I was born on the floor of our cramped apartment in the city of Mecca on April 25, 1979. My mother was alone, except for my older sister, who was barely much more than a toddler herself. My father had been out when she went into labor, and under Saudi rules and customs, my mother could not be admitted without her male guardian or a mahram to accompany her to the hospital. There were no exceptions. She couldn’t even call for help because our apartment had no phone.
I was fortunate to be her fifth child, and the third to survive; her body knew how to have children. When she heard my first cry, she asked my sister, “What did I bring into the world?” And Muna, who had been able to talk since she was about one year old, looked at me on a towel, covered in blood and afterbirth, and said simply, “Ne’ama.” Ne’ama is the name of one of my cousins from my mother’s side, and in Arabic it means “bliss.” My sister knew I was a girl and had named me. But my older cousin Saadiya, from my father’s side, changed my name to Manal. She said that Ne’ama was an uncommon name in Saudi and warned that kids would make fun of me. She was right, and she spared me a lot of bullying in school. So it was that my parents’ children are a matched set, Muna, Manal, and Muhammad—but my mother and father always called me “Ne’ama.”
My mother was Libyan. She was born in 1947 in a hospital in Alexandria, Egypt, where her father had moved his family during the Italian colonial period. But she always considered herself Libyan. Her family was prestigious, proud, and wealthy. At one point they were responsible for overseeing the Ottoman Empire’s vast treasury in North Africa. This is where the family name came from: bayt al mal was what the Ottomans called the minister of finance at the time. My grandfather was a successful merchant and owned property across a vast swath of territory between Libya and Egypt. When he moved to Egypt, he was given the honorific nickname of Sheikh of the Maghareba, or chief of the Moroccans, a loose reference to the many peoples of North Africa living to the west of Egypt. My mother was raised in a lavish house in the port city with servants and attendants and every material comfort a girl of that era could imagine, everything except love.
My father was born poor in the village of Tarfa’a in Wadi Fatima, a valley less than twenty miles outside Mecca. No one ever recorded the date of his birth, although we all believe he was born ten years before his official government age. When he was required to get a national ID and a driver’s license, the state simply assigned him the first day of the month of Rajab. Most undocumented people have that date as their birthday—there is a joke that on the first of Rajab, you can say happy birthday to half of the Saudi nation. Growing up, all of my girlfriends’ parents were also listed as being born on that date. It is as if you suddenly told half of America that their birthday is going to be on July 1.
My father never knew his own father, who died before he was born. He never spoke of his father or his lineage, although it is also a noble one. Nearly everyone in the Fatima Valley belonged to a single tribe, the Ashraf (plural of al Sharif) tribe. Our tribe can trace its origins back to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him, hereafter PBUH); we are the descendants of his grandson Hassan, the child of Muhammad’s youngest daughter, Fatima, and her husband, Ali bin Abi Taleb, known as the Fourth Caliph, who was also Muhammad’s cousin (Peace Be Upon Them). The influence of the al-Sharif tribe has been felt across the Arab world. In the last century alone, al-Sharifs have governed the Hejaz region of the Saudi kingdom, and have ruled as kings in Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, and Palestine.
My own father, whom we always called Abouya, which means “my father” in his native Hejazi dialect, never went to school. He is illiterate, although he has memorized all the basic phrases for the prayers. But he is curious. He would often listen to the radio and he followed and argued about politics and sports. Once I could read, I would read him the newspaper and a few times tried to teach him how to read and write. My mother had been to school through the fourth grade, so she could read enough to fill out our school registration forms, which she did with a fierce determination.
My parents would never have met if not for Islam. As young men, my father and his elder brother, Uncle Sa’ad, moved to Mecca to work. My dad had a car that he used to ferry pious Muslims back and forth between the airport outside the bustling port city of Jeddah and the sacred places of Mecca. He was busiest during the month of the hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime visit required of all able Muslims to the holiest place in the Muslim world, the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the dark granite Kaaba, literally “the cube,” which stands inside. The Kaaba is revered in Islam as the first house of worship, built by the Prophet Ibrahim (PBUH), who is known to Christians and Jews as Abraham. It is the place toward which all Muslims face when they perform their five daily prayers. When a Muslim dies, tradition dictates that for burial his or her face must be turned toward the Kaaba. The rest of the year, my father drove other pilgrims who traveled to the city to observe lesser rites; devout Muslims believe a prayer in the presence of the Kaaba is worth a hundred thousand prayers elsewhere.
My father, Massoud al-Sharif, first laid eyes on my mother when she came from Egypt with her family to perform the hajj. It was as if their meeting was fated. My father was divorced, and so was my mother. When she returned home, he flew to Alexandria, showed up at her house, and asked her father for permission to marry. Her father said yes.
Years later, Abouya would say he married my mother for her beauty, and she was indeed very beautiful. Mama, in turn, would say that she married my father to escape the stepmother she hated: her own mother had died when she was only four years old. But perhaps she wanted to escape from everything. Not once did I hear her wish blessings on her father’s soul, something that Islamic religion and culture require of children after the death of a parent. “God does not wish mercy upon my father,” she used to say, whenever his name was mentioned. “He robbed me of my son, and my education too.”
During her first marriage, Mama had given birth to a son, Essam. But when her marriage dissolved, Mama had to leave her baby behind: her father would not allow her to return to his house with a child. Mama saw her elder son just one time in all those intervening years, in 1990, during a visit to Libya, when Essam was about twenty-one years old.