by Zahra Hankir
“I’m old enough to be your mother,” I told him.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Just keep talking.”
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The longer I was in Saudi Arabia, the more I understood how invasive the presence of the religious police, or muttawa—run by the government body known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice—is in Saudi life. They were the only men allowed to look women up and down under the pretext of ensuring they were properly dressed, although men were also targeted. One man was chided by a policeman for allowing a Western woman to step onto the escalator before him. Another was berated for having streaks of blond in his hair. “Are you trying to seduce women?” he was asked. A young Saudi woman caught with a newspaper she’d brought in from another country containing an advertisement for the movie Titanic was accused of possessing pornography. A Lebanese couple got into trouble after the husband asked his wife if she wanted to have a taste of his ice cream. The muttawa couldn’t bear the sight of a woman licking the dessert in public. Some women ended up in jail for innocent infractions; when their sentences were over, their families sometimes refused to take them back because they had sullied their honor.
I usually encountered the muttawa in the mall. Some ordered me discreetly in English to cover my hair. Sometimes I would argue with them, saying that as a Christian, I didn’t have to follow that particular rule. They would respond that Mary, the mother of Jesus, always had her hair covered.
In November 2003, I ventured out to cover the aftermath of a shootout between police and Islamic militants in a very conservative neighborhood of Riyadh. “Cover up your hair properly,” my Pakistani driver, Ihsan, told me. I wanted firsthand witness accounts, so I started approaching the men in the area, asking for their names, what they saw, and what they did for a living. I was so consumed with reporting that it took me a while to understand that to conservatives, what I was doing was tantamount to hitting on the men. Some of them avoided me by pressing themselves against the fences of nearby homes, lowering their gazes, and scurrying away. I knew I was in trouble when I heard the screech of a religious police car a few meters away. Angry men got out of the vehicle and were soon joined by even more angry men from the neighborhood. They advanced toward me, unleashing a torrent of what were supposed to be insults: safira (a woman whose face is unveiled), mutabarrija (made up in a way meant to entice men—I wore only moisturizer), and “You’re shamelessly mingling with men.” I backed away, trying to process the bizarre, surreal situation. I didn’t get all of the witness accounts I had wanted, but I wrote about the shootout anyway, and mentioned the incident in the story.
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One of the things I enjoyed about covering Saudi Arabia is how unusual some of the stories were. In October 2008, I saw an announcement in the newspaper about an upcoming beauty pageant for sheep. So I thought to myself, why not? It was an opportunity to witness an undercover aspect of Saudi life. And it was a lot of fun!
The event took place in the desert outside Riyadh at midnight. Its goal was to encourage Saudis to breed sheep for quality. There were two things I didn’t expect: first, the stench of dung, which hit me as soon as I arrived at the location; and second, the seriousness with which the entire event was planned. I was the only woman there, but about four thousand men were in attendance. Some of them sat in armchairs near a tiny runway covered with a red carpet discussing what makes sheep attractive. “Height,” said one. “No excess fat in unwanted places,” said another. “Good stock,” said a third.
Then the spectacle started. First there was a show of fireworks, followed by a competition for the best poem in praise of sheep. Then the animals sashayed down the runway as would-be buyers appraised them. The winner was Sana, purchased for $120,650. “I loved the length and width of his cheeks, his long neck, and how the creamy yellow fur falls down his body,” said its new owner.
One cool evening in January 2012, I was invited to one of the most unique outings I have ever been to: stand-up comedy in an empty pool at the back of a house in Jeddah. I was on assignment for a Bloomberg News story on Saudi youth, and some of the people I had met wanted to show me how they go about defying the country’s various bans—in this case, the ban on theaters. About sixty men and women in their early twenties sat on stools, armchairs, and a carpet inside the pool as comedians poked fun at some of the quirks that defined their culture, including how officials black out the arms, legs, and chests of women in magazines. “I bought a Spice Girls CD, and I was surprised to see they were wearing abayas,” one joked.
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Saudi Arabia was so opaque to me that many rumors, no matter how outrageous, sounded plausible. Once when I was reporting a story on how the kingdom was beginning to acknowledge the prevalence of AIDS cases in the country, someone told me that women, both local and foreign, could not buy condoms. Since most of the women I interviewed had contracted HIV from their husbands, I wanted to check if that was true, so I could add the tidbit to my story. But I also didn’t want to get in trouble, so I asked a young diplomat to come along with me.
He brought along a friend, and the two men remained at a distance from me in a big supermarket as I chose a yellow packet of condoms, took it to the Saudi cashier, and paid for it. (I truly felt like a teenager at this point.) No problems at all. I told the diplomat that the transaction was too easy, so he took me to a small pharmacy. As I walked through the door, the diplomat urgently whispered: “Donna, no!” The bearded Saudi cashier was clearly very conservative. I ignored the diplomat, who followed me in with some trepidation, chose a purple box of condoms, and went to the cashier, where I dissolved into giggles like a schoolgirl would. The cashier looked up and without a word handed me the plastic bag containing the box. I had never expected to find myself in such a situation, buying condoms in a country like Saudi Arabia.
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Before his death in 2015, King Abdullah paved the way for the changes happening now. His decisions to reform were in part due to the calls for modernization in the kingdom following 9/11, and in part due to technological advancements like satellite TV and the internet, which brought the wider world into Saudi homes and made it easier for citizens to circumvent social obstacles. In addition to allowing women to work in lingerie and makeup stores, he allowed them to stay at hotels without a guardian letter, granted them the right to vote and run in elections—though only municipal elections have been held—and sent female athletes to the Olympic Games for the first time in 2012.
I have been to Saudi Arabia several times since Prince Mohammed came into power. One sign of how much things have changed is this headline, published by the daily newspaper Arab News shortly after Valentine’s Day in 2018: UN-FORBIDDEN LOVE: SAUDIS ENJOY SECOND “RELIGIOUS POLICE-FREE” VALENTINE’S DAY. In decades past, no one would’ve dared to brag about marking a Western celebration and being totally dismissive of the religious police. Sheikh Ahmed Qasim Al-Ghamdi, a previous muttawa chief in the holy city of Mecca, even endorsed the celebration, telling the paper that love was a natural feeling, “a positive aspect of the human being.”
When I travel to Saudi Arabia these days, I can see the changes as soon as I land. The dark, drab arrivals hall at the Riyadh airport has been painted white, with television sets playing cartoons. Passport-control officials now sport white robes and smiles, in contrast to dark uniforms and frowns. Young people can be seen everywhere, and their energy is felt at business conferences, start-ups, and ministries. Women are more visible in public and in government and banking jobs.
The transformation made me feel somehow outdated, at least at first. My black abayas, considered bold when I bought them because of their red embroidery and sprinkles of glitter, are passé amid the more relaxed grays and blues that don’t fully cover what’s underneath them. On an assignment for Bloomberg News in December 2016, I
went to a variety show in Jeddah where the audience was mixed and Justin Bieber’s song “Let Me Love You” blared from giant speakers—this in a country that had banned music and men and women mingling in public. At restaurants, the family sections are still there, but minus the partitions that used to shield each table and made eating out feel like dining in a tomb.
But it hasn’t all been good news. There’s now a climate of fear in the kingdom that I have previously encountered in repressive regimes but never in Saudi Arabia. Some Saudis I have known for years didn’t want to meet when I was on a reporting trip to Jeddah and Riyadh in August 2018, saying it was too risky to be seen with journalists. The shift in their attitude came after the government arrested clerics, critics, and women activists, and detained hundreds of prominent businessmen and some royals at the Ritz Hotel in Riyadh in November 2017. The mass arrests were part of a so-called anticorruption campaign that some analysts have labeled as shakedowns. The developments sent a message to Saudis that the new leadership has little tolerance for free speech and isn’t concerned about due process or transparency.
As I’m writing this, Saudi Arabia and its crown prince are mired in an international controversy over the killing of the Saudi journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi, who moved to the United States in 2017 to avoid arrest and went into self-imposed exile. Khashoggi, whom I met in early 2002, disappeared after walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. It took the Saudis seventeen days to finally admit that government agents had murdered Khashoggi following an altercation at the consulate, after first claiming he had left the premises unscathed. That account didn’t align with what Turkish officials had been leaking: Khashoggi was tortured and dismembered at the consulate, they said, a claim the Saudis have denied. The episode exposed vulnerabilities for the prince as he faced the toughest questioning of his rule, with U.S. lawmakers blaming him for the murder.
These events have left me wondering whether foreign media can continue reporting more or less freely before they, too, come under some kind of control.
Every time I find myself amazed by the new Saudi Arabia, I recall an incident at a restaurant in Riyadh in December 2016. Music was playing in the background, young women were taking selfies, and there was lots of chatter and laughter, before two totally covered women walked in and demanded that the waiters switch off the music. Although there were only two of them in a restaurant packed with diners, their wishes prevailed, and the music was turned off. Saudis grew up believing that music, gender mixing, women driving, and celebrating Valentine’s Day are all haram (forbidden by Islam) because they lead to decadence. These two women had the religious argument on their side and no one dared challenge them. How many in the kingdom still agree with them? No one really knows. But I’ve asked many Saudis if they’re happy with the changes, and everyone has responded with ambivalence, saying, “Yes, but . . .”
Dying Breed
Roula Khalaf
I can’t recall the precise moment I decided I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, but I know it had something to do with the Commodore Hotel in Beirut’s legendary Hamra district. A scruffy establishment with plentiful booze at the bar and the rare advantage of a working telex line, the Commodore was for years the home base of foreign correspondents covering Lebanon’s civil war. Many would make their name during the bloody sixteen years of conflict that erupted in 1975, pitting Muslim militias against Christians, turning factions within each sect against one another, and inviting foreign interventions. In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and linked up with Christian militias to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization. My family temporarily swapped our spacious home a few miles west of the Commodore, on the Mediterranean shore, for a small, dark, serviced apartment a two-minute walk from the hotel, above a celebrated bar called Jack’s Hideaway. At times, we visited the hotel lobby, catching a glimpse of the war reporters huddled with machine-gun-wielding militiamen.
The appeal of the hotel had nothing to do with the greater safety we felt in Hamra, which, in any case, was fleeting. I was an anxious teenager who gorged on French novels and was desperate for a cause, while at the Commodore, the women and men were right on the front line. Just thinking of them conjured up images of excitement and intrigue; they embodied a freedom and a purpose that I craved.
It would be more than a decade before I received my first assignment as a foreign correspondent. By a fortunate twist of fate, I was hired to cover another civil war in the Arab world, one that would prove even more brutal than Lebanon’s. When I began covering Algeria in 1995, the war in Lebanon had ended, though not before the Commodore had succumbed to its ravages. The hotel was bombed and plundered in 1987 by gunmen who fought outside and within its walls. Soon after, a spate of kidnappings forced the rest of the foreigners, including correspondents, out of Lebanon.
But the Commodore came back to mind on my first trip to Algiers, when I stayed in another war hotel. The Djezair, otherwise known as the St. George, was a charming former Moorish palace where rooms were still referred to by the names of the fabled figures who stayed there, including Winston Churchill. By the time I arrived in Algiers in the fall of 1995, the military had been fighting an Islamist insurgency for more than two years. The rebels had taken up arms after an election that they were poised to win was canceled by the army, a coup that had been applauded by Western allies of Algiers. This was the first Arab spring, nearly two decades before the uprisings of 2011 swept the region. It was also the first time that an Islamist party came within a whisker of power.
That party was the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, a ragtag collection of various Islamist tendencies that had come together when Algeria shed decades of authoritarianism and allowed parties to compete in elections. For two years after the military coup, the country was virtually shut off from the world and firmly sealed off from the international media. I was part of the first batch of reporters allowed in by a military-backed regime keen to burnish its image in the face of mounting accusations of human rights abuses.
The ambassador in London who had signed off on my visa took me out to lunch before my trip. We met at an Italian restaurant in Holland Park, around the corner from the embassy. On the menu were delicious pasta dishes and a heavy dose of propaganda. Intellectuals and journalists were hunted down like animals in those days; Algeria was deemed the most dangerous country in the world for reporters by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The regime, too, was killing indiscriminately. The ambassador advised me to keep a low profile by dressing modestly and in dark colors and never straying from the minders that would be assigned to me in order to stay safe. I took his advice seriously, packing the most ragged clothes I could find in my closet. On my first night at the St. George, I was reminded of what a rookie reporter I was when I spotted Nora Boustany, the Washington Post correspondent whose work I’d followed for years, in bright-red high-heeled pumps.
I returned to Algeria time and again as the North Africa correspondent for the Financial Times. The minders were always present to trail journalists and control their messages. The big question in Algeria at that time was “Qui tue qui”—who was killing whom. Officials painted all the rebels with the same brush, and blamed all the violence on what was then called the GIA, the French acronym for the Armed Islamic Group, a radical offshoot of the FIS; opposition politicians were convinced the GIA was infiltrated by the military. Over the years, other reporters and I were bused several times to massacre sites to interview victims, in surreal visits that the government inexplicably treated as touristic road trips. The pattern was always the same: villagers told contradictory stories, leaving us with the impression—although we never had proof—that the massacre site had been thoroughly prepared for our arrival.
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Algeria was my introduction to foreign reporting, an adventure that was steeped in tragedy yet unforgettable. Though I haven’t visited Algiers for nearly ten years, I can sti
ll see its whitewashed colonial buildings and the tears of mothers and fathers whose children had disappeared. Algerians have a name for the contempt with which the regime—“le pouvoir,” as it is known—has always treated them. They call it the hogra. Colleagues who cover Algeria tell me the hogra is still entrenched in the Algerian psyche.
Since the war in Algeria, which I covered for more than five years, I have reported on numerous crises and conflicts, from Iraq to Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories. To the memory of the Commodore, I added the dilapidated Rasheed Hotel in Baghdad, the charming American Colony in Jerusalem, and the dreary Sheraton in Damascus. From those bases, I bore witness to momentous geopolitical shifts and told stories of inspiring courage and of wretched failures. I heard of hopefulness, saw the bloodshed, and learned of the despair before I witnessed the cataclysm of the Arab revolutions and their rapid extinguishment through counterrevolutions.
Over the years, however, as I moved on from on-the-ground reporting to running a foreign network for a global news organization that is one of the few that are still committed to serious foreign reporting, I have also watched upheaval of a different sort: the digital revolution that upended the business model of media outlets, putting formidable pressure on revenue streams, spurring new competition from social media platforms, and forcing changes in the ways in which readers interact with newspapers. The vast majority of online advertising spending has shifted from newspapers to Google and Facebook. News organizations that have survived have adopted a subscription model that brings journalists into a more direct relationship with readers. Thanks to reader data, we are now informed about what users are reading, where, how, and for how long.
