Princess (5 page)

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 teacher even asked Sara if she was a primary graduate, and shook her head in wonder when she learned that Sara was not. Our instructor had been fortunate to have a modern-thinking father who had sent her to England for an education. Because of her deformity, a club-foot, she had found no one who would marry her, so she chose a path of freedom and independence for herself. She smiled as she told us that her deformed foot was a gift from God to ensure that her mind did not become deformed too. Even though she lived in the home of our royal cousin (it was and still is unthinkable for a single woman to live alone in Saudi Arabia), she earned a salary and made her decisions about life without outside influence.

I liked her simply because she was kind and patient when I forgot to do my lessons. Unlike Sara, I was not the scholarly type, and I was happy the teacher expressed little disappointment at my shortcomings. I was much more interested in drawing than in math, and in singing than in performing my prayers. Sara sometimes pinched me when I misbehaved, but after I howled in distress and disrupted the whole class, she left me to my mischievous ways. Certainly, the instructor truly lived up to the name given her twenty-seven years before—Sakeena, which means “tranquility” in Arabic.

Miss Sakeena told Mother that Sara was the brightest student she had ever taught. After I jumped up and down and yelled, “What about me?” she thought for a long moment before answering. With a smile, she said, “And Sultana is certain to be famous.” That evening at dinner, Mother proudly passed on the remark about Sara to Father. Father, who was visibly pleased, smiled at Sara. Mother beamed with pleasure, but then Father cruelly asked how any daughter born of her belly could acquire learning. Nor did he credit Mother with any contribution to the brilliance of Ali, who was at the top of his class at a modern secondary school in the city. Presumably, the intellectual achievements of her children were inherited solely from their father.

Even today I shudder with dismay while watching my older sisters attempt to add or subtract. I say little prayers of gratitude to Auntie Iffat, for she changed the lives of so many Saudi women.

In the summer of 1932, Uncle Faisal had traveled to Turkey, and while there, he fell in love with a unique young woman named Iffat al Thunayan. Hearing that the young Saudi prince was visiting in Constantinople, the young Iffat and her mother approached him about disputed property that had belonged to her deceased father. (The Thunayans were originally Saudis but had been taken to Turkey by the Ottomans during their lengthy rule of the area.) Smitten by Iffat’s beauty, Faisal invited her and her mother to Saudi Arabia to sort out the misunderstanding of the property matter. Not only did he give her the property, he married her. Later, he was to say it was the wisest decision of his life. My mother said Uncle Faisal had gone from woman to woman, like a man possessed, until he met Iffat.

During the years of Uncle Faisal’s reign, Iffat became the driving force behind education for young girls. Without her efforts, the women in Arabia today would not be allowed in a classroom. I was in awe of her forceful character and declared I would grow up to be just like her. She even had the courage to hire an English nanny for her children, who, of all the royal brood, turned out to be the most unaffected by great wealth.

Sadly, many of the royal cousins were swept away by the sudden rush of riches. My mother used to say that the bedouin had survived the stark emptiness of the desert, but we would never survive the enormous wealth of the oil fields. The quiet achievements of the mind and the pious religious beliefs of their fathers hold no appeal for the vast majority of the younger Al Sa’uds. I believe that the children of this generation have decayed with the ease of their lives, and that their great fortune has deprived them of any ambitions or real satisfactions. Surely the weakness of our monarchy in Saudi Arabia is bound up in our addiction to extravagance. I fear it will be our undoing.

Most of my childhood was spent traveling from one city to another in my land. The nomadic bedouin blood flows in all Saudis, and as soon as we would return from one trip, discussions would ensue as to the next journey. We Saudis no longer have sheep to graze, but we cannot stop looking for greener pastures.

Riyadh was the base of the government, but none of the Al Sa’ud family particularly enjoyed the city; their complaints never ended about the dreariness of life in Riyadh. It was too hot and dry, the men of religion took themselves too seriously, the nights were too cold. Most of the family preferred Jeddah or Taif.

Jeddah, with its ancient ports, was more open to change and moderation. There, we all breathed easier in the air of the sea. We generally spent the months from December to February in Jeddah. We would return to Riyadh for March, April, and May. The heat of the summer months would drive us to the mountains of Taif from June to September. Then it was back to Riyadh for October and November. Of course, we spent the month of Ramadan and two weeks of Haj in Makkah, our holy city.

By the time I was twelve years old, in 1968, my father had become extremely wealthy. In spite of his wealth, he was one of the least extravagant Al Sa’uds. But he did build each of his four families four palaces, in Riyadh, Jeddah, Taif, and Spain. The palaces were exactly the same in each city, even to the colors of carpets and furniture selected. My father hated change, and he wanted to feel as if he were in the same home even after a flight from city to city. I remember him telling my mother to purchase four each of every item, down to the children’s underwear. He did not want the family to bother with packing suitcases. I found it eerie that when I entered my room in Jeddah or Taif, it was the same as my room in Riyadh, with the identical clothes hanging in identical closets. My books and toys were purchased in fours, one of each item placed in each palace. My mother rarely complained, but when my father purchased four identical red Porsches for my brother, Ali, who was only fourteen at the time, she cried out that it was a shame—such waste—with so many poor in the world. When it came to Ali, though, no expense was spared.

When he was ten years old, Ali received his first gold Rolex watch. I was particularly distressed, for I had asked my father for a thick gold bracelet from the souq (marketplace) and he had brusquely turned aside my request. During the second week of Ali flaunting his Rolex, I saw that he had laid it on the table beside the pool. Overcome with jealousy, I took a rock and pounded the watch to pieces.

For once, my mischief was not discovered, and it was with great pleasure that I saw my father reprimand Ali for being careless with his belongings. But of course, within a week or so, Ali was given another gold Rolex watch and my childish resentfulness returned with a vengeance. My mother spoke to me often about my hatred for my brother. A wise woman, she saw the fire in my eye even as I bowed to the inevitable. As the youngest child of the family, I had been the most pampered of the daughters by my mother, sisters, and other relatives. Looking back, it is hard to deny that I was spoiled beyond belief. Because I was small for my age, in contrast with the rest of my sisters, who were tall with large frames, I was treated as a baby throughout my childhood years. All of my sisters were quiet and restrained, as befitting Saudi princesses. I was loud and unruly, caring little for my royal image. How I must have tried their patience! But even today, each of my sisters would spring to my defense at the first sign of danger.

In sad contrast, to my father, I represented the last of many disappointments. As a consequence, I spent my childhood trying to win his affection. Finally, I despaired of attaining his love and clamored after any attention, even if it was in the form of punishment for misdeeds. I calculated that if my father looked at me enough times, he would recognize my special traits and come to love his daughter, even as he loved Ali. As it turned out, my rowdy ways ensured that he would go from indifference to open dislike.

My mother accepted the fact that the land in which we had been born was a place that is destined for misunderstandings between the sexes. Still a child, with the world stretching before me, I had yet to reach that conclusion.

Looking back, I suppose Ali must have had good character traits along with the bad, but it was difficult for me to see past his one great defect: Ali was cruel. I watched him as he taunted the handicapped son of our gardener. The poor child had long arms and strangely shaped legs. Often, when Ali’s boyhood friends came over for a visit, he would summon poor Sami and tell him to do his “monkey walk.” Ali never noticed the pathetic look on Sami’s face or the tears that trickled down his cheeks.

When Ali found baby kittens, he would lock them away from their mother and howl with glee as the mother cat tried in vain to reach them. No one in the household dared to chastise Ali, for our father saw no harm in Ali’s cruel ways.

After a particularly moving talk from my mother, I prayed about my feelings for Ali and decided to attempt the “Saudi” way of manipulation instead of confrontation with my brother. Besides, my mother used God’s wishes as her platform, and using God is always an admirable formula for convincing children to change their actions. Through my mother’s eyes, I finally saw that my present course would lead me down a thorny path. My good intentions were squashed within the week by Ali’s dastardly behavior. My sisters and I found a tiny puppy that had evidently become lost from its mother. The puppy was whimpering from hunger. Overcome with excitement at our find, we rushed about collecting doll bottles and warming goat’s milk. My sisters and I took turns with feedings. Within days, the puppy was bouncing and fat. We dressed him in rags and even trained him to sit in our baby carriage.

While it is true that most Muslims do not favor dogs, it is a rare person who can harm a baby animal of any species. Even our mother, a devout Muslim, smiled at the antics of the puppy. One afternoon we were pushing Basem, which means “smiling face” in Arabic, in a carriage. Ali happened to walk by with his friends. Sensing his friends’ excitement over our puppy, Ali decided the puppy should be his. My sisters and I screamed and fought when he tried to take Basem from our arms. Our father heard the commotion and came from his study. When Ali told him that he wanted the puppy, our father instructed us to hand him over. Nothing we said or did would change our father’s mind. Ali wanted the puppy; Ali got the puppy.

Tears streamed down our faces as Ali jauntily walked away with Basem tucked under his arm. The possibility for love of my brother was forever lost, and my hate solidified when I was told Ali had soon tired of Basem’s whimpers and, on the way to visit friends, had tossed the puppy out the window of the moving car.

Chapter Three: My Sister Sara

I felt wretched, for my favorite sister, Sara, was crying in Mother’s arms. She is the ninth living daughter of my parents, three years older than I. Only Ali’s birth separates us. It was Sara’s sixteenth birthday, and she should have been rejoicing, but Mother had just relayed distressing news from Father.

Sara had been veiling since her menses, two years earlier. The veil stamped her as a non-person, and she soon ceased to speak of her childhood dreams of great accomplishment. She became distant from me, her younger sister who was as yet unconcerned with the institution of veiling. The sharpening of Sara’s distance left me longing for the remembered happiness of our shared childhood. It suddenly became apparent to me that happiness is realized only in the face of unhappiness, for I never knew we were so happy until Sara’s unhappiness stared me in the face.