Some years later, I asked Amal whether Aunt Hasaneyya had circumcised her and her sisters. She said no, and I was shocked. Why, then, had Aunt Hasaneyya been present at their home at all? I wondered. Why had the girls of my uncle’s family called me “dirty”? I felt deceived. But perhaps they had in fact been circumcised, and it was shame, anger, or pain that prevented them from talking about it.
Circumcision is not common in Saudi Arabia, although the number of girls forced to undergo it has risen in recent years. Its practice largely occurs only in certain areas: southern Saudi Arabia and the cities of Mecca, Al Qunfudhah, and Lith. Saudi sheikhs neither command it nor forbid it. The daughters of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)—whose practices Muslims look to for much of their everyday guidance—were not circumcised. Rather than drawing on religious sources, advocates of circumcision adhere to social customs and scientifically unproven beliefs, which state that the procedure protects the girl from “deviant” behavior by removing her desire for sex. They also point to the existence of hadiths, sayings from Muhammad (PBUH), which supposedly mention a woman in Medina who performed circumcisions on girls, and whom the Prophet did not prevent from doing so. Yet when I searched for these hadiths and studied them, I found that the actual evidence is very weak and cannot support such a harsh conclusion.
So it was that a few minutes on a single summer morning forever altered two young girls’ lives in about as much time as it takes to unlock a car door, slide into a seat, pull a seat belt tight, engage the engine, and back out into the street.
4
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Mecca under Siege
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It was the day of Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice, the holiest of all Muslim holidays, held to commemorate the willingness of Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his firstborn son, Ismail, to submit to God’s command. Eid al-Adha falls during the period of the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam and a religious duty required of every able Muslim adult. We were already in Mecca, but my mother was performing the customary pilgrimage circle around the granite Kaaba. I remember clinging tightly to her, my hand tugging on her white ihram clothes. Mama’s face was uncovered as we completed our seven circuits around the Kaaba. Even in the crowd, my mother stood tall and broad, with a pure, fair complexion and a long, full face. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat, and her body drenched with sweat. I was wearing a hijab over my dress: I was probably eight or nine. We were two drops in a sea of jostling bodies, clothed in white and circling barefoot on the cool marble sanctuary floor. The smell of sweat filled my nostrils: my ears were overwhelmed with calls of Allahu Akbar, spoken in accents from every corner of the globe. The sun was blazing, and some of the pilgrims poured cold Zamzam water over their heads, leaving faint trickles on the floor.
Then my mother reached down, pulling me by my small hand toward the Hijr Ismail, a rounded white marble wall adjacent to the north side of the Kaaba. Muslims believe that Hagar, the Egyptian wife of Ibrahim (PBUH), and their son Ismail are both buried there.
The days of hajj are heavily focused on purity. Men are required to dress in two sheets of seamless white cotton. The first of these, the izār, is wrapped around the waist, while the second is wrapped around the upper part of the body leaving one shoulder exposed. The head, too, is left bare and is shaved after a ritual sacrifice of a ram. The women are bound to the same standard of purity, and usually wear simple white robes and a white head covering. Even the Kaaba is returned to a pure state by lifting the black cloth—the kiswah—that usually protects the black stone structure.
My mother and I looked for a spot in which we could perform two raka’as of Hijr Ismail, the ritual recitation of phrases from the Koran accompanied by a combination of bowing and prostrating ourselves before the ancient Kaaba. All around us, people moved close to the uncovered wall of the Kaaba, touching it and seeking God’s blessings. We could inhale the Kaaba’s distinctive scent, a result of its daily anointing with Indian aloe and attar of rose (ward al-Ta’ifi). My mother pointed out a hole in the wall of the Kaaba to the woman praying beside us. “The aftermath of al-Mukboor Juhayman,” she told her. (“Mukboor” translates as “put in the grave”; it is a harsh slur to speak upon a dead person.) I didn’t understand what Mama meant, but I knew the word Juhayman. It was spoken many times in adult conversations, but always in a whisper, as if it were a bad or dangerous word.
I would later learn that the hole was from a bullet. The actual hole was relatively small, but the suffering carved out from it and from all that it represents has been much, much greater. It is a suffering that dates back to the year I was born. In November 1979, Juhayman al-Otaybi led a two-week siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca; I was not yet seven months old. Juhayman al-Otaybi, whose name in Arabic means “angry face,” was an Islamist militant and prominent member of the radical fundamentalist organization Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba, “the Salafi group that commands right and forbids wrong.”
The Third Saudi State was still very young, just forty-seven years old, and under the reign of its fourth monarch, Khalid bin Abdul Aziz, when the siege occurred. It began on November 20. As dawn started to break that morning, which marked the first day of the year 1400 according to the Islamic calendar, Juhayman and a band of his followers, some Saudi, as well as others from across the globe, including even the United States, captured the Grand Mosque. It was just before 5:30 a.m., at the moment when the day’s opening prayers and wishes for peace had just concluded. Brandishing high-powered rifles, pistols, and daggers that they had smuggled inside coffins—many Muslim families bring the coffins of their dead relatives to the Grand Mosque so that they may perform the most merciful funeral prayers, one prayer in the Grand Mosque is the equivalent of one hundred thousand prayers offered elsewhere—the attackers chained shut the Grand Mosque’s fifty-one gates and scaled its seven minarets. Looking down nearly three hundred feet, Juhayman’s men had a nearly perfect view of the city and a precise vantage point from which to train their guns.
By birth, Juhayman was a Bedouin; these tribal, nomadic people have lived in the region for thousands of years. He was also an Islamic preacher. He had spent eighteen years in the Saudi national guard, where he never rose above the rank of corporal but had ample time to attend lectures on Islam. His father had been an extremely devout follower of a Sunni sect founded in the mid-1700s by Muhammad Ibn Abdel Wahhab, who preached that Islam had become corrupt, paganized, and Europeanized. He rejected what he viewed as unnecessary cultural sophistication as well as personal luxuries—including silk clothing, tobacco, gold adornments for men, and music and dancing. He wanted a return to the pure form of Islam as first practiced by Muhammad (PBUH) and a rigorous application of even the smallest details of original Islamic law. Ibn Abdel Wahhab found an ally in Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants would become the House of Saud, the future kings of Saudi Arabia. But the alliance partly fractured in the twentieth century. The family of Abdel Wahhab remained a powerful religious force, but the religious militia that had backed the Wahhabis and the House of Saud turned on the Saudi king after he allowed Westerners into the country. In 1929, King Abdul Aziz of the House of Saud defeated his former military allies in battle. One of the survivors of that defeat was Juhayman’s father.
By 1979, Juhayman had become steeped in this highly fundamentalist Wahhabi-Salafi preaching, which joined the original Wahhabi belief in a strict interpretation of Islam that rejects modern influences with a second, radical, highly Puritanical view of Islam (Salafism) that was being formulated among extremist scholars. The result is a set of extreme Salafist beliefs that is critical of and even downright hostile to modern advancements in technology and human thought. Juhayman also increasingly became convinced that the Muslim world was nearing the fateful end of days, the great cataclysm that would destroy the globe and leave only the most devout standing. Muslims believe that before this day, the Mahdi, Islam’s redeeme
r who would rid the world of evil, will come. Juhayman was convinced that the Mahdi had arrived in the form of his brother-in-law, who accompanied him on the siege of the Grand Mosque.
Juhayman’s takeover of the mosque and its grounds caused utter confusion. Initial reports suggested that the besiegers were Iranians. Just sixteen days before, on November 4, Iranian militants had seized the US embassy in Tehran and taken more than sixty hostages. Information about conditions inside the mosque came only when an American helicopter pilot who had served in Vietnam made two passes above to snap photos. (The pilot and his crew had to convert to Islam by saying the Islamic profession of faith, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger,” in order to be cleared to fly over the site, since no non-Muslims are permitted. At that time the government lacked any of its own pilots capable of undertaking the mission.) The Saudis quickly realized that the man in control of the mosque was part of an extremist group whose main adherents had been detained and then released less than two years before, a man whose innocence had been vouched for by none other than Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz (one of the nation’s leading Islamic scholars and a strong proponent of this growing extremist Salafi ideology). Bin Baz had in fact preached to and had taught Juhayman in Medina, the second home of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).I
As the siege continued, the Saudi kingdom imposed an information blackout, even cutting telephone and telegraph communications lines to the outside world: at various points, the kingdom also falsely claimed that the siege was over. It took two weeks, the assistance of a contingent of French commandos and Pakistani special forces, a massive fire, pitched gun battles, the shelling of five of the seven minarets, and the deployment of chemical gas in the vast tunnels underneath the mosque (tunnels largely built by the bin Laden construction firm, the family of Osama bin Laden) to end the siege. A fatwa by Bin Baz was written to justify the armed attack by Saudi troops on the Grand Mosque.
In the days following the takeover, the turmoil spread beyond Mecca. The American embassies in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Tripoli, Libya, were violently attacked by local mobs, incited by claims that the Americans were behind the desecration of the Grand Mosque. The US embassy in Pakistan was completely destroyed; the 137 Americans inside barely made it out alive after hiding for hours in the building’s safe-room vault, surrounded by an out-of-control fire. One Marine was killed. Elsewhere in the embassy compound, a US Army warrant officer asleep in his staff apartment on his day off was also killed, his body burned by the mob.
In Mecca, the final death toll was far higher. Officially, the number of dead—including Saudi kingdom soldiers, rebels, and pilgrims trapped in the Mosque when the siege began—is listed as 270, but there are other estimates that put the number of deceased at 1,000 or more, with many of those being innocent pilgrims.
On January 8, 1980, a little more than a week after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan, the Saudi government publicly beheaded sixty-three of the rebels who had occupied the Grand Mosque. The executions were carried out in eight Saudi cities. Juhayman was the first to die, in Mecca. But his ideology did not. It has become one of the animating forces of contemporary Islamist extremism. The Egyptian army officer who would assassinate President Anwar Sadat eighteen months later was inspired by Juhayman: by chance, his brother had been a pilgrim at the Grand Mosque during the siege. Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, ISIS, and even groups like Nigeria’s Boko Haram are rooted in the same fundamentalist ideology that Juhayman once preached, advocating a strict interpretation of the Koran, the application of harsh Islamic law, and calls for jihad against the infidels, particularly Jews and Christians.
Until “the days of Juhayman,” which is how the siege is still referred to in Mecca, Saudi Arabia had been both increasingly prosperous and increasingly modern, supported by the global oil boom, which had lifted the country out of poverty and turned it into a land of plenty. But afterward, fears of a radical Islamist tide began to pervade the country, prompting the ruling family to meet with senior religious clerics and elders to discuss how this new brand of extremism could be addressed. In an effort to appease those who had gravitated to this ideology, the Saudi state decided to embrace some of their doctrines. Juhayman and his followers might have been driven from the Grand Mosque, but now their extreme beliefs would increasingly occupy the entire Saudi nation from within.
The first group to feel the full impact were women. In the weeks after the uprising, female announcers were banned from television. Pictures of females were censored in newspapers, and the government cracked down on the employment of women. A hard-line Salafist ideology was introduced and taught not only in Saudi schools but around the world by Saudi-funded missionaries. Bin Baz would issue another fatwa, declaring that jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan was an individual duty of every Muslim. One of those who left the kingdom to join that fight was Osama bin Laden.
Growing up in Mecca, I would hear veiled references to the days of Juhayman. We never studied the siege in school, and it was never spoken about publicly. Today it has been all but erased from the public Saudi record. Even the hole in the Kaaba has been covered up. But the legacy of Juhayman and his embrace of extreme Salafism would come to impact even the smallest details of my life inside the Saudi kingdom.
The first official Saudi government school for girls opened in 1964, two years after the king officially banned slavery in the kingdom. It was far from a universally popular decision. The first man to call for girls to be educated, Abdulkareem Aljuhayman, had been jailed for six months for his views. One prominent Saudi scholar implored his fellow citizens, “O Muslims, be aware; pay heed to these dangers. Stay in close ranks and work together to close those schools that have been opened to educate girls with a modern approach. These schools give the appearance of compassion, but inside them lurks strife and a plague-like affliction. The end result of these schools will be immorality and a lack of regard for religion. If you will not be able to realize their closure in the future, do not accept for them to be opened now.” When the first girls’ school did finally open, Prince Faisal (the crown prince and later the king) had to send soldiers to protect the students, not unlike what happened when schools were desegregated in the American South. It can be so difficult to effect change, so hard to overturn long-standing views.
It was always possible to distinguish the girls’ schools from the boys’. The girls’ schools had the look of detention centers, shut behind high solid walls of corrugated metal (imagine a shipping container cut into pieces) and a solid gate. The only man visible was the guard standing at the entrance. The school windows were bolted shut and covered so no outside eyes might gaze inside. Although we had a large outdoor courtyard in the middle of the school, there were no playgrounds, because girls should not run around or jump.
The school door was opened in the morning so that the students and teachers could enter; then it was locked tight with a single key. It could not be opened again unless the headmistress gave her permission. There were also no emergency exits. In 2002, fifteen girls died in a fire inside Mecca’s Middle School No. 31. The city’s religious police had barred the girls from exiting through the front door because they were not wearing their abayas and were thus not following proper Islamic dress code. When the school door was opened and they were finally carried out, it was as charred corpses.
Many of the girls’ schools in Mecca—like No. 31—were converted houses. Unlike all the boys’ schools, they had no names. We knew them only by their numbers; mine were Primary School No. 21, Middle School No. 16, and Secondary School No. 13. The female students were as invisible as their schools. At the end of the day, when cars arrived to take the students and teachers home, the guard would call each girl or woman by her father’s name, never her own.
School began at 7:00 a.m. and finished around noon. Our apartment was around the corner, so unlike most of the students, my sister, Muna, and I walked to school. All of us would stand in line until we heard the bell, then each
student was expected to take the hand of the girl next to her and march into the building. We stayed in one classroom for the whole schoolday, forty girls in each room.
Inside, every school was the same, three stories. The heat in the classrooms was stifling due to old or broken air conditioners. When they worked, the feeble, battered units blew warm air into the rooms. The bathrooms were dirty and smelly, and all the mirrors had been removed or broken so that no student could stop to check her face in the reflection. By middle school and adolescence, girls’ faces would be completely covered by the niqab. Before then, if we wanted to catch a glimpse of ourselves, we had to crowd around the shiny metal water coolers.
My sister was allowed to register for school when she was five years old, but soon after that the rules changed, all students were required to be at least seven years old. This is why my sister was four years ahead of me in school, although we were two years apart in age. The first day that I could be registered, my mother dressed me all in white, a white hairband, white dress, and white shoes. The school forms required that I have a certain vaccination before I could enter. Mama took me to the health clinic directly across the street to get the necessary shot. The city had just finished paving the street, and the road was covered in wet, black tar. I tripped and lay splayed on the ground. My white dress became black, and I felt the humiliation of having to start school in a dirty dress.
Daring to Drive Page 7