I was beaten again during a science class. Saudi education consists primarily of memorizing and reciting, not asking and answering questions. The teacher had written on the blackboard, The sky is blue, the clouds are white. She would ask everyone to repeat what she had written. When it came to be my turn, I said no. I had my own ideas. I said, “But the sky is white, and the clouds are blue.” The first time I said the wrong line, the teacher beat me on the hands with the ruler, and then second time as well, until I finally said, “The sky is blue, the clouds are white.” After that, I learned to follow the rules without questioning them.
It was common to be beaten for getting the wrong answer. Even at home, when Mama taught me to memorize the Koran, she used beating as the instructional technique. If I refused to practice, she would beat me badly. When she taught me the first sura (verse), I wasn’t able to recite it correctly. She slapped me after every mistake that I made. I would be trying to learn and crying at the same time. The beatings were enough to make anyone hate education, especially when you were too young to understand your mistakes.
At the start of sixth grade, our class didn’t have an Arabic-language teacher, so the geography and history teacher taught us Arabic. But she didn’t teach us the correct way to draw the letters, and so all of our notebooks were filled with horrible mistakes. When we finally got a teacher for Arabic, she collected our notebooks and was horrified. Usually when you make a mistake, such as failing to do your homework, you were beaten twice on the hands with the ruler. But this teacher said that each of us would be beaten for every mistake that we had made. Imagine all of these notebooks, filled with four lines, two sentences each, over and over, day after day. Imagine how many mistakes you can make in those four lines. I was one of the top students in the whole school, and I had made forty mistakes. I got forty beatings with the ruler; I still remember the pain. The teacher was shouting and screaming at me the whole time. All forty girls in that class were beaten that day. Everyone cried. The worst was knowing that the punishment was simply because another teacher had failed to teach us what we were expected to learn. It was for something we had not been taught, not for us having failed to do the work.
Boys were beaten too, and their beatings were in many ways worse than ours. They were taken outside and told to remove their shoes, before being forced to the ground, their feet bound together and lashed to a long stick called a falaka. On their backs, with their legs held up by two other boys who were tasked with holding the ends of the falaka, and the soles of their feet exposed, they would be beaten on the bottom of their feet by a teacher using a bamboo cane. My brother received his first falaka beating when he was six years old. He was a student in the pre-primary level, and was not even a full-fledged student, only what we call a “listener.” He cried all day afterward and refused to go back to school the next morning. Abouya told me that he himself had stopped attending the classes of his own kutāb—the unofficial religious schools scattered through Saudi’s rural villages—after a teacher beat him so badly with the falaka that he was unable to walk. In the mid-1990s, a Saudi boy was beaten so severely by his teacher that he later died from his injuries. Finally, after that, official beatings in Saudi schools were banned.
But I am grateful for school. School taught me to read, and I loved reading. I would go crazy over books. Before I started school, when only my sister could read, I would chase her around the apartment, trying to learn the letters and words from her. She would always refuse. Once I was in school, I would read my sister’s textbooks, sneaking them out of her bag without her knowing. It didn’t matter to me that they were textbooks; I was so desperate for something new to read. Eventually, my sister would hide her books rather than give them to me.
I would often read the same book many times because there was nothing else and I saved some of my lunch money in hopes of buying a new one. Women and girls were not allowed in the only public library in Mecca, so in the summer my dad would take me to a bookshop that sold religious books for cut-rate prices. On Saudi TV Channel 2, I watched Sesame Street to learn the English letters A, B, C. My sister had a book with English letters, but she wouldn’t share it. Once, in the stationery store, I bought an address book along with my schoolbooks, just because the address book was organized according to the letters A through Z.
Even my heroes were from books. My absolute favorite character was Jo from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. To me, she was amazing. She was a writer, rebellious, and aspired to be independent. Jo did what the boys did. She wasn’t supposed to ride a bicycle wearing her big dress, but she took the bicycle and rode it anyway. I had very long hair, and it saddened me that my parents would never let me cut it like Jo did.
Another of my heroes was Mowgli, the jungle boy from Rudyard Kipling’s story. He had a song in the TV cartoon that went “How beautiful it is to live in a world with no walls.” I loved that line. It was how I felt when I used to go visit my grandmother in the valley where my father grew up. There all the houses had huge yards and the sun came in everywhere. Everything was open, not like our apartments in Mecca, which were always small and dark. In Mecca, even if you had a window, you had to put up a lot of shades so people on the outside couldn’t see what was inside. We live in one of the most sun-drenched countries on earth and most of our lives are spent indoors, in quasi-darkness.
I was also captivated by Sinbad, because he was an adventurer who traveled the world. In my world, physical activity—running, jumping, climbing—was forbidden to girls because we might lose our virginity. The only games we were permitted to play involved nothing more than singing songs and holding hands. We had one song about an open road and a closed road. When we got to the closed road, we used to hold each other’s hands tight and lift them up in the air. I remember we even invented one game where we just drew squares on the ground. There was nothing else to do. But reading and studying, that was something to do. At school, in books, I could run away from the troubled house I lived in, from my family, from any problems. I remember when Mama would have a fight with Abouya, I would hear the fight with one ear, but with the other one, I would be studying, minding my own business.
If reading books had opened my mind, more years of formal, state education closed it. Even though corporal punishment was banned by the time I reached middle school, we were every bit as tightly controlled in what we thought and what we did, just in other, less outwardly visible ways. Saudi education, particularly girls’ education, had become the domain of Islamist theologians.