Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
T
he secret police came for me at two in the morning.
The second knock on the door quickly followed the
first. They were loud, hard knocks, the kind that radi-
ate out and shake the doorframe. My five-year-old son
was asleep, but I was awake still, sitting up with my brother.
Startled, my brother jumped up and rushed to the entry. I stayed
slightly behind, feeling the night air rush in as he pulled open the
door. It was May, so the air was warm but still pleasant, not oppres-
sively hot. And it was dark. My lone porch light had burned out weeks
before and I hadnt bothered to replace it. I thought about the light,
I wondered whether the sudden noise would have woken my son
small thoughts passing through my mind in those seconds before
everything changed.
In the shadowy darkness, all we could see were men, crowding
around my front stoop, pressing forward. They had no uniforms,
nothing to identify them. When my brother asked them who they
were, there was silence. Finally, one of them spoke. Is this Manal
al-Sharif s house?
unlike every other place in Saudi Arabia, inside the Aramco com-
pound, women can drive. There are no prohibitions, no restrictions.
They simply slip behind the wheel and start the engine. And there are
protections. Not even the local city police or the Saudi religious police
are allowed to venture onto Aramco-controlled land. Aramco has its
own security and fire departments. It handles its matters internally,
like a separate, sovereign state inside the Saudi kingdom.
But the Saudi secret police, I learned that night, could still enter.