In the Land of Invisible Women

by Qanta Ahmed

  A heavy, riveted, blue-rimmed Rolex glinted under his left shirt cuff. It was probably a diving watch, watertight to one hundred meters. Yet I doubted he could swim; he didn't seem an outdoorsman. Meaty alabaster hands twirled an expensive Motorola cell phone with surprising delicacy. The black cellular and the steel watch flashed eddies of reflected light across the mud-baked ceiling of the room. Idly, he extended and retracted an aerial. Intermittently he made calls, all the while blue eyes darting, scanning from side to side.

  Imad was never seen without his phone and was noted for constantly upgrading to a new model every few weeks. Even though he was enormously educated and privileged, he shared the same anxiety as the restless teens in Riyadh. He needed the latest toy to feel au courant. Though Imad was dressed a picture of Kennebunkport relaxation, something about him remained taut, alert, and fundamentally tense. I stared hard. I couldn't distinguish what held him back.

  “Qanta, you must try this,” Hamid urged. I looked up and noticed that a tablecloth had been spread across the durries. Food was now unfurled in every direction. There were no appetizers or aperitifs. The entire feast had been served. Saudi men in full regalia waited to the side like bearers. Others were already loading their plates with rice, goat meat, breads, olives, cheeses, and other delicacies. Hamid held out a plate of rice towards me. I served myself.

  “Where did you grow up, Hamid?” I asked, realizing I knew very little about my colleagues even after months working together.

  “I was born in a small village outside of Jeddah. We are Hijazi!” He flashed a wry smile at me. “My father was a fisherman, Qanta. He would go in his small fishing boat into the Red Sea and catch food for all of us. The rest that we didn't need, he would sell. I would help my father drag the nets and sometimes mend them.”

  I studied his starched cuffs and the perfectly pressed collar on his thobe which was completely buttoned up. It was hard to imagine the hands of a fisherman's son as I looked at his cultivated digits, now more accustomed to stethoscopes than fishing lines. A silver Waterman pen with a blue cap twinkled in his single breast pocket. Doubtless his forebears were illiterate. On his wrist, a plain Swiss watch was framed in the soft black hair of his forearm. His father kept time with the rise of the sun and the fall of the tide, perhaps even praying moored at sea. This family had gone from fishermen to physicians in the brief space of half a generation.

  “My father still fishes, but of course he doesn't need to. He enjoys it. He is in his seventies now and we have bought him a better boat, Mashallah, but he loves the sea. He wanted me to have an education, Qanta, it was very important. You see, my father cannot read.”

  I had guessed correctly. Even so, Hamid had studied overseas. Like many of the doctors at the King Fahad Hospital, he was a graduate of Hamilton (Ontario) and later of a University in Toronto. Hamid was a multiply certified specialist and, from what I had seen, a very capable one.

  “When the National Guard announced they wanted to sponsor doctors to travel to the West to gain education (only if they returned after their training to our country) my father pushed me to do it. I was the first one in our family to leave the country in many generations. You know the Hijazi are heavily derived of migrating pilgrims who used to come to make Hajj decades earlier and never left the country afterward. Hijazis are famous for being worldly and of mixed blood, very different to the Najdi here in Riyadh. Anyway, I attended medical school in Canada on a government scholarship from the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Then they sponsored my residency and my fellowship. I came back one of the first Saudi nationals with that training, in the whole Kingdom and of course, they gave me a job.”

  In a rare moment of pride, Hamid leaned back and smiled at his achievement. I wondered if he saw the influence of racial aristocracy as a Saudi national (who would naturally be chosen over Western contemporaries for the best, most senior appointments) rather than an actual meritocracy of his achievements as the main driver for his early administrative seniority. I couldn't bring myself to ask Hamid these deeper questions. I didn't want to offend a kind and generous man.

  A waiter proffered me a meat dish which was newly arrived. A pungent odor drove me away from it. Unsure if this was the smell of the meat or of Hamid's stockinged feet, I was repelled but accepted anyway, unwilling to offend my Saudi hosts. My nostrils strained to separate the offending scent, tracing it to the dish after all. I forced myself to eat some of the fibrous meat drenched in a thick sauce of some kind. It tasted even worse than it smelled. Hamid looked on, highly amused.

  “So, you like camel flesh, Qanta?”

  I promptly stopped mid-mastication and before I could be embarrassed by my retching, I struggled to swallow the remainder with minimal fuss. Working fast, I gobbled some plain pita bread to dilute the strong, leathery taste. I was reminded of sweaty camel sellers who came to the ICU in search of injured friends. The ICU would smell for hours after their visits. Trying to salvage a fragment of decorum, I looked at Hamid and began to formulate a satirical response. His head was thrown back in a gale of laughter at my predicament, especially when he saw my eyes were tearing from the repugnant taste. I began to laugh a little myself, my lips curving helplessly into a smile. I was having fun.

  Suddenly, we were quickly silenced by the sounds of intrusion. In a startling moment, fishermen and camel sellers were forgotten. Looking at Hamid, I discovered his eyes were now widened in terror. We could hear angry shouts and loud banging. Even dining in a private room in a discreet restaurant, we had been discovered.

  The Mutawaeen were here.

  WAHABI WRATH

  EVERYONE STOPPED EATING. THE AIR was pregnant with fear. Across from me, I watched Alon, a visiting professor from Johns Hopkins, turn sallow as all color drained from his face. The door flung open revealing a single, glowering Muttawa. We were in the company of our deepest fears.

  The Muttawa entered the room triumphantly, pushing through our cross-legged ranks. He stood in the middle of the durries laid with food, sandaled feet abutting salad trays. From our seated position he towered over us. His lean, sharp carriage emanated a mean, rigid spirit. Narrowed eyes shone with the triumph of his catch: over a dozen men and women, seated at dinner without segregation or veiling. His bisht, a material of thin brown muslin worn over a white robe, trembled with excitement. Swelling with a ripe, turgid rage he prepared to ejaculate his fury upon us. He moistened his full, purple lips with a fat pink tongue. His sour mouth was fringed with coarse facial hair. Around him we retreated into impotence, actually shrinking. He radiated evil.

  Beyond the dining room we could hear his colleagues apprehending the restaurateur, several waiters, and one woman from our party (who had been unfortunate enough to be returning from the restroom when she encountered the Muttawa raid). For the first time, I noticed the room had only one exit, now blocked by a Wahabi Muttawa, and then glanced at my stilettos, useless in a getaway. We were trapped. A sharp scream rang out. Alarm rippled through the gathering. We were really in danger.

  “Let me go! You are hurting me! Ow!” It was Diana's voice, sounding more indignant than afraid. “You have no right to touch me! How dare you lay a finger on me, a Muslim woman! My husband will file a complaint! I am a married Muslim woman. You will regret this!”

  Diana was defying the Mutawaeen. An American, she had lived in the Kingdom for more than a decade and was married to a Saudi man by whom she had two children. She had accompanied us to dinner in her role as the events manager. Her blonde hair and her white skin hid her conversion to the Muslim faith, fooling most who crossed her path. Even ten years of living in the Kingdom had not lessened her leonine, if foolish, courage. She especially detested the religious police.

  Thick retorts in pharyngeal Arabic rose in objection to her protests. The Mutawaeen sounded even angrier. My fears began to grow. When the lone Muttawa sentry had turned his back, I signaled to Sami (an Egyptian toxicologist sitting diagonally across from me) to hand me my shoes. I sidled my stockinged f
oot from under me and began strapping the glittering stilettos in place. My fingers fumbled in fear.

  Friends had warned me of the Gestapo-like raids of the Mutawaeen. Just before I had arrived, a Western secretary to the ICU chairman had been repatriated after her relationship with a fellow Westerner had been discovered at a restaurant in Riyadh where she had dined with her then-boyfriend. He had been deported immediately, she placed under house arrest. Finally she was advised by her home consulate (Australian) that a return to Sydney would probably be best.

  Warnings were not issued only to expatriates. The Saudis feared the Muttawa too, both at their indiscriminate use of force (beatings in their custody were well-described) as well as the slur on one's reputation that followed questioning and incarceration. The prowling Muttawa patrols were one reason why even innocent romance in the Kingdom was such a secret and illicit affair. Even husbands and wives out in public in Riyadh never left their homes without their marriage licenses in tow. Mutawaeen could demand legal proof of marital status of both Saudis and non-Saudis alike.

  Nowhere in the Kingdom was immune. Even individuals' homes had been raided when private gatherings were suspected. This of course was now increasingly difficult when the homes were provided by powerful agencies who employed expatriates as a matter of course, explaining why at the National Guard Hospital the Muttawa were never seen on the grounds; the Saudi National Guard were too powerful by dint of their Royal patronage. In fact, the Saudi National Guard force had been created precisely to counter the Mutawaeen threats to the monarchy.

  Other safe harbors in Riyadh (free from their monitoring) were believed to exist on certain, very costly properties belonging to the famed heroic “free prince,” known simply as al-Waleed. There, in chic eateries where one was surrounded by powerful princes and members of the Royal glitterati, the state-employed Mutawaeen did not dare enter, let alone arrest or harass any influential guests. Upsetting the wrong prince could upset the delicate symbiotic relationship between the clergy and the monarchy. But the influence of Prince al-Waleed, nephew to the King and the fifth richest man in the world, a wealth he had generated by his own wits rather than simply siphoning off oil money, was simply too powerful. So perhaps it was not so shocking that tonight, in a private restaurant in an unknown suburb of central Riyadh, we were at the mercy of the Mutawaeen. I wondered how, or indeed if, we could reach home at all.

  One by one, the Muttawa demanded to know our nationalities.

  “Egyptian.”

  “American.”

  “Canadian.”

  “Bahraini.”

  “Yemeni.”

  “Omani.”

  He stopped at Imad, pausing.

  “Qatari,” he lied, squirming uncomfortably. None of the Saudi men with us was prepared to admit his Saudi nationality; not even our host. Even Hamid, the salt of the earth Hijazi Saudi, didn't present himself as that, seeking shelter behind a feigned Kuwaiti citizenship. I was agog. These men were truly afraid. After a few minutes, the situation deteriorated.

  The Muttawa then began confronting Manaal, who had just returned from UCLA where she had finished a fellowship. They were locked in an escalating crescendo of Arabic. She carried dual nationality, both American and Saudi. Unlike the men, she was defiant, puzzling the dull Muttawa. I held my breath, fearing the worst.

  Manaal's transplantation from UCLA to Riyadh had been exceptionally difficult for such an intelligent and confident Saudi woman. We had often shared notes over our difficulties as professional women in the Kingdom. Sometimes her Saudi husband's indignation on her behalf toward her dilemmas was even stronger than ours. Manaal was the product of a liberated Saudi father and a very modern and supportive Saudi husband. She was enormously proud of the influence these men had been in her life. I remembered her saying only days earlier:

  “Oh Qanta, my father is incredible! He takes special pride in ‘taking down’ arrogant men. He loves to hear them rant on about how inferior women are, only to then embarrass them by saying, ‘Mashallah my daughters, one a pediatrician, the other a cardiologist, are far more brilliant than the men in our family. They inherited all the smart genes from their mother's side!’ That usually shuts them up.” And she laughed out loud. “He calls himself ‘The Feminist Nazi.’ He is so irrationally and fanatically pro-Women!”

  Now returned to Riyadh, she had begun encountering the antithesis of her father's philosophy. For her, back in the Kingdom for only a few weeks, the Muttawa were excruciatingly offensive. Even I was more accustomed to them now than Manaal, navigating them with circumspection rather than at the full-speed ahead conflict with which Manaal seemed to surge. She would have to relearn the rules of engagement here. Manaal's voice began to rise, spilling over into blatant anger. I asked Sami to translate.

  “She is saying the Muttawa is a disgrace to the Kingdom,” he whispered. “That he is embarrassing all the international delegates visiting our institution. She even adds he has no Islamic basis for his investigations. She is adding that he is humiliating the Saudi hosts who are trying to show the world how advanced we are in science and medicine. Does he realize we have Christian visitors here who are being introduced to Islam for the first time in this meeting?”

  I cringed. Could Manaal have said anything more infuriating to them? Sami continued his running commentary. “Instead, you, the Muttawa, are showing the reality of Riyadh. Still a very backward and primitive society where only Wahabi Islam rules!”

  Sami stopped translating, silenced by the critical mass of rage Manaal and the Muttawa had reached. By now, the Muttawa was leaning down toward Manaal's upturned face, flushed with evident fury. She was a force. Her anger was frightening. Her creamy cheeks were suffused with a pink afterglow, framing coal-black eyes that blazed dangerously. They were almost butting chins as they collided in conflict; hers cleft, his receding. The Wahabi cleric and the Saudi academic were equally intense in their defiance. It was hard to decide who was more dogmatic in their beliefs. Riyadh's überorthodox climate, a pressure cooker of conflict, transformed even moderates into fanatics. There could be no middle ground here.

  “Manaal, please stop. That is enough. You are making things worse.” Imad's calm voice broke through the impasse between the cleric and the clinician. “Please, Manaal, it's no use arguing with him. You are only making him angrier.”

  I looked at Imad, pale from the strain of the proceedings. His perspiring brow glittered under the lamplight. Yet despite the ordeal, Imad still managed to be calm. He was a master of self-control. Manaal was humiliated by this public chastisement by an academic senior. Furthermore, Imad had made the reprimand very public by expressing it in English. Now all of us understood; Manaal's hot temper was a liability, endangering us further. I was just deciding whether the Muttawa could understand this exchange when he headed straight toward me. I was immobilized in his bloodless stare. All eyes were on me.

  He addressed me in incomprehensible Arabic. I stared at him nonplussed as he spewed his speech. Sensing danger in his venom, I grasped my handbag closer to me and zipped it carefully shut. By strange chance (in preparation of forthcoming travel) it contained my passport tonight. I didn't want him to see the telltale British insignia stamped on maroon leather. I suspected even an illiterate would recognize this to be British. It was possible he reserved special malice for expatriate Muslims who mixed with Westerners. Unexpectedly, the Muttawa stopped speaking, staring at me pugnaciously. He must have asked a question. No one offered to translate, so I responded.

  “I don't understand Arabic.” Resorting to the colonial origins of my forebears, I enunciated the words in cut-glass English, an accent I reserved for particularly difficult moments. My emerging voice surprised me; constricted by fear, it sounded several octaves higher than normal.

  “You—don't—speak—Arabic,” he taunted, mimicking me dangerously. I was shocked that he knew any English at all. He had probably heard everything Imad had said to Manaal and understood it. Our fear was giving him
considerable satisfaction and now we couldn't even hide behind interchanges in English. He leaned in, even more closely.

  “I am British!” I answered, through gritted teeth, barely able to contain the coiling cobra of fury inside me.

  “Oh, you are British?” he taunted. “Show me your passport! Where is it? Show me!”

  Everyone was silent. I was in a dilemma. If I proved to him my status, there was a real danger he would impound my passport and I would be in custody at the mercy of the Mutawaeen. But if I refused, perhaps I would be punished as a Saudi. I was unsure which of these was likely to be a worse fate. I looked around me for clues but my colleagues were paralyzed in their own fears. They waited for my response with baited breath. Even Sami had stopped smiling, an especially ominous sign. Imad, poker-faced, was a blank canvas. I glanced a final time to him for direction but he stared back, impassive, a Saudi sphinx, something in which I had learned he was masterfully practiced. Positions of authority in the Kingdom demanded an inhuman ability to conceal one's authentic opinions. Perhaps this was why he had risen to such starry heights at such a young age.

  “Show me your passport!” The Muttawa was insistent. I wondered if he had glimpsed Her Majesty's crest peeping out of a pocket in my handbag where I had casually slipped it earlier in the evening. I decided to be honest. I had already come to my senses and realized the Muttawa was operating without a Saudi police officer. To my knowledge without the authority of the police force, he had no grounds for harassing us.

  “I don't think I should show you my passport.” I tried hard to sound firm.

  “You don't think you should show it to me?” he mimicked spitefully. If we hadn't been so afraid, the situation was approaching a bizarre, almost Pythonian comedy. I had a sudden desire to laugh: nerves.