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

early
hours of the morning.
    Three mutawas had been told of the
indignation from the foreign community, and they stood with the
armed guards at the entry of the delivery theater to ensure that no
sympathetic foreigner assisted the girl to escape. After delivery,
the girl was wheeled back into her room. The mutawas informed the
physician that the new mother would be removed on that day and
taken away to be stoned for her crime against God. The fate of the
newborn had not been determined since the family had refused to
raise the child as their own.
    With horror in her eyes, the nurse stated
that the young girl had tearfully told the physician the events
that had led to her tragic situation. Her name was Amal and she was
the daughter of a shopkeeper in Riyadh. She had been only thirteen
years old when the event occurred that shattered her world. She had
just begun to veil.
    It was a Thursday night (equivalent to
Saturday nights in the Western world). Amal’s parents had traveled
to the Emirates for the weekend and would not return until Saturday
noon. Three Filipino house servants were sleeping and the driver
was in his small gate house, far removed from the main dwelling.
Amal’s older married siblings were living in other areas of the
city. Of the family, only she and her seventeen-year-old brother
were left at home. Her brother and the three Filipinos had been
instructed to take care of her. Her brother had taken the
opportunity to entertain a large group of teenage friends while his
parents were out of the country. Amal heard loud music and voices
late into the evening; the game room was located directly below her
bedroom. She thought that her brother and his friends were more
than likely smoking marijuana, a substance with which her brother
had lately become enamored.
    Finally, when the walls of Amal’s bedroom
began to vibrate from the sounds of the bass from the stereo, she
decided to go downstairs to ask her brother and his friends to turn
down their music. Dressed only in her thin nightgown, she had no
intention of entering the room, just poking her head into the
doorway to yell for peace and quiet. The lights were dim, and the
room was dark; her brother did not respond to her cries, so the
girl went inside to look for him.
    Amal’s brother was not to be found. The other
teenage boys in the room were obviously heated with drugs and talk
of women, for Amal was pounced upon by several boys at once and
found herself pinned to the floor. She screamed for her brother and
tried to make the boys understand that she was the daughter of the
house, but her pleas did not register in their drugged minds. Her
gown was ripped from her body. She was brutally assaulted by her
brother’s friends, as they had turned into a frenzied mob. The
volume of the music muffled the sounds of the attack, and no one
heard her screams for help. Amal lost consciousness after the third
boy raped her.
    Her brother had been in the bathroom, but he
was so drugged that he had slumped against the wall and slept in a
haze through the remainder of the night. Later, when the dawn of
light cleared the heads of the attackers and Amal’s true identity
was revealed, the boys fled the villa.
    Amal was taken to a nearby hospital by the
driver and the Filipinos. The doctor in the emergency room notified
the police. The mutawas became involved. Due to Amal’s seclusion as
a female, she could not identify her attackers by name, only that
they were acquaintances of her brother. Their names were taken from
Amal’s brother, but by the time they were collected and asked to
appear before the police for statements, they had taken great pains
to collaborate on their story. According to the boys’ version of
the evening, no drugs had been present. They acknowledged only that
they had been playing loud music and having innocent fun. They said
the girl had entered the room in a sheer nightdress and enticed
them to have sex. She told the boys she had been upstairs reading a
book on sex and had a great deal of curiosity. They swore that they
had turned her down at first, but that she behaved in such a bold
manner—sitting on their laps, kissing them, fingering her body—that
they could not hold back any longer. The girl had been left without
a chaperon and was determined to have a good time with some boys.
They declared that she was insatiable and had begged them all to
participate.
    The parents returned from the Emirates.
Amal’s mother believed her