I didn’t realize it then, but the satellite dish was a slippery slope. Even though I had deleted the music video channels, I could not escape the haram sounds of music. In April 1999, I wrote in my diary: “The final match of the inter-faculty basketball league ended in the victory of the team from the Faculty of Home Economics, led by captain Rania K., over the team from the Faculty of Medicine, led by captain Tara F., and the score was 30–44. My team, from the College of Science, took third place. I tried to sit outside the club when music was being played for the break in the middle of the match, but I had to go in when they were giving out the medals.”
The first song I ever purposefully listened to started as an accident. One day I walked into the living room as my brother was listening to the Backstreet Boys. I stopped, struck by the beauty of the words and the music. But I was too embarrassed to tell him that I wanted to stay and listen. I waited until he left the house and then put the headphones over my ears and pressed Play on the tape recorder.
Show me the meaning of being lonely . . .
There’s something missing in my heart
To my ears, the music flowing through the headphones was the dreamiest, most beautiful thing that I had ever heard. I could not understand how something so beautiful could be the work of the devil. The lyrics struck a chord with me; I felt truly lonely in my closed-off world of rigid beliefs, and I too felt there was something missing in my heart. Yet I remained torn: I loved the music, but I felt guilty whenever I listened to it. As the Backstreet Boys sang about loneliness, I imagined the pain of molten iron flowing into my ear, because that was what the clerics had preached would happen. Whenever this guilt became too much to bear I would renounce music for a while. But then my brother would buy a new tape, and I would listen to it on the sly.
To live your life with such constant guilt is torment. But that wasn’t the only feeling I experienced. Inside my mind, there was a growing sense of contradiction between what I heard in sermons and what I saw all around me. Despite the prevailing rhetoric that condemned music ever more aggressively, both of the public television channels opened their programs with the national anthem, and their shows were accompanied by music. There was a store that sold musical cassettes near our building. Photography was labeled as haram, but there was a photography shop near our building. A picture of the king was printed on all the banknotes, and his picture hung everywhere, on the streets and inside buildings. It was haram for men and women to socialize and shake hands, but the television showed clips in which men from the government welcomed mixed official delegations from other countries, and the Saudi men chatted and shook hands with the women.
I had three choices. My first option was to commit the sins of listening to music and watching television in spite of my religious convictions, which would mean ignoring my feelings of guilt and accepting these contradictions. But this would make me a sinner, something I knew I could not live with. My second choice was to reject everything I had been taught about music and television, but this too would have big consequences: outright rejecting the tenets of my faith would place me in the same category as those who had been excommunicated from Islam, even if I continued to pray, fast, and read the Koran. The third option was to look for an acceptable way out of my dilemma. But how would I know where to look for the answer when I couldn’t tell anyone what I truly felt?
My plan had always been to study physics. After three terms of general study, I enrolled in the physics department, only to discover that it was very small and unpopular; there were six other students and me. I hadn’t come this far in my education to study something no one cared about. One of the largest and most popular departments in the university was computer science, and it was also the hardest to join. Fifteen hundred girls had taken the departmental admissions test, competing for two hundred available spaces. I asked to switch my enrollment to computer science: my academic record was good enough that the university said I did not need to sit for the admissions test. By the time I graduated, only sixty of the original two hundred girls remained in my cohort, because computer science was more rigorous than most of the other scientific departments.
I bought my first computer with a loan from my uncle and my grown-up cousin Miss Fayza. Initially, I only used it to complete my homework. But that changed with the introduction of the Internet. We were supposed to use email to submit our homework and to communicate with our professors, so it was essential for me to have working Internet at home. The obstacle was convincing my father. He had come home one Friday after weekly prayers and the imam’s sermon talking about a new evil, the Internet, and we heard him repeat the same rhetoric about it that had been previously used to vilify the satellite dishes.
My father even handed me a cassette tape with a sermon describing the dangers of the Internet. The evil of the Internet, proclaimed the tape, is that it helps girls and boys to date and exchange messages without being watched or held accountable by anyone. Chatting on Messenger was to be avoided at all costs. The Internet also provided an open door for ideas and beliefs that would pollute our pure, extreme Salafi doctrine. I promised myself that if I managed to get access to the Internet, I wouldn’t use these chat rooms or read anything that would affect my beliefs. (The government has had a similar reaction to other widespread technological innovations. When cell phones with cameras first appeared, they were banned in Saudi. I had to smuggle an early Nokia camera cell phone into the country from Bahrain in 2004. There was a large black market for these banned phones, with smugglers hiding them inside car bumpers or car door frames, while customs officials and police used ultrasound devices to ferret them out.)