My father did not bother coming to the jail to wait. Decades of living with Saudi customs and unwritten rules had taught him the need for direct appeals. My impulse had been to seek a lawyer; Abouya’s was the opposite. Codes, courts, and even lawyers are very much foreign constructs. In the Saudi kingdom, justice is just as often whatever a person in power decides it is. It varies from situation to situation, and it can be swayed by tribal and family ties and lineages. Accordingly, my father began making a daily pilgrimage to the door of the governor of the Eastern Province, Prince Muhammad bin Fahd, the nephew of King Abdullah and the son of the former King Fahd. Each morning, Abouya would go and wait at the gate to the Imara, the governor’s house in Dammam, until the gates closed at 2:00 p.m. He would be the last person to leave, and each time, he would beg to see the prince, to ask for forgiveness on my behalf and for my release. But the prince refused to see him.
Instead, my father spoke with the Imara’s social worker, a man named Ghazi, with the title of Family Relationship Adviser. He was a religious man with a large beard and he would ask Abouya how he could allow his daughter, a divorced woman, to live alone in a compound with Americans and non-Muslims. “They drink,” he would say. “The women walk around without their abaya.” He would go on to list every religious and cultural transgression to which I was exposed and was presumably also committing. And then he would ask how my father could allow me to live alone without a man.
Ghazi was supposed to be a resolver of disputes and a healer of families, but here he sowed shame. He was also leaking false information to the press. It was Ghazi who said that I had “broken down” and “confessed the names of the people behind [me].” Ghazi was the one who said that there were five charges against me, including driving without a license, inciting public opinion, and operating as a traitor and a spy on behalf of foreign enemies. He called for my trial and said that I had embarrassed the country in the international media.
On my fourth day in prison, Ghazi came to the jail. When his visit was announced, I had no idea who he was. The prison guards told me to cover my face because he was a religious man. At first I refused, but eventually I did pull a veil over it, but a thin one so that he could see through. I also had on red shoes.
In our meeting, he accused me of being “egotistical,” of calling for a second “Day of Rage,” and inciting demonstrations against the king. (The first “Day of Rage” had been in March, when Saudi pro-democracy protestors promised demonstrations: nearly all were squelched.) Ghazi claimed that more than three hundred citizens had come to Imara calling for my trial, and others were prepared to bring cases against me based on my violations of Saudi moral codes. “You want to move your Aramco life outside the compound,” he said.
I listened to this diatribe, and the whole time, I remained very calm. Then I spoke. “You don’t know me,” I said. “We didn’t call for demonstrations. I have a driver’s license. And I love my country. I disagree with you saying that my ego is doing this. The only people involved in this effort are Saudi girls.”
Whatever Ghazi had expected, it wasn’t this. He finally conceded, “You are different from how I pictured you,” he said, “angry and wanting to break the law.” Then he told me that he had called for my flogging in a public place to set an example. When I heard that, I asked to leave.
He did call for my flogging in the press, and that was his undoing. His words embarrassed the Imara and the whole Saudi government in the international media. After that, they shut him up—but they never disavowed any of the earlier lies. Sadly, this is a typical tactic. In Saudi Arabia, when they want to break someone, they spread lies about them, making them appear to be a coward or a traitor. Saudi students in the United States who had put up a Free Manal Facebook page took it down once they read the five supposed charges. I lost supporters because of the falsehoods Ghazi spread.
My father sat at the gate to the governor’s house and I sat in prison while in the press and online, each day, articles, news reports, and postings sought to shame me, to assassinate my character, and to so thoroughly humiliate me that no other girl or woman would want to drive. On social media, Saudis were divided on whether I was right or wrong. It was more than a generation since the drivers of 1990, and yet so very little, if anything, had changed.
Except for one thing. Rather than being a small story, my arrest had become a big one. My story was broadcast all over the world, and this international press was causing a great deal of embarrassment for the Saudi state. The flogging comment was the final straw. Even the king was embarrassed when the United States criticized Saudi Arabia for jailing a woman for driving.
As soon as Muneera shared my note, my father flew to Jeddah, where the king lives. My best hope lay on the other side of the kingdom.
I can only imagine my father, the man who had ferried pilgrims in his hot Corolla year after year, now dressed in his cleanest robe, arriving at the lush royal court complex, perched on a corniche that looks out over the glistening Red Sea. The compound stretches for eighty-five acres and includes helipads and boat berths, a vast garden and many tents. Palm trees rise from holes cut into the edges of the vast stone plaza, but even the towering royal palms seemed smaller beside the soaring, futuristic architecture and tall, gushing fountains. Even though the chief of our family’s tribe and two cousins accompanied him, Abouya must have felt small indeed.
Although the Saudi capital is in Riyadh and the king has a palace there, the royal palace in Jeddah was built to receive visitors. In spite of its modern trappings, some traditions remained as ingrained as they were in the days when kings received visitors inside their tents. The king still held a royal majlis, sitting to receive visitors and subjects and to listen to their concerns, which were delivered by formal petitions. The gleaming entrance to the complex was crowded with scribes, men who for 100 riyals would write a petition to the king. It was a tradition no doubt dating back to days when a large majority of the kingdom was illiterate. But even today, the well-educated still hire scribes, who have learned how best to state a case or pose a request. In my father’s case, though, a scribe was a necessity, as he still had not learned how to read or write.
Accompanied by his three fellow tribesmen, my father approached a scribe seated at his desk. He was not particularly interested until my father spoke our tribal name. Then the man raised his head. Abouya had his full attention. Scribes are trained to follow the news, and even the most casual observer could not have missed the story of my arrest. Abouya told my story, the scribe retold it, and after some back-and-forth, they settled on a final version, which the scribe then copied in his best calligraphy onto paper that would be presented to the king. When he had finished, he read the appeal aloud one last time to my father, who pressed his thumb into an ink pad and then pressed it against the paper. That was his signature. It was done. The petition was sealed in a large envelope. My father handed over 100 riyals and received the envelope in return. The transaction was complete. It was still early morning,