My relationship with my brother—my best friend for so long—became very strained. The friction between us reached its peak when I searched his wallet and found pictures of beautiful and rather scantily clad Lebanese singers. I waited for my father to come home before I staged the confrontation. My waiting paid off: my father had his own firmly held religious beliefs, even if they were not always as strong as mine, and my brother was forcibly removed from our apartment for a day. I forgot about the incident, but my brother never did. He still remembers it and says, “You caused me a lot of pain during your extremist days!”
Even after I became very devout, the one thing my heart would not allow me to relinquish was the beautiful Barbie doll that I had brought back from Egypt. Perhaps it was because she was the last tangible evidence of the one happy period of my childhood, the only surviving proof of a more innocent and simpler time. Or maybe it was because of the amount of effort I went through to get her. Either way, I held on to her like a precious treasure, giving her a position of honor on my bookshelf. I clung and clung until one day a very devout friend visited me and destroyed her while I was preparing tea. I came into the room with the pot and the cups to see what remained of Barbie lying there, her lovely clothes torn, her delicate limbs snapped, and her soft, long, golden hair all chopped off. My friend’s name was Mariam, and she was an American who had converted to Islam and come to Saudi for Umrah. She, like me, had been indoctrinated into the militant Salafi school of Islam, and she had refused to return to America. She was doing what Salafi decree preached, destroying that which was haram.
After my radical phase ended, I looked for a replacement Barbie doll everywhere I went. I bought several new Barbie dolls to make up for the sadness of losing my first, and I’ve kept them all so that someday another little girl might play with them.
It was not just dolls with beautiful faces and bodies that were forbidden, but all forms of human and animal representation. As a fatwa from Salafi scholar Muhammad ibn Uthaymeen states, “It is not permitted to take photographs of animated beings, because the Prophet (PBUH) condemned all photographers to everlasting torment: ‘The most stringent punishment on the Day of Judgment will be reserved for those who depict the forms of others.’ This makes clear to us that photography is a major sin, since condemnation and warning declarations of severe punishment were bestowed only upon major sins.” But one of the hobbies I truly adored was drawing. I created another world for myself when I drew, a beautiful world, full of happiness.
While my handwriting was disorganized and unruly, my drawings were elaborate and perfectly proportioned. I grew to expect the same question at the beginning of each academic year: “Manal, are you sure these drawings are your own?” The teacher would present me with a blank sheet of white paper and whatever tools were available, and I’d start drawing right there in front of her to prove that I truly was the only one responsible for my creations. At the end of the school year, the teachers would take my sketchbooks to use as examples for students in the following year. Many of my drawings were displayed in elegant frames on walls in the school, which made me exceedingly proud. When I created bigger drawings, I loved nothing more than to use the walls as my canvas, and happily spent all my free periods creating colorful designs. At school, we were not allowed to draw faces and animals due to the prohibitions against representation, but at home my notebooks were filled with images of creatures and smiling people.
I was proud to win any drawing competition that I entered, both at a school level and even a national one. It just so happened that the company that I would eventually work for after graduating from college, Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, held an annual contest for children’s drawings. I submitted an entry during my second year of middle school, and my Oasis and Palm Trees won. As a prize, they sent me an electronic drawing pad. The pad was designed to be plugged into the television so that whatever was drawn could be displayed on the screen. Our television set was very old (we still had an aerial) and there was no way for me to connect my new gadget, so I gave it as a gift to my neighbor’s daughter, who loved drawing as much as I did. I happily did all of my brother’s drawing homework as well. He told me once that his teacher admired his drawings and had asked him whether anyone at home was helping him. He told the teacher it was his older brother, since saying that it was his sister would have been too embarrassing.
Both my brother and my sister knew how much I loved my drawings. They also knew I wouldn’t hesitate to give up and retreat in the middle of a fight if they so much as threatened to rip them up. One time my sister made good on her threat and ripped up a sketchbook whose contents I’d worked on all year. I wept and wailed as if grieving the death of a friend. Afterward, I taped all the pieces together, and I still have that sketchbook.
One of my school teachers suggested that I take a distance-learning course to develop my drawing skills. She gave me a brochure for the Master Art diploma at the Penn Foster Career School, a correspondence school in Pennsylvania. My father helped me pay the enrollment fee, and each month I received study modules and a selection of drawing tools. I found it hard to juggle my art assignments with my compulsory schoolwork, but when I obtained my diploma at the age of seventeen, I felt very pleased with myself.
My relationship with drawing ended abruptly not long after, following a single day in our religious studies class. I had known that drawing animate beings was haram. But that day I learned that the people who made such drawings would be among the most strongly punished on the Day of Judgment. I spent a full week feeling confused, unable to sleep from recurring nightmares. I was trapped between two equally painful agonies: my feelings of sinfulness and guilt at having breached the commands of my faith on the one hand, and the thought of abandoning the drawings that I had worked hard on from almost the first moment I could hold a pencil. A little part of my soul was poured into each and every one.
After a week of relentless insomnia and guilt, I saw no other option. I climbed up to the roof of our apartment building and burned all my drawings of living things. I stood silently and cried as I watched my papers and notebooks burn. The conflicting sensations of comfort and pain raged inside me like the fire leaping before my eyes.