I still have one such booklet, printed on stock paper the size of a playing card, so that it might easily be carried in a pocket or a purse. Entitled “A Gift to the Muslim Woman,” its focus was the full veiling of the body, head, and face. It reads in part:
My Muslim sister: today, you face a relentless and cunning war waged by the enemies of Islam with the purpose of reaching you and removing you from your impenetrable fortress. . . . Don’t be tricked by the ideas they are promoting. One of the things that these enemies of Islam are trying to discredit and eliminate is the niqab. The facial covering is what distinguishes a free woman from an infidel woman or a slave and avoids her being confronted with the wolves that walk among us. As the scholar al-Qurtubi said: the whole of the woman—her body and her voice—is a’ura (sinful to put on display) and should not be revealed unless there is a need for her to do so.
One of the conditions of veiling is that it acts as a container for the entire body, without exception, and it should not be incensed or perfumed. This is demonstrated by the hadith which tells us that any woman who applies perfume and passes by others so they can smell her scent is an adulteress. Veiling is not imposed upon you to restrict you, but to honor you and give you dignity; by wearing the religious covering, you will preserve yourself, and protect society from the emergence of corruption and the spread of immorality. . . . My Muslim sister, keep this booklet and give it as a gift to your sisters after reading it.
Other taboos included wearing pants, styling one’s hair, and even parting one’s hair on the side—because doing so causes a woman to resemble the infidels. Nail polish is forbidden, because it prevents the ritual waters of ablution from performing their task. In fact, the things most frequently cited in religious lectures, which preoccupied most of our efforts and consumed most of our time, were often not only superficial but also incomprehensibly trivial, such as the prohibition against eyebrow plucking. Even though the hadith that the religious scholars used to justify this prohibition was not an actual hadith at all but rather a statement by the Prophet Muhammad’s companion Abdullah ibn Masud (PBUH), the argument was still put forward that plucking a woman’s eyebrows represented an interference with God’s creation, and that whoever plucks her eyebrows is a cursed woman destined to be banished from God’s mercy.
To comply with this decree, women’s beauty salons affixed notices over their entrances declaring that eyebrow plucking was excluded from their services; many even specifically added that plucking was condemned and was a religious violation. But women with unruly eyebrows often circumvented this prohibition simply by dyeing their unwanted hairs.
As teenagers, we also heard extensive preaching on the requirement to obey one’s husband. This, we were informed, would serve as one way that a woman could guarantee her entry to paradise. Preachers stressed the necessity of women gaining their husbands’ permission for everything, whether visiting family, cutting their hair, or even performing voluntary religious fasting. They emphasized the need for women’s complete subordination to their husbands in all facets of life. As one Saudi sheikh said during a lecture, “If your husband has an injury filled with pus, and you lick this pus from his wound, this is still less than what he can rightfully expect.”
I comforted myself with the promise that these arduous duties would pave my way to paradise. And I imagined the alternative, a hell fraught with sinful desire, which I would avoid. Each day I wore gloves and black socks, along with a niqab that completely concealed my eyes. I stopped visiting my aunt’s and uncle’s houses to socialize or have fun and went only out of the obligation of kinship, a very important concept in the Saudi world. Ignoring the ties of kinship and duties to one’s relatives is grounds for being denied entrance to paradise. But in my newly religious eyes, not all kinship ties were the same. By the time I was in secondary school, I refused to accompany my mother on her trips to Egypt, since Egypt was a sinful country where women were not veiled, people went to the movies, and men and women mixed together. I considered it impossible to be in such a country and not to object to the sins of its people. And I never forgot to advise my mother about continuing to wear her facial covering when she traveled there.
A key component of our school curriculum was the Doctrine of Loyalty and Disavowal. The first stage of disavowal, as we were taught, is to hate and to become an enemy of the “infidels,” in this case meaning anyone who is faithful to a religion or creed other than Islam, including atheists or anyone who follows another version of Islam, such as the Shiite sect. We were instructed to express our hate and enmity in a myriad of ways. We were not to smile at these infidels or greet them. We were not to reside in or travel to their countries. We were not to participate in their holidays or wish them well or attend important occasions of theirs like weddings and funerals. We were not to copy the way they dressed or talked, nor to record our history using infidel systems like the Gregorian calendar. We were not to appoint them to any positions of authority in Muslim countries. In primary school, we even had a lesson titled “The Impermissibility of Standing by One Who Turns Away from God and His Prophet,” where we read these lines: “God almighty, cut off the friendly relations between Muslims and infidels. Even if a Muslim lives far away, he is your brother in religion; and as for the infidel, even if he is your brother by blood, he is your enemy in religion.” We were, however, to seize any and all opportunities to invite infidels to follow the religion of Islam and pray for their guidance.