The first formal protest of the ban on women driving occurred in 1990 during the run-up to the Gulf War, about four months after Iraq invaded Kuwait. All through that autumn, American soldiers had been arriving in Saudi Arabia, by the tens of thousands, to prepare for Operation Desert Shield, the invasion that would drive Saddam Hussein’s forces back to Baghdad.
On November 6, 1990, as Saudi Arabia simmered with unease, forty-seven women defied the ban on driving. For thirty minutes, they lined up their cars in a convoy and drove around the capital city, Riyadh, until the religious police caught up with them and all forty-seven were arrested. Their goal had been to demonstrate to Saudi society that while they were women, they were competent enough to sit behind the wheel of a car.
I had heard about these women when I was eleven years old. They were depicted as sexually loose, un-Islamic, pro-Western women who danced in the streets with the American soldiers without any regard for covering their hair with hijabs. I remembered asking questions about these women, but the adults around me didn’t want to discuss them. Eventually, people began to forget. In my twenties, when I thought about these women, it was only scorn I felt. Having absorbed the government’s version of the story, I believed that they and their protest and the trouble they had caused were why my generation was not allowed to drive. And in fact the cultural taboo against driving was strengthened because of their protest. Their act of dissent had in a sense proven true the dire warnings about what would happen should women drive. But there is another side to the story.
For these forty-seven women, known as the “women drivers,” those thirty minutes have stalked them for the rest of their lives. Immediately following the incident, all the women and their husbands were banned from foreign travel for a year. Those who held government jobs were fired. And they became targets of religious condemnation: in Friday sermons at mosques around the country, their names were read aloud, and they were denounced as immoral vixens, boldly seeking to destroy Saudi society. The late journalist and photographer Saleh Al-Azzaz, who documented this protest, was arrested, jailed, and tortured.
For the women, additional harassment and humiliation followed. In 2008, one told an American National Public Radio (NPR) interviewer that it was impossible to be promoted. No matter how good a job she did, she would forever be that “woman driver.”
But that protest had happened a long time ago; I was barely a schoolgirl then. The world was changing, and I believed Saudi Arabia also was ready to change. So, I decided that for my next birthday, I would do the unthinkable. I would get behind the wheel of a car, outside the Aramco compound, and dare to drive.
Inside Saudi Arabia, there had never been complete unanimity on the subject of women and driving. The Saudi royal family and government officials have argued that Saudi society, not the government, should decide whether it is right for women to drive. After the 1990 protest, the Ministry of the Interior did issue a statement (although not a specific traffic rule) that “driving while female was illegal and subject to a fine.” (The Ministry of the Interior is also not a legislative entity, and a driving ban should technically be issued by a legislative body.) That statement was based on the religious fatwa issued by Grand Mufti Bin Baz immediately after the November 6 protest, in which he called these women morally corrupt and underscored that it was haram for women to drive. But online I found other “grand Islamic scholars,” colleagues of Bin Baz, who questioned the decision to issue a fatwa against driving. One scholar, Al Albani, even suggested that in Muhammad’s (PBUH) time women could ride a donkey, so why not a car? Cars provided more protection for women.
I was not the only Saudi woman growing desperate to drive. Only days after my humiliating walk along the side of the road, a friend invited me to join a Facebook event called “We are driving May 17th.” The event was being organized by a young woman named Bahiya. I discovered that I knew her aunt. I accepted the invitation immediately and asked if I could be added as an administrator. Facebook was the chief means of organizing the near daily protests in Egypt and was playing a role in Tunisia and Libya as well. All of us had seen how a Facebook event and post could pick a date and issue a call for action. I wanted this to be a big event, well beyond forty-seven female drivers.
When I told one of my friends about the event, his response was, “Manal, that’s only about a month away. It’s too soon. Change the date.” So we did. We pushed it out to June 17, which happened by accident to be a Friday—most of the Arab Spring gatherings had been on Fridays as well. The friend also advised me to get on Twitter. Up until now, I had been focused on Facebook. It was how I had made and kept up with American friends. But Facebook is not big in Saudi Arabia—only about one-third of Facebook accounts in Saudi Arabia belong to women, and most women cannot post using their own photos or use their real names online. If it is forbidden to show your face in public on a sidewalk, how can you show it in an electronic gathering place? In 2011, Twitter was the preferred form of social media for Saudis. Saudi Arabia had more than 5 million Twitter accounts and about 2.4 million active Twitter users, defined as people who log in at least once a month. Twitter was the way to get our message out, my friend explained. So I learned to use Twitter.
I registered my account under the handle @Women2Drive, uploaded a photo that one of our supporters had designed, and in the profile bio, I wrote, “We call on all Saudi women to drive on June 17.”
Within days, @Women2Drive had thousands of followers.