My town house was not in the holy city of Mecca, my childhood home of twisted streets and thronging pilgrims, off-limits to all non-Muslims. Nor was it set amid the gleaming towers and sky bridges of the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, high on a desert plateau. It was tucked in perhaps the most Western enclave in the entire kingdom, the pristine Aramco (Saudi Arabian Oil Company) compound in the Eastern Province, originally designed by Americans working for John D. Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil, which had helped found Aramco. Today, Aramco is the Saudi state oil company and the world’s largest daily exporter of oil, sitting atop 260 billion barrels of petroleum reserves. It is also the world’s wealthiest company, with a net worth estimated as high as $2.5 trillion. And it was my employer. When the Americans sold Aramco to the Saudis in the 1970s and 1980s, part of the agreement required the Saudis to continue to employ women.
The Aramco compound has long been a world unto itself. With lush green golf courses, lawns, palm trees, parks, and swimming pools, it looks very much like a perfect Southern California town. Inside the gates of Aramco, Saudi rules do not apply. Men and women mix together. Women do not have to be veiled or covered. We celebrated holidays like Halloween, when everyone dresses up in costumes. And unlike every other place in Saudi Arabia, inside the Aramco compound, women can drive. There are no prohibitions, no restrictions. They simply slip behind the wheel and start the engine. And there are protections. Not even the local city police or the Saudi religious police are allowed to venture onto Aramco-controlled land. Aramco has its own security and fire departments. It handles its matters internally, like a separate, sovereign state inside the Saudi kingdom.
But the Saudi secret police, I learned that night, could still enter.
I turned to face the sliding glass doors at the edge of my living room. Unlike the traditional Saudi way of covering one’s house the way most families cover their women, I have never liked curtains. I always wanted the light streaming in. Now one of the men stood with his face pressed against the bare glass, his damp breath spreading like fog before the dry desert air sucked it back up again. He said nothing, and he did not move. Only his eyes slowly scanned my room. That night, he did not move from that glass door, did not release his face the entire time. Like the others, he was dressed in civilian clothes. That, however, is the hallmark of the secret police. They do not wear uniforms. They do not even identify themselves as police. They have other jobs, other identities. Yet they are woven through society at every level, and their sole purpose is to inform. They are employed by the kingdom to monitor citizens and to enforce the rules.
From behind the door, my brother began pushing back. “Don’t you realize it’s two in the morning? People are asleep here. Besides, we’ve only just come from the Thuqbah traffic police station.” He wanted to imply that the matter had already been resolved. But there was no reply.
My brother paused and then raised his voice a little louder. “Who are you people? Unless you have an arrest warrant, we won’t leave. If you want something, come back in the morning. You don’t show up in the middle of the night and talk about bringing us to the police.”
This was an understatement. In Saudi Arabia, our legal code is referred to not as “laws,” which devout Saudi Muslims believe can be given only by Allah; we use another word that translates into English roughly as “system.” The system says that no one can be arrested for a minor crime between the hours of sunset and sunrise. The same system also says that you cannot arrest anyone without a statement from a judge, unless the authorities consider you a threat to national security. But the men outside said nothing. After a few minutes had passed, they started knocking again.
I was standing now in my living room, wearing sweatpants and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. I had nowhere else to go. It was a small house: a living room, a tiny galley kitchen, one bedroom, and a balcony, all of 750 square feet. Enough for my five-year-old son and me. I was divorced; under Saudi rules, without a husband, my father was my official male guardian. I could not work, attend school, or travel without his permission. But he lived in Jeddah, on the other side of the country.
I didn’t know if the men could force open the door and come in and take me. I still didn’t even know exactly who “they” were, but I realized I had to tell someone what was happening. I dialed a female Saudi journalist. I’d reached out to her when I’d first become interested in proving that women could legally drive. Even though it was the middle of the night, she answered the phone and told me she’d get me a lawyer. She gave me the number the lawyer would be calling me from. A few minutes later my phone rang. A woman named Suad al-Shammari, who identified herself as a lawyer, was on the line. The first thing she told me was to record our phone call, so I recorded the call with my iPhone as we spoke.
“Who are they?” she asked. “Are they religious police? Representatives from the traffic police? Do they have any kind of warrant?”
I told her that I didn’t know. “They’re still outside knocking,” I said.
Suad talked with me for nearly twenty minutes. She told me that unless these men were from the national security division and I was wanted as a terrorist, they weren’t allowed to come in the middle of the night and tell me to leave my home. She suggested I call the local police and ask if a warrant had been issued for my arrest. If there was no warrant, I should not go with them. “Send them away,” she said. “Don’t leave with them.” So, as I listened to the men rapping their fists against my front door, I dialed 999 to speak with the police. A man on the other end of the line assured me there was no warrant for my arrest.
Almost as soon as I hung up, my phone rang again. This call was from Kholoud, a women’s rights activist, who had already been tweeting about my arrest the previous afternoon. In the confusion, I didn’t know that at that very moment one of my colleagues from Aramco, Omar al-Johani, was hiding behind a bush very close to my house. He had read Kholoud’s tweets about my arrest and knew the street where I lived. He drove around until he saw the cars and the security guards. Now he was tweeting about the men surrounding my door. Kholoud was following him online. “Manal,” she said calmly, “I want you to do something. I want you to go with these guys. It will bring them shame if we announce that they’ve taken you from your house in the middle of the night. This is a violation of your rights. We should expose them.”
I didn’t like the idea of going anywhere with these people. I didn’t want to leave my son and I still didn’t know exactly who was outside. But I kept thinking about what Kholoud had said. I decided to pray. I went upstairs. In the hallway leading to my small bedroom. I performed two raka’as (the full cycle of an Islamic prayer, spoken while standing, sitting, and prostrating) and asked for God to show me the way. It was now nearly four in the morning. In a little over an hour the sky would be streaked with the first hint of desert sun. I felt something inside me say, “Go, Manal. You’ll be okay.”