A second later, my phone buzzed, “I’m here outside, wearing a blue top.” It was the woman in jeans, with the ponytail.
We started off talking about conditions for women working at Aramco, but before the hour was over, I summoned my courage and told her about Women2Drive. As soon as I began talking, her face lit up. “How did we not know of each other, right here in Aramco, living and working in the same space?” she asked me, reaching over to squeeze my hand. From then on, all our caution fell away. Wajeha was younger than I had expected, and despite all she’d been through, was clearly committed to the struggle for women’s rights. Since 2003, she had faced harassment: death threats, email threats, ugly comments in cyberspace. She’d been working at Aramco longer than me, but because of her activism, she’d been unable to advance in her career. Her boss had made it very clear that if she continued to agitate for women’s rights, there would be no opportunities for promotion; her goals were not “conducive to the policies or the position of Aramco.” She’d accepted these restrictions—she was glad to have a job—and she said that she would “never stop fighting for the rights of women.”
Wajeha cautioned me, “Prepare yourself for it, Manal. You’re likely to get arrested.”
I nodded but casually dismissed her concerns. Wajeha had already filmed herself driving and had posted the video to YouTube. Granted, she had driven inside the Aramco compound at Dhahran Beach, a place where women were allowed to drive, but in the video she hadn’t specified her location. I did know that she had been arrested more recently for holding up a sign on the Bahrain causeway that read, “Cars want to be driven by Saudi women.” Under Saudi code, this act was considered a protest, punishable by jail time. When I told her that I had read the traffic code thoroughly and was sure that there were no legal obstacles to driving, she smiled slightly and winked at me. “Of course, you’re right, Manal,” she said, “but that is not all that stands in the way of our rights.”
“Don’t worry,” I told Wajeha, as we parted at the door of the cafe. “This time will be different.”
We had a Twitter presence and a very active Facebook account, but inside Saudi Arabia, the local media ignored us. One reporter told us that the paper would only publish a story about us if the event happened on June 17. But if we were to have an impact, we had to get attention from the press. We needed that attention to recruit more drivers. We would have to start with the international press.
The Saudi friend who had convinced me to join Twitter now said that I needed to use it to initiate contact with other activists and with journalists. I increased my tweets about the campaign’s calls for women drivers and began reaching out to reporters outside Saudi Arabia. Almost immediately, they responded. One of the first to contact me was Donna Abu-Nasr from Bloomberg News; a few days later, Atika Shubert from CNN asked me for an interview. I was giddy with excitement and felt reassured to have that kind of attention. In other parts of the world, press coverage and public awareness offered a unique kind of protection. In Saudi Arabia, it also guaranteed that our day of driving would not go unnoticed.
The Bloomberg story was posted online right away, but the CNN interview, which I did over Skype, did not appear. There were new uprisings in Libya, which pushed our efforts off the air. I was giving up hope when one morning the official Saudi government foreign-language newspaper published a small mention of the June 17 event. It was just a mention, but it was presented neutrally. I thought we had been given a quiet nod to proceed. That night, CNN International finally aired the interview. We posted screen shots to Twitter and Facebook, and for the first time, many of our wary supporters grew braver. All of a sudden, June 17 and Women2Drive were everywhere.
The CNN interview ended with me saying, “The rain begins with a single drop,” a quote which went viral and is still repeated today.
That week, it became clear that one of the most daunting aspects of our efforts would be logistics. Many women who wished to participate did not know how to drive. When we put out a poll on Twitter, only eleven percent of the women who said they wanted to drive had any kind of license. More than two thousand women said they wanted to learn how. We began trying to locate women who could drive and were willing to teach others, either in parking lots or other safe spaces like the desert. One woman who came forward to help teach was Najla Hariri, a Saudi woman who had lived in Egypt and Lebanon and was licensed to drive in both countries. She not only offered to teach, she began driving herself around the streets of Jeddah. I put a BBC news crew in touch with her, but they had no film footage of her driving, so many Saudis in their online comments claimed that they didn’t believe her. The government did, however, and she was later questioned and referred for trial.
Now, in addition to the logistics of driving, we had to find new ways to deal with the rising backlash to our plan.
I had an idea. I thought that if, prior to the event on June 17, someone posted a video of a woman driving, it might “normalize” the experience and show Saudi citizens that there was nothing dangerous about women driving. I also wanted to prove that many of us already knew how to drive—that we had licenses and even cars. And I wanted to prove that the Saudi authorities would not stop a woman driver. For weeks, I had heard people say, “If you drive, the man-wolves will eat you alive.” I wanted to show that there were no “man-wolves,” and a woman could drive without fear. So I decided to film myself.