Saudi refugee in Canada, Rahaf Muhammad, reviewed the conditions of women in her country, with the book she recently published under the title “The Rebel: Escape from Saudi Arabia to Freedom”.
Rahaf said in her book that she was raped in Saudi Arabia, and she was afraid to inform her family.
In her books, Rahaf reviewed her childhood and youth until she was able to reach Canada and “enjoy freedom and security,” as she put it.
There, she gave up her family name, becoming Rahaf Muhammad, instead of Rahaf al-Qunun.
According to a summary of the book presented by the newspaper,The GuardianBritish It tells the tale of a young woman’s desperate rush for freedom, escaping pain and oppression.
In early 2019, 18-year-old Rahaf snuck out of her family’s hotel room in Kuwait and bought a plane ticket to Bangkok, beginning the most extraordinary journey.
After that, her father and brother fought a hot pursuit with the Thai airport authorities, which are working in cooperation with the Saudi embassy, and they are all determined to bring her back. However, Rahaf barricaded herself in a hotel room at the airport and restrained herself before she began appealing to the world as she told what happened to her and her fear for her life.
Rahaf’s only weapon was her smartphone, as she began posting dozens of tweets on her Twitter account, in which she said that if she was forcibly returned, she would disappear or die, calling for immediate assistance to obtain asylum.
The pleas of this miserable girl sparked a whirlwind that included the governments of five countries in addition to the United Nations, drawing the attention of the world media to a weak woman in a stark predicament in a faraway land, before Canada granted her asylum on her land through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Rahaf says in her book that during the early years of her childhood in the city of Hail, northern Saudi Arabia, she was full of happiness and laughter, and she played with her siblings in Saudi Arabia.
But following she turned seven, her world slowly, and constantly, began to shrink, as she found that she might not learn to swim, nor laugh out loud, nor even leave the house without her siblings. Instead, she is forced to look following and serve her male relatives and train her in submission.
Rahaf stated that she was not allowed to sit on the balcony to breathe some fresh air, and was also prohibited from going to the mall without a male guardian, or even speaking at the GP’s office in case she fell ill.
After she turned nine years old, she was forced to wear a black abaya and niqab, which made her completely unidentified and unrecognizable.
When she cut her hair and was caught kissing girls, all her mother’s fears were fulfilled, with Rahaf saying she was slapped, beaten, taken out of school and hidden away where she was treated as a curse on the family.
Meanwhile, her father had a second wife and then followed her up with a third, causing emotional pain to her miserable mother, who found no other way to release her anger and frustration than her rebellious daughter.
In his book, Rahaf describes how she was indoctrinated in “Wahhabi beliefs” that did not provide room for critical thinking and that considered “liberation as intellectual sabotage punishable by stoning or death”, and that she was distressed and sad when she traveled with her family to cities and countries such as Turkey, where she saw herself as girls They let their hair down and the dresses on, and they swayed to the music with pleasure and happiness, and then I dared to dream of freedom.
One of the tragedies that she recounts in her book is that one night, while she was taking a taxi to go home, she was raped, as the rapist drove off knowing that he would not face any consequences, but she was afraid to tell her family for fear of the consequences.
In nearly 300 pages, Rahaf Muhammad narrates her journey to a journey that will be associated with large numbers of women in a country where “there is no place for women’s opposition” to the family and social system.
According to the newspaper “The Guardian”, Rahaf’s story is the story of many who do not have a voice and are still subject to their circumstances, and that she is speaking on his behalf from her new homeland in Canada, noting that she misses her family and cannot return to the kingdom, the threats that she fled from still exist until now. .
The newspaper concludes by saying that Saudi Arabia, for all its talk regarding women’s empowerment and the rule of law, still has a long way to go, and this book may help improve things.
