Inside the Kingdom (52 page)

Still, the futuristic cities, if they are ever built, promise to be traditional in one sense at least—the land for the first one, King Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea coast two hours north of Jeddah, was provided by members of the royal family, Azouzi and Prince Bandar among them, who all became partners in the project.

There is only so much that one reforming monarch can accomplish in a country of entrenched habits with eighteen million natives and ten million foreigners (five or six million authorized, the remainder illegal), but King Abdullah keeps on trying. One outspoken writer and thinker—a member of the Shura Council—was worried to be summoned to the royal presence after he wrote an article that criticized the slow pace of reform. There were too many obstacles to modernization, he complained—lazy bureaucrats, wasta (elite influence, meaning royal and business corruption), and also the religious establishment: the sheikhs were getting in the way.

“A good article,” Abdullah informed him approvingly. “You should write more like that.”

“Thank you, tal omrak (may your life be long),” replied the writer, relieved not to be bawled out. “But I have to tell you that I am getting very seriously threatened for what I have said.”

Like Mansour Al-Nogaidan and anyone else who was perceived to be undermining religious orthodoxy, the columnist had received dozens of hostile and even murderous text messages on his mobile phone in the forty-eight hours since his article had appeared.

“I am happy to write more articles like that,” he said hesitantly. “But if I write them, who will give me protection?”

There was a moment’s silence, then Abdullah looked him full in the face, his black beard jutting fiercely forward.

“
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

S
uzanne 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.”