In the Land of Invisible Women (40 page)

* * *

I had no doubt David was telling the truth. The degree of social restrictions on the movement of women was unparalleled here. The beginnings of our religion glorified powerful, autonomous women and now State sanctioned Wahabi extremism denied even the existence of empowered women even when they piloted jets. Feminism is a fundamental right and expectation of all Muslim women. I already knew, as in early Islamic periods, feminist rights would have to be demanded by women for other women. The Kingdom would be no different than any other stage in the formative history of Islam.

Maha was pressing on. She still had a lot more to say.

* * *

“This problem is much bigger than I realized,” Maha said. “We are trying to change our culture here, a culture of silence. Women are finally finding the confidence to speak out. Look at the newsreader, she has status, wealth, prestige, and she didn't mention it for years.

“But it will take time. It's hard for our country to allow itself some introspection; even harder if it is introspection in a public forum. But I am still optimistic, Qanta! Mashallah, the Kingdom is moving at an incredible pace. I think our brainchild, the National Family Safety Program, is going to help a lot of Saudi families.
³³
The Saudi government has started to work against this violence. We even formed a human rights society that has as a major focus domestic violence. Now we have domestic violence courts, and finally we may have women to stand at the bar and defend cases. Inshallah, change is coming, change is coming!”

Maha went on to explain that the Saudi monarchy had been instrumental in enabling her to accomplish such tremendous change.

“We now have official approval of His Majesty the King through royal decree for our efforts. Our honorary president for our agency is Her Highness Princess Sita Bint Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, who is the King's sister. Believe me, Qanta, she is not just a figurehead, she is an action woman! We have her support in both addressing the problem and finding solutions. This program, which I formed under the umbrella of our hospital which is a government agency, can now function as a nonprofit organization with royal patronage. This is critical because of the influence and access that brings to us in our society. We have wasta!

“I have been very fortunate. The Princess has been so welcoming to these ideas and has had the courage to take on these challenging and very painful problems our countrywomen face. You probably read about the arrival of Saudi women who will be practicing law in our own country pioneered by the Ahmed Zaki Yamani law. They just decided to start hiring women.

“Please, there is more to Saudi women than driving and abbayahs! We are much more complicated than that!”

Again, I noticed the resonance with early Islamic feminism. Women first had to exercise their rights, voice their demands for freedom and privilege, and recover some of their autonomy from men. Along the way, Saudi women, just as in my experience in the Kingdom, would indeed encounter supportive and benevolent men who aided their efforts, but clearly Saudi women would have to make considerable effort by and for themselves. Perhaps women were finally beginning to gain the confidence of becoming a palpable entity in society, a social advocacy group, a force for change, on their terms, and at their pace, not that of their menfolk.

I understood Maha's dilemma to want controlled change, change that had powerful royal sponsors to foster it to success, which she had to balance with an intense impatience for justice for the weakest in her society. So much about Saudi Arabia was sliced into unintelligible sound bytes that ultimately didn't explain anything and somehow demeaned the sincere efforts of the modern intellectual glitterati, as I liked to think of my friends in the Kingdom.

Trivialization was exactly the right word to describe the dangers of assessing events as an outsider. The West preferred to see the Kingdom as a caricature, its realities were unfamiliar, and to many, simply unbelievable.

Exhausted by her own passion, Maha was finally silent. She quivered with energy. Her face shone with noor, the light that is said to emerge from the truly good. The woman was a tour de force in a pint-sized abbayah.

“And do you know what Qanta? We just put the first offender in prison. Can you believe we changed the law? These were crimes that were not punishable by imprisonment. Well we, a group of veiled Saudi women, we have changed this!

“Believe me, Saudi women are going to finally have their day! We are learning, we are becoming braver, and we are finding men like Dr. Fahad, who supports all my efforts at the National Guard and has fostered an environment where I could create these agencies; and men like our King, who lends influence so I can accomplish these things. Alhumdullilah, we have every thing in the Kingdom we need to solve our own problems. We just have to have courage. And Allah grants us that. It is said Allah will help those who help themselves, and that God does not change a people unless they change themselves first. I give you the citation, check it my dear! This is a very important point. Islam values progress and self-improvement in its followers. We have a responsibility to live up to that.

“Make no mistake, Qanta my dear, we are changing!”

I had no doubt. Maha, the Gloria Steinem of Arabia, was ensuring it.

9/11 IN SAUDI ARABIA

A
T FOUR IN THE AFTERNOON on a Tuesday, I was home early. I filled the kettle with the sun-warmed, desalinated water. I allowed myself a rare moment of joy. My resignation was tendered. Finally I would return to New York. After two years, I would be leaving the Kingdom. I would be returning to the real, free world, where I could be valued as a woman once more. I felt a warm sense of satisfaction.

Outside, the vapid, mid-afternoon heat strangled the rooftop apartment. This was now to be my last Saudi September, my last months of buffeting desert breezes, my last dusty days shrouded, suffocating in black polyester.

Downloading email, I savored the anticipation of contact with the real world. The television was on. The nostalgic sound of Katie Couric soothed me. NBC seemed to be running the same news item. Glancing at a single smoldering tower, staccato sirens insistently pulled me to the screen.

Moments later, any nostalgia drowned in swirling currents of horror. Scrambling to the phone, I began dialing numbers to reach friends in New York City. For me, 9/11, moments before, had been a day of freedom and beginnings. Instead, my American future was now supplanted by the fearful vacuum arrived in plane-shaped arrowheads that sheared our world in two. The terror had come like an arrow through its quarry. I was reminded of the chilling Hadith which now in these moments seemed prophetic. It was ascribed as the words of the Prophet when asked what he feared most for his followers:

They recite the Quran and consider it in their favor but
it is against them
They transpose Quranic verses meant to refer to unbelievers and make
them refer to the believers
What I fear most for my Ummah is a man who interprets verses of the
Quran out of context
¹³
They will pass through Islam as an arrow passes through its quarry.
Wherever you meet them, kill them!
The one who kills them or is killed by them is blessed
They are the dogs of the People of Hell

The deadly attacks were looped on endless replay. I watched the digital currents of debris sweeping over the monitor and surging through Lower Manhattan, sending reverberations of destruction rippling across the globe. I could already feel them here. I called Imad at once.

“I know, Qanta, we are watching it now in the administration office. It's unbelievable.” Imad sounded engrossed. Ye t his voice was somehow cold. We were yet to discover the nationality of the perpetrators. Finding myself reluctant to explore his reaction, we agreed to talk later.

Compelled to dart between speed dial and satellite TV through sleepless hours, I arrived at work the next morning drained. Around me, in the Intensive Care Unit, glossy with the rich patina of U.S. tax dollars, the air was pregnant with muted exaltation. I recalled a similar, palpable excitement when Governor George W. Bush was announced president in 2000. Then, Saudi Arabia breathed an anguished sigh of relief. My puzzlement at the time was singular in its naïve stupidity. Didn't I know that if Gore had been elected, the U.S. presidency would have been “one heart beat away from a Jew,” colleagues had irritably explained, referring to Senator Lieberman. Shocked, I had recoiled at the effortless anti-Semitism rampant among my educated peers.

Months later, I found myself once more flummoxed. In a crucible of silence, punctuated only by mechanized breaths of the patients around me, I condensed my searing anxieties. Distracted, I studied colleagues through plate glass as I examined my patients.

No one approached me to express concern about New York, even though it was the place I still called home. As I ventured beyond my ruminations, I was increasingly aware of excitement. Inside the hermetic world of the ICU, I detected the unmistakable fetor of relish in the face of destruction.

I watched through the glass. Majeed studied an X ray, his ivory brow furrowed in concentration. His fair, veined skin glowed blue-white against the light box. An Omani national, and a brilliant, U.S.-educated physician whose work was published in the best American journals of medicine, he was a valued, experienced colleague.

This morning, his cool, blue eyes glinted with unusual energy. Normally a man of little emotion, he was clearly excited. I didn't dare ask him why, remembering his staggering outburst at my Polish colleagues months earlier contesting the realities of the Shoah. Radek and Jan had looked at each other in disbelief, Radek especially amazed since his friend ran historic tours for Israelis visiting Kraków. Majeed was a self-confessed Holocaust denier. I had witnessed his indignant nihilism about the six million condemned to be extinguished infinitely in countless narrow minds like his. Despite his intelligence, he possessed capacities I had never previously encountered.

I was, however, alone in my naïvete. Jan and Radek were, in contrast, more than familiar with virulent anti-Semitism in the Kingdom. One incident stood out in particular. Jan and his wife Yola were visiting a stadium on a guided tour arranged by the National Guard Hospital. The Palestinian guide, excited to spy the national Polish emblem on Jan's T-shirt, singled out the friendly couple. He treated them to a special, very attentive tour; afterward, Jan mentioned how surprised he was that a Palestinian could recognize the Polish insignia.

“Oh, Dr. Adamski, the Palestinians
love
the Polish! Didn't you know? Because of the way you took care of the Jewish problem so effectively. We adore you!” Jan and Yola crumpled, paling with nausea. The friendly Palestinian looked on, beaming—he earnestly admired the Polish couple.

I had long been a painful oddity within the sophisticated medical circles of Riyadh. My relationships with Jewish friends in America in particular were at best a puzzlement (prompting one Saudi woman to ask, “And what do Jews eat?”) and at worst (in the eyes of the orthodox) an immoral deviancy only confirming my heresy. In the eyes of many of my colleagues and Saudi friends, these friendships made me someone who was apart, other, outcast.

I turned to my Pakistani friends, hoping to seek shelter. Imran, the brilliant, Manhattan-trained intensivist who had embraced me in his family, was a handsome man, a dead ringer for Dylan McDermott. I could always rely on his wit and humor to cheer the dullest of days. Today, he was in no mood for jokes, yet he seemed strangely infused with energy. Mobeen, a more orthodox Muslim and benevolent Pakistani, was actually laughing, fascinated by the news reports. Only Imtiaz, who could barely tear himself away from his beloved Persian poetry to attend patients, seemed remotely concerned.

He said, “These are terrible times for America. Dark days have arrived for that country.” I scrutinized his expression, unsure if he felt compassion. Before I could decide, Imran clarified any doubts I might have about popular sentiment.

“So, they lost thousands of Americans. They are guessing three thousand right now. Do you have any idea how many people die in Palestine every day, Qanta? The loss of these lives is hardly equal to the daily losses of life in the Muslim world in past years. Don't you know about the carnage we faced working in Karachi, at our alma mater hospitals?” Imtiaz nodded his assent.

“God, those bomb blasts that go off so often in Karachi were terrible. I remember them from my medical student days. Those were some of the first patients I ever attended,” Imtiaz volunteered, referring to the years of violence that had troubled the city for so long.

I glanced up at Imran. We were attending a patient with a badly infected limb. I was surprised to meet his angry stare. He was angry at my sorrow. I gazed at the fetid wound we were inspecting. We had worked on this patient for weeks. Somehow, in the eyes of the doctors around me, our efforts on a single Muslim were worthier than the three thousand souls who had perished ten thousand miles west of here. I was stupefied.

“What happened, Qanta? You look terrible!” blurted out another Beiruti colleague who rarely entered conversation. “Are you ill? What's the matter?” His face was genuinely blank.

“What do you mean?” I snapped. “Didn't you see the news? Don't you know how many Americans died yesterday? Of course I look terrible. I was trying to reach my friends all night on the phone. It's just unbelievable.” I actually began to express some of my mounting anger. Imran laughed hollowly.

“Qanta, where have you been? You are so naïve. We always thought that. But we figured, she can't know because she doesn't follow politics, so we excused you. It's time you realized, America has been doing this to people all over the planet. Murder. It was their turn. They deserved this…” I was already moving away, I didn't hear the rest. I couldn't be around my colleagues, men whom I had considered friends. My final distinction from my surroundings had become clear. I was not of these Muslims. I was something other.

My brain shrieked with echoes of their self-righteous insanity. They were treating patients in the wealthiest Arab state in the world only by dint of their American credentials; credentials they had acquired in years of patient mentoring from Americans, oftentimes from Jewish Americans. These men had accomplished all this, arriving from impoverished schools in other countries to travel to America, only because they had been invited on generous visas by the American government. I was sick. Of all Muslims, these American-trained Pakistani nationals, men who had made homes in New York City, men who were physicians, should know better, feel more, and experience shame at their own reactions.

Stumbling away from these men I no longer understood, I didn't know where to put my sadness. No one wanted my foolish sentiments of loss. As physicians, guarding life was the keystone of our life-purpose. This calculating mathematics of hatred, a hunger for blood, from physician colleagues, professing to be Muslim, stunned me. Irrespective of the men's roles as healers, sworn to first do no harm, to preserve life, to ease suffering, they brandished their badges of hatred openly, proudly, immediately. They almost chastised me for not sharing their sentiments. Thankfully, something about me curbed them. We had already divided.

Later, making evening rounds, huddling in the darkness of the ICU, amid beeping monitors and muted telephones, my nurses asked to speak to me.

“What is it, ladies?” I asked, weary and ready to end the ward round. It was well past midnight.

“Not here, Doctora, not here,” Mama Mary looked grave. Vicky, the Zululander, recently widowed, actually looked afraid. “In here, this should be OK. We can't be heard in here.”

They pulled me into a vacant isolation room, normally reserved for transplant recipients. The double doors sealed behind us. The shades were lowered. Laminar airflow rushed a quiet hiss. Tonight the silence wasn't soothing. My nurses surrounded me. In our circle we were a world of nationalities ourselves, each a woman from a different continent: Swedes, South Africans, Indians, Philipinas, Canadians, and myself. Mama Mary haltingly told me of the events of 9/11 during the day. While I had been glued to my television, they had been on duty. The Scandinavian was already crying.

“Doctora, on the maternity wards, and on the general medical and surgical wards, the patients were watching TV when the towers crumbled. Patients, Saudis, actually clapped.”

Normally timid, Juliette interrupted, impassioned.

“One of my nursing friends, an American, was there on the ward doing her medication rounds. When the patients started clapping she told them, ‘I am an American.’ They laughed. They still clapped. She started crying while she was trying to give them their medicines.”