Jean P Sasson - [Princess 02] (16 page)

I knew that the total value of Amani's jewelry alone was well into the millions of dollars, and it had been given to her by those who loved her and desired economic security for her future. I promised myself that if Amani genuinely wanted to provide for the poor, then money would be given to her for that purpose.

Feeling depressed and unappreciated for our generosity, I remembered the millions of riyals Kareem and I had quietly donated over the years to the poor of the world. In addition to the required zakah liability, the percentage of our annual income not needed for our daily living expenses, Kareem and I contribute an extra 15 percent of our income for purposes of education and medical care to various Muslim countries less fortunate than Saudi Arabia. Never have we forgotten the words of the Prophet: "If you give alms openly, that is well, but if you give them to the needy in private, it is even better for you, and will atone for some of your bad deeds. Allah is aware of all you do."

Thinking of the funds we had provided to build medical clinics, schools, and private dwellings in the poorest of Muslim lands, I felt the keen desire to remind Amani of the enormity of the financial contributions made by her parents. Had my child discounted our charitable activities as meaningless? Or was her true desire to turn our family into beggars, like those who benefited from our great wealth?

Returning to my bed, I lay quiet for over two hours, thinking thoughts, discarding wild ideas, not knowing how to do battle with a force that is higher than any man.

Darkness had fallen over my room when Kareem came home from his Jeddah offices.

"Sultana! Are you ill?" Kareem switched on several lamps and walked to my bed, peering down at my face with concern.

"Your face is flushed. Do you have a fever?" I did not answer my husband's questions. Instead, I took a deep, tortured breath. "Kareem, one of your flesh and blood is plot ting the overthrow of the monarchy."

Kareem's face turned from pale brown to bright red in a matter of seconds. "What?"

I feebly waved my hand in the air. "Amani. Today, our daughter held a meeting of young princesses and good friends. I accidentally overheard her speaking. She is using the Koran to turn her youthful cousins and acquaintances against the leadership of our family."

Kareem clicked his tongue in the Arab manner that denotes disbelief. He laughed. "You are crazy, Sultana. Amani is the least likely of our children to incite violence."

I shook my head. "No more. Religion has strengthened our child. She is beginning to resemble a hungry lion rather than a gentle lamb." I repeated to Kareem what I had overheard.

Kareem made a face. "Sultana. Believe me when I say this latest passion is nothing more than a passing phase. Ignore her. Soon she will tire of her excesses.

It was clear that Kareem himself was tired of the topic of Amani's religious conversion. I had talked of little else during the past week. Amani's passionate embrace of all things extreme in our religion tortured her mother, while her father dismissed his daughter's fervor with a joke and a prediction that it would be short-lived.

I realized that Kareem and I would not share and resolve this latest crisis together as we had in Maha's case. I felt the fight go out of my body. For the first moment since giving birth to Abdullah so many years before, I grew weary of motherhood, and wondered how many more generations of women could be enticed to burden themselves with the solitary and thankless procreation, nourishing, and guidance of the human race.

With a rasping sound in my throat, I cried out to my husband, "How lonely is the life of a woman!"

Fearing that I would react in an extreme manner to my grief, Kareem patted me tenderly on my back, and sweetly asked if I would like my dinner served to me privately in our quarters. He said he would take the evening meal alone with our children, if that were the case.

With a sigh of martyrdom, I decided not to stay alone. I had been in solitude for many hours, and I did not want to give Amani the idea that her mother was sulking. I pushed myself off the bed and told my husband I would freshen myself for dinner and see him downstairs.

Kareem and I met in the small family sitting room, and since we were an hour early for dinner, I asked him to go with me on a stroll in the Turkish bath and garden area.

Remembering the evening we had shared before, Kareem thought I was feeling romantic, and his eyes caressed my face with tenderness.

I returned his smile, but in reality I wanted to examine the garden area and see what evidence, if any, my child had left of her religious meeting with her friends and royal cousins.

We entered a large, beautiful courtyard that had been designed by a famous Italian fashion designer.

Over the years, many of our royal cousins had attempted unsuccessfully to copy the loveliness of our unique "Turkish room." A flowing waterfall situated in the back of the room emptied clear water into a large circular pool inhabited by many exotic fish. A stone path circled the pool, and beautiful flowers, tenderly cared for by the staff of gardeners, lined the walkway. Two raised sit ting areas were located to the left and to the right. Lush green foliage imported from Thai land was draped over the rattan furnishings, which were covered in pastel cushions. Glass-topped tables were set about the sitting areas, and it was a most pleasant spot for our family to enjoy morning or evening coffee.

The walls were made of special tinted glass, but the greenery was so abundant and dense that it shaded us from the hot rays of the sun. A stone pathway, carved with the faces of various wild animals, led around the waterfall. I felt sad as I walked on the face of a giraffe, for I remembered that Kareem had had the stones specially carved for Amani, as a surprise to our animal-worshiping child.

The walkway took us to the Turkish bath area. Our home in Cairo had such a room, and I had requested the Italian designer to study that design and duplicate it at our palace in Jeddah.

The Turkish bathhouse contained four baths, each one in a different style and size, centered in a fashionable life of luxury, which could hardly be afforded without the vast wealth of the Saudi oil fields, I swept my hand across the lovely setting of the Turkish bath. "This," I said to Kareem, "is what our daughter believes is a great sin, to enjoy what God has seen fit to provide our family."

My husband made no response.

I pressed him further. "Kareem, we must take action. Or do you want your own flesh and blood to lead the revolt that will bring down the house of Al Sa'ud?"

Kareem, still not believing his daughter capable of serious mischief, refused to further analyze Amani's disenchantment with our royal status, saying only that our daughter should be left to her consoling faith, even if it was against her mother's obstinate resistance.

Holding me tightly by my shoulders, Kareem forbade me to mention the subject again, making a ridiculous statement. "Sultana," he said, "I decided long ago that each of us must respect the other's delusions, or there will be no peace in our home. Now! Drop this disagreeable subject!"

After days of soul-searching, I finally reached the understanding that I was not to blame for my daughter's new direction in life. I decided that Amani's zeal for a cause was a direct result of Saudi Arabia's horrendous poverty, which had been relieved by sudden and enormous wealth. To get to the heart of the matter, I had to go back in time.

Many people, Muslims and Christians alike, despise Saudis for their unearned wealth. Yet, few bother to understand the wretched poverty endured by all Saudi Arabians until the mid-I 970s. I highly resent this hasty analysis of our current situation.

Many years passed after the actual discovery of oil under the sand of the desert before our people benefited from the riches guaranteed by the oil production that had been organized by American companies. In the beginning, King Abdul Aziz, my grandfather and the founder of Saudi Arabia, trusted the smooth-talking men who made false promises, not understanding that the deals they struck put millions into the pockets of the Americans and paltry sums into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Only when the American oil companies were forced to be fair did they behave in a principled manner.

Thus, due to the disproportionate method of dividing the proceeds from the oil wealth, it took many years for the bedouin tents of the desert to be replaced by luxurious villas and palaces. Meanwhile, the people of Saudi Arabia suffered greatly. Infant mortality in Saudi Arabia was among the highest in the world, for there was no money, doctors, or hospitals to treat the sick. The Saudi diet consisted of dates, camel milk, and goat and camel meat.

I can remember seeing the desperate look in the eyes of one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom as he shared the horrifying tale of his early years. A brilliant and highly respected man of business, he spent the first fifteen years of his life going from door to door in the mud-hut village of Riyadh, in an attempt to sell small bags of goat's milk. He was the man of the family at age seven, for his father had died of a slight infection received when he cut himself with his sword while slaughtering a camel for the Haj feast. The infection had turned to gangrene, and his father had left the living with screams of great pain rending the air.

As was the custom of the day, the young boy's mother was wed to a surviving brother of his father, a man who had many children of his own. The young boy felt responsible for his five younger siblings.

Four of the five children were buried by his own hand, their deaths the result of poor nutrition and lack of medical facilities. His brutish climb to prosperity was a tale of Dickensian horror.

After a youth spent amid dire poverty, it was quite natural that the first Saudi generation to know the power of wealth would pamper their offspring, showering them with all that their money could purchase. While Kareem and I grew to adulthood without knowing need, we understood the vital force of our parents' poverty, which had made a lasting impact during our youth. However, the children born from our generation never knew deprivation, even second-hand, and so did not realize what it really meant to be poor.

Civilization followed a natural course, for concentrated wealth balanced insecurely upon a lost heritage may at any moment be dismissed as of no value. It was only a matter of time until the shaky foundations began to tumble.

The conventions and traditions accepted by past generations were questioned by my generation.

The generation that followed mine often, wholly without restraint, followed their animal instincts.

This primitive rejection of social order brought forth a natural backlash of religious fanaticism and disdain for extravagant fortunes.

Now, those who are most fanatical are the offspring of my generation. Having never known life without great wealth, and spared any knowledge of the consequences of wrenching poverty, our children and the children of our acquaintances are scornful of our economic ease and are searching for a purpose greater than the accumulation of additional riches.

My child Amani became a leader of a group of women who strive to be even more militant than the men who lead the faithful to overturn the throne claimed by the Al Sa'ud clan.

While Amani sought to save the souls of those she knows as relatives, or claims as friends, she brought forth a confession from her cousin Faten, the child of my brother, Ali, that none of us could ever have imagined.

No man has been haughtier with women than Ali. As a child, he treated his ten sisters with contempt. As a young man living in America, he bedded and casually discarded hundreds of Western women. As a husband, he treated his wives as slaves, caring little about their happiness, careful to wed girls at first puberty so that they knew little of man's nature and accepted his perverse behavior as normal. In addition to four wives, Ali settled one concubine after the other in his home. As a father, he virtually ignored his daughters and showered affection on his sons.

It was only natural that his son Majed, brother of Faten, grew into a sadistic youth who considered women nothing more than sexual objects.

Looking back, I know now that Majed would have been beheaded or shot to death by a firing squad had his crime become common knowledge. Nothing could have saved him from this fate, not even the fact that he is the son of a high-ranking prince, for his sin was without precedent in the Al Sa'ud family.

We had returned to our home in Riyadh, where each afternoon after school Amani continued her daily Koran sessions with those relatives who were interested in returning to the times of darkness, when women would remain silent on all aspects of life that did not occur within the confines of their homes.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, and I watched from my bedroom balcony as one after another of my daughter's friends and relatives left our driveway in the safety of their chauffeur-driven limousines.

Faten, the daughter of my brother, Ali, was the last to leave, and I thought it odd that she and Amani talked for many long moments, with passionate embraces exchanged on more than one occasion.

Sadly, I guessed that Faten, in her desperate unhappiness as the daughter of my unfeeling brother, had fiercely seized the cause my child had offered her.

Desperate to return to a normal relationship with my child, I cautioned myself not to introduce the topic of religion with Amani ever again, but to let God lead her where he wanted her to go. Still, I thought to interest Amani in a game of backgammon or cards, to see if I could focus her mind on something other than her faith.

When I timidly knocked on my daughter's door, there was no response. I heard the sound of weeping and entered her room. I felt irritation sweep through my body, for there sat Amani, holding the Koran in one hand and wiping her tears with the other. While I wanted to shout that religion was not meant to sadden a person, I resisted the urge and knelt at my child's feet. I began to pat her knee and calmly question her on the cause of her grief.

Expecting to hear that she had received some message from God not meant for my ears, I was startled when she replied, "Mummy, I am truly grieved by what I must do!"