The aspersions cast on these female friendships took their toll on one of my own friends. Rana was also from Mecca, and we studied together in the College of Science, though we were in different departments. We both adored basketball, and we always played on the same team—we understood each other perfectly. We wore the same clothes, read the same novels and books, and later on listened to the same music. It was a treasured friendship, and her company helped me feel less sad about the childhood friends I missed: Manal, Malak, Jawahir, and my female cousins, Amal and Hanan.
One day, a member of the sports club threw a veiled comment in my direction. Her barb implied that because Rana and I spent so much of our day together, we must be lovers and lesbians. It was only a throwaway comment, but it hurt and humiliated me deeply. Homosexuality is explicitly forbidden under strict sharia, and the punishment for homosexuality is death. Stoning and other forms of execution are still carried out today against gays and lesbians in some Muslim countries. I stopped talking to Rana completely, and I didn’t explain why. I liked her very much, but I couldn’t allow anyone to call her morals or mine into question, even if just in passing. What other people thought was very important to me in that period of my life. I stayed away from Rana until we graduated and never explained the reason. Years later, when I’d stopped worrying about what people expected of me or what they were saying, I told her that I owed her an explanation. I visited her and we talked as if we’d never been apart. She forgave me, and we resumed our friendship. She’s someone I turn to when things are darkest. I’m still saddened to think that such meaningless words and opinions controlled my happiness, my unhappiness, and even my choice of friends for so many years.
The friends I met at the sports club came from all parts of the university. Another of my friends was a girl named Sara, who was born in Jeddah and had lived there all her life. We studied together in the College of Science, and we coordinated our schedules to be able to meet in the sports club and play basketball. One day, as I waited at the university gates for my father, I saw Sara leaving the campus and was surprised to see that she didn’t cover her face. I was astonished and disappointed at the same time. How was it that Sara could expose her face like this to the outside world? How could God accept her prayers when she was unveiled? Sara wasn’t one of the girls who used makeup, but she had a natural, radiant beauty that could easily capture a man’s interest.
I found myself facing a huge dilemma. Sara was among the nicest of all my friends. She welcomed me with a wide smile whenever she saw me, and she always performed her prayers on time. At the end of the month she collected money from the girls at the sports club to tip the cleaning lady, Aunt Aisha. One time, when Sara and I hadn’t seen each other for a while, she welcomed me with a warm hug. I wasn’t used to receiving such gestures from anyone. In my family, the only time I had been hugged was when my aunt consoled me after the death of my grandmother.
Despite Sara’s kindness, I didn’t know how I could possibly continue our friendship after seeing her expose her face. I tried to stay away from her: she was disobeying God, I told myself, and she deserved His wrath. Sara tried to ask me why I was avoiding her, and I made endless excuses instead of telling the truth. This was the first real test of my radical beliefs. I remembered what we had been taught: that we should base our love and friendship for another person solely on her level of piety. But Sara made this hard to do. I decided to continue our friendship in the hope that someday I’d be able to sway her beliefs, but that someday never came. Sara didn’t change. I did.
The first Saudi television channel began broadcasting Arabic-speaking programs in 1964, and the second, an English-speaking channel, debuted in 1983. There were no others, and this lack of choice led us to refer jokingly to the two channels as Compulsion 1 and Compulsion 2. Still, they were not entirely useless. I owe the beginnings of my English education to Compulsion 2, which included the program Sesame Street in its schedule.
Then the haram satellite dishes arrived. Though only a few satellite channels were available inside the kingdom, all owned by other Arab governments, the differences between the types of programs they showed and the ones shown on our two channels were easily noticeable. Conservative religious shows dominated the Saudi channels’ lineup. Our news broadcasts were largely preoccupied with banal updates on the royal family: “His Highness received a guest, His Highness waved goodbye to a visitor, His Highness has traveled.” Despite the bans on the sale of satellite dishes and receivers, there was a black market for these contraband goods. Although this made the dishes and receivers astronomically expensive, it didn’t stop people in cities like Jeddah from installing them on their roofs. I would listen to my university friends talk about the Arabic-dubbed serial dramas from Mexico—one called Guadalupe was particularly popular. They would talk about the news channel Al Jazeera, too, and how it was a different type of news broadcast. This caught my interest. But in more conservative Mecca, it remained a social taboo to have satellite channels; friends and family might even shun you. I knew that my father, who had been swayed by the religious rhetoric warning of the dangers of the dish, would flatly refuse to have one in the house.
But I also noticed that our neighbors in our apartment building in Mecca had their own dish on the building’s roof, so I asked them to help me get another dish for our apartment and implored them to keep it quiet. I spent part of my government-sponsored university allowance to pay for our dish—which was ironic, considering the dish was banned by the government. I placed the receiver on top of the video player, and I was careful to cover everything with an embroidered cloth cover so Abouya wouldn’t see it. Then I made sure to delete all the channels showing music videos, so that none of us would accidentally stray into sin.
Mama was very happy to have the Egyptian satellite channel. When Abouya was out, we gathered around the television to watch old Egyptian films, amazed to be seeing them in Saudi Arabia. For a long time, we kept our secret from my father. But one day, while waiting for us in the car outside the building, he noticed a thick black wire running down from the roof and ending inside our balcony. “Is this the wire from a dish?” he asked me.
What was there to say? What could possibly excuse our deception?
“We’ll settle this when you get back from university,” he told me.
I spent that day’s classes dreading the coming altercation, but, shockingly, he never broached the subject with any of us ever again. I felt comfort in the fact that he knew, and that we knew he knew, and that there was now an unspoken understanding that none of us would ever mention it. Gradually, Abouya began to follow the Al Jazeera broadcasts just as we did, and the dish became an open part of our household. It was our electronic window to the outside world.