Inside the Kingdom (53 page)

Mashael had been unwilling to accept the ancient tradition of family-arranged marriage, with its modest, not to say pessimistic expectations of personal happiness. Like a growing number of young Saudis, she had been tempted by the Western fantasy of fulfillment through “love,” which Saudi TV and popular culture promote today as enthusiastically as any Holly-wood movie. But Saudi taboos rule out the rituals of courtship and sexual experimentation by which young Westerners have the chance to make their mistakes and move on. Open dating, let alone living together, is unthinkable in a society ruled by traditions that judge families by their ability to keep their daughters virginal.

“My husband and I simply did not know each other,” says Mashael, today an articulate and stylish woman in her late thirties, whose long black hair tumbles over the black silk of her abaya. “I’m not blaming anyone but myself. We married too young.”

Having fallen victim to a common Saudi problem, she adopted what turns out to be a common Saudi solution.

“I found love with a woman. Before I was married, I never knew that a relationship between woman and woman could happen. I did not dream it was possible. Then I went to university, and I had my first love affair with a woman. It was soft. It was warm. It was like a painkiller.”

Lesbianism is not hard to find on Saudi female campuses, according to numerous Saudi and Western women, with crushes and cliques and super-close friendships. These relationships may not always be sexual, but they are marked by the heightened emotions described by Jane Austen and other chroniclers of early-nineteenth-century England, where the Industrial Revolution was creating the world’s first “modern” society, bringing new concepts of “romance” and individual choice into conflict with traditional family rules and rigidities.

“I was looking for consolation,” says Mashael, “and I found it. I entered those groups. To start with you are curious, then you go with the flow. It is around you everywhere. A girl strokes your hand and you know she’s trying to seduce you, but, in a way, you want to be seduced. You think, ‘Why not?’ Sex life is a disaster between Saudi men and women, and everyone knows that the men play around. The level of betrayal is extraordinarily high. So after a time you think, ‘Why not with another woman?’ It is a great way to have revenge.”

And also a safe way.

“In this society you are mad if you have an affair with a man. With a woman it is safe. No one can question why you spend an evening at home together. You can go shopping or go out to eat with a woman. You can have a conversation. You can have friendship. You are two individuals with your own rights and personalities. You are not an object, the mere possession of someone else. There does not have to be sex every time. You can just hug each other or touch. And when there is sex, it is more romantic and slow. Even the kiss is different between woman and woman. It is more gentle. You are trying to give each other pleasure, not just take it, and you are sharing your feelings. You can be open together about your troubles and your problems. The love is generous. You can give each other quality time—because in Saudi Arabia a man spends very little time with his wife. It is in that separation that lies the pain.”

Lesbian or not, many Saudi women spend immeasurably more time with other women—and their children—than they do with their husbands. Men routinely head out in the evening to dine, drink coffee, gossip, talk politics, and generally while away the time in masculine pastimes, much as Edwardian gentlemen did in their clubs. Even if he does not have much more than TV-watching on the agenda, the husband will go out to view, and usually eat, in the male section of a buddy’s house, while the womenfolk gather in their own quarters—both sexes being catered for, even in quite lowly homes, by the ubiquitous Asian menservants, cooks, and maids.

“At the end of the evening,” says one Saudi woman, “the husband will come home with one expectation. He’s been chatting all night. It’s not more conversation that he wants.”

This segregated lifestyle is the rule in the royal family, so there is lesbianism inside the palaces as everywhere else.

“I’d hate to be a princess,” says a woman who has royal friends, “because it is not easy for them to marry outside the family. Nowadays many of them are well educated, and they do not want to marry any self-indulgent idiot prince. Some were previously married briefly. So behind those walls there are a lot of clever, pretty women in their thirties who are single with no prospect of a man.”

Tribes control their identity by controlling their womenfolk, and that is certainly the case with the Kingdom’s top tribe of all. Rare is the princess who is able to marry a Saudi nonroyal, and should she wish to marry a foreigner, according to a Riyadh joke, she must be over forty, physically disabled, or the holder of a Ph.D.—preferably all three at once. Maybe it is not a joke, for there are an increasing number of royal women taking further education, and who like to be addressed as “Princess Doctor.”

“The elite wear masks in this country,” says Mashael. “They pretend they don’t feel the pain, that empty-inside feeling of dissatisfaction with their life. Men and women are conditioned in this society to live separate lives, so they go on living separately. It’s not questioned. If you’re a woman and you want the happiness that goes with being part of a couple, you have to get that, in my experience, from another woman. And because you both want each other to be happy, that can help with your marriage. Often my girlfriend would give me advice to help me make things better with my husband. When things were difficult at home, I would give her a phone call just for two or three minutes and I would feel recharged.”

Still married to the same husband, with several children and another child on the way, Mashael, like a growing number of middle-class Saudi women, now runs a successful small business. She does not consider herself a lesbian.

“In another society, I would never have gone with a woman. I would never have thought of it, or been offered it. And I would certainly never want to live with a woman. I know that is not the solution. I have a sixty percent good marriage. Today I get my strength from my work, my kids, and, above all, from myself—not from the necessity of having another woman. At the end of the day, there’s the same pain.”

She lists the qualities she has derived from her intimate friendships with women: “Tenderness. Sharing. Trust. Honesty. Support. Strong and clean emotions. Respect—above all respect. If you want those good things in your life in Saudi Arabia, you can only get them from a woman. You will seldom get them from a Saudi man, at least not from any Saudi man that I have met—especially not respect. There are very few Saudi men who treat their women as truly equal partners in life—not in their hearts.”

Mashael believes that the problem lies in the overwrought, convention-obsessed atmosphere of the Kingdom itself, with its emphasis on appearances and “face.”

“It’s amazing,” she says, “how my husband becomes a different man when we go on holiday and can escape from this country—even to Bahrain. We start to do things as a couple. We go shopping together. We play together in the swimming pool. The children become closer to us. The whole family benefits. I’m without my black [clothes], he’s without his headdress. It’s as if, by taking off our Saudi costumes, we’ve become ordinary human beings, not putting on an act, just natural and warm. He says he can feel my warmth.

“Then we bump into some friends from home, and he freezes. Once we were walking together in the street somewhere abroad, and we saw some Saudis coming from the other way. He just walked off in another direction, as if he was nothing to do with me.”

The notion of “face” still holds the Saudi mentality in a rigid grip. “Is She a Disgrace?” asked Yasser Harib in a column of that title in
Al-Watan
in October 2008, pondering the common sight of a Saudi husband striding out alone in a shopping mall with his wife trailing yards behind with the children. “You might assume that these people have no connection with each other until they exit the mart and approach their car.”

Harib noted how “the man will usually walk quickly when he sees a group of men sitting at a café in order not to tie him[self] to the woman walking behind him at a distance”—and how this shame extends into the language. A traditional Saudi husband will use “such euphemisms as ‘my people’ or ‘my home’ when talking about his wife, as if she were something obscure or disgraceful that he does not want other people to know about.”

In 2008, it has to be said, it is possible to see young Saudi couples, presumably married, walking hand in hand in shopping malls—with the woman, usually, covered totally by a veil. But such public expressions of affection remain the exception, and traditionalists see nothing wrong with that. Social conservatism is the glue that is holding the Kingdom together, in their view, while more laid-back Arab societies have fallen apart.

“Look at our neighbors in the Middle East,” says one traditional Saudi. “Look at the Lebanese. They are considered to be the sophisticates, the ‘Europeans’ of the area, so clever and free and easy, compared with us, the old-fashioned, conventional tribal stick-in-the-muds. They drink wine and hold hands. But look at the mess that the Lebanese have made of their government. They have great cooking and lousy politics—with militia carrying weapons in the streets. What’s wrong with a bit of old-fashioned tribal toughness and deference to those in authority, saying your prayers and sticking to the rules?”

So is the convention-bound Saudi male destined never to become a normal member of the human race?

“I certainly do not blame Islam,” says Mashael. “I wish that our Saudi men would study the life of the Prophet more closely—it’s another example of how the religion of this country has been twisted by its tribal prejudices. We know that the Prophet was gentle with his women. He cherished his wives. He treated them with softness and respect. There is a hadith in which he tells men to take care of their women as if they were ‘precious glass.’ ”

In the summer of 2008 the hottest show on Saudi television was a Turkish soap opera in which a husband took care of his wife in precisely that way. It cleared the normally crowded streets every evening. According to MBC, the Saudi-owned satellite channel, between three and four million viewers tuned in nightly to watch
Noor,
a 141-part series whose romantic and supportive hero, Muhannad, treated his wife Noor, a fashion designer and the title character, with respectful tenderness—as both a love object and an equal. The show became the rage of the season, with newspapers reporting divorces after men found pictures of Muhannad on their wives’ cell phones. Several cartoonists slyly depicted husbands who missed the point by getting plastic surgery to try to
look
like the twenty-four-year-old Turk. Saudi women swooned over the blond and blue-eyed hero who was not afraid to show his soft side. Saudi men dismissed him as “gay.”

Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, Bin Baz’s successor as the Kingdom’s grand mufti (and blind, like Bin Baz), was concerned with episodes in
Noor
that depicted dating and pregnancy outside marriage. He issued a fatwa condemning the show as “a declaration of war against Allah and his Messengers”—while the chairman of the Supreme Judiciary Council, Saleh Al-Laheedan, went further, denouncing the owners of Westernizing TV channels as being “as guilty as those who watch them. . . . It is legitimate,” he said, “to kill those who call for corruption if their evil cannot be stopped by other penalties.”

The chief justice was well aware that the principal owners of MBC were the Al-Ibrahim family, brothers-in-law to the late King Fahd, and he would only issue a halfhearted apology, pointing out defiantly that he had forty years’ experience of shariah law, and was the oldest Islamic scholar in the country. The religious establishment was finally hitting back at the Al-Saud for its trickery over the introduction of the TV satellite dishes.

Meanwhile, the Turkish embassy announced that the number of Saudi travelers to Turkey that summer had increased to over one hundred thousand—from about forty thousand the year before.

“Basically,” says Mashael, “Saudi men behave the way they do because their mothers indulged them as kids. We all know that Arab women put the man-child on a pedestal, which swells his head and encourages him to lord it over his sisters and other women. So if wives want husbands to change one day, the answer is quite simple—the solution lies in our own hands. The mothers of Arabia have got to stop spoiling their sons. They must treat them as true equals with their daughters.”

CHAPTER 30

Illegitimate Occupation

T
he first time that George W., son of Bush, met face-to-face with Abdullah, son of Saud, they got on better than either of them had expected. It was April 2002, and few Americans could imagine why their president should extend any welcome to the leader of the country that had just given them 9/11, let alone greet him respectfully in a suit and tie—the first and only time Bush cleaned up so formally at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. The tie had been his mother’s idea.