Her first book, “Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening,” published this week by Simon & Schuster, is a memoir of her political coming of age. She is now best known for challenging the laws and mores that keep women down in Saudi Arabia, including what she considers the kingdom’s infantilizing restrictions on the right of women to drive. al-Sharif, 38, has undergone a radical change of heart since those Salafi firebrand days.
al-Sharif said the other day, scrolling through the images she had uploaded on her phone. There was a photo of herself, in a red dress for Eid another of her mother, in a calf-length skirt she had stitched herself another of her dad, barechested, for the hajj.
She found them, years later, after her mother had died. The one thing she could not destroy was a plastic bag of family photographs that her mother had stashed in her bedroom. All kinds of things were forbidden for women and girls, she had also learned: no plucking your bushy eyebrows, no parting your hair fashionably to the side, no revealing your face in public. She gave up drawing human figures and reading her prized Agatha Christie novels - forbidden, she had learned, under the puritanical strain of Islam sweeping through her native Saudi Arabia at the time. OSLO - Manal al-Sharif was 14 when she burned her brother’s Back Street Boys cassettes, then her mother’s fashion magazines.
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