Almost every day, I went for walks on the paths around the compound, usually with Aboudi. Rafael started showing up on my doorstep to join us. He was scheduled to leave Aramco in the spring of 2012. On one of our last walks, he told me that he had fallen in love with me “the first time I saw you at that barbecue gathering.” He was moving to Dubai to start a company and he wanted me to come with him. He added, “I don’t treat women like my girlfriend, but like my wife.” But I could not go to Dubai without being his wife.
Rafael asked what he would have to do to marry me. My answer was simple: become a Muslim. But the reality was more complex. As a Saudi citizen (man or woman) you must have special permission from the interior minister to marry a non-Saudi. I asked for permission to marry Rafael, and the Saudi authorities refused. We could not marry in Dubai, either; its government said I needed permission from the Saudi embassy. So, Rafael took me to his home in Brazil to meet his family. He converted to Islam in the Rio de Janeiro Islamic Center, speaking the required profession of faith. We did not have a formal wedding because there was still no place to get married legally. Instead, a cousin of Rafael’s who is a lawyer in Montreal helped us get a civil marriage certificate from a law court in Canada.
Rafael’s family already knew about me; they had followed the news of my driving and arrest. They were warm and welcoming. But there was also the pain of leaving my own family and country behind. And my second marriage was stunningly close to an arranged marriage. Rafael and I knew very little about each other; we had to wed because the rules left us with no other options.
By far, the hardest part was leaving Aboudi. My ex-husband would not allow Aboudi to travel to Dubai. And although he initially said that he would permit Aboudi to visit me in Dubai at least two times a year, he quickly reneged on that promise. If I wanted to see my son, I had to buy a ticket on my own and fly back to Saudi Arabia. Because I had no house, I had to stay with Aboudi’s grandmother in their family home whenever I visited. I did that every or every other weekend, and I do it still.
After I had moved, my ex-husband took Aboudi to Dubai on a trip, but he did not tell me and he did not allow me to see our son while they were there. Later, I found photos from the trip on Aboudi’s iPad. I was furious. I hired a lawyer to contest the premise that I could not have my son with me in Dubai.
We spent two years in the Saudi court system, and I spent tens of thousands of riyals. I had to fly my father from Jeddah to appear in court; my own lawyer told me that I shouldn’t attend, saying, “Your presence could create complications.” My father signed a pledge promising that he would go to jail if Aboudi didn’t return after visiting me. In the end, the court’s verdict was no. The basis for their decision was a tenth-century text that denied children’s right to travel because of the “risk of the child dying en route on such a dangerous distance.” That legal premise dated from the time of camels and caravans traveling over hot desert sands. The trip from Dammam to Dubai was one hour by plane. Flights arrived and departed all day long. My lawyer suggested an expensive appeal. I found a woman, Dr. Suhaila Zain Al-Abdeen, who specializes in interpreting old legal and religious texts. We spent a week writing a twelve-page appeal citing passages from the Koran and the hadiths that justified my right to have my son visit. I handed the appeal to my lawyer and waited. But I lost again.
In the eyes of the Saudi Arabian government, I am also still not legally married. When I gave birth to another son, Daniel Hamza, in 2014, the government would not grant him a visa. I could not take him into the country with me. While I was pregnant, Aboudi won a stuffed animal that he gave to the baby. My two boys have big-brother and little-brother T-shirts, but they have never met. Aboudi cannot leave Saudi with me; his brother cannot enter Saudi with me. They only know each other from photos and from waving on screens across an Internet feed.
I did not understand the consequences of leaving my job at Aramco until I started looking for work again in Dubai. I went on forty-seven interviews in two years, almost always getting to the final rounds of the application. Then my file would go to Human Resources, they would look me up, and I would not be hired. My name and my history preceded me and negated any other skills on my résumé. In the meantime, I accepted every invitation I got. I spoke at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, gave a TED Talk, and spoke at a UN event, a WIRED summit, Harvard University, and many others. I paid many of my own expenses just so that I could speak out. I wrote in newspapers and blogged. I took up the cause of a five-year-old Saudi girl, Lama, who was beaten with a cane and electric cables. She suffered a crushed skull, broken ribs, and a broken arm and died in a hospital. Her father was a well-known Saudi preacher. He had reportedly been “concerned” that his five-year-old daughter had lost her virginity. After her death, he paid $50,000 in blood money to his wife to avoid punishment; if Lama had been a boy, the sum would have been $100,000.
I started a campaign called I Am Lama, which helped pass the first Saudi code against domestic violence. Efforts to criminalize domestic abuse had been under way since 2008, but nothing had happened for four years. When a group of young men posted a YouTube video in which they cut off a cat’s tail, an animal cruelty statute was passed within two weeks. I wrote that Lama’s father would have been punished more harshly if Lama had been a cat.
I also started Faraj, a Twitter campaign to release the Saudi, Filipino, and Indonesian female domestic workers who were being held in the Dammam prison. This activism had become my job; more than that, it had become my mission.