It was afternoon and because it was May, it was neither hot nor cold. Springtime in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia is quite beautiful. In the green, watered spaces, flowers were blooming. I knew that it was around 2:00 p.m., because I saw all the government workers streaming out of their offices at the end of their workday. It was crowded; we were just another car joining the commuter stream. We had vanished by blending in.
Usually when I’m riding in the car, I read a book. I am a voracious reader. I keep a book beside my bed on the nightstand, in my office, even in the bathroom. But I didn’t have a book then. So, as the man from the prison drove, I started reading whatever I could see out of the car windows. I read the names of the shops and stores along the streets; I read the billboards, the road signs. I read while we were entering Dammam, the city where I had lived for four years when I was married. I was still reading signs when we arrived at one that read Dammam Central Prison. A solid concrete wall and a checkpoint loomed before us. I was being sent to jail.
They had taken me from my house at 4:00 a.m., without warning, without allowing me to call a lawyer, without a warrant. I had begged the men who had interrogated me to let me call my son, but they didn’t allow me to call anyone. It was as if I had disappeared. And they could detain me indefinitely. It was done. There are people in jail in Saudi Arabia, even women, who have languished there for years without a trial or a sentence.
I started yelling at the two men in the front seat. “Where are you taking me? Sir, please talk to me, where are you taking me? It’s my right to know where you are taking me.”
They remained silent.
“You can’t just do this, I am not a criminal!” I screamed. “How could you take me to jail without papers, without a ruling, without being sentenced in the court?”
Not a word. I looked at Halimah. “Halimah, say something, do something,” I pleaded. But she just clutched at her bag balanced on her knees, not making a sound.
If any of them had shouted back at me, that would have been more merciful. I had never been to jail. All I could think was that if I went in there, I would never get out. I thought about my son. Would I ever see him again? I thought about my job, knowing that after this, I would surely lose it—a job that I had fought so hard to get and keep. I was the only woman working among so many men, not just working beside them but proving that I was better than them. I thought about the scandal that being jailed would bring to my family.
The car stopped. The driver rolled down his window and asked the security guard where the women’s prison was.
I tried to think. I had to get a message through to Halimah. When I had left the house in such a rush, I hadn’t checked my bag. I didn’t even have a pen or paper to write on. But then I realized that I did have a piece of paper in my bag. I had been planning to go to apply for a driver’s license with one of the female activists, but we couldn’t find a taxi to take us to the licensing office. Instead, I had gone off driving on the streets with my brother after work. When I ended up at the Thuqbah police station and one of the policemen had accused me of driving without a Saudi license, I had pulled out the paper and said, “This is my application. Give me my driver’s license.” Now, ironically, those papers were still sitting in my bag. I just needed a pen. I dug around and the only thing I had was an eyebrow pencil. It was good enough. I wrote on the driver’s license application, “Help. Get me Muneera’s number from my phone.” Muneera is my sister-in-law. As we drove on, I reached over and squeezed Halimah’s hand and showed her the paper. I had to be careful. The men could see us through the rearview mirror. They could hear anything that we said. But I had to get her to read the note.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look at me.
We reached yet another gate that led to a parking lot and a building. But the driver didn’t park in any of the spaces; he drove up and stopped next to the door. The two men left the car and went inside carrying my papers. This was my chance. I had to get in touch with someone. I didn’t know where my brother was, and the only phone number I could remember was my dad’s, but I wouldn’t call him. He did not even know about the campaign for women to drive. But my sister-in-law, I could reach her.
I turned to Halimah. This time, I reached out and took hold of both her hands, and said, “Halimah, I need your help. I need to call my family.” I kept talking to her. “Please, Halimah. They are inside. No one will know. I just need to make a call from my phone or send a text message to my sister-in-law. Just so they know where I am. Please.”
Her eyes looked at me through the tiny slit, and she said, “I’m really, really sorry.” Her voice sounded like she was in pain. She said that she did not know they were bringing me here. She had only been told to accompany me so that I would not be alone with two men. But, she said, “I cannot give you your phone.”
I kept pleading with her. “I have a child,” I said. “You have two kids, I have one kid. You know, you understand.”
But she told me that if she gave me my phone, she would be fired. She had instructions that she could not violate. “If I break them,” she said, “I will be in so much trouble. I cannot afford to lose my job.”
I kept begging her the entire time that we waited, but she did not relent. When the men came back, they opened the car door and told me to come with them. I tried to resist. I said, “No, I’m not going with you, I want to call a lawyer. You can’t just put me in jail with no charges.”
But they replied that I was coming with them. If I refused, they said, “We will have to drag you inside by force.”
I dragged my feet the whole way inside to a very big room with an office on one end. The first thing I noticed was the ceramic tile on the floor. It was the exact same black-and-white pattern that had covered the floors of my old school in Mecca. Decades before, when the kingdom built all its government and school buildings, it must have used these tiles on every floor. They might have looked new back then, but now they just looked worn and old.
There were two men at the entrance, sitting on a row of chairs, the kind you see in airport terminals, where the seats are connected. They were holding papers. I was told to go toward the office and wait on a sofa away from the desk. Then they ushered me in.
My papers were handed to a man in a uniform sitting behind the desk. His name, Musaad, had been engraved on a small wooden nameplate. I later learned that he was the deputy head of the prison. The man in charge of the prison was on vacation, which is how I came to be standing in Musaad’s office. He did not cover his head. He had a short beard and a mustache, and when he saw my papers, pure disgust crossed his face. He looked at my papers, then up at me. I started to wonder what those papers said.
“So you’re the infamous Manal al-Sharif,” he said, eyeing me from behind his desk. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you did?”