There was no counternarrative. By that time the extreme Salafis controlled all media; books that did not conform with their ideology were banned. The fixation on declaring things forbidden (haram), which had begun with girls’ education, now extended to censorship of the printed press, radio, and television. They also rejected anything new that might disrupt official communications, such as satellite channels and the Internet, and innovations like credit cards and insurance. No battle was too small. In their Friday sermons, imams denounced the infiltration of satellite dishes inside the kingdom, declaring a religious war on the dish. People who owned one were branded as traitors to the faith. “O nation of Islam, these satellite dishes are tornado-sized storms of sedition which will pluck our homes from their roots and destroy them. I swear by my God: they are a torrent of sinful desires, designed to swallow up all traces of modesty, chastity and faith,” wrote Sheikh Hamad Aldahloos in one fatwa. Radicalized youth began targeting rooftop satellite dishes with rifles, and a 1990 decree from the Ministry of the Interior officially banned their use. (That decree remains in place today, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia owns the most influential satellite channels in the Arab world—MBC Group and Al Arabiya—is the headquarters for eighty-five channels, and has the second-highest satellite TV penetration in the Arab region, at ninety-seven percent.)
At the heart of Salafi ideology is a deep belief in Hell. What I remember most from my own life during this period was the all-consuming fear that I, as a Muslim, wouldn’t reach the level of righteousness and devotion required to escape condemnation from the eternal hellfires.
No Saudi student could fail to hear the message. During the school day, religious sheikhs frequently visited schools to give lectures via the public address system. Because we were girls and young women, we were not permitted to lay eyes on male clerics, but attendance at these faceless lectures was mandatory. In middle and secondary school, the lectures grew more frequent and were supplemented by speeches from some of our most devout teachers after the noontime prayer in the school’s mosque. It was not mandatory to attend these events, but as a curious teenager, I went.
These religious lectures were overwhelmingly designed to arouse feelings of guilt or fear in our hearts. They were vivid and mesmerizing, and they terrified us with talk of the torment of the grave. We were commanded to imagine the Day of Judgment, when we would be standing between the hands of God and, for those who fell short in performing their religious duties, the agony of the fire. Similar lines were heard in schools across the nation, such as these words from a sermon about the importance of praying on time: “Whoever neglects his prayers, God will punish to drown thirsty; even if he drinks the water of all the seas in the world, he will not quench his thirst; and God will narrow his grave, pressing on him until his ribs no longer hold their form. God will set fire to his grave, and send to him a snake called ‘The Brave and the Bald.’?” The preachers would also spew horror stories about the violent, brutal deaths suffered by sinners or even simply negligent individuals. Their voices building to a crescendo, they would recount these happenings as if they were real-life events to which each preacher had been an eyewitness.
The lecture that forever changed me centered on the ritual act of washing and shrouding the dead. There are a number of death-related rites in Islam. When a Muslim dies, his or her body must be washed in a mixture of three liquids: water, camphor, and a liquid prepared from the leaves of the sidr tree—the same type that grew in my grandmother’s courtyard back in Wadi Fatima. Then the body must be shrouded in white cloth and a prayer offered before burial.
“Death will act as your preacher today!” began the teacher who delivered the lecture, determined that the gravity of the subject should pass none of us by. The lecture was steeped in melancholy. It described the desolation of the grave and the time we spend alone there with only our deeds for company. “What have you done to prepare for the grave?” the teacher asked us, spitting contempt. And then: “Who will act as the body while I demonstrate the shrouding process?” One girl was singled out and moved to the front of the room. We watched, wide-eyed and frightened, overwhelmed with guilt and feelings of deficiency, as the volunteer’s eyes were covered with cotton and a white shroud brought down onto her face. At once the audience and the corpse were joined together in a collective wave of hysteria. Sounds of plaintive wailing rose around us until every other sense was overwhelmed.
Then the teacher commanded each of us to seclude ourselves in a dark and quiet place when we went home, in order for us to feel the loneliness of the grave, our grave. “Remember,” she said, “there will be nothing there to amuse or occupy you in that hole except the good deeds you did during your life. So ask yourself today: Are your prayers on time? Are you complying with the conditions of the religious veiling? Are you being complacent with regard to haram things like singing, wearing tight clothing, and plucking your eyebrows?” She went on to recount the rest of the long list of forbidden things and actions.
The idea of death pursued me and tore at my insides as I walked home. When I got back to the apartment, I hid myself away. I took out the cassette tape we had been given after the lecture: Throes of Death. The teacher had told us to play it whenever we became lazy with our acts of worship or our souls tempted us toward sin. I put the tape in the player, placed the headphones over my ears, and listened to the earth-shattering yells of a preacher: “Have you prepared for death?” Plaintive moans swirled around him as the tape wound its way forward; the image of the girl in the shroud passed through my head, and I began to cry. I promised to God that I would reform myself and be a good Muslim. I remembered what they had taught us at the school lectures: that your religion cannot be complete until you have changed the evil around you. I would have to change not only myself but also my family.
Growing up in a conservative, religious society had already made me multazima, compliant, with the central Muslim rites: prayer five times a day, fasting, reading the Koran, performing the daily religious recitations, and wearing the facial covering that we had been obligated to wear since the beginning of middle school. Basic religiosity had been imposed by my family as well, on both my father’s and my mother’s sides. My father’s side had separated me from my male cousins. My mother’s side, during one of my visits to Egypt when I was ten years old, had insisted on my participating in the ritual of five daily prayers.
But after the lecture on death, I felt that all my previous attempts at being a good Muslim were woefully insufficient. From that day forward, I embraced religious fanaticism. This story is in no way unique to me; it’s the story of an entire generation brainwashed with extremist discourse and hate speech, an entire generation who grew up being imprisoned, first by the constraints of our society and its religious leaders, and then by our own actions—by our own thoughts and minds.
It is difficult to convey the number of duties and prohibited acts that we as young women had to contend with. They became exhausting and overwhelming, and ultimately suffocating. Independent thought was all but impossible. We simply followed the course set before us, afraid of stumbling, just as I had been afraid of stumbling with my face shrouded in the niqab.
Every public and most private spaces were saturated with radical books, brochures, and cassette sermons; almost all focused exclusively on death, the torture of the grave, and the hereafter. Throughout Mecca, these materials were distributed free of charge in the markets, the schools, and the mosques, and they were exchanged among family and friends. These pieces of religious propaganda were overwhelmingly intended to ensure the compliance of women.