In the Land of Invisible Women (30 page)

Until payment of compensation, the surviving driver, who was partly responsible for the accident (along with the deceased), remained incarcerated. The
Arab News
reported his consulate had appealed to the local Indian community to help raise funds, but no help had been forthcoming. Somehow the anonymous Saudi man learned about the case, not knowing either the driver or the deceased, and wished to relieve the distress of both the driver's family and the victim's widow. He disbursed the monies completely unexpectedly. They were given to the Sri Lankan consulate to be wired to the widow at once.

“Wow, that is generous, Qanta!” Saraway gushed, as he read from the paper. “And they never revealed who donated the money.” Saraway paused.

“Why did he do it, Saraway? Did it say anything about the donor?”

“Let me see… yes, here at the end it mentions the donor wanted to give because while he didn't expect any reward in this life, he knew Allah is bountiful and will reward him in the next. That's all it says. He must be one rich guy.”

“And a generous one, Saraway.” I repeated the tale to Jane later in the evening. Her cynicism was partly alleviated.

“I had never heard of that before, but it does make sense. I have to say the Arabic reputation for generosity is legendary. And for good reason. You know I go to the Palace to do physiotherapy on the Crown Prince and one of his wives? They both have pretty bad osteoarthritis of the knee. Anyway, while I am on my knees working on the Princess, bending down doing the range-of-motion stuff, the courtiers are usually bustling about bringing requests from their subjects to their attention. I think they actually take them seriously. Once in a while she stops me in the middle of our exercises to make a decision. I have heard some even get to have an audience with the CP himself.”

I looked at her blankly. “Crown Prince,” she explained. “I guess think of it as town hall meetings. The princes meet with their local ‘constituencies’ as it were (can't think of a better term, Qanta), and they hold a weekly Majlis, which means a kind of conference, literally a place of sitting. People tell him their troubles. The Prince helps solve them. Sometimes he mediates disputes over the amounts of diyya demanding which seem to be climbing to astronomical levels here.
²⁴
People come to the Prince as a final court of appeal. The monarchy is very alive here, Qanta, and very involved with their people, make no mistake!”

Ultimately the heaving adolescent cadaver was transferred out of the ICU to a chronic respiratory ward where his body continued to be supported by artificial means. He remained suspended there for some time until finally even artificial life support could not keep his organs functioning. After the death of the teenager his family, with careful persuasion from local elders and the encouragement of their Monarch, accepted blood money in lieu of the death penalty. The juvenile assaulter got to live.

So, while it was Fouad who was condemned at the moment of the stabbing in this life, the surviving teen lived to be condemned in the next.

PRINCES, POLYGAMISTS,
AND PAUPERS

J
ANE HAD MADE ME THINK about monarchy more deeply. As a British citizen I understood the unique affection a subject can have for a monarch, particularly one who has ruled for more than half a century. But in Saudi Arabia the monarch and his monarchy were not as remote from everyday Kingdom life as perhaps might be so in other countries. Working in a hospital, it was not uncommon for them to minister to the sick or to open a building. Sometimes they came to the hospital for their own treatment, though often they chose to receive care at international institutions of renowned status. Other times they came for private fly-by-night visits on business that I could not fully understand.

On one such an evening, I had just finished assessing the patients in the ICU. It was close to midnight. As I closed a heavy file, the charge nurse reminded me that a senior member of the royal family might appear in the ICU. I disregarded the nurse's fussing. Everyone was making their patient space even tidier than usual. Emma, a gorgeous Filipina, was once again applying her already-perfect lipstick. I caught her checking her enviable ruby pout in a pocket mirror. She fixed a stray hair into place. An excitement was in the air and just at that moment the automated steel door of the ICU flung open.

A tiny figure, veiled in an abbayah, entered the ICU. About ten steps behind her, I recognized one of the hospital administrators looking very much the worse for wear, being up so late at night. Evidently he was escorting our much anticipated royal guest. All the nurses stood up, acknowledging the dignitary. They paused in their work for a moment, before continuing in their duties. Mark, the night ICU manager, sidled up to me explaining who she was.

“She is actually one of King Fahad's wives,” he whispered, awestruck himself.

I was shocked at her youth, she could be no more than thirty-two; and the King, we all knew, was a debilitated man, a stroke patient, already in his advanced eighties. We followed the figure's progress as she moved through the ICU. Her footsteps clicked discreetly with the sound of costly couture. She took small, careful steps on the shiny floor; measured, mincing. As she wandered past the patients, she approached no one. In response no one dared to address her directly. Unschooled in royal protocol, I was unsure what was proper. How could she understand what she was seeing if no one explained the patients to her, I wondered, watching her circuit the unit.

Nervously she peered through the glass windows of each patient cubicle. She seemed naïve of the critical care environment in the way that most lay-people tend to be. I wondered if she was actually alarmed at the graphic illness here. Her face was revealed as her veil fluttered slightly with her motion. She looked a little pale and drawn. The administrative escort tarried even further behind when he saw her approaching a cubicle directly. He was obviously queasy as the young Queen stopped to gaze at a man with limp, fractured limbs patched together with steel fixtures. The patient, sunk deeply in an air mattress, lay atop a snake's pit of intravenous and dialysis lines that pulsed with his recycled blood. He looked like a corpse in a casket. Surprisingly, the Queen seemed undisturbed—impressive for a lay-visitor.

She continued walking around the perimeter of the unit, finally turning toward my direction. Spying my white coat, which distinguished me from all other women in the room, she recognized I must be the physician on call. She paused, locking her almond-shaped, hazel eyes with mine. Even surrounded by a headscarf, she was ravishing. Her skin was a perfect shade of pale nutmeg, her nose subtly aquiline. Arched brows, refined and slim, elevated imperceptibly into a subtle inquiry. A flicker of smile appeared on glossed lips.

“Salaam alaikum,” I volunteered, inexplicably finding myself compulsively bowing from my head and shoulders. She responded in cut-glass, classical Arabic.

She studied me in silence, as did I her. No one moved. The administrator was flummoxed as though not knowing how to manage such a breach of the Queen's personal space that my address had created. I was equally motionless. I was caught in the fiery light of magnificent diamonds that glittered on her person. Her delicate ear lobes were heavy with carats of Graff diamonds. They radiated a brilliance that pierced the gossamer blackness of her muslin veil. As she adjusted her veil, her slim fingers on both hands sparkled, laden with glittering stones, their radiance reflecting in the polished tips of her manicured nails. A Cellini wristwatch glittered with gems, beaming like headlamps in the dark. Her whole personage was illuminated, other worldly. I was intimidated.

“Welcome to the ICU, your Highness,” was all I could offer. Immediately I wondered if I should have used “Majesty.” She nodded a smiling acknowledgment in return. A moment of connection passed between us in a shared gaze. And then, with a downward flutter of her kohl-lashed lids, I was dismissed. The moment had passed and the Queen had moved on. In a few seconds she had disappeared through the steel doors, the administrator scurrying behind her. The silence, which had contracted opaquely around the mysterious Queen, began to dissipate, dissolving back into the edges of the humming unit. I regretted my reticence.

The young Queen who came to visit the hospital that day was one of many wives of the elderly King. No one knew exactly how many he had taken. The monarchy had traditionally strengthened its ranks through polygamy, a means of transferring and even consolidating power through women. Polygamy was not encountered solely among the royals; many of my Saudi colleagues were children of polygamous families, though none of them were participants in polygamous marriages. The working-class ranks of Saudi professionals, among them physicians, had the same economic challenges as monogamous couples in the West: polygamy was expensive. One wife was quite enough purse to muster for the male Saudi breadwinner.

The practice of polygamy in the Kingdom is a remnant of pre-Islamic Arab tribalism, though Islam certainly grants a man permission to have up to four wives simultaneously. A specific verse in the Quran discusses the possibility of polygamy for men in Islam which, while clearly permissible, is far from actually ordained.

And if you fear that you cannot act equitably toward orphans, then
marry such women as seem good to you, two, three, and four, but if you
fear that you may not do justice to them, then (marry) only one.

(Quran 4:3)

Scholars mention always that this particular verse was revealed to the Prophet after a battle in which many Muslim fathers and husbands were slain, leaving orphaned children and widowed wives behind. At the time, carefully institutionalized polygamy was suggested as a solution of social welfare for the surviving unattended and unsupported women and children. The critical observation to make, however, is that Allah recommends polygamy only for those who can actually dispense equal and impartial affection, circumstances, lifestyles, and homes for each wife.

The Quran then goes on to mention that this kind of fairness is unlikely to be possible for a mere mortal, preference being human nature and that therefore (because partiality is likely to result) polygamy is effectively invalidated. Preferential treatment for one wife over another or one set of offspring over another is considered completely un-Islamic.

In Saudi Arabia, however, polygamy at an unprecedented level was integral to the cementing together of disparate fiefdoms into al-Saud's early empire. The al-Saud dynasty was conceived and nurtured by a power base possible only through polygamy. Unquestionably, this practice of polygamy upon which the Kingdom was built flouts Islamic teachings, if only through the sheer numbers of marriages men entered.

Pascal Ménoret describes this phenomenon best in his seminal work,
The Saudi Enigma
.
²⁵
Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the Kingdom's first king, was reputed to have married 135 virgins and one hundred other women in addition, far in excess of the maximum prescribed four wives for a single Muslim man. The King chose brides from among the greatest Bedouin tribes and through his marriages melded partnerships and contracts throughout his Kingdom. His wives were among the daughters of eminent Bedouins or the aristocracy of settled sedentary communities holding power in the Najd. Others were apparently daughters of more-popular clans and less-exclusive stock. Some women were even daughters of the enslaved.

With this astonishing policy of institutional matrimony, King Abdul Aziz al-Saud pieced together a staggering dynastic network; one that extended across all geographic regions of the Kingdom. By intermarrying across tribal boundaries of families, clans, and even across classes of his future subjects, he knitted together the beginnings of a Kingdom. Ménoret suggests this was not merely to forge alliances through marriage, which he correctly notes could not be a secure means of building a Kingdom, because (since divorce was allowed in the Kingdom as prescribed in Islam), merely marrying and then replacing wives at whim would likely alienate various parties, paradoxically weakening his Kingdom-building.

Instead, it was the subjugation, the very taming of a rolling, nomadic nation, that Abdul Aziz accomplished through his voracious and determined appetite for polygamy, which he fueled with enormous wealth and indomitable ambition. He used the wealth he had amassed through progressive control of settlements in the Kingdom secured by his fierce Army of God and his strategic conquering of vast expanses of land. Soon after, oil wealth served to consolidate his power into an unassailable supremacy which, far from perpetuating tribal links, actually superseded them precisely because he had married across and through various influential tribes. His collective influence now exceeded that of any single prominent tribe. His power was best described (as termed by Ménoret) to be “supra-tribal.” Without polygamy, Abdul Aziz al-Saud could never have accomplished this dominion, and the Kingdom likely would have remained fragmented into fractious fiefdoms.

Thus, like overarching swathes of canopied canvas in a Bedouin tent, Abdul Aziz swept up each of the prominent tribes in the Kingdom under his rule. As a result, ordinary members of each individual tribe were forever ensured access to a sympathetic ear in this diverse parquetry of monarchy because the King had married representatives from all. Each subject therefore (through intermediaries and community bureaucrats) could take their concerns to their own tribal component of royalty within these intricate, recessed eaves of the House of Saud.

Today, his progeny, the Saudi ruling class, is now estimated to number anywhere from seven to twelve thousand strong; a vast, shifting network of interrelated überaristocracy full of intrigue, conflicts, competing interests, and competitive ascendancy. The young Queen who had floated into our ICU one night was merely one of many figures at the helm of the apical echelons of this extraordinary family.

One morning, as I was being driven to work by the trusty Zachariah, I watched the scene through the car window. The hospital grounds were abuzz with activity. New palm trees were being unloaded from endless flatbed trucks. The bald, stiff trees were being planted in symmetrical lines on either side of my usual route to work. It was pleasant to see that the hospital was finally landscaping what was, until then, an eyesore of ripped up earth and desolate building lots awaiting construction. In the matter of a few months an entire building had arisen from the dusty embers of the desiccated land. The new building gleamed white in the morning light. A huge insignia denoted this to be the Cardiac Surgery Building. This was where Ghadah's husband would now operate.