Saudi Woman, Manal al-Sharif, Who Defied Driving Ban
Posted by Jim Newman on June 15th, 2012 – 3 Comments – Posted in UncategorizedPost by Jim Newman
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CNN has a good piece on Manal al-Sharif who defied the Saudi ban on women driving.
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, Manal al-Sharif was taught in school that listening to music — just like driving, showing her face in public or making a decision without consulting her male guardian — was forbidden and sinful.
She believed so strongly in music’s satanic powers that she burned many of her father’s and brother’s cassette tapes so they couldn’t play them anymore.
Then one day in 2001, al-Sharif was about to dub over one of her brother’s American tapes with a lecture on Islam when curiosity got the best of her. She let herself listen to a few bars. And the first song to touch her ears helped reroute the course of her life.
It was the Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely.”
“They had been telling us that music was Satan’s flute — was a path to adultery,” she said in a recent presentation at the Oslo Freedom Forum, a human rights conference in Norway. “This song sounded so pure, so beautiful, so angelic. It can be anything but evil to me. And that day I realized how lonely I was in the world I isolated myself in.”
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Never, in a million years would I have thought of The Backstreet Boys as a rebel band. Go figure. If this is true then this kind of cultural influence has far greater peaceful democratizing effect than the Bush years of waving a gun and saying my way or the high way, which sounds a lot like a Saudi saying.
Here is her youtube video with subtitles from last year when she filmed her demonstration by, gasp, driving.
Here she is at the 2012 Oslo Freedom Forum.
June 17 is now an annual demonstration to allow women to drive. When you are cruising around on the 17th consider that it is a privilege and not a right. That we consider it a right is because we forged a constitution that gave freedom to women on all levels. While conservatives want to continue to repress women–I knew conservative Republican men who didn’t think or allow their wives to drive–and write up obscene antiabortion laws (just passed this week), nevertheless, we have much to be proud and much to lose if we let theocrats debase our freedoms.
It’s funny but those old school conservative boys said women should’t drive because they should be pampered or because women weren’t mechanical, they were mothers. The real issue was they didn’t want to allow women to drive even when women wanted to and could quite well. It was just patriarchal bullshit. Perhaps some men were sincere but most really did not think women were competent. I was there. I heard them. I hated it and couldn’t say anything. Now I can. Fuck it. Let them wreck your car (if it’s even just yours) if that’s what it means. So what?
Jim Newman, bright and well
I’m a little confused by the line, “Let them wreck your car (if it’s even just yours) if that’s what it means.” That still sorta suggests that a women would wreck their car. There are plenty of guys I would never let touch my truck nor my motorcycles, because I don’t see them as competent drivers. There is a woman that I allow to drive my truck on a regular basis, because she is an excellent driver. I have yet to wreck a vehicle.
If a person isn’t competent, male or female, they would be better served by a driving class. The MSF (motorcycle) classes also make for better drivers even if a person never buys a car (I think there are studies that show this, but I’m not sure where). Besides wrecking being bad for the car, a person can get hurt, including the driver.
Should women drive? Absolutely! But EVERYONE should be taking proper classes to ensure they drive as safely and as defensively as possibly. There’s no such thing as gender making a person incompetent in anything.
Your point that driving class is useful is well taken. My spouse is a better driver than I. She is also a better navigator even though I once taught orienteering.
I say let them wreck the car in the spirit that it is more important to let people do things than prohibit them based on supposed or biased issues of competency. If someone doesn’t want to let someone else drive because they think they’ll ruin the car then my point is so what? (assuming they have a license) That’s not the issue. I think we all spend too much time worrying about our precious possessions or issues of harm and care then letting people experience life. I can’t tell you how many conservative men I knew in Utah that wouldn’t let their woman use a gun, boat, car, tractor, tool, electronic, fishing pole, camera, or … because they were sure it would get ruined or they were sure that their woman couldn’t learn it. Hell, I used to be touchy about my record player with its expensive and fragile needle–I risk being hypocritical here. But at some point we have to let this stuff go.
My 14 yr old daughter needs some spending money as she is going to Turkey this summer. Rather than just give it to her I said I would hire her–she is frustrated that she can’t get a real job because of labor laws and driving issues. For these last three weeks I have had to work off farm to make money. I thought to include her in my work, building a pottery studio in a barn. I offered the owners, a friend’s parents, free labor with the guarantee that her work would be acceptable. They clearly were uncomfortable though they understood my intent and commended me–she could help caulk. I realized they did not really trust her though they kind of wanted to. More importantly that this might infect my daughter with not feeling confident.
So instead I gave her the job of painting the back porch which was on my list as well. But I let her have the entire job. From cleaning off, to sanding, to caulking, to taping out, and finally to painting. She is not a caller so she would text me occasionally but otherwise she did it on her own. Yes, she was slow. Yes, she was too careful in some ways and risky in others. And yes, she wasted paint because she didn’t know how to deal with old brick and I missed telling her that morning to get it wet first with water or thin out the paint.
But she owned that job. If I had made her follow the directions that would make her more professional, more competent, I would have turned her off–that’s part of her personality. It just didn’t matter that she got tired and left a 12 dollar brush out–something I would correct in a “true” employee or apprentice. It didn’t matter that she got paint on windows that she had to scrape off later rather than slowing down and controlling the brush. It didn’t matter that when she saw me not using a drop cloth she followed suit but dripped even more paint on the floor–so bad that I said to heck with varnishing the floor but painted it instead.
I could have hovered over her and made sure she did a professional job but it was more important that she accomplish the job, not do it perfectly, and not be intimidated to paint again. I remarked that if she knew how to paint she could almost always find work. She responded that she could always be a waitress. Yikes. True, but now she has a choice. It’s not that one job makes her competent but it is true that now she knows she could do it and the next time she will probably do it better.
I have to agree the same for kids. I just had a discussion with a parent over not allowing her 17-year-old son to mow lawns because she’s concerned he’ll hurt himself. I lost that one. I think mowing is far safer than driving.