Justine’s Second Post from Oslo Is Now Online
Wednesday, 9th May – Oslo
A year ago a young woman got into the driving seat and caused an uproar. She was arrested for ‘a serious disturbance of public order’, because Manal Al-Sharif took to the wheel in Saudi Arabia.
Yesterday I introduced Manal, and other speakers from some of the most aggressively repressed regimes that we do not hear about much, or, in some cases, at all: Tutu Alicante from Equatorial Guinea, Manal from Saudi, Benny Wenda from West Papua, Jestina Mukoko, Zimbabwe, Alexey Tikhonov, Kazakhstan, and Dr Chee Soon Juan from Singapore, except that Dr Chee was not with us because he is not allowed to leave Singapore. As the leader of the opposition party, the Singapore Democratic Party, Dr Chee is constantly subjected to arrest, detainment, and he has now been bankrupted too, for his criticism of the ruling People’s Action Party.
At this forum there have been 121 speakers across the past four years of the forum here in Oslo, 36 of those have served prison sentences for their views, totalling 175 prison time between them. Quite a chunk of that time has been served by those I introduced yesterday:
http://www.livestream.com/oslofreedomforum2012/video?clipId=pla_e6eb7da5-609c-43ef-8a0e-f6ba49a5fc0b&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb
Manal was the youngest member of this group, and the combination of her youth, courage, and beauty have made her rocket fuel for the media. She was on the front page of the highest circulation Norwegian newspaper, Afterposten http://www.aftenposten.no/
this morning, driving, legally, mainly due to haveing passed her driving test in Boston, as against paying a bribe in Saudi to get a driving licence, for a woman.
She is steering her course by telling her story, an act that has just got her fired from her job as a computer security consultant, just before she came to Oslo. But perhaps more powerful than Manal’s part in the Women2Drive campaign in Saudi is the very gentle way that she talks of her inner life, and of the time when she changed from being hard line in her views about women in Islam, to a softer outlook, one that allows her to take off her hijab amongst friends, and smile every time she talks of driving. ‘I was really tough, my views were so hard. I had isolated myself,’ she said. ‘Do you remember when you first heard music?’ she asked us. She did, very clearly.
Manal had believed that music was the instrument of the devil. ‘I would put my brother’s tapes in the oven, I would cook them…sorry Bro,’ she smiled, admitting to the audience here what she has never told her brother. ‘And then I realised how small the box was that I was in when I started to step out of it,’ she explained, playing ‘Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely’ by the Backstreet Boys. The audience laughed, but Manal was radiant on stage. ‘It sounded so pure, so beautiful to me.’
When the Egyptian-American commentator and journalist Mona Eltahawy http://www.monaeltahawy.com/
opened this morning’s session on the power of voices to create change, she quoted the 19th century Russian-born activist, Emma Goldman: ‘If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.’ Manal Al-Sharif has found her own voice, her dance. We can only quietly hope that, for the future of women in regimes such as Saudi, that those like Manal will be able to move as women rather than as political messengers, to be snapped up by the highest bidding think tank in another country, away from the where they can be a gentle, day to day, instrument of change.