Jean P Sasson - [Princess 02] (4 page)

Without justification, she has tormented her brother, Abdullah, and her younger sister, Amani, for as long as they both can remember. Few children have brought so many crises to one family as Maha.

In appearance, Maha is a stunningly attractive girl, with a frighteningly seductive personality. She has the look of a Spanish dancer, all eyes and hair. Combined with this great beauty is a gifted mind.

Ever since her birth, it seemed to me that too many blessings had been bestowed upon my eldest daughter. With so many abilities, Maha is unable to focus on one goal, and lacking a unifying purpose, she has failed to harness her talents in any one direction. Over the years, I have watched as a hundred promising projects have been started and then abandoned.

Kareem once said he feared that our daughter was nothing more than a girl of brilliant fragments, and would fail to accomplish one single goal in her lifetime. My greatest concern is that Maha is revolutionary seeking a cause.

As I too am such a person, I am aware of the turmoil raised by a mutinous character.

In her earlier years, the problem seemed simple. Maha loved her father to distraction. The intensity of her feelings increased with her years.

Whereas Kareem adored his two daughters as he did his one son, and strove to avoid the resentments I endured as a child, the makeup of our society drew Abdullah more closely into Kareem’s life outside of our home. This basic fact of our Muslim heritage was the first shock of Maha’s young life.

Maha’s intense jealousy of her father’s affections brought to mind my own unhappy childhood—a young girl who had chaffed under the harsh social system into which she was born. For that reason, I failed to comprehend the seriousness of my child’s discontent.

After Maha set fire to Abdullah’s thobe, we knew that her possessiveness of Kareem went far beyond normal daughterly affection. Maha was ten years old and Abdullah was twelve. Amani was only seven, but she had watched her sister slip away from their game, fetch her father’s gold lighter, and set fire to the edge of Abdullah’s thobe. Had Amani not cried out a warning, Abdullah could have been seriously burned.

The second shocking incident occurred when Maha was only eleven. It was the hot month of August.

Our family had left the sweltering desert city of Riyadh and gathered at my sister Nura’s summer palace in the cool mountain city of Taif. It was the first time in years that Father had attended a gathering of his first wife’s children, and his attentions were devoted to his grandsons. While admiring Abdullah’s height and figure, my father ignored Maha, who was tugging on his sleeve to show him an ant farm the children had built and proudly displayed. I saw Father as he brushed her aside and proceeded to squeeze Abdullah’s biceps.

Maha was stung by her grandfather’s preference for her brother and his indifference to her. My heart plunged for the pain I knew was in her heart.

Knowing Maha’s capability for creating a scene, I walked over to comfort my daughter just as she assumed a masculine stance and began to curse my father with fiery invectives of the coarsest indecency, peppered with vile accusations.

From that moment, the family gathering rapidly declined. Though humiliated, I had the quick thought that Maha had expressed to my father his manifest due.

Father, who had never held a high opinion of the female sex, made no pretense of his feelings now.

Scornfully, he ordered, “Remove this horrible creature from my sight!”

I saw plainly that my daughter had awakened Father’s contempt for me. His eyes were penetrating, and his lips were curled in scorn as he looked from his daughter to his granddaughter. I overheard him mutter to no one in particular, “A mouse can only give birth to a mouse.”

In the blink of an eye, Kareem snatched Maha from Father’s sight and took her squirming and cursing into the villa to wash out her mouth with soap. Her muffled cries could be heard in the garden. Father left soon after, but not before announcing to the entire family that my daughters were doomed by my blood.

Little Amani, who is too sensitive for such accusations, collapsed into hysterics.

My father has not acknowledged the existence of either daughter since that day.

Maha’s belligerence and hostility did not prevent her from occasional bouts of kindness and sensitivity, and her temperament cooled somewhat after the incident in Taif. My daughter’s angers ebbed and flowed. In addition, Kareem and I doubled our efforts to assure both our daughters that they were as loved and esteemed as our son. While this proved fruitful in our home, Maha could not ignore the fact that she was considered less worthy than her brother in the world outside our walls.

It is a distressing habit of all Saudi Arabians, including my own family and Kareem’s, to pour attention and affection on the heads of male children, while ignoring female children.

Maha was a bright girl who was hard to deceive, and the uncompromising facts of Arab life burned into her consciousness. I had strong premonitions that Maha was a volcano that would one day erupt.

Like many a modern parent, I had no clear notion of how to help my most troubled child.

*

Maha was only fifteen during the Gulf War, a time that no Saudi Arabian is likely to forget. Change was in the air, and no one was more tempted by the promise of female liberation than my eldest daughter. When our veiled plight peaked the curiosity of numerous foreign journalists, many educated women of my land began to plan for the day when they could burn their veils, discard their heavy black abaayas, and steer the wheels of their own automobiles.

I, myself, was so caught up in the excitement that I failed to notice that my oldest daughter had become involved with a teenage girl who took her idea of liberation to the extreme.

The first time I met Aisha I was uncomfortable—and not because she was unrelated to the royal family, for I, myself, had cherished friends outside the circle of royalty. Aisha was from a well-known Saudi Arabian family that had made its fortune importing furniture into the kingdom to sell to the numerous foreign companies that had to stock large numbers of villas for the swarm of expatriate workers invading Saudi Arabia.

I thought the girl was too old for her years. Only seventeen, she looked much more mature, and acted in a tough manner that smelled of trouble.

Aisha and Maha were inseparable, with Aisha spending many hours at our home. Aisha had an unusual amount of freedom for a Saudi girl. Later, I discovered that she was virtually ignored by her parents, who seemed not to care about their daughter’s whereabouts.

Aisha was the oldest of eleven children, and her mother, the only legal wife of her father, was embroiled in a never-ending domestic dispute with her husband over the fact that he took advantage of a little-used Arab custom called mut’a, which is a “marriage of pleasure,” or a “temporary marriage.” Such a marriage can last from one hour to ninety-nine years. When the man indicates to the woman that the temporary arrangement is over, the two part company without a divorce ceremony. The Sunni sect of Islam, which dominates Saudi Arabia, considers such a practice immoral, condemning the arrangement as nothing more than legalized prostitution. Still, no legal authority would deny a man the right to such an arrangement.

As an Arab woman belonging to the Sunni Muslim sect, Aisha’s mother protested the intrusion of the temporary, one-night or one-week brides her depraved husband brought into their lives. The husband, disregarding the challenge of his wife, claimed validation through a verse in the Koran that says, “You are permitted to seek out wives with your wealth, indecorous conduct, but not in fornication, but give them a reward for what you have enjoyed of them in keeping with your promise.” While this verse is interpreted by the Shiite sect of the Muslim faith as endorsement of the practice, these temporary unions are not common with Sunni Muslims. Aisha’s father was the exception in our land, rather than the rule, in embracing the freedom to wed young women for the sole pleasure of sex.

Occupied by the plight of helpless girls and women in my land, I questioned Aisha closely about the indecent practice I had heard discussed by a Shiite woman from Bahrain whom Sara had met and befriended in London some years before.

It seemed that Aisha’s father did not desire the responsibility of supporting four wives and their children on a permanent basis, so he sent his trusted assistant on monthly trips into Shiite regions in and out of Saudi Arabia to negotiate with various impoverished families for the right of temporary marriages with their virginal daughters. Such a deal could easily be struck with a man who had four wives, many daughters, and little money.

Aisha sometimes befriended these young girls, who were transported into Riyadh for a few nights of horror. After Aisha’s father’s passion waned, the young brides were sent away, returned to their families wearing gifts of gold and carrying small bags filled with cash. Aisha said that most of the youthful brides were no more than eleven or twelve years old. They were from poor families and were uneducated. She said they seemed not to know what exactly was happening to them. All the girls understood was that they were very frightened, and that the man Aisha called Father did very painful things to them. Aisha said all of the girls cried to be returned to their mothers.

The hard-eyed Aisha wept as she related the story of Reema, a young girl of thirteen who had been brought to Saudi Arabia from Yemen, a poverty-stricken country that is home to a large number of Shiite Muslim families. Aisha said Reema was as beautiful as the deer for which she was named, and as sweet as any girl she had ever known.

Reema was from a nomadic tribe that roamed the harsh land of Yemen. Her father had only one wife, but twenty-three children, of whom seventeen were girls. Even though Reema's mother was now shriveled and bent from childbearing and hard work, she had once been a lovely girl and had given birth to seventeen beautiful daughters. Reema proudly said that her family was known as far away as San'a, the capital of Yemen, for the beauty of their women.

The family was very poor, with only three camels and twenty-two sheep. In addition, two of the six sons were handicapped from difficult births. One son's legs were twisted and he could not walk; the other jerked in a strange motion and could do no work. For these reasons, Reema's father strove to sell his sought-after daughters to the highest bidder. During the summer months, the family would travel through high mountain passes, along narrow, tortuous roads into the city, and a deal would be struck for the daughter who had reached marriageable age according to Islam.

The year before, at age twelve, Reema had reached puberty. She was her mother's favorite child, and the girl attended to her handicapped brothers. The family had pleaded with her father to let her remain with them a few more years, but he sadly confessed that he could not. There were two sons after Reema, and the sister closest in age was only nine years old. Reema's younger sister was small and undernourished, and her father feared the girl might not reach puberty for another three or four years. Reema's family could not exist without the marriage money.

Reema was taken to San'a to be wed. While her father scouted the city for a suitable bridegroom, Reema remained in a small mud house with her sisters and brothers. On the third day, her father returned to the hut with the agent of a rich man from Saudi Arabia. Reema said her father had been very excited, for the man represented a wealthy Saudi Arabian who would pay much gold for a beautiful girl.

The Saudi agent insisted upon seeing Reema before he paid the money, a request generally met with the blade of a Yemeni sword rather than humble compliance from a Muslim father. The gold in the agent's hands overcame the religious convictions of the family. Reema said she was inspected in the same way her father inspected the camels and sheep at market. Reema confessed she did not protest the shame, for she had always known she would go to another family, as the purchased property of another man. But she squirmed and pushed when the man insisted upon viewing her teeth.

The agent pronounced Reema satisfactory and paid a portion of the agreed sum. The family celebrated by killing a fat sheep, while the agent had Reema's documents prepared to fly to Saudi Arabia. Reema's father happily announced that the family could now wait out the four years until Reema's younger sister reached the proper age, for the man from Saudi Arabia had paid a large sum for Reema.

Reema herself forgot her anxieties, even becoming excited, after her father told her that she was the most fortunate of girls. Reema was going to a life of leisure, she would eat meat every day, have servants at her beck and call, and her children would be educated and well fed. Reema asked her father if the man might purchase her a doll, one like she had seen in a discarded European magazine the children had discovered in the trash bins of San'a.

Her father promised that he would make Reema's request a high priority.

When the man returned a week later, Reema first learned the terrible truth, that the marriage would not be honorable, that it was a marriage of mut'a, a temporary union. Her father became angry, for his honor was at stake, his daughter should not be treated in such a lowly manner. He pleaded with the man from Arabia, saying that it would be difficult to find another husband for his daughter, who would no longer be considered fresh and clean. He might be forced to provide for Reema for many years while seeking a man who would accept her as a second, less honored wife.

The man sweetened the deal with a bundle of bills. He said that if Reema's father refused, he would be forced to insist upon the return of the money already paid.

Reluctantly, Reema's father relented, admitting that he had already spent a portion of that sum.

Ashamed, he turned his face to the ground and told Reema that she must go with the man, that it was God's will. Reema's father asked the Saudi man to find Reema a permanent husband in Saudi Arabia, since there were many Yemeni laborers working in that rich country.

The agent agreed that he would make an effort. Otherwise, he said, Reema could become a servant in his home.