Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 10
On the day of the second show, I was all set to wear my party dress again but my father told me not to. “What should I wear then?” I asked eagerly.
“No need for anything because you can’t go on the show any more,” my father replied shortly.
“I was a good girl, why can’t I go with the rest?” I wailed.
“It’s not you, it’s the muttawa’a. Your underwear showed in the trial run and they said the show could not take place with such a big girl showing her legs like that.” Even to a five year old, that sounded extreme and totally unjustified. So I had a tantrum. A compromise was eventually reached whereby I would sit at the back of the group with my fat baby brother on my lap, wearing trousers. Baba Hattab would carry everyone else to pop the surprise balloon, but I had to pop the balloon standing on my own.
***
We arrived at the Administration Building just as the siren announcing the beginning of the working day began its incremental wail. I hopped out of my father’s car and joined the crowd of employees rushing to clock their arrival at the stroke of seven. My father would be in his office on the last dying note of the siren. It would wail again three more times, twice for the lunch hour between noon and one o’clock, and finally at five in the afternoon when work hours were through. Growing up to its wails, it seemed a perfectly natural way to start the day, a siren announcing working hours. Everyone in Dhahran referred to the siren with respect to their daily activities, as in “Be sure to be home before the siren” and we always adjusted our clocks and watches to the first initial notes of its wail.
I went to the information counter to inquire about my office’s location. The receptionist looked at me and then lowering her reading glasses gazed a second too long at my pants suit, causing me to feel inordinately self conscious. I had chosen to wear a white pants suit thinking it most appropriate for a ‘first day of work’ outfit. I knew that this fashion item had not yet reached Dhahran but that was normal; the conservative Americans did not usually follow what was on the catwalks in Europe, whereas Beirut, the stylish Lebanese capital where I was studying, did. More curious looks were shot surreptitiously in my direction as I walked towards my designated office, pushing me to check my clothes repeatedly for any coffee spills or tears. At the end of the working day, as the five o’clock siren screamed, the sweet secretary who had shown me around whispered softly that it was very brave of me to turn up in trousers, but her boss had told her to relay the message that I was not to wear them to work any more, their being against company policy.
“What?! Are you serious?!” I was astonished by this unexpected conservatism.
The secretary was embarrassed and mumbled something that sounded like “Oh go ahead and wear what you please. Who are they to tell us what to wear?”
My father had not commented on my outfit because he too was oblivious to the fact that there was a dress code for working women in Aramco as rigid as the one for women in Saudi Arabia. The next day, other female employees turned up for work in trousers, causing loud arguments in the offices, but the women prevailed and trousers were worn with a vengeance from that day forward. The buzz was that this successful mini-revolt within corporate Aramco all started when “the Basrawi girl waltzed into Aramco headquarters wearing a pants suit.” In the era of bloody civil rights protests, militant feminism and bra burning in the United States, I, a Saudi female, who did not exist outside of my father’s name, unwittingly became the symbol of feminist liberation for the American female employees of Aramco.
Saudi Student Society At the coffee machine one afternoon, I bumped into a young Saudi acquaintance who was studying at the American University of Beirut. We had met at a Saudi students’ gathering in Beirut that I had reluctantly been dragged to by a common friend. Saleh was funny and informal and refreshing to talk to.
“Fadia,” he had exclaimed on seeing me, “I’m so glad we’re here together. You’re coming with me to meet the other Saudi students working in Aramco after work.”
What could I say? “No” would not have worked. And I am grateful for this window of opportunity that Saleh Turki gave me in meeting some of the most interesting young Saudi people that I have ever met: educated young Saudis, both male and female, who had applied for a summer job from universities in Riyadh and Jeddah and abroad, and as yet untouched by Aramco. King Faysal was the ruler of Saudi Arabia then and education for everyone, especially girls, was a priority for him. All Saudi students received full scholarship to any university of their choice with a generous monthly stipend of $600 (lots of money in those days). We, the young Saudi Arabian generation fortunate enough to have lived during this brief progressive phase in Wahhabi rule were enabled to study abroad and come home to a guaranteed job. We would be the only generation to reap the benefits of this short-lived opportunity in the Kingdom’s history. Unsurprisingly, most of the present-day effective movers and shakers for political and social reforms in Saudi Arabia come from my generation.
Under King Faysal’s reign, oil revenues had increased by more than 1,600 percent, allowing him to set up a generous system of welfare benefits for all Saudi subjects. The ascetic, highly intelligent King brought in technological and educational advancement never seen in the kingdom before, as he did not let his Wahhabi convictions stand in the way of his political savvy. To the dismay of quite a few members of his extended royal family, which included the future King Fahd, then a prince third in line of succession, King Faysal channeled oil revenue out of greedy princeling hands and invested them in the modernization of the Kingdom and its subjects. Our Saudi generation began to feel a refreshing waft of promise for self-expression. Although it was a fatwa by the ulema that had brought the new King to power due to his half brother’s alleged profligate spending and his vacillating Pan-Arab tendencies, Faysal refused to allow the muttawa’a a free hand. They were left fuming but powerless behind the rigid red line that King Faysal drew curtailing their presence in the everyday lives of the Saudi subjects.
In the euphoria of seeing our country moving forward technologically and educationally, away from the rigid, archaic rule of the ulema, we turned a blind eye to the debilitating fact that whatever changes King Faysal achieved, he still had to appease the conservatives to preserve his throne. In fact, King Faysal was not moving us towards self determination and democracy. He was actually setting up a benevolent police state, a state with greater centralized control of both the economy and of the political and social system. In that era of post-colonial Arab upheaval against established monarchies (1958–1962) and the sweeping charisma of Egyptian President and Arab nationalist hero Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Faysal was there to ‘correct’ the anti-west movement spurred on by his deposed half-brother Sa’ud’s flirtation with Arab nationalism. Western interests in Arabia’s oil began to be seriously threatened when increasing number of Saudis began to agitate for control over their oil. The last thing the Americans wanted was to have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia turn into the People’s Republic of Arabia.
The first open challenge to the Al Sa’uds as absolute rulers came from one of Ibn Sa’ud’s own sons, Prince Talal, in the first serious bid for a constitution which went nowhere. Another serious challenge to Saudi Arabia’s cozy arrangement with the United States came from Sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Mu‘ammar, a western-educated Saudi from Najd in charge of the labor office overseeing the oil camps. He was jailed when he tried to write a constitution in an aborted ‘liberal revolution’ in 1963. I had been vaguely aware of the attempted coup from whispers overheard between my mother and an Egyptian friend who was crying softly in our kitchen after the disappearance of her husband, who was in the Saudi Air Force. No one dared to inquire after him anymore, when those relatives who had done so disappeared as well. Yet another challenge to the American sponsored monarchy involved Abdullah Tariki, the first Saudi to be educated by Aramco in the United States, who came back to challenge them with the power of education and patriotism combined. He became the first Director General of
Petroleum Affairs and one of the main founders of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960, under King Sa’ud’s reign. An ardent supporter of total nationalization of Saudi Arabia’s natural resources, he attempted to put a program in place that would educate the Saudi Arabian public about oil affairs through the media, and fought to improve the terms of the concessions, opening up positions for Saudis in the company management with the aim of using the country’s wealth for the benefit of all the people. Tariki was hated by Aramco. It kept him under close scrutiny, following and recording his every move until King Faysal dismissed Tariki and exiled him to Lebanon.
There were masses of public beheadings of political opponents and purging of the army and air force as Faysal built a modern police state designed to control all political activity. A US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee report of 1965 looked upon Faysal’s activities with considerable satisfaction, stating that the King was finally gaining control over the proper use of the oil resources. As far as US corporate interests were concerned, the Saudi nation was back in safe hands. Thinking they could have it both ways, the American oil executives watched noncommittally when, with every forward step in modernizing the Kingdom, Faysal placated the ulema with an equal step backwards. He simultaneously initiated non-oil based projects, five year plans and schools for girls, while opening Saudi Arabia’s doors as a safe haven for extremist Muslims from Egypt and Syria who faced persecution by their secular Pan Arab governments to teach religion to Saudi Arabia’s youth. This act would result in far-reaching consequences as many of today’s restive Saudis were students of these Egyptian and Syrian fundamentalist exiles.
***
The Saudi students who were working for Aramco that summer and I formed a ‘Saudi Students Society’ with an official agenda, to give a formal cover for our meetings. We agreed to meet at the home of Nayla, an articulate and refined Saudi girl who was studying Petroleum Engineering in the United States. There were two other girls besides myself, a fearless outspoken firebrand studying in the American University of Beirut, Fatima and her gentler but equally forthright younger sister, Munira (who was my age). Our first meeting went immediately into full throttle when we girls confronted the six young men in our group, a mixture from different provinces in Saudi Arabia, over the double standard that educated Saudi men held towards women. Did they really want to mount a challenge against the stranglehold of the royal family and the ‘ulema on women’s rights? Would they allow their daughters the same freedom as their sons in their life choices? The responses of the young men were unanimous with respect to their disapproval towards the modus operandi of the Al Sa’uds and their ‘ulema. But when the issue of women’s freedom came into their homes, they looked sheepish and avoided eye contact as they tripped over their words searching for a diplomatic non-binding way of expressing themselves truthfully. With a lot of hemming and hawing, a mixed bag of half answers was offered that ended abruptly in tongue-tied silence when Fatima exploded in anger at the intolerable double standard Saudi women and many women the world over have to suffer:
“You are the elite of the male Saudi population, educated, and exposed to so many different aspects of the world and its philosophies. Yet you check out your reasoning at Saudi Arabia’s borders and become blind to any dynamic thought concerning the stagnant society we are being forced to exist in because it has so many privileges lined up for you as males and feeds your ego. What have you done to deserve this power over us except being born male?” She turned her scorn on a hapless Najdi, Hamid, who had ventured the idea of keeping the status quo because of tribal custom. “The idea of an educated woman scares you doesn’t it? It’s so much easier to be all powerful when all you have to fall back on is ‘tribal custom.’ Where is that taking our country with 50 percent of its population gagged and tied at home?”
Munira added, “Fatima and I are fully supported in our professional futures by our father, but he’s a rare Saudi. Why should we need to rely on coincidence or whim for our futures as Saudi women? It’s educated people like you, not the ignorant Bedouins who keep this country backward.”
Nayla deftly underlined the sisters’ well placed words and side tracked Hamid’s retort with her tongue in cheek comment, “We’ve made groundbreaking progress here, at least we‘re talking about this taboo subject without losing our honor or head.”
For my two bits, I nodded in earnest agreement with the daring words of my Saudi girl friends but I could not speak out as a Saudi as they had, handicapped as I was by the Aramcon stigma I had stamped all over me.
The Enlightened City of Medina al Munawara I was familiar with the households that these young men were reared in from a car trip my family made in 1967 to meet the extended Basrawi family in Medina for the first time in our lives. A much feted highway connecting the Eastern Province to the Western one had been completed that year and my father jumped at the opportunity to introduce us to his home in Medina. It would be a thought-provoking journey, as we confronted an integral part of our identity that we had not yet been exposed to. The first stop on our trip was Riyadh, after a mind-numbing six-hour drive on flat terrain with a road that never rose or swerved and the only shifts of scenery were glimmering mirages of water, maddeningly within reach but always just ahead on the asphalt surface. We entered Riyadh without knowing this was Riyadh, the capital city; there was hardly any difference from the terrain we had been driving through. It was a sprawling town of decrepit mud brick buildings and a few shoddy cement ones surrounded by the ever-present desert patiently waiting to reclaim its territory at their doors.
This was 1967; the excesses brought about by the petrol dollar were not yet visible under the budget-conscious King Faysal. My father stopped the car by a shop at the side of the road and with strict instructions especially to us girls not to move out of the car, left with my mother to get some groceries. There wasn’t much to stare at from the window, so all four of us fell asleep while we waited. Suddenly I felt the sharp end of a stick poking my side. I opened my eyes to stare at close range into the crazed eyes of a muttawa’a whose head was well into our car screaming, “Cover your head woman! Cover your head you sinner you!” My sister and I screamed back, “Get out of here you rude man! Leave us alone!” Fortunately, for all concerned, my parents returned at this very moment. I was shocked to hear the placating humble tone of voice my father used with the muttawa’a. “There is no other way,” he told me as we drove off with the old man still raining curses on us. “The alternative would be to get hauled into the police station.”
I felt deeply insulted. A sense akin to being violated shook my whole body. Who was this creepy old pervert and what right did he have to bully us into the submission I had just seen my father displaying? I was ashamed of my father’s reaction and ashamed that we had not been able to get even.
Out of Riyadh, the desert scene changed strikingly. We had entered the Nufud desert on the edge of the Rub’ al Khali, the most majestic and formidable of all deserts, source of much lore, spirituality, and hardship. Stunning formations of knife-edged sand dunes rose in graceful curves, lofty and magnificent in wondrous shades of red, perpetually transformed by small puffs of hot desert air that swooped across in short gusts and flurries. We experienced the soundless silence found only in deepest depths of the desert. I began to understand its enduring fascination as I gazed at the trackless sand that lay in the sinuous curves of the waves of the sea, rippling repeatedly on and on to the world’s end. This was Bedouin Arabia where monotheism was born. The Nufud made it clear how this came to be. Its infinity and eternity, stillness and solitude reduced us into insignificant mortal dots within the immeasurable grandeur spread out all around us.
Our passage through the Nufud brought on an unusual silence in the car as we absorbed what we had experienced individually, not sharing our thoughts, until we fell asleep to the rhythmic movement of the car. We awoke with a start to my father’s happy announcement, “We are in Hijaz!” Once m
ore the topography took unfamiliar shape and the inclination of the road began to slant upwards as we ascended the Hijaz Mountains, desolate bare hills covered with dramatic black volcanic rock formations. On the other side of the Hijaz Mountains was Medina al Munawara, my father’s birthplace and that of his father and about three hundred years of Basrawis before them, the first being a judge sent by the Ottoman governor to the Holy City from his home in Basra (hence our last name) in southern Iraq.
We reached the plain of Medina and saw the outline of an arresting rocky range of red, brown, black and green granite. “Mount Uhud,” our father told us significantly, visibly moved. We stared back blankly. “A turning point for Islam occurred here,” he explained patiently. It was a strange story that our father told us word for word as it was written in the Koran, gripping in its intense amount of detail describing the battle with the recurring phrase of how defeat turned into victory by the martyrdom of the Prophet’s followers. Mount Uhud was the scene of a disastrous defeat of the Prophet and his men at the hands of his Quraish tribesmen from Mecca where many of his closest companions were killed. The Prophet turned his defeat and the martyrdom of his closest companions into victory after he led an attack on Mecca which brought Uhud’s victors to their knees, begging for forgiveness. The Prophet forgave them, and they converted to Islam. Of the new converts were notable warriors such as Khalid Ibn Al Walid, who became a famous Muslim commander and conqueror credited with spreading Islam beyond the borders of Arabia and initiating an era of legendary, enlightened Islamic empires.
The city appeared before us surrounded by its crenellated walls; a desert oasis with a history that stretched thousands of years before the Prophet Mohammed made it his home. He had asked for refuge there from the irate Meccans who were pursuing him for his Islamic creed that threatened their lucrative polytheism, and Medina’s Elders, a mixture of Jews, polytheists and Christians, had welcomed him with open arms. We could see the five slim straight minarets of the Mosque of the Prophet and its large green dome that covered the Prophet’s home, where he lived and which became his grave after he died. There was no denying the spell that fell over us as we drove through Medina’s walls. Fronds of countless palm trees in gardens within the city waved gently to and fro in the evening breeze. Even thirteen centuries after his birth and to people like us who were not devout believers, the Prophet’s spiritual presence was palpable, a unifying harmony that gently nudged us closer to the city’s inhabitants. The city is known to the Islamic world as Medina al Munawara (City of Enlightenment) after its people converted to Islam, but to its inhabitants it is simply Madinat al Nabi (the City of the Prophet). And my father had started to cry.