After I told Amal my secret, she told her older sisters. They informed me that I could no longer talk to my male cousins, let alone play with them. If one of my male cousins wanted to walk past where I was sitting, or even enter the house while I was there, I had to first be hidden out of sight. This isolation extended to Aunt Zein’s house as well. Her oldest son banned his children, my friends Hammam and Hossam, from having any contact with me. We no longer raced in the yard or read our favorite books. We could no longer assemble LEGO blocks or play Atari games. Muhammad and his pigeon hut were lost to me too, and we didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye. I saw him once in the hallway by accident and desperately wanted to say hi, but could not bring myself to do so. And he would not speak to me. I visited my uncle’s and aunt’s houses less and less. I felt isolated and alone, and I was angry and confused that people who had been as close to me as brothers had disappeared. I no longer knew what they looked like. I cannot compare the feeling to anything except the empty grief one feels after a loved one dies. I suppose it was akin to death, a severing from half of the people I had known.
Men and women were not always so strictly segregated in Saudi Arabia’s homes, schools, offices, and public places. The wife of one of my older cousins did not cover her face, and she would sit with her brothers-in-law during a meal. Even a woman’s need to have one designated male guardian—a father, husband, brother, uncle, or son—to provide permission for the most basic activities—including travel, particularly outside the country—is a relatively recent development in Saudi society. It was the younger generation, my cousins, who imposed this level of segregation and religiosity on their elders and set these draconian rules for their parents, rather than the other way around. I remember my aunt saying, “I’m so thankful that my kids are teaching me about Islam.”
After 1979, after the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, my generation was brainwashed. In school, we were taught to go home and lecture our parents about prayer and sins, most of which involved the behavior of women. Those born female in Saudi society now pass through two stages in their lives. First, as young girls, they are supervised and monitored; then, as adult women, they are controlled and judged. Their first menstrual cycle is the abrupt turning point. There is no transition into adolescence. Young women in Saudi Arabia do not experience anything like the “teenage years,” that time to experiment, have adventures, and even make mistakes and learn from them. As soon as a girl reaches puberty, from the moment her breasts begin to show, she is obliged to enter a state known in Arabic as khidr (“numbness”). She must be outwardly devoid of emotions and feelings. In public, she must veil herself from prying eyes and avoid speaking. She must observe a long list of religious and societal taboos.
It wasn’t until I was in secondary school that I learned about the ritual washing that must be performed after your period, after intercourse, and forty days after the blood stops when a woman has given birth. One of my secondary school teachers began shouting at our class: How could you not know the correct way to wash? After she was done with her scolding, she said that we must start with the right side, beginning with wetting our hair and scalp and then continuing down the body. Once the right side had been cleaned, the same process had to be performed on the left. If you do not wash properly, she told us, our prayers to God would not be accepted. I had not known. After my period had finished, I had simply taken a regular shower.
There were other daily ritual washings to be performed. Each day the mouth had to be cleaned, then the nose, then the face, and then the hands and elbows, then you wiped your hair and finally your feet. There were specific prayers to be said before washing and after, which were impossible to forget because of the stickers all around to remind us. There were stickers on the bathroom door with the prayer to be said before entering the bathroom, stickers of prayers to be said before leaving the house or the school. When you’re stopped at a traffic light, that too is a time to pray. You should say Astaghfiru Allah, God forgive me, God forgive me, over and over, until the light changes. These were on top of our other obligations, such as reading the Koran and the five daily acts of prayer, both of which had their own set of required ablutions. And veiling.
The first time I wore a veil, I was ten years old. I had seen my favorite teacher, the religious studies teacher, Miss Sanaa, leaving school dressed completely in black, an abaya over her body, a niqab covering for her face, hiding everything, even her eyes. Her feet and hands were covered in black socks and gloves. I went home and told Mama that I wanted to wear the niqab and gloves. She was surprised, but she bought me the pieces and taught me how to wear them. My sister laughed at me, but I refused to be discouraged. Instead, I felt very grown up as I walked to school the next day, bursting with pride.
But as I made my way home in the afternoon, I discovered that the niqab was a rather difficult piece of clothing for our hot climate. It was hard to breathe through the dark fabric as it drew up against my mouth and nose. The gloves made it impossible to get a proper hold on anything. But I had to keep wearing my new covering; it would be far too embarrassing to tell Mama that I had just as quickly changed my mind.
As it happened, the end of my adventure with the niqab and gloves came a few weeks later at the hands of two other girls: my sister and my cousin Amal. One day, while the three of us were walking to my uncle’s house on the next street, my sister turned toward me and in a single, swift motion pulled off my niqab. She and my cousin ran away, laughing, the niqab clutched tightly in her hand. Exposing my face in the street felt disconcerting. I felt betrayed, but it was also the perfect excuse to stop wearing the niqab. I could blame it on the two of them.
That summer, when we went to my grandfather’s house in Egypt, the first thing I noticed was the women, who walked freely in the streets, wearing colorful clothes and uncovered hair. I pressed my nose against the car window, feeling more like a spectator at a Cirque du Soleil performance than a passenger driving through an ordinary Egyptian neighborhood. When we stopped at a traffic light, I looked over and saw a woman seated behind the steering wheel of a car, driving, something I had never seen in Mecca.