I’m quite sure that I was the first woman ever to enter the Thuqbah station. There was only one detention space in the station, and it was only for men. The specific citation was “driving while female.” My brother had been sitting beside me, in the passenger seat, and then had sat next to me again for five hours inside the Thuqbah traffic police station, a two-story, nondescript concrete government building with a sturdy fence all around and a detention room where drivers could be held for hoursĪuthor Manal al-Sharif at Politics and Prose in Washington DC last week. That previous afternoon I had been pulled over by the traffic police for the “crime” of driving my brother’s car. They want to see her at the Dhahran police station.” My brother did not have to ask why. When my brother asked them who they were, there was silence. They had no uniforms, nothing to identify them. In the shadowy darkness, all we could see were men, crowding around my front stoop, pressing forward. I thought about the light, I wondered whether the sudden noise would have woken my son-small thoughts passing through my mind in those seconds before everything changed. My lone porch light had burned out weeks before and I hadn’t bothered to replace it.

It was May, so the air was warm but still pleasant, not oppressively hot. I stayed slightly behind, feeling the night air rush in as he pulled open the door. Startled, my brother jumped up and rushed to the entry. My five-year-old son was asle ep, but I was awake still, sitting up with my brother. They were loud, hard knocks, the kind that radiate out and shake the doorframe. THE SECRET POLICE came for me at two in the morning. The second knock on the door quickly followed the first. You can purchase the book at local booksellers or online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. This intimate memoir also details the countless ways Saudi women are demeaned in the guise of “protecting” them. In Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening, published last week by Simon & Schuster, al-Sharif recounts her participation in the movement to let women drive and her encounter with the Saudi secret police. But the kingdom at large was famously “the country of one king and millions of queens”-and queens, of course, don’t drive. In the Aramco compound, a town unto itself, she was free to own her own home, raise her son, walk around unveiled, work with men, drive to work. She was a modest, religious Muslim woman who began to see that, not the true religious laws or even Saudi laws, but many Saudi customs, were counterproductively restrictive. Manal al-Sharif, a computer-security engineer at Aramco, the powerful Saudi state oil company, didn’t plan to become an activist.

Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif