In early 2019, an 18-year-old Saudi woman, Rahaf Mohammed, snuck out of her family hotel room in Kuwait and bought a plane ticket to Bangkok, beginning the most extraordinary journey of her young life. The welcome she received, however, met her deepest fears. With her father and brother in hot pursuit, and Thai airport authorities, working in collaboration with the Saudi embassy, all determined to send her back, Mohammed barricaded herself in an airport hotel room, took a deep breath and decided to tell her story to the world.
Using the smartphone that had been her only respite from a windowless, repressive existence in the conservative heartland of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed detailed her plight in a series of posts on Twitter. If she was forcibly returned, she would disappear or be killed, she wrote. She needed immediate help to apply for asylum.
The maelstrom that followed involved the governments of five countries as well as the UN, drawing the attention of the world’s media to a vulnerable woman at a stark impasse in a faraway land. In the weeks and months that followed, her ordeal also cast a spotlight on her homeland: a place where “rebels” such as her are still the source of immense shame and young women remain barely seen or heard.
In regional Saudi Arabia, the cultural reforms announced over the past five years are yet to cut through. Archaic traditions that have kept women as chattels remain steadfast beliefs among Rahaf’s family. Her brothers in the city of Ha’il played with friends on the streets, made their own decisions and monitored her phones. Rahaf, meanwhile, couldn’t sit on a balcony, go to the mall without a male guardian, or even speak in the GP’s clinic. From the age of nine, she was fully covered in a shapeless black abaya and niqab, anonymous to the rest of the world, and condemned to a small, ambitionless life, the course of which she had little role in shaping.
When she cut her hair short, spoke back in class and was caught kissing girls, all her mother’s fears were realised. Slapped, abused, dragged from school and hidden away, Rahaf was treated as a family curse. Her father, meanwhile, took a second wife, then a third, both much younger than their anguished mother, who seemed to wreak her wrath on her rebellious daughter.
In a debut book, aptly titled Rebel, Mohammed details a confused and often painful childhood that had no place for a free spirit such as hers. Indoctrinated into Wahabist beliefs that offered no room for critical thinking and viewed emancipation as a subversion punishable by stoning or death, she was miserable from an early age. And even more so when she caught glimpses of how other girls lived: on trips to Turkey and Dubai, she saw foreigners, the curves of women wearing dresses, and found music and laughter. She dared to dream that the same freedoms could be hers.
As a teenager, she began to test her boundaries at home in Saudi Arabia. More beatings from her brothers followed. She was ostracised; and further tormented by her own blooming sexuality. Then one night, on a taxi ride home, she was raped. The driver rapist drove off knowing he would face no consequences. If her ordeal was known, she would be blamed for travelling without a guardian and possibly cursed by a family already out of patience with her. Soon afterwards, Rahaf made the decision to leave.
The small screen that acted as her lifeline to the world helped to connect her with others who had escaped, a few Saudi girls who had managed to break the shackles and start independent lives abroad. Rahaf began making plans, and the next family holiday – to Kuwait – was the time to put them in motion.
In nearly 300 pages of simple but effective prose, Rahaf Mohammed turns her journey into one that vast numbers of women in Saudi Arabia will relate to. There is nothing pretentious about her writing, and nor does there need to be. Lifting the veil on the repression of women – even in upper-middle-class families such as hers – is rare in the kingdom, a place in which dissent, towards the state and family structures, is not tolerated.
Mohammed brings alive her austere classrooms, the rages of her domineering brothers, the desires of girls like her and the sorrow of such oppression. Her story is that of many more without a voice who cannot rise above their circumstances. She speaks for them in a dignified, raw manner. From a new home in Canada, disowned by her Saudi family, Mohammed is living the life she more or less wants. She misses her family, though, and cannot return to the kingdom. The threats she fled from remain real now.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, for all its talk of female empowerment and rule of law, still has a long way to go. This book may help things along.
Martin Chulov is Middle East correspondent for the Guardian and Observer
• Rebel: My Escape from Saudi Arabia to Freedom by Rahaf Mohammed is published by HarperCollins (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
