Daring to Drive: Book Review

This was such a fascinating book. I love reading a book which really opens up even part of a new culture. I learnt so much about Saudi Arabia, the way Saudis practice their faith, the roles of men and women among many other things. Reading it made me very happy not to be a woman living in Saudi Arabia!

Manal Al Sharif tells her life story running up to her decision to get behind the wheel and challenge the unwritten but loudly spoken rule that women must not drive. The decision caused uproar in the Kingdom and personally for Manal too. But as she said once in an interview, The rain begins with a single drop.

Manal Al Sharif:

At the start of December, academics from Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working with a retired professor from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, presented a graphic report warning Shoura members that if women were allowed to drive, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce would “surge.” The report also stated that if women were allowed to drive, “within ten years, there would be no more virgins” in Saudi Arabia. It cited the “moral decline” that has occurred in other Muslim countries where women drive.

****

Some published statistics estimate that the divorce rate inside Saudi Arabia is as high as sixty percent.

****

We couldn’t believe that there were places in the world where kids had their own rooms like we saw in the movies. Private space was largely unheard of. If you fought with a sister or brother, you couldn’t go off to your own room and close the door. If I wanted to be by myself, I might go to the balcony. When I got a little older, I had a portable, plastic storage closet. I used to put it together in the middle of the sitting room and cover the top with sheets to make a curtain, so I would have part of the room for myself. I could write and read and be by myself, until my brother would come along and demolish it.

****

The widespread illiteracy of our parents and the manner in which we were taught—dictation without discussion, memorizing and repeating without analysis or criticism—molded and subjugated us in such a way that we became domesticated and tame. We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had imposed upon us.

****

During the daytime, it was the genies we feared, although we were too scared to utter the word genie, and so we would say “Bismillah” instead. (Bismillah means “in God’s name.” We say it before starting anything, from a meal to a project. Saying “Bismillah” will cause any genie coming your way to vanish.) As children, we were told that genies would possess you if you failed to say your prayers before performing any of a host of daily tasks: using the bathroom, looking in the mirror, getting dressed or undressed. Forgetting to pray before changing clothes meant that angels might see your aura. We needed to pray before we ate, before we started a new class in school, a new job, or a new day. There were prayers for starting a trip, even a prayer for taking an airplane or getting into a car. All these prayers were designed to protect us from the genies, who were as real to us as our own families. The genies lived in their own genie cities, had their own tribes, and had names, wives, and children. Where angels are made of light, genies are made of fire, and humans of mud, or so we are told in the K.

Many women, including young women, believe that they are possessed by genies. Some even pay money to have the bad genies removed from their bodies, and countless others worry about being given the evil eye and thus having their blessings destroyed. I have close friends who did not share the news that they were getting married, that they were pregnant, or that they were building a new home until after the fact, out of fear of being cursed with the evil eye. I have learned never to say, “Oh, you have a beautiful child” to certain friends, because if anything ever happened to the child, I would immediately be blamed for having given it the evil eye. Women become conditioned to say only the bad things, to complain about their lives, for fear of otherwise inviting the evil eye, and create rituals and obsessions to avoid it. For example, after you have spent the day at someone’s home, your hostess might drink the last dregs of your coffee from your cup, believing that it will offer protection in case you have coveted anything while you were there. A bad grade on an exam, a food stain on an expensive leather purse—anything at all—can be blamed on someone else’s evil eye.