In the Land of Invisible Women

by Qanta Ahmed

  Today my friends continue their work inside the Kingdom and often carry their contributions with them to the wider world. We see the Saudi flag displayed at medical conferences in the United States. International collaboration is increasing, academic publications growing, clinical services expanding. Most importantly to me, the Holocaust denier now collaborates with a Jewish academic, his small mind finally widened by the generous experience of a patient American.

  Of my Saudi love, all that remain are memories and fragments. Imad and I were never reunited after our foiled meeting at King Khalid International. He is now the father of two and in these intervening years has made a successful marriage of his endogamous betrothal. I feel both proud and poignant as I watch him enter the pressured role of Saudi fatherhood. He has melded happiness of a kind for himself in his country, still disguising his conflicts in a rebellion of Boss and Brioni.

  Ghadah is already defending her PhD thesis. She made the local papers in England, where reporters wrote about (and photographed) the beautiful, married Saudi woman who was commuting from Riyadh to study among them. Back in Riyadh, she unfurls the tattered cutting for me to read as we sip coffee in her baroque living room. Her face is beaming with a rare pride and she giggles at her wondrous surgeon-husband who manages the children in Riyadh while she studies for two weeks out of every three, five thousand miles away. Cardiac surgery is less aging, he jokes, than playing Mr. Mom. The wide-eyed girls admire their mother even more. She has grown their world in the realization of her dreams.

  And Ghadah is also a local force for feminism. The last time I saw her she had built her new house, which was scattered with her busy life amid the Lalique and Versace and Daum. She hosts lunch parties every weekend for her circle of young Saudi marrieds for whom she has become something of a figurehead. Even now she remains the most beautiful woman I know. It is heartening to know they have each other to exchange ideas, discuss politics, and even watch the national obsession—soccer.

  Today Dr. Fahad advises the Monarch. He cultivates honey from his own hives and serves it to his guests for breakfast. I can confirm it is delicious. He also raises a beloved granddaughter, Lulu, who at three already has more motorized vehicles than her grandfather. At home he teaches her to swim. She is a brave paddler and an able tricyclist. She will grow into a feisty, enchanting woman, witty like her charming grandfather, but will certainly drive herself in her own car to more opportunity than her mother's generation could ever know.

  Zubaidah is, like me, unmarried. This month she completed her Hajj. Zubaidah didn't wait to meet her Maker until after marriage. She moves at her own speed and her life is not arrested by a late marriage. She remains the consummate Muslim and a softly spoken, highly fragrant feminist. I miss her enormously.

  Fatima remains a divorcée but still hopeful for love. Faris sends me pictures of his new wife. They smile into the sunlight, squinting atop a hill in Beirut. For the first time in years he looks really happy, and his marriage was to be extremely timely. A few months later his new bride would nurse him after a catastrophic illness. I spoke to her in my fractured Arabic until finally the nurse held the receiver for Faris. For a few sad minutes, I listened to his fluent English replaced by a dysphasic struggle to conquer speech made woolly with disease. Weakened, he is making a slow recovery and he worries to meet the responsibilities of his four unmarried children in this lifetime.

  Reem never operated again, instead delivering three daughters. She bought her own house where she lives with her husband and her in-laws. When we talk of medicine she is wistful. I don't believe she will ever return to vascular surgery. I hope she is fulfilled even if her talents are not. She keeps her own counsel, but we both know she squandered her dreams. It makes us both sad.

  And what of the Gloria Steinem? Only this morning Maha emailed me with details of the end of the ban on women's driving in the Kingdom. The day is nearing and who, we wondered at once, would teach all the women to drive? Often I imagine I would like nothing better than to drive myself right up to the House of God. Perhaps one day I will, and maybe Maha hopes for the same herself. She continues to be a force for change. Like all women who do this work everywhere in the world, she is not always popular and she is oftentimes alone, but I carry her in my thoughts always, as I know will each reader.

  And so the stories continue. Perhaps the storyteller failed to meet her task with justice. No matter how deeply I connect, the Saudis remain enigmatic, their surface a brilliant veneer refractory to insight. And yet I have to admit, I still count the dichotomies: angry divorcées who dream of becoming second wives; conflicted Saudi men who cannot forsake the expectations of powerful matriarchs; womanhood that is both oppressed and liberated by veiling; Saudi men who are feminists and Saudi grandmothers who propagate female suppression; and the women… the women!

  It is the women who really opened the door to this society for me. Women who confided, women who guided, women who competed, women who disdained, women whom I attempted to heal and who in turn would heal me, women who were illiterate yet had memorized the Quran, women who could repair aneurysms but could not make a three-point turn, women who were objects of affection from even within their closeted veils.

  It is these same women who hold the keys to change, through their daughters and their sons but most of all through themselves. It is the voices of these mothers, wives, sisters, aunts, and daughters that we crave and their voices that narrow men fear. It is women's voices that are becoming audible, women's actions that are becoming visible, and through their actions, Saudi women who are daily becoming more powerful. Nothing is as fierce or imbued with goodness as the oppressed who have overcome their cowardly oppressor. It is these small women, scurrying around in their abbayahs, who will seize their justice from the jaws of extremists and wrest their new place beyond the gender apartheid which is still the Kingdom. The gender apartheid committed in the name of Islam is already dying, rasping its last, soured breaths.

  And the other corners of silent observation that somehow speak volumes resound even now. The inscrutable prejudices that are dearly held in the face of rational logic; a firmly held, deep suspicion and simultaneous admiration of the West; a religious attachment to Americana and to the accoutrements of the Bedouin, whether a Dior ghutra or a Bedouin in a Detroit SUV; a rigid Islamic theocracy that cannot suppress the true beauty in Islam no matter how weighty the suffocation. Most touching: the enormous resilience and tenderness that persists in the most unexpected places.

  The Kingdom's ability to both infuriate and humble me at once is what I hold dearest, for it was that which I so needed until I could finally see what I had always possessed: a place in Islam no matter how displaced I had become. Inside the Kingdom there was and there remains a beauty in her harshness that stays with me even now. No amount of petrodollars or paneling or polish can conceal its rugged glory. It is for this that I thank the Kingdom, for this that I thank the Stranger I was once within it, and for this that I thank those of the Kingdom Dwellers who made me, and still make me, welcome.

  Charleston, South Carolina, United States

  January 29, 2008

  ENDNOTES

  1 While Saudis never call themselves Wahabis, I use the term in the Western sense to identify the extremely orthodox, rigid, and regressive face of Islam. Wahabi implies a follower of Wahabiism and is a widely used term which can encompass several meanings. Wahabiism refers to the 18th century polemical teachings of Abdul Wahab (which were published in 1730 in his sole work Kitab-Ul-Tawhid, which translates as the Book of Monotheism). Abdul Wahab was a self-appointed Islamic “reformer” advocating a regressive version of Islam. Abdul Wahab denounced any interpretation or innovation as un-Islamic which is counter to the mainstream Muslims of many sects, instead promoting archaic rigidity which has been carried to a ridiculous extreme.

  While the term Wahabiism is one first ascribed to the region by Western diplomacy in the 19th Century (first appearing in 440 In the Land of Invisible Women
1803), it has today become inextricably linked in Western literature to radical manifestations of enforced and compulsive indoctrination deemed by some elements to be Islam.

  Saudis never call themselves Wahabis and never introduced themselves as such to me during my six years of living in or traveling to the Kingdom. In fact, they actually find the term offensive because the implication of following Abdul Wahab is suggested and worship of any intermediary between man and God is anathema to Muslims.

  Famously one senior prince, Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the Governor of Riyadh, contemptuously referred in a 1998 speech to outside commentators as “those who call us Wahabi,” implying a fundamental misunderstanding of Saudi Islam. Rather, Saudi Muslims are more likely to refer to themselves as Salfists or Salfiyuun which means followers of the Salafi, the original disciples of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), or Muwahhiddun, which means unitarian.

  Throughout this book I chose to use Wahabi in the Western sense to identify the extremely orthodox and rigid regressive face of Islam which is a significant element of Kingdom life; and while not representative of all Saudis (perhaps even not representative of most Saudis), it is a reasonable lay-term to ascribe to much of the state sanctioned, legislated clerical policing of all religion in the Kingdom.

  Readers are directed to more academic references for deeper insights listed in the bibliography, particularly to Pascal Ménoret's excellent The Saudi Enigma, for further clarification.

  2 Feminism and Islam, Legal and Literary Perspectives by Mai Yamani. In “Chapter 12: Some Observations on Women in Saudi Arabia,” page 279 (263-281).

  3 Ibid.

  4 The Saudi Enigma by Pascal Ménoret. In “Chapter 7: The Appearance of Women,” page 183. Also Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia by Mai Yamani. Page 106.

  5 A Modern History of the Islamic World by Reinhard Schulze. In “Chapter 5: ‘Ascendancy of Islamic Ideologies 1973-89’ The Crisis of Mecca,” pages 226-229.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Sullivan, Kevin. “Saudi Youth Use Cellphone Savvy to Outwit the Sentries of Romance.” Washington Post Foreign Service. August 6, 2006. Accessed February 24, 2008, at washington-post.com.

  8 Shalhoub, Lulwa. “Women-Only Hospitals: Who Will Rule the Roost, Idealists or Pragmatists?” Arab News. February 1, 2008.

  9 Journal of Palliative Medicine 2006 Volume 9 Number 6 Hedayat, K, 1282-1291.

  10 Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World by Robert R Bianchi.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Feminism and Islam, Legal and Literary Perspectives by Mai Yamani. In “Chapter 12: Some Observations on Women in Saudi Arabia,” page 279 (263-281).

  14 The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism by Stephen Schwartz. In “Chapter 1: Snow in the Desert,” Page 10.

  15 Pyramids and Nightclubs: A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince and Blond Belly Dancers by L.L. Wynn.

  16 Sardar, Ziauddin. “Islam: Enter a new, improved Saudi philanthropist.” The New Statesman. July 24, 2006.

  17 The Saudi Enigma by Pascal Ménoret. In “Chapter 3: Genesis and Structure of the Modern State.”

  18 A Modern History of the Islamic World by Reinhard Schulze.

  19 al-Sanea, Rajaa. “My Saudi Valentine.” New York Times. February 13, 2008.

  20 Zawawi, Susan. “Red is Banned till Fri.” The Saudi Gazette. February 11, 2008. Accessed February 24, 2008, at http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46708&Itemid=1.

  21 Qusti, Raid. “Coffee with Colleague Lands Woman in Trouble” Arab News. February 15, 2008. Accessed February 24, 2008, at http://www.arabnews.com.

  22 Labi, Nadya. “Kingdom in the Closet.” The Atlantic Monthly. May 2007.

  23 The Great Theft, Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, by Khaled Abou El Fadl.

  24 “Abusing the Concept of Blood Money.” Arab News. November 30, 2007. Accessed February 24, 2008, at http://www.arabnews.com/services/email/email.asp?artid=104141&d=30&m=11&y=2007&hl=Abusing%20the%20Concept%20of%20Blood%20Money.

  25 The Saudi Enigma by Pascal Ménoret. In “Chapter 3: Genesis and Structure of the Modern State.”

  26 The Saudi Enigma by Pascal Ménoret. In “Chapter 7: The Appearance of Women,” pages 173-189.

  27 http://www.islam-watch.org/AdrianMorgan/Women-Under-Islam2.htm.

  28 Feminism and Islam, by Mai Yamani. In “Chapter 12: Women in Saudi Arabia,” pages 263-281.

  29 Kandela, Peter. “Egypt's Trade in Hymen Repair.” The Lancet. 1996:347(9015):1615. Also Patterson-Brown, Sara. “Commentary: Education about the Hymen is Needed.” British Medical Journal. 1998:316:461.

  30 ABC News “Saudi Arabia, Land of Shadowy Contrasts, A Rare Inside Look at Saudi Arabia,” by Barbara Walters. March 29, 2002.

  31 Vuilliamy, Ed. “Breaking the Silence.” The Guardian. October 5, 2005. Also Dr. Maha al-Muneef's Speech: “Gender Health from Violence to HIV: Women are Breaking the Silence” June 26, 2006, in Vienna, Austria.

  32 Vuilliamy, Ed. “Breaking the Silence.” The Guardian. October 5, 2005.

  33 Qusti, Raid. “Cases of Child Abuse on the Rise.” Arab News. July 19, 2006.

  34 Pyramids and Nightclubs: A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince and Blond Belly Dancers by L.L. Wynn.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Bailey, David A. and Tawadros, Gilane, eds. 2003. Veil: Veiling Representation and Contemporary Art. London: Institution of International Visual Arts.

  Bianchi, Robert R. 2004. Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  El Fadl, Khaled Abou. 2005. The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

  Labi, Nadya. May 2007. “Kingdom in the Closet.” The Atlantic Monthly.

  Ménoret, Pascal. 2005. The Saudi Enigma. Beruit, Lebanon: World Book Publishing.

  Schulze, Reinhard. 2000. A Modern History of the Islamic World. London: I.B Tauris and Co. Ltd.

  Schwartz, Stephen. 2002. The Two Faces of Islam. New York: Doubleday.

  Wynn, L.L. 2007. Pyramids and Nightclubs. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  Saudi Arabia has been described as a schizophrenic state. What are the complexities of the society you can identify that are revealed in this book? Would you agree with this description?

  Virginity has a medicolegal value in Islam, leading some women to seek hymen reconstruction out of desperation. Is such an intense value of chastity an alternate form of oppression?

  While male supremacy is state legislated in the Kingdom, there are certain situations in which men are oppressed as well as women. What are the tools of this male oppression and how effective are they?

  What might be some goals in terms of Saudi-U.S. relations? How can Saudi Arabia and the United States better understand each other?

  The author repeatedly reminds readers of the compassion of the Islam religion. Can a mandated Islamic Theocracy truly be Islamic?

  While some women reject or resent the veils they are forced to wear and customs they are forced to obey, others wholeheartedly embrace them. Why do you think they do this?

  With so much social pressure to conform, it is no wonder so many do so. There are several people Qanta meets in Saudi Arabia who refuse to conform at enormous personal risk. What do you think gives them the courage to defy the rules and mores of their own government and society?

  Have you ever personally encountered an injustice that horrified you, but you were afraid to speak out about it fearing of some kind of reprisal? If you had the courage to speak out about the injustice, what gave you that courage?

  What do you think of the way Qanta prepared for this journey?
Would you prepare differently? Do you think it would have dulled the shock if she had known more about the traditions, culture, and politics of Saudi Arabia before she left? Why or why not?

  Early on in the book, Qanta wonders at the behavior of the boy struggling to make sure his mother's veil is kept on during her surgery, “Didn't he know God was Merciful, tolerant, and understanding and would never quibble over the wearing of a veil in such circumstances, or I doubted, any circumstances?” There are many examples throughout scriptures of all denominations of Gods acting in ways that cannot be described as merciful, tolerant, or understanding, and there are many people who don't feel this way about God. How do you think peoples' and cultures' ideas about Gods' personalities are shaped?

  When Qanta boards the plane for Saudi Arabia, the pilot prays in Arabic, which strikes her as a noteworthy and soothing ritual. Does the United States have any rituals that might strike an outsider as odd, but may be soothing to Americans?

  The author writes, “No central air, when it would be over 120°F in the summer? I wondered of the furnace of summer ahead.” The author faces many challenges, both physical and mental, in this trip. Do you think the kinds of challenges faced by someone moving to a landscape and a culture entirely different than their own are something that we have the strength for throughout our lives? Or that it is something that we can only throw ourselves into with the energy and strength of youth?

  On a daily basis, are there things you would rather not do in order to fit into society and not cause a fuss? Do you think these simple acts are as oppressive as those experienced by Saudi women?