![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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