The Saudi girl, Rahaf Muhammad, issued a book about her experience of escaping from the Kingdom to Canada, where she obtained asylum after a trip that almost ended in the Thai capital, Bangkok, where she was detained in a hotel for days.
According to Rahaf’s account, she was subjected to “abuse” by her family before escaping from them, but she was arrested at Bangkok airport, her passport was confiscated and she was placed in a hotel here, where she was supposed to be returned to her family.
At the hotel, Rahaf made calls on social media, saying that her life would be in danger if she returned to the kingdom, before the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees contacted her and Canada granted her asylum.
Muhammad arrived in Toronto a week later, at the beginning of 2019, and received a torrent of congratulatory messages as well as death threats, as she announced later.
Her book, “The Rebel: My Escape from Saudi Arabia to Freedom,” recounts her times in the family home, which she describes as “strict and abusive.”
And transfer newspaper New York Post Rahaf said, “I closed my social media account and gave up my family name, Al-Qunun.”
“I hope my story will encourage other women to be brave and find freedom,” she says. “I also hope that this will change the laws in Saudi Arabia, and that instead of this book being an escape story for one girl, it becomes an agent of change.”
Rahaf tells the story of her puberty in a conservative house in Saudi Arabia, and says that she was beaten and threatened with death by her brothers.
The Amazon website, where the book is available, says, “Rahaf Muhammad tells her wonderful story in her own words, revealing untold facts about life in the closed kingdom, where young women are raised in a repressive system that places them under the legal control of a male guardian.”
She managed to reach Thailand while her family was vacationing in Kuwait, where she took the passport that her brother kept, and traveled with the help of Saudi friends abroad before the Saudi authorities discovered her travel and tried to return her.
In Toronto, Rahaf initially lived with a Canadian Jewish family that helped her adjust to life in a new country.
She reached out to other Saudi fugitives, as well as counselors and therapists.
She says that despite everything that happened, Rahaf missed her family and tried to contact her mother and other relatives on WhatsApp, but they asked her not to contact them again.
“I have goals to graduate from university, a dream of becoming an actress, and plans to help refugee women settle in,” Rahaf says. “This is what I want to achieve. I have what it takes to make a good life.”