Outside on the street, I lifted my niqab and placed it in my handbag. The first thing I sensed was the air on my skin as I walked. I felt it touch my cheeks, my forehead, and all the other parts of my face for the first time since I was still a girl. Breathing felt different, too: the barrier was gone, and I finally inhaled freely. It was like opening a long-closed window into a dark room. That was the moment I rediscovered my face.
At the hospital, I walked uneasily through the corridors, toward the office of Dr. Abdelbari, the hospital’s head of information technology, who would be conducting my interview. I kept my head down; I felt completely naked whenever a man walked by, and I quickened my step to disappear from his sight.
Dr. Abdelbari welcomed me as I entered his office. “Peace be upon you, too,” he said, and held out his hand. I looked down. I’d never shaken hands with a man in my life, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it now. I apologized profusely, and thanked God that no one else was watching. I was certain I had ruined my chances of getting the summer internship. I sank into the chair opposite his desk and studied the piles of papers.
Dr. Abdelbari was a man in his late fifties, originally from Pakistan. He was slim with white hair and a warm voice. He was wearing a white thobe, the long robe traditionally worn by Saudi men, but without a shemagh, the white-and-red-checked head covering. He was surprised that I spoke English, which I needed to know for the internship. The government schools where I had studied were known for teaching nothing more than the basic rules of the language. I told him that I’d taught myself, because I loved learning languages.
“We’ll give you a monthly remuneration of a thousand riyals if you prove yourself,” he told me.
It was a very small amount given the long working hours, but getting the experience made up for the low wage. I woke up at six every day to arrive at the office by eight, and when I finished my work at five in the afternoon, I had an hourlong journey back to Mecca ahead of me. I was very surprised that the workplace was mixed. The department gave me a desk in one of the offices, and I shared the space with another intern, a girl named Sue from Kenya. The team with whom we worked was comprised of three male employees and one woman. None of them was from Saudi Arabia, which made me feel somewhat more at ease. It was the first time I’d dealt with men other than my father and brother, and I was overcome with curiosity. I was like a twentysomething Alice in Wonderland, having fallen down my own peculiar rabbit hole.
I became enthralled by any man who spoke even a few words to me, including the reception clerk. I’d obsess over one man and then a week later become infatuated with another. I noted every detail—the way they talked, their clothes, the style of their facial hair, their hands, their walk—but I never showed my feelings; I was careful to maintain a cold and uninterested air, all the while terrified that my eyes would somehow give me away. Summer ended, and the IT department didn’t give me the financial reward it had promised. But they did give me my very first certificate of experience and, perhaps most important of all, my first experience of a normal work environment, with no separation between women and men.
Uncovering my face when I was anywhere outside with Abouya and Mama—or in any public place in Mecca, for that matter—remained unthinkable; it would never be deemed acceptable in our environment and social circles. My cousin Amal never saw the face of her other grandmother, who belonged to a Bedouin tribe and never took off her covering, even in the presence of her family. The first time my father saw my face uncovered in public wouldn’t be until some years after I had moved far away to the Eastern Province. Even then, he was very upset with me. More than once he ordered me to put my niqab back on. I told him I would, but I didn’t. With time, my parents got used to seeing me without it.
Today, my friends who grew up as I did, wearing the niqab, are divided into two groups. One group insists, like me, on wearing only the hijab when at home in Saudi Arabia. (All females in Saudi Arabia, even non-Muslims, are forced to wear the abaya cloak whenever they leave the house.) The other group has kept the niqab, whether because of the social pressure or because of their husbands’ commands or because they believe in it. But none of my friends who wear the niqab on a day-to-day basis wear it outside Saudi Arabia. They wear either the hijab or no form of head covering at all.
The phenomenon of Saudi women deveiling in transit is so well known that I remember a Tunisian work colleague making jokes about it. “When Tunisian women get on the airplane to leave the country,” he would say, “they put the hijab on, and when the Saudi women board, they take it off!” Part of the reason for this lies with the law, secular and religious: Tunisian state law used to prohibit the wearing of the hijab, while Saudi religious law imposes it. My retort was simple: “This is what happens when the state intervenes in a person’s private life; it creates two separate personas. It compels you either to lead two separate lives, or to violate what’s imposed on you when the state isn’t looking.”
The propaganda declaring that the niqab is what separates Muslim women from the infidel complicates the debate. As I grew older, I came to believe that it is a very ugly thing to describe women with uncovered faces as infidels. One time, I was on a flight between the Saudi cities of Dammam and Jeddah. A girl about ten years old was sitting next to me. I was chatting with her because she wasn’t sitting with her family. “Are you an infidel?” she suddenly asked me.
“Why do you think I’m an infidel?” I asked.
“Because you don’t cover your face,” she replied.
Despite my black abaya and hijab, she doubted that I was a Muslim.
During that same summer before my last year of university, a man my age, Sultan, approached my family to inquire about marriage. He was a cousin from my father’s side. Though my sister and I had escaped being married at eighteen so that we could complete our education, girls like me were not free from the constraints of social norms. As we prepared to graduate, we were expected to welcome the knocks of suitors at the door.