On June 27, 2000, Sheikh Hamoud bin Aqla al Shuebi pronounced the following fatwa: “To grant a woman an identity card bearing her picture is an abomination which is not permitted by sharia law. It will result in great religious, moral and social evils.” But a little more than one year later, in November 2001, the Saudi interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, decreed that Saudi women twenty-two years or older would be able to obtain personal identification cards with the written consent of their guardian. Newspapers reported that the purpose of the new ruling was to help women “perform their activities with ease” and to prevent fraud and identity theft. But others claimed that the real reason was security; in a number of cases, would-be terrorists had been arrested wearing women’s clothing. Whatever the reason, the issuing of an ID card was now possible, although optional.
Not long after the decree, I asked my father to take me to the Office of Civil Affairs in Mecca. I didn’t tell him why. When we arrived, I tried to make it a happy surprise: “Abouya, did you know that I can now get an official identity card? They issued the decision this week, and I’m here to submit my application.”
My father looked at me, his expression a mixture of outrage and disbelief. What he had heard me saying was this: “I want independence from you, and I don’t need you after today. My picture will be on the identity card, and men will see it.” I know that’s what he heard because those were the accusations he flung at me, word for word, in response to my request.
I insisted that he was my father and that I would never abandon him or stop being obedient to him. I explained how the card would be very important for me after I graduated, when I needed to prove my identity in the workplace and elsewhere. I reminded him how many times we had been stopped at checkpoints between Mecca and Jeddah, how he’d been interrogated to make sure that we were his daughters, and how we’d been able to do nothing but take out our university ID cards as proof.
My father wasn’t moved. He shook his head and pointed for me to go by myself. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to apply for the ID card without his signature, but I went to the registry office anyway and sat there waiting, holding back my tears. I took an application form and the guardian consent form and returned to the car chastened. Abouya looked at me and said sarcastically, “Where’s the card?” It was a clear statement that he was still the master of my fate. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just fake the guardian consent form as Mama and I had done for the apartment rental contract; to do such a thing with government papers would be fraud.
The identity card remained my obsession. I became cold with my father, and took every opportunity to remind him of what I wanted. In turn, his hurtful responses often drove me to tears. “You want to be a man?” he would ask. Or, “That’s it? You don’t want to depend on me anymore?” But I never tired of approaching him, consent form in hand, to repeat my request.
Finally, after several weeks, he surrendered. We went to the Office of Civil Affairs together and applied for my ID card. The serial number on the card was 1091, meaning that only 1,090 Saudi women had received their cards in the weeks before me. I tucked the card in my wallet and carried it with pride: for the first time ever, I had something to prove my identity. The most important thing of all was the picture. I looked miserable, but I didn’t care: it showed my face, my eyes, nose, and mouth, with nothing blurred or concealed or veiled. It was the day my homeland acknowledged me as a Saudi citizen. But more than that, it was a symbol of my newfound courage to assert myself. I had changed and perhaps, in some small way, so had my father.
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Employed and Homeless
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Growing up, we never had pocket money. If my brother or sister or I wanted something, we would save a riyal or two from our school breakfast money each day. I remember I wanted a magnetic board with English letters because I really wanted to learn English. The board cost 50 riyals. I saved for weeks to buy that board. No one was rich at the government schools we attended, but there weren’t many girls poorer than us. One of my friends had an allowance of 500 riyals for clothes. I didn’t have any clothing allowance. My father gave my mother 50 riyals a year for our clothes, so she would buy material and sew Muna and me our two dresses each year.
The only time we were allowed to buy anything was at the start of school, when we went to the stationery store for books and school supplies. Abouya would also buy me a coloring book. The rest of the year, though, I was afraid to ask him for anything. He beat all of us for no reason, so I certainly didn’t want to give him an excuse.
Abouya was very generous when people came to visit. Whenever Uncle Ali came from Libya, he bought great quantities of food and gifts. But we lived in an old apartment with secondhand furniture and had no toys except what my mother scraped together or what we saved for ourselves out of our breakfast money. One time, when I desperately wanted to buy some things for my Egyptian Barbie, I asked my mother if I could sell some of the gold jewelry that my Libyan uncle had brought me. Mama said yes, so I sold some of my rings and necklaces, and then she took me to the toy store. I bought a kitchen set and a bedroom set for Barbie.
Mama sometimes told us that our father made good money. For years, he worked for a gas station. But he didn’t bring his money home, and he wouldn’t put it in a bank. He “banked” nearly all of his earnings with his boss. He only took enough money to pay the rent, the grocery bill, the electricity bill, and a little bit extra beyond that. We lived in a horrible apartment while my father’s salary lived with his boss.
When I was in middle school, my father was fired. He went to see his boss with the receipts for years of salary to collect his money. He brought a big black suitcase to put the cash in. But all the boss did was kick him out of the office. Abouya yelled at him, saying that he would go to the Grand Mosque and pray that God punished him. And the boss basically said, sure, go ahead and ask God to punish me. Abouya came home with nothing. Everyone was angry. We had dreamed of moving to a house that we owned, but now the money was gone. We partly blamed Abouya for his blind trust in his employer.
Abouya changed a lot after this incident; he lost his trust in people. He managed to sell a piece of land in Jeddah that he had gotten from the government. (The government used to give land to citizens to build their own homes; he was going to use the savings from his salary to build a home on that land.) He bought a pre-owned taxi with the proceeds. Then he went back to his first job, driving pilgrims to Mecca.
All of this made me determined to find a good job.
My quest to find a job began as I approached my fourth year of university. Teaching wasn’t an option. Only boys’ secondary schools taught information technology, and even if girls could study computer science, I didn’t want to return to the same dismal government girls’ schools that I had endured all those years. Since my major was a new one, I couldn’t get a master’s or doctorate; the university didn’t have the necessary academic staff.
The longer I hunted for a job, the gloomier my prospects seemed. One day Maram, one of my classmates, dashed my hopes of finding employment anywhere. “The best you can aim for is to work as an instructor in one of the training institutes,” she told me. The job she was talking about didn’t even require a diploma, and the money wouldn’t be enough to afford any of the things I wanted. “You’d be lucky to get 4,000 riyals,” she said.
Just as she’d helped me earlier to enter the university, my sister came to my rescue again. During the summer before my senior year, she helped me get an internship at the university hospital, where she was doing her final year of medical training. My sister didn’t believe in the niqab: she wore it only outside the hospital. My parents never tried to force it on her, perhaps because they knew she’d never accept it.
In the past, Muna and I had clashed over the niqab as well. But the day I entered university hospital for my interview, I decided that I, too, would uncover my face. I�
��d never revealed my face to men before—I’d never even contemplated it—so I had no idea how it would make me feel.
Outside on the street, I lifted my niqab and placed it in my handbag. The first thing I sensed was the air on my skin as I walked. I felt it touch my cheeks, my forehead, and all the other parts of my face for the first time since I was still a girl. Breathing felt different, too: the barrier was gone, and I finally inhaled freely. It was like opening a long-closed window into a dark room. That was the moment I rediscovered my face.
At the hospital, I walked uneasily through the corridors, toward the office of Dr. Abdelbari, the hospital’s head of information technology, who would be conducting my interview. I kept my head down; I felt completely naked whenever a man walked by, and I quickened my step to disappear from his sight.
Dr. Abdelbari welcomed me as I entered his office. “Peace be upon you, too,” he said, and held out his hand. I looked down. I’d never shaken hands with a man in my life, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it now. I apologized profusely, and thanked God that no one else was watching. I was certain I had ruined my chances of getting the summer internship. I sank into the chair opposite his desk and studied the piles of papers.
Dr. Abdelbari was a man in his late fifties, originally from Pakistan. He was slim with white hair and a warm voice. He was wearing a white thobe, the long robe traditionally worn by Saudi men, but without a shemagh, the white-and-red-checked head covering. He was surprised that I spoke English, which I needed to know for the internship. The government schools where I had studied were known for teaching nothing more than the basic rules of the language. I told him that I’d taught myself, because I loved learning languages.
“We’ll give you a monthly remuneration of a thousand riyals if you prove yourself,” he told me.
It was a very small amount given the long working hours, but getting the experience made up for the low wage. I woke up at six every day to arrive at the office by eight, and when I finished my work at five in the afternoon, I had an hourlong journey back to Mecca ahead of me. I was very surprised that the workplace was mixed. The department gave me a desk in one of the offices, and I shared the space with another intern, a girl named Sue from Kenya. The team with whom we worked was comprised of three male employees and one woman. None of them was from Saudi Arabia, which made me feel somewhat more at ease. It was the first time I’d dealt with men other than my father and brother, and I was overcome with curiosity. I was like a twentysomething Alice in Wonderland, having fallen down my own peculiar rabbit hole.
I became enthralled by any man who spoke even a few words to me, including the reception clerk. I’d obsess over one man and then a week later become infatuated with another. I noted every detail—the way they talked, their clothes, the style of their facial hair, their hands, their walk—but I never showed my feelings; I was careful to maintain a cold and uninterested air, all the while terrified that my eyes would somehow give me away. Summer ended, and the IT department didn’t give me the financial reward it had promised. But they did give me my very first certificate of experience and, perhaps most important of all, my first experience of a normal work environment, with no separation between women and men.
Uncovering my face when I was anywhere outside with Abouya and Mama—or in any public place in Mecca, for that matter—remained unthinkable; it would never be deemed acceptable in our environment and social circles. My cousin Amal never saw the face of her other grandmother, who belonged to a Bedouin tribe and never took off her covering, even in the presence of her family. The first time my father saw my face uncovered in public wouldn’t be until some years after I had moved far away to the Eastern Province. Even then, he was very upset with me. More than once he ordered me to put my niqab back on. I told him I would, but I didn’t. With time, my parents got used to seeing me without it.
Today, my friends who grew up as I did, wearing the niqab, are divided into two groups. One group insists, like me, on wearing only the hijab when at home in Saudi Arabia. (All females in Saudi Arabia, even non-Muslims, are forced to wear the abaya cloak whenever they leave the house.) The other group has kept the niqab, whether because of the social pressure or because of their husbands’ commands or because they believe in it. But none of my friends who wear the niqab on a day-to-day basis wear it outside Saudi Arabia. They wear either the hijab or no form of head covering at all.
The phenomenon of Saudi women deveiling in transit is so well known that I remember a Tunisian work colleague making jokes about it. “When Tunisian women get on the airplane to leave the country,” he would say, “they put the hijab on, and when the Saudi women board, they take it off!” Part of the reason for this lies with the law, secular and religious: Tunisian state law used to prohibit the wearing of the hijab, while Saudi religious law imposes it. My retort was simple: “This is what happens when the state intervenes in a person’s private life; it creates two separate personas. It compels you either to lead two separate lives, or to violate what’s imposed on you when the state isn’t looking.”
The propaganda declaring that the niqab is what separates Muslim women from the infidel complicates the debate. As I grew older, I came to believe that it is a very ugly thing to describe women with uncovered faces as infidels. One time, I was on a flight between the Saudi cities of Dammam and Jeddah. A girl about ten years old was sitting next to me. I was chatting with her because she wasn’t sitting with her family. “Are you an infidel?” she suddenly asked me.
“Why do you think I’m an infidel?” I asked.
“Because you don’t cover your face,” she replied.
Despite my black abaya and hijab, she doubted that I was a Muslim.
During that same summer before my last year of university, a man my age, Sultan, approached my family to inquire about marriage. He was a cousin from my father’s side. Though my sister and I had escaped being married at eighteen so that we could complete our education, girls like me were not free from the constraints of social norms. As we prepared to graduate, we were expected to welcome the knocks of suitors at the door.
I was strongly opposed to the “supermarket method” of selecting a bride, a process where neither the prospective bride nor groom has much of a say in the end result. The potential groom’s mother comes to visit the girl first; if the girl wins her approval, she goes home and describes the girl to her son. The prospective groom then comes with his father to meet the girl’s father. During this meeting, the groom also gets to see the girl briefly. This supervised encounter is known as a shoufa, and it’s the only permissible way for boy and a girl to lay eyes on each other without being married.
The day came for Sultan’s mother to pay my mother a visit. I was very upset at the thought of her seeing our modest house, and the only clothes I owned that were appropriate were my university clothes. Since our father did not allow us to go out except to visit my family and the only family member left was my uncle—my grandmother and aunt having passed away—I had no formal dress clothes, no colorful long skirts or elegant blouses. My friend Jihan offered to lend me some of her clothes for the day. I was very embarrassed; I’d never worn anyone else’s clothes before.
When Sultan’s mother arrived, I served her coffee and juice. It is customary in Saudi culture for the suitor’s mother to be able to briefly look upon the intended girl. But there should be no conversation between them, and the girl should never be the one to open the door and welcome her prospective mother-in-law into the house. I stood in front of Sultan’s mother with clothes that didn’t belong to me and a mind that was elsewhere. I was only going through the motions.
Though I wished that she’d hate me, find me ugly, and dismiss any possibility of an engagement, she contacted Mama again to set a date for Sultan and his father to visit with my father. If my feelings had been mixed before, now every fiber of my being resisted. When my college friends brought in pictures of their engagements or marriages for us to look at, I would think that something li
ke that might be nice for me. But whenever I was alone and thought about excelling in my studies and my work, dreaming of a job that would lift my family out of poverty, I could not imagine being married. Slowly, I began to consider the real reason for my aversion to marriage, and memories of the barber Abdulaleem and my bloodstained yellow jalabiya came flooding back. I told my parents that I was no longer interested in completing the rituals of engagement.
“Give me one reason for your refusal!” my father demanded.
For once in my life, I spoke the truth. “The day of my circumcision disfigured me horrifically,” I replied. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get married, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive you.”
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