When I got out of jail I discovered that a new group of girls and women had started a Facebook page called Women2Drive—the earlier effort had only been an event, not an actual page. I didn’t know anyone involved, but I contacted the group. We worked together for months without meeting in person. Most lived in Riyadh, and I decided to fly there and see them. One girl was fourteen years old; I met her with her mom and sister. Her mom was separated and had been abused by her husband and brothers. She couldn’t ask for a divorce because she was afraid of losing her daughters. She was fully veiled and I couldn’t see her face, but she gripped my hands and pleaded, “Don’t give up to fight for my daughters’ rights. I lost all hope until you came.” The mom eventually bought a small car. A Sudanese woman taught her fourteen-year-old daughter how to drive. The girl drove her mother and sister everywhere. They were caught several times, but the mother begged for mercy and promised that her daughter would not drive again, so they were released.
Among all the pledges that I signed was one not to give interviews, not to speak about my driving, and not to discuss my time in jail. And initially I held fast to that pledge. I said no to everyone.
What I did do was try to help some of the women I had left behind in prison. I had made a promise to God to give away one month’s salary and I did that. I bought a plane ticket home for Maysara, the woman who had loaned me her bed, and gave her money to help her start over. I held a collection among my Aramco colleagues to buy plane tickets for other women who could not afford to leave prison, and we were able to send twelve inmates home.
But, as the months passed, the story of women driving did not fade away. In September, a woman named Shayma Jastaniah who lived in Jeddah was found guilty of driving through the city streets and sentenced to ten lashes; the sentence was later overturned on orders of the king. And the Saudi press would not leave me alone. The final straw was an article accusing me of being an Iranian agent inside Aramco, working in the company’s most sensitive department, information security. The article contained many pieces of accurate information—my birth date, where I had gone to school, details about my family—so everything else it said seemed true as well.
I felt I had to respond. I gave one interview to a pro-government journalist, Turki al-Dakhil, with the television network Al Arabiya. One of my friends told me beforehand to stick to the facts, just say what happened, not to make accusations, and not to play the victim. I tried to do that. The government intervened and wouldn’t let the show air in its usual slot, but they apparently forgot to ban the radio broadcast of the audio. It played on a major Saudi radio station, uninterrupted, and thousands of people heard it. When the televised interview was shown for the first time during what was supposed to be a slot for reruns, tens of thousands more people watched it. It was seen in beauty salons, car dealerships, and cafés. My friends texted me to tell me that people had stopped what they were doing and were clustered around the televisions to watch this Manal al-Sharif.
After the interview aired, I met with the deputy prince of the Imara, Prince Jalawi bin Abdul Aziz. He told me that he saw my interview and that it “shows you are a patriot and an educated woman. We are honored to have you as one of us.” At Aramco, I received a verbal warning for having given the interview. If I did something like that again, I would be fired.
In the weeks that had followed my arrest, a slew of royal decrees were released. The first in June allowed women to work in shops and malls as cashiers. It took a pronouncement from the king for me and millions of other women to be able to buy our lingerie and underwear from another woman.
In October, the king gave his annual address to the Shoura council, in which he said, “We will not accept marginalizing women.” He announced that women would be given a chance to stand in municipal elections and to participate in the Shoura, an unelected advisory council for the king. It was the first and last time he spoke about women in this context when addressing the Shoura, and even though he didn’t mention driving, it seemed like a victory.
Outside the kingdom, the driving movement had gained attention and support. In June, six US congresswomen, led by Carolyn Maloney of New York State, wrote a letter to me expressing their admiration. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out in favor of Saudi women being allowed to drive. There were sympathetic campaigns in Italy, and in the States a group called Honk for Saudi Women was formed.
In November, six months after my arrest, I filed a lawsuit in the Saudi courts challenging the government’s refusal to grant me a driver’s license. At the start of December, academics from Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working with a retired professor from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, presented a graphic report warning Shoura members that if women were allowed to drive, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce would “surge.” The report also stated that if women were allowed to drive, “within ten years, there would be no more virgins” in Saudi Arabia. It cited the “moral decline” that has occurred in other Muslim countries where women drive.
In January, news outlets reported that I had been killed in a car crash in Jeddah, and that I had been driving at the time. My phone lit up with family and friends calling me. I could not believe it. The story of my death on the roadway made headlines around the country and around the world. Of course, it wasn’t true. The woman killed was a member of a desert community. She was driving, but she had not been part of Women2Drive. I believe that whoever distributed this misinformation wanted to prove that driving was too dangerous for women, and they wanted people to believe that God was specifically punishing me.