At the same time as her burial, a little baby was being buried. The baby’s father asked if it was okay to bury their baby with Mama, in the same grave. In Islam, babies, unlike adults, are considered to be without sin. A lot of mercy comes to the grave of a baby. Babies can go straight to God and ask for forgiveness for their parents. Mama, who left her oldest son behind in Libya, who lost two babies with Abouya, and who did not get to see her little grandson one last time to say goodbye, was buried with this poor baby. We believe that now she has a baby’s soul with her as a friend.
For three days after her burial, friends came to Mecca to pay their respects. Mom’s old cell phone didn’t stop ringing with people calling to say how sorry they were. In Libya, there was another funeral for her that lasted three days, and the same in Egypt. In Libya, my oldest uncle’s house was crowded with people who came to offer condolences. The entire time we knew her, Mama gave away everything she had. She always wore the worst clothes and no gold jewelry; whatever she was given by her brother or that she later earned, she gave away. I would bring her gifts, and she would give them away. Now everyone was coming to speak of her generosity. Grown women came and said, “She was our other mother too.” They spoke of how she taught them to sew or to cook. One family that had lost their own mother talked about how Mama would send food to them. She never told anyone about this. She knew my father wouldn’t approve, and she didn’t want anyone to know.
She was an amazing woman who will always be my inspiration.
Some things about Saudi Arabia do not change. It is a country roughly three times the size of Texas, with vast natural resources and a strategic position in the Middle East. Today it has a population of about 20 million Saudis, and nearly 10 million of these people are under twenty-five years old. The current king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz, is a son of the kingdom’s founder, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who was born in 1876 and had more than thirty sons who lived to reach adulthood. Every Saudi king since the founding of the kingdom has been a son of Ibn Saud. But King Salman will be the last; when he came to power in 2015, he removed his younger brother from the line of succession. The next king will be either King Salman’s nephew, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, born in 1959, or, some rumors suggest, Salman’s son, Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, born in 1985 and the current defense minister.
Commentators, journalists, and essayists are now sifting through tea leaves, trying to conjecture if and when a transfer of power takes place, what inside the kingdom will change. There is talk of rolling back religious control; in April 2016, the religious police were stripped of their ability to make arrests. There is an effort under way to privatize a portion of Aramco, creating an initial public offering of up to five percent of the company’s stock. There are proposals to remove government subsidies and to have more Saudis work—somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the men in the kingdom are unemployed. (Women are excluded from unemployment statistics. And while unemployment is a major issue in the kingdom, at least eighty-five percent of the employees working at all levels of the Saudi private sector are non-Saudis, meaning they are foreign-born workers.) Yet there are changes for women. Four female athletes represented the kingdom at the 2016 Olympics in Rio. A women-owned law firm opened in Jeddah in 2014, and four female lawyers are licensed to practice in the Saudi system, rather than simply serving as “legal consultants.” In December 2015, nineteen women won seats in local councils, although with 2,106 total seats, that is less than one percent. Widowed and divorced mothers are finally able to obtain family identity cards.
There is even talk of one day, far in the future, letting women drive.
On November 29, 2016, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal took to Twitter and wrote: “Stop the debate. It’s time for women to drive.” He also posted a four-page letter to his personal website, where he stated, “It is high time that Saudi women started driving their cars.” His reasons were primarily economic, particularly the cost of employing foreign drivers, about 3,800 riyals, or roughly $1,000 a month, which is a drain on household budgets. He also said it prevents women from participating in the workforce. But the prince, while he is wealthy and owns considerable business interests, is not part of the official government. Even the young Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has said that he is “not convinced” that women should be allowed to drive. So we wait. (When I moved to Dubai, I shipped my car and I kept my Saudi license plate, because someday, I want to drive my car across the border into my homeland.)
These are all hopeful developments, but there is still a very long road ahead, literally and figuratively, for Saudi women. Saudi Arabia’s government is now the largest investor in the transportation company Uber, having provided $3.5 billion in funding from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. The director of the fund, a member of the royal family, was given a seat on Uber’s board. But, while Uber helps Saudi women get from place to place, it is not a way for women to drive themselves. Saudi Arabia is using a modern smartphone app as a means to enforce the long-standing ban. In fact, about eighty percent of Saudi Uber’s users are Saudi women.
Or consider this story of a Starbucks in Riyadh. Early in 2016 a sign was posted on its door in Arabic and English: “Please no entry for ladies only send your driver to order thank you.” Starbucks’s official reply was that while it “welcomes all customers, including women and families,” this particular store had been “built without a gender wall,” meaning that it could only accommodate men. Starbucks added that it was working to receive approval from local authorities to build a permanent gender wall. As one American female radio talk show host noted, it’s like in Greensboro, South Carolina, when the Woolworth’s in 1960 said we like all our customers, but the black ones can’t sit at the lunch counter because it’s tradition.
The third story is of a call I received from a friend of mine. She had been married for eighteen years and had two daughters when her husband announced that he was divorcing her to marry another woman. He took the girls, as is his right under the Saudi divorce code, took the things from their house, and moved to another city. She was left with the loans that he had taken out in her name, unbeknownst to her. At the age of thirty-six, she would have to return to having her father—a drug addict whom she has not seen or spoken to in thirteen years—be her guardian. Now he must be the one to give her permission to travel, to work, to open a bank account, to find housing, to do almost anything.
There can be no modern Saudi kingdom as long as women are still ruled by men. It may take a long time, but I do believe that kingdom will come. I think of my father, sitting in the mosque in Jeddah, listening to the Friday sermon and hearing the sheikh say, “Manal al-Sharif has committed evil. If we allow women like her to drive, we lose control over our women.” And then I think of another section of Jeddah, home to the Al Shallal theme park, which, one night a week, is open just for women. The most popular attraction at the park? Bumper cars, where for five minutes, women can drive freely, even if it is only in circles, around and around.
The rain begins with a single drop.
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