Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  We drove through a winding maze of narrow dirt paths lined with old wooden houses covered in intricate wood filigree that shaded the homes from the unrelenting sun, and their women from the public eye. Along our slow drive, relatives and old friends joyfully stopped my father to hug him and welcome him, kissing my brothers but firmly averting their eyes from looking at our unveiled bodies. Once we were in the home of my father’s clan, all such formalities dropped. A whirlwind of socializing awaited us like we had never experienced in our young lives. Our host, my father’s cousin, was a devoutly religious old man who welcomed us with infinite warmth and generosity, leaving his door wide open to the continuous stream of relatives who came to embrace us into the family fold. We felt valued and loved. Our alien state of ‘modernity’ did not stand in the way of their interaction with us. Our female relatives giggled at our clumsiness with our abayas. When we would forget to don them upon leaving the house, they found such detachment from the abayas intriguing, as without it covering them in public, they felt undressed.

  Stepping into Medina al Munawara was like stepping into another dimension of time and space, literally. Both the calendar and the hours of the day begin from a different point in time from the rest of the world. The dates that are printed on the calendars, on the daily newspapers, used by schools and at offices are in accordance with the Hijra year. Year One of the Hijra year coincides with 622 AD, the year that the Prophet Muhammad was driven out of Mecca for his Muslim faith and welcomed in Medina. All activity of the day, whether it is work, meals, naps, sex, or socializing, revolves around the hours of prayer. It was easy to slip into such an Islamic manner of life, so profoundly did it constitute everyone’s daily routine.

  The highlight of my visit to Medina was my visit to the Mosque of the Prophet at prayer time. I had visited mosques before in Damascus, the most remarkable of which had been the Umayyad mosque. Undeniably one of the most beautiful and grand of mosques worldwide, it paled in comparison with the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, not solely by its beauty, but more so by its spirituality. Regardless of one’s degree of religious devotion, it was impossible not to succumb to the hushed serenity that settled on us as we entered the Prophet’s Mosque. Some women sat in a circle around a Sheikha, a female religious teacher, who was explaining Islamic thought; others were silently mouthing prayers; yet others tended to their children as they waited for the call to prayer. I sat down on a carpet next to my mother and our relatives and allowed myself to surrender to the piety around me. As I looked upwards at the soaring vaulted ceilings and the dappled sunlight that filtered through filigree stone windows onto the people down below, a sudden flutter of countless white doves wove silently across the sun’s rays as though on cue with the call to prayer. The clear tenor voice of the muezzin rose and fell as he repeated the words: la ilaha illallah wa Muhammad rasul allah (there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet), words that strike a deep chord in Muslim hearts the world over. It struck an unforgettable chord in my heart then, as if I was hearing the muezzin’s words for the first time.

  Worlds Apart

  This part of Arabia was a radically different Arabia from the one I knew in Aramco. I befriended the younger members of our family who were my age, two of whom were already married. The son of our host, Khaled, was seventeen and his wife, Arwa, also a cousin, was fourteen and they already had a baby daughter, a cherubic newborn named Zalfa. They would sit for hours with the rest of the cousins to hear about our lives in Dhahran. What they were keen to learn about was not the mixed classes we attended nor what living with Americans was like, but rather how our classrooms were designed, which books we read, what our teachers taught us and how they taught us.

  The boys told us of their studies in the Medina schools. The curriculum included the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran through rote memorization, math, selective history (the Al Sa’ud version), and selective science (carefully sidestepping Darwin and the human body). Al deen (religion) formed the core curriculum of their studies and students could not receive their Tawjihieh diploma that enabled them to go on to higher studies if they did not pass al Tawhid (Unitarian dogma), which comprised details more intricate than a book on law. The young people in Medina regarded their religion with fear rather than comfort. I looked into the young faces that longed to learn about the world outside of Wahhabi theology and I realized that sheer circumstance had put me where I was and not where they were.

  Marwan would pose the only glitch during our visit to Medina. With each day of our week-long stay, he became more and more unbearable as the notion of men’s privilege over women began to go to his eleven-year-old head. Even my mother voiced her annoyance, which was quite exceptional as Marwan in her view could do no wrong. On the fourth day of our stay, as we were preparing to leave the house to visit more cousins, Marwan strutted in imperiously and gave us an order to speed it up, the men were waiting. He also used the word hurma (protected one), a dismissive word for woman in our view. As if on cue, Fatin and I pounced on him with pent-up fury and we didn’t release him until he cried. That snapped him out of his illusions of superiority.

  I was packing my things in preparation for our departure later in the day when Arwa whispered urgently in my ear to come into her room. She wanted to tell me something in private and took advantage of the prayer time when the adults were otherwise occupied. I walked in with a beating heart not knowing what to expect, there had been so much urgency in her voice. In the room was her husband who immediately went to the door, locked it and remained standing to make sure we were not intruded upon. She opened a drawer and pulled out a reading book for elementary students, whispering proudly, “I’m learning to read and write.” I didn’t understand.

  Her husband stepped in. “I smuggled these books in to Arwa because I feel it is wrong for her not to be educated. If my father found out he would force me to divorce her immediately because he has been taught to believe it’s sinful to educate women. I love Arwa dearly and would never be able to live with anyone else, but my father is the law in this house.” He paused, looking behind his shoulders edgily and lowered his voice to a whisper. “I know I am taking a risk but I will educate my wife and I will educate my daughter. We wanted to have a chance in private to thank you for your support and enthusiasm about learning. You are decent, and it proves that education is not the work of the devil for women, as some sheikhs like to say. I am a devout Muslim and I have read in the Koran about the importance of education, and look at all the quotes I have collected to support my argument in case my father discovers what Arwa is doing. So my conscience is clear.”

  And he began to read the passages he had so earnestly compiled to bolster his conscience in this daring step he had taken with his wife. “Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman.” … “The ink of the scholars is more precious than the blood of the martyrs” … “Islam directs all energies toward conscious thought as the only means of understanding the nature of God’s creation and thus his will.” … “The superiority of the learned over the more pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over the stars.” … “If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make the way to paradise easy.” … “The scientist walks in the path of God.”

  I felt proud to be related to these devout young Saudis possessing such courage and such integrity. I promised myself that I would do all that was in my power with my education to overturn the appalling marginalization of the Saudi Arabian woman.

  6

  Forbidden Knowledge

  I wanted to begin my research on the social engineering of Dhahran for my senior study right away so I asked around my office and was told that there was a library in the Administration Building which was more of an archive where Aramco history was stored. This was just what I needed. Without delay I made my way to the library the following day during my lunch break and asked for permission to have a look around. “Sure,” the librarian said smiling cheeril
y, “Help yourself. Just be sure to put everything back the way you found it.” And with that easy entry, I began my study of Aramco’s history against the background of the Arab political world that I was now fully cognizant of thanks to my life in Beirut. The 1967 war with Israel had catapulted me irreversibly over the American divide into the Arab world.

  Saudi Arabia Inc.

  The histories of Aramco and modern Saudi Arabia became entwined as Aramco executives worked closely with the newly formed Saudi government to create from sand and dust and goat-hair tents: transportation and communications infrastructures, maps and negotiated boundaries, foreign policy and diplomatic relations, national education, and health care. No Arab employee or trainee passed through Aramco’s employment rosters, nothing so much as moved in the entire Peninsula, without being discussed, recorded in triplicate and stored in Aramco’s ubiquitous manila files. Within the archives in the Administration Building I discovered from correspondence meant only for American eyes exactly how powerless Ibn Sa’ud and his sons actually were concerning Aramco’s interests.

  As I moved methodically from shelf to shelf on to the back of the library, I came upon a large dusty box file that stood out from the rest of the folders by virtue of its sheer size. Intrigued, I pulled it out and began to leaf through it. I had always wondered what made the Aramco bosses select my father along with nine other men from 9000 Saudi workers to be the first Saudis to be educated by Aramco. Why him and not Ali or Hussein, who were still making our hamburgers and ice cream sundaes? They had joined Aramco at the same time as my father.

  The answer was Pan-Arab politics. It was not until 1956, eleven years after the company began operations, at the height of the Pan-Arab movement reawakened by Gamal Abdel Nasser, that a selection of carefully screened Saudis like my father were promoted rapidly to ‘senior staff ’ to serve as showcase Arabs and give a veneer of ‘equality and diversity’ to the American project in Aramco. This senior staff status permitted my father and those select Saudis like him to live with the Americans in their air-conditioned, landscaped camps. If it hadn’t been for the Pan-Arab movement, neither Aramco nor the Al Sa’uds nor their ‘ulema would have felt it to be in their interest to open Dhahran’s Main Gate to Saudi Arabians.

  “Working for Aramco was not what I expected,” my father had told me when he spoke about his early days at Aramco. “Our houses in 1944 were little better than stables for camels, very primitive and very insulting. There was a hole in the ground for a toilet and one single light bulb hung from the ceiling. Some rooms didn’t have a proper roof, just palm fronds woven together. In summer we boiled from the heat, and when the shamals came we covered our bodies and faces with wet cloths so we could breathe. Of course in the winter we froze while the Americans were bedded and fed on Aramco’s account in large furnished climate-controlled bungalows. We knew about the privileges given to the Americans, many of whom were machine operators like many of my Saudi co-employees. The Saudi cooks who served them told us that the thick steaks that the Americans love so much were imported in such quantities that the oil men would cut out the thickest part of the steak and throw the rest away. Well, at some point my co-workers couldn’t take the discrimination any longer and there was a strike that escalated into a riot.”

  In 1945, 2000 Arab workers and eventually all 9000 laborers rose in a massive protest against being “ill-paid, ill-housed and ill-used in general.” My father objected but did not riot, a point well taken by Aramco’s CEOs.

  Not wanting the strike to spread, Aramco sent an alarm to its protector in the Eastern Province, the Emir of Al Hasa, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, to stop the rioting. He promptly obliged as an Aramco official recorded in his diary, “with savage beatings by the Emir’s slave soldiers.” Although hundreds of angry American drillers had rioted for pay raises and had destroyed company property at the Ras Tanura site, they did not get the beatings the Saudis did, nor did the Italians who went on strike as well, fed up with being treated ‘just like the Arabs.’

  “And do you know what we got after the strike?” my father asked, “Do you know what the improvements were that they advertised around the world as ‘new quarters for Arab workers that were the best in the Middle East?’ We got a cement floor in our reed huts and the Italians got latrines. No Saudi was allowed to enter the part of the camp where American families lived or to remain in the camp after working hours.”

  Amazingly however, when Frank Jungers, a one-time Aramco President, was asked if Saudi employees resented American privileges, he had replied: “No, not really.”

  In a move to soothe ruffled feathers on both sides of Aramco’s personnel problems, Ibn Sa’ud visited Aramco on January 25, 1947. My father was among his designated translators, having become proficient in English by then. He recalled the King with fondness and admiration, “Everything about Ibn Sa’ud was bigger than everyone else, his hands, his height, his shoulders, and his laugh.”

  True to his larger-than-life persona, the King never did anything half-baked. He arrived at Dhahran’s airfield in a fleet of six airplanes accompanied by four of his brothers and eight of his sons and as many of his royal court as he could fit in. Those of the royal court (2000 in total) who did not find seats on the airplanes arrived in a fleet of 500 limousines overland from Riyadh. At the welcoming ceremony, my father’s students sang patriotic songs which he had taught them for the occasion. The King showed his appreciation by shaking their hands and ordering his staff to give each of the students and staff five silver riyals, the equivalent of a month’s salary. Aramco’s newly built guest mansion, Hamilton House, was opened for the King, while a tent city was erected nearby for his entourage. Ibn Sa’ud politely spent one night at Hamilton House then moved in with his entourage, citing difficulty in negotiating western plumbing. Bahrain’s Emir came for a visit with his own entourage and an intense competition of banquets ensued back and forth, each more magnificent than the next. Ibn Sa’ud asked to meet all the children living in Dhahran, hauling each one onto his lap for a small tête-à-tête and a hug.

  After a tour of Dhahran and Ras Tanura’s refinery, Aramco’s CEOs, dressed in the same Arab garb as the King, got down to business, but first asked the translators to step aside before sitting down with the King. Miffed at being shouldered aside, my father remained standing nearby and overheard their request for land to build an Eastern Province annex to the American Consulate of Riyadh.

  “Where would you like the annex to be?” Ibn Sa’ud wanted to know. “Right under where you are sitting,” was their prompt answer. Ibn Sa’ud granted the request without finding it improper as my father did that this request should come from oil company executives rather than through America’s foreign affairs department.

  The American Consulate went up adjacent to the American Air Base that had been completed one year previously, in 1946. The ‘airbase,’ as everyone referred to it, began to grow in “fits and spurts on an annual basis,” in my father’s words, in tandem with the increase in Aramco’s oil production and American employee influx, until it almost became an extension of Dhahran. My father used to play the Bingo that I got into trouble for there and attend movies on a large screen. He also bought his groceries from a small commissary open to a select few Arab Aramco employees. “The open invitation to the movies for non-Americans was eventually rescinded,” my father recalled wryly, “as per the ulema’s instructions, but the American Air Base stayed.”

  Another controversial translation stint that my father was involved in shortly after he had joined Aramco was with Aramco’s lawyer, Gary Owen and Ibn Sa’ud’s Minister of Finance, Sheikh Al Suleiman. The minister’s secretary Najib Salha was present, as he always was, but this time was asked to step outside. Two minutes into the meeting, my father found himself in the unenviable position of floundering in translating for a topic that he had no background or knowledge of: Saudi Arabia’s disputed eastern borders with the Trucial States (the United Arab Emirates today). When it became embarrassingly appar
ent to Gary Owen that his translator was unable to deliver, Najib Salha was reluctantly recalled to carry on. After the meeting, my father apologized for the botched task and Gary patted him wryly on the shoulder, and told him that he had abbreviated his meeting as he had issues with Najib Salha’s trustworthiness and that “fortunately no damage was done.”

  In 1949, five years after Aramco began operation, 85 percent of the 10,000 Saudi Arabian employees were still unskilled, illiterate workers. Merely 80 Saudi Arabians had reached the skilled craftsman level and a small handful of Saudis supervised other Arabs. No Saudi supervised any Americans. Post World War Two, Aramco found itself overwhelmed with an unabating demand for oil to fuel America’s economic boom and not enough Arabic-speaking American trainers to upgrade the level of the present Saudi Arabian manpower.

  This top-heavy Arab-American relationship changed dramatically after the occupation of Palestine by the Zionists in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948. An influx of well-educated Palestinian refugees began to stream into Saudi Arabia looking for work. Aramco jumped at the chance of having first pick of the best and brightest of this cosmopolitan and literate group of newly stateless refugees to bridge the yawning middle gap between American trainers and Saudi Arab labor. Palestinians began to fill the rosters of skilled craftsmen, teachers, and other professional positions with their high level of expertise and fluency in both Arabic and English. In no time, the Palestinians outnumbered the Americans in the training positions and outshone the presently employed Saudis in both accomplishments and organizational skills. This soon turned into a double-edged sword for the Americans in Aramco.