Book Review: Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening by Manal al-Sharif

Defying Western assumptions about Arab and Muslim women, Manal al-Sharif’s book is a primer on the country’s patronage relationship with the ruling class and working class socio-economic realities.

by Sarah Aziza

When it comes to Western audiences and Eastern women, there is a long tradition of willful ignorance, fetishization, and condescension. In the case of Arab and Muslim women, outsiders receive a steady diet of images of cloaked, silent figures, rendered somehow hypersexualized and infantilized at once. These depictions also tend to ignore i…