I composed myself, walked downstairs, and opened the door. Not everyone outside was a stranger. I recognized one man, Fahad, as an Aramco official; he held up his company ID card as proof. He started speaking to me but the whole time his eyes and his face were turned away, so that he was looking only at my brother. “We just need you to come to the Dhahran police station,” he said. “You’ll sign some papers and then be released. I am a colleague, so you can trust me. I will be there with you, I will not leave you. I will bring you back.”
I didn’t trust him. I called Aramco security. The man on the other end assured me, “This guy works for us. He will escort you to the police station.” My brother insisted upon accompanying me as well, although all the men outside wanted me to go alone, without him, which should have convinced me that something was wrong. In Saudi society, a woman needs her official guardian (usually her father or husband) or a mahram—a close male family relative whom she cannot marry, such as a father, brother, uncle, or even a son—to accompany her on any official business.
Even a woman in labor will not be admitted into a hospital without her guardian or at least a mahram. Police cannot enter a home during a robbery, and firefighters are forbidden from entering a home during a fire or medical emergency if a woman is inside but does not have a mahram present. In 2014, Amna Bawazeer died on the campus of King Saud University when school officials refused to allow male paramedics to enter the female-only school after Amna collapsed from a heart ailment. The same story repeated itself in 2016 at Qaseem University when male paramedics were not allowed on campus to treat a female student, Dhuha Almane, who subsequently died. It is not a stretch to say that death is preferable to violating the strict code of guardianship and mahrams.
I went back inside and put on my abaya, the swirling black cloak that covered my entire body, except for my hands and the tips of my feet, as well as a hijab, a head scarf, that covered my hair, my ears, and my neck, everything except my face. Then I made one last phone call to Atika Shubert, a female reporter for CNN based in London, who had interviewed me a week earlier. Atika promised that she’d put the news that I’d been taken from my home on CNN’s international website. If she did that, I trusted that I would not simply disappear.
I walked out holding my brother’s arm, I hadn’t even looked at my sleeping little boy or kissed him goodbye. I wanted to believe that this was a formality, that I’d be back in time to wake him, feed him breakfast, get him to school, and then head to work. At most, I told myself, I would only be gone a couple of hours. At this time of night, it was less than ten minutes from the Aramco compound to the Dhahran police station.
As soon as I stepped outside I counted the people there. There were nine of them: seven men, two women, and five cars. Once I passed through the doorway, the two women—female Aramco guards, fully covered except for a small slit for their eyes—muscled in beside me. I knew they worked for Aramco because over their abayas they were wearing the company’s standard issue khaki-colored coats with a large badge on the chest. They were most likely part of the contingent of female guards who manned the checkpoint at the women’s gate into the compound. When veiled women entered Aramco, these guards were the ones who uncovered their faces to verify the women’s identities. They could gaze upon any other woman’s face, know her identity, without ever revealing their own.
They walked uncomfortably close, as if they were ready to grab me and hold me down if I tried to escape. I got into the back of one of the cars—not a police car but an Aramco company car. The women didn’t follow me in. I was alone, except for two men. My brother sat in the front, and Fahad, the Aramco official, drove. No one spoke. I looked out the window at the blackness, felt the car hum along the road. Five minutes passed, then ten. I could make out none of the familiar landmarks in Dhahran. We were not heading into the city. We were driving east. Everything else left my mind except for one question: “Where are you taking us?”
I never set out to be an activist. I was a religious girl, born and raised in Mecca. I started covering myself with abayas and niqabs before it was even required, simply because I wanted to emulate and please my religious teachers. And I believed in a highly fundamentalist version of Islam. For years, I melted my brother’s pop music cassette tapes in the oven because in fundamentalist Islam, music is considered haram, meaning forbidden. The first time I ever heard a song, I was twenty years old. It was the Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely,” and I still remember almost every word.
The only thing I did at a young age that was somewhat rebellious was to get a job. I had a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and I was hired by Aramco as an information security specialist. I got married young, at age twenty-four, and had a son. Then I got divorced, which is fairly common; some published statistics estimate that the divorce rate inside Saudi Arabia is as high as sixty percent. Both my parents were divorced when they married. But once I turned thirty, I started to do daring things on my birthdays. On my thirtieth birthday, I was working in the United States, in New Hampshire, and I went skydiving. The next year, I bought a ticket to Puerto Rico and spent thirty-six hours traveling alone. And back in Saudi Arabia in 2011, when I turned thirty-two, I decided that I would start driving.
I learned the proper rules of driving when I was working and living in the States—I got a New Hampshire and then a Massachusetts driver’s license. But in Saudi Arabia, I never got behind the wheel, except inside the Aramco compound. Saudi women rely on drivers, usually foreign men, some of whom have never taken a driving test or had any kind of professional instruction, to ferry them from place to place. We are at their mercy. Some families are wealthy enough to employ their own personal driver, but many women rely on an informal network of men with cars who illegally transport female passengers. Women carry lists of these private drivers in their phones, and we call and call until we find one who’s available. Or we take a taxi—taxis and their drivers are at least registered and licensed by the traffic police—but the taxis are old and many of the men who operate them don’t bathe, so the stench is often overwhelming. My friends would text me if they found a clean taxi driver, and I would text them.