Each year my mother made me two school dresses, which I alternated day to day. I wore them until they were little more than threadbare rags. The style and colors were dictated by the General Administration for Girls’ Education: dark green for primary school, dark brown for middle school, and navy for secondary school. Before school let out, the administration sent home a notice to the parents with photos of what the next year’s uniform should look like. Mama was one of the few who followed the picture exactly, the same ugly green color material, the same ugly collar. Most of my girlfriends had pretty dresses that had been redesigned by their moms or tailors with better shades of green and nicer colors. In primary school, Mama sent me off each morning in one of the ugly dresses and my hair plaited in two braids, tied with white ribbon at the ends.
At the beginning of every day, the classes lined up in queues and listened to the morning broadcast on the school’s PA system. This began with recitation of the Koran and the hadiths before moving on to a piece of wisdom for the day, or new instructions for the students if there happened to be any. We were then asked to read, in unison, Sūrat al-Fatiha—the opening sura of the Koran—and to sing the Royal Salute.
After that, teachers went up and down each line to inspect the students. Had we polished our nails, which was prohibited, or forgotten to cut them? Were any of us wearing a decorative headband or colored shoes? Or perhaps we had chosen to adorn ourselves with a forbidden accessory, like a ring or bracelet. The girls’ primary schools permitted black or white hairbands, black shoes, and white socks, and anyone wearing anything else did so at her peril. In middle and secondary school, white was banned. One day in secondary school I pinned a white hairband into place as I dressed for school, only to have it wrenched from my head about an hour later by the school deputy, along with a handful of my hair.
We also grew used to surprise inspections of our bags and possessions. It was forbidden to bring anything to school other than a schoolbook or notebook. Carrying a lipstick, a comb, or a mirror to school—or even an outside book or, as we grew older, a cassette tape or a photograph—was prohibited. The school would confiscate the item, summon the student’s mother, and also send a letter of warning to her guardian.
There was no room in the girls’ schools for any activity that was not directly related to our academic classes—they were forbidden by order of the mufti. No sports, no theater, no music, no art appreciation, no visits to museums or historical sites, no celebrations for our end-of-year graduation. There wasn’t even space for a school library. The only permitted enrichment classes were drawing, sewing, and home economics. We were taught how to make different types of stitches, how to crochet, and how to prepare cakes and pickles: even though we were at school, the expectation was that our ultimate destination was inside a home.
I adored drawing class, though we weren’t allowed to draw living creatures, only plants and inanimate objects; the Saudi clerics’ interpretation of Islamic law prohibits representative art, such as drawing a person. Many times I tried to test the limits of this prohibition. My smiling fruits often enjoyed the use of human hands and feet. But my teacher usually confiscated those drawings, which ended up as shreds of paper in the wastebasket. So I stopped drawing people in my art sketchbook and started instead to draw them in my notebooks at home, which I filled with the forbidden smiling faces and bounding animals.
Inside the classrooms, school was rigid, but as soon as it came time to pause our lessons to eat, chaos prevailed. There was no set place to eat, and no one formed lines to buy food. In the beginning, I brought my own food. Each day, Mama sent me with a cheese sandwich and a drink. Then one day, one of the teachers pulled me aside and asked me if everything was okay at home with my family. I said yes. She asked why I brought my own meal rather than pocket money to buy breakfast. The only girls who brought their own food to school were the poor girls, because they couldn’t afford to pay for breakfast at school. My face turned red, I was so embarrassed to think that anyone at school would consider me poor. After that, I asked Mama for pocket money and she gave it to me. But every day, I had to endure a shoving match with about one hundred girls over the small box of sandwiches for sale. I was a thin, small girl and couldn’t fight my way through so I ended up with my hair pulled and no breakfast. My sister refused to help in part because I wouldn’t put up a fight, but a girl named Fatin, the older sister of one of my friends, took pity on me. I’d give her my money and she would buy me food. But it was always horrible. One time they left the food next to a kerosene container, which must have leaked onto the sandwiches. The smell was awful and every bite tasted like kerosene, but they sold it to us anyway. It still amazes me that we literally fought each other to buy such terrible food.
Every girl did bring her own water, however. The school’s metal coolers were old and rusty, and the water that came from them was warm and brown.
In class, we were not grouped according to our abilities but rather divided up into alphabetical groups by our first names. I was incredibly lucky to find two of my best friends in my group, another Manal and a girl named Malak. There was not enough space in our classroom for me to have my own desk, so each day I would squeeze myself into a crack between Manal’s and Malak’s desks and nestle between them. They were both very pretty, and the pretty girls were always favored by the teachers. Malak always arrived at school dressed beautifully with bands in her hair. Her mother even ironed her socks. The teachers would bring the pretty girls candy. They would speak nicely to them and permit them to do things that the rest of us could not. When it came time to go to the bathroom, the teachers always allowed the pretty girls to go, but depending on their mood, the other girls might be forced to stay in their seats. One time, one of the average girls wet herself after she was sent back to her seat, and the teacher yelled at her as she sobbed.
I was not one of the pretty girls. In drawing class, I spent extra time trying to make the most beautiful pictures I could so that the teacher would praise my art. I was at least fortunate to be smart, although some of my teachers disliked me because I would interrupt and ask questions. Many times, though, my good grades saved me from a harsh beating. But not always.
When it came to beatings, Saudi Arabia’s schools were no better than its homes. I remember the expression uttered by many parents when they registered their children, which translates literally to: “The skin is for you, and the bone is for us.” This meant that the teacher was permitted to hit the child whenever he or she deemed it necessary. The deputy of our school had a fifty-centimeter wooden ruler, somewhat shorter than a yardstick, that she carried everywhere, and each teacher brought a traditional thirty-centimeter wooden ruler with her to class. When a female student was punished, she was required to extend her palm and be smacked by the ruler. But it did not stop there. Teachers might also pinch our ears and slap our faces and behinds, and pull our hair. There were also “moral” punishments, like missing the daily break or being stopped and publicly reprimanded in front of every girl standing in the morning queue.
I remember the first beating I received at school, during my first week of first grade. The teacher was named Miss Ilham, and she was an angry woman very much like my mother. She was busy at her desk when she noticed me chewing gum and called for me in a loud voice to come forward. I got up from my desk and walked dumbly to the front of the class, wondering what I could have done to be singled out: no one had explained to me that chewing gum was not allowed. As I stood, confused, there came a slap on my right cheek so forceful that it drove my face into the green chalkboard and left a chalk stain on my other cheek. Then she began to scream at me, “Gum?! Gum?! Do you have no manners at all?!”
She pointed to the wastebasket. Amid my sobbing, the gum had fallen out of my mouth and now lay like an incriminating piece of evidence on the patterned white-and-black ceramic floor. Terrified, I walked toward the wastebasket and back only to receive a second slap. “Blindness in your eyes!” Miss Ilham screamed. “The gum is
still on the floor, you dishonest girl!”
I was beaten again during a science class. Saudi education consists primarily of memorizing and reciting, not asking and answering questions. The teacher had written on the blackboard, The sky is blue, the clouds are white. She would ask everyone to repeat what she had written. When it came to be my turn, I said no. I had my own ideas. I said, “But the sky is white, and the clouds are blue.” The first time I said the wrong line, the teacher beat me on the hands with the ruler, and then second time as well, until I finally said, “The sky is blue, the clouds are white.” After that, I learned to follow the rules without questioning them.
It was common to be beaten for getting the wrong answer. Even at home, when Mama taught me to memorize the Koran, she used beating as the instructional technique. If I refused to practice, she would beat me badly. When she taught me the first sura (verse), I wasn’t able to recite it correctly. She slapped me after every mistake that I made. I would be trying to learn and crying at the same time. The beatings were enough to make anyone hate education, especially when you were too young to understand your mistakes.
At the start of sixth grade, our class didn’t have an Arabic-language teacher, so the geography and history teacher taught us Arabic. But she didn’t teach us the correct way to draw the letters, and so all of our notebooks were filled with horrible mistakes. When we finally got a teacher for Arabic, she collected our notebooks and was horrified. Usually when you make a mistake, such as failing to do your homework, you were beaten twice on the hands with the ruler. But this teacher said that each of us would be beaten for every mistake that we had made. Imagine all of these notebooks, filled with four lines, two sentences each, over and over, day after day. Imagine how many mistakes you can make in those four lines. I was one of the top students in the whole school, and I had made forty mistakes. I got forty beatings with the ruler; I still remember the pain. The teacher was shouting and screaming at me the whole time. All forty girls in that class were beaten that day. Everyone cried. The worst was knowing that the punishment was simply because another teacher had failed to teach us what we were expected to learn. It was for something we had not been taught, not for us having failed to do the work.
Boys were beaten too, and their beatings were in many ways worse than ours. They were taken outside and told to remove their shoes, before being forced to the ground, their feet bound together and lashed to a long stick called a falaka. On their backs, with their legs held up by two other boys who were tasked with holding the ends of the falaka, and the soles of their feet exposed, they would be beaten on the bottom of their feet by a teacher using a bamboo cane. My brother received his first falaka beating when he was six years old. He was a student in the pre-primary level, and was not even a full-fledged student, only what we call a “listener.” He cried all day afterward and refused to go back to school the next morning. Abouya told me that he himself had stopped attending the classes of his own kutāb—the unofficial religious schools scattered through Saudi’s rural villages—after a teacher beat him so badly with the falaka that he was unable to walk. In the mid-1990s, a Saudi boy was beaten so severely by his teacher that he later died from his injuries. Finally, after that, official beatings in Saudi schools were banned.
But I am grateful for school. School taught me to read, and I loved reading. I would go crazy over books. Before I started school, when only my sister could read, I would chase her around the apartment, trying to learn the letters and words from her. She would always refuse. Once I was in school, I would read my sister’s textbooks, sneaking them out of her bag without her knowing. It didn’t matter to me that they were textbooks; I was so desperate for something new to read. Eventually, my sister would hide her books rather than give them to me.
I would often read the same book many times because there was nothing else and I saved some of my lunch money in hopes of buying a new one. Women and girls were not allowed in the only public library in Mecca, so in the summer my dad would take me to a bookshop that sold religious books for cut-rate prices. On Saudi TV Channel 2, I watched Sesame Street to learn the English letters A, B, C. My sister had a book with English letters, but she wouldn’t share it. Once, in the stationery store, I bought an address book along with my schoolbooks, just because the address book was organized according to the letters A through Z.
Even my heroes were from books. My absolute favorite character was Jo from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. To me, she was amazing. She was a writer, rebellious, and aspired to be independent. Jo did what the boys did. She wasn’t supposed to ride a bicycle wearing her big dress, but she took the bicycle and rode it anyway. I had very long hair, and it saddened me that my parents would never let me cut it like Jo did.
Another of my heroes was Mowgli, the jungle boy from Rudyard Kipling’s story. He had a song in the TV cartoon that went “How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.” I loved that line. It was how I felt when I used to go visit my grandmother in the valley where my father grew up. There all the houses had huge yards and the sun came in everywhere. Everything was open, not like our apartments in Mecca, which were always small and dark. In Mecca, even if you had a window, you had to put up a lot of shades so people on the outside couldn’t see what was inside. We live in one of the most sun-drenched countries on earth and most of our lives are spent indoors, in quasi-darkness.
I was also captivated by Sinbad, because he was an adventurer who traveled the world. In my world, physical activity—running, jumping, climbing—was forbidden to girls because we might lose our virginity. The only games we were permitted to play involved nothing more than singing songs and holding hands. We had one song about an open road and a closed road. When we got to the closed road, we used to hold each other’s hands tight and lift them up in the air. I remember we even invented one game where we just drew squares on the ground. There was nothing else to do. But reading and studying, that was something to do. At school, in books, I could run away from the troubled house I lived in, from my family, from any problems. I remember when Mama would have a fight with Abouya, I would hear the fight with one ear, but with the other one, I would be studying, minding my own business.
If reading books had opened my mind, more years of formal, state education closed it. Even though corporal punishment was banned by the time I reached middle school, we were every bit as tightly controlled in what we thought and what we did, just in other, less outwardly visible ways. Saudi education, particularly girls’ education, had become the domain of Islamist theologians.
King Saud had placed girls’ education under the control of an independent educational institution called the General Administration for Girls’ Education. He also established a separate supervisory body headed by the grand mufti—the country’s leading religious cleric—whom he tasked with organizing girls’ education, developing the curriculum that the girls would study, and monitoring the progress of girls’ schools. Thus the person in charge of our state education was a bearded religious sheikh, himself the product of a religious institution.
But the worst consequence of these tight intertwinings of religion and education inside Saudi Arabia would affect boys and girls equally: the radical Islamization of our studies. Anxious to reject the pan-Arab nationalists who were coming to power in places like Egypt and Iraq, the Saudis decided to align themselves with some of the most radical of the Islamists, men who had been jailed in other nations, like Egypt, for their violent ideology. These men had found a political haven in the Saudi kingdom. Now they were also going to find a place of supreme importance in the Saudi educational system. The task of drafting the curriculum for all school stages was entrusted to leaders of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus our books included works such as “Jihad for the Sake of Allah” by Sayyid Qutb, as well as writings by radical Islamist thinkers like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, whose ideology of violent holy war on behalf of the one true Islam is the basis for much of the religious
interpretations expounded by Al Qaeda and ISIS. The Ministry of Education printed their books and taught their messages of stringent Islamist education and hatred of differences in its public schools.
There was a suffocating control over everything. Independent thought was discouraged; visual, audio, and print media were equally lacking in freedom. The censorship of books left no survivors. Political writings, historical narratives, even romance novels—any type of book considered to conflict with the prevailing extreme Salafist doctrine—was banned. Students in other countries might rebel against this madness, but the widespread illiteracy of our parents and the manner in which we were taught—dictation without discussion, memorizing and repeating without analysis or criticism—molded and subjugated us in such a way that we became domesticated and tame. We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had imposed upon us. My friends and I believed that the rest of the world, and even less observant parts of the Muslim world, were conspiring against our true Islam. I believed the words of one of the kingdom’s leading Salafi clerics, who stated that our Islam “represents the last bastion of truth and virtue.” And I was increasingly determined to live my life according to those principles.
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I. In 1993, Bin Baz would become the kingdom’s grand mufti. Ironically, one of his most famous fatwas (religious pronouncements) was the statement that he issued against women driving cars. Bin Baz wrote, “Depravity leads to the innocent and pure women being accused of indecencies. Allah has laid down one of the harshest punishments for such an act to protect society from the spreading of the causes of depravity. Women driving cars, however, is one of the causes that lead to that.” But he also fell out of favor with the extremists for his ruling that allowed non-Muslim troops to be deployed on Saudi soil during the Gulf War to help defend the kingdom from the Iraqi army. In addition, his decree was seen as allowing non-Muslim soldiers to wear the Christian cross and carry the New Testament into battle against other Muslims. That ruling remains a huge point of contention within Saudi society today. One radical cleric declared Bin Baz to be kafir, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam.
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