At King Abdulaziz, the girls’ university buildings were completely set apart from the boys’ buildings. We even had a separate gate, where we had to show a university ID in order to go in and out. This meant that for the first time in my life I had a card with my name and picture. At that time, official, government-issued ID cards were available only to Saudi males. They received them upon turning fifteen, whereas women remained dependent on men their whole lives. The names of females were only added, without pictures, to a card known as the “Family ID.”
We were taught by male professors, though we never saw them face-to-face. Everything was done via closed-circuit television; we saw and heard the professors, who were sitting in a classroom in a separate building lecturing the male students, but they couldn’t see or hear us, so we were denied any chance to participate. As if that wasn’t enough of a disadvantage, the CCTV often crashed, and then we would simply miss the lecture. If we wanted to ask the professor a question, the only way to do so was by telephone, which was supervised by a female assistant who sat through the lecture with us to maintain discipline and record our attendance. Only the medical students escaped these constraints: the buildings belonging to the College of Medicine and Pharmacy were separate from ours, and it was permissible for female students to attend lectures given by the male doctors.
The excessive measures undertaken to separate boys and girls meant that we existed in two entirely different worlds. This unnatural separation caused problems that would never be found in a less rigid society. Human beings have lived primarily in mixed communities since the beginning of time, since God created Adam and made Eve to be his companion. God made the coexistence of males and females the basis for the continuation of the human race; He made it so that one is not complete without the other. But my religious observance prevented me from talking to any men at all, even the seller from whom I bought my clothes. I would whisper to my mother what I wanted and she would speak on my behalf. In this way, we respected the fact that my voice was sinful to put on display, because it would seduce the seller, unlike my mother’s voice, which belonged to an old, married woman. It didn’t bother me that my mother called me by my brother’s name, Muhammad, when we were in the street, for even my name was considered a’ura (sinful) when uttered in front of men.
At university, however, I heard stories about telephone relationships, made possible by mobile phones. Boys and girls had many clandestine ways to share numbers. A boy might walk past a girl in the marketplace and drop a piece of paper with his number into her bag. If he had a sister who knew the girl, he might ask his sister for the girl’s number or even steal it from his sister’s mobile phone. More indiscriminate boys wrote their numbers in women’s public toilets or flashed them on pieces of paper held up to car windows when a girl passed. Sometimes the numbers were exchanged as text messages. We even have a specific word for these practices: targeem, or numbering.
More daring than the phone calls, I heard occasional stories of dates, where boys and girls met each other outside the university’s walls. These relationships could never be openly discussed; they were conducted with utmost secrecy and discretion. A young man could talk on the phone with a girl for months without even knowing what she looked like.
I couldn’t believe this was happening in Saudi Arabia. If a girl in Mecca was found to be conducting a romantic relationship—even if it consisted only of phone calls and messages—she would face severe beatings from the men in her family, not to mention very likely risk a lifelong confinement inside her home.
There was no worry that I would ever speak to a young man in public or private, let alone accept a phone call or a message from him. I might have been at university, but I still very much railed against “Western values.” I forcefully defended the constraints imposed upon Saudi women with the reasoning that these constraints were protecting our society from decay and preserving virtue. I didn’t dare request permission from my father to go out of the house for anything other than to attend school or visit the Grand Mosque; I already knew that he would say no, and for the most part without giving his reasons. I also didn’t mind that things were like this: he had the right to do that, I reasoned, because he knew my own best interests better than I did. If I ever did dare to ask permission for a trip or to attend a weekend activity on the university campus, I knew that I’d face anger and reproach. Even after I’d relinquished most of my radical ideas, I was still reluctant to leave the house or do anything without asking him first. It was important to me to have my parents’ blessing. I tried to please my father in any way I could, but there was always some aspect of what I did that made him dissatisfied. Both of us ended up sad: I was unhappy trying to make him happy, and nothing I did seemed to make him happy anyway.
My father lived his life according to a very strict code. Among his most-repeated sayings and rules, “Don’t borrow money from anyone so that you owe them a favor. Don’t spend the night in someone else’s place, because you might see aspects of their character that you dislike. Don’t accept recompense from anyone, even if they are in a position to pay you; all recompense comes from God.”
Although the last time he had hit me was in the third year of secondary school, my fear of him remained the dominant factor in our relationship. It was hard to love him fully when a constant unease governed our dealings with each other, but I did love him in spite of everything. I knew he’d been deprived of his own father before he was even born, and that at a young age he’d left his mother to transport pilgrims between Mecca and Jeddah. I appreciated that he never spent nights outside the house and that we never once woke up in the morning without finding our school money waiting for us. Our family relied on my father’s work as a taxi driver to put food on the table each night, so he worked even when he was sick. He never took a day off. His work was arduous, and he didn’t return home until after midnight, but for seven years straight, he woke my sister and me at six in the morning to drive us to our university in another city. For five of those years, he was waiting outside the gates to bring me home at two in the afternoon. Then he would return by six in the evening to pick up my sister. Calculating the distance between Mecca and Jeddah, he endured five years of spending six or seven hours of his day on the road—in addition to his taxi driving—just so we could get to and from university on time.