As Majda al-Bahr, 38, sat in her white taxi at a busy Jerusalem junction a woman in a chocolate-coloured Beetle wound down her window and motioned to speak to her.
“Are you a taxi driver?” the woman exclaimed above the growl of car engines waiting for the traffic lights.
The blare of horns as the lights changed to green drowned out the short exchange. But this is a daily occurrence from Bahr, who is the only female Muslim taxi driver in Jerusalem. Wearing a white headscarf, she cuts a distinctive figure in the city’s taxi-driving community.
“People always think I’m Jewish at first,” says Bahr, who speaks conversational Hebrew. “But then I tell them that I’m Muslim and they are even more surprised. They say it’s brilliant, it’s fantastic.”
Bahr is an unlikely heroine breaking down the gender and religious barriers in the holy city. Born and educated in Kuwait, Bahr, whose parents are both Palestinian, has worked as a taxi driver in the city for five years. Previously, she worked as a cleaner in hotels and retirement homes.
Now, the mother-of-five shares the taxi with her husband and works six days a week. She normally takes Saturday off — the Jewish Sabbath — when there is very little business.
“It’s very expensive in Jerusalem,” she says, explaining why she first became a taxi driver, “and we needed more money.”
Bahr constantly juggles the challenges of motherhood with her job. Working the morning shift, she sometimes cuts it short to make lunch for her children.
In her conservative Muslim community, Bahr says that it is her female Muslim friends that have been her biggest champions. “My friends think it is daring and brave to be a taxi driver,” she says.
Her husband is even trying to persuade another Muslim female friend to get behind the wheel. She also says that her male Muslim and Jewish colleagues at the local taxi office are completely supportive.
One of her Jewish colleagues praised Majda as “the best woman in West Asia.
“She is something different in our culture, to see a female Muslim taxi driver,” says her colleague. “She really broke all the rules.”
But the same colleague says that some of the male Palestinian drivers that work at the firm do not approve of Bahr and give her the cold shoulder. She shrugs at the notion that anyone would disapprove of her work.
She constantly criss-crosses the city, driving from the Jewish side to the Arab side, picking up passengers. Bahr, who also sits on the board of a local transport union, says that occasionally Jewish passengers are unhappy when they realise she is Palestinian.
“But most of the Jewish passengers are kind and show me directions," says Bahr.
For now, Bahr says that she is happy driving the taxi. But she has set her sights on something bigger. She is taking bus-driving lessons.
BBC News