Much later, I learned that drawing is prohibited in Islam only for those who intend to worship the pictures in place of God. But the militant religious discourse to which I was subjected was based on the principle of forbidding not only that which is explicitly sinful but any thing that might eventually lead one to commit a sin.
But perhaps the greatest and most lasting casualty of the entire period of my adolescence was my relationship with my sister. In our apartment, after many years, we eventually got a landline telephone with two receivers. One receiver was in the guest room, which my sister commandeered for her own room. She was forever locking the door. The second receiver was in our main room. One day when I was in my third year of middle school and my sister was in her last year in secondary school, I picked up the receiver to make a phone call and overheard her talking to a man. I stayed on the line, silently listening to the whole phone call. I was shocked to hear my sister talking to a stranger and exchanging words like “I miss you” and planning to meet in secret. When the conversation ended, I was enraged. I kept the secret to myself until the next morning, when I told my two best friends and asked them what I should do. They listened but said nothing. I decided I would tell my mother. If I confronted Muna directly, I knew that I would receive a harsh beating at her hands.
Even before I had finished speaking, Mama was terrified. She confronted Muna, but my sister denied everything, calling me delusional and a liar. Muna later beat me severely, which made me even more determined to catch her in the act. Religion wasn’t my only motivation. I also wanted revenge. Years before, when I was in primary school, Muna had found my diary, where I used to write fictional stories and imagine myself having all kinds of childish adventures. Once I wrote a love story between me and one of my second cousins. My great mistake was to use our actual names, not knowing that Muna read everything I wrote. Muna tore the story from my notebook, hid it away, and blackmailed me, telling me that she would show it to Mama and Abouya.
I was in agony, terrified of the consequences if my parents read the story. One day, my mother finally confronted me in front of my brother, who was still very young, only in second grade. Looking very disappointed, Mama asked, “Is it true that you are writing letters to that boy that you think you are in love with?” Muhammad planted himself between Mama and me, interrupted her, and said, “Manal would never do that.” All the shame that I felt was now a hundred times worse.
I answered, “They are not letters, they are stories I wrote.”
I will never forget the look in Muhammad’s eyes as I spoke. I felt that I had lost my brother’s trust. My sister never showed the actual story to Mama, instead she blackmailed me for weeks. I searched for it everywhere, in her bag, among her clothes and books. I snuck into her room using the spare key Mama kept hidden away. But I could not find my story. Once when we had a short truce, I politely asked her to give it back to me. I was still terrified that my father might see it. Muna finally agreed and went to the kitchen to grab a screwdriver. She had hidden the story in the motor box of the ceiling fan. But even though she returned the story, I never forgot the agony she had put me through.
I kept looking for proof of Muna’s relationship with the boy whose voice I had heard on the phone, searching the house until one day I found a strange cassette in my mother’s sewing machine. I was curious and played the tape. It contained a long message from the boy. On the recording, he called me all kinds of names, referring to me as “their enemy,” saying that I was the reason they couldn’t be together, calling me “the devil alive.” That night I handed the cassette to Abouya. It was proof of Muna’s sins, and she would now have to atone.
Abouya began to beat her. All the other times when he had beaten her, Muna would fight back and eventually he would give up. But not that night. As she begged him to stop, I stood and watched, terrified and guilt-stricken, and unable to change anything.
The cassette ended up with my cousins, who told the whole family that Muna was in love with a stranger. It was a huge scandal. Aunt Zein told me later that she stopped going to large family gatherings because it was too much to take all the questions and criticism. What made it worse was that while Muna’s boyfriend was Arab, he was not Saudi. I had thought Abouya wasn’t racist: all of his best friends were Egyptians, and I had never heard him belittle any nationality, unlike everyone else around me, even my mother. But there was a strict dividing line in his thinking. He could be best friends with someone from outside Saudi Arabia, eat with them, live in the same area, share ups and downs. But none of them could ever marry one of his daughters or any of the women in his family.
After this, Abouya cut off our landline and our access to the outside world. He locked us in the apartment and barred us from seeing anyone or having anyone visit us. We couldn’t even go out to buy food. The only place he allowed us to go was to school and back, and only if we were accompanied by Mama or by him. My brother was locked in with us too. The next year, when Muna asked to attend medical school in Jeddah, Abouya’s first reply was to beat her again.
I wish now that I could simply erase my radical teenage years from my life and repair the damage I did to my family and myself. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that in my quest for Salafi religious perfection, a precious, free-spirited period of my life had been stolen away.
7
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The Forbidden Satellite Dish
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Throughout secondary school I kept a diary, recording the events in my life, my thoughts and experiences. Many of the entries are predictable, but not this one, written on June 4, 1997: