Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia

can buy and a ruinous example of
what was wrong with our country).
    My sisters and I gathered around our mother,
for our auntie was now out of control and screaming accusations
about the family. She was particularly incensed at Crown Prince
Faisal and blamed him for her husband’s dilemma. She told us that
the brothers of her husband had conspired to take the throne that
had been given by their father to the one of his choice, Sa’ud. She
cried out that the religious council, the Ulema, had arrived at the
palace that very morning and had informed her husband that he must
step aside as king.
    I was entranced by the scene before me, for
rarely do we view confrontation in our society. It is our nature to
speak softly and agree with those before us and then to handle
difficulties in a secret manner. When our auntie, who was a very
beautiful woman with long black curls, began to tear out her hair
and rip her expensive pearls from her neck, I knew this was a
serious matter. Finally my mother had calmed her enough to lead her
to the sitting room for a cup of soothing tea. My sisters gathered
around the closed door and tried to hear their whispering. I kicked
around the large clumps of hair with my toe and stooped to gather
the large smooth pearls. I found myself with fistfuls of pearls and
placed them in an empty vase in the hallway for safekeeping.
    Mother guided our weeping auntie to her
waiting black Mercedes. We all watched as the driver sped away with
his inconsolable passenger. We never saw our auntie again, for she
accompanied Uncle Sa’ud and his entourage into exile. But our
mother did advise us against feeling harsh toward our uncle Faisal.
She said that our auntie had uttered such words because she was in
love with a kind and generous man, but such a man does not
necessarily make the best ruler. She told us that Uncle Faisal was
leading our country into a stable and prosperous era, and by doing
so, he earned the wrath of those less capable. Although by Western
standards my mother was uneducated, she was truly wise.
     

Chapter Two: Family
    My mother, encouraged by King Faisal’s wife
Iffat, managed to educate her daughters, despite my father’s
resistance. For many years, my father refused even to consider the
possibility. My five older sisters received no schooling other than
to memorize the Koran from a private tutor who came to our home.
For two hours, six afternoons a week, they would repeat words after
the Egyptian teacher, Fatima, a stern woman of about forty-five
years of age. She once asked my parents’ permission to expand my
sisters’ education to include science, history, and math. Father
responded with a firm no and the recital of the Prophet’s words,
and his words alone continued to ring throughout our villa.
    As the years passed, Father saw that many of
the royal families were allowing their daughters the benefit of an
education. With the coming of the great oil wealth, which relieved
nearly all Saudi women, other than the bedouin tribes people and
rural villagers, from any type of work, inactivity and boredom
became a national problem. Members of the Royal Family are much
wealthier than most Saudis, yet the oil wealth brought servants
from the Far East and other poor regions into every home.
    All children need to be stimulated, but my
sisters and I had little or nothing to do other than to play in our
rooms or lounge in the women’s gardens. There was nowhere to go and
little to do, for when I was a child, there was not even a zoo or a
park in the city.
    Mother, weary of five energetic daughters,
thought that school would relieve her while expanding our minds.
Finally, Mother, with the assistance of Auntie Iffat, wore Father
down to weak acceptance. And so it came to be that the five
youngest daughters of our family, including Sara and myself,
enjoyed the new age of reluctant acceptance of education for
females.
    Our first classroom was in the home of a
royal relative. Seven families of the Al Sa’ud clan employed a
young woman from Abu Dhabi, a neighboring Arab city in the
Emirates. Our small group of pupils, sixteen in all, was known in
those days as a Kutab, a group method then popular for teaching
girls. We gathered daily in the home of our royal cousin from nine
o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, Saturday
through Thursday.
    It was there that my favorite sister, Sara,
first displayed her brilliance. She was much quicker than girls
twice her age. The