Inside the Kingdom (17 page)

CHAPTER 9

Dawn Visitors

I
n the early 1980s, Fawzia Al-Bakr became one of the first Saudi women to write in the newspapers under her own name.

“Women used to hide behind bylines like
Bint al-Badia
[‘Daughter of the Desert’],” she remembers. “I thought that was stupid. I had nothing to hide.”

Twenty-one years old and a teaching assistant at the University of Riyadh, the forthright Ms. Al-Bakr delivered her views through a weekly full-page column in the relatively conservative newspaper
Al-Jazeera
.
⁹

“I wrote about women and freedom and things like the wrongness of modern men having more than one wife. I argued the need for civil organizations in Saudi Arabia to advance human rights.”

Al-Bakr never went into the
Al-Jazeera
office—there were no facilities for women to work there—and she never met the male editor of her page. She was planning to do so, but one morning in June 1982 when she was organizing exams at the university, she was summoned to the principal’s office. Two men in thobes were waiting for her, with a woman, who asked politely if they could escort her to her home. It was her first contact with the fabled Mabahith, literally “the detectives,” Saudi Arabia’s secret police.

The Mabahith are a department of the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, so vast and pervasive in their watchfulness that
secret
is scarcely the word for them. They have woven themselves into the very fabric of Saudi life. There is a Mabahith informant praying in every significant Saudi mosque, ready to make a phone call should the imam’s sermon get too fiery, nor would any university faculty be complete without its careful listener by the coffee machine. The proudly worn badge of the Interior Ministry’s security forces actually depicts a huge, staring eye—though in 1979 they had been caught out by both the eastern intifada and by the seizing of the Grand Mosque. It was not entirely their fault—they had captured the “Mahdi” himself before the seizure, after all, only to be told to let him go—but it had spurred them to redouble their intelligence gathering, with mixed results. While the intensified border patrols of the ministry had not picked up many militants, they had gathered a rich harvest of alcohol smugglers. The price of black-market whisky in Jeddah had exploded from one hundred dollars to as much as four hundred dollars per bottle.

As Fawzia Al-Bakr reached her family home in the company of her polite but unsmiling escorts, she tried to warn her teenage brother.

“Wasalu zuwwar al-fajr!”
she whispered—“The dawn visitors have arrived!” Her brother’s eyes opened wide with horror.

The plainclothes officers escorted her up to her bedroom, where they searched through her desk and cupboards.

“They took all my notebooks and files,” she recalls. “I told my mother it was something to do with missing exam papers.”

It was not until Al-Bakr found herself at an office of the Interior Ministry that she realized the full danger of her situation.

“There was a crowd of other women who had been brought in, with a lot of policemen milling round, and I thought I must be dreaming. Then they started reading out the names—‘the prisoner Fawzia Al-Bakr.’ I nearly fainted. One of the women had to hold me upright.”

The new prisoner was issued a blanket and a dirty gown, then locked alone in a cell inside the ministry building.

“The food was atrocious. It was prepared by bedouin women who looked after us. They were very nice ladies, but also very simple. They could not read or write. I think they were the wives of soldiers or National Guardsmen.”

In the small hours of every morning, at around 2 A.M., the police summoned Al-Bakr for questioning. One of the bedouin women escorted her to the interrogation room.

“They were very civil. There was no suggestion of torture or intimida tion, but they kept on asking the same things. The interrogators changed, but the questions they asked were the same: ‘Have you seen these leaflets?’ ‘What do you think of the government?’ ‘Do you belong to Al-Haraka Al-Wataniya [the National Movement]?’ ”

Al-Haraka Al-Wataniya was a group of liberals who were campaigning for reform in the late 1970s and early ’80s. They were particularly opposed to the conservative trend of social policy since Juhayman, and because political gatherings were forbidden in Saudi Arabia, they were, by definition, an “underground” organization. Academic and intellectual, with a high proportion of members who had completed their educations in the West, they included freethinkers and atheists who liked to label themselves “Communist,” risking the fierce shariah law penalties on those who renounce their faith. But their agenda did not extend far beyond talk.

“I’d turned down invitations to join various organizations—there was one called Al-Islahiyoon [the Reformists]. I just wasn’t interested in joining things. I only wanted to write my columns. But I was obviously campaigning for the same sorts of changes as the Reformists, the National Movement, and all the others. Who wouldn’t, the way things were going?”

After a week the women were moved from the ministry cells to villas in the Riyadh suburb of Suleymaniya.

“I think they’d pulled in so many people they couldn’t cope. There was a great panic in those years after Juhayman and the Shia riots. The government was overwhelmed. They must have rented these villas—compounds built for expatriates. They were quite comfortable, we each had our own room. But the windows were blocked, and we could not meet with each other. We spoke to each other through the lavatory pipes. I got to know one woman, Zahrah, a Shia, an artist—she could not stand being on her own. She was screaming all the time. And every night they’d take me for the same questioning for two hours or more.”

The worst thing for Al-Bakr was having no contact with her family.

“They had no idea where I was, if I was dead or alive—whether I would ever come back. My father went every day to Prince Salman’s office. Nothing—they wouldn’t tell him anything. It was terrible for them.”

Making the family feel the pain was part of the Mabahith technique.

“It’s good to get the family involved,” explains a currently serving Mabahith officer. “It means that they’ll probably put pressure on the troublemaker when he (or she) comes out of detention. We have also found that while many detainees might be willing personally to go back inside again, they moderate their behavior for the sake of sparing their family—particularly their mother.”

The assistant professor kept up her own spirits by trying to memorize the Koran, the only book she was allowed.

“It was good for my Arabic language. You can use any experience that does not break you to build yourself up. One lady tried to commit suicide, so they took all our mirrors away. That was surprisingly difficult, not being able to see yourself. After a time you begin to wonder if you are still there.”

One day, with no warning, after nearly three months of detention, one of the female guards came to tell her to pack up her things.

“
‘Khalas!’
she said—‘It’s finished’—I could go home. Some official phoned my family to say I was coming out that night, and they were all there to greet me, my cousins and my aunts—it was a wonderful party.”

Great was the rejoicing at the university.

“My boss, the dean, Dr. Mansour Al-Hasmy, gave me a special award—Honorary Employee of the Year. He made a big deal of it. He wanted to make a public point on the campus about freedom. And he worked really hard to get me a scholarship the next year to go to the University of Oregon. The newspaper,
Al-Jazeera
, had also been supportive—they had kept sending me my paychecks all the time I was inside.”

But her mother found it hard to celebrate.

“My mother is a loyal Saudi citizen, but to this day she is mad at Prince Nayef.”

From the traditional, family point of view, Fawzia’s three months behind bars had been a social catastrophe.

“What angered my mother most was that it had ruined my marriage prospects. What family would allow their son to marry a girl who had been to prison?”

The gazellelike oryx is Arabia’s most graceful form of wildlife, and, according to an old Saudi joke, the survival of the oryx became a matter of concern to the Ministry of the Interior. So they called in the world’s top security forces, America’s FBI and Britain’s SAS, to see if they could track down a specimen—while also inviting their own secret police, the Mabahith, to show what they could do.

After a day, the FBI reported in. “We’ve located an animal a few miles from our camp. We’ve got it in our sights. Give us the word and we’ll pull the trigger.”

A day later, the SAS called. “We’ve got one surrounded, but she appears to be pregnant. We recommend approaching with extreme caution.”

But from the Mabahith came no word—not that day nor the next. After a week of waiting, a search party was sent out, which eventually located the elite corps of Saudi detectives, miles from the oryx grounds, all huddled around in a circle, menacing a frightened rabbit. One of them was holding the rabbit up by the scruff of the neck, while another was indulging in the Mabahith’s then nationally notorious form of torture—beating the prisoner hard with a stick on the soles of its feet. This tactic is said to derive from a saying of the Prophet that punishment should leave no mark on the body, so as they walloped away at their victim’s leathery soles, Saudi interrogators could comfort themselves with the reflection that their torture was truly “Islamic.”

“Come on, come on! Stop wasting our time!” the interrogator was shouting at the captive rabbit. “We know the truth! Admit that you’re an oryx!”

The work of the Mabahith was scarcely more subtle in real life. Working as Riyadh editor for the English language newspaper
Saudi Gazette,
the young American journalist Peter Theroux noticed how his office telephone would go dead at crucial moments.

“It was as if certain phrases triggered a cutoff,” he remembers. “An American woman once rang me offering a story about strange things that her husband was discovering at a military facility. The moment she mentioned the name of the base, the phone line went dead. She rang back, and the connection cut out again the moment she mentioned the name.”

It was not the sort of story that Theroux would have touched with a barge pole, in any case. He had soon learned the so-called red lines (
khutoot hamra
) within which the Saudi media had to operate. There were a set of undefined but generally understood conventions—the Palestinians could do no wrong, the Israelis could do no right, there should be not a whisper of dissent about the king or the religious establishment, and there should be no “bad news” stories that might make readers discontented. It sometimes seemed that too many paragraphs about the Kingdom’s appallingly high rate of traffic accidents could be judged seditious.

To avoid any doubt, the editors in chief of all the newspapers were summoned to a monthly meeting at the Ministry of Information to discover the red lines of the moment—some papers actually published photographs of their editor with the minister “discussing the topics of the day.” Peter Theroux remembers the outcome of one such discussion in the spring of 1982 following the horrific, Guernica-style destruction of the flourishing town of Hama by the Syrian government that February. Intent on eliminating the Muslim Brotherhood, the Assad regime had organized the brutal murder of ten thousand or so opponents, and as many more innocent bystanders. Hama remains a backwater to this day.

“How could you ignore something as ghastly and inhuman as that?” recalls Theroux. “It was beyond dispute that the massacre had happened, and there was no doubt that our readers would be looking for some comment in the editorials. It was not as if Syria was any special friend to the Saudis. But the word came down from the ministry not to criticize: ‘Syria is an Arab sister. Bash Begin [Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister] instead.’ ”