Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  On our arrival at Alexandria’s train station, we made a beeline for the semicircle of brightly befeathered horses and black hooded carriages, hantoors, which awaited passengers headed towards the coastal city, hoping our favorite carriage driver, Hassanein, would be there to take us to Tehteh (Granny) Im Yousef, our great-grandmother. She was a cheerful bundle of energy and always sang happily in her Egyptian dialect as she welcomed us into her modest home in a Christian neighborhood, a quiet genteel residential area with French era colonial buildings decked with flower boxes and Ottoman era villas enclosed by high walls that hid spacious courtyards which we could glimpse from her tiny balcony. A white domed church topped by a giant cross stood at the end of her narrow winding street. Tehteh’s home, a two-bedroom apartment that could easily have fitted into my aunt’s marble entrée, was immeasurable in terms of the love that abounded within its tiny walls. She had high metalframe beds that supported stacks of mattresses which were immediately taken down and prepared for us in all four corners of the bedroom. In a silent but clear statement about her devout attachment to Christianity despite her brief marriage to my Sunni Muslim great-grandfather, my great-grandmother had the cross and pictures of the Madonna and Jesus in every room. It made for some whispers and nudges among our aunts and uncles; but these remained nudges and whispers; no one dared broach the topic, being the potential minefield that religion tended to be.

  Khalo Joseph, who followed the Maronite creed like his mother, had been taught the craft of shoemaking by the nuns at the convent school he had attended and his tiny shop was underneath the house. My siblings and I took turns at sitting there; it was too small to accommodate all four of us … at least that was the reason Khalo Joseph gave. But I would imagine it was more of a diplomatic way of giving Khalo Joseph a chance to actually get some work done during our visit. What a fascinating place his shop was. We all decided we wanted to be shoemakers when we grew up and spent hours laboriously putting together our own shoemaking kit upstairs. We pretended to hammer the heel of our shoe with small nails that we stuck in our mouth exactly in the manner of Khalo Joseph and vigorously polished our shoes and anyone else’s with a collection of toothbrushes that we swiped from the bathroom.

  My great-uncle was in love with his profession. He approached it as an artist to a canvas as he would pull out a soft rich brown piece of irregular shaped leather, turn it round and round in his hands while he got the feel for it, and then finally bring out a wooden shoe dummy and begin to compose his shoe. He would cut the soft leather with a small knife using short deft motions, then pull it over the shoe dummy, stretching it this way and that in the manner he envisioned it to be, and as pieces of leather flew and his needle danced in and out, a shoe would magically begin to appear. I would sit quietly in my corner observing him intently, and he would look up at me every now and then to remark: “I am a very lucky man, ya danaya (sweetheart), to make a living out of a craft I love so much.” Poor Amti Bahija would never know such happiness.

  3

  Disneyland Within, Desertland Without

  Returning to Dhahran from our summer holidays, we had no trouble slipping back into our American lives as that was our real world. What we experienced as Arabs did not affect us the way our American experiences did. When we relayed our summer experiences we were aware that Egypt and Syria were viewed as exotic and we began to view them in the same exotic light that our friends and teachers did.

  Spiritual Encounters On occasion it wasn’t my Arabness that brought me unwarranted attention but my religion. During sixth grade, I was invited along with Barbara and Carolyn, two friends from my Girl Scout troop, to the home of a new student, Cindy, a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl of Swedish extraction who had been in Dhahran for less than a month. Cindy’s mother met us at the door greeting me in the exaggerated solicitous manner I had become used to from some of the American adults in their interaction with me. Lunch was already on the table: spaghetti and meat balls with brownies and ice cream for dessert. We were starving and demolished the meal in no time. After lunch, we went into Cindy’s bedroom, a prettily furnished room with plush wall-to-wall carpeting, a four-poster bed covered by a ruffled pink bedspread and the dream of all young girls of our generation: her very own matching pink princess phone. We spread ourselves around the room, Cindy put the Beach Boys on her compact record player and we began a gab session about school and boys. We were on the verge of turning into teenagers and wanted to make sure we were getting the boy/girl dynamics right. Somehow, without warning, the gab session turned to religion and from there to Christianity. I suddenly found myself under the spotlight with the three girls forming a tight circle around me and pushing me to convert to Christianity. “But I’ll go to Hell and my parents would disown me,” I answered miserably. I really wanted to appease my friends but something told me I would be crossing a very dangerous line if I even as much as thought of going down that road. “Let them disown you,” Cindy told me airily, “my parents would adopt you and you would live with us.”

  A small temptation wiggled into my eleven-year-old mind. I looked around Cindy’s beautiful bedroom. Her parents obviously doted on her. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all; I would be doted on too and I would go to America, a magical place in my imagination, a dreamy land where it was all fun and play according to my friends. Catching a small window of opportunity, Cindy jumped up, “I’ll call my mom, and she’ll tell you all about Jesus and how much happier you’ll be as a Christian like us.” Her mother walked in, looking very much like the mother of Dick, Jane, and Sally in my first grade reader in her peach-colored shirtdress and a small apron around her slim waist. She sat next to me and taking my hand in hers, gently lifted my face so she could look me in the eye. She spoke for a long time about Jesus and his miracles and said that I would be treated as dearly as Cindy in their home if I decided to run away from my despotic Muslim way of life and become a Christian.

  I toyed with the idea of frolicking in a United States where I wouldn’t have to follow my father’s oppressive rules; it became yet more tempting to step through the door being held wide open for me seemingly with only happy days ahead. The girls’ and mother’s argument was unsettling. They told me that the best religion to be was Protestant and they sincerely wanted to save me from the hellfire and damnation they were convinced that I as a Muslim was going into. If I said “no,” I would permanently shut the tempting door to being part of the American world that fascinated me; and if I said “yes,” I would lose everything I knew.

  After an intense inner struggle, I decided my answer would be “no” but I did not have the courage to say it out loud. “I would love to be a Protestant,” I told them, and, avoided them forever more after that incident. Cindy and her family did not stay long in Aramco: someone caught wind of their proselytizing and they were shipped back to America. It wasn’t through me though; I never breathed a word to anyone … I certainly didn’t want a replay of the rock-throwing incident and its repercussions ever again.

  Apart from that singular incident, spiritual events in Dhahran were homely occasions for intercommunal socializing. On the days of our Islamic holidays, the Christian Aramcons dropped by to wish us a ‘Happy Eid’ and on Christmas Day we returned the call; holidays were one big visiting spree as our homes filled with American and Arab friends wishing one another well. Dhahran’s commissary sang gaily with Christmas songs as it overflowed with Christmas ornaments and fairy lights, gold-gilded Whitman’s Sampler chocolate boxes and Drostes chocolates wrapped in silver and red decorated with plastic fir trees sprinkled with plastic white drops of snow. I collected these trees passionately, soon amassing a Lilliputian forest on my bookshelf where I would pick one and turn it round and round in my hand trying to grasp the feel of the snow that I knew only in my mind’s eye.

  On the tenth of every December, my siblings and I hauled out our plastic fir tree and happily decorated it with shiny baubles, angel hair, and strings of flashing candles made of glass. We care
fully placed the presents we received from our friends under the tree, not opening them until Christmas morning. At school our teacher read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas’ and my classmates worried about Santa skipping their houses after not finding a chimney to drop off his gifts in their fireplace-less duplexes, while I secretly wondered if he skipped my house because I was Muslim. I would stare at the pictures of the milky white snow and ask my friends if it tasted like vanilla ice cream. “Of course it does, silly” they would laugh, “can’t you tell?” But I would eventually discover that they were only showing off because they too had never seen snow since their holidays in the ‘States’ were always in summer.

  Bringing toys into Dhahran for Christmas was a prime contentious issue between Aramcon mothers and Wahhabi customs officials. In Wahhabi beliefs, any replication of the human body is sinful and dolls were fanatically destroyed at customs before the horrified eyes of their tiny owners. Aramcon mothers eventually found a way to circumnavigate this painful course of action. The Dhahran Women’s Group came up with the idea of bringing toys in through the private shipments that American Aramco employees were permitted annually from mail order catalogues such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. These shipments bypassed Saudi customs on an understanding between Aramco’s Government Relations and Saudi Arabia. Each year several women offered their shipment quotas to be filled with toys and dolls for the Aramco community as a lucrative fund raiser for the Group’s various projects.

  To avoid the crushing rush the first toy fair experienced with handto-hand combat among mothers for highly coveted items such as ‘G.I. Joes,’ a lottery was organized where each mother drew a number that allowed her in on a specific day and specific hour. Those who got the tail end of the series … well too bad, better luck next year. My father didn’t believe in toys, finding them silly and a waste of money, so we had to circumnavigate our private censor at home. My mother would secretly squirrel away housekeeping money for the toy fair and come back from it laden with our hearts’ desire, as happy to give them to us as we were to receive them. Once the toys were in the house, it didn’t matter any more; my father never knew they came from the toy fair, thinking instead that they were birthday presents.

  The major event of the Christmas Season in Dhahran was the nativity play. The children cast as Joseph and Mary became minor celebrities until the day after the show. Our nativity play in Dhahran was more striking than most with live camels and donkeys led by their Bedouin owners (no Bedouin would trust his camel or donkey to any one else). Having live animals as ornery as donkeys and camels made it a rare nativity which sailed through with actors, singers and animals smoothly playing their roles. One particular Christmas show, after Mary was turned away from the last inn while the angels sang ‘Silent Night,’ her donkey decided it had had enough and began to bray in virulent protest, setting off the sheep and goats waiting around the stable to surround Baby Jesus when He arrived. The donkey’s owner rushed to its side and tried to calm it down by whispering in its ear, and offering it a carrot. But the donkey was inconsolable. Mary was unceremoniously ordered to climb down and the owner led away his still stridently objecting donkey. A visibly huffy Mary, considerably diminished, dramatically speaking, stomped on foot into a stable in chaos with Joseph running behind her. The three kings perched on camels waiting in the wings held their breath for fear of a possible copy-cat reaction from the camels, but this time around the camels behaved. Needless to say, the scene surrounding the new-born Jesus was minus the barnyard animals and their maestro, the donkey.

  We caroled the community on Christmas Eve with the rest of the school children from the back of Dhahran’s big red fire engine. Our musical tour began outside Aramco President Thomas Barger’s home, the largest house in Dhahran situated strategically on its highest point, in a neighborhood aptly named ‘The Hill’ where the top brass of Aramco were congregated. President Barger and his strikingly beautiful wife would emerge smiling graciously, followed by their five leggy, athletic and accomplished children, our Aramcon royalty, carrying trays piled with oven-warm Christmas cookies. With the cookies warming our tummies, the fire engine rolled slowly onwards past Dhahran’s duplexes and bungalows now transformed into a dazzling cornucopia of iridescent lights that twinkled and shone in the clear night air.

  Every Christmas, this tiny speck in the Arabian Desert turned into a hushed, shimmering, magical, winter wonderland. A six-meter high conical-shaped hedge in a roundabout in the middle of Dhahran became a resplendent Christmas tree sprayed with generous mists of artificial snow. Garlands of red and gold tinsel were draped around the tree’s clipped branches and giant glittery baubles sparkled in reflection from illuminating klieg lights within its wire frame. On the hedge’s topmost tip gleamed a colossal silver five-point star placed there with much fanfare by the President of Aramco as Aramcon families clapped down below. Circling the base of the Christmas Tree hedge were Santa’s faithful reindeer forever in takeoff mode, ready to fly a gift-laden, jovial, life-size Santa over the bungalows of the little Aramcons.

  But there was something not quite right about this Paradise. One step beyond Dhahran’s Main Gate, within the kingdom proper, muttawa’a agents for the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice in charge of enforcing Shari’a (Islamic Law), were controlling the public morality of non-Aramcon Saudis with fanatical zeal. Under their vigilant eyes, all Saudi subjects were forced to conduct themselves as the Wahhabi ulema believed daily life to have been conducted in the 7th century AD during Prophet Mohammed’s lifetime.

  We, the select few Aramcon Saudi citizens, were free of muttawa’a breathing down our necks because of an ingenious understanding reached in 1956 by Aramco with the Al Sa’uds and their reluctantly acquiescing ulema, after Saudi Arabia became a major source of oil to the west.

  From the start, Aramco’s CEOs were painfully aware that allowing Shari’a inside the oil camps carried the highly likely scenario of muttawa’a running willy-nilly within the community and upsetting what was sacred to all parties concerned: namely, the flow of oil to the West. After intense negotiations by Aramco’s Government Relations and Public Relations Departments with the Al Sa’uds and the ulema of the Committee for Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a common consensus was reached that it would be in all the above parties’ interests that Aramco law rule within the confines of the community and Saudi Shari’a law rule outside of the community. So it came to be by royal decree in 1956, that any woman who drove inside Dhahran wearing shorts, did her errands and went home. Driving outside the community gates, however, she went to jail.

  To further appease the ulema whom they recognized to be the essential guardians of the Al Sa’ud throne, Aramco’s American CEOs solemnly agreed that it was a ‘cultural’ matter that no Saudi should be unnecessarily exposed to any form of thought or lifestyle outside the Wahhabi religious tenets within the Kingdom, whether the Saudi was a Wahhabi or not. As far as the Americans running the oil company were concerned, this arrangement suited them fine. Their primary interest was the oil and whatever measures it took to maintain control over its production and transport to the West. If the Saudi royal family felt enforcement of the Wahhabi interpretation of purity of Islam was a matter of national security, so be it, as long as it was outside Aramco jurisdiction. The ulema were mollified into accepting the arrangement by generous funding for their quest to convert Arabia and beyond to Wahhabism, from Aramco oil proceeds earmarked for the royal family.

  Until the early seventies, no muttawa’a lurked where Aramcons trod in the Eastern Province. We bought our vegetables and fruit from the nearby fishing village of Al Khobar in pedal-pushers and T-shirts. We went on field trips to Qatif and Hofuf in the Al Hasa Oasis in sleeveless dresses. My mother never wore anything on her head except a voile scarf in case of a sandstorm breaking out when she was leaving the Beauty Shop.

  The muttawa’a’s services were not needed within Aramco. Their main role of policing th
e local population and any spread of anti-Al Sa’ud ideas that could crop up in anti-government meetings was handled very thoroughly by the Americans. The American government funded and trained Saudi Arabia’s army and the National Guard first and foremost to deal effectively with those who opposed the ruling family. Men like Colonel Harry R. Snyder, a senior intelligence officer, fluent in Arabic and an expert on Arab affairs, were appointed to this job. Snyder was amongst the first batch of American intelligence officers transferred in 1949 from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, today’s CIA) headquarters of the Middle East Intelligence and Propaganda Division based in Cairo. He led the first US Training mission for Saudi Arabia’s nascent security apparatus, then supervised Aramco’s Training Department for its Saudi Arabian employees, where he became my father’s boss.

  During the late forties and early fifties, with few educated Saudis, no credible threat to the throne existed. Nonetheless, Aramco did not take any chances. According to its oldest records dating to its pioneer days of the late forties, Aramco’s then executives refused to employ educated Saudis and other Arabs, or to accord them equal status with the Americans, much less allow them to reside in the American camp. This created a backlash in the late fifties and sixties when the number of educated and enlightened Saudis began to multiply along with Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth. Popular anti-imperialism among various Arab nations found sympathetic Saudi ears, acutely embarrassing the Al Sa’uds, upholders of Wahhabi Islam, protectors of Islam’s two holiest cities, and patrons of the imperialists (the Dhahran American Air Base was easily the largest American military base between Germany and Japan).

  Aramco’s alarm bells jangled after King Sa’ud was denounced as “the slave of imperialism” by Cairo’s influential ‘Voice of the Arabs’ prompting the ulema to demand increasing funds to remain silent about the American ‘infidels’ protecting the Al Sa’ud throne. Although the ulema’s job description was the same as the Americans with respect to maintaining the Al Sa’ud throne, the ulema wanted it under their control and not that of the Americans. Their ire weakened the incumbent Al Sa’ud king who needed their religious cover to remain credible as the official ‘Custodian of the Two Holy Shrines’ before the Islamic world. The royal family’s solution was to gradually recede the American defense forces in Saudi Arabia out of sight into the distant desert and augment the Saudi ulema’s share of oil dollars with yet broader powers to prevent any enlightenment educationally, socially and most important of all politically.