Honors Day arrived. The ceremony was held at the offices of the General Administration for Girls’ Education. But I didn’t wear graduation robes as I had dreamed of, nor did I receive a certificate of achievement, or a gift, or even the special cash prize. All I received that day was a shield bearing my name. It wasn’t even inscribed with anything to show that I earned first place. The government had discontinued the award that year, and in general, girls did not receive the same type of recognition as boys. I left the ceremony feeling only crushing disappointment. I put the shield in the box with the rest of my shields and certificates, and I felt even more determined not to rely on other people for anything. I would realize my dreams myself.
However, the graduation wasn’t a complete loss. Aunt Zein surprised me with a beautiful gift of engraved gold bangles, just like the ones she wore. It was the only graduation gift I received. I had to sell them later to buy clothes for university.
After a girl finished secondary school, it was customary for would-be suitors to come knocking at the family’s door. My best friend, Malak, married when she was eighteen, right after we graduated, and my friend Manal married a short time later. Mama, however, was adamant that no one should broach the topic of betrothal or marriage with her. She immediately refused any and all interested parties without even consulting Abouya or us. While I was still at school, one of my teachers tried to arrange an engagement between her brother and me. I didn’t even know about it until after my mother had refused, saying, “My daughters will marry after completing their education.”
I struggled to decide what I wanted to study at university and which university I should attend. My first-choice subject, engineering, was not available to women. And female secondary school graduates received no guidance with our decisions. If you did not want to study medicine or nursing, the only other choice for girls was to become a teacher. Thus the cycle continued: you are taught by women, and then you teach women, and the women you taught will go on to teach the next generation. This was to prevent the mixing of women and men in the workplace, which was both a religious and a social taboo. But what it has led to is too many applicants for these professions and a glut of educated women who cannot find employment outside of these three fields. In 2012, the Ministry of Labor revealed that eighty-five percent of those seeking jobs were women, despite the fact that more women obtain university degrees and certificates of higher education than men.
Without a scholarship to study abroad, I had three choices for university. My first option was to enroll in Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, ten minutes away from where I lived. It didn’t provide many opportunities or a particularly qualified teaching staff, but it was known for a Salafi-inspired radicalism that would have suited me very well at that period of my life. Another choice was to study at one of the colleges of education, institutions designed to prepare women for the teaching profession. Regardless of one’s major, one’s course of study was dominated by religious and education-related material.
My third option was to study at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, an hour’s drive away. It was unthinkable that I would live on or near campus; I would have to commute. King Abdulaziz University provided many more opportunities than Umm Al-Qura, but my still-radical self had serious concerns. The school was located in a liberal, progressive city. Despite its proximity to Mecca and the fact that it served as the arrival point for the majority of Muslim pilgrims, Jeddah was considered the most “open” city in Saudi Arabia. The university had a bad reputation among Meccans because it allowed girls to uncover their faces. It even allowed girls at the College of Medicine to participate in mixed education. My sister had enrolled at the university before me, and when she decided to study at the College of Medicine, she faced strong objections from my father and some of my male cousins over the mixing of the sexes. My cousins categorically told my father not to allow her to attend a “mixed” school. My father, remembering Muna’s flirtations with the Arab boy, listened. This ideological combat soon turned physical; she was severely beaten by my father and imprisoned in the apartment.
Somehow Mama managed to smuggle Muna out of our building and get her to the school to take the acceptance test; I remember Muna leaving that day with a bandage over one of her eyes. She passed the test, earning top marks. Still, my sister needed my father’s consent before she was able to enter the school. To this day, I don’t know how Mama persuaded my father to sign the permission papers. (Females in Saudi Arabia still cannot enroll anywhere without having permission from their assigned male guardian.) But she did.
I submitted my registration papers at the University of Umm Al-Qura, but they were so dismissive and disparaging, shouting insults and herding the female students from place to place like hapless sheep, that I decided to enroll in the College of Education instead. It wasn’t possible to major in physics there, so I chose the English department, although I wasn’t very happy with my decision. For her part, Mama was very disappointed that I had chosen the College of Education: “I want you to be a doctor, like your sister,” she said.
“But Mama,” I replied, “the Faculty of Medicine is mixed—and anyway, I hate the sight of blood. I can’t imagine myself ever being a doctor. What I really want is to study physics.” Mama cried. “Twelve years of top grades, and all that effort wasted for you to go to the College of Education?” she asked.
The combination of Mama’s tears and my own lack of conviction about the English department made it impossible to remain stubborn. The only choice left was King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. My concern now was how to approach my father. How would I tell him I’d changed my mind again? To my surprise, he agreed without protest. Unlike with my sister, none of our relatives told him not to let me go. I withdrew my registration from the College of Education and headed for Jeddah with my father.
By then the period to register for any university was over and the doors were closed. My sister helped me to be placed on the “wait list.” Eager to make sure that I could get off the list if a spot opened up, my sister and I spoke on a daily basis with the dean of admissions and registration. After a week of asking at the office and a week of going up to the university gates, only to be denied entry, I began to lose hope. Would a whole year of my life be wasted?
Then, unexpectedly, the dean invited me to an interview. I thought that she would use the interview to decide if I merited one of the vacant spots. To my surprise, when I got there I discovered that she wanted to tell me in person that I had been accepted. “We’d be honored for a student with an academic record like yours to join our university,” she said.
Though her words certainly made me happy, I had no idea what an impact that they would ultimately have. Those words opened the door to a new stage in my life, a door that would lead to a way out of the narrow confines of the first eighteen years of my existence. Despite all the differences and problems between my sister and me, I discovered that there was one thing that united us: the importance we placed on education and on excelling in our studies, no matter how hard we had to struggle to do so.
At King Abdulaziz, the girls’ university buildings were completely set apart from the boys’ buildings. We even had a separate gate, where we had to show a university ID in order to go in and out. This meant that for the first time in my life I had a card with my name and picture. At that time, official, government-issued ID cards were available only to Saudi males. They received them upon turning fifteen, whereas women remained dependent on men their whole lives. The names of females were only added, without pictures, to a card known as the “Family ID.”
We were taught by male professors, though we never saw them face-to-face. Everything was done via closed-circuit television; we saw and heard the professors, who were sitting in a classroom in a separate building lecturing the male students, but they couldn’t see or hear us, so we were denied any chance to participate. As if that wasn’t enough of a disadvantage, the CCTV often crashed, and then we would simply miss the lecture. I
f we wanted to ask the professor a question, the only way to do so was by telephone, which was supervised by a female assistant who sat through the lecture with us to maintain discipline and record our attendance. Only the medical students escaped these constraints: the buildings belonging to the College of Medicine and Pharmacy were separate from ours, and it was permissible for female students to attend lectures given by the male doctors.
The excessive measures undertaken to separate boys and girls meant that we existed in two entirely different worlds. This unnatural separation caused problems that would never be found in a less rigid society. Human beings have lived primarily in mixed communities since the beginning of time, since God created Adam and made Eve to be his companion. God made the coexistence of males and females the basis for the continuation of the human race; He made it so that one is not complete without the other. But my religious observance prevented me from talking to any men at all, even the seller from whom I bought my clothes. I would whisper to my mother what I wanted and she would speak on my behalf. In this way, we respected the fact that my voice was sinful to put on display, because it would seduce the seller, unlike my mother’s voice, which belonged to an old, married woman. It didn’t bother me that my mother called me by my brother’s name, Muhammad, when we were in the street, for even my name was considered a’ura (sinful) when uttered in front of men.
At university, however, I heard stories about telephone relationships, made possible by mobile phones. Boys and girls had many clandestine ways to share numbers. A boy might walk past a girl in the marketplace and drop a piece of paper with his number into her bag. If he had a sister who knew the girl, he might ask his sister for the girl’s number or even steal it from his sister’s mobile phone. More indiscriminate boys wrote their numbers in women’s public toilets or flashed them on pieces of paper held up to car windows when a girl passed. Sometimes the numbers were exchanged as text messages. We even have a specific word for these practices: targeem, or numbering.
More daring than the phone calls, I heard occasional stories of dates, where boys and girls met each other outside the university’s walls. These relationships could never be openly discussed; they were conducted with utmost secrecy and discretion. A young man could talk on the phone with a girl for months without even knowing what she looked like.
I couldn’t believe this was happening in Saudi Arabia. If a girl in Mecca was found to be conducting a romantic relationship—even if it consisted only of phone calls and messages—she would face severe beatings from the men in her family, not to mention very likely risk a lifelong confinement inside her home.
There was no worry that I would ever speak to a young man in public or private, let alone accept a phone call or a message from him. I might have been at university, but I still very much railed against “Western values.” I forcefully defended the constraints imposed upon Saudi women with the reasoning that these constraints were protecting our society from decay and preserving virtue. I didn’t dare request permission from my father to go out of the house for anything other than to attend school or visit the Grand Mosque; I already knew that he would say no, and for the most part without giving his reasons. I also didn’t mind that things were like this: he had the right to do that, I reasoned, because he knew my own best interests better than I did. If I ever did dare to ask permission for a trip or to attend a weekend activity on the university campus, I knew that I’d face anger and reproach. Even after I’d relinquished most of my radical ideas, I was still reluctant to leave the house or do anything without asking him first. It was important to me to have my parents’ blessing. I tried to please my father in any way I could, but there was always some aspect of what I did that made him dissatisfied. Both of us ended up sad: I was unhappy trying to make him happy, and nothing I did seemed to make him happy anyway.
My father lived his life according to a very strict code. Among his most-repeated sayings and rules, “Don’t borrow money from anyone so that you owe them a favor. Don’t spend the night in someone else’s place, because you might see aspects of their character that you dislike. Don’t accept recompense from anyone, even if they are in a position to pay you; all recompense comes from God.”
Although the last time he had hit me was in the third year of secondary school, my fear of him remained the dominant factor in our relationship. It was hard to love him fully when a constant unease governed our dealings with each other, but I did love him in spite of everything. I knew he’d been deprived of his own father before he was even born, and that at a young age he’d left his mother to transport pilgrims between Mecca and Jeddah. I appreciated that he never spent nights outside the house and that we never once woke up in the morning without finding our school money waiting for us. Our family relied on my father’s work as a taxi driver to put food on the table each night, so he worked even when he was sick. He never took a day off. His work was arduous, and he didn’t return home until after midnight, but for seven years straight, he woke my sister and me at six in the morning to drive us to our university in another city. For five of those years, he was waiting outside the gates to bring me home at two in the afternoon. Then he would return by six in the evening to pick up my sister. Calculating the distance between Mecca and Jeddah, he endured five years of spending six or seven hours of his day on the road—in addition to his taxi driving—just so we could get to and from university on time.
At the beginning of each semester, our teachers asked us to buy books and lecture pamphlets from the university bookshop. The bookshop was located beyond the girls’ campus, so we couldn’t go there ourselves. While my classmates sent their drivers with a shopping list, Abouya was the one who went there for me. He might have to wait two or three hours to get a copy because of the thick, frenzied crowds at the university bookshop, and each time he refused to allow me to pay for the cost of the books from the monthly stipend the university gave me, no matter how expensive they were.
I came from a very poor neighborhood in Mecca, and an even poorer family. Although I had traveled to Egypt, I couldn’t really conceive of the fact that there was an entirely different Saudi world only an hour away. When I went to study in Jeddah, it was a huge social leap, and one for which I wasn’t prepared. I heard girls talking about clothing brands, and I saw my classmates with luxury bags, expensive watches, and designer sunglasses. I listened to stories about summer trips to Geneva and London, and I saw drivers in luxury cars waiting for the students outside the university gates. The other students bestowed looks of superiority or pity on those who were less well off, and I felt those looks wherever I went.
My father’s taxi was a Toyota Corolla, and like all the taxis in Mecca, it was painted bright yellow. Abouya had bought it secondhand. The air conditioner didn’t work, which was quite an inconvenience given that we lived in one of the hottest regions of the world, where daytime temperatures commonly exceed 40 degrees centigrade (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Each afternoon, when I left the university, I took special care so that none of my classmates would see me getting into the distinctive yellow car. I didn’t want to hear their hurtful comments. But it also hurt me knowing that I was ashamed for my classmates to see my father.
Money had always been an issue for my family, but once I got to university, things got a little easier. The monthly financial allowance from the school (1,000 riyals for male and female students in the scientific departments, and 800 riyals for those in the arts departments) was a huge help when it came to buying things I needed for my studies, even clothes. I worked in the women’s sports club to supplement my stipend, earning an hourly wage of ten riyals ($2.60), and I could earn up to 500 riyals per month. Despite my long hiatus from drawing, I was still a good artist, and I would also create drawings and paintings to sell to my classmates, usually for 35 riyals, but sometimes for as much as 70. On one occasion, I received a request to work on a mural that was two by three meters. I spent a full month completing it, and was paid 1,500 riyals, the most I’d been paid f
or anything in my life. I used the money to buy a new, remote-controlled television and a VHS player. Abouya still has them.
My financial independence liberated me. Having money enabled me to make decisions and follow them through. Not only did I no longer constantly consult my father, I did some things without him even knowing: fear of physical violence had been replaced by a fear of disappointing him. Now, for the first time in my life, I had the freedom to choose the color of my clothes and shoes, my hairstyle, even where I went (inside the campus). These choices, although simple, gave me the feeling that I had some say over my life. I had been conferred a degree of responsibility, I could trust myself. These were feelings that I had always been deprived of, though I hadn’t noticed the deprivation. I had thought that being under the control of a male guardian was the normal way to live. How could I have known otherwise?
Though we were permitted to do many things in the university, wearing pants remained a taboo. They were allowed only in the sports club, and even then they had to be loose and worn with a long T-shirt to cover the derriere. I found out about the university sports club from my sister. Although women’s sports are banned under the Saudi code, King Abdulaziz is the exception. It is the only government school in the country that allows girls to play sports. I had always loved sports, and I registered at the sports club in my first week. Though I’d been kept from playing sports after I reached puberty—no more soccer with my cousins or riding bikes or running races—my passion remained alive. If I didn’t have a lecture to attend, I would spend my time in the sports club. All of my close friends at the university were also members of the sports club, and I participated in every activity available: basketball, volleyball, badminton, table tennis, karate, cycling, running, billiards, and foosball. I kept my sporting activities a secret from my family, because in their view they were socially and religiously forbidden. Sports was the first taboo that I broke, and I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt. I was happy to be making up for those lost years. But I was also careful to make sure that my sports never affected my academic achievements: I remained a top student throughout all my university years, never once breaking my covenant with Mama.
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