My constant interference in our family’s everyday life was a source of ongoing tension. Extremism frequently turns its champions into angry people, driven by conflicting desires. At first, I pitied my less enlightened parents and siblings. Then I felt superior to them, poor sinners that they were. Then I lost patience with their unwillingness to see the one true path and resorted to threats, intimidation, and yelling. At night, I was tormented by thoughts of what would happen to all us of when we reached our graves.
My relationship with my brother—my best friend for so long—became very strained. The friction between us reached its peak when I searched his wallet and found pictures of beautiful and rather scantily clad Lebanese singers. I waited for my father to come home before I staged the confrontation. My waiting paid off: my father had his own firmly held religious beliefs, even if they were not always as strong as mine, and my brother was forcibly removed from our apartment for a day. I forgot about the incident, but my brother never did. He still remembers it and says, “You caused me a lot of pain during your extremist days!”
Even after I became very devout, the one thing my heart would not allow me to relinquish was the beautiful Barbie doll that I had brought back from Egypt. Perhaps it was because she was the last tangible evidence of the one happy period of my childhood, the only surviving proof of a more innocent and simpler time. Or maybe it was because of the amount of effort I went through to get her. Either way, I held on to her like a precious treasure, giving her a position of honor on my bookshelf. I clung and clung until one day a very devout friend visited me and destroyed her while I was preparing tea. I came into the room with the pot and the cups to see what remained of Barbie lying there, her lovely clothes torn, her delicate limbs snapped, and her soft, long, golden hair all chopped off. My friend’s name was Mariam, and she was an American who had converted to Islam and come to Saudi for Umrah. She, like me, had been indoctrinated into the militant Salafi school of Islam, and she had refused to return to America. She was doing what Salafi decree preached, destroying that which was haram.
After my radical phase ended, I looked for a replacement Barbie doll everywhere I went. I bought several new Barbie dolls to make up for the sadness of losing my first, and I’ve kept them all so that someday another little girl might play with them.
It was not just dolls with beautiful faces and bodies that were forbidden, but all forms of human and animal representation. As a fatwa from Salafi scholar Muhammad ibn Uthaymeen states, “It is not permitted to take photographs of animated beings, because the Prophet (PBUH) condemned all photographers to everlasting torment: ‘The most stringent punishment on the Day of Judgment will be reserved for those who depict the forms of others.’ This makes clear to us that photography is a major sin, since condemnation and warning declarations of severe punishment were bestowed only upon major sins.” But one of the hobbies I truly adored was drawing. I created another world for myself when I drew, a beautiful world, full of happiness.
While my handwriting was disorganized and unruly, my drawings were elaborate and perfectly proportioned. I grew to expect the same question at the beginning of each academic year: “Manal, are you sure these drawings are your own?” The teacher would present me with a blank sheet of white paper and whatever tools were available, and I’d start drawing right there in front of her to prove that I truly was the only one responsible for my creations. At the end of the school year, the teachers would take my sketchbooks to use as examples for students in the following year. Many of my drawings were displayed in elegant frames on walls in the school, which made me exceedingly proud. When I created bigger drawings, I loved nothing more than to use the walls as my canvas, and happily spent all my free periods creating colorful designs. At school, we were not allowed to draw faces and animals due to the prohibitions against representation, but at home my notebooks were filled with images of creatures and smiling people.
I was proud to win any drawing competition that I entered, both at a school level and even a national one. It just so happened that the company that I would eventually work for after graduating from college, Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, held an annual contest for children’s drawings. I submitted an entry during my second year of middle school, and my Oasis and Palm Trees won. As a prize, they sent me an electronic drawing pad. The pad was designed to be plugged into the television so that whatever was drawn could be displayed on the screen. Our television set was very old (we still had an aerial) and there was no way for me to connect my new gadget, so I gave it as a gift to my neighbor’s daughter, who loved drawing as much as I did. I happily did all of my brother’s drawing homework as well. He told me once that his teacher admired his drawings and had asked him whether anyone at home was helping him. He told the teacher it was his older brother, since saying that it was his sister would have been too embarrassing.
Both my brother and my sister knew how much I loved my drawings. They also knew I wouldn’t hesitate to give up and retreat in the middle of a fight if they so much as threatened to rip them up. One time my sister made good on her threat and ripped up a sketchbook whose contents I’d worked on all year. I wept and wailed as if grieving the death of a friend. Afterward, I taped all the pieces together, and I still have that sketchbook.
One of my school teachers suggested that I take a distance-learning course to develop my drawing skills. She gave me a brochure for the Master Art diploma at the Penn Foster Career School, a correspondence school in Pennsylvania. My father helped me pay the enrollment fee, and each month I received study modules and a selection of drawing tools. I found it hard to juggle my art assignments with my compulsory schoolwork, but when I obtained my diploma at the age of seventeen, I felt very pleased with myself.
My relationship with drawing ended abruptly not long after, following a single day in our religious studies class. I had known that drawing animate beings was haram. But that day I learned that the people who made such drawings would be among the most strongly punished on the Day of Judgment. I spent a full week feeling confused, unable to sleep from recurring nightmares. I was trapped between two equally painful agonies: my feelings of sinfulness and guilt at having breached the commands of my faith on the one hand, and the thought of abandoning the drawings that I had worked hard on from almost the first moment I could hold a pencil. A little part of my soul was poured into each and every one.
After a week of relentless insomnia and guilt, I saw no other option. I climbed up to the roof of our apartment building and burned all my drawings of living things. I stood silently and cried as I watched my papers and notebooks burn. The conflicting sensations of comfort and pain raged inside me like the fire leaping before my eyes.
Much later, I learned that drawing is prohibited in Islam only for those who intend to worship the pictures in place of God. But the militant religious discourse to which I was subjected was based on the principle of forbidding not only that which is explicitly sinful but any thing that might eventually lead one to commit a sin.
But perhaps the greatest and most lasting casualty of the entire period of my adolescence was my relationship with my sister. In our apartment, after many years, we eventually got a landline telephone with two receivers. One receiver was in the guest room, which my sister commandeered for her own room. She was forever locking the door. The second receiver was in our main room. One day when I was in my third year of middle school and my sister was in her last year in secondary school, I picked up the receiver to make a phone call and overheard her talking to a man. I stayed on the line, silently listening to the whole phone call. I was shocked to hear my sister talking to a stranger and exchanging words like “I miss you” and planning to meet in secret. When the conversation ended, I was enraged. I kept the secret to myself until the next morning, when I told my two best friends and asked them what I should do. They listened but said nothing. I decided I would tell my mother. If I confronted Muna directly, I knew that I would receive a harsh beating at her hands.
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Even before I had finished speaking, Mama was terrified. She confronted Muna, but my sister denied everything, calling me delusional and a liar. Muna later beat me severely, which made me even more determined to catch her in the act. Religion wasn’t my only motivation. I also wanted revenge. Years before, when I was in primary school, Muna had found my diary, where I used to write fictional stories and imagine myself having all kinds of childish adventures. Once I wrote a love story between me and one of my second cousins. My great mistake was to use our actual names, not knowing that Muna read everything I wrote. Muna tore the story from my notebook, hid it away, and blackmailed me, telling me that she would show it to Mama and Abouya.
I was in agony, terrified of the consequences if my parents read the story. One day, my mother finally confronted me in front of my brother, who was still very young, only in second grade. Looking very disappointed, Mama asked, “Is it true that you are writing letters to that boy that you think you are in love with?” Muhammad planted himself between Mama and me, interrupted her, and said, “Manal would never do that.” All the shame that I felt was now a hundred times worse.
I answered, “They are not letters, they are stories I wrote.”
I will never forget the look in Muhammad’s eyes as I spoke. I felt that I had lost my brother’s trust. My sister never showed the actual story to Mama, instead she blackmailed me for weeks. I searched for it everywhere, in her bag, among her clothes and books. I snuck into her room using the spare key Mama kept hidden away. But I could not find my story. Once when we had a short truce, I politely asked her to give it back to me. I was still terrified that my father might see it. Muna finally agreed and went to the kitchen to grab a screwdriver. She had hidden the story in the motor box of the ceiling fan. But even though she returned the story, I never forgot the agony she had put me through.
I kept looking for proof of Muna’s relationship with the boy whose voice I had heard on the phone, searching the house until one day I found a strange cassette in my mother’s sewing machine. I was curious and played the tape. It contained a long message from the boy. On the recording, he called me all kinds of names, referring to me as “their enemy,” saying that I was the reason they couldn’t be together, calling me “the devil alive.” That night I handed the cassette to Abouya. It was proof of Muna’s sins, and she would now have to atone.
Abouya began to beat her. All the other times when he had beaten her, Muna would fight back and eventually he would give up. But not that night. As she begged him to stop, I stood and watched, terrified and guilt-stricken, and unable to change anything.
The cassette ended up with my cousins, who told the whole family that Muna was in love with a stranger. It was a huge scandal. Aunt Zein told me later that she stopped going to large family gatherings because it was too much to take all the questions and criticism. What made it worse was that while Muna’s boyfriend was Arab, he was not Saudi. I had thought Abouya wasn’t racist: all of his best friends were Egyptians, and I had never heard him belittle any nationality, unlike everyone else around me, even my mother. But there was a strict dividing line in his thinking. He could be best friends with someone from outside Saudi Arabia, eat with them, live in the same area, share ups and downs. But none of them could ever marry one of his daughters or any of the women in his family.
After this, Abouya cut off our landline and our access to the outside world. He locked us in the apartment and barred us from seeing anyone or having anyone visit us. We couldn’t even go out to buy food. The only place he allowed us to go was to school and back, and only if we were accompanied by Mama or by him. My brother was locked in with us too. The next year, when Muna asked to attend medical school in Jeddah, Abouya’s first reply was to beat her again.
I wish now that I could simply erase my radical teenage years from my life and repair the damage I did to my family and myself. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that in my quest for Salafi religious perfection, a precious, free-spirited period of my life had been stolen away.
7
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The Forbidden Satellite Dish
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Throughout secondary school I kept a diary, recording the events in my life, my thoughts and experiences. Many of the entries are predictable, but not this one, written on June 4, 1997:
There are ten days left until the secondary school exams, and I’m feeling very scared and uneasy. These are my final years of school; all the teachers think highly of me, and I don’t want to let them down. The problem that’s plaguing me now is these awful feelings of fear and dread. I know I’ll be asked about my studies on the Day of Judgment: for whom was I studying? For whom did I stay up late all those nights, and for what purpose? And what will I say? God, forgive me for all the times I studied for myself and not for the good of Islam. Make all this studying for your benefit, and don’t let the devil get close to us. I’ve made a pledge to myself: I’ll do everything I can to become someone of significance, not for the sake of fame, but because I want to serve Muslims everywhere; I want to offer them something useful. I want to be like Necmettin Erbakan [1926–2011], the head of the Islamist Welfare Party in Turkey, or Ali Begovic [Alija Izetbegovic, 1925–2003], the president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I want to visit all the countries of the Islamic world, solve their problems and repair them single-handedly. I’d hate to live my whole life without having had an impact on the course of things in our great world. I wonder, will I achieve my impossible dream? I don’t think so!
The fact that I ended my secondary school years with such ambitions was something of a miracle. My views had remained extremist and closed-minded. But, more than that, I had grown up in a society that considered teaching, in girls’ schools of course, the only acceptable career choice for a woman. It was a job that would keep her as far from the sight of men as possible. Girls who wished to deviate from this path and work as a doctor or nurse for female patients were viewed with a great deal of suspicion. And this was at a time when Saudi Arabia was recruiting engineers, medical doctors, and PhDs from Egypt and other Arab countries due to a lack of qualified people among its own population. None of this, however, stopped me from nurturing my dreams.
I had two major motivations. The first was an overwhelming desire to lift my family out of poverty and improve our social standing. The second was my mother, who carried a deeply held conviction that education, academic success, and an independent career should be the entire focus of our lives; she single-handedly made education a household priority. My mother came from an educated and academically successful family. Although she did not attend school beyond the fourth grade, all but one of her siblings and their children are university graduates. Mama’s dream was for me to become a doctor, but mine was to become an engineer or a nuclear physicist. Back then, it wasn’t even possible for girls to study these fields, but this did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm.
The universal expectation was for girls to learn how to perform domestic duties such as cleaning, cooking, washing clothes and dishes, and raising children, in preparation for becoming a good wife. But Mama was strongly opposed to us doing any chores. She had only one domestic worker, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, who came to help during the day; everything else she did herself. I don’t recall Mama once asking my sister or me to help her with anything; in fact, she was angry if she saw us devoting time to any task other than our studies. “I don’t want any reward from you, or any thanks,” she used to say. “My reward will be at the end of the year when I see top grades on your school certificates. I want you to be the number one students not only in your schools, but in the whole of Mecca.” If one of us got second place, we had failed our mother. None of us would receive her blessing until we were the best.
But getting top grades was difficult, particularly in the sciences. We studied sixteen different topics per semester, but had no access to laboratories and other essential materials, and thus no pr
actical lessons. The only way to make up for this was to ask parents for help, hire a tutor, or use the already completed notebooks of an older sibling. None of these options was available to me. My parents were not educated, and they couldn’t afford a private tutor. As for my sister, she took pains to destroy her notebooks at the end of every year. “Make some effort to find the answers yourself,” she told me. “You don’t deserve to get them by doing nothing.”
But I wasn’t going to let my mother down. From my fourth year of primary school through my last year of secondary school, my grades were not only the best in my class but the best in the whole school. At first I worked for my grades to please my mother. I was never rewarded with presents or money; I worked because the satisfaction of achieving was a gift in itself. I started to enjoy the respect that my academic achievements won for me from the teachers and headmistress. Their interest made me feel as if I mattered; it gave me a sense of self. And it was a great achievement for the school that one of their students was able to join the ranks of top students from all over the city.
In school, my grades won me third place in the entire region of Mecca, and in secondary school I achieved first place, with a score of 99.6 percent. The newspapers published the names of the top ten students, and I proudly checked the list to see mine above them all. My teachers told me that there was a cash prize of 5,000 riyals for the student with the top score. Immediately, I thought about everything that Mama needed and drew up a list of what I would buy: a new washing machine to replace our old, broken one; a new oven; a set of pots and dishes. If there was anything left over, I would buy my father a Rado watch, since he’d been without a watch for some time. When my uncle had complimented his old one, Abouya had taken it off his wrist and given it to him as a gift.
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