The first official Saudi government school for girls opened in 1964, two years after the king officially banned slavery in the kingdom. It was far from a universally popular decision. The first man to call for girls to be educated, Abdulkareem Aljuhayman, had been jailed for six months for his views. One prominent Saudi scholar implored his fellow citizens, “O Muslims, be aware; pay heed to these dangers. Stay in close ranks and work together to close those schools that have been opened to educate girls with a modern approach. These schools give the appearance of compassion, but inside them lurks strife and a plague-like affliction. The end result of these schools will be immorality and a lack of regard for religion. If you will not be able to realize their closure in the future, do not accept for them to be opened now.” When the first girls’ school did finally open, Prince Faisal (the crown prince and later the king) had to send soldiers to protect the students, not unlike what happened when schools were desegregated in the American South. It can be so difficult to effect change, so hard to overturn long-standing views.
It was always possible to distinguish the girls’ schools from the boys’. The girls’ schools had the look of detention centers, shut behind high solid walls of corrugated metal (imagine a shipping container cut into pieces) and a solid gate. The only man visible was the guard standing at the entrance. The school windows were bolted shut and covered so no outside eyes might gaze inside. Although we had a large outdoor courtyard in the middle of the school, there were no playgrounds, because girls should not run around or jump.
The school door was opened in the morning so that the students and teachers could enter; then it was locked tight with a single key. It could not be opened again unless the headmistress gave her permission. There were also no emergency exits. In 2002, fifteen girls died in a fire inside Mecca’s Middle School No. 31. The city’s religious police had barred the girls from exiting through the front door because they were not wearing their abayas and were thus not following proper Islamic dress code. When the school door was opened and they were finally carried out, it was as charred corpses.
Many of the girls’ schools in Mecca—like No. 31—were converted houses. Unlike all the boys’ schools, they had no names. We knew them only by their numbers; mine were Primary School No. 21, Middle School No. 16, and Secondary School No. 13. The female students were as invisible as their schools. At the end of the day, when cars arrived to take the students and teachers home, the guard would call each girl or woman by her father’s name, never her own.
School began at 7:00 a.m. and finished around noon. Our apartment was around the corner, so unlike most of the students, my sister, Muna, and I walked to school. All of us would stand in line until we heard the bell, then each student was expected to take the hand of the girl next to her and march into the building. We stayed in one classroom for the whole schoolday, forty girls in each room.
Inside, every school was the same, three stories. The heat in the classrooms was stifling due to old or broken air conditioners. When they worked, the feeble, battered units blew warm air into the rooms. The bathrooms were dirty and smelly, and all the mirrors had been removed or broken so that no student could stop to check her face in the reflection. By middle school and adolescence, girls’ faces would be completely covered by the niqab. Before then, if we wanted to catch a glimpse of ourselves, we had to crowd around the shiny metal water coolers.
My sister was allowed to register for school when she was five years old, but soon after that the rules changed, all students were required to be at least seven years old. This is why my sister was four years ahead of me in school, although we were two years apart in age. The first day that I could be registered, my mother dressed me all in white, a white hairband, white dress, and white shoes. The school forms required that I have a certain vaccination before I could enter. Mama took me to the health clinic directly across the street to get the necessary shot. The city had just finished paving the street, and the road was covered in wet, black tar. I tripped and lay splayed on the ground. My white dress became black, and I felt the humiliation of having to start school in a dirty dress.
Each year my mother made me two school dresses, which I alternated day to day. I wore them until they were little more than threadbare rags. The style and colors were dictated by the General Administration for Girls’ Education: dark green for primary school, dark brown for middle school, and navy for secondary school. Before school let out, the administration sent home a notice to the parents with photos of what the next year’s uniform should look like. Mama was one of the few who followed the picture exactly, the same ugly green color material, the same ugly collar. Most of my girlfriends had pretty dresses that had been redesigned by their moms or tailors with better shades of green and nicer colors. In primary school, Mama sent me off each morning in one of the ugly dresses and my hair plaited in two braids, tied with white ribbon at the ends.
At the beginning of every day, the classes lined up in queues and listened to the morning broadcast on the school’s PA system. This began with recitation of the Koran and the hadiths before moving on to a piece of wisdom for the day, or new instructions for the students if there happened to be any. We were then asked to read, in unison, Sūrat al-Fatiha—the opening sura of the Koran—and to sing the Royal Salute.
After that, teachers went up and down each line to inspect the students. Had we polished our nails, which was prohibited, or forgotten to cut them? Were any of us wearing a decorative headband or colored shoes? Or perhaps we had chosen to adorn ourselves with a forbidden accessory, like a ring or bracelet. The girls’ primary schools permitted black or white hairbands, black shoes, and white socks, and anyone wearing anything else did so at her peril. In middle and secondary school, white was banned. One day in secondary school I pinned a white hairband into place as I dressed for school, only to have it wrenched from my head about an hour later by the school deputy, along with a handful of my hair.