Daring to Drive: A Saudi Women’s Awakening by Manal Al-Sharif Book Review

In the autobiography, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Women’s Awakening, by Manal Al-Sharif, the use of discrimination to maintain the current distribution of power is shown through the significance of religion, gender roles, and taboos. Prejudice disguised as cultural normality has promoted the complete dehumanization of women and the corruption of the legal and educational systems. The distortion of the lines between religion, education, and law lead to a vast informational corruption among the general public. The power of these political and religious figures goes nearly unchecked, leaving the citizens with no guaranteed personal rights or privacy from said authorities. Being that “In Saudi Arabia, our legal code is referred to not as “laws” which devout Saudi Muslims believe only can be given by Allah: We use another word which translates roughly as “system”.(Al-Sharif 4-5), a system without distinct laws leaves room for corruption from other means of authority.

The population in Saudi has no guaranteed personal freedom or protection under the law. During Al-Sharif’s encounter with the religious police, she noted that “They had no uniforms, nothing to identify them” (1). "Police" dressed as citizens demanding her obedience to their authority when she had no way to tell who these people even were or if they were police at all. These men came to her house in the middle of the night with no identification of who they were, Al-Sharif was still taken without valid reasoning, “They had taken me from my house at 4:00 am without warning, without allowing me to call a lawyer, without a warrant” (21). A society in which rules are created merely for the convenience of the authority leaves no

rights for the citizens within it, especially women.

The treatment of women in this society leads to a dark and peculiar reality. The women in this society are covered, hidden, mutilated, and are treated as inferior beings. Women were not to be seen without a man, “Female announcers were banned from television. Pictures of females were censored in newspapers, and the government cracked down on the employment of women” (65). This society completely divides their population women are not meant to work and if they do it's deemed as culturally inappropriate. For Al-Sharif a man that she met in her workplace and shared a love interest with said “…he is from a very conservative family, and he would never marry a girl that works for Aramco” (168). The working women, especially those women working in a Coed environment like Al-Sharif we're looked down on by their society. And the male coworkers who were cordial to Al-Sharif still maintained their unethical perspectives towards women in the workplace, “This man was quiet and calm; he was one of the men who treated me respectfully. But he was terrified that his wife had discovered he was working with a woman” (164). Women are presented as these malicious individuals yet cannot do anything for themselves.“It is an amazing contradiction: a society that frowns on a woman going out without a man, that forces you to use separate entrances for Universities, banks, restaurants, and mosques; that divides restaurants with partitions so that unrelated males and females cannot sit together, the same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a stranger to you and have him take you somewhere in a locked car alone.”(10), these rules and requirements are not for their protection of women, they are merely for the intensive dehumanization of the female gender that this society strives for. Even the men that did have wives study not treat women as if they were individuals, “There were men whose wives I never saw, men who never spoke about their wives, who never uttered their names” (195), the societal perspective and treatment of women stems from a strong lack of ethical and educational knowledge. This treatment of women is all this society knows. Once something is accepted by most of the population and enforced by the government it becomes culturally appropriate.

Discrimination and corruption in the educational system contribute to the enforcement of cultural acceptability. Kids are immediately stripped of their individualism, ‘I adored drawing class, though we weren't allowed to draw living creatures, only plants, and inanimate objects; the Saudi clerics’ interpretation of Islamic law prohibits representative art, such as drawing a person (69). The kids were prohibited from having their unique skills. For example, when Al-Sharif was attending school as a child she wrote a story on her own time with her skills and showed her teacher, “Your Story? You liar,” she told me. “It’s not your story. You copied it from others and claimed it as your own. (79) The children in this school were being fed corrupt and immoral ideas, and if they did do something unique punishment is more likely than praise. Discrimination and dehumanization by taking away individualistic traits, combined with a lack of physical and ethical knowledge, help keep the population compliant with the rules and regulations of society.

Misinformation, prejudice, and discrimination are used by Saudi Arabia’s central government to control their population with minimal retaliation from the masses. With prolonged discrimination, a state of complicity emerges causing people to not know right from wrong. The less knowledge the population has the easier it is to configure their views and perspectives according to the needs of the authority. The lack of law and individual representation leads to a complete violation of human rights and leaves immense corruption of all systems religious political and educational.