by Robert Lacey
“Like the Kuwaitis!” retorted Fahd caustically. “They did not rush into a decision, and now there is no Kuwait.”
“There is still a Kuwait,” persisted Abdullah.
“And its territory,” replied Fahd, “consists of hotel rooms in London, Cairo, and elsewhere.”
Abdullah conceded the argument, and as the other princes in the room agreed, the king turned to Cheney and spoke his first and only word of English—“OK,” he said.
Within days U.S. planes and troops were flooding into Saudi Arabia’s airports and bases in every corner of the country. Schwarzkopf ’s rule of thumb was simple. He wanted five U.S. soldiers on the ground for every Iraqi, and by the end of September thousands of young Americans in combat gear were driving their jeeps around the streets and highways of the east. The trouble was that quite a number of these Americans were women—attractive young female GIs who swung their vehicles around as if they were back in North Carolina. This set alarm bells ringing in the Saudi Ministry of Defense, and, after talks with General Schwarzkopf, the U.S. lady drivers were confined to U.S. camps, the Aramco compound, and out in the desert (where bedouin women also drove).
But the ban did not apply to the several thousand Kuwaiti women who had recently arrived in the Kingdom. They went on driving their cars to the shops—they could be seen every day in Al-Khobar and the sprawling cities of the oil fields, loading their cars with groceries and ferrying their children to and from the beach. There was no law that explicitly banned women from driving in Saudi Arabia. There is none today—the Kingdom’s notorious female driving ban is a matter of social convention, fortified by some ferocious religious pressures. So some Saudi women started looking thoughtfully at their Kuwaiti sisters.
Dr. Aisha Al-Mana came from a religious family on her mother’s side—“all imams and bearded ones,” she recalls. Her father was Mohammed Al-Mana, Abdul Aziz’s literate companion and translator whose charming memoir, Arabia Unified, vividly captures the leisurely atmosphere of Riyadh before the oil wealth came.
“My father,” she remembers, “always warned me against joining parties and factions, either left or right. ‘Be yourself,’ he used to say.”
Aisha took his words to heart. As a politically active student in America she had fought a losing battle against the Islamist takeover of the Arab student organizations in the 1970s.
“In those days the U.S. government encouraged the religious hard-liners as a counterweight to the Arab nationalists,” says Aisha. “I remember how the State Department used to give money to the fundamentalist students—the Arabs and also the Iranians. They gave them air tickets for their conferences and helped them organize. I saw it myself. They thought they were fighting Communism, and they ended up with Khomeini. All this Islamism—it’s not religion: it’s only politics, and it was America that helped create these extremists. They just ride on religion, these born agains—in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, and in the southern states of America too: they’re all after their own piece of the cake.”
Expressing such views forthrightly after she returned to Saudi Arabia got Dr. Al-Mana into trouble with the Ministry of the Interior. Her work as a school principal, lecturer, and women’s activist in Riyadh and the Eastern Province earned her invitations to foreign conferences, but the Mabahith had other ideas.
“They call you in and ask you to sign a taahud, a pledge, in which you promise not to repeat something you have said which they do not like. So you sign it. Then you say the same thing again, or write it in an article, and when you go to travel you get to the airport and discover there’s something on the computer: they won’t let you leave. You’re there with your bags all packed, and you have to go home again. Then after a year or so you hear from a friend who was also banned, but has now been allowed to go. So you try again, and this time you find that you can walk through the barrier. They don’t tell you officially. The ban just melts away—till the next time you annoy them.”
A wife, mother, school principal, and activist, Aisha Al-Mana had been banned like this on four occasions, and she found the battle tiring.
“I’ve been active in women’s rights since my personal awakening. I used to refuse to wear the abaya. I thought I could change the world single-handed.”
The war rekindled her fire. It was Friday, October 19, 1990, and Aisha was traveling inland from Al-Khobar, heading down the highway to Riyadh, with heavy U.S. trucks and desert-camouflaged troop transporters rumbling on either side, towering over her car.
“I believe that wars are fought by rulers, not by the people—it’s the people who suffer. So when I saw those huge American convoys traveling, I knew that they had not come here for me, for my people, or for my government. What a nonsense to say that they had come halfway round the world to protect me! They had come to protect their own interests—because they didn’t want Saddam to control their oil. It made me feel bad. People were taking decisions about me somewhere else. Then I thought, Why shouldn’t I have a say? There is something I can do.”
Aisha Al-Mana told her driver to stop the car, get out, and go and sit in the backseat. Then she got into the front, took her place behind the wheel, and drove all the way to Riyadh—a distance of nearly two hundred miles. She had learned to drive as a student in America and, like many Saudi women, was accustomed to driving whenever she was abroad.
“I felt wonderful. I felt like I was flying. When I came to the checkpoints along the road, the guards asked, ‘What’s going on?’ I told them, ‘What’s going on is what you can see is going on.’ I laughed and showed them my ID, so they laughed. ‘That’s all we have to check for,’ said one. They were bedouin. They were not shocked. They had seen women drive. Their wives could have been driving the family pickup somewhere over the hill at that very moment, for all we knew. I smiled at them and they smiled at me. They waved me through. We were all kind of happy.”
When Aisha Al-Mana got to Riyadh, she shared the tale of her glorious journey with a group of women who had gathered to discuss what they could do to help the national emergency.
“They asked me to join them. We all wanted to help—to help with first aid, perhaps, if there were going to be bombs and missiles. We wanted to do something. But a lot of us were helpless. Many of our foreign drivers had been repatriated. How could we get to hospitals or schools, or wherever we might be volunteering? So here was a good reason to ask for permission to drive—it was religious. Islam is a very flexible religion. If you are traveling, you can delay or combine your prayers. If you have nothing to eat, you can eat pork. So we said, ‘Let’s start with this.’ Let’s get in touch with some officials and say we want to help with the defense of our country, and to do that we need to be able to drive ourselves—like the Kuwaiti women are already doing.”
In the days that followed, Aisha spoke to some ministers she knew, while others of the group spoke to officials and princes who might be favorably inclined. A week later the women convened again.
“We had all received the same answer. ‘Thank you very much. It’s a kind offer and a great idea—but this is not the best moment.’ That is what you are always told when you suggest change in Saudi Arabia—‘I agree with you, of course, change has to come. But just wait a little. Be patient. Now is not the right time.’ We had had enough of that. We decided that now was the right time.”
The women agreed to meet the following Monday.
“I arrived late, and by the time I had got there, they had taken the decision to drive. They had fixed the location and the route. We decided to dress properly, with abayas and veils (head scarves, not full niqab), and to send a letter to Prince Salman [the governor of Riyadh] telling him what we intended to do, why we thought it was the right time. I delivered the letter to his office first thing next day.”
The letter, if delivered, did not reach the prince, who would proceed through his working day in blithe ignorance of the planned demonstration—until he was woken from his afternoon nap with the news.
The
women had chosen a circular route through some of the busiest and most modern shopping streets of Riyadh, along King Abdul Aziz Road, down Tahliah (Desalination) Street, through the Olaya district and back. There were forty-seven of them in fourteen cars.
“We could have had more. We could have had hundreds. But we’d decided just the evening before—in less than twenty-four hours. And we didn’t want to make it too big. We wanted this to be symbolic.
“Look,” explains Aisha Al-Mana. “I don’t like driving. I never did. But it is a basic necessity for ladies who work and are supporting families. A foreign driver costs you seven hundred to a thousand riyals [$180 to $250] per month. Then there is his food and health care and his accommodation—which may be in bachelor accommodation with other drivers, which causes problems in its own right. There are more than a million male foreign drivers in Saudi Arabia, doing nothing else but driving the women around.
“So say a lady who works earns four thousand riyals [$1,000] a month. A third of that has to go on paying her driver—money that goes out of the country. Then think of the mother who stays at home and doesn’t work—how is her husband to afford a driver for her if he is a teacher or a civil servant? He has to do all the driving himself, taking her to the shops, taking the children to and from school. Think how the productivity of those men would rise, if they were not taking time off work every day to act as chauffeur.”
The economic arguments in favor of women driving seem irrefutable to a Western sensibility, as does the main religious one—that the effect of the driving ban is to place a respectable Saudi woman, usually alone and often for long periods of time, in a confined space with a single man who is not her husband or permitted male relative. One might have thought that this last argument would have some purchase with the members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
“This is what shows you that none of this is religious,” says Aisha. “It’s all social. These men need to keep control of their womenfolk. It’s a matter of their pride. And as part of their pride, they cannot believe that a decent Saudi woman would choose to misbehave with a non-Saudi man.”
The convoy of cars had made their planned progress nearly twice around the circuit, when a traffic patrolman spotted them. Reem Jarbou, then a teenager sitting excitedly beside her mother, Wafa Al-Munif, a business-woman and charity worker in Riyadh, saw the policeman look casually across the road, then look back again in a horrified double-take at the procession of women sedately driving their cars down Tahliah Street.
“He had no idea what to do. I saw him reach for his radio, and his call must have been monitored by the religious police, because suddenly they were all over us—jumping out of a dozen or so of their huge trucks and swarming everywhere in their headdresses and thobes and long beards. Then the regular, uniformed police arrived, and there was a standoff. Here we were, a group of women, standing by our cars, a little shaken, wondering what would happen next and rather proud of what we had done, while the men were standing round in the street arguing. Whose jurisdiction was it? Which of them would have the honor of taking us into custody?
“Luckily all the police, religious and regular, answered to Prince Salman. He was not going to let us fall into the hands of the religious maniacs, and they were furious—beside themselves. One got into our car beside the policeman who drove us to the police station. He was just steaming, a great big angry lump of indignation in the front seat: he kept muttering curses and insults as we drove. He said he wanted to kill us, and I really think he meant it.”
Among those arrested was a happily pregnant Fawzia Al-Bakr. Her time in prison eight years previously had not hampered her marriage prospects—on the contrary. Her notoriety had attracted the attention of Fahd Al-Yehya, a young medical student who would become one of the Kingdom’s most eminent psychiatrists. The couple had got married in 1985—“I think he liked my writing,” says Dr. Al-Bakr, who earned her Ph.D. in comparative education at the Institute of Education, University of London, in 1990.
Fawzia had borrowed her brother’s car to take part in the demonstration, and as she stood beside it, she recognized one of the policemen who came toward her out of the melee.
“ ‘Dr. Fawzia,’ he said, ‘do you remember me?’ It was one of the Mabahith who’d interviewed me all those years back when I was locked up in the villas. ‘You never stop, do you?’ he said, and he sort of smiled.
“Later on, when we got to the police station, he came across to me again and told me what to write on the report form as I was filling it in. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t say your brother knew that you were borrowing his car. He’ll only get in trouble. Say that you took the car without his consent.’ ”
Unlike the Mabahith, the religious police could not see the funny side. As darkness fell, husbands and brothers started arriving at the station to take their womenfolk home. They were showered with scorn by the bearded ones.
“Weaklings!” They hissed. “Don’t you know how to control your women?”
The insult went to the heart of the matter, for control of womenfolk is the basis of every tribal society: let your women go off (and therefore, ultimately, procreate) with anyone they choose, and that is the end of male tribal authority—of the tribe itself, in fact. Whatever the military outcome of King Fahd’s war, the women’s driving demonstration made clear that the social consequences were going to be incalculable.
While Prince Salman was wrestling with the problems caused by one demonstration in Riyadh, his nephew Bandar in Washington was trying to encourage another. To help sway U.S. public opinion behind the war, the ambassador called a meeting of Saudi students in Washington. The embassy sent airline tickets to fly in the leaders of the Saudi student clubs from universities all over the country.
“This is a grave moment in your country’s history,” he told them as they gathered in the Radisson Renaissance hotel on Seminary Road in Alexandria, Virginia. “Now is the time for you to go out and demonstrate. Show the Americans how you feel. Be vocal! Make banners! Think up slogans! Go out into your campuses and in the streets and make your feelings felt!”
There was an awkward silence.
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness,” said one of the students. “But how shall we do this? We have never been educated to do such things—we’ve always been told that it’s un-Saudi to demonstrate. How do you expect us to do this now?”
Back in Riyadh, the demonstrators who had made their feelings plain were suffering the consequences. All the women lecturers at King Saud University were suspended and banned from the campus. Religious conservatives denounced them fiercely in the newspapers, and their criticisms seemed to meet with popular support. The loudspeakers of the Friday sermons positively quivered with fury. Abdul Aziz Bin Baz issued a fatwa against women driving.
“The situation of women,” declared one of the milder cassettes that circulated, “is the reason for all these woes that are falling on the nation.”
It was a reprise of the arguments that had followed the uprising of Juhayman ten years earlier—with a sinister edge. Leaflets were distributed that publicized the names of the women and their husbands. Good Saudis and Muslims were urged to take action against these “Communist whores.” The cruelest cuts came from young traditionalists among the lecturers’ own female students—they spat on their teachers.
“The king was truly shocked,” remembers one of the royal family. “After the war he invited the women to his majlis to let them know that he felt for their suffering. ‘You are our daughters,’ he told them.”
Dr. Aisha Al-Mana did not attend the meeting.
“So far as I know,” she says, “that meeting was not the king’s idea. It was requested by some of the women who wanted to say they were sorry—they were worried about their jobs. They felt they needed to apologize, and that is their right. But I am not sorry. In my opinion we did nothing for which we should apologize. To drive as Saudi women—that is our right.”
CHAP
TER 15
Battle for Al-Khafji
By the middle of January 1991 the little settlement of Al-Khafji on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border was a ghost town. Life in the northeastern corner of Saudi Arabia had grown ever more hectic as preparations accelerated for the U.S.-Saudi military campaign to recapture Kuwait. But Al-Khafji stood deserted—a peppering of empty, angular buildings and forlornly looping power lines on the salt flats of the Gulf coast. Saudi guards had abandoned the northern frontier post to which the emir of Kuwait had driven in such distress on the morning of August 2, 1990. The town was undefendable, decided the commander of the Arab armed forces of the U.S.-Saudi coalition, Khaled bin Sultan, who dug in his first line of fortifications some twenty-five miles to the south.
The serious business of the war was being conducted overhead. Taking off from an arc of bases and hastily constructed desert landing strips in the early hours of January 17, 1991, aircraft of the U.S.-Arab coalition roared into action with a blitzkrieg of precision-guided bombs and missiles that would rain down on Iraq for thirty-eight days and nights, their mission to demoralize and, where possible, destroy, the Iraqi armed forces.
As it turned out, the weeks of remorseless aerial bombardment, followed by the classic outflanking maneuver that Norman Schwarzkopf executed to recapture Kuwait, produced a remarkable victory for the U.S.-Saudi coalition and their allies. Saddam’s army would surrender after less than one hundred hours of ground combat.
But such success seemed anything but guaranteed as January 1991 drew to a close. The Iraqi Army was huge and menacing, with a proven inventory of intimidating chemical weapons. On January 18, 1991, Saddam launched seven of his Scud missiles against Tel Aviv and Haifa, then directed twenty of the missiles at Riyadh and Dhahran in a succession of alarming nighttime attacks. There were disputes within the coalition—Schwarzkopf and Prince Khaled clashed regularly, a pair of oddly similar man-mountains with egos to match. How much firepower should be directed against Baghdad? Should not more be done to degrade Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guard? The fear of everything that might go wrong was reflected by the coalition’s provision of chemical suits and by some eighteen thousand hospital beds in the theater of operations. It was at this moment, on the night of January 29-30, 1991, that Iraqi tanks of the 5th Mechanized Division, one of Saddam’s crack units, rumbled over the undefended Saudi border with troop carriers and occupied the town of Al-Khafji.