While we were in Egypt, my sister and I did not wear a niqab or a black abaya over our shoulders, or even a hijab over our hair as we were accustomed to doing in Saudi Arabia. We wandered about uncovered. Until we returned home.
Within a couple years, we had no choice but to take up the veil. By the early 1990s, the over-the-head abaya and full-face niqab were imposed on all female students, just as they had been on women in other areas of Saudi life. It was the most stringent form of niqab. While the traditional niqab left a slit for the eyes, we were now supposed to lower our head scarves to block out this opening entirely. It was hard to get used to it on my journey to and from school. The full face covering made me almost blind, and I stumbled every day on the steps of our building. One time when I fell, our neighbors’ sons watched and laughed.
6
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My Barbie Is Murdered
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I know the exact day and event that transformed me at age thirteen from a moderately observant Muslim into a radical Islamist. Until that moment, my shift had been a slower, more cumulative process, a series of adaptations and accommodations. But after this particular afternoon, I became almost unrecognizable to my younger self. I became extremely observant, down to the most minor acts; I renounced nearly every small pleasure I had known as a girl; I brutally enforced my new beliefs upon my family. And I can say with certainty that this happened as a direct result of the environment I lived in, from my schooling and education to the radical preachers broadcasting on TV; the cassettes and VHS tapes of their fiery sermons; the books and leaflets that were distributed for free in common gathering places, like the souk, our local market. There was now one completely acceptable place to direct the emotions of my own teenage upheavals and frustrations: into the global Muslim political struggle and calls for an Islamic state or caliphate.
As a teenager, at least sixty percent of our time in class was spent studying religion and religious subjects—including Tajweed, the rules for reciting the words of the Koran; the hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH); the Fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence; and the importance of Tawhid, Muslim belief in the singular pre-eminence of God; and Islamic culture and history. But we were not studying a classical, historical understanding of Islam. We were studying a hybrid Salafi ideology, which decreed that Islam must be returned to its purest form, the form they believed was first practiced by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his Companions (Sahabah). This was the doctrine that Juhayman and his followers preached when they captured the Grand Mosque, the doctrine that the Saudi royal family allowed to dominate much of the kingdom in the aftermath of the siege. This Salafism requires strict adherence to the most literal interpretation of the Koran, believes in no other law but sharia, and embraces the tenets of jihad against nonbelievers.
Inside Mecca and other cities across the kingdom, sharia was on display most Fridays, when a prisoner would be led into the large square near the Grand Mosque after prayers. One of my very religious friends during secondary school told me about following a great crowd with her father and siblings until she caught sight of a blindfolded Pakistani man being led to his beheading. He was being dragged by his hands and was crying. At one point, she said, he peed himself, the stain adding to his humiliation and fear. Scared and anxious herself, she did not stay to watch his final moments; she begged her father to leave before the man’s head was laid against the stone and severed with a blow from a sword.
I sometimes saw pickpockets near the Grand Mosque. When the authorities caught them, they would periodically cut off their right hands for stealing, a punishment described in the centuries-old sharia law texts, although contemporary scholars debate how literal or widespread these sanctions were. Afterward, the traumatized stump would be plunged into boiling oil to cauterize the veins and arteries and stop the bleeding. If the person was caught stealing again, he would have his right foot cut off above the ankle. Of course, there are some people in positions of power in the kingdom who have stolen billions of dollars, but their hands and ankles have never been cut off. That punishment is only for the small-time pickpockets.
Extreme Salafi beliefs reject any moderation or innovation in Islam. They condemn not only Shiites (members of the sect most common in Iran and the eastern part of Saudi Arabia) but millions of other Sunni believers as well. (Salafis are Sunni Muslims, but the overwhelming majority of Sunnis are not Salafis.) Salafis are confident that only they and they alone will survive the time of judgment. They also believe that they are the true warriors against a centuries-old conspiracy to corrupt and destroy Islam.
In the 1980s and 90s, as this form of Salafism gained traction in the Saudi kingdom, the overall state of the Muslim world played directly into the Salafi narrative of a war against Islam. The Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, the Serbian/Croatian attacks in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the massacres against the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, the first Palestinian uprising—these were all cited as proof of a widespread, international conspiracy to exterminate Muslims. According to our teachers and clerics, no one was at greater risk in this global struggle than women. The anti-Islamist forces were determined to deflower women, to bring them out of their houses and remove their veils.