Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia

by Jean Sasson

  Sadly, many of the royal cousins were swept away by the sudden rush of riches. My mother used to say that the bedouin had survived the stark emptiness of the desert, but we would never survive the enormous wealth of the oil fields. The quiet achievements of the mind and the pious religious beliefs of their fathers hold no appeal for the vast majority of the younger Al Sa’uds. I believe that the children of this generation have decayed with the ease of their lives, and that their great fortune has deprived them of any ambitions or real satisfactions. Surely the weakness of our monarchy in Saudi Arabia is bound up in our addiction to extravagance. I fear it will be our undoing.

  Most of my childhood was spent traveling from one city to another in my land. The nomadic bedouin blood flows in all Saudis, and as soon as we would return from one trip, discussions would ensue as to the next journey. We Saudis no longer have sheep to graze, but we cannot stop looking for greener pastures.

  Riyadh was the base of the government, but none of the Al Sa’ud family particularly enjoyed the city; their complaints never ended about the dreariness of life in Riyadh. It was too hot and dry, the men of religion took themselves too seriously, the nights were too cold. Most of the family preferred Jeddah or Taif.

  Jeddah, with its ancient ports, was more open to change and moderation. There, we all breathed easier in the air of the sea. We generally spent the months from December to February in Jeddah. We would return to Riyadh for March, April, and May. The heat of the summer months would drive us to the mountains of Taif from June to September. Then it was back to Riyadh for October and November. Of course, we spent the month of Ramadan and two weeks of Haj in Makkah, our holy city.

  By the time I was twelve years old, in 1968, my father had become extremely wealthy. In spite of his wealth, he was one of the least extravagant Al Sa’uds. But he did build each of his four families four palaces, in Riyadh, Jeddah, Taif, and Spain. The palaces were exactly the same in each city, even to the colors of carpets and furniture selected. My father hated change, and he wanted to feel as if he were in the same home even after a flight from city to city. I remember him telling my mother to purchase four each of every item, down to the children’s underwear. He did not want the family to bother with packing suitcases. I found it eerie that when I entered my room in Jeddah or Taif, it was the same as my room in Riyadh, with the identical clothes hanging in identical closets. My books and toys were purchased in fours, one of each item placed in each palace. My mother rarely complained, but when my father purchased four identical red Porsches for my brother, Ali, who was only fourteen at the time, she cried out that it was a shame—such waste—with so many poor in the world. When it came to Ali, though, no expense was spared.

  When he was ten years old, Ali received his first gold Rolex watch. I was particularly distressed, for I had asked my father for a thick gold bracelet from the souq (marketplace) and he had brusquely turned aside my request. During the second week of Ali flaunting his Rolex, I saw that he had laid it on the table beside the pool. Overcome with jealousy, I took a rock and pounded the watch to pieces.

  For once, my mischief was not discovered, and it was with great pleasure that I saw my father reprimand Ali for being careless with his belongings. But of course, within a week or so, Ali was given another gold Rolex watch and my childish resentfulness returned with a vengeance. My mother spoke to me often about my hatred for my brother. A wise woman, she saw the fire in my eye even as I bowed to the inevitable. As the youngest child of the family, I had been the most pampered of the daughters by my mother, sisters, and other relatives. Looking back, it is hard to deny that I was spoiled beyond belief. Because I was small for my age, in contrast with the rest of my sisters, who were tall with large frames, I was treated as a baby throughout my childhood years. All of my sisters were quiet and restrained, as befitting Saudi princesses. I was loud and unruly, caring little for my royal image. How I must have tried their patience! But even today, each of my sisters would spring to my defense at the first sign of danger.

  In sad contrast, to my father, I represented the last of many disappointments. As a consequence, I spent my childhood trying to win his affection. Finally, I despaired of attaining his love and clamored after any attention, even if it was in the form of punishment for misdeeds. I calculated that if my father looked at me enough times, he would recognize my special traits and come to love his daughter, even as he loved Ali. As it turned out, my rowdy ways ensured that he would go from indifference to open dislike.

  My mother accepted the fact that the land in which we had been born was a place that is destined for misunderstandings between the sexes. Still a child, with the world stretching before me, I had yet to reach that conclusion.

  Looking back, I suppose Ali must have had good character traits along with the bad, but it was difficult for me to see past his one great defect: Ali was cruel. I watched him as he taunted the handicapped son of our gardener. The poor child had long arms and strangely shaped legs. Often, when Ali’s boyhood friends came over for a visit, he would summon poor Sami and tell him to do his “monkey walk.” Ali never noticed the pathetic look on Sami’s face or the tears that trickled down his cheeks.

  When Ali found baby kittens, he would lock them away from their mother and howl with glee as the mother cat tried in vain to reach them. No one in the household dared to chastise Ali, for our father saw no harm in Ali’s cruel ways.

  After a particularly moving talk from my mother, I prayed about my feelings for Ali and decided to attempt the “Saudi” way of manipulation instead of confrontation with my brother. Besides, my mother used God’s wishes as her platform, and using God is always an admirable formula for convincing children to change their actions. Through my mother’s eyes, I finally saw that my present course would lead me down a thorny path. My good intentions were squashed within the week by Ali’s dastardly behavior. My sisters and I found a tiny puppy that had evidently become lost from its mother. The puppy was whimpering from hunger. Overcome with excitement at our find, we rushed about collecting doll bottles and warming goat’s milk. My sisters and I took turns with feedings. Within days, the puppy was bouncing and fat. We dressed him in rags and even trained him to sit in our baby carriage.

  While it is true that most Muslims do not favor dogs, it is a rare person who can harm a baby animal of any species. Even our mother, a devout Muslim, smiled at the antics of the puppy. One afternoon we were pushing Basem, which means “smiling face” in Arabic, in a carriage. Ali happened to walk by with his friends. Sensing his friends’ excitement over our puppy, Ali decided the puppy should be his. My sisters and I screamed and fought when he tried to take Basem from our arms. Our father heard the commotion and came from his study. When Ali told him that he wanted the puppy, our father instructed us to hand him over. Nothing we said or did would change our father’s mind. Ali wanted the puppy; Ali got the puppy.

  Tears streamed down our faces as Ali jauntily walked away with Basem tucked under his arm. The possibility for love of my brother was forever lost, and my hate solidified when I was told Ali had soon tired of Basem’s whimpers and, on the way to visit friends, had tossed the puppy out the window of the moving car.

  Chapter Three: My Sister Sara

  I felt wretched, for my favorite sister, Sara, was crying in Mother’s arms. She is the ninth living daughter of my parents, three years older than I. Only Ali’s birth separates us. It was Sara’s sixteenth birthday, and she should have been rejoicing, but Mother had just relayed distressing news from Father.

  Sara had been veiling since her menses, two years earlier. The veil stamped her as a non-person, and she soon ceased to speak of her childhood dreams of great accomplishment. She became distant from me, her younger sister who was as yet unconcerned with the institution of veiling. The sharpening of Sara’s distance left me longing for the remembered happiness of our shared childhood. It suddenly became apparent to me that happiness is realized only in the face of unhappiness, for I never knew we were so hap
py until Sara’s unhappiness stared me in the face.

  Sara was lovely, much more beautiful than I or my sisters. Her great beauty had become a curse, for many men had heard of Sara’s beauty through their mothers and sisters and now wished to marry her. Sara was tall and slim and her skin creamy and white. Her huge brown eyes sparkled with the knowledge that all who saw her admired her beauty. Her long black hair was the envy of all her sisters. In spite of her natural beauty, Sara was genuinely sweet and loved by all who knew her. Unfortunately, not only did Sara acquire the curse that comes with great beauty, she was also exceptionally bright. In our land, brilliance in a woman assures her future misery, for there is nowhere to focus her genius.

  Sara wanted to study art in Italy and be the first to open an art gallery in Jeddah. She had been working toward that goal since she was twelve years old. Her room stayed cluttered with books of all the great masters. Sara made my head swim with descriptions of the magnificent art in Europe. Just before the wedding announcement, when I was secretly plundering through her room, I saw a list of the places she planned to visit in Florence, Venice, and Milan. Sadly, I knew that Sara’s dreams would not come true. While it is true that most marriages in my land are guided by the hands of the older females of the families, in our family, Father was the decision maker in all matters. Long ago, he had decided that his most beautiful daughter would marry a man of great prominence and wealth.

  Now, the particular man he had chosen to marry his most desirable daughter was a member of a leading merchant family in Jeddah that had decided financial influence with our family. The groom was chosen solely because of past and future business deals. He was sixty-two years old; Sara would be his third wife. Although she had never met the old man, he had heard of her great beauty from his female relatives and was eager for the wedding date to be set. Mother had tried to intervene on Sara’s behalf, but Father, as was his way, responded without emotion to his daughter’s tears. And now Sara had heard she was to wed. Mother ordered me to leave the room, but her back was turned; I tricked her by making noises with my feet and slamming the door. I slid inside the open closet door and wept silent tears as my sister cursed our father, our land, our culture. She cried so hard that I lost many of her words, but I heard her cry out that she was sure to be sacrificed like a lamb.

  My mother wept too, but she had no words of comfort for Sara, for she knew her husband had the full right to dispose of their daughters in any marriage he liked. Six of their ten daughters were already married to men not of their choosing. Mother understood that the four remaining daughters would follow that darkness; there was no power on earth that could stop it.

  Mother heard my squirming in the closet. She narrowed her eyes and shook her head when she saw me, but made no effort to make me move. She told me to bring cold towels, and then she turned her attention back to Sara. When I returned, she placed the towels on Sara’s head and soothed her to sleep. She sat and watched her young daughter for many minutes, and finally, she rose wearily to her feet. With a long, sad sigh, she took me by the hand and led me to the kitchen. Although it was not mealtime, and the cook was napping, Mother prepared for me a plate of cake and a glass of cold milk. I was thirteen, but small for my age; she cuddled me in her lap for a long time.

  Unfortunately, Sara’s tears served only to harden Father’s heart. I overheard her entreaties to him. She became so unbalanced in her grief that she accused our father of hating women. She spat out a verse of Buddha: “Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered are unhappy....” Father, his back rigid with anger, turned and walked away. Sara wailed at his back that she would have been better off unborn, since her pain so overweighed her happiness. With an ugly voice, Father responded by saying that her wedding date would be moved up to avoid stretching out her pain of anticipation.

  Father normally came to our villa once every fourth night. Men of the Muslim faith, with four wives, rotate their evenings so that each wife and family is given an equal amount of time. It is a serious situation when a man refuses to go to his wife and children, a form of punishment. Our villa was in such an uproar with Sara’s suffering that Father instructed Mother, who was his first and therefore his head wife, to inform his other three wives that he would rotate among their villas, but not ours. Before he left the villa, Father curtly told Mother to cure her daughter of her feverish resentments and to guide her peacefully to her destiny, which in his words was that of a “dutiful wife and good mother.” I barely recall the weddings of my other sisters. I vaguely remember tears, but I was so young and the emotional trauma of marriage to a stranger had not yet penetrated my thoughts. But I can close my eyes today and bring to mind every detail of the events that occurred the months before Sara’s wedding, the wedding itself, and the sad events that unfolded in the weeks afterward.

  I held the family reputation of the difficult child, the daughter who most tried my parents’ patience. Willful and reckless, I created havoc in our household. I was the one who poured sand into the motor of Ali’s new Mercedes; I pinched money out of my father’s wallet; I buried Ali’s gold coin collection in the backyard; I released green snakes and ugly lizards from jars into the family pool as Ali lay sleeping on his float.

  Sara was the perfect daughter, with her quiet obedience, and had earned perfect scores on her schoolwork. Even though I loved her madly, I thought Sara weak. But she surprised us all during the weeks prior to her wedding. Apparently she carried a hidden strength for bravery, for she called our father’s office on a daily basis and left messages for him that she was not going to marry. She even called the office of the man she was scheduled to marry and left a hard message with his Indian secretary that she thought he was an old, disgusting man, and that he should marry women, not girls. The Indian secretary obviously thought better of giving such a message to his employer, for seas did not part and mountains failed to erupt. Determined, Sara called back and asked to speak to the man himself! He was not in his office. Sara was informed that he would be in Paris for a few weeks. Father, wearying of Sara’s behavior, had our telephones disconnected.

  Sara was confined to her room.

  My sister’s reality loomed ahead. The day of the wedding arrived. The weeks of fretful mourning had done nothing to diminish Sara’s beauty. If anything, she appeared more beautiful, almost translucent, a heavenly creature not made for this world. Because of weight loss, her dark eyes dominated her face, and her features seemed chiseled. There was no end to Sara’s eyes, and I could see into her soul through her enormous black pupils. I saw fear there.

  Our older sisters, various female cousins, and aunties arrived early on the morning of the wedding to prepare the bride for the groom. My unwanted presence escaped the attention of the women, for I sat like a stone in the comer of the large dressing room that had been converted into a preparation room for the bride. No less than fifteen women were attending to the various wedding details. The first ceremony, the halawa, was performed by our mother and her oldest auntie. All of Sara’s body hair had to be removed, except her eyebrows and head hair. A special mixture of sugar, rosewater, and lemon juice that would be spread over her body was now boiling over a low fire in the kitchen. When the sweet paste dried on her body, it would be removed, and Sara’s body hair would be ripped off with the sticky mixture. The aroma was sweet-smelling, but Sara’s yelps of pain made me shudder in fear.

  The henna was prepared for the final rinse through Sara’s luxuriant curls; her hair would now shine with beautiful high-lights. Her nails were painted bright red, the color of blood, I reflected, gloomily. The pale pink, lacy wedding gown hung from the doorway. The requisite diamond necklace with matching bracelet and earrings were gathered in a pile on the dressing table. Although sent over weeks ago as a gift from the groom, the jewels remained unnoticed and untouched by Sara.

  When a Saudi bride is happy, the preparation room is filled with the sounds of laughter and eager anticipation. For Sara’s wedding, the mood was somber; her attendants mig
ht as well have been preparing her body for the grave. Everyone spoke in whispers. There was no response from Sara. I found her oddly subdued in view of her spirited reactions during the past few weeks. Later, I understood her trancelike state.

  Father, concerned that Sara would humiliate the family name by voicing her objections, or even insulting the groom, had instructed one of the Pakistani palace doctors to inject her with powerful tranquilizers throughout the day. Later we discovered that the same doctor had given the groom the tranquilizers in the form of pills for Sara. The groom was told that Sara was highly nervous with excitement over the wedding, and the medicine was prescribed for a queasy stomach. Since the groom had never met Sara, in the coming days he must have assumed that she was an unusually quiet and docile young woman. But, then again, many old men in my country marry young girls; I am sure they are accustomed to the terror of their young brides.

  The beating of drums signaled the arrival of guests. At last, the women were finished with Sara. The delicate dress was slipped over her head, the zipper was raised, and the pink slippers were placed on her feet. My mother fastened the diamond necklace around her neck. I loudly announced that the necklace might as well be a noose. One of my aunties thumped me on my head and another twisted my ear, but there was no sound from Sara. We all gazed at her in awed silence. We knew no bride could be more beautiful.

  A huge tent had been erected in the backyard for the ceremony. The garden was inundated in flowers sent from Holland. With thousands of overhanging colored lights, the grounds were spectacular. Taking in the splendor, I forgot for a few moments the grimness of the situation.