know, who you weren't necessarily safe with. So the contradictions were just crazy. So what was the form of protest you chose to protest the ban on women driving? AL-SHARIF: It's a very - it's a civil disobedience. So for me, driving or the right to drive is not only about moving from A to B. It's a way to emancipate women. It gives them so much liberty. It makes them independent, believe in their own ability to be able to take care and charge of their own life, to drive their own life. GROSS: So if I understand correctly, more women are driving in Saudi Arabia even though they can get arrested for doing it. AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: OK, so you're really taking a big risk if you're a woman and you're... AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: ...Driving. AL-SHARIF: Mostly - I know a girl. She's 14 years old. She's so young. But in Saudi Arabia, you can drive as a boy as young as 14 years old. GROSS: Whoa (laughter). AL-SHARIF: She dress like a boy. She always posts videos of herself driving, and that was amazing. And she said, we never thought of buying a car because we were three girls in the house - they don't have a man - until we saw you driving. And her mom asked me - her mom name is Aisha (ph). And she kept saying, don't stop. And the girl, her daughter, said, they stole mom's life. I will not allow them to steal my life. She's - I met her in 2011, six years ago. She's now 20. GROSS: What are the dress restrictions on women now in Saudi Arabia? AL-SHARIF: Not only on Saudi women, on all women - so you have - I wish they'd just tell us, you have to wear modest clothes. I would respect that. But you have to put on an abaya. An abaya's a cloak. You put it on top of your clothes. Most families frown at girls when they want to uncover their face. Most husband don't want their wives to uncover their face. So it's enforced by the government. If you go to school, any government school, you have to cover your face. From middle school all the way until you graduate, you have to cover except in Jeddah. Jeddah, they don't - they're more liberal than the other cities. But all the other cities, you have to wear the abaya if you go to a government school and cover your face. All the government organizations - you have to cover your face by law. They - their employees have - women employees have to cover their face. In the street - depends on your family. But you can never walk in the street without putting on abaya. So that's a restriction. GROSS: I know when you got married for the first time, your first husband said, OK, you're my wife now; you're not going out unless you cover your face. AL-SHARIF: Yes, and I had to cover my face again after fighting everyone to stop covering my face. And actually it's one of the reasons I left my ex-husband. GROSS: Let's take a short break, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Manal al-Sharif. Her new memoir is called "Daring To Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening." We'll be back after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF AVISHAI COHEN'S "GBEDE TEMIN") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Manal al-Sharif. Her new memoir is called "Daring To Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening." She grew up in Mecca and, in her early teens, adhered to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. In her 20s, she became the first woman to work in the information security division at Aramco, the Saudi national oil company. In 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring, she was arrested after organizing a protest against the ban on women driving. She now lives in Sydney, Australia. So you didn't set out to be an activist. You were... AL-SHARIF: No. GROSS: ...Raised in Mecca. You became very religious in your early teens. You destroyed your brothers' music cassettes and your mother's magazines when you became so fervent in your religious belief. What made you so fervent? I mean you weren't brought up that way, so what kind of radicalized you? AL-SHARIF: What radicalized me growing up was really schooling in Saudi Arabia. That's one. The second thing - the books that we used to read. And they distribute freely everywhere in markets and schools and mosques. Everywhere you go, those booklets - they distribute it. Also, the peers are conservative, ultraconservative. I would say teachers - they were our role models. And also, the - it's everywhere. And you watch TV. You listen to radio. You - the cassettes - oh, my God, the cassettes. The cassettes were one of the major thing that radicalized the youth growing up. We were radicalized in the '80s and the '90s. There was one source of information. The books were censored, and we had all these wars going around in the Islamic world. And I start with Afghanistan where the youth were encouraged to go for jihad in Afghanistan. One of those people who left was Osama bin Laden. I was brought up in this era or in this time, the awakening time they call it in Saudi Arabia. We've been through this. Everyone been through this in my country - destroying our photos, stopping everyone from listening to music, questioning the beliefs of the others, the hate against the infidels. We were brought up this way. And even people like mom - she didn't believe, for example, in covering the face. Later on, she was against that I uncover my face. So even the ones who were not radicalized at that time, they were radicalized later. A lot of people broke out of that. Like, my sister and my brother didn't really care. There are a lot of people like my sister and my brother, also, who didn't care. But it was very difficult for them because everyone around them would not allow listening to music, would not allow watching TV or buying newspapers with pictures on it. And it was the norm, by the way, in Saudi Arabia. It wasn't something like - oh, my God, it was huge if you know someone who listened to music. They would bring you cassettes to convince you not to listen to music. And they will talk to you... GROSS: And these were like cassettes of speeches. AL-SHARIF: Yes, sermons. GROSS: Sermons. AL-SHARIF: We have - so the cassettes were the ones that distributed these radical thoughts. In school, we were taught - and I wrote about it in my book. We were taught to hate against the nonbelievers. We were taught that even if he's Muslim and he doesn't follow the true Islam that we teach in the school, he's your enemy, even if he's your father or your mother. Imagine when you're - when you learn these things. There were youth who go and burn whole cassette shops in Saudi Arabia. And this is the time I grow up with. When those people are our heroes, the extremists, they're our heroes because he's - she's (unintelligible). She follows the true Islam. GROSS: So when you were radicalized, what did that mean for you as a girl? What were some of the things you believed that you as a girl should not be allowed to do and you fervently believed you should not be allowed to do it? AL-SHARIF: I always questioned them. Even when I was practicing to be a good Muslim, and I was trying to please God and stay away from hellfire and go to heaven, I was still questioning these things. So I wasn't really happy. The more I was trying to follow the rules that we've been taught, the more miserable I became. So even in the time of my radicalization, I felt - when I had to burn my own drawings. And I love drawing. When they stopped me from drawing animated objects like animals or humans, it wasn't something that I made with happiness. I was taught that this is the right way to call for God, and this is the right way to read his blessings or God's mercy. GROSS: So you became a women's rights activist. Did that have to do with going to a university and maybe getting exposed to books different from the kind of propaganda books that you were exposed to earlier in your life? AL-SHARIF: No one grows up wanting to be an activist. I myself did not know what the word activist means. Just everyone started calling me activist after the campaign. When I was working at Aramco, the discrimination against this woman, I didn't know the word was discrimination. I just felt it's wrong that I do the same job as my male colleague, and he's treated differently just because of my gender. I think if I work in a female-only office, it will - I would not have these questions. I started having it because I was working and I would be excluded from promotions because he's building a house. He has a family. Excuse me, but I'm working too, and I deserve this promotion. Or he gets to get - the company gives you a loan to build your own home. They exclude me because I'm a woman. Oh, your husband will get to you a house. What if I'm a widow? What if I'm not married? What if I don't want to marry? Why I need to wait for a husband to give me the house? If you are pregnant and you apply for a job in Aramco, you will fail the medical test just because you're pregnant. This is discrimination. I was so mad. So these things really make you speak up. Most people inside are too afraid to speak up because the backlash from the society and from the government is unbearable. We live in one of the last absolute monarchies in the world. Men and women don't have political or civil rights. So imagine someone comes and asks for their civil rights. The backlash is really huge. You get harassed. You get banned from leaving the country, which as we call it the internal exile. You lose your job. You cannot land a job after that, which was the case with me when I left my job. So the price - the personal price you pay is really high. And they make sure that everyone knows, so they don't follow you. They don't walk in your path. DAVIES: Manal al-Sharif speaking with Terry Gross. Al-Sharif's new memoir is "Daring To Drive." We'll hear more from her after a break, including her reaction to the Trump family's visit to Saudi Arabia. Also, film critic Justin Chang reviews "Beatriz At Dinner" starring Salma Hayek. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF KYLE EASTWOOD'S "SIROCCO") DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're listening to Terry's interview with Saudi women's rights activist Manal al-Sharif. Her new memoir is called "Daring To Drive." A heads-up to parents, this part of our interview will include a brief discussion of female genital mutilation, which you may not feel is appropriate for children. GROSS: So let's talk a little bit about your life. Your mother's from a prosperous Libyan family. She was raised in a lavish home. Your father was born less than 20 miles outside of Mecca. He was illiterate, uneducated. I think for your mother, marriage was a way of getting away from her family. But it sounds like she entered a kind of Saudi women's prison when she moved to Saudi Arabia because there were all these prohibitions that she had to abide by. You and your sister were circumcised, also called female genital mutilation. Who ordered that? Was that your mother's idea to do that? AL-SHARIF: I have no clue. We didn't discuss it really with mom and dad, but the first trial was mom when she brought a woman to circumcise us. We had a woman in the family in the Sharif family. They call her (foreign language spoken). She used to circumcise girls. We were kids - really didn't understand what circumcision mean. And then the one who really circumcised us was a barber. He was my father's friend. My mom herself was circumcised, and she told us the story that she ran away with it cut - one labia. And the other one they couldn't cut, and she was bleeding. And she hid in the neighbor's house. And it was shocking to me that mom - she puts us through the same thing. But the pressure from the society is huge that a mom, a mother and a father can put their own daughters through so much pain just to abide by the society rules. This is how dangerous it is that your own children - you put them through so much pain because you need to follow. You need to be obedient to the - otherwise your daughters are dirty. Otherwise, your daughters would not be suitable for marriage. GROSS: Is it still a custom to circumcise girls in Saudi Arabia? AL-SHARIF: It's a taboo. You never hear anyone in Saudi Arabia talk about it. I sat with my cousin. I asked her and I said were you circumcised? Were any of your sisters - six sisters - circumcised? She refused to tell me. I talked to my other cousin. Were my aunts circumcised? Were you circumcised? Did you circumcise your daughter? They won't tell you. See, they don't talk about it, and it happens in parts of society, not all parts of society, mostly my families, Sharif family, parts of the Hijaz and the south of Saudi. They do it, but people don't talk about it. There is no law, no one campaigning against it, and we don't have even statistics to tell us how many girls been going through FGM. No one knows. GROSS: So it's a taboo. But a lot of people still do it anyways? AL-SHARIF: I can't - I really can't answer a lot. GROSS: Right. OK. Because you... AL-SHARIF: Because I really don't have that number. GROSS: And people don't talk about it. AL-SHARIF: But I know it's happening just people are not talking about it. GROSS: So you had no anaesthetic, no medication. It was a blunt instrument that was used. You were mutilated in the process. Later, you had corrective surgery. What impact do you think it had on you as a girl and as a woman to have undergone this female genital mutilation? AL-SHARIF: I think the worst one is not the pain. The worse one is losing trust in the people you love. GROSS: Because they put you through that. AL-SHARIF: Yes. It's very difficult. It's very difficult to even talk about today. GROSS: Didn't any adult explain to you what was being done or why it was being done? AL-SHARIF: No. They never talked about it with us. They didn't explain to us what was going to happen. Growing up, it was not easy because I'm different from the other girls. And no one explained to me why I had to go through this. And in Saudi Arabia, it's - these things we don't get sex education, we don't get how your body looks like education. The first time I saw a vagina is - my Brazilian husband showed me a picture of a vagina, and he said this is how a woman vagina look like. I'm like this is it? I had no clue. So we don't - I was 30 - it was last year. And these things really bothers me so much that we put women through this pain because it's all about controlling us. It's all about suppressing whatever urge that woman they think is going to have. And this is how to make sure she's stays virgin until her husband marries her. She finds a husband, and she gets married. It's all this obsession with virginity. GROSS: I think a lot of girls grow up - and maybe this is less true today - but grow up with a lot of embarrassment surrounding their genitals, and I think how much worse that must be when somebody has shown up without any explanation and start cutting your genitals and that you have to live with the consequences of that for the rest of your life. How can you feel good about your body after something like that has happened? AL-SHARIF: You never do. You always feel like less. You feel like why happened to me? Why I had to go through this? Muslims circumcise boys, and it happens in the seventh day after they're born. So they don't go through the trauma like girls. So girls - her genital had to be because when she is a baby, she - it's not grown yet. They have to wait until she's 8 or 7 - 7 and above. So they cut it. And that idea of cutting part of your own child body is scary, is really - is - it really scares me like how the family do that to their own daughter. It's still a taboo, by the way. It's not - got nothing to do about Islam. It's an African thing. It came from Africa. And you find Christians and Muslims both in Egypt, for example, they circumcise their daughters. It's happening now in Europe because there are Muslims living there. So they take their daughters on trips to do the circumcision. And it's scary because it's still a taboo in most countries. They're still not discussing it. It's not enough really done against it. GROSS: You know, you write that because of the genital mutilation you - afraid you didn't want to get married. You know you... AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: But you did. You've been married twice. The first time, was there a love between the two of you? AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: Was it - there was? AL-SHARIF: Yes, yes. I chose him. We were in love. We worked together. But I had to tell him. It was so difficult to explain what happened. He didn't believe like what? Because in his part of the country, they don't do this. So he didn't understand, but he was the only one. I had to tell him. It was very difficult, and I felt less. I did feel less when I had to tell him what happened, and I was thinking he was not going to marry at me because when they circumcised me, I was really, really misshaped because they had to use stitches after because I was bleeding. And I looked different. I looked totally different. And I said I will look for a doctor to fix these things, so I had to go through more pain to fix things. It's never easy to discuss this thing. It's never easy to talk about it, but I think now I'm in peace with it. After I wrote about it, I think the book was really kind of therapy because, finally, I talk about things that I never talked. I had to dust off all my dirties and go through them and write things that I would never discuss with even my closest friends. And now I'm just putting my whole life story, very intimate details in this book pages. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Manal al-Sharif. She is the author of the new memoir "Daring To Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening." We'll talk more about her work as a women's rights activist after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, my guest is Manal al-Sharif. Her new memoir is called "Daring To Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening." She grew up in Mecca, and in her early teens adhered to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. In her 20s, she became the first woman to work in the Information Security Division at Aramco the Saudi national oil company. In 2011, she was arrested after organizing a protest against the ban on women's driving. And she now lives in Sydney, Australia. So when you got married, you know, we talked about this earlier. Your husband - your first husband said to you now that you're my wife, you have to cover your face... AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: ...In public and that - you found that very upsetting. You didn't want to cover your face. AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: Were there ways that your first husband changed once he became your husband and he officially had kind of control? I mean, was he your guardian when he became your husband? AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: So... AL-SHARIF: Remember the car thing? When I said the car registration? Yes. Once I got married, my guardian became my husband. GROSS: So the guardianship was transferred from - what? - your father to your husband? AL-SHARIF: Yes, yes. GROSS: So that's a really horrible position to be in where, like, the person who's supposed to be, you know, like, your lover, your partner becomes like your boss. AL-SHARIF: No, not your boss - becomes your owner. GROSS: Your owner, yes. AL-SHARIF: He owns you. GROSS: Yes. AL-SHARIF: I wish. My boss is my friend. GROSS: Right, right. I hear you. So did it change your feelings about him when he became your owner and actually used his authority? AL-SHARIF: Gosh, I hated it. I loved him so much, but at the same time, it was so shocking to me that I have to go through what I went through with dad because my relationship with dad changed. I had to work on it to change - asking for permission for everything, covering my face. I broke through that with my father, and it wasn't easy - took so long time to stand my ground and tell dad, I want to marry this man or I'm not going to cover my face or I'm going to study in this school. It wasn't easy. It didn't come easy. And then I thought like, oh, my God, I went back 10 years when I get married because I have to work again to change this man to accept that I'm independent, to accept that I have opinions, to accept that I'm not going to follow these rules. And it wasn't as easy as dad. Dad with time it could have changed him. And I thought I'm going to change his ideas, but I failed miserably. And there was a mistake a woman make really when she gets mad with someone who she knows his - this is his personality. These are his thoughts and beliefs, and she thinks I'm going to change him. You can never change people. He could not change me because he thought that way, and I couldn't change him. So that was a mistake really. GROSS: So you got divorced. Is it hard... AL-SHARIF: I left. I left my ex-husband. GROSS: Are you allowed to do that? AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: I mean, he owns you, as you said. AL-SHARIF: No, you are allowed to do that. That's a surprise. So if a woman wants to get divorced, she can go to the court. And it's called (foreign language spoken). It's different than divorce where she has to pay him back anything he spent on her. And I told him I'm leaving you. When (foreign language spoken) allowing women to live in the compound, first thing I did. I applied for a housing and they gave me a studio. And I told him I'm leaving you. He couldn't believe it, of course. And actually two weeks after I left the house, he sent me a text message saying you're divorced. He went himself, like, he didn't - I didn't have to go to the court and apply for a divorce and all these things which takes years. It was easy. I was like, wow, this is great. It wasn't easy - no, the divorce itself was easy that he went to the court and divorced me, and I wasn't even there. I was mad that I wasn't there. It was difficult. I cried that day, but I knew it was the right thing to do because I couldn't change him. He couldn't change me. GROSS: President Trump made Saudi Arabia the first stop on his first trip abroad, and he announced a $110 billion arms deal which includes precision weaponry and an anti-missile system. The Saudis gave him a really royal treatment, including projecting a multistory image of his face on the side of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel where he was staying. I'm wondering what message do you think would you like to see President Trump give to the Saudis about women's rights? AL-SHARIF: First of all, I had no expectations. We didn't expect anything. We actually didn't want anything from President Trump when he came to Saudi. What really bothered me wasn't President Trump. It was Ivanka Trump because when she spoke about women's rights, she said there'd been progress - encouraging progress is what she called. That was really an insult to the woman's rights movement because the government didn't do any progress. The progress that it did, it was very cosmetic. It didn't really at least name an age for woman - that she's an adult, considered an adult. And for us women in the last movement, which is I Am My Own Guardian, the leaders of this movement are being prosecuted, being sent to jail. Miriam Letabe (ph), one of the leaders of this movement, she's in jail since April 17. I even tweeted to her. Of course, she didn't see my tweet but it just - I wanted to do that. I said, I wish you stayed quiet. Just be quiet. We're fighting. When you say these things, you're just giving them a reward for something they didn't do. Just being - what's the right word to say? - hypocrite. That really made us really mad back home. When Miriam Letabe was jailed on April 17, one week later, the U.N., they voted - Saudi Arabia - to be part of woman - women's rights commission exactly one week later. And countries that promote women's rights, countries like U.K. and Belgium, they voted for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is ranked 141st out of 144 countries in the world when it comes to the Gender Gap Index, the Global Gender Gap Index. How this country made it to the women's rights commission in the U.N.? So this - these actions are the ones that really troubles us when it comes from politicians. GROSS: So you thought that - you were upset with Ivanka Trump's comments because she complimented the government on its progress. AL-SHARIF: Yes. GROSS: And the government hasn't really made much in the way of progress but... AL-SHARIF: Cosmetic. Cosmetic. GROSS: Just cosmetic, but you didn't speak out on behalf of the women who are actually taking the risks to further women's rights and the women who are in jail because of those risks that they've taken. Is that what you're saying? AL-SHARIF: We did not want her really to want to talk about these things. We're not expecting her to talk at these things but at the same time to stay quiet. So if there is not real progress, and there is a backlash on women's rights activists being prosecuted and sent to jail, you're giving them a reward by saying there is a progress. For me, it's - this is the backstop. This is the one that if you don't want to criticize and support the movement, don't talk. But to go and even encourage and reward them for things that they didn't do, that was the thing that bothered me so much. GROSS: So you're on a book tour now in the U.S. AL-SHARIF: Yeah. GROSS: Are you going back to Saudi Arabia anytime in the near future? AL-SHARIF: Yes, of course. I have my son there. So after the tour, right away I'm going back to Saudi. GROSS: Are you worried? AL-SHARIF: Hopefully I don't get arrested. I I'm always worried. Every time I go to Saudi Arabia, I'm always worried because it's never - you never know when you get arrested again for a tweet or a retweet or something you said in an interview like what I'm doing now with you, something that slipped. So you have to always have this filter going on the whole time you talk. Can I say this or not? Will this get me in trouble or not? Because at the end of the day, I always think I'm going back to Saudi. I have to - I want to see my son. So it's tricky. GROSS: Well, I hope you stay safe. AL-SHARIF: Thank you. GROSS: Thank you so much for your bravery and for speaking with us. Thank you. AL-SHARIF: Thank you for having me. DAVIES: Manal al-Sharif speaking with Terry Gross. Al-Sharif's memoir is called "Daring To Drive." Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews "Beatriz At Dinner" starring Salma Hayek. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF YO LA TENGO SONG, "WEATHER SHY")

• ABC - http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-08/saudi-women-revolution-has-a-long-way-to-go-says-manal-al-sharif/9396306

  Women in Saudi Arabia have a long way to go in order to be free, says Manal al-Sharif
  The World Today By Thomas Oriti and Laura Brierley Newton
  Updated 12 Feb 2018, 4:05am

  Manal al-Sharif
  PHOTO: Manal al-Sharif was at the forefront of the Women2Drive campaign in Saudi Arabia. (Supplied)
  RELATED STORY: Saudi women buckling up for their next fight after winning the right to driveRELATED STORY: Woman wearing miniskirt in Saudi video 'arrested' after outcryRELATED STORY: Saudi Arabia launches Girls' Council to empower women — without any girls
  Saudi women last year celebrated a big win when they were granted the right to drive, now the woman behind the campaign says she'll celebrate on the day she's recognised as a citizen of her own country.

  Manal al-Sharif was at the forefront of the Women2Drive campaign, which was run by rights activists who saw the ban as an emblem of the kingdom's repression of women.

  In 2011, she was arrested after a video appeared on social media showing her driving in the country.

  Growing up Ms Sharif was told her role in life as a woman was to stay at home, to be a mother and a wife.

  "My whole life was minimised and summarised in that role for me as a woman," she said.

  "The education I went through as a woman inside Saudi Arabia, as a girl growing up was really destructive."

  It was not until she travelled to Egypt with her mother to visit family that she suddenly saw another world, a world where Muslim women were allowed to do simple things — like drive a car.

  "They were just having normal life, sitting in restaurants together, talking," she said.

  A young Manal Sl-sharif poses with her mother, father and brother on rocks
  PHOTO: Manal al-Sharif with her family as a child. (Supplied)
  "Mum was talking with her cousins, while I was deprived from talking to my male cousins.

  "So that was the first contradiction I faced growing up and in Saudi Arabia."

  Recognition as a citizen 'the next challenge'
  Western leaders and powerful figures have been watching developments in Saudi Arabia closely.

  And Ms Sharif said there was still much more work to be done before women could become "liberated".

  But she has learnt to celebrate the small victories, and said the right to drive campaign — which took 27 years — has helped to push the country towards bigger change.

  One change Ms Sharif remains hopeful for is the day that women such as herself will be acknowledged as a full citizen of their country.

  "I'm still not even recognised as a citizen. My son, I cannot pass my nationality, my passport to him," she said.

  "If I'm in jail, I cannot leave jail without my male guardian permission. I cannot leave the country without my male guardian.

  "So unless the country acknowledge me, names an age when I'm adult before law and acknowledges me as a citizen, then that's the day I would really celebrate."

  Manal al-Sharif sits in a car and makes the peace sign.
  PHOTO: Saudi woman and Women2Drive campaigner Manal al-Sharif sits in a car and makes the peace sign on September 27, 2017. (Twitter: Manal al-Sharif)
  Ms Sharif said 80 per cent of Saudi Arabia was under the age of 40, and yet most of the leadership was over 80.

  And she said that younger generation were being sent overseas to study, exposing them to other countries and other governments.

  "So you have all these highly educated people coming back, they've lived abroad in functioning democracies and they go back and of course, they will push for change."

  The Saudi women revolution
  When Ms Sharif tried to get the attention of the media on issues such as the male guardianship system, or the lack of women's status within the family, it was impossible.

  So she used Women2Drive campaign was used as a symbol for all those issues.

  "Driving was really the one that gets the media attention to shed light on woman's status in Saudi Arabia," she said.

  "When a woman goes out and drives, everyone is watching — and then we just pitch in all the other issues that we want to discuss.

  "We call it the Saudi women revolution, or the pink revolution."

  Veiled women in Saudi Arabia
  PHOTO: Ms Sharif says the push for change is largely coming from the younger generation.
  (Amit Dave: Reuters)
  The ban on women driving meant that for them to get anywhere not on foot, they had to have a male drive them.

  Saudi Arabia does not have public transportation, and so walking and driving are the only options to get around.

  The two options for women were to hire a male driver, or to depend on a male relative to drive them — even boys as young as nine years old.

  "It's a very strange situation when you are separated from the man all your life… but we are forced to be locked in a car with a complete stranger to drive us around," she said.

  "That contradiction creates a lot of discomfort and also sexual harassment — blackmailing the woman because she needs that man to drive her around, so he has access to her house, her number, her life."

  While many countries have some sort of anti-harassment laws, Saudi Arabia has long shied away from putting any in place.

  Last year it was reported that draft legislation for a bill against sexual harassment was stalled in the Shura Council.

  Members who opposed it argued that the law would encourage intermingling between genders, as well as allowing women to go out in more provocative attire.

  The law was passed by royal decree, but Ms Sharif said it remained "under discussion" and as such was not currently enforced.

  Ms Sharif has written a book, Daring to Drive, and will be speaking at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House.

• London Independent - https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/saudi-arabia-women-drive-right-fight-manal-al-sharif-a7785326.html

  RACHEL HOSIE
  @rachel_hosie
  Monday 12 June 2017 08:15 BST

  637

  CLICK TO FOLLOW
  INDY/LIFE
  In Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive - it damages our ovaries, apparently.

  But one woman is fighting to change that, and that woman is 38-year-old Manal al-Sharif.

  One evening six years ago, al-Sharif was on her way home from a doctor's appointment and was struggling to find a taxi. Men in cars kept driving past, jeering at, harassing and following her - she was terrified.

  READ MORE
  Saudi Arabia jails rights activist who defied women’s driving ban
  Despite having a driving licence and owning a car, she wasn’t allowed to drive due to Saudi law (she’d bought the car when she was married and could afford a driver).

  “Why do I have to be humiliated?” she said to The Times. “Why can’t I drive, when I have a car and a licence? Why do I have to ask colleagues to give me a ride, or my brother, or look for a driver to drive my own car?”

  In 2011, al-Sharif made history by filming a video of her driving and posting it on YouTube - it racked up over 700,000 views in just one day.

  As a result, she spent a week in a prison riddled with cockroaches for the offence of “driving while female.”

  Al-Sharif’s family were affected too - her brother and his family were forced to leave the country because they were being harassed so much.

  It was when Al-Sharif went to the US for three months for work that she realised just how differently women were being treated. She stopped wearing her hijab and only wore it at work once back in Saudi Arabia.

  Saudi women face many forms of oppression, but it’s driving that al-Sharif feels most strongly about: “I believe that when women drive in my country, that will liberate them,” she said. “We don’t have pedestrianised cities, there’s no proper public transportation. Driving is the key.

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  “It means that women are independent, they can leave the house, they don’t have to wait for a male guardian. Guardianship is the source of all evil when it comes to binding women.

  “I’m 38 years old, I have two sons, I pay my own bills, but legally I’m a minor. I can’t do anything. I have to go to my father to get my passport. It’s outrageous. Once women can drive, all this evil will fall.”

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  Al-Sharif is anti-veil too: “I was brought up to follow the rules and listen to the man,” she said. “They said that covering our faces was to please God, but if you cover a woman’s face then she becomes invisible. She loses her identity.

  “It’s got nothing to do with being devout, it’s about controlling women’s bodies. It’s about men being seen to be in charge. When a man asks his wife to cover her face, it says, ‘You belong to me.’”

  She has now written a book, Daring To Drive, in which she writes: “I’m proud of my face. I will not cover it. If it bothers you, don’t look. If you are seduced by merely looking at it, that is your problem. You cannot punish me because you cannot control yourself.”

  READ MORE
  Celebrity feminists 'are making people care less about women’s rights'
  Despite the fact that many of al-Sharif’s peers - both male and female - warned her not to write the book, the majority of millennials are on her side: “They talk the same as me. Finally I don’t feel like I’m ostracised. How long do we have to shush each other?”

  She believes Western governments need to do more to help, but ultimately, equality will only really be achieved if it comes from within:

  “You cannot ask for your rights if you don’t believe you have rights,” she says. “Women need to believe that they deserve to be treated equally and that they deserve to be full citizens in their own country.”

  Through her struggle, al-Sharif has lost her job as well as custody of her son - she was refused permission to marry a Brazilian man so the couple went to Dubai to get married. They now live in Sydney, Australia, and she sees her son, who is 12, only two or three times a year.

  Al-Sharif has a second son, who is two, but he’s never met his half-brother: “I want to go back to Saudi Arabia, of course I do. I want my children to be together.

  “I thought I’d get government approval for my marriage in a few months and I’d be back, but it’s now been five years. That’s being an activist in my country. Welcome to my life. Welcome to Saudi Arabia.”

• Huffington Post - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/lan-anh-vu/how-i-got-there-manal-als_b_12650652.html

  How I Got There: Manal al-Sharif

  By Lan Anh Vu
  2016-10-26-1477498066-3678894-photo123.JPG

  Manal Al-Sharif is a women’s rights activist from Saudi Arabia who helped start a women’s right to drive campaign in 2011.

  In May 2011, Al-Sharif filmed herself driving a car in Saudi Arabia, where women are prohibited from driving. She posted the video on YouTube, called on women to participate in a Women2Drive campaign on June 17 of that year, the video received nearly 700,000 views in a single day. During a second turn at the wheel, she was imprisoned for nine days.

  Al-Sharif was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”, and by Arabian Business as the most inspiring Arab woman. She was also awarded the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Al-Sharif was the first Saudi female IT security consultant working for the oil company Saudi Aramco for 10 years. Lan Anh Vu sat down with Al-Sharif at Forum 2000 to hear more about her journey, how she launched the Women2Drive movement and the key lessons she has learned along the way.

  As told to Lan Anh Vu

  Guardianship System in Saudi Arabia
  Under Saudi Arabia’s rigid Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam, women fall under the legal authority of a guardian. No matter what your social status, age, or education, if you are a woman, then you are always treated as a minor and in need of a legal guardian—a man—for your entire life. They say that this law is to protect women.

  Women cannot study, travel, marry, or even receive medical treatment without the consent of their father, husband, or another man in their family. I was taught that as a woman, I am entirely ‘awrah. If I walk down the street, then I have to cover up. Women cannot use their names. For example, if my mother calls to me on the street, then she has to call me by my brother’s name. So, I have been faceless, voiceless, and nameless.

  How I Launched the Women2Drive Movement
  It was May 2011, I complained to a colleague about the harassment that I had to face in trying to find a driver to take me home, even though I have a car and an international driver’s license. In 2009, when I was working in Boston, United States, I got my first driver’s license at the age of 30. When I returned home, however, I could not drive in my own country. There is no official law that bans women from driving, it’s just a societal norm.

  For women in Saudi Arabia, if you want to work, then you need a guardian—a man—to grant you permission to work. But to go to work and return home, you also need a man to drive you. There is no public transport, there is no good taxi system, and the sidewalk isn’t safe for women to walk on. It’s a daily struggle for working women. The cost of hiring a private driver often deters women from entering the labor market. In families that cannot afford a private driver, children as young as 16 serve as drivers, and they are inexperienced. That’s one of the reasons why Saudi Arabia has high traffic fatalities.

  In 2011, amid the explosive Arab Spring, activists used social media to call for action. I was inspired to create a video and called for women with international driving licences to go out and drive on June 17. I recorded a video of myself explaining what the campaign was about, and for the first time, I showed my face. Finally, I had come to light; I had a face, and I existed. I was there to speak up for myself.

  When the video was posted on YouTube, it received nearly 700,000 views in a single day. I started receiving death and rape threats unless I stopped the campaign. The government stayed very quiet. I wanted to know how the authorities would respond on the actual day, June 17, when women went out and drove. So, I asked my brother to come with me, and I drove past a police car. I was arrested, sent to jail, and signed a pledge not to drive again. I didn’t realize until after I was released how many people were inspired by my simple individual story about something that so many of us do every single day. The news embarrassed the government, which felt compelled to release me after Hillary Clinton and human rights organizations called for my release. It inspired so many people around the world and even created a rally that led to my release nine days later.

  On June 17, about a hundred brave women drove despite all of the streets were packed with police cars at every corner. Not even one of those women was arrested. We broke the taboo that day.

  For us, driving is not what we are looking for, but being in the driver’s seat of our only destiny. That means ending guardianship in Saudi Arabia, which means recognizing women as full citizens. I always say that countries that keep women in the backseat will always end up on the wrong side of history.

  2016-10-26-1477446835-3086154-photo43.JPG

  Lessons Learned
  There are always rumors when you speak up in countries like mine. So, you always have to be available. You have to be present on social media and not question the rumors, but simply be there. You have to talk about the things that you do, because unless you keep them busy with what you do, they will keep you busy with what you say. That is what my activism has taught me.

  I found that when you come up with something new, you speak against the status quo, and people come out in three groups. Twenty percent are totally against you and will do everything to bring you down. Another twenty percent is supportive, but the other sixty percent are the silent majority. They are the people who you should go and talk to, because if you motivate those people, then you can create the critical mass that can create change.

  You also need to have a support system. When you speak up, be prepared to pay the price, including losing your job or custody of your children. You could also face a lot of pressure from the family. My family has been totally against it, not because they don’t want me to get rights, but because they are afraid that I would be harmed. But if you keep quiet, then nothing will change and you will always be in the silent majority.

  Women Voting in Saudi Arabia
  In 2015, women in Saudi Arabia were allowed to vote and run in municipal elections for the first time. However, the election was for municipal council members who have few powers. All powerful government positions are appointed by the King. Shura Council members are also appointed, women make up a fifth of the Council and have advisory power on policy with limited legislative powers.

  My Message to the World
  My message to the world is to surrender your ego: try not to think that you are not as fortunate as some people or inferior or not as good as someone else. Everything is possible; we just need to be hopeful and think of the world from a human perspective. The world is so small compared to the universe, so we shouldn’t fight for petty things.

  This interview has been condensed and edited.

  This post is part of “How I Got There” series, which features people around the world speaking about their journeys. What is the path to success? What challenges did people face and how did they overcome them? Lan Anh and her guests answer all these questions and much more. To view the entire series, visit here.

  Follow Lan Anh Vu on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Lananh_Vuova

• Elle - http://www.elleuk.com/life-and-culture/culture/longform/a39012/saudi-arabian-activist-manal-al-sharif-women-drive/

  THE SAUDI WOMAN WHO FOUGHT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHT TO DRIVE
  When the Saudi Arabian government sent Manal al-Sharif to prison for driving a car, the 38-year-old computer scientist became a full-time activist, using her experience to highlight the lack of rights for women in the Middle East. Instrumental in fighting for women's rights, ELLE interviewed her before the driving ban was lifted last week.

  AS TOLD TO HOLLY WILLIAMS
  OCT 2, 2017
  104
  In my country [Saudi Arabia], most women don't know how to drive. They don't have a driving licence, they don't own a car. It's a patriarchal society: women are expected to stay at home and look after the men in their family.

  However, my mother was tough and insisted that all her children were educated. I grew up in Mecca and studied computer science at a college [King Abdulaziz University] in Jeddah. I joined Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, in 2002, and was the only woman working in internet security in the entire country at the time. Women could drive in the company's compound, which was in the desert, so I asked my brother to teach me.

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  Saudi activist Manal Al Sharif, who now lives in Dubai, flashes the sign for victory as she drives her car in the Gulf Emirate city on October 22, 2013, in solidarity with Saudi women preparing to take to the wheel on October 26, defying the Saudi authorities, to campaign women's right to drive in Saudi Arabia | ELLE UK
  GETTY
  I married one of my colleagues and had a son with him, but we divorced after he demanded I stopped working and went back to wearing the niqab [a face-covering veil that leaves the eyes clear]. In 2009, I left Saudi Arabia for a year and went to the US to take part in a work exchange programme. The US felt like another planet: I rented my own apartment, drove my own car and was no longer scared.

  It was a culture shock when I got back to Saudi Arabia. I finally fully understood that I am discriminated against in Saudi Arabia, just because I'm a woman. Colleagues started calling me a trouble- maker. They said, 'These are the laws. You can't change them,' but we can change the laws if we speak up. It was also the time of the Arab Spring [a series of protests across the Middle East], and that made me think change was possible.

  In 2011, I discovered that the 'ban' on women driving was a tradition, not a law. It made me question everything about women's rights in my country. I called for a Women2Drive Day on 17 June that year. Driving a car in public was symbolic: it declared, "We are here, and we are not afraid." More than 120,000 invitations were accepted to the event on Facebook. It was a grassroots movement; we had a lot of support from men and women, as well as resistance.

  Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World Gala, New York, America | ELLE UK
  REX FEATURES
  Before Women2Drive Day, I drove with my brother to test how the authorities would respond. At 2am the next morning, the secret police [the Mabahith] came to my house and arrested me – I was imprisoned for nine days. I was terrified, and shocked by how filthy the prison was; people were completely dehumanised. I didn't think I'd be thrown into prison for something that wasn't even a crime. It was frightening; when a dictatorship sends people to prison in that way – no ruling, no court case – you fear you will be forgotten there.

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  The international press picked up on my arrest, which embarrassed the government. There was a campaign in Italy called I Drive With Manal, and FEMEN activists from Ukraine went topless, holding signs saying, 'Camels for men, cars for women.' It showed solidarity: it was not only about Saudi Arabia, but women all over the world. Even Hillary Clinton sent her support.

  Most importantly, it meant that on Women2Drive Day, about 36 women drove in public. Some drove right past the traffic police and no one was arrested because the whole world was looking at Saudi Arabia. I had become an accidental activist.

  Activists from the women's rights-group Femen bare their breasts while protesting outside the Saudi embassy against the prohibition on women driving in Saudi Arabia on October 28, 2013 in Berlin, Germany | ELLE UK
  GETTY
  After I was arrested for driving, there was a huge campaign to shame me in the local media. I was denounced in Friday sermons [the weekly address in a mosque], which was hard on my family: my father had to listen to a whole sermon about Manal al-Sharif and the prostitutes that want to drive cars. What I didn't know was that my family would be involved in getting me out of jail, and my father had even gone to see our ruler, King Abdullah.

  Manal al-Sharif and United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attend the TIME 100 Gala celebrating TIME'S 100 Most Infuential People In The World at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2012 in New York City | ELLE UK
  I no longer live in Saudi Arabia. I can't. I lost my job when, against my employer's will, I attended a conference about women's rights in Norway. I've since moved to Australia and remarried. The Saudi government won't give my husband and our son a visa, so my two boys, Abdalla and Daniel Hamza [who is still with his father in Saudi Arabia], have never met. Being separated from my child is the most difficult part of not living in my home country.

  Women2Drive activists continued to drive and campaign until 2014. Then I had a court case in an attempt to secure my son's right to visit me, and my lawyer told me to stop talking, so I had to shy away from the public sphere. Now, I'm slowly returning to activism and I know my memoir will be controversial. All the Arabic publishers rejected it, which shows how difficult it is to speak up in the Middle East.

  منال مسعود الشريف
  ✔
  @manal_alsharif
  You want a statement here is one: "Saudi Arabia will never be the same again. The rain begins with a single drop" #Women2Drive ❤️

  4:03 AM - Sep 27, 2017
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  I won't be silenced. The late American activist Rosa Parks and the US civil rights movement have been a constant inspiration. When I was growing up, there was a mentality that we were not to question, discuss or argue, that you should just accept what the authorities tell you. But that is changing: with social media, they cannot do whatever they want and get away with it anymore.

  This originally appear in the July issue of ELLE.

  'Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening' by Manal al-Sharif (Simon & Schuster) is out now

al-Sharif , Manal: DARING TO DRIVE
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
al-Sharif , Manal DARING TO DRIVE Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 6, 13 ISBN: 978-1-4767-9302-3

Inside the walls of segregation and oppression dictating the lives of Saudi women.Arrested and imprisoned for "driving while female" in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, in 2011, Saudi author and activist al-Sharif, formerly an information security expert at the Aramco oil company, chronicles her long path to feminist activism within a deeply conservative Islamic culture. From forced circumcision at age 8, condoned by her largely uneducated parents, to extreme segregation between the sexes in her poor community of Mecca, including separate entrances, covered windows, high walls, and the necessity for a guardian or close male relative to accompany women anywhere and sign any legal documents, the author found emancipation very gradually, a process she compares to the experience of those involved in the American civil rights movement. Indeed, in Saudi Arabia, the dictates of religious culture, rather than law, were and are iron-clad regarding women; al-Sharif required the permission of her father to pursue everything from education at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah (considered a scandalously "liberal, progressive city") to her first job at Aramco (the only IT woman employed during her 10 years there) to marriage. The author's decision to drive emerged from a long frustration with getting around via hired drivers and costly taxis, as all Saudi women were consigned to do: in a kind of perverse logic, al-Sharif had bought a car for her hired driver to use. Yet after a liberating work trip in America, where she got an actual license, she convinced her brother to help her drive and sympathetic women friends to video the great moment behind the wheel, which led to her arrest and harassment by the religious police. Ultimately, al-Sharif's appalling conclusion is that, in her country, "if you want to race with men, you'd have to do it with your hands and legs cut off." An intimate and powerful book from what is hopefully only the first of many Saudi voices to speak out.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"al-Sharif , Manal: DARING TO DRIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668468/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a1e6149. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668468

Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening
Laura Chanoux
Booklist. 113.18 (May 15, 2017): p2.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening. By Manal Al-Sharif. June 2017.304p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781476793023). 320.082.

In 2011, Manal Al-Sharif was arrested and jailed for driving a car in Khobar, Saudi Arabia. Her imprisonment attracted international attention to the country's restrictions on women. Manal's memoir chronicles her evolution from a fiercely religious young woman into a champion of women's rights and the face of the Women2Drive movement. Though there is no legal statute barring women from driving, Saudi culture enforces strict customs that force women to rely on hired drivers and male relatives to get around. Without reliable transportation, many women are unable to work, run basic errands, or even seek medical attention in emergencies. After her arrest, Manal was slandered in the national press, received death threats, and was denounced by religious leaders. In addition to her driving, Manal's experiences as a young woman highlight the many other barriers for women, such as the requirement to have a male guardian's permission for most decisions. Her memoir is in Saudi Arabia and the challenges of seeking major social change.--Laura Chanoux

YA; Young adults will likely appreciate Manal's perspective and insight into Saudi culture and women's rights. LC.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chanoux, Laura. "Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 2. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084661/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26260e39. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084661

Daring to drive
Sarah McCraw Crow
BookPage. (June 2017): p26.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
Manal al-Sharif's memoir Daring to Drive opens with a chilling sentence: "The secret police came for me at two in the morning." Al-Sharif is questioned for hours and then jailed in a filthy, overcrowded women's prison. Her crime: driving her brother's Hyundai, because in Saudi Arabia, women do not drive. Without a male guardian, Saudi women can't rent an apartment, take out a loan, get an ID or register a child for school--and they can never drive, not even to take a sick child to the ER. Saudi religious police enforce a harsh array of laws and customs--women must cover their bodies completely, and unrelated men and women must never mix.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Al-Sharif gives a compelling account of her impoverished, sometimes violent upbringing in Mecca, and of her schooling, where teachers beat students for trivial infractions and religious studies were paramount. She describes the wave of fundamentalist fervor that swept through Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s, imposing increasing limits on women. It is within this rule-bound atmosphere that al-Sharif transforms from fundamentalist teen to a college student studying computer science. She then becomes the first woman in information security at Aramco, the Saudi oil company (originally an American consortium). At Aramco, she interacts with men and lives in Western-style housing. It is her work at Aramco, along with an exchange year in New Hampshire, where she learns to drive and befriends non-Muslims, that leads to her quest to drive in Saudi Arabia and eventually to her calling as a women's rights activist.

Al-Sharif writes with simplicity, and despite its bleak moments, Daring to Drive moves along quickly. She shares some lovely moments, such as her childhood visits to her rural grandparents, whose lives seemed far freer than her own, and the sports she secretly played in college. She shares her hopeful motto--"the rain begins with a single drop"--which also describes a nation that's moving forward by the tiniest of increments.

--SARAH McCRAW CROW

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Crow, Sarah McCraw. "Daring to drive." BookPage, June 2017, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492899148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aab90c71. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492899148

Women2Drive
Persis Karim
The Women's Review of Books. 34.6 (November-December 2017): p18+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
Daring to Drive : A Saudi Woman's Awakening

By Manal al-Sharif

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017, 289 pp., $26.00, hardcover

While the Arab Spring of 2011 is long behind us, and it delivered far less than many across the region hoped for, it is hard to forget the energy and courage of the individuals who sparked a movement that spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East. In a manner of months, millions mobilized on the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Damascus, and Sana'a to challenge some of the most repressive and long-standing dictatorships in the region. The images of people, especially young people, flooding the streets played nightly on television and social media. But the instrumental role that women played in many of those movements was often pushed aside by the revolutionary fervor that called for regime change.

However, one quiet revolt, initiated and led by women, fought for something more basic than a change of leadership: the right to drive a car. For Manal al-Sharif, the Saudi woman at the heart of the campaign to challenge the kingdom's prohibition on women's driving, the Arab Spring was fundamentally a struggle for women's freedom.

Daring to Drive documents al-Sharif's role in the 2011 women2drive campaign. Even more, it portrays the complexity of Saudi legal and cultural restrictions, which undermine women in everyday life through the institution of mahram: male guardianship. Part memoir and part manifesto, Daring to Drive provides a rare glimpse into a society about which most Americans know very little; our images are limited to two tropes: individual Saudis as the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks; and periodic news photos of male Saudi leaders in traditional dress standing next to US presidents and their (unveiled) wives. Rarely do these images include Saudi women. We do not hear them speak or understand their stories.

I had the opportunity to work with al-Sharif during the proposal phase of her book. Initially, she conceived of it as a way to bring international attention to Saudi women's struggle to do something women elsewhere take for granted: drive a car. The book she has written, however, is far more developed and wide-ranging; it not only documents her daring act of driving, but also the abuses heaped on females, including being unable to do nearly anything without the consent of a male guardian. For Saudi women, driving represents far more than simply taking the wheel of a car. Women must obtain the permission of a male relative to go anywhere--school, work, shopping, whom to marry, and any kind of travel. Because women are forbidden to drive, they must rely on either a male relative or a hired male driver to transport them. "It is an amazing contradiction," writes al-Sharif:

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 males
and females cannot sit together; that 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.
Al-Sharif dispels the myth of Saudi Arabia as a land of wealthy sheiks and hidden women through her detailed narrative about her life and that of her atypical family. Her parents, both illiterate and poor, met during the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Her mother was from Libya, and her father was a taxi driver who shuttled pilgrims from around the world to and from the holy sites of Mecca. They were far from stereotypical rich Saudis who have so much money they can travel and shop abroad in the most exclusive shopping malls of Europe and the US. On the contrary, her family struggled economically, and al-Sharif often went without the things her peers had--adequate food, books, and many everyday comforts such as adequate housing. The family was ostracized because her father had married outside his tribe and culture: in Saudi Arabia, even those from other Muslim and Arab countries are seen as outsiders, regardless of how long they have lived there. Al-Sharif describes a childhood that was full of depravity and hardship, including regular beatings at the hands of her parents and teachers, and a traumatic circumcision that left her with psychological and physical scars. (In an email to me after the book came out, she wrote that she hadn't thought about the circumcision for many years, until she started writing.)

Perhaps because of her poverty and marginalization, al-Sharif as a young girl was determined not to be left out or left behind. She became a passionate lover of reading, full of curiosity about the world. Trips to visit her mother's family in Egypt showed her an alternative to the strict Saudi-style Salafi Islam. But at the age of thirteen, as a result of her education and constant radical preaching on TV, she started to change, she writes, from a "moderately observant Muslim into a radical Islamist." After the 1979 revolution in Iran and the attack, that same year, on the Grand Mosque in Mecca by insurgents who wanted to overthrow the House of Saud, Saudi religious restrictions and the trend toward fundamentalism throughout the region intensified. "Religious sermons and leaflets were distributed for free in common gathering places," writes al-Sharif. She began to feel judgmental of women who did not follow the rules of veiling and fasting, and she participated in "disavowals," in which she and her peers "express[ed] our hate and enmity" toward "infidels."

As she grew more devout, she chose to wear the niqab (a full-body covering, including the face, with slits for the eyes). At the same time, however, she was performing well in school and wanted to attend university, but because she had witnessed her father's protest at her sister Muna's decision to attend the College of Medicine, a mixed university, she chose instead to attend King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah (a women's university). There, she was exposed to a variety of behaviors, customs and cultures, but "nothing did more to change my ideas and convictions than the advent of the Internet, and later, social media," al-Sharif writes. Ultimately, it was on the internet that she read articles that challenged her beliefs and her country's "extremist" form of Islam.

After al-Sharif graduated with a degree in computer science, she found a job at ARAMCO, the Saudi oil company (formerly the Arabian American oil company, which had been a majority American-owned company until the 1980s). While working and living on the ARAMCO compound, which was a sort of American colony, she enjoyed the same freedoms as the American and international workers. Men and women worked together. And it was on the compound that she bought a car and learned to drive. Women could drive inside the compound, but not on Saudi roads: for errands or family visits offsite, she had to hire a male driver.

These contradictions--her freedoms as an ARAMCO employee, her ability to drive on company property but not in her own country--finally became too much. Al-Sharif became an "accidental activist" after an incident in which she found herself in Khobar City at dusk after a doctor's appointment, without a driver to take her home. As she waited for a driver, men yelled at her, calling her "whore" and "prostitute." The next day she told a male colleague about the harassment, and he informed her that, technically, there was no law prohibiting women from driving--it was simply culture and custom.

After the conversation with her co-worker, al-Sharif made an impulsive but important, life-changing decision: she would get behind the wheel of her car and "dare to drive." Within days of her decision she saw a Facebook event called "We are driving May 17th," organized by a young woman named Bahiya. She contacted the woman and asked if she could be added as an administrator. Because she had witnessed the use of social media, and Facebook in particular, in the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, al-Sharif decided that she too would use these platforms to organize a much larger driving protest. On the advice of a friend, she created a Twitter account (her handle was @Women2Drive) and almost immediately began to connect with some of the more than 2.4 million Twitter users.

"When social media began to flourish during the Arab Spring of 2011," she writes, "I found myself in possession of a voice--a miraculous thing in a country where women are almost never heard." In her Twitter profile, she wrote "We call on all Saudi women to drive on June 17." After organizing day and night to get women to commit to driving on that day, she decided to make an informational video for Women2Drive in preparation for the June 17 action. Although she was careful not to call it a protest, on May 17, she got behind the wheel. She did not hide her face, and she spoke her entire name in the video. She filmed herself driving, calmly stating, "We are your sisters, your mothers, your daughters. We expect your support, and now we're giving you the chance to show it." Her final words were, "The whole story: that we will just drive."

Al-Sharif's daring first step of filming herself driving and posting it on YouTube got her more than 120,000 views on the first day. Many of the reactions to the video were positive, but many more were critical, harsh, angry, threatening, even, and many suggested that al-Sharif was under the influence of foreigners. Two days later, she was arrested and jailed. She quickly became known around the world through news coverage of the Arab Spring and the social media campaign to free her, which reached international news outlets. Finally, with immense international pressure, including from human rights organizations, after eleven days, al-Sharif was freed. The June 17 event, however, did not take place.

Like the other activists who risked so much during the Arab Spring, al-Sharif paid a high price. She was shunned at her job, and eventually told to keep quiet. But the final threat to her job at ARAMCO came when she was invited to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum, after she had been informed that she would receive the 2012 Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. She was told that if she went to Oslo, she would lose her job. Yet, she felt she had to speak out. Her speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum went viral on YouTube, but within her own country, her success had turned her into an "enemy of Saudi Arabia and a traitor to Islam," she explains. Due to the threats and fears for her safety, she soon realized she had no choice but to leave Saudi Arabia. She went to Dubai with the man she would eventually marry, a Brazilian consultant to ARAMCO, whom she had met just before she left her job. Today, al-Sharif lives in Australia. Because she married a non-Saudi, she cannot reside in her country, and she sees her Saudi-born son from her first marriage, Aboudi, only during short visits.

Al-Sharif showed bravery and resilience in speaking out about her country and its religious practices, which harm half the population. In Daring to Drive, she shares a powerful story of her awakening as a Saudi and an activist, advocating for women's rights to tell their own stories and determine their own fates.

Reviewed by Persis Karim

Persis Karim is a professor of Comparative and World Literature and the director of the newly established Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature and a poet. More information at: www.persiskarim.com.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Karim, Persis. "Women2Drive." The Women's Review of Books, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 18+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522044229/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8bc48e2. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A522044229

"al-Sharif , Manal: DARING TO DRIVE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668468/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4a1e6149. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. Chanoux, Laura. "Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 2. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084661/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26260e39. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. Crow, Sarah McCraw. "Daring to drive." BookPage, June 2017, p. 26. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492899148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=aab90c71. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018. Karim, Persis. "Women2Drive." The Women's Review of Books, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 18+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522044229/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8bc48e2. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.

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  https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/97904905/review-daring-to-drive-by-manal-alsharif
  Word count: 537

  Review: Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif
  2
  Author Manal Al-Sharif
  Author Manal Al-Sharif

  Manal Al-Sharif had a driver's license, obtained while working in the US. She even owned a car, the purple Cadillac she piloted around the confines of the massive Saudi oil company where she was a computer engineer. But outside its gates, she was forbidden to drive.

  This, the divorced mother of a young son discovered, was not because the traffic code forbade driving by women, but because Saudi religious custom did. (Saudi King Salman has lifted the ban, effective next June.)

  Enforcing this and many other restrictions on women was a network of agencies including Saudi Arabia's notorious religious police. When Al-Sharif decided not only to drive in public but to challenge this enforcement by publicising her action on social media, its consequences went far beyond those she'd envisaged. While not the first Saudi woman to drive in public, she had built an international social media movement around the issue, was jailed for nine days in appalling conditions, and lost her job.

  Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif.
  supplied
  Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif.

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  It's an engrossing story, tautly written and Al-Sharif, now living in Australia, acknowledges her debt to ghostwriter Lyric Winik, "my fifth collaborator in three years when I had all but given up the hope of finding the right writer". Winik, she says, ploughed through a mountain of material including speeches, videos and more than 1000 pages of interview transcripts inherited from her predecessors to create this narrative.

  This is more than an insight into the writing process. It reinforces an impression conveyed by Sharif's story itself – that she is a difficult and inflexible person – qualities which lay at the heart of her teenage religious fanaticism as much as did the claustrophobic religious education to which she attributes it. Such was her radicalism that she alienated friends and family, even destroying their possessions – burning her brother's music tapes and the Italian magazines her mother used to sew clothes for her daughters, for example.

  Yet by the time she reached university, Al-Sharif's ferocious defence of religious restrictions was gradually eroding. Secretly listening to her brother's music; joining internet chat rooms and visiting forbidden websites; and even smuggling a forbidden mobile phone with camera into Saudi Arabia from Bahrain – her life became a mass of contradictions. Her railing against such restrictions culminated in her driving protest, which appears not so much an act of bravery as one of frustration.

  As well as a lively and entertaining story, this highly personal and revealing memoir of Al-Sharif's upbringing is an enlightening, even extraordinary, look at the full extent of the restrictions Saudi Arabian women face. She draws back a curtain on this closed society, providing insights into a society in which technological advances sit within a cruelly restrictive and patriarchal culture reminiscent of the Dark Ages.

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