In the Land of Invisible Women (31 page)

My image of monarchy in the Kingdom was molded after that of my Saudi friends. Zubaidah and Ghadah, even Jane, who had actually met the highest levels of Saudi monarchy, saw the Crown Prince Abdullah as a benevolent and indulgent prince who had a fondness for all in his Kingdom. He was adored especially as a champion of women. In time, listening to the Saudi women who had lived in the Kingdom all their lives, I had conjured an image of a powerful yet avuncular man.

As I studied a huge banner being applied to the building, something completely different came into view. Next to the gargantuan canvas, dozens of thin, sun-burned workers were rendered Lilliputian in size. In the image I was reminded of dictatorship. Something about the scale of the picture—its gray and white palette; its elevated vantage; its monumental supremacy—was distinctly pharonic.

I watched the Bengali laborers. They tied the canvas tight with ropes, ensnaring a fluttering Gulliver. I was deeply disturbed by the iconography. In the Kingdom, the rulers were revered almost to the point of idolatry. I thought about my own short Queen, a Sovereign in humdrum hats and handbags. There was something ordinary and mundane about her stature. Somehow she remained of us, rather than apart from us, even though she was the undisputed monarch. I could recall no image of her of the same stature as the one at which I gazed. In a country ruled by iconoclastic Wahabiism where followers refused even to display their facial photographs on their ID badges and any art other than geometry was scorned upon, I couldn't tally the contrasts of the towering image above. The Islamic ideals I understood to be universal and the reality of living in the Kingdom seemed again to clash. I stood gazing into the gray, blind, canvas eye of the Prince overhead. It revealed nothing.

The next morning, once more on the way to work, I noticed all the unrolled grass had already been neatly turfed. The bald palm trees, slowly relaxing their scant, tall leaves, were now surrounded by an undulating landscape of rolling greens. Overnight the avenue leading to the hospital had morphed into a Jack Nicklaus golf course. Here and there, gardeners worked on trimming the edges of the lawn with diligent precision. Only one problem remained: without rain for more than twelve months, the grass, transported from elsewhere in the Kingdom, was a dull, inanimate brown.

The workers hurled water at it through myriad hoses and a new sprinkler system, but still it remained a resistant bronze. A South Indian foreman was screaming at the workers. They cowered under the shower of his verbal abuse but even the best gardener was powerless against the prevailing four percent humidity of Riyadh, where annual rainfall rarely exceeds four inches. I severely doubted the grass would be green for the Prince's entourage of black S-Class Benzes, which was due to roll by this avenue in the late morning of the next day. I had underestimated the landscapers' ingenuity.

On Wednesday morning, again Zachariah drove me to work. It was seven a.m. The Crown Prince was due in at eleven. Overnight the transformation had continued. Isolated gardeners were evening out the final ripples in the now lovely and verdant vista. Even the trees seemed a little more settled in their new roots. One worker, trailing a damp towel tucked into the rear hip pocket of his blue boiler suit, sprayed what looked to be pesticide with a motorized pump. He sprayed the now green lawn evenly and consistently. I was puzzled. I had never noticed mosquitoes in Riyadh, and pesticide in February was distinctly unusual. The city was perched on an arid plateau. Now that I considered it, I had never seen the grass being sprayed before. But as I took in the lush scene, perhaps all the watering had paid off. The lawn looked sumptuous, a perfect green, no traces of the dull brown grass remained.

I commented to Zachariah that the green grass looked wonderful. Months since I had ventured out of the Kingdom, I found myself craving greenery. The smell of fresh-cut grass, the universal marker since my English childhood of the onset of summer, had long escaped my memory here in the sterile Kingdom. And that's when it struck me: though I could see grass, I couldn't smell it.

The men were not watering the grass; they were spraying it an emerald green. This was Ireland in an atomizer. The workers were coloring the dead, hurrying to finish before the Crown Prince's gaze would zoom by, perhaps peering through the bullet-proofed, tinted, heavily armored glass of his German car.

So much about the Kingdom concerned outward appearances. Veneer was as important as substance, perhaps more so. The Crown Prince's entourage would arrive in moments, so the vista must appear perfect. Climate was hardly an excuse. I was astonished at the efforts, seemingly wasteful, to welcome royalty. As the Bengali workers toiled in prostrate dignity, I was struck by the futility of their efforts. They had slaved for days to create an illusion that may or may not elicit royal note. If the Prince was studying his speech as he passed by in muted luxury, he might miss the entire scene, invalidating their days of underpaid effort.

A few hours later, the royal party arrived in a fleet of two dozen racing Mercedes. They rushed through the barriers, not stopping until they reached the steps of the building. The motorcade had sped past the newly minted avenue at fifty miles per hour. I doubted the Prince had even glimpsed the greened grass. The aging Regent stepped out of his vehicle and slowly greeted a waiting reception line of carefully selected Caucasian nurses.

Less than an hour later the motorcade left, halogen headlights blazing, brilliant even in mid-morning sunlight. As they screeched around the corner onto the Khuraij Road, a tiny Saudi beggar boy, perhaps no more than six, looked at the gleaming cars racing, blasting away. His torn thobe fluttered in the rip currents of powerful German exhausts. He coughed a little and shifted his shoeless feet on the rapidly heating asphalt. In a Kingdom of princes, paupers could only watch.

DIVORCE, SAUDI-STYLE

I
HAD HEARD OF FARIS'Sdivorce some weeks earlier. Recently he had also been hospitalized. One evening, I mentioned this to Zubaidah.

“Yes, Qanta, we heard. Someone had heard from the mosque that he was not there on Jumma (Friday prayer). But of course, we think it is a reaction to his divorce.” She fixed her hair matter-of-factly, securing it back with a final pin. We were in the women's room.

“I didn't know he was divorced, Zubaidah. In fact I didn't know he was married. I never asked him about that.”

“Oh Qanta, everyone in the Kingdom is married. It's most unusual to be like us, single and unmarried.” She cast me a sidelong, droll glance. She refused to expound. My curiosity was piqued.

A few days later, I decided to ask my colleague Imran. He was the chosen confidante of every nurse in the ICU. He always knew the latest gossip.

“Oh gosh, that's old news.” I waited for him to explain. “You must know his wife. I mean his ex-wife, Fatima? You know, she comes to our conferences. She was at the last conference we had for that patient that turned out to have vasculitis?” I did indeed remember.

I began forming a picture of Fatima. She was the extremely soft-spoken Saudi woman who was practically buried up to her nose in her veil. She always seemed to smile at me when I was in the same meetings, but being unable to see even her crow's feet, I couldn't ever be sure, and often met her with my blank, puzzled stare. She usually went on to discuss the biopsy specimens. Her advice was always pertinent. We all considered her an excellent clinician, but I didn't know anything else about her.

“So what happened, Imran? Why did they divorce?”

Imran began chuckling to himself, wheezing a little. He obviously thought something was funny. “Poor guy. It seems he fell in love with another Saudi woman, the nuclear cardiologist. Maybe you know who I mean? The one in the white veil? Anyway, it seemed he suddenly decided to take her as his second wife, because his love was so passionate for her.” Imran was obviously exercising poetic license with the story. He giggled, “You know, he even followed her to California, settling her in to her fellowship at UCSF, and planned to marry her when she returned after her training. They say he actually escorted her during her emigration, flying with her all the way. Unbelievable. Anyway, when he told Fatima, his wife, she said ‘Forget it! I am not agreeing to that.’ And she promptly asked for a divorce. Of course now the children are divided. I think they live on the same compound but now in different villas.”

“What happened to the woman he loved, the young cardiologist?” I asked, struggling to keep Imran focused on the details.

“Oh, her. Well, when she told her family that she was considering marrying a married man, they absolutely forbade it, plus it turns out she was from a different tribe and her family didn't allow inter-tribal marriages. I think she is still single.” Imran returned to some X rays and began to make a phone call.

I was suddenly reminded of the woman in question. Nameless, she always caught my eye because of the intense wrapping of her white linen veil, which covered her entire face except for her eyelids. But this woman, being particularly orthodox, was even more cautious, securing her layers of head covering with visible safety pins which she applied just next to her right eye, as though she was worried about a sudden gust of wind which might tear her precarious veil away.

The safety pin really disturbed me. I hadn't seen anything like it in the Kingdom. She peered through a tiny rent of the white linen, her quiet, blank eyes darting around, mostly in fear. Now I wondered whether she was worried about running into Fatima, who also worked at the same hospital, though I doubted that, enveloped in their veilings, they could actually recognize each other. What a mystery Faris was. I wondered how he had wooed the young doctor. In the Kingdom, a man's desire must have been particularly arduous to find its way through all these veils.

I hadn't known of anyone who intended to be divorced during my stay in the Kingdom. In a country where tribal and endogamous marriages were common and the stigma of divorce both culturally and theologically enormous, I wondered how commonly divorces could occur. I referred the question once again to Zubaidah, carefully steering myself away from the reasons she, at thirty-six, continued to remain single.

“Oh Qanta, it is becoming terribly common. We don't know why. In my opinion the women are becoming very educated and independent, and finding suitable marriage partners becomes more and more difficult for the girl's family. You know that marriage is very important for Muslims, Qanta, don't you?” I nodded. “Allah has written for us in his book there is someone for each of us. Let me remind you.” She opened the Holy Quran which she kept at her small, neat desk, searching for a passage. After a few moments, she read to me in Arabic. I waited for the translation.

“I read you the translation, Qanta,” and she glanced up at me with her gray eyes to check I was listening. In this late-afternoon light they seemed almost green.

Among His signs is [the fact] that He has created spouses for you from
among yourselves so that you may console yourselves with them. He has
planted affection and mercy between you; in that are signs for people
who think things over. (based on Quran 30:21)

“That sounds lovely, Zubaidah. So maybe he has created one such for me. I would like someone to ‘console’ me!” For a time we both laughed.

“Families here are afraid of divorce. After divorce it is hard for a Saudi woman to remarry, and anyway marriage is very expensive for the man and his family. You must have heard of the mahr, the bridal price, which must be paid to the bride (to her, not to her family, Qanta). It's due when the wedding occurs. Well, a lot of men don't have that money or have to earn for years to save it. Things are becoming difficult. We want our Saudi men to marry Saudi women, because we are a small race, but nowadays they are going overseas to marry ladies from Jordan and Lebanon and of course, sometimes Americans and Europeans, because for them the mahr isn't really enforced. So, we are left with more and more Saudi women waiting to be married.

“When they do marry, because they have waited so long, it is too much of a strain for the older Saudi woman to adjust. I think it's OK if you are like Ghadah, who got married at 19. She got to grow up with her husband, but otherwise it becomes very difficult. And while women have been waiting, in the more educated classes, they become working women, like us. Adjusting to a marriage with a man who then only wants you to be at home or to cook and raise children is a big shock. Lots of women cannot do it.”

“So women are asking for divorce, Zubaidah?”

“Of course, Qanta!” Zubaidah always became invigorated whenever she discussed Islam. “Islam permits it on several bases. The woman has just as many rights to divorce as a man; she has the right to leave if the marriage is not working. Remember always, Islam is justice, if nothing else!

“For example, if a man wants to take a second wife, that cannot happen without the first wife's permission. And if he insists, that is grounds for her asking for divorce. Islam allows additional wives to a man, up to a maximum of four on very special circumstances, let's say if the first wife cannot bear children or if she is mentally sick. Then instead of just discarding his wife, Islam allows the man to take a second wife while keeping the first. However, the Quran is very specific: the man must provide for both women equally and allow them independent living quarters of equal economic status. He has to love them equally. And right after this verse the Quran adds another restriction.” She paused to say emphatically, “The Quran says, ‘And for you as a human being this will be very difficult,’ because partiality is a natural human tendency and therefore you will not be able to fulfill the recommendations in this way.”

“In my interpretation it means that really it isn't possible for men to behave so perfectly, Qanta. So yes, Allah gives them the option, but it is not easy to meet the requirements. So polygamy is not required, it is only an allowed possibility that God expects most men will not be able to handle either spiritually, emotionally, or economically—wives are expensive, my dear!”

Zubaidah had a way of explaining everything with such clarity. It was a pleasure to learn about my religion from her knee, so to speak. What basis could Faris have had to ask for a second wife, from his wife who had borne him four children, and after such a flagrantly pursued romance of which even Imran seemed to have gleaned every detail?

I made plans to meet with Fatima and investigate. Doubtless she was feeling abandoned; perhaps she could use an inquisitive friend. Though I was single for entirely different reasons, I was astounded by the excellent company I was keeping among dozens of single, never-married women in the Kingdom—many of them extremely well-educated. By 2002 an estimated one and a half million Saudi women were estimated to be never married. Simultaneously, divorce rates have risen astronomically, to one in three Saudi marriages ending in divorce by 2002. This has met with pressure to reduce the oppressive mahr sums that Zubaidah referred to, to more affordable levels, permitting remarriage and encouraging marriage at earlier ages.
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The mahr is paid either in total at the time of the marriage and may come in the form of cash, jewels, property, or a combination of all three, or if acceptable to the bride, a certain amount is paid at the beginning of marriage and the remainder deferred until after death or if the marriage is terminated based on divorce.

These mahr, properties, for instance, or sums of money, cannot be divided as assets of the marriage after divorce. The mahr is expressly for the bride and none other. In fact, if the woman does bring other assets and wealth, perhaps of her own earnings or inheritance, into a marriage of her own, Islam demands that these remain categorically hers and cannot be settled when a marriage ends, unless she chooses to share with her husband.

According to Muslim family law, always the financial obligations of the divorced wife, the nafqa, are borne by the divorced husband, but never the other way around. A wife's status is a precious, serious, and very protected one in the eyes of Islam, and Islamic law as translated by Sharia in the Kingdom is closely integrated with these beliefs, in contrast to the hypocrisy of some of the other cultural practices that are somehow sanctioned in the Kingdom.

Some women plan their marriages with a great deal of foresight, considering possibilities like polygamy. These women, in a display of Islamic feminism, consult with religious sheikhs from their local community to insert protective clauses in their marriage contracts to hold husbands accountable to certain indisputable Islamic rights for the wives they plan to marry. These documents can be effectively thought of as prenuptial agreements.
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The women ask the sheikhs to insert clauses, known as Shurut (conditions)
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that are binding to the husband and that will protect her status after marriage; for instance, clauses that enable the woman to travel freely, the freedom to travel abroad to study, to take employment, and other liberating privileges. In order to exercise their social autonomies after marriage, these women are citing Islamic references, which in an ultraconservative world actually affirm women's rights. Sometimes the wives can specify whether or not they would permit the husband to take a second wife, and if not, they can stipulate grounds for divorce. Often the women can record in the clause that they are unsure of their possible response to the arrival of a new wife in the marriage and hold reservations permitting them to divorce on this basis if that becomes their final response.