"I Don't Have a Life to Live." Saudi Arabian Girl Explains Life under the Rule of Islam

Manal al-Sharif was 14 when she burned her brother’s Back Street Boys cassettes, then her mother’s fashion magazines. She gave up drawing human figures and reading her prized Agatha Christie novels — forbidden, she had learned, under the puritanical strain of Islam sweeping through her native Saudi Arabia at the time. All kinds of things were forbidden for women and girls, she had also learned: no plucking your bushy eyebrows, no parting your hair fashionably to the side, no revealing your face in public.



The one thing she could not destroy was a plastic bag of family photographs that her mother had stashed in her bedroom. She found them, years later, after her mother had died. There was a photo of herself, in a red dress for Eid; another of her mother, in a calf-length skirt she had stitched herself; another of her dad, barechested, for the hajj.



“I’m so happy she hid them from me,” al-Sharif said the other day, scrolling through the images she had uploaded on her phone. “I thought we didn’t have any.”



Al-Sharif, 38, has undergone a radical change of heart since those Salafi firebrand days. She is now best known for challenging the laws and mores that keep women down in Saudi Arabia, including what she considers the kingdom’s infantilising restrictions on the right of women to drive.



Her first book, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening, published this week by Simon & Schuster, is a memoir of her political coming of age. It is equally a portrait of tumult and tyranny in Saudi Arabia over the last four decades — and the kingdom’s vexing relationship with the United States.



I met al-Sharif in Norway, at a human rights conference in the capital, Oslo, in late May, as the Trump family was visiting her country. Speaking to women in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, Ivanka Trump called the country’s progress on women’s rights “very encouraging,” even as she acknowledged that “there’s still a lot of work to be done.”



Al-Sharif found the appraisal insulting. She pointed to the case of her friend Mariam al-Otaibi, detained since April for her campaign against a policy that requires a woman to obtain the permission of a male guardian to work, study or travel, regardless of how old she is. Al-Sharif wears a blue plastic wristband in support of the campaign to end the guardianship system. “#IAmMyOwnGuardian,” the wristband reads.



“What type of progress in women’s rights?” she said. “I wish she was more specific so I wouldn’t feel insulted. If you don’t want to support us, just stay quiet. Don’t praise. You’re making it worse for us.”



Al-Sharif was born at home in 1979, the second daughter of a Saudi father and a Libyan mother. They lived in a cramped apartment in Mecca, Saudi Arabia’s holiest and most religiously conservative city. Her father drove a taxi. Her mother stitched their clothes from designs she had copied from fashion magazines. There wasn’t always running water. There was a lot of abuse: her father beating her mother, her sister beating her, and later her first husband beating her. Lots and lots of beatings.



Her generation was bound by a rigid form of Islam. She remembers religious leaders coming to lecture on her school’s public address system. Leaflets were passed out in the streets, prescribing what and what not to do.



An elderly aunt who had always worn colourful traditional Saudi gowns suddenly began to cloak herself in a head-to-toe black abaya, because her children told her to. Her mother took down from the bedroom wall a decorative hand-stitched canvas of a woman, bathing. Photos vanished from their apartment.



Being true to that sort of doctrine, as she recalled it, required hating the infidel. “My generation, born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we were all radicalised,” she said. “You give up so much to follow these rules. It gets under your skin.” It left her skin, slowly.



Then there was September 11. She was appalled that the extremist doctrine she grew up in had spurred 19 hijackers — 15 from Saudi Arabia — to kill so many people. She had had enough of the hate. Inside Saudi Arabia, the rules were — and remain — particularly onerous for women.



Al-Sharif needed her father’s permission to enter university; she studied computer science. She needed his permission to apply for a job; she was hired as an information security specialist at Aramco, the Saudi oil company. She needed his permission to travel abroad for a business trip, and to get a passport.