King Saud had placed girls’ education under the control of an independent educational institution called the General Administration for Girls’ Education. He also established a separate supervisory body headed by the grand mufti—the country’s leading religious cleric—whom he tasked with organizing girls’ education, developing the curriculum that the girls would study, and monitoring the progress of girls’ schools. Thus the person in charge of our state education was a bearded religious sheikh, himself the product of a religious institution.
But the worst consequence of these tight intertwinings of religion and education inside Saudi Arabia would affect boys and girls equally: the radical Islamization of our studies. Anxious to reject the pan-Arab nationalists who were coming to power in places like Egypt and Iraq, the Saudis decided to align themselves with some of the most radical of the Islamists, men who had been jailed in other nations, like Egypt, for their violent ideology. These men had found a political haven in the Saudi kingdom. Now they were also going to find a place of supreme importance in the Saudi educational system. The task of drafting the curriculum for all school stages was entrusted to leaders of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus our books included works such as “Jihad for the Sake of Allah” by Sayyid Qutb, as well as writings by radical Islamist thinkers like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Abul A’la Maududi, whose ideology of violent holy war on behalf of the one true Islam is the basis for much of the religious interpretations expounded by Al Qaeda and ISIS. The Ministry of Education printed their books and taught their messages of stringent Islamist education and hatred of differences in its public schools.
There was a suffocating control over everything. Independent thought was discouraged; visual, audio, and print media were equally lacking in freedom. The censorship of books left no survivors. Political writings, historical narratives, even romance novels—any type of book considered to conflict with the prevailing extreme Salafist doctrine—was banned. Students in other countries might rebel against this madness, but the widespread illiteracy of our parents and the manner in which we were taught—dictation without discussion, memorizing and repeating without analysis or criticism—molded and subjugated us in such a way that we became domesticated and tame. We were like captive animals that had lost the will to fight. We even went so far as to defend the very constraints that they had imposed upon us. My friends and I believed that the rest of the world, and even less observant parts of the Muslim world, were conspiring against our true Islam. I believed the words of one of the kingdom’s leading Salafi clerics, who stated that our Islam “represents the last bastion of truth and virtue.” And I was increasingly determined to live my life according to those principles.
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I. In 1993, Bin Baz would become the kingdom’s grand mufti. Ironically, one of his most famous fatwas (religious pronouncements) was the statement that he issued against women driving cars. Bin Baz wrote, “Depravity leads to the innocent and pure women being accused of indecencies. Allah has laid down one of the harshest punishments for such an act to protect society from the spreading of the causes of depravity. Women driving cars, however, is one of the causes that lead to that.” But he also fell out of favor with the extremists for his ruling that allowed non-Muslim troops to be deployed on Saudi soil during the Gulf War to help defend the kingdom from the Iraqi army. In addition, his decree was seen as allowing non-Muslim soldiers to wear the Christian cross and carry the New Testament into battle against other Muslims. That ruling remains a huge point of contention within Saudi society today. One radical cleric declared Bin Baz to be kafir, an infidel, and a traitor to Islam.
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Behind the Veil
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I still remember the last beating I received from my father. I was in my third year of secondary school and he struck me so hard across the side of my head with his palm that I almost lost my hearing on one side. For hours, my ear was deaf to all sound. I don’t know why he hit me.
The illogical cycle of cruelty at home and in school carried over into my interactions with my siblings. We dealt with each other with our fists, the stronger one hitting the weaker. I received my share of beatings, biting, and hair pulling from my sister, and in turn, my brother received his share of beatings from me. Then as he grew up and grew stronger, I received my share of beatings from him. But we were simply acting out what we had learned. Fear dominated our relationship with our parents. If there was no physical violence, there was a steady stream of verbal abuse, frustration, an absence of encouragement, constant intimidation, or simply total indifference.
I ran away to books and lessons to forget, but that was not always successful. One time, when I was twelve, I borrowed a romance novel—The Empty Pillow by Egyptian writer Ihsan Abdel Quddous—from my sister, without asking. Risqué romantic novels like The Empty Pillow and the Abeer series, a collection of foreign romances translated into Arabic and published in Lebanon, were banned in Saudi Arabia, but frequent trips to visit my mother’s family in Egypt meant that my sister and later I were able to smuggle them back into the kingdom. When Muna discovered I had her book, she beat me and then she burned the pages before my eyes so I wouldn’t be able to finish it. I remained obsessed with finding out the ending—did the young lovers find happiness or not? Only when I saw the movie based on the book, during a visit to my grandfather’s house in Egypt, did I discover what had happened to the characters that had captivated my mind.
My appetite for reading led me to love writing, and here again, my visits to my mother’s family in Egypt were invaluable. We were staying at my grandfather’s house, where my uncle Omar was also living at the time. The oldest of my uncle’s daughters was a lady we called Abla (big sister) Eftaima, who baked bread for us in a wood-burning oven. One day I saw a pile of worn-out storybooks next to her. They were hidden under layers of dust, but I cleaned off one cover to reveal the title Al-Mughamiroon Alkhamsa—“The Five Adventurers.” I realized that my cousin was tossing the books into the fire. The bread to feed our stomachs was being baked at the expense of the pages that would have fed our minds.