I hope, however, that this inspired choice and the editorial decision of the subtitle, “A Saudi Woman’s Awakening,” with its suggestion that Saudi women are the only ones in need of a wake-up call, does not lead readers to smugness and the feeling that all is right in the Western world.Īl-Sharif gazes at us from the book’s cover in quiet confidence, her face a record of earlier triumphs. We are certainly indebted to her agents from our tabloid tell-all culture who gently but firmly told her she needed to instead tell a personal story. We are told in the acknowledgements that al-Sharif’s first inclination, coming from a “private culture” as she does, was to present a dry, technical history of the Women2Drive movement. This act of rebellion and the time she spent in horrific conditions in jail without trial for “driving while female” form the climax of Daring to Drive, which is written in a simple, straightforward style that is compelling because of it. Manal al-Sharif separated herself from the nameless masses of Middle Eastern women we in the West imagine to be oppressed - and stupid and soulless because of it - in 2011 when she spearheaded a social-media movement urging Saudi women to defy convention and drive, their own sort of Arab Spring.
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