Almost every woman I know has been harassed by a driver. They make comments about our appearance or about conversations they overhear; they demand more money; they touch you inappropriately. Some women have been attacked. I’ve had drivers make all sorts of inappropriate comments and tape my calls when I’ve used my cell phone, even drivers who don’t speak Arabic, thinking maybe they could blackmail or extort me. Then there are the cases of drivers who sexually molest the children they are hired to drive to and from school.
It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man; that forces you to use separate entrances for universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone. Even women who have personal drivers cannot depend on these hired men. Some don’t show up, others disappear entirely. The Saudi men call women “queens,” and say that queens don’t drive. Women often mock this title by saying “The kingdom of one king and millions of queens.” Or they post a photo of Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth driving her Jaguar, saying “Real queens drive their own cars.”
One night in 2011, I had a doctor’s appointment after work in Khobar, outside the Aramco compound. When I left the medical office at nearly 9:00 p.m., I called all the drivers I knew to ask for a ride home, but none was available. They were off-duty, or busy driving other Saudi queens. When the clinic locked its doors, I started making my way down the streets. There were plenty of men in their cars out that night, and they all saw me, walking alone, my face uncovered. (Most Saudi women cover their faces.) It was an invitation for them to harass me, and they did. Some cars whizzed past; others slowed to a crawl. The drivers honked their horns and screamed slurs and cruel names and other vile things. I kept looking straight ahead, but it was terrifying. I called my brother, but his phone was turned off.
One of the cars followed me. There were shops lining the street, but it was night, so they were closed. And they were all set back, with wide parking lots in front. This guy would slowly pull his car into one of the lots. Then he’d lower his window and look at me, as though inviting me to get in. I’d keep walking, and he’d pull into the next parking lot, lower his window, and look at me again. I was so mad. I felt violated, all because I couldn’t find a driver and I couldn’t do what he could: drive myself home. When I passed by what must have been a construction site, I picked up a loose rock from the ground and held it in my hand. As soon as he saw me with the rock, he shot me a furious look and sped off, tires squealing. But I threw it anyway, as hard as I could, toward him and his car. Then I stood there in the street, tears running down my face, crying like a little girl. I’m not a girl. I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m educated, I had a car that I bought and had been making payments on for four years—it was sitting with its stone-cold engine, parked next to my town house—but I still couldn’t stop things like this from happening to me.
In Saudi Arabia, harassment isn’t a criminal offense. The authorities, especially the religious police, always blame the woman. They say she was harassed because of how she looked or because of the way she was walking or because she was wearing perfume. They make you the criminal.
When I got home that night, I poured out my complaints on Facebook: the degradation of having to find a driver, of always worrying about being late, or being left somewhere, of trying to cobble together a patchwork of rides from relatives and drivers whose numbers I hoarded in my phone. I ended my post by promising to drive outside the Aramco compound on my birthday and take videos and upload them to YouTube. David, one of my American friends from New Hampshire, wrote on my Facebook wall “trouble-maker,” and I replied, “no, history-maker.” But even then, I didn’t believe myself. I thought I was bluffing.
Fahad, the Aramco government affairs man, the person who had promised to bring me home, who had told me over and over that we were going to the Dhahran police station, had lied. But I couldn’t call him a liar to his face. Instead, in what I hoped was a calm voice, I asked where we were going. He had said the Dhahran police station, I reminded him.
He brushed off my question, saying, “Yeah, yeah. Well, they waited so long at Dhahran and you didn’t come, so now they’ve asked for you to go to the Khobar police station.” His style was smoother and softer than that of the religious police, who used to carry sticks for beatings and now just scream and yell at women. But the message was the same: it was my fault for not grabbing my bag and my abaya and going straight away with a group of strange, unidentified men at two o’clock in the morning.
Khobar is a sprawling city with almost 1 million residents. Like most newer Saudi cities, it is a collection of skyscrapers and shopping malls, located on what was an ancient port bordering the Persian Gulf, which we call the Arabian Gulf. In the West, it is perhaps best known for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, when a massive bomb hidden inside a tanker truck by extremists killed nineteen American military service members.
The sky was just turning light with the first streaks of pink as we arrived at the station. It was a big, cinder-block building on King Abdullah Road, not far from the waters of the gulf. I had already passed this very same station in my car two days before. That day was the only other time that I had driven on public roads inside the kingdom.
Inside the station, everyone was nice to me at first—even solicitous. They asked my brother and me if they could get us juice or water, maybe some coffee. They apologized for bringing us in so early. “We just need to finish this paperwork,” they said. “We will let you go just after we finish this paperwork.” My brother and I were led into a small room with one window. There was a desk and some chairs and a very large picture of King Abdullah framed and hanging on the wall, looking down at me.
The man from the police station started off by saying that they didn’t want to scare me, and he began with the simplest of questions: “You are Manal al-Sharif?” I nodded. Then he turned to my brother and asked him some questions as well.
It was hard to tell how much time had passed. Eventually, a young man entered and offered me a sandwich and orange juice, but I refused to eat. I tried to cooperate with the questioning as much as I could, hoping that they’d get what they needed and let me go home to my son.