Manal Al-Sharif > Quotes

“My scars teach me that I am stronger than what caused them.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“My face is my identity. No one will cover it. I’m proud of my face. If my face bothers you, don’t look. Turn your own face away, take your eyes off me. If you are seduced by merely looking at my face, that is your problem.
Do not tell me to cover it. You cannot punish me simply because you cannot control yourself.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“The rain begins with a single drop”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Freedom is to live with dignity”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“This is what happens when the state intervenes in a person’s private life; it creates two separate personas. It compels you either to lead two separate lives, or to violate what’s imposed on you
when the state isn’t looking.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“I was lonely, desperate, and angry. At that moment, I truly understood what it meant to be a Saudi woman. It meant being confronted with every possible kind of
obstacle and discrimination. It meant being told that if you want to race with men, you’d have to do it with your hands and legs cut off. I started to wish I had been born somewhere—anywhere—else.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had
imposed upon us.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Because my mother couldn't change my present, I decided to change my daughter's future”
― Manal al-Sharif

“How odd it is that we judge a woman by her clothes and the place she eats lunch and the subjects she talks about with her colleagues
on her coffee break, yet we don’t judge a man if he doesn’t grow his beard or if he works with women or speaks to them. Why do Saudi women allow subjugation to a man and adhere to men’s rules and conditions? Why did I?”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Don’t be afraid. Fear won’t prevent death, it prevents life.” —NAGUIB MAHFOUZ”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Khobar police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“while there are some scars that we might wish to hide because the spiritual or mental pain they represent is far greater than the physical pain caused to us at the time of injury, there are also some scars that we want to see whenever we look in the mirror. Because these scars serve as a valuable reminder of our past. My scars teach me that I am stronger than what caused them”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“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; that same society expects you to get into a car with a man who is not your relative, with a man who is a complete stranger, by yourself and have him take you somewhere inside a locked car, alone.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Gradually, I realized that the ideas I had embraced and defended blindly all my life represented a singular, and highly radical, point of view. I began to question everything.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“We had grown used to watching bloodshed, massacres, and destruction in Muslim countries like Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, and Iraq; now, for the first time, we were seeing the same thing in America.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“It is too soon to say how many of my generation may have learned to despise injustice as a consequence of the beatings, verbal abuse, and general cruelty that we suffered as children. But I know that I have, and I know that I will carry that lesson with me always.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Even a woman in labor will not be admitted into a hospital without her guardian or at least a mahram. Police cannot enter a home during a robbery, and firefighters are forbidden from entering a home during a fire or medical emergency if a woman is inside but does not have a mahram present. In 2014, Amna Bawazeer died on the campus of King Saud University when school officials refused to allow male paramedics to enter the female-only school after Amna collapsed from a heart ailment. The same story repeated itself in 2016 at Qaseem University when male paramedics were not allowed on campus to treat a female student, Dhuha Almane, who subsequently died. It is not a stretch to say that death is preferable to violating the strict code of guardianship and mahrams.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“The axiomatic thing about Saudi society is that while there are a seemingly infinite number of rules, it is also possible for people in authority to go outside those rules, and, if not break them, at least bend them quite a bit.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“I got a text from my husband. “Manal, you are divorced,” it read. “Your papers are in the court of Khobar.” I was divorced in my absence, just as I had been married.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“So you’re the infamous Manal al-Sharif,” he said, eyeing me from behind his desk. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you did?”
“Is driving a car something shameful?” I answered back.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Inside my mind, there was a growing sense of contradiction between what I heard in sermons and what I saw all around me.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Extremism frequently turns its champions into angry people, driven by conflicting desires. At first, I pitied my less enlightened parents and siblings. Then I felt superior to them, poor sinners that they were. Then I lost patience with their unwillingness
to see the one true path and resorted to threats, intimidation, and yelling. At night, I was tormented by thoughts of what would happen to all us of when we reached our graves.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“Despite my long hiatus from drawing, I”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“I had to smuggle an early Nokia camera cell phone into the country from Bahrain in 2004. There was a large black market for these banned phones, with smugglers hiding them inside car bumpers or car door frames, while customs officials and police used ultrasound devices to ferret them out.)”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“The only acceptable form of “music” was religious anasheed, a form of a cappella chanting that occasionally included a bit of percussion to keep the words on a consistent beat. The themes centered on the tragedies Muslims faced around the world.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“The phenomenon of Saudi women deveiling in transit is so well known that I remember a Tunisian work colleague making jokes about it. “When Tunisian women get on the airplane to leave the country,” he would say, “they put the hijab on, and when the Saudi women board, they take it off!”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“I still have one such booklet, printed on stock paper the size of a playing card, so that it might easily be carried in a pocket or a purse. Entitled “A Gift to the Muslim Woman,” its focus was the full veiling of the body, head, and face. It reads in part: My Muslim sister: today, you face a relentless and cunning war waged by the enemies of Islam with the purpose of reaching you and removing you from your impenetrable fortress. . . . Don’t be tricked by the ideas they are promoting. One of the things that these enemies of Islam are trying to discredit and eliminate is the niqab. The facial covering is what distinguishes a free woman from an infidel woman or a slave and avoids her being confronted with the wolves that walk among us. As the scholar al-Qurtubi said: the whole of the woman—her body and her voice—is a’ura (sinful to put on display) and should not be revealed unless there is a need for her to do so. One of the conditions of veiling is that it acts as a container for the entire body, without exception, and it should not be incensed or perfumed. This is demonstrated by the hadith which tells us that any woman who applies perfume and passes by others so they can smell her scent is an adulteress. Veiling is not imposed upon you to restrict you, but to honor you and give you dignity; by wearing the religious covering, you will preserve yourself, and protect society from the emergence of corruption and the spread of immorality. . . . My Muslim sister, keep this booklet and give it as a gift to your sisters after reading it.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening

“The daughters of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)—whose practices Muslims look to for much of their everyday guidance—were not circumcised. Rather than drawing on religious sources, advocates of circumcision adhere to social customs and scientifically unproven beliefs, which state that the procedure protects the girl from “deviant” behavior by removing her desire for sex.”
― Manal Al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A gripping account of one woman's home-grown courage that will speak to the fighter in all of us

“I knew that I wouldn’t be able to apply for the ID card without his signature, but I went to the registry office anyway and sat there waiting, holding back my tears. I took an application form and the guardian consent form and returned to the car chastened. Abouya looked at me and said sarcastically, “Where’s the card?” It was a clear statement that he was still the master of my fate.”
― Manal al-Sharif, Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening