On one of my last trips to Egypt, I had already put these Salafi teachings into practice. While I was visiting my grandfather’s familial house in Egypt, a neighbor named Umm Mina came by one morning. My uncle’s family was living there—Umm Mina was their friend—and we all shared breakfast together. After we’d been eating for some time, my cousin offered her a plate of eggs. She refused them politely, saying, “No, thank you, I’m fasting!” For Muslims, fasting means completely abstaining from all food and drink, even water, so I was puzzled by her response. “Did the guest forget that she was fasting?” I asked my cousin later. I was shocked when she explained that their neighbor was a Coptic Christian and that, in the Coptic doctrine, fasting means only abstaining from animal products. I became furious, vehemently protesting against my cousin’s willingness to receive an “infidel” in the house, let alone be friendly with her and share a meal. After that, I refused to greet Umm Mina whenever she came to the house or even sit in the same room with her. And of course, soon after I avoided traveling to Egypt altogether.
Even in Mecca, I avoided going out of the apartment, and when I did, it was only to go to school or the Grand Mosque. I was eager to go to the mosque once a week with Mama, who still fasted each Monday and Thursday without fail and then broke her fast in the Grand Mosque, where she would obtain the maximum religious gain. My reason for going was to meet Muslim girls and women from other countries like Turkey, Pakistan, and Iran; I wanted to preach Salafi ideas to women who had journeyed to Mecca for Umrah, a non-mandatory, lesser pilgrimage to the Holy City, which, unlike the hajj, may be performed at any time. But before I left home, I now requested my father’s permission.
On the occasions when I went with Mama to the souk, the local market, I completely stopped talking with the sellers because an unmarried girl should not be heard. I also stopped reading the detective novels and science fiction novels that I had adored so much: my Agatha Christie books and the Arabic novels The Impossible Man and The Future Files were banished to the scrap heap as immoral works. I replaced them with religious books and cassette recordings of overwrought sermons filled with threats and intimidation and cries of lamentation and grief.
I had never owned cassettes of music or songs before. Music was one of the great taboos, or forbidden (haram) things, in Saudi culture; religious discourse routinely described it as “the post mail for adultery” and the “whistles of Satan.” What little music I heard was accidental, usually while watching television. I largely stopped watching TV to avoid inadvertently committing that particular sin, and insisted to my parents that we lower the sound whenever any music came on. There were no remote controls. so I would get up and turn the knob myself.
The only acceptable form of “music” was religious anasheed, a form of a cappella chanting that occasionally included a bit of percussion to keep the words on a consistent beat. The themes centered on the tragedies Muslims faced around the world. They urged support through “jihad of the soul” and monetary donations. In the early 1990s, one of the most famous and popular of these religious chants, whose lyrics we memorized, can be translated as:
Kill me and tear me apart, drown me in my blood
You will not live on my land, you will not fly in my sky
You are filth and debauchery, you are the cause of the plague
You are infidelity and treachery, your way is to conceal the light
My healing is in killing you, you will not live serenely
You sold the Afghani people peacefully, without shedding blood
O swords of God, raise yourselves from slumber to light
Teach these grown men a lesson, banish them to nothingness
Exhaust the infidels with beatings and condemn them to wander in the desert
Raise the flags of the religion and rule with the Sharia of Heaven.
My extremism did not remove all music from our home. My father still kept his tapes of Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez and Farid al-Atrash. My brother held on to the tapes of his favorite boy bands, the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. But I tried hard to dissuade my family from listening to singing, watching television, or collecting magazines with photographs, since we had been taught in school that the presence of photographs in the home would prevent the entry of angels. During this period, Islamist magazines and newspapers also appeared, distinguished from regular publications by their lack of photographs. Particular attention was paid to excluding all photographs of women. Mama, however, had a big collection of fashion magazines that one of her brothers, Uncle Ali, had brought her from Italy, and she used them to find designs for the clothes she made.
One time, when I was alone in the house, I gathered up all of my mother’s magazines and all of my father’s and brother’s tapes that featured singers. My sister’s possessions were locked up, so I couldn’t reach those. Then I climbed up to the roof of our apartment building and set everything on fire. As the flames consumed the glossy pages and charred and melted the plastic covers, I thought of the gains I would make in God’s eyes for destroying these evil things with my bare hands. I felt glad to be rescuing my family from sin. After that, I deliberately recorded over any new tapes that my brother bought: rather than hearing his favorite bands when he played them, he would be greeted by the voice of a cassette preacher’s sermon instead. This preacher would talk about the contempt of singing and warn of God’s intention to pour molten iron into the ears of anyone who listened to instruments.
After my bonfire, Mama hid all the family photograph albums from me to prevent me from burning those as well. She considered our few pictures to be precious. It was two decades before I saw them. I stumbled upon this small treasure trove while cleaning out Mama’s room after she died. And I was grateful. A significant number of Saudis reject the idea of photography for reasons of privacy, so images of relatives and friends are often rare. Many of those, like me, who later renounced their extremism, say they have never regretted anything as much as having ripped up their family photographs.
My constant interference in our family’s everyday life was a source of ongoing tension. Extremism frequently turns its champions into angry people, driven by conflicting desires. At first, I pitied my less enlightened parents and siblings. Then I felt superior to them, poor sinners that they were. Then I lost patience with their unwillingness to see the one true path and resorted to threats, intimidation, and yelling. At night, I was tormented by thoughts of what would happen to all us of when we reached our graves.