Rudyard Kipling"
“When you're left wounded on Afganistan's plains and
the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle
and blow out your brains,
And go to your God like a soldier”
General Douglas MacArthur"
“We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and be the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
“May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't .” “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
“Nobody ever defended, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
The Soldier stood and faced God
Which must always come to pass
He hoped his shoes were shining
Just as bright as his brass
"Step forward you Soldier,
How shall I deal with you?
Have you always turned the other cheek?
To My Church have you been true?"
"No, Lord, I guess I ain't
Because those of us who carry guns
Can't always be a saint."
I've had to work on Sundays
And at times my talk was tough,
And sometimes I've been violent,
Because the world is awfully rough.
But, I never took a penny
That wasn't mine to keep.
Though I worked a lot of overtime
When the bills got just too steep,
The Soldier squared his shoulders and said
And I never passed a cry for help
Though at times I shook with fear,
And sometimes, God forgive me,
I've wept unmanly tears.
I know I don't deserve a place
Among the people here.
They never wanted me around
Except to calm their fears.
If you've a place for me here,
Lord, It needn't be so grand,
I never expected or had too much,
But if you don't, I'll understand."
There was silence all around the throne
Where the saints had often trod
As the Soldier waited quietly,
For the judgment of his God.
"Step forward now, you Soldier,
You've borne your burden well.
Walk peacefully on Heaven's streets,
You've done your time in Hell."
Manal al-Sharif got behind the wheel in Saudi Arabia. Then she met the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. 'You know when you have a bird, and it's been in a cage all its life?
When you open the cage door, it doesn't want to leave. It was that moment."
This is how Manal al-Sharif felt the
first time she sat behind the wheel of a car in Saudi Arabia. The
kingdom's taboo against women driving is only rarely broken. To hear her
recount the experience is as thrilling as it must have been to sit in
the passenger seat beside her. Well, almost. Ms. Sharif says her moment of hesitation
didn't last long. She pressed the gas pedal and in an instant her
Cadillac SUV rolled forward. She spent the next hour circling the
streets of Khobar, in the kingdom's eastern province, while a friend
used an iPhone camera to record the journey.
It was May 2011, when much of the
Middle East was convulsed with popular uprisings. Saudi women's-rights
activists were stirring, too. They wondered if the Arab Spring would
mark the end of the kingdom's ban on women driving. "Everyone around me
was complaining about the ban but no one was doing anything," Ms. Sharif
says. "The Arab Spring was happening all around us, so that inspired me
to say, 'Let's call for an action instead of complaining.' "
The campaign started with a FacebookFB-2.33%
page urging Saudi women to drive on a designated day, June 17, 2011. At
first the page created great enthusiasm among activists. But then
critics began injecting fear on and off the page. "The opponents were
saying that 'there are wolves in the street, and they will rape you if
you drive,' " Ms. Sharif recalls. "There needed to be one person who
could break that wall, to make the others understand that 'it's OK, you
can drive in the street. No one will rape you.' "
Ms. Sharif resolved to be that person, and the video she posted of
herself driving around Khobar on May 17 became an instant YouTube hit.
The news spread across Saudi media, too, and not all of the reactions
were positive. Ms. Sharif received threatening phone calls and emails.
"You have just opened the gates of hell on yourself," said an Islamist
cleric. "Your grave is waiting," read one email.
Aramco, the national oil company where
she was working as a computer-security consultant at the time, wasn't
pleased, either. Ms. Sharif recalls that her manager scolded her: "What
the hell are you doing?" In response, Ms. Sharif requested two weeks
off. Before leaving on vacation, however, she wrote a message to her
boss on an office blackboard: "2011. Mark this year. It will change
every single rule that you know. You cannot lecture me about what I'm
doing."
It was a stunning act of defiance in a country that takes very
seriously the Quran's teaching: "Men are in charge of women." But less
than a week after her first outing, Ms. Sharif got behind the wheel
again, this time accompanied by her brother and his wife and child.
"Where are the traffic police?" she recalls asking her brother as she
put pedal to the metal once more. A rumor had been circulating that,
since the driving ban isn't codified in law, the police wouldn't
confront female drivers. "I wanted to test this," she says.
The rumor was wrong. As she recounts, a
traffic officer stopped the car, and soon members of the Committee for
the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi morality
police, surrounded the car. "Girl!" screamed one. "Get out! We don't
allow women to drive!" Ms. Sharif and her brother were arrested and
detained for six hours, during which time she stood her ground.
"Sir, what law did I break?" she
recalls repeatedly asking her interrogators. "You didn't break any law,"
they'd say. "You violated orf"—custom. The siblings were released but Ms.
Sharif was rearrested a day later. She was detained for over a week and
released only after her father personally pleaded with Saudi Arabia's
King Abdullah for a pardon and pledged to forbid his daughter ever to
drive again in the kingdom. Even now, recounting the story at New York's
JFK Airport while she waits to board a flight to Dubai, Ms. Sharif's
voice trembles with anger: "I was just driving a car!"
Manal al-Sharif was born in the holy
city of Mecca to a family of "conservative" but "regular Muslims," as
she puts it. "Dad would listen to music," she says. "He would wait for
new albums by Umm Kulthum," a widely popular Egyptian pop singer. "My
aunt used to wear golden bracelets, and she used to show her hair under
her pink hijab." The family's moderate attitudes were
remnants of a way of life that came under severe attack in 1979, the
year Ms. Sharif was born. It was a turbulent moment in the region. In
Iran, Shiite radicals deposed a socially permissive autocracy and began
building a repressive Islamic theocracy.
In November 1979 in Saudi
Arabia, a band of Sunni jihadis took control of the Grand Mosque in
Mecca, killing hundreds of worshipers and security forces. It took two
weeks and the help of French commandos to break the siege. The incident, infidel rescuers included, was a huge embarrassment for
the reigning al-Saud dynasty, whose monarchs style themselves as
"Custodians of the Two Holy Mosques." To prevent future jihadi attacks,
"the government did everything it could to please the fundamentalists,"
Ms. Sharif says. "It gave them control over education and women. So
women were removed from all public life in Saudi Arabia, and there is
now complete separation between the genders." The kingdom had always been deeply religious. Yet it was only after
the 1979 siege that the al-Saud began promoting radical Islam at home
and abroad as a way of staving off challenges to their own legitimacy.
Thus was born what former Wall Street Journal publisher and author Karen
Elliott House identifies in her book "On Saudi Arabia" as "Islam
Inc."—the symbiosis of clerical obscurantism and oil riches that keeps
the al-Saud in power. One result is a society where women make up just 12% of the workforce
and own 5% of businesses, a country where 15 young girls were doomed to
perish in a 2002 schoolhouse fire after the morality police prevented
their rescue because the students were improperly dressed.
Ms. Sharif is in many ways a product of
this system, including the public schools she attended in the 1980s and
'90s. "They brainwashed kids," she recalls. "They told us, 'This is
Islam, and it is our time to rule the world again.' So you were brought
up in an atmosphere that made you go for extremism, for hatred of the
other, and to fear people who are conspiring against Muslims—against
us."
As she grew older, Ms. Sharif started questioning the authorities who
would "use the word of God to control people who are like my family."
She came to see the painful impact of Islamist ideology on women. Her
aunt, for example, once fond of colorful clothes and jewelry, was cowed.
She would "listen to these fundamentalist lectures and cry, saying
'it's haram to show your face.' She cried and changed everything about herself."Then there was the driving ban. Ms.
Sharif came to despise the fact that "we're proudly known as the country
where women can't drive." In 1990, an earlier generation of women
tried, and failed, to challenge the ban. During the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait, about 40 Saudi women organized a "drive-in" protest. They argued
that amid a national emergency, when their male guardians might not be
available, Saudi women must be permitted to drive. Predictably, the 1990 drive-ins enraged the religious establishment.
"When I was a kid they sent brochures all around the country, with the
names of the women and their house numbers, encouraging people to call
them and tell them to come back to Islam," Ms. Sharif says. "They said
these women had sex with American troops. They said they took off their hijabs and burned them." Why persist today in the face of
still-vicious opposition? Because the campaign to overturn the ban is
about more than driving. "Women's rights are nothing but a part of the
bigger picture, which is human rights," Ms. Sharif says. "Women are
trusted with the lives of their kids, even serve as teachers and
doctors, but they aren't trusted with their own lives."
Ms. Sharif has paid a price for living her own life. After she gave a
speech about her activism at the 2012 Oslo Freedom Forum, where she was
awarded the inaugural Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent, she and
her family came under renewed pressure from Islamists. Things got worse
when video of the speech went viral on YouTube. "They said no one will embrace Islam after watching this speech,
because what I showed is a violent religion. But what I showed was my
personal story," she says, adding that it is "an insult to Islam, to any
religion," to suggest that it can be undermined by a personal story.
Ms. Sharif was pushed out of her job in May 2012 and has since
relocated to Dubai, where she lives with her Brazilian husband, Rafael.
The couple met in 2010 when they were both working for Aramco. She
needed permission from Saudi Arabia's interior minister to marry a
non-Saudi, says Ms. Sharif, who has a 7-year-old son from a previous
marriage. "It's your personal life, and they get their noses into it
even at that level." The minister rejected Ms. Sharif's
request to marry a foreigner, and her ex-husband bars her son from
traveling outside the kingdom with her, so she can see him only by
visiting from Dubai every weekend. "It's the worst thing flying back to
Saudi Arabia. I'm on the surveillance list, so every time I go, they
stop me and they take more information. They monitor my travel."
The al-Saud rulers, she says, are
cracking down on dissidents out of fear that the Arab Spring's
reverberations might spread to the kingdom. In early March, two founding
members of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association received
long jail sentences for, among other things, starting an unlicensed
human-rights organization. The arrests, she says are meant "to shush the
others, because they talk about the same things we talk about:
constitutional monarchy, political parties, having political rights. So
they take these people and make an example out of them."
The sentences were handed down less than a week after new Secretary
of State John Kerry visited the kingdom. His visit was a disappointment
for Ms. Sharif and others who share her outlook. "He just praised Saudi
Arabia for appointing 30 women to the unelected Shura council," she says
of Mr. Kerry. "It's a fake body anyway, a powerless body. You can't
praise something that's not tangible, that's merely a cosmetic change."
If American officials aren't willing to criticize the Saudis on their
rights record, she says, "at least they shouldn't praise them."
As our interview ends, one question
remains: Has Ms. Sharif gotten behind the wheel of a car in the kingdom
since the heady days of her campaign? "Yes, I drove again," she says.
"I'm a normal woman, a normal person, and I just want to drive." This bird won't be returning to its cage anytime soon.
WSJMr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.
