Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  “Ana (I),” he said deliberately, striking his right hand loudly against his barrel chest so that it echoed. “I—Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz.”

  Then Abdullah called for one of his private secretaries to hand over his name and an all-hours royal-switchboard telephone number.

  CHAPTER 29

  Girls of Saudi

  Suzanne Al-Mashhadi works in one of Jeddah’s well-appointed drug and alcohol rehab units. While Saudi law fiercely prohibits drugs and alcohol—drug dealers are routinely executed—the Saudi government to day adopts a supportive attitude toward addicts who seek to break the cycle of their dependence. Suzanne Al-Mashhadi is one of a team of social workers who liaise with the female relatives of male patients.

  “They would never dream of talking about their problems with a man,” she says, “and it helps that I sound like an Egyptian.”

  The daughter of a Saudi father, Suzanne picked up her idioms from her Egyptian mother. Where, for example, a Saudi would say “Ma arif ” (“I don’t know”), an Egyptian says “Ma rafsh.”

  “When they hear me talk like a foreigner, the families relax. They open up. They tell me the secrets that they would never dare tell a fellow Saudi. The shame falls away, and sometimes we actually get to hear the truth about a situation.”

  Dealing with shame and hypocrisy in her professional life has fine-tuned Suzanne Al-Mashhadi’s sense of the principal Saudi battlefield—the battle of the sexes. At the beginning of 2007 she published a column in the Riyadh newspaper Al-Hayat,22 “I Am Black and You Are White.” Her title derived from the elegant white clothing that helps Saudi men stay relatively cool and composed in the local heat, while Saudi women are condemned to get hot and flustered in the frumpy black mourning garmentsthat they wear—almost as if grieving the loss of their independence and identity.

  “You are the first dream for every father, who wants a son to boast about,” she wrote, addressing an imaginary male listener, “and the first love for every mother, who knows it is now less likely that her husband will look for another woman to produce the son he desires. They take your name for themselves and proclaim it in a proud tone—Umm-Mohammed or Abu-Mohammed [Mother or Father of Mohammed]. That is a pleasure which I can never deliver to my parents. Compared to you, I simply do not exist.”

  The black-white discrimination, wrote Suzanne, goes on from birth, through pro-male divorce rights and control of the children, until death itself.

  “When I die, your friends will wish ‘May God renew your bed.’ But should you die first, no one would ever say that to me. I will be considered immoral if I should think to embrace another man—with my own children standing in the front line of those who would condemn me and give me grief.”

  Suzanne was expecting some criticism of what she wrote, but she was astonished at the source of it.

  “Almost all the nasty e-mails, and certainly the really bitter ones, came from women—from other women who cursed me to hell: ‘You are a liberal, ’ ‘You are a secular,’ ‘You do not represent us.’ I wondered if some of the notes had been sent by men pretending to be women. But the encouraging e-mails all seemed to come from men. When did Saudi men get so liberal, I wondered? I never noticed the change. This is the big problem, I’ve decided, in Saudi society. It’s the only problem—men and women.”

  Khaled Bahaziq, the vacationing jihadi, had come to the same conclusion. As extremism gathered steam in the years after the Gulf War, the warrior who went to Afghanistan ten times had started to sense the limitations of jihad.

  “Muslims are very good at being ready to die,” he remarks. “They are not so good at being ready to live together in peace—at learning to accept and tolerate their differences.”

  Continuing to interest himself in Islam’s oppressed, Khaled had traveled to Bosnia in the early 1990s. But he did not join in the fighting.

  “There were other people trained and ready for that. By then I was starting to think about how people could learn to live together in harmony—and man-woman relations are the basis of that.”

  Back in Jeddah, Khaled started to volunteer in his spare time for an Islamic charity, Maktab Al-Dawah, the Cooperative Guidance Center, attending the domestic law courts to offer support to the victims of divorce and custody cases—who were invariably women.

  “I used to cry as I watched some of those cases. Many women had asked their husbands for their rights, and had been given a violent answer. They had been battered. One woman had lost her sight in one eye. But the courts gave no redress. So far as I could see, everything in the legal process, and especially the prejudice of the male judges, favored the man.”

  Looking in Islam, Khaled could find no justification for this.

  “Nowhere in the Koran does it say that the woman must serve the man. If anything, it is the other way around. That is how the Prophet acted. It is famous that he did all the work for his wives.”

  Feeling certain that he was dealing with a social, not a religious problem, Khaled started taking courses in counseling.

  “I wanted to stop the cultural mistreatment of our women. Saudi men only talk sweetly to their wives when they want sex. So many of our problems come from the possessive, controlling attitude of Saudi men toward their women. And, of course, you cannot control another person—not in their hearts—except by love. Unconditional love.”

  As his reputation as a counselor grew, more and more patients came to him—almost all of them women.

  “I never tell people what they ‘should’ do. I don’t offer a magic solution. I just try to help them open their eyes. I ask them, for example, what advice they would like to give to themselves. I always ask to see the husband, but he hardly ever comes—I don’t get the chance to talk to many men.”

  The counselor got the chance to change that to some degree when he was offered his own weekly TV show on a cable channel—Go for Happiness. His earnest advice turned out to be a hit, with extra programs screened during Ramadan. The Afghan jihadi had become marriage counselor to the Kingdom.

  “On television,” he explains, “my main emphasis is on teaching manners—to the men. The women don’t need it. They have the manners already. It’s the Saudi men who have to learn how to treat their womenfolk properly, and I tell them that if they manage to do that they will find themselves rewarded a thousandfold. When we become generous to our women, they become generous to us in return. If a man is good and kind to a woman, she will give him her life. If he does not, he will never taste her life properly—nor his own soul either.”

  Mashael (not her real name) got married when she was eighteen.

  “I’d been seeing my husband secretly for about a year and a half,” she remembers. “His sister was a good friend of mine, and she helped us get together away from the world. We spent hours on the phone. I was crazy about him. I forced my family to agree. It was so romantic.”

  But the romance melted within months of the couple getting married.

  “I could not believe how quickly it happened. After the second day I thought, ‘This man is weird.’ He was so incredibly possessive. I was no longer my own person. He expected me to build every detail of my life around him, while he kept the right to do whatever he liked. He told me what to wear, how he wanted me to cut my hair—even what I should think and feel. That was his right. I was his new piece of property.”

  The world is full of possessive and domineering husbands, but in Saudi Arabia the law actually enshrines the principle that the male knows better than the female. A woman may not enroll in university, open a bank account, get a job, or travel outside the country without the written permission of a mahram (guardian) who must be a male blood relative—her father, grandfather, brother, husband, or, in the case of a widow or separated woman, her adult son.

  “I had to agree completely with his opinions, what he felt about our family and friends. If I disagreed he’d fly into a temper, use ugly words, and threaten me. I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I wanted to go back to my
family, but my pride would not let me. I knew that they would blame me.”

  Mashael had been unwilling to accept the ancient tradition of family-arranged marriage, with its modest, not to say pessimistic expectations of personal happiness. Like a growing number of young Saudis, she had been tempted by the Western fantasy of fulfillment through “love,” which Saudi TV and popular culture promote today as enthusiastically as any Holly-wood movie. But Saudi taboos rule out the rituals of courtship and sexual experimentation by which young Westerners have the chance to make their mistakes and move on. Open dating, let alone living together, is unthinkable in a society ruled by traditions that judge families by their ability to keep their daughters virginal.

  “My husband and I simply did not know each other,” says Mashael, today an articulate and stylish woman in her late thirties, whose long black hair tumbles over the black silk of her abaya. “I’m not blaming anyone but myself. We married too young.”

  Having fallen victim to a common Saudi problem, she adopted what turns out to be a common Saudi solution.

  “I found love with a woman. Before I was married, I never knew that a relationship between woman and woman could happen. I did not dream it was possible. Then I went to university, and I had my first love affair with a woman. It was soft. It was warm. It was like a painkiller.”

  Lesbianism is not hard to find on Saudi female campuses, according to numerous Saudi and Western women, with crushes and cliques and super-close friendships. These relationships may not always be sexual, but they are marked by the heightened emotions described by Jane Austen and other chroniclers of early-nineteenth-century England, where the Industrial Revolution was creating the world’s first “modern” society, bringing new concepts of “romance” and individual choice into conflict with traditional family rules and rigidities.

  “I was looking for consolation,” says Mashael, “and I found it. I entered those groups. To start with you are curious, then you go with the flow. It is around you everywhere. A girl strokes your hand and you know she’s trying to seduce you, but, in a way, you want to be seduced. You think, ‘Why not?’ Sex life is a disaster between Saudi men and women, and everyone knows that the men play around. The level of betrayal is extraordinarily high. So after a time you think, ‘Why not with another woman?’ It is a great way to have revenge.”

  And also a safe way.

  “In this society you are mad if you have an affair with a man. With a woman it is safe. No one can question why you spend an evening at home together. You can go shopping or go out to eat with a woman. You can have a conversation. You can have friendship. You are two individuals with your own rights and personalities. You are not an object, the mere possession of someone else. There does not have to be sex every time. You can just hug each other or touch. And when there is sex, it is more romantic and slow. Even the kiss is different between woman and woman. It is more gentle. You are trying to give each other pleasure, not just take it, and you are sharing your feelings. You can be open together about your troubles and your problems. The love is generous. You can give each other quality time—because in Saudi Arabia a man spends very little time with his wife. It is in that separation that lies the pain.”

  Lesbian or not, many Saudi women spend immeasurably more time with other women—and their children—than they do with their husbands. Men routinely head out in the evening to dine, drink coffee, gossip, talk politics, and generally while away the time in masculine pastimes, much as Edwardian gentlemen did in their clubs. Even if he does not have much more than TV-watching on the agenda, the husband will go out to view, and usually eat, in the male section of a buddy’s house, while the womenfolk gather in their own quarters—both sexes being catered for, even in quite lowly homes, by the ubiquitous Asian menservants, cooks, and maids.

  “At the end of the evening,” says one Saudi woman, “the husband will come home with one expectation. He’s been chatting all night. It’s not more conversation that he wants.”

  This segregated lifestyle is the rule in the royal family, so there is lesbianism inside the palaces as everywhere else.

  “I’d hate to be a princess,” says a woman who has royal friends, “because it is not easy for them to marry outside the family. Nowadays many of them are well educated, and they do not want to marry any self-indulgent idiot prince. Some were previously married briefly. So behind those walls there are a lot of clever, pretty women in their thirties who are single with no prospect of a man.”

  Tribes control their identity by controlling their womenfolk, and that is certainly the case with the Kingdom’s top tribe of all. Rare is the princess who is able to marry a Saudi nonroyal, and should she wish to marry a foreigner, according to a Riyadh joke, she must be over forty, physically disabled, or the holder of a Ph.D.—preferably all three at once. Maybe it is not a joke, for there are an increasing number of royal women taking further education, and who like to be addressed as “Princess Doctor.”

  “The elite wear masks in this country,” says Mashael. “They pretend they don’t feel the pain, that empty-inside feeling of dissatisfaction with their life. Men and women are conditioned in this society to live separate lives, so they go on living separately. It’s not questioned. If you’re a woman and you want the happiness that goes with being part of a couple, you have to get that, in my experience, from another woman. And because you both want each other to be happy, that can help with your marriage. Often my girlfriend would give me advice to help me make things better with my husband. When things were difficult at home, I would give her a phone call just for two or three minutes and I would feel recharged.”

  Still married to the same husband, with several children and another child on the way, Mashael, like a growing number of middle-class Saudi women, now runs a successful small business. She does not consider herself a lesbian.

  “In another society, I would never have gone with a woman. I would never have thought of it, or been offered it. And I would certainly never want to live with a woman. I know that is not the solution. I have a sixty percent good marriage. Today I get my strength from my work, my kids, and, above all, from myself—not from the necessity of having another woman. At the end of the day, there’s the same pain.”

  She lists the qualities she has derived from her intimate friendships with women: “Tenderness. Sharing. Trust. Honesty. Support. Strong and clean emotions. Respect—above all respect. If you want those good things in your life in Saudi Arabia, you can only get them from a woman. You will seldom get them from a Saudi man, at least not from any Saudi man that I have met—especially not respect. There are very few Saudi men who treat their women as truly equal partners in life—not in their hearts.”

  Mashael believes that the problem lies in the overwrought, convention-obsessed atmosphere of the Kingdom itself, with its emphasis on appearances and “face.”

  “It’s amazing,” she says, “how my husband becomes a different man when we go on holiday and can escape from this country—even to Bahrain. We start to do things as a couple. We go shopping together. We play together in the swimming pool. The children become closer to us. The whole family benefits. I’m without my black [clothes], he’s without his headdress. It’s as if, by taking off our Saudi costumes, we’ve become ordinary human beings, not putting on an act, just natural and warm. He says he can feel my warmth.

  “Then we bump into some friends from home, and he freezes. Once we were walking together in the street somewhere abroad, and we saw some Saudis coming from the other way. He just walked off in another direction, as if he was nothing to do with me.”

  The notion of “face” still holds the Saudi mentality in a rigid grip. “Is She a Disgrace?” asked Yasser Harib in a column of that title in Al-Watan in October 2008, pondering the common sight of a Saudi husband striding out alone in a shopping mall with his wife trailing yards behind with the children. “You might assume that these people have no connection with each other until they exit the mart and approach their c
ar.”

  Harib noted how “the man will usually walk quickly when he sees a group of men sitting at a café in order not to tie him[self] to the woman walking behind him at a distance”—and how this shame extends into the language. A traditional Saudi husband will use “such euphemisms as ‘my people’ or ‘my home’ when talking about his wife, as if she were something obscure or disgraceful that he does not want other people to know about.”

  In 2008, it has to be said, it is possible to see young Saudi couples, presumably married, walking hand in hand in shopping malls—with the woman, usually, covered totally by a veil. But such public expressions of affection remain the exception, and traditionalists see nothing wrong with that. Social conservatism is the glue that is holding the Kingdom together, in their view, while more laid-back Arab societies have fallen apart.

  “Look at our neighbors in the Middle East,” says one traditional Saudi. “Look at the Lebanese. They are considered to be the sophisticates, the ‘Europeans’ of the area, so clever and free and easy, compared with us, the old-fashioned, conventional tribal stick-in-the-muds. They drink wine and hold hands. But look at the mess that the Lebanese have made of their government. They have great cooking and lousy politics—with militia carrying weapons in the streets. What’s wrong with a bit of old-fashioned tribal toughness and deference to those in authority, saying your prayers and sticking to the rules?”

  So is the convention-bound Saudi male destined never to become a normal member of the human race?

  “I certainly do not blame Islam,” says Mashael. “I wish that our Saudi men would study the life of the Prophet more closely—it’s another example of how the religion of this country has been twisted by its tribal prejudices. We know that the Prophet was gentle with his women. He cherished his wives. He treated them with softness and respect. There is a hadith in which he tells men to take care of their women as if they were ‘precious glass.’ ”