The Long Drive to Prison: The Struggle of Saudi Women Activists

I learned to drive in Lebanon when I was seventeen years old. My father left Saudi Arabia for political reasons in 1975. I was exhilarated to drive myself to the American University of Beirut, in what was a divided city at the time following several years of civil war. My excitement was short-lived as I ventured alone into rather dangerous neighborhoods. A clumsy and not very confident young driver, I carefully navigated the multiple checkpoints set up by various militias. Very quickly I came face-to-face with aggressive and impatient male drivers whizzing around the city. The civil war had turned many Lebanese men into unruly drivers, always in a hurry to reach their destination before the snipers and the bombs took their toll. On one occasion, early in my driving experience, I was trying to get out of a narrow and congested alley with great difficulty. Behind me was a very impatient taxi driver, who got out of his car and approached me. Thinking that he was going to help me get out of my paralyzed situation, I opened my window to talk to him. He was shouting and cursing. I explained that I was a novice, but to no avail. Listening to my accent, he immediately recognized me as a Saudi. He came close to my car and showered me with very vulgar insults, all derivatives of male and female body parts. I closed my window and wiped away the tears that had begun to roll down my cheeks.

I returned to Saudi Arabia for a brief moment in the late 1980s. Having survived the onslaught of the Lebanese drivers and the bumpy roads that had become war zones, I now considered myself an experienced navigator of difficult situations. I felt frustrated not being able to drive myself around Riyadh to run errands and visit family and friends. I was grounded and always dependent on a male driver, for whom I developed a dislike. He was always late and inquisitive. My paranoia lay in not finding him after he dropped me off in the marketplace. There were no mobile phones in those days. Because I was covered in a black ʿbaya, including my face, he couldn't recognize me, and the burden fell on me to find him among the many drivers who always gathered outside shops waiting to collect their employers. He was never there. Waiting for him even for five minutes alone outside the shops of al-Wazir Street felt worse than driving through the bumpy roads of the Lebanese civil war. Inquisitive men, either shopping or just hanging around; the odd invitation to get into other cars; the flying cards with male names and phone numbers; and the occasional insults for being a young unaccompanied woman standing in the street—always a suspicious person—interrupted my wait and added to my anxiety. Having survived the Lebanese experience, I learned to develop a body posture and a female piercing gaze through the holes of my facial veil that I believed would frighten even the most aggressive intruder into my limited waiting area in an all-male-dominated space.

On June 24, 2018, came the historic moment when women in Saudi Arabia were allowed to drive. Since the 1990s women had been campaigning to lift the ban on driving. This was one of their goals, but their aspirations went further than the steering wheel. They demanded full citizenship, above all equality and respect as women in a country that continued to see them as minors in need of a guardian in order to live their lives.

Many women were exhilarated just as I was when I occupied the driver's seat at the age of seventeen. Allowing women to drive was considered a symbolic gesture pointingin the direction of promised freedoms, equality, andrespect. Just days before lifting the ban on driving, several leaders of the nascent Saudi feminist movement were arrested on a series of vague charges, including contact with foreign embassies, being agents of foreign enemy governments, and recruiting subversive underground cells. The hand that had...