The Oasis attack drove oil prices to a record high of $42 a barrel. Back then, a $50 barrel of oil was unimaginable. It took another four years of regional chaos to drive the price to $100, and then higher still.
“Every society secretes its evil.” That’s what the Saudi president of Aramco told me. His office had inlaid marble floors, and pieces of sky flickered through windows and were refracted in glass columns. “We have our share, you have your share. This is our share.”
As we pulled into Valerie’s driveway, her husband was headed out the front door, hauling a Labrador by the collar. “We’re out riding around,” he told Valerie. “Okay,” she sang. The living room was sunny and cool. Four of her friends nestled in leather sofas, sipping Diet Pepsi on the rocks and glowing in vibrant floral cottons, the plumage of the suburbs.
“I made iced tea.” Valerie slid a platter of homemade chocolate chip cookies and cranberry cake onto a low-slung coffee table and collapsed into a sofa. Awkward quiet ensued. We all looked at each other, wondering who should start. Then Valerie lifted her chin.
“The other day should never have happened,” she cried indignantly. “They knew it was coming. They knew it was inevitable for these guys to get away with it.”
She meant the massacre at Oasis. Where was the security, she demanded. “For that matter,” she added in rising tones, “where is our security?
“I go to the pool, and those guys are sitting there smoking cigarettes and drinking tea,” Valerie said. “They’re not going to stop me if I blaze in there with a gun.”
Give the Saudis a break, interrupted Cora Lee, a forty-four-year-old accountant. Security was getting much better and, after all, you couldn’t expect them to have anticipated this sort of carnage. “They really haven’t had a need to invest in security until now.”
The other women groaned as if they’d heard that old excuse a thousand times. “Since 2001 they should have had it covered.” Valerie’s blue eyes flashed. “You don’t have to be the head of the country to figure that out. It’s common sense.”
Tracy Thompson nodded vigorously. A substitute teacher and the wife of an Aramco worker, Tracy wore a Miami Dolphins visor and capri pants.
“Even if they catch these two guys, so what?” Her voice sounded rough. “There’s another two hundred. It’s frustrating, too, because we know there could be a sympathizer living next door.”
“We know they’re on camp,” Valerie chimed in.
“We know they’re on camp,” Tracy echoed, nodding as if she were giving an “Amen.”
“But are there really people like that living here?” Cora frowned.
“Those Palestinian-American kids walk from school with our kids and they’re telling them that America is evil, America is the enemy.” Tracy looked at Cora as if she were hopelessly naive. “It’s here, and you just don’t know it. And they have American passports. Immigration laws, that’s another thing. Why do we give visas to pregnant women from these countries?” She addressed that one to me. I kept my mouth shut.
“You know it’s there,” agreed Amy, a preschool manager.
Until recently, these women were living what they called “the good life.” They were middle-class wives and mothers who’d caught the elusive American dream here in Saudi Arabia, and they were determined to cling to it. They’d found a corner of the planet where salaries were high, streets safe, and neighbors friendly. Within Aramco’s gates the sun shines day after day and there is no unemployment or homelessness, there are no uninsured. Ensconced in a sort of corporate resort and military base rolled into one, utterly removed from the severe desert kingdom that they called home in only the most theoretical sense, they enjoyed the romantic mystique of expatriate life without the inconvenience of foreign language, unfamiliar mores, or strange cuisine.
“Security here is so bad,” Tracy griped. “Wednesday and Thursday nights we have all these youths here, and they don’t belong here.”
“Why not?” demanded Cora. “They’re friends of the kids here.”
Pamela caught my eye across the table. “Life here is so great for those of us who are here,” she said breathily, with a faint smile that cracked and immediately slipped.
There is oil under our feet, and these are prairie women. When the topic of the kingdom outside the gates comes up, they turn questioning faces in my direction. They had carted themselves along, Americans swaddled in Americana. Maybe this is the essence of the Saudi–American relationship, I thought. We need one another, and we are braided together. But we don’t try to become one another, and maybe we don’t even try to understand one another, because what each sees in the other provokes visceral disgust. In Saudi eyes we are a nation of whores, drugs, broken families, and guns; we swing our power like a club and the world bides its time until our ignorance strips us of our glory. To Americans, Saudis are fanatic, brutal, sexist, materialistic, modern-day slave owners. But we have been wrapped up in the Saudi oil industry since Americans struck black gold in 1936 and on down through the twentieth century, as riches welled up and transformed an illiterate, impoverished backwater into an opulent kingdom. Americans needed Saudi oil, and Saudis needed American expertise and political cover. All of that weird codependence revolved around Aramco. America is here, absolutely, but hidden so as not to anger the locals, walled off because otherwise who can stomach Saudi Arabia? We will coexist but neither side will sacrifice its character. We will not show our faces and we will not look one another in the eye. These women do not know what I know, because they have not lived outside the gate.
One afternoon I had found a Starbucks in a fancy shopping mall in Riyadh. I filled my lungs with the rich perfume of coffee, and it smelled like home—caffeinated, comforting, American. I asked for a latte and the barista gave me a bemused look; his eyes flickered and he shrugged. The milk steamer whined, he handed over the coffee, and I turned my back on his uneasy face. The Saudi men stopped talking and watched me pass with hard stares. I ignored them and sank into an overstuffed armchair.
“Excuse me,” hissed the voice in my ear. “You can’t sit here.” The man from the counter hung at my elbow, glowering.
“Excuse me?”
“Emmm …” He drew his discomfort into a long syllable. “You cannot stay here.”
“What? Why?”
Then he said it: “Men only.”
He doesn’t tell me what I will learn later: Starbucks has another, unmarked door around back that leads to a smaller espresso bar, and a handful of tables smothered by curtains. That is the “family” section. As a woman, that’s where I belong. I have no right to mix with male customers or sit in view of passing shoppers. I must confine myself to the separate, inferior, and usually invisible spaces where Saudi Arabia shunts half the population.
I stand up. It’s the only thing I can do. Men in their white robes and red-checked kaffiyehs stare impassively over their mugs. I drop my eyes, and immediately wish I hadn’t. Snatching up my skirts to keep from stumbling, I walk out of the store and into the clatter of the shopping mall.
Futilely I would count down the days until I could flee westward on sterilized jets, only to remember, over and over again, that there was no escape. Saudi Arabia stuck to me, followed me home and shadowed me through my days, tainting the way I perceived men and women everywhere. Back home in Cairo, the cacophony of whistles and lewd coos on the streets sent me into blind rage. I slammed doors in the faces of delivery men; cursed at Egyptian soldiers in a language they didn’t speak; kept a resentful mental tally of the Western men, especially reporters, who seemed to condone, even relish, the marginalization of women in the Arab world. If a man suggested I take a shawl to dinner, I demanded to know why he was telling me what to do, did he think he owned me?
I first visited Saudi Arabia during the fasting month of Ramadan, prepared for even greater holiday inconvenience than non-Muslims encountered in Egypt—no eating in plain view until after sundown, dry throats, and the gassy stomachs of midnight feasts, ev
erybody jagged and jonesing for nicotine and caffeine. But in pious Saudi Arabia, I learned, Muslims follow the letter of the daylight fast while subverting the spirit. They sleep all day and start work at sundown, when eating is no longer haram. I couldn’t make calls until five in the afternoon, and sources offered appointments at two in the morning.
And so one lost night I slumped limply on a hotel sofa as the clock neared three a.m., screwing my eyes open to interview a lawyer known for his links to Saudi insurgents. He’d brought along a man with a big hammy face and bushy beard frazzled orange with henna. Redbeard, it turned out, was a veteran of the Afghan jihad. He told me about how he’d been sent to Afghanistan, a warrior in the Saudi-American project to fight the USSR with Islamic fundamentalism. Back then, he told me, his government and my government had been on the right track. “The government betrayed herself,” he snarled.
“So what did you think of September 11?” I asked him.
He spread his face into a grin and showed me a thumbs-up.
“I hope it is repeated every second,” he said deliberately. “And I enjoy the picture of the falling Trade Center every time it’s shown on TV.”
Veterans of Afghan jihad had molded Saudi society and made holy war trendy, and their ideologies festered until they eventually helped birth September 11. Now Iraq seethed and boiled next door, and Saudi clerics whispered of jihad in Fallujah and Ramadi, and all that rage turned against the Saudi government itself, the corrupt, filthy, apostate government that had sold its soul to Washington and let Western infidels roam the Land of the Two Holy Shrines. And all the while, the Saudi-American friendship marched forward.
Saudi Arabia was always, to me, the place that most maddeningly displayed the mystery of jihad. People got radicalized in Gaza City, where they lived like rabbits in a squalid little cage while Israeli settlers rolled past on private highways to beachfront homes. They got radicalized in Afghanistan, where war was printed on the landscape, and in Baghdad, where a foreign occupation unleashed deep political fears of disenfranchisement. On a human level, all of that made sense; there was a logical scheme that you could follow.
In Saudi Arabia, it was rich boys and men, nestled in material comfort in a sovereign country, railing about how their brutally Islamic government wasn’t Islamic enough. In Jalalabad or Gaza, people stood in the street and told you how they felt. In Saudi Arabia, radicalism was tamped down behind obfuscations. It was packaged in fancy cars and expensive sunglasses; hidden behind the high walls of mansions. They didn’t spread it out and say, this is what it is, and this is why it is. The heart of jihad looked as smooth and American as anyplace I could ever imagine, full of Saudis who had studied in Kentucky and Wisconsin and Americans enthusing about the wonderful Saudi hospitality. And they didn’t trust each other at all. There was a place where the East and the West joined, and that place was the dark slick rush of oil money. It was in the greed of Americans and the cold calculations of Saudis.
The rules are different in Saudi Arabia. The same U.S. government that drummed up public outrage against the Taliban by decrying the mistreatment of Afghan women goes to Saudi Arabia and keeps its mouth shut. McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Starbucks make women stand in separate lines. Hotels like the InterContinental and Sheraton won’t rent a woman a room without a letter from a company vouching for her ability to pay; women checking into hotels alone are regarded as prostitutes. Saudi Arabia is still the place where America colludes, where we have quietly decided that women’s rights are negotiable.
Terrorism and security are questions of cost. That’s what a Saudi oil official told me when I interviewed him that summer. He was irritated with America for urging its citizens to leave the kingdom.
“The U.S. government is discouraging people from coming to Saudi Arabia, and at the same time they’re recruiting people to go to Iraq,” he snorted. “As if that were safer.”
We were sitting in a Riyadh skyscraper, one of the many anonymous towers hemmed in by webs of freeway. Far below Mercedeses and Hummers coursed through the dusk toward a flat horizon, along corridors of shop windows asparkle in silver and silk.
“I believe in the human capacity for making good things and making bad things,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s a question of cost. It’s an economic issue.”
Saudi men often raised the question of women with me; they seemed to hope that I would tell them, out of courtesy or conviction, that I endorsed their way of life. They blamed all manner of Western ills, from gun violence to alcoholism, on women’s liberation. “Do you think you could ever live here?” they asked. It sounded absurd every time, and every time I would repeat the obvious: No.
I was there when, inspired by the war in Iraq and a general enthusiasm for Arab voting, the kingdom called for municipal elections. Women couldn’t vote, let alone run, in elections that filled just half the seats on impotent city councils. Still, in a simulacrum of democracy, candidates pitched tents in vacant lots and hosted voters for long nights of coffee and poetry readings. I stepped inside a tent one night; men milled around on thick layers of carpet, sipping thimbles of coffee in white robes bleached spotless by a hidden army of women. When they caught sight of me, they turned their backs and muttered. The campaign manager, who had invited me to the tent in a flourish of liberalism, rushed to my side, apologies spilling from gritted teeth. The citizens were angry at the sight of a woman, he said. I was costing his man votes; if I stayed, he’d lose the election. So I picked my way back out of the tent, eyes dazzled by portable lights, and waited in the vast desert night for one of the men to drive me home.
A few days later, a U.S. official from Washington gave a press appearance in a hotel lobby in Riyadh. Sporting pearls, a business suit, and a bare, blond head, she praised the Saudi elections.
“[The election] is a departure from their culture and their history,” she said. “It offers to the citizens of Saudi Arabia hope … It’s modest, but it’s dramatic.”
The American ambassador, a Texan oilman named James Oberwetter, chimed in from a nearby seat.
“When I got here a year ago, there were no political tents,” he said. “It’s like a backyard political barbeque in the U.S.”
One afternoon, a candidate invited me to meet his daughter, a demure twenty-something who folded her hands in her lap and spoke fluent English. I asked her about the elections.
“Very good,” she said impassively.
So you really think so, I said, even though you can’t vote?
“Of course. Why do I need to vote?”
Her father interrupted. Speaking English for my benefit, he urged her to be candid. But she insisted: What good was voting? She looked pityingly at me, a woman cast adrift on rough seas, no male protector in sight.
“Maybe you don’t want to vote,” I said. “But wouldn’t you like to make that choice yourself?”
“I don’t need to,” she said, slowly and deliberately. “If I have a father or a husband, why do I need to vote? Why should I need to work? They will take care of everything.”
Some Saudi women are proudly defensive, convinced that any discussion of women’s rights is a disguised attack on Islam from a hostile Westerner. But some of them fought quietly, like the young dental student who sat up half the night for months to write a groundbreaking novel exploring the internal lives and romances of young Saudi women. Or the oil expert who scolded me for asking about driving rights, pointing out the pitfalls of divorce and custody laws: “Driving is the least of our problems.” I met women who worked as doctors and business consultants. Many of them seemed content enough.
But they are stuck, and so are the men. Over coffee one afternoon, an economist told me wistful stories of studying alongside his wife in the United States. His wife drove herself around; she was an independent, outspoken woman. Coming home to Riyadh had depressed both of them.
“Here, I got another dependent: my wife,” he grumbled. He chauffered and chaperoned her as if she were a child. “When th
ey see a woman walking alone here, it’s like a wolf watching a sheep. ‘Let me take what’s unattended.’”
Both he and his wife believed, desperately, that social and political reform needed to materialize. Foreign academics were too easy on Saudi Arabia, he argued, urging only minor changes instead of all-out democracy because they secretly regarded Saudis as “savages” unsuited for a surfeit of freedom.
“I call them propaganda papers,” he said. “They come up with all these lame excuses.”
The couple had already lost hope; their minds were on the next generation. All they could do, they thought, was speak frankly.
“For ourselves, the train has left the station. We are trapped,” the economist said. “I think about my kids. At least when I look at myself in the mirror I’ll say: ‘At least I said this. At least I wrote this.’”
The story was on the front page: A nine-year-old girl had been stabbed to death by her father and stepmother. It happened in Mecca—Islam’s most sacred city, home to the holiest of holy shrines.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 15
