Princess Sultana's Daughters

With Fouad’s daughter,
Fayza.”
    Staggered by confusion and skepticism, I
could not speak. With my mouth hanging open, I sat and stared at my
son.
    *
    Still in his early twenties, Jafer Dalal was
a young man admired by all who knew him. He was both handsome and
strong, with a serious but kindly countenance bespeaking quiet
wisdom and calm strength. He was a charming conversationalist, a
gentleman of refinement and courtesy. Jafer was one of but a few
young men whom Kareem trusted completely with the women of his
family.
    Jafer was Abdullah’s dearest and most
cherished friend.
    Often I told Kareem that I would have liked
to have known Jafer’s parents, for never had a man been better
raised. But that could never be, for Jafer’s mother died when he
was only twelve and his father was killed in the Lebanese civil war
when Jafer was seventeen. His one brother, older by four years, had
been critically wounded in the Lebanese war and was a permanent
resident of a nursing facility located in the south of Lebanon.
Orphaned while still a teenager and without any siblings to offer
him shelter, Jafer moved from the only home he had ever known and
traveled to live with an uncle in Kuwait, who managed some
businesses for a wealthy Kuwaiti.
    As a Palestinian Sunni Muslim, born and
raised in the refugee camps of southern Lebanon, Jafer did not have
an easy life.
    After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the PLO
stood behind Saddam Hussein. It was not surprising that after the
war ended there was much resentment by the Kuwaiti citizens toward
the large Palestinian population. While Jafer’s uncle and his
family had remained loyal to their Kuwaiti sponsor and could have
remained in Kuwait, there was such a backlash of antagonism toward
anyone with Palestinian identification that the Kuwaiti sponsor
recommended that the family move to another land. The kindly man
did not want such a fine family to risk danger by remaining in
Kuwait. “Let a few years pass,” he promised, “and the crisis will
be over.”
    This Kuwaiti sponsor co-owned a business with
Kareem, and he suggested to my husband that Jafer’s uncle would
make an excellent employee for a particular job opening in that
company’s offices in Riyadh.
    As there was some bitterness at the time
between our king and Yassir Arafat with regard to the Gulf War,
there was a political movement in Saudi Arabia to avoid employment
of people with Palestinian nationality. As a high-ranking prince,
however, Kareem could do as he pleased. On the recommendation of
his Kuwaiti partner, he employed Jafer’s uncle.
    After the man arrived in Riyadh, he became
one of Kareem’s most trusted employees, assigned difficult tasks
and responsible posts. Jafer accompanied his uncle and so impressed
my husband that he was given a management position in Kareem’s law
offices.
    From the moment Abdullah was introduced to
Jafer, the two young men became fast friends, Abdullah claiming
Jafer as the brother he never had.
    Jafer came into our lives only two short
years ago, yet he quickly became a beloved member of our
family.
    Conspicuously attractive, Jafer drew much
female attention wherever he went in the city. Abdullah claimed
that women passed his friend notes of invitation while in hotel
restaurants. Once, when Jafer accompanied Abdullah to the King
Faisal Hospital and Research Centre to visit a royal cousin who was
hospitalized there, three foreign nurses volunteered their
telephone numbers to Abdullah’s friend after the briefest of
conversations.
    I thought Jafer wise beyond his years, for it
appeared that he lived a life of celibacy in a land that frowned
upon illicit relationships between men and women.
    Sensing that the young man was lonely and of
an age to settle down, Kareem reproached Jafer for his persistent
bachelorhood. Making serious offers to introduce Jafer to Lebanese
or Palestinian contacts, men who might introduce him to
marriageable Muslim women from those countries, Kareem declared
that it would be a tragedy if Jafer avoided love, adding that even
good men could be ruined by too much virtue!
    With a wink in my direction, Kareem
mischievously added that all men should experience the pleasures
and tribulations of female companionship.
    In jest, I made a threatening move toward my
husband, for I knew the truth—that Kareem, a happy father, could
not fathom a life without children.
    Kareem failed in his attempt to provide
female company for the young man whom he had grown to