Saudi women's driving activist Manal al-Sharif is in the U.S. for the launch of her new book, DARING TO DRIVE. She is making appearances and sat down with Terry Gross of Fresh Air. You can link to a podcast of the interview on the right side of the site linked
here.
Below is an article about the interview. The link above also will take you to a book excerpt.
Manal al-Sharif's path to activism began simply enough: In 2011, the
Saudi woman filmed herself driving a car, then uploaded the
video
to YouTube. Ordinarily such a video might not get much notice, but
because it's not socially acceptable for women to drive in Saudi Arabia,
where there is a de facto ban, Sharif's video went viral.
Sharif
describes driving as an act of civil disobedience: "For me, driving —
or the right to drive — is not only about moving from A to B; it's a way
to emancipate women," she says. "It gives them so much liberty. It
makes them independent."
Initially arrested for driving, Sharif
was released when her story elicited outrage from around the world. She
now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her second husband and son.
Though
she is no longer in Saudi Arabia, Sharif remains outspoken about
women's rights: "When I see something wrong, I speak up," she says of
her advocacy on behalf of Saudi women. "It should be the norm, not the
exception." Her new memoir is
Daring to Drive.
Interview Highlights
On the guardianship system for women in Saudi Arabia
We
have the guardianship system and that is the one that imposes a lot of
restrictions on me, as a woman. ... 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 ... for important things like going to school, getting a
job, leaving the country, going to the court, even going to the police
and complaining. They always ask for a man's consent and permission.
On why she decided to advocate for Saudi women's right to drive
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's license, but I couldn't
drive my car. I was paying the installments for this car for five years.
That was very frustrating. I almost got kidnapped once because I
couldn't find a car to take me back home.
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. It was a continuous struggle, and it was very
empowering that I know how to drive. I have a car and I have a driver's
license. When I knew that there is no law, I was thinking, "Well, if
there's no law, so why are not driving?" It was accumulating, it didn't
just happen overnight.
On Saudi women's reliance on foreign drivers
[Private
drivers] get paid around $500 a month. No Saudi would accept this
salary, and no Saudi will be 24/7 available ... to drive you around. ...
[Drivers] work long hours with you, because they drop the kids at
school, they drop you at work, when you need to go for grocery shopping,
all these things — you will not find Saudis accepting these jobs.
The private sector itself in Saudi Arabia, 90 percent of the
people working there are non-Saudis, so also the contradictions here
make me mad, because you don't allow me to mix with Saudis or men in
general all my life, but then you enforce a perfect stranger to be
living in my house, to be driving my own car and have my own phone
number. ...
Most of them don't even know how to drive! My first
driver, I had to teach him how to drive. He didn't even know the signs.
... He didn't know the city. He didn't speak Arabic.
On how her protest helped inspire others to drive
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. She dressed like a boy
and I met her mom and I met her other sister, and they said [the police]
stopped her so many times and they found out she's a girl, and she
would plead with the police officer and explain to him that she doesn't
have anyone. But she continued driving.
She always posted
videos of herself driving, and that was amazing. 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."
Her mom ... kept saying, "Don't stop." Her daughter said, "They stole Mom's life. We'll not allow them to steal my life."
On the hard-line views she encountered as a student
In
the '80s in Saudi Arabia, you were radicalized. 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 on around in the Islamic
world. ... I was brought up in this era or in this time. ... We've been
through this. ... 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. ...
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. I wasn't really happy. The more I
was trying to follow the rules we had been taught, the more miserable I
became.
On undergoing female genital mutilation as a girl
The
one, really, who 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 when they cut one labia and the other one they couldn't
cut, and she was bleeding and she hid in the neighbor's house.
It
was shocking to me that [my] mom, she put us through the same thing.
But the pressure from the society is huge ... that 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 be obedient. ...
I
think the worst was not the pain, the worst is losing trust in the
people you love. ... It's very difficult even to talk about today. ...
They didn't explain to us what was going to happen. ... These things
bother me so much, that we put women through this pain.
