Arabia's Hidden America: A Saudi Woman's Memoir

Arabia’s idden H America A Saudi Woman’s Memoir

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rabia s A ’ idden H merica A A Saudi Woman’s Memoir

Fa d i a

B a s r a w i

South Street Press

ARABIA’S HIDDEN AMERICA Published by South Street Press 8 Southern Court South Street Reading RG1 4QS UK South Street Press is an imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited Copyright © Fadia Basrawi, 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. First Edition ISBN-13: 978-0-86372-309-4 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Typeset by Samantha Barden Jacket design by David Rose Printed in Lebanon

Contents '(

Preface: Desert Surburbia … Desert Kingdom 1 Brave New World: Growing Up in Aramcon

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2 The Devil’s Pact

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3 Making and Taking: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco

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4 Social Engineering, Yankee Doodle Dandy Style

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5 Lebanon: My Past, My Future

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6 Come with me to Lebanon

123

7 The Tides of War

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8 Life will go on

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9 Dignity or Death

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10 War and Dreams

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11 Lessons in Love

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12 What goes around comes around

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13 The Road Not Taken

235 241

Postscript v

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Preface Desert Surburbia … Desert Kingdom '( he Saudi Airlines Boeing 707 banked to the left and began its descent to Dharan International Airport. I peered excitedly out of the airplane’s window to catch my first familiar signs of home … the hundreds of flickering orange-yellow flares that dotted the sea of red sand below. They were admittedly an odd bonding link, these flares that defined the skyscape of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. From above they winked and glowed so prettily in the oncoming dusk; on the ground they filled the air around us with a nauseating stench of rotten eggs – pungent testimony to Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth that was keeping the industrialized world so well-oiled and so well-heeled. A flurry of traffic suddenly crowded the airplane’s aisle as the Saudi women on the flight, clad in the season’s light summer attire, disappeared one by one into the bathroom to reappear incognito moments later, enshrouded from head to toe in voluminous black abayas (cloaks). Glancing briefly at the mounds of black that now occupied the seats around me, I turned quickly back to the window, unable to hide my anger at this enforced double standard of veiling. We landed; I was home for the summer of 1970 from my sophomore year of university in Beirut. Before exiting the airplane’s cool interiors, I paused and fortified myself with a deep gulp of oxygen before plunging into the airless furnace of Saudi Arabia’s summer. I’d lived here most of my life but had yet to become inured to that initial blast of roasting heat and humidity. Clutching my green Saudi passport tightly, I wended my way, uncovered

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by abaya or veil, towards the Saudi Arab ‘nationals’ passport sector bypassing a long winding line of non-‘nationals’, largely from the Third World. I felt a wave of empathy for them as they waited with resignation for the passport officer to ask them the most inane questions just because he could. My being a Saudi Arabian female travelling alone did not make my entrance into Saudi Arabia (or exit) much easier. The passport officer, a dark and scrawny man with a pointed scraggly beard, stared dourly at my uncovered head. His beady eyes darted censoriously over the giant square buckle in my short hair, my psychedelic orange tunic, low-slung leather belt, and white bell bottoms, and, leaning forward, took in my red cork platform sandals. Lifting his frizzy eyebrows, he asked derisively: ‘You are a Saudi?’ Rolling my eyes to notify him of my attitude, I pointedly nudged my passport closer in his direction. He scrutinized my photo-less passport closely to check if I was from the ‘first tier’ of Saudis (that is, born from a Saudi Arabian father, or second tier (that is, naturalized). ‘Really?’ he said, answering my silence sarcastically. ‘And from Medina al Munawarra? You don’t look Saudi Arab,’ he spat, throwing the holiness of the city at my uncovered face. I rose to the bait. ‘Yes I do … I am a Hijazi.’ ‘Why don’t you speak the dialect? Eh? Eh? You sound Syrian. Answer me. What kind of a Hijazi are you?’ I lost my struggle to contain my temper and pounded the counter defiantly: ‘IT IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. YOUR JOB IS TO STAMP MY PASSPORT.’ His voice rose into an enraged squeal: ‘Woman, SHUT UP!’ Well, I’d come this far, and I wasn’t about to back down: ‘No, YOU shut up!’ In the split second that the officer’s face froze in confusion between shock and fury, my father grasped the situation from where he stood watching us behind the barrier, spoke briefly to the police officer next to him and materialized between us smiling his famous smile. He was a television celebrity in the Eastern Province due in large part to his good looks and that smile. ‘How are you? I’m Fahmi Basrawi,’ he greeted the passports officer in lilting Hijazi Arabic, shaking his hand. ‘Fahmi Basrawi?’ the passport officer croaked as he gaped at my father, the perfect image of modern Saudi elegance with his clipped moustache, immaculate white thobe (Arab long robe), gold cufflinks and one side of his white ghutra (triangularly folded voile cloth covering the head) flipped neatly over the agal (a thick black circular cord that held the viii

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ghutra in place) falling in picture-perfect alignment down the other side of his face. Caught mid-sneer, the passport officer hastily passed his hand over his face in embarrassment, transforming instantly both in expression and voice. ‘This is your daughter?’ he inquired in what he hoped was a mellifluous tone of voice. ‘I would never have guessed … no actually, yes … now that you mention it, I do see the resemblance. I simply was doing my job, but your daughter misunderstood me,’ he added, with an ingratiating smile. ‘Hah!’ I threw in with all the indignant fury I could muster. My father, continuing to smile, took me firmly by the arm and walked us away from the passports division. Then, as we rounded a corner, he dropped the smile. ‘Do we have to go through this every time?’ he exploded in exasperation, shelving his charm for people other than me. We drove away from the airport in an uncomfortable silence. My relationship with my father was a strained one. We had never been able to reach a middle point where we could see eye to eye on life matters and my education abroad was not making it any easier. ‘Why should I keep my mouth shut when he didn’t shut his mouth?’ I blurted, still smarting from the passport official’s disrespect. Keeping his eyes rigidly focused on the road ahead, my father did not answer, leaving my question to dangle awkwardly in the prickly air between us. I settled back resignedly in my seat and looked out at the drab desert landscape, rusty billboards and the occasional nondescript cement block building. I hadn’t expected my father to engage in any sort of critical dialogue with me. He was a Saudi senior staff employee of Aramco (Saudi Aramco today, the largest oil company in the world), and his long years there had effectively sealed his mouth and any independent form of thought that he may have had as a young Hijazi. Born in Medina in 1922 when it was under the Hashemite Sherif Hussein’s Kingdom of Hijaz, he was ten when Saudi Arabia (with everyone in it) was internationally recognized by the world community as the property of King Abdel Aziz Ibn al Sa’ud in 1932. He rarely mentioned that period of politics in his life, or any politics for that matter. Turning left, we approached Dhahran, Aramco’s administrative centre and home to me from the age of five. We passed under an arched gateway emblazoned with ‘Go in safety’, in Arabic and English … Aramco’s Arche de Triomphe, then slowed down at the ‘Main Gate’, a ix

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brick and glass guard post that crackled non-stop with disembodied voices over a shortwave radio. Manned by a joint patrol of Saudi police and Aramcon security guards, it was the only point of entry into Dhahran. Upon seeing us, Juma’a, the head security officer, gave my father a smart salute with a wide grin and, peering into the car, gave me a warm welcome for my safe arrival. He had known me since early childhood and a kindred feeling existed between us. My family had been among the first Saudis to be singled out by Aramco to live the ‘American Dream’ in its administrative oil town of Dhahran, an all-American suburbia in the middle of the Arabian Desert. Entry through the Main Gate was permitted only to those who had reached the senior staff status of rank 16 and above within Aramco’s employment hierarchy. Anyone outside of Aramco’s senior staff, non-Aramcon guests, particularly Saudis, had to be personally met by their host with Aramco ID in hand stating name, rank and serial number, and introduced to the guards before they were allowed to enter this ‘Forbidden City’. My father was given due esteem for his rank in the company, particularly by those Saudis who did the grunt work for Aramco. These oil company towns (which also included Ras Tanura and Abqaiq) were so insular that American employees and other Westerners could work for Aramco for up to thirty years within the barbed wire perimeter fence encircling the oil towns and not make the acquaintance of a single Saudi Arab or learn a single Arabic word, save for the politically correct terminologies taught to them such as ‘sadiqi’ (my friend), ‘shukran’ (thank you), ‘inshallah’ (God willing), ‘bukra’ (tomorrow) and ‘ahlan wa sahlan’ (welcome) – useful greetings words to be used at the annual functions held for Saudi Arab and American employees. Such a barrier between Saudis and American was necessary during those early years to control the Saudi voices that might possibly ask bothersome questions such as ‘Who owns what in the oil production process?’ and ‘Where are the profits going?’ We drove into Dhahran past the Oil Exhibit, Aramco’s Public Relations showpiece where my father worked as an assistant manager, then turning right, we continued on down Main Street, a wide asphalt lane lined with sheltering banyan trees, pink flowering oleander bushes. Single-storey homes with shingled roofs and well-tended gardens stood in square blocks along both sides of the road. Not an abaya or muttawa’a (dreaded enforcers of Wahhabi Puritanism) in sight. Sounds of laughter and music drifted from the ‘efficiencies’, single bedroom studios on x

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Seventh Street where the unmarried Aramco employees resided in U-shaped blocks around a common square grass space. The singles’ housing was positioned a safe enough distance away from family housing in Dhahran’s layout. Many of Aramco’s American employees harked from the Bible belt of the American Mid-West and did not approve of the liberal values of some of the unattached young employees. These puritanical Americans were cut from the same cloth of religious fundamentalism as the Wahhabi Muslims in control of Saudi Arabia, but within Dhahran the freedom of ‘to each his own’ was granted … I wished that applied elsewhere in the Kingdom. At last, to both my silent relief and my father’s, we reached home, 4595-B, a duplex marked by a towering acacia tree that distinguished ours from the row of identical houses on Fourth Street. I ran inside to greet my mother. As I hugged Mama and kissed her soft cheeks now flushed pink from preparing dinner in my honour, my sister and two brothers tumbled out of their rooms to greet me, along with our pampered Siamese cat TC (named after the American cartoon character Top Cat). It felt good to be home. Mama had prepared my favourite food: deep-dish macaroni cheese, roast chicken basted in lemon and saffron, samboosak (fried puffs of ground meat and onions basted in pomegranate sauce) and, for dessert, apple pie. Our dinner table sounded like a translation centre as my sister Fatin, my brothers Ghassan and Marwan and I chattered in American, switching to Syrian Arabic with our mother and a mix of both languages with our father, whom we addressed as ‘Baba’. But this evening, Baba was in no mood for conversation, still carrying the black cloud that had perched over him since my tiff with the passports official. His unreceptive brooding did not keep Mama from smiling sweetly at me, frequently reaching out to pat my hair as if to make sure that I was truly, physically there. Just twenty years older than I was, we were beginning to be mistaken for sisters as I grew into my adult self. Not that there was any striking resemblance. Where she was petite and plump, I was tall and broad-shouldered; where she had the irregular features, full cheeks and round face of the Damascenes, I had the regular features, high cheek bones and almond-shaped eyes of my father who traced his ancestors to the Saadoun tribe of southern Iraq. Out of my siblings, I was the closest in appearance to my father but the least similar in character. After the dinner table was cleared, Fatin, Ghassan, Marwan and I piled into the compact bedroom my sister and I shared, a pink xi

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four-by-four metre room with white frilly curtains, two standard wooden desks, American bunk beds and a Persian carpet covering tan linoleum tiles. I plopped contentedly into an easy chair by the large window that looked out on to our back yard, now awash with light from the corner street lamp. Just beneath our window, the shared bane of us all and of our Siamese cat was a large cage filled with a dozen parakeets that kept up an unalleviated prattle as long as there was light. Thankfully they were under a canvas for the night, allowing us welcome peace and quiet. Beyond the parakeets’ cage was my mother’s pride and joy, her garden – a riot of marigolds, petunias and the ever-present periwinkles that nodded gently in the night air around the edges of a plush dark green lawn. The proverbial white picket fence with matching gate enclosed our pastoral patch of nature. Daily, at the first streak of dawn, Mama donned a floppy cloth hat and raced with the sun to feed, weed and water her flowers, happily singing off-key to herself while she lovingly nurtured every bloom. TC hopped on to my lap and curled into a furry ball purring softly. I looked affectionately at my younger siblings crowded on the bottom bunk bed. Fatin, a year my junior, was groaning about her upcoming A-levels in England in preparation for medical school. Since the age of six her passion had been to study medicine, and nothing was going to stop her. The groaning was a smokescreen. Tiny but muscular, her physique expressed her tough inner self. With light brown hair pulled back into an efficient pony tail that further pronounced the roundness of her face and the decidedly upward slant of her hazel eyes, Fatin was so unlike me in size, looks and character that no one ever guessed our relationship. The Chinese in England repeatedly mistook her for a compatriot and berated her indignantly for not speaking the language. Ghassan, on the other hand, was obviously my brother. He had been in the UK as well, attending Lord Mayor Treloar College for the handicapped as he suffered from cerebral palsy. But that had not kept him from returning with a full-fledged Beatles haircut, his glossy pitch-black hair flopping fashionably over his smooth olive-skinned forehead. He was triumphantly relating a successfully weathered clash with Baba over his hairstyle which brought about a worried expression on Marwan’s face, a Beatles’ fan as well but far less confrontational. Marwan, at fourteen the youngest sibling, was about to graduate from ninth grade at Dhahran Senior Staff School in a week’s time, and would join Fatin and Ghassan xii

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in England for his GCSEs at summer’s end at Bryanston School in preparation for a degree in civil engineering. Marwan’s copper-coloured hair, freckled button nose and white skin had almost resulted in my father being carted off for kidnapping at Cairo Airport in 1960. At the airport, a guard had noted Marwan’s colouring and his prattle in American and had asked him if he was Irish. Marwan was four years old at the time, spoke very little Arabic and did not understand the guard’s Egyptian dialect but he had nodded politely in response, and that was apparently enough proof that Marwan was Irish! Anyway, the guard had not found it credible that this American-speaking, foreign-looking child could be the biological son of this Saudi Arabian man with black hair and moustache. More to the point Egypt was not happy with the politics of Saudi Arabia that year. As my father was getting our passports stamped, he suddenly found himself surrounded by security guards accusing him loudly of kidnapping and pandemonium broke out. We began to cry, my mother yelled and everyone in Cairo Airport came rushing to catch the action. My mother’s blonde brother, Khalo (Uncle) Adnan, studying agriculture in Ain Shams University in Cairo, was trotted out from the receiving sector to show where Marwan got his fair looks from – but all to no avail. The security guards would not be budged from their accusation. We suffered several noisy and exhausting hours in the airport until my father’s sister, Amti (Aunt) Bahija who lived in Cairo in palatial style, contacted friends in the right places to sort the matter out. Now Marwan was regaling us with impersonations of Mama during yet another clash with Aramco’s long-suffering personnel department over their shoddy workmanship in the maintenance of our bungalow (he had been her shanghaied interpreter with the Filipino clerks). I knew I could count on shared feelings of outrage at the Dhahran Airport passports officer away from Baba’s unsympathetic ears. Our father wanted us educated but unaltered. Politics and demands for civil reforms in Lebanon, where I had been studying for the past five years, were influencing my perception of Saudi Arabia and Aramco. I was eager to discuss my changing views of the world with my siblings and to tell them about my new Lebanese boyfriend, Adnan Khayyat, a journalist for the influential Lebanese An-Nahar newspaper. I smiled inwardly as Fatin and Ghassan discussed animatedly the confusion they caused by disclosing their real nationality to new English aquaintances, and xiii

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then their enjoyment as they would watch them politely adjust to the Saudi Arab rather than the American they had thought they were talking to. I was having the same responses in Lebanon, but with less resulting hilarity as neither the USA nor Saudi Arabia were particularly popular in Beirut against the backdrop of the turmoil of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict which defined how Lebanese approached non-Lebanese. My siblings and I were Saudi by virtue of having been born to a Saudi father and that’s where Saudi Arabia stopped in defining us. Without ever stepping foot in the United States of America we had developed into a new breed of the American colonized while living on Saudi Arabian soil: Saudi in name and as American as the Americans in everything else. We called ourselves ‘Aramcons’. Circumstances alone would pull me into an Arab awakening while my siblings would remain firmly as American as the apple pie we had for dinner. Eventually we would inhabit two separate worlds at extreme odds with one another…

* * * In the beginning Dhahran was a dusty collection of makeshift tents and palm tree frond huts, set up in 1933 to house American oil men from the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, Aramco’s forerunner. Even then the oil camp was, as it remains today, the largest American enclave in the Middle East, despite a homesick American’s plaintive song: Home no more in Dhahran, where the Arabs and Bedouins play, Where a shamal always blows, and God only knows What causes a white man to stay? The answer to his question is ‘oil’ of course.

The Americans had begun searching for oil in Saudi Arabia in the early 1930s in spite of Great Britain’s firm conviction that the Eastern Province did not have enough oil for exploration to be worthwhile. The first American geologists doggedly followed old camel trails and crisscrossed the desert many times over in Ford V-8 touring cars and a Fairchild monoplane, certain that they would strike oil. Of course, these trips created quite a stir amongst the locals as Nassir al Ajmi, a Saudi who rose to become an Aramco CEO, wrote in his autobiographical xiv

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book, Legacy of a Lifetime. Describing his first contact with cars and foreigners as a child in a nomadic camp on the edge of the Ghawar field, the world’s largest oil field, he wrote: ‘The first time that I saw a vehicle was a frightening experience. I was playing with other children next to our encampment when we heard a strange noise. We saw an odd-looking thing rushing towards us with a cloud of dust behind it. We ran as fast as our legs could carry us and hid inside the tents. As we peeked through the holes to observe the noisy, strange looking creature, we noticed two or three, unfamiliar looking people wearing funny clothes and deep plates or funneled pots over their heads! It was an exploration party asking for water and seeking directions.’ The American geologists finally struck oil in the Eastern Province on 3 March 1938 in Dammam Well No.7. When the well spurted its first 1,585 barrels of oil, Saudi Arabia formally became an oil-producing country and when profits from Saudi oil shot up from $2.8 million in 1944 to $114 million in 1949, the USA slid into dependency on foreign oil in its quest for global supremacy. Aramco’s three tented oil camps were rapidly upgraded to eventually become America’s largest settlements across the globe, bigger than those in Manila, Shanghai and Panama. Aramco’s three oil camps were landmarks of social and horticultural engineering in 1950s’ Saudi Arabia. Their streets and sidewalks were paved; trees, flowers and green grass were in abundance everywhere. Each of the three communities had its own library, golf course, clay tennis court, bowling alley, yacht club, horse-riding stables and Olympic-sized swimming pool. All were Saudi Arabia’s firsts, not to mention the electricity grid, central air conditioning and fresh desalinated drinking water. In no other region of Saudi Arabia could anyone (particularly Saudis) go to movies, dance on a moonlit patio to live music played by a popular American band, or listen to celebrated pianists perform the works of Mozart, Chopin and Liszt. Dhahran even had a mention in the New York Times in 1956 where it was described as an American community transplanted to the Arabian Desert complete with weekend gardeners, women’s clubs, PTAs, and television. ‘Dhahran’, the article continued, ‘is distinguished by brightly lit air-conditioned homes, each with its own yard and hedge’. A statement that included such mundane details as worthy of mentioning underlined in bold red lines the backwardness of the rest of the country. Illustrious scholars such as historian Dr Arnold xv

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Toynbee, Arabist H. St John Philby, and anthropologist Dr Margaret Mead accepted Aramco’s invitations to give lectures to members of the community. All three came away with warnings of an eventual backlash against Aramco’s segregation policy from the rest of the country, but their warnings fell on ears that were not ready to listen. In the Dhahran that we grew up in, women wore shorts and booze flowed freely. We bought our food from the company’s ‘commissary’, which sold all things American – including pork products. We moved freely from one area of Dhahran to another on bikes and roller-skates, hopped on and off the free bus service driven by Shiite Saudis that the Americans (and us) were taught to call sadiqi (my friend). While everyone living outside Aramco’s towns drank brackish water, we drank fresh desalinated water from our taps. Cold water fountains were stationed in all the public places of the camp complete with envelope paper cups and salt tablet providers to combat the intense heat. We camped out with our scout troops on Aramco’s private beach, Half Moon Bay. We competed in American football and basketball with Abqaiq and Ras Tanura. Our swimming pool area, ruled by a stern Indian lifeguard named John, had the air of a resort spa with its reclining sun chairs, and piped-in ‘muzak’ ranging from country-and-western to classical to rock (never Arabic). My Catholic classmates attended Catechism, went to Confession with a residing Catholic priest, and to Sunday school, which was actually on a Friday. That day of the week was the one item where the line was drawn between Aramco and Saudi Arabia. Friday, the Muslim holy day, resolutely remained as the only day when everything closed down and all Muslim men attended prayer in the mosque – even in Aramco. My siblings and I addressed one another by the American mispronunciation of our names. I was Fudgie (short for Fadjyah), Fatin was Faahttn, Ghassan was Gussaaaan and Marwan was Moe. Growing up we entered Brownies and Cub Scouts, and graduated into Boy and Girl Scouts of America. On Halloween we went trick-or-treating with our friends, dressed up as GI Joe and Cinderella. I joined the cheerleaders for one of Dhahran School’s American Football teams, the Bears. Marwan played catcher for the Orioles, Dhahran’s Little League Baseball team, and Fatin was the star gymnast on the rings. We hung out with our friends in the pool hall in the Recreation area in the centre of Dhahran. There was a Teen Canteen set up especially for young teenage Aramcons replete with a jukebox, soda fountain and a Filipino barman xvi

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we all called Mike. A short walk away was the Snack Bar, where we ate super-size grilled hamburgers and caramel sundaes prepared and served by Hussein and Ali, Shiite Saudi Arab personnel from the neighbouring al Hasa oasis towns of Qatif and Hofuf. On every American Independence Day on the Fourth of July, Dhahran held a parade led by baton-twirling, mini-skirted majorettes and a spiffily costumed brass band with my sister on the clarinet. Two Eagle scouts carried the American and Saudi Arabian flags as they led troops of Brownies, Cub Scouts and Boy and Girl Scouts. Floats draped with pretty girls in sundresses rolled past clapping crowds, followed by Americans on spirited Arabian horses and elementary school children dressed as cowboys and Native Americans. To the rat-tat-tat of the drums and the blare of the trumpets, the parade moved triumphantly down King’s Road and on to the County Fair, spread out in Dhahran’s Recreation area. There we eagerly ate hot dog buns smothered in ketchup and washed them down with root beer. We moved on to rides on laconic camels, paying the outstretched hand of their equally laconic Bedouin owners before embarking. Then there were the bakery contests to nibble from, three-legged races and donkey races to join. We placed bets on races of tiny green turtles fished out from the water canals of the al Hasa oasis that sported numbers on their minuscule backs. By day’s end, with our prize turtles still racing in circles in a bowl of water, we were more than ready for a sound night’s sleep as we dragged our bulging stomachs and our booty home. We led the rarified life of coddled westerners in one of the harshest of terrains on the face of this earth – except when the deadly shamals struck. Nature is the great equalizer and the shamal winds, deadly northeast sandstorms, forcibly drove this home. One such unannounced shamal struck during English class when I was in sixth grade. We were in the grips of the poem ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allen Poe. As we sat in spellbound silence listening to Miss Mathews’ dramatic reading, we became aware of a different kind of silence. An eerie red light had appeared outside the classroom’s windows, blotting out the sun amidst a deathly stillness. The playground and sky and distant desert horizon had disappeared without a trace into the opaqueness of the red glow and it was as though we were suddenly drifting alone in space. Miss Mathews dropped her book mid-sentence and walked rapidly to the window. As she stared at the unfolding scene outside, she underwent an astonishing transformation: xvii

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from a stodgy school marm into excited youthful woman. ‘Drop your books and pick up a pen and paper,’ she ordered us in breathless anticipation. ‘This class is going to be dedicated to the shamal. We are witnessing the rare experience of a shamal ’s birth.’ With the sombre mood of the poem still upon us, and the unexpected change that our English teacher had undergone, we entered a surreal world as the shamal unfolded around us. The red glow deepened to shades of even darker red and increased in opaqueness as the air filled with particles of dust, each bringing in its own shade of desert sand, much like the gathering of soldiers before the battle. Stirring swathes of deep yellow began to glide amongst the motionless multihued flecks of red tinted sand. When the last of the red glow disappeared into the deep yellow, Nature gave the signal for battle. Unearthly screaming howls from the shamal ’s angry winds shattered the silence, attacking our windowpanes in a barrage of wildly swirling grains of sands that had turned into tiny but deadly spears, capable of choking the uninitiated. The shamal was not stopped by the physical barriers of our classroom walls and we began to feel the sand crunching between our teeth and becoming embedded all over our bodies, ears, noses and hair. As we bent over our papers writing feverishly, we stole surreptitious glances at our transfixed English teacher who remained standing at the window until the school bell jangled her back to earth. The lighter side of living in the desert was the unmitigated joy we felt when it rained. On the rare days that rain fell, the neighbourhoods in Dhahran rushed out, adult and child alike, into the streets to revel at this miracle of nature. We hopped onto our bikes pedaling furiously for the pleasure of swooshing through the wet rivulets running down the streets while the adults square-danced in the puddles. We twirled in circles like mesmerized dervishes, arms spread out, our faces eagerly turned up to the sky to catch each fat globule of water before it fell to the ground. The desert rain fell like a symphony, its raindrops falling softly and almost hesitantly at first, one followed by another gaining in momentum, falling faster and faster, reaching a crescendo to deep rolling thunder and diagonal streaks of lightening; then ceasing as abruptly as it began, leaving soaked Aramcons to drift back to their homes, big smiles on their faces. Across the street from our house was the baseball diamond complete with bleachers for family and friends to watch the young players strike in or strike out. Behind the baseball diamond was a vast circular xviii

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expanse of soft grass for American football games and annual track meets. With its close proximity to us, we developed a sense of propriety over it, a spacious green playground where we flew our kites and perfected our somersaults with our neighbours Candy, Crystal and Kelly Riley. We often pitched a tent in its midst for sleepovers with our friends where, snug in our sleeping bags, we spent the night talking, singling out our favourite constellations and gazing in silent wonder at the Milky Way as it cascaded across Arabia’s infinite ink-black sky in a spectacular explosion of celestial glitter. I could see our green playground from where I sat next to my bedroom window while I stroked TC on my lap. The full moon appeared on the horizon, a golden benevolent smiling face, so bright that it outshone the myriad stars covering the desert sky. For me, well into university, Beirut was already outshining Dhahran much as the moon outside my bedroom window dimmed the stars. With Marwan’s graduation we would all formally have moved out of Dhahran. It would gradually recede from our lives as we moved on to different points of orientation in the unfolding years ahead. I had come home that summer of 1970 with more questions than answers about my life in Dhahran and my Saudi Arabian identity … fourteen years since the morning I had stood before my first grade classroom facing American children for the first time in my life.

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1 Brave New World: Growing Up in Aramcon '( he year was 1956 and I was five years old, one year younger than my American classmates. My father had just completed his degree in Public Relations at the American University of Beirut on an Aramco scholarship that had promoted him to senior staff, making us one of the first three Saudi Arabian families ever to move into Dhahran. We arrived in Dhahran from Beirut a week before school began on a TWA caravelle (then functioning as Saudi Arabia’s official airline). Peering impatiently out of our airplane’s windows as it rolled slowly to a stop, the first image we caught of Saudi Arabia was of our father waving to us just a few metres away on the tarmac. Behind him was a dusty hangar with a fat propeller airplane inside and a second long hangar, open at both ends, with a long table running down its middle. We headed towards the open-ended shed, stopping at the long table with our luggage. Unsmiling Saudi customs soldiers rifled roughshod through our belongings, pausing significantly over our mother’s lingerie. Once the guards were satisfied that we had nothing contraband they grunted ‘seeru’ (leave). We walked out of the shed to meet the desert for the first time in our young lives. There it lay, stretched out before us under repetitive waves of steaming air, swaths of toneless beige that extended flatly on to the distant horizon, save for a single slash of black, the asphalt road that leads to Dhahran. Our first introduction to our homeland’s topography was anti-climactically aggravating as the scorching hot sand and broken shards of minuscule seashells slipped into our brand new

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shoes and poked our feet through our socks, while our shuffling footsteps kicked up swirls of dust that settled into our eyes and coated our sticky cheeks. My father was in excellent spirits that day of our arrival as he proudly drove us into Dhahran in a red Ford stamped with the Aramco insignia. I tried to absorb the strange town that we were driving into – a town that had no apartment buildings, no traffic, no loud honking cars, no vegetable vendors calling out their wares, no shoppers and no shops, no families out on the streets, not a sign of human life as I knew it in Beirut. All we saw were silent identical houses, one row after the next with fenced-in gardens. We drove up to our new home, a grey square house with white windows and a pointed grey roof surrounded by a thick, dark green hedge dotted profusely with tiny white flowers. There was one other identical house next to it and a long cement sidewalk that stretched alongside empty plots of sand in both directions. ‘Our street is still new,’ Baba explained. ‘More houses will come and our neighbourhood will soon look like the rest.’ As we eagerly crowded through the gate, we brushed past the hedge’s tiny white flowers releasing their sickly sweet perfume into the hot sticky air. Our new home’s front yard, side yard and back yard were disappointingly little more than fenced in desert, punctuated by wilted clumps of grass being watered by a solitary desperately twirling sprinkler. We dashed eagerly into our new home, up three wooden steps leading to a swinging screen door that slammed behind us with a loud clap. We caught our breath when we found ourselves directly in the living room. In the homes we knew in Beirut and Damascus, the living room had always been off-limits to us as it contained the fanciest furniture and ornaments, its door opening only for special guests. Our new living room was a featureless rectangular room with taupe-coloured walls, matching taupe-coloured carpeting and four armchairs of polished wood with taupe cushions that sat stiffly around a low polished wooden rectangular table. Two metal standing lamps with off-white conical lampshades shed triangles of light over the seating arrangement. Everything in our new home, Baba told Mama, belonged to Aramco. We explored our new bedrooms, three small square rooms with one window each shaded by white venetian blinds, two single beds, a built-in cupboard and a circular glass ceiling light fixture. My mother was delighted with the kitchen and its large white oven, large white refrigerator, large white washing machine, 2

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and cupboards filled with pots, pans, glassware and cutlery. I knelt to touch the strange floor tiles (linoleum) that muffled the sound of our running feet, having only experienced echoing ceramic and terrazzo tiles. We revelled in the marked coolness of our new home, meeting central air conditioning for the first time in our young lives. In Beirut an open window was all that was needed to cool the room. We adjusted to our new home easily (age was a helpful factor), but Mama took longer fully to appreciate the hassle-free conveniences of an American home compared with the labour-intensive Damascene kitchens. Damascene kitchens smelled of Bunsen burners used for cooking which needed to be pumped and lit at the same time. Dry goods were stored in burlap bags that needed to be retrieved from a mezzanine attic above the kitchen. Vegetables were bought from roving salesmen who advertised wares in catchy throaty cries of ‘Assabee’ al bubboo ya khiar’ (cucumbers like a baby’s fingers) as they trundled past on colourful heavily laden wooden carts. The fresh vegetables needed to be sorted and cleaned before being cooked, during gossip sessions with the next-door neighbour and any visiting friend or relative, before being placed in a copper pot on the noisy Bunsen burner for a labourintensive slow-cooked meal. Meat came from the butcher around the corner who strung freshly killed and skinned sheep and cows at the entrance to his shop. Chicken came from another nearby seller who killed the daily quota on a large marble slab with a single swipe of the curved blade of his knife. For seasoning, herbs were clipped from terracotta pots that stood in a row outside the kitchen window. And after the meal was eaten and fully digested, water was boiled in large aluminum vats for washing the dishes, the kitchen floor was scrubbed clean with a straw broom and soap and water, and then mopped dry by a hand-held cloth. There would be none of that in my mother’s new modern, efficient suburban life. On the morning of my first day of school, I jumped out of bed eagerly and ran to the clothes I had laid out on the chair the night before. I was the kind of child who loved school. I carefully slipped a crisp white cotton pique dress over my head and tied the sash loosely behind my back. Then I sat on the bed to pull on a brand new pair of lightly woven white cotton socks that folded twice at the ankle. Mrs James, wife of the school principal, a kindly lady who had helped my mother find my ‘first day of school’ clothes, called them ‘bobby socks’. 3

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She had called the black and white shoes that I was now slipping on my feet ‘saddle shoes’. I painstakingly knotted the bow into rabbit ears while I repeated the names of the American socks and shoes to myself: ‘bpaah-pbee sux’, ‘saa-dell shoo.’ Finally, I pulled on a light pink sweater and fussed with the sleeves until they stopped just below my elbow. Ready. Now I was dressed like every other girl I had seen in Dhahran. After a quick breakfast, I clambered on to a chair in front of the bathroom mirror to observe closely how my mother fashioned my fringe with a wet fine-toothed comb into a small crescent at the side of my forehead – a hairstyle I never left the house without. Satisfied with my image, I ran out and hopped into the car with my father for the short ride to school. He had already prepared me for what I should expect: ‘Lots and lots of Americans, who speak no Arabic’ – a concept difficult to absorb. How could they not speak Arabic? Everyone in my world up till now spoke Arabic. They were in Saudi Arabia, therefore they must speak Arabic. ‘Now tell me what you know in English,’ he asked me as we drove to school. ‘Hell-lloo, koot-pye, bpaah-pbee sux, saa-dell shoo, wan-tooo-sree-forrr-fife,’ I recited breathlessly, exhausting my American vocabulary. We parked the car and climbed a short flight of steps to the school, a sprawling modern building with glass façades, a flat cement roof and brick walls amidst well-tended patches of green grass and palm trees. We walked into a large airy reception area and straight through to the office of the principal, Mr Vincent James, a good-humoured, grey-haired bear of a man with a laughing smile. Mr James stood up, clasping my hand playfully, and boomed cheerfully in fluent Arabic, ‘Ahlan wa sahlan (Welcome) Fadia.’ Then, placing my hand in the crook of his elbow with a grand flourish, he turned to my father while winking at me, ‘You stay here Fahmi; Fadia’s too big to have her father take her to class,’ and we walked off arm in arm, our heels clicking softly on the polished linoleum tiles of a long hallway with walls painted a soft vanilla colour and smelling vaguely of the same disinfectant my mother used in our bathroom. ‘Hena (Here) Fadia.’ Mr James and I were standing, still arm in arm, before a colourful light-filled room with large windows and venetian blinds across one wall and children seated at small wooden desks in rows, who turned in unison to stare unblinkingly at me. Their drawings filled two of the walls and a large green blackboard covered the third. What I saw as big and small lines was the English alphabet on a 4

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banner that circled the classroom near the ceiling, stopping before what I would learn was the flag of the United States of America. Hopping up from behind her desk, my teacher came forward and kneeled smilingly at my eye level. Tall and willowy with short auburn hair and a wispy fringe that emphasized her big green eyes, I found her even prettier than my mother. ‘Marhaba (Hello) Fadia,’ she said, ‘Ana ismi (My name is) Miss Thornton.’ Then, turning to the class, she announced, ‘Children, Fadia Basrawi is from Saudi Arabia.’ Fifteen children who spoke only American chimed ‘Hell-lloo, Faaadiiiaaa’ in one breath. Mr James laughed, stroked my head affectionately and with a ‘Ma’a al Salamah (Goodbye)’ left the room. I turned to Miss Thornton and told her in Arabic that I spoke no English but she just kept on smiling. I tugged at her skirt urgently and repeated my words while I tried to fight a rising wave of alarm. This time she shook her head slowly. I realized with a sinking heart that she did not speak Arabic; those Arabic words she had greeted me with were all that she knew. Suddenly I felt bereft of Mr James’ comforting presence as a petrifying sense of alienation crept over me and my heart began beating so hard that I was afraid it would jump out of my chest. Miss Thornton gently took my hand and led me to a desk in the front row and, pulling out the chair, motioned for me to sit down. Looking around at the silent wide-eyed children in my class, I made another frightening discovery. Not a single child in the classroom had black hair! They were a sea of blonde-haired heads with tiny features and no visible eyebrows. Although I had inherited my mother’s fair skin, I was still so different from everyone else. Saddle shoes and bobby socks did not make me one of them. My panic-stricken eyes lit on one very skinny girl with a wild mop of bright orange hair, tiny eyes, bright red thin lips, a long neck and chalk-white skin covered by so many freckles they touched one another. I had never seen anyone who was so skinny or had so many freckles in my life. The unsuspecting orange-haired girl became the trigger for my meltdown. I burst into loud terrified sobs. All fifteen children jumped up from their chairs to comfort me as first graders tend to do when faced with the degree of unhappiness I was suffering. Unfortunately, the first to reach me was the carrot top and this had the effect of making me feel like a trapped cat. Miss Thornton stepped in swiftly and hauled me and my wildly flailing hands and feet on to her lap with my back to the class where she held me close patting me soothingly. My tears and sobs 5

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eventually stopped and I slid down slowly from the safety of Miss Thornton’s lap but kept my fingers entwined tightly around the edge of her skirt which I did not release for the rest of the day. The classroom was a treasure trove of fascinating new things I had never seen or touched before. Fat brightly coloured wax crayons that smelled good enough to bite, thick white paste that I was so tempted to taste and small scissors with blunted edges that fitted perfectly in my hand – all of which I was unable to explore fully as I needed to keep a tight grip on Miss Thornton’s skirt and a close lookout for the orange-haired girl. By day’s end, under the gentle suasion of my teacher, I was ready to approach the carrot top and give her a very tentative hug. Several weeks into first grade, I broke the code of the English language when I deciphered my first three words in the first grade reader about Dick, Jane and Sally and their dog Spot, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ And what joy that gave Miss Thornton. She applauded happily and asked me to stand in front of the class to read ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ in one of the proudest moments of my life. The class clapped gamely following Miss Thornton’s cue. I left school that day with my reader and waited impatiently for my father to come home to read it to him. ‘Bravo, Fadia,’ he smiled, ‘We’ll have to start you on Arabic.’ He arranged for a good friend of his, a Palestinian school teacher, Mr Suleiman Rabayi’, to come in daily to give me Arabic lessons across the hall from my classroom. Everything about Mr Rabayi’ was dark and serious. He was short with thick black eyebrows, a bushy black moustache and deep shadows that circled his mournful dark eyes. He sat on a swivel chair, I on a child chair in a room little larger than a broom closet. While I stared fixedly at him as he methodically picked at every hair of his moustache from one end to the other, he intoned each Arabic letter with its vowel accent followed by a word beginning with that letter, which I repeated after him in a sing-song voice, committing the words and letters to memory. This was the traditional rote method of teaching the Arabic language. I internalized this rote method of ‘memorize and repeat’, and an idea came to my head that maybe I would understand Americans better by mirroring their movements and repeating their words. I loved my teacher, Miss Thornton, very much and I was desperate that she remained as proud of me as she had been that day that I learned how to read my first words. So I focused on the sweetest and smartest girl in class, Nayna Lee Rees – a plump, smiling, round-faced girl with honest 6

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brown eyes, rosy cheeks, straight brown hair and a short fringe – as my role model. Nayna was fun, always had the right answer to the teacher’s question and all the other children in the classroom wanted to be her best friend. Whatever she did, I did. If she sharpened her pencil, I did too. If she put one foot behind the other under the desk, I did too. If she took out her crayons to draw, I did too. What I grasped from her words, I repeated softly to myself. One morning, Miss Thornton called me to her and asked me to move my desk next to Nayna’s. She had caught on to the childish reasoning behind my obsessive copying act and had secretly designated Nayna as ‘Teacher’s little helper to Fadia because she’s new’. Being the thoughtful girl she was, Nayna kept her secret with Miss Thornton. I only found out how my cover was blown from Miss Kant, my second grade teacher, when she reminisced many years later during a summer job at Dhahran School about my early days there. ‘Fadia,’ she greeted me affectionately, ‘Now that you’re grown, I can tell you that Miss Thornton and I worked together with that sweet little girl Nayna to help you adjust to you new world!’ I never forgot Miss Thornton’s humane approach to education and when it was time to choose a major for my university degree, I decided on Child Development and Sociology to better understand what a child needs to face the world on the right footing. What could have become a permanently scarring experience at the beginning of my life was turned into an empowering one by Miss Thornton’s understanding of a frightened child’s world. I wish I could say the same about all the teachers I had in Dhahran School. My sister Fatin had a horrific kindergarten experience where she too went through the same ‘copying what others are doing’ act. Well, she almost flunked kindergarten due to Miss Waldish misconstruing her inability to speak or act like an American as a learning disability. Fatin was saved from permanent impairment to her self-image by an enthusiastic ex-Green Berets science and gymnastics teacher, Mr Goellnor, who spoke Arabic as well as the Arabs. Well built, with a grey-haired buzzcut and a long tattoo of an anchor on his muscular forearm, Mr Goellnor was beloved by everyone young and old. He noticed Fatin’s gymnastic talents and encouraged her to develop them as far as she could while she was a student in Dhahran School. Unfortunately for Fatin, her training stopped there as physical education for girls is forbidden by royal decree in Saudi Arabia. 7

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* * * As Aramcon-bred Saudi Arabians, my siblings and I often found ourselves between a rock and a hard place as we tried hard to fit in both the Saudi Arabian and American circles. During fourth grade I gave up on trying to look like my blonde, blue-eyed American classmates, particularly after an unfortunate experience with the fashionable hoop crinoline petticoat craze that pushed the circle skirts of our frilly dresses almost straight out and, with me, straight up when I sat down in class, exposing my frilly pink underwear. I decided to adopt the more infallible persona of an avowed tomboy, climbing trees, chasing boys in the playground and hitting them, racing bikes with them and winning … in short anything a boy boasted he could do, I learned to do better. Our neighbourhood had the proverbial neighbourhood bully, Bobby, who was (as is usually the case with bullies) bigger, older and less furnished in the brain department than the rest of us. What he had was bigness, a gruff harsh voice and an ability to throw rocks with deadly precision. Fed up with his swagger and checkpoints that interrupted our roller-skate swoops down a smooth cement alley in our block, my friends and I decided to take Bobby up on this much bragged-about talent, prepared our barracks and waited in ambush for him when he passed by on his prized Schwinn bike – as he did every afternoon after school. Whoooosh! Pingggg! The first stone flicked off his handlebars. With a roar of anger, he looked behind him and saw us clapping and cheering and taunting him. He threw his bike down, ran to the side of the road, picked up a sizeable stone and threatened to bash our brains in. Our answer was a lot of loud laughter. In the heat of the moment, I unwisely jumped from behind our protective barracks, threw another stone and yelled that he wouldn’t dare hit girls. My last words were ‘You can’t hit me, you can’t hit me’, but he did, with that huge stone on the back of my head leaving a lasting memory of him both physically and mentally. ‘Take that, you dirty Arab!’ he yelled as the stone hit its target. Head wounds are often a lot more dramatic than serious with all the blood that gushes out and Bobby was terrified of what he had just done. He began to cry and apologize but we were not in the mood to let him off so easily. My friends took me bleeding and howling to my house. My father grimly wrapped a huge towel around my head and dashed to the emergency 8

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ward. I exited from the hospital with a satisfyingly large white bandage encircling my head, which I wore martyr-like to school the next morning. What was to come was far more dramatic than what typically should have ended as a standard rite of passage of tangling with the school bully. I was the daughter of one of ten Saudi Arab senior staff employees out of three thousand American senior staff employees. Bobby was the son of the Head of Security of Dhahran, responsible for peace and harmony within the community. My father was not going to let this incident pass unnoticed and immediately filed a complaint through a lawyer friend (Palestinian) with red lines underscoring the ‘dirty Arab’ slur. Suddenly the company was faced with a very awkward public relations debacle. A flurry of damage control swirled dizzyingly around me, embarrassing me no end. In another world, I would have been just another elementary schooler clearing out a space in the school’s hierarchy, but in the Aramco world I became as fragile as a porcelain doll that must remain untouched for the continuity of the peaceful mask of Aramco’s Saudi Arab–American ‘partnership’. On my first day of injury, my teacher walked into class and, looking sympathetically at me, pointed out to the class how important it was to be fair and polite with people like me who were ‘different’. This heaped more discomfort on me than my stitches. I looked down at my desk, bright red with embarrassment, and refused to look up or answer any questions. I truly wished the earth would open up and swallow me. The whole idea behind my scuffle with Bobby was to become a toughie and fit in with the popular crowd. What was I to do with this patronizing pity pouring all over me, separating me from everything I wanted so desperately to belong to? The boy’s father showed up at our house the following evening with his son in tow. Bobby, red faced and dressed in formal clothing which included a bow tie, solemnly apologized to me while looking at his feet, his swagger vanished. All of you have been nine years old at one time and you can imagine the intense awkwardness that both Bobby and I suffered as we faced one another under the daunting pressure of both of our fathers. We ended up becoming fast friends. The incident passed but not without the niggling unease of always wondering if I was being treated nicely because I deserved it or because I was a Saudi Arabian token in Aramco’s school. In my childish attempt to be one of the crowd, I had come up against the invisible line of demarcation that defined who I was to everyone – not American. 9

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It was not an easy task to live in such an all-American community for my mother either. Until she came to Dhahran she had never met a foreigner and took the easy way by choosing to do what every Syrian does when they leave Syria – remain Syrian to the core: unbending, unchanging and unyielding. My mother, Muzzayyan Kotob, was a Damascene beauty with amber eyes, a rosy complexion, glossy black hair and skin so sensitive and translucent that the slightest pressure left glaring marks. The eldest and prettiest of her sisters, she loved the feminine accoutrements of clothes, perfume and make-up so much that it bordered on narcissism. She wore what made her happy, exposing her plump white arms and legs against the summer heat, never coming to terms with the abaya. On the rare occasions when we were growing up when she had to wear the abaya, she would hike it up so high to avoid tripping on it that, in my father’s bemused words, ‘it defeated its purpose’. My father gave up on the hope she would pick up his Hijazi accent and succumbed to speaking the Syrian dialect at home, so naturally we grew up speaking it too. She never mastered the English language during the four decades of my father’s employment in Aramco, mainly due to her lack of interest in becoming absorbed into her new surroundings, content to pick what Americanisms she felt were strategic to her existence in Dhahran, and making them Syrian. The ‘Happy Birthday’ song for parties she insisted on throwing for us even though it was not the usual custom in Damascus (or Saudi Arabia) became ‘Hebby Birsdek is too yoo’. Our birthdays were never complete without her rendering a joyful solo. Unable to fill her home with the usual flowers, herbs and greenery that abounded in Damascene homes, my mother filled the rooms of our prefabricated duplex with assortments of plastic flowers, large and small, of all colours imaginable and unimaginable. She learned to make ‘shaklit ships’ (Chocolate Chip cookies) and ‘shaklit kek’ (chocolate cake) as chewy and rich as the Americans next door. With her green fingers, she discovered the one indoor plant that thrived in the shady artificially cooled homes of Dhahran, the coleus – a shade-loving velvety leafy plant that she nurtured into a vibrant richly variegated bushel-sized shrub from a mere rooted cutting and won first prize for her entry annually in the annual Women’s Group houseplants competition. She fed us our favourite cereal that she knew as ‘kornaflek’ which we ate with thawed milk from Minute Maid frozen milk cans imported from the USA. 10

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Never a particularly enthusiastic cook, she took a strong liking to Swanson’s TV dinners which were all the rage when we were growing up, complete with the accompanying TV table, while, naturally, we watched TV. Although she never could eat the stuff herself, she learned to make ‘teenus berrer’ (peanut butter) and jelly sandwiches on white toasted bread sliced diagonally down the middle. From the day she discovered non-iron ‘drip-dry’ material, we were dressed in clothes made in nothing else. She didn’t speak the language but that didn’t mean she couldn’t catch the drift in our chatter when we thought we were undercover by speaking American. A well-placed ‘Sherrub’ (shut-up) with pursed lips and a knowing sidelong glance reduced us to helpless laughter, putting a temporary halt to our snide commentaries. My mother’s learning experience of how Americans functioned was more often than not derived from discomfiting encounters. A particular habit she developed a horrified aversion to was their firm handshakes. One burly Texan had sent her to the emergency ward after grasping her hand in an enthusiastic handshake that crushed her fingers. In Middle Eastern culture, when a man shakes hands with a woman, it’s barely a touch of the fingers and both the woman’s hand and the man’s remain limp. Along with their handshakes in my mother’s roster of strange American habits was their manner of feeding their guests. She had a taste of it (or lack thereof ) in the first week after her arrival in Dhahran at a dinner held by my father’s boss for the new Saudi Arabian employees. Whenever the hostess offered my mother a dish, she had demurred politely in the Middle Eastern tradition of waiting for the hostess to insist. In the American tradition, the American hostess had not insisted, accepted her ‘no’ and moved on to the next guest, leaving my mother to return home starved and insulted. Her mantra to us as we were growing up was ‘Never say “no” to Americans; they’ll believe you.’ Within our household, my parents interacted with one another and brought us up in the traditional, authoritarian manner of most households in the Arab world. My argument with the passport officer was a disquieting revelation of an independence of will that my father had never encouraged us to have. His word had always been non-negotiable and we acquiesced to his rule without question. My mother never encouraged us to do otherwise, no matter how arbitrary or unfair we might perceive his edicts. But my father’s censure was not strong enough to stem our rapid Americanization. As we partook in all the rites of 11

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passage of any American youngster – Valentine’s Day card counts, Easter egg hunts, sleepless slumber parties and so forth – we became immersed in a Western culture, which our parents did not understand or accept, and drifted into uncharted waters where our parents could not guide us. This created tense relations between our parents and ourselves as we developed a vision of the world around us not in line with theirs. The radio songs that I loved early in my life were not sung by the popular Arab singers such as Shadia, Sabah or Um Kulthoum on the Sawt el Arab (Voice of the Arabs) radio station that my parents listened to but rather were those songs sung by Ricky Nelson, Bobby Darin and country singer Johnny Cash on Aramco’s radio station. My siblings and I dropped everything to watch Rawhide, I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Howdy Doody, and surreptitiously turned the television off and tiptoed away when any Arabic-speaking programme came on-screen before our father spotted it and forced us to remain seated. We discovered the magic of comics and secretly began compiling towers of Wonder Woman, Archie and Superman collections, reading them with flashlights under our blankets after we were sure our parents were asleep. Comics then were the equivalent of today’s video games, a children’s subculture we did not want to be excluded from. However, to our father they were the equivalent of the devil’s scripture. He banned them from the house. But we went ahead and collected them anyway, making sure they were stashed out of sight. He would always find them, though, and then all hell would break loose. My father was an obedient employee of Aramco who never exposed his anti-American grouses publicly but allowed his pent-up anger at the daily marginalizing he suffered under his American bosses to explode at our expense in the kingdom of his own home. One afternoon after school, I opened the back screen door to our house and heard the sounds of a thrashing. My father had come home early and discovered Marwan and Ghassan swimming in a pool of comics. I cringed as I heard the painful sound of our comics getting torn in half and backed quietly out of the house to leap across the alley in two swift jumps to my best friend Candy Riley’s house. Ghassan and Marwan had already gone through their spanking; no reason why I should offer my neck like a lamb led to slaughter. Our father thought this would effectively halt the Americanization that was steadily taking over our lives. But of course he was very wrong. We simply waited for a grace period and started new collections once 12

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again. Our Arabic and our Arabness were fast becoming pointless irritants in our young Aramcon lives. Our parents were unable to give us a role model in our Arab world that we could emulate, but we had plenty in our American one. The differences between our parents and those of our American friends embarrassed us. Although my mother was committed to our education, particularly my sister’s and mine, and had been instrumental in sneaking her two younger sisters into school, opening the way for them to go on to university degrees, we were discomfited by her lack of education. She had only reached fourth grade when her illiterate mother decided there was no longer any need for further education now that she could read and write, and pulled her out of school to help at home. My gentle peace-loving and devout grandfather, who doted on my mother, had tried to get his emotionally unstable wife’s edict reversed but eventually acquiesced for the sake of peace and harmony within the house. Such details did not matter to us during our childhood years; we were only aware that she was never a Brownies’ troop leader, room mother or PTA member. She turned our side yard into a chicken coop so we could eat fresh eggs and brought about complaints from the neighbours because our rooster was keeping them up all night. My father, who wasn’t particularly crazy about people, loved animals and half of our front yard was taken over by hutches for rabbits that multiplied in runaway numbers. We began to give them away as birthday presents until they too were banned after the Dhahran municipality discovered that they were gnawing away at the birthday recipients’ bungalows’ foundations. In the informality that is prevalent in Levantine societies, my mother befriended the Saudi bus drivers and they spent the trip gossiping about the Americans while we hid at the far end of the bus putting as much distance as possible between us. Even my mother’s obsession with greenery had its downside for us. Saudi Arabia’s geography butted in to remind us physically where we were on the globe, particularly disgustingly when the locusts attacked. Every year for most of my childhood in Dhahran we experienced the terror of the locust attacks. Chilling warnings of their pending invasion were broadcast repeatedly to all of Dhahran’s inhabitants well ahead of their expected landing date, creating a general hysterical build-up amongst the Aramcons. Typically my mother’s hysterical build-up was exponentially more than the norm at the thought of the inevitable demise of her 13

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beloved plants and flowers. Not one to take assault sitting down she requisitioned us on the day of attack into a very unwilling locust combat unit arming us with pillow cases in a desperate bid to fight a quixotic battle to save her garden. All very well for her: she had no fear of insects. As soon as the ominous buzz that always preempted the locusts’ imminent attack became audible, my mother would begin to both cry and pray that the locusts would switch course mid-flight, while we waited cowering with disgust inside the house, hoping against hope that her prayers would be answered. But it never happened. In a final deafening roar, a thick black sheet of starving locusts dropped from the sky. Running outside with banshee yells to hide our terror, we frantically waved sheets and pillow cases at the solid wall of insects descending onto our front yard, with very little effect. The locusts covered every square inch of terrain, crawling and flying, as they denuded every tree, bush and flower under their repulsive legs. The sky disappeared as wave after wave landed, covering everything with their stinking yellow goo. In a few minutes it was all over, the locusts taking off as suddenly as they arrived. We would collapse in defeated exhaustion, still gripping our useless pillowcases, in a garden that had turned into a lifeless brown wasteland covered with dead locusts and beheaded flower stems, our acacia tree stark and nude with its skinned limbs, our grass no more, the ensuing silence as deafening and terrifying as the locust attack. Another major difference between our home and those of our American friends that we noticed at a very early age was that the noise decibel within our home was incrementally louder than that of our American friends, especially in matters of give and take with the children (at least in front of strangers), in addition to loud newscasts at the break of dawn from the popular radio station Sawt al Arab min al Kahira (the ‘Voice of the Arabs’ from Cairo). ‘Voice of the Arabs’ kept my mother informed and she in turn kept us up to date on all the developments of our war with Israel. As a young child I resented having to endure listening to such painful events in my world, envying my friends who could blithely play with their dolls without worrying about enemy attacks in their lives. My earliest awareness of the Palestinians and their cause was through eavesdropping on a visit by a newly arrived Palestinian friend of my father’s in 1957. I had politely greeted Mr Shafiq Umbarji, who was a delightful-looking man with light brown hair that waved in ripples, rosy cheeks, a blonde moustache and a very sweet smile. He had asked me 14

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about school and I had described my day to him including the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Not wanting to be more different than I already was, I was dutifully parroting the Pledge of Allegiance with my hand on my heart to the American flag on the upper corner of our classroom wall. ‘Fahmi?’ Mr Umbarji turned to my father, his sweet smile suddenly gone: ‘Are you aware of this? And is there a Saudi Arabian flag in that classroom?’ There wasn’t. I felt sorry for my father, who was very very embarrassed by my exposé. Only with the firm promise that this would stop would Mr Umbarji get off the case that had obviously disturbed him so much. Then, with a smile, my father told me I could leave now. I did, but remained playing in the room next door wanting to hear Mr Umbarji’s stories; he seemed so fascinating and animated. As I dressed my doll and admiringly combed her long blonde hair, I caught snippets of the conversation as Shafiq Umbarji described his forced exodus from Palestine, still a very fresh gash in his heart. I put down my doll and edged closer to the door when I heard the words: ‘the Palestinian Deir Yassin village massacre in 1948’. Mr Umbarji’s voice rose to a loud, tense level as he spoke about the terror Zionist group Irgun and I caught his shouted words: ‘… the hell of screams, explosions, gunpowder, blood and smoke as the Irgun attacked Deir Yassin … unarmed villagers were ordered into a square, lined up against the wall and shot … a nine-months-pregnant woman had her belly sliced open with a butcher’s knife; her sister tried to extricate the baby from the dead woman’s womb and was killed on the spot … a sixteen-year-old watched a terrorist with a sword slice a neighbour from head to toe … trapped villagers tried to flee, but the terrorists tracked them down with guns and hand grenades, finishing them off with knives … when the blood-curdling screams faded away Deir Yassin was a smouldering ruin …’ Mr Umbarji was interrupted by a blood-curdling scream coming from me in the room next to theirs as I vividly constructed the imagery of the pregnant woman’s belly being sliced open with her baby inside. Rushing to me, Mr Umbarji was distraught by my terror, but did not try to deny what I had heard. The cause was far too important to him to erase it in such a cavalier manner. He apologized to me, young as I was, for the terror his words had caused me but all he could sincerely hope for was that I would never experience the terror that Palestinian children my age were experiencing. 15

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With the exception of the presence of the Saudi flag in the classrooms after my father followed up on his promise to Shafiq Umbarji and complained to the administration, Dhahran Senior Staff School treated us much as the company dealt with its Arab employees: as mirages … there, but not really there. We did not study the geography or history of Arabia, or the beauty of the Arabic word or the history behind the Muslim civilization. I had no idea who the Fatimids, Abbasids or Umayyads were, or what Salaheddine el Ayyubi or Haroun al Rashid did or where. I barely knew the facts surrounding our prophet. But I did learn that ‘in fourteen ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, what went on during the Boston Tea Party, the contents of the Declaration of Independence, how to build a log cabin and furnish it, the hardships of the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, the location and history of all fifty states in America, and the names and life histories of each and every one of the Presidents of the United States of America. We were as excited as our friends over the election of John F. Kennedy and about his picture-perfect family. My mother was happy for different reasons, carrying the eternal hope that a new American president meant new hope for the Arabs in the Arab–Israeli conflict. In 1963, a handsome new teacher from North Carolina, Mr Allen, arrived fresh from the United States to teach us history. History immediately became our favourite subject, especially to us girls as we had all developed an unabashed crush on Mr Allen. His soft southern drawl and intensity of purpose in the classroom brought American politics alive to our seventh grade class. We learned about the burgeoning American Blacks’ civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech. But closest to Mr Allen’s heart was the difference between Democrats and Republicans and how much better, in his view, Democrats were. John F. Kennedy was his hero. One morning we entered class to find Mr Allen slumped in his chair, his head on his desk, crying unashamedly. He had just learned about JFK’s assassination. Our class settled into shocked silence as we looked wordlessly to one another for help. What does a seventh grader do when their favourite male teacher is crying his heart out? We began to cry too, silent tears rolling down our cheeks, boys and girls. Gathering his papers without looking up, Mr Allen walked out of the classroom, not saying a word. It was the last time we would see him. The next day he flew with his wife and two children for his annual leave, 16

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leaving us with a substitute teacher who didn’t hold a candle to our beloved Mr Allen. Tragically, on his way back, his MEA flight crashed ten minutes from Dhahran International Airport into the Persian Gulf, taking a large number of Aramco employees and their families with it. We lost friends and teachers, my father lost his boss, and Saudi Arab parents lost sons studying in Beirut. It was a solemn time for Dhahran as we mourned Mr Allen, the MEA victims and JFK. Serious political upheavals were shaking the Middle East that year of 1963 which I was oblivious to and frankly did not identify with – major upheavals such as Baathist coups in Iraq and Syria, which brought about a serious halt to democratic development to date within two powerful Arab countries and, just next door, a proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Yemen’s civil war as American foreign policy weighed in heavily behind the al Sa’uds as the replacement for Egypt’s socialist-minded President Gamal Abdel Nasser for leadership of the Arab world. I took no notice of these historic events. They were Arab events. In my heavily blinkered world, it was infinitely more ‘cool’ to be American than it was to be Arab in Dhahran of Saudi Arabia. This Arab–American divide in our family life became particularly acute after I hit puberty. Suddenly all the rules changed dramatically for me. Dances, get-togethers, beach parties and boy guests became strictly and unarguably off-bounds in the new code of conduct sternly dictated by my uncompromising father who offered no explanation other than that I was a Muslim Saudi daughter. It was a very anxiety-provoking situation as I had no other Saudi girl to hash matters out with to understand better why such strict surveillance was so necessary. These were children I had grown up with and now I was to behave formally with them. It didn’t help that my puberty was ahead of my American girlfriends and well ahead that of the American boys. My reaction to this untenable situation was that I, as a Saudi daughter, and I as an Americanized Saudi teenager, became two different people. I was one person at home and someone else the moment I stepped outside the door. Much distress went into the dual teenage lifestyle I led but the desire to associate freely with my peers was stronger than staying locked up at home just because my father said so. The line separating one nation from the other was always clear to me while I was growing up in Dhahran but I was not clear where I stood with respect to that line. 17

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When Barbara invited me to join her and her parents to play Bingo, I said yes, despite knowing how serious my breech of conduct was by going there. Playing Bingo at the American air base teeming with lonely young American men in uniform was, in no uncertain terms, forbidden by my father. Over and above loving the game and the anticipation of getting the number that would allow me to shout ‘Bingo!’, I wanted to see the forbidden territory for myself. In the euphoria of crossing a red line and without telling Barbara or her parents of the breech I was committing, I dared Barbara to wear lipstick, a very big dare for us at our tender age of eleven. Barbara ran into her mother’s room and returned with the brightest colour of her mother’s collection and we slathered it on. Pursing our lips self-consciously, we ignored her parents’ smirks as we clambered eagerly into the car to head out to the air base, a fifteen-minute drive away. Giddy with anticipation, we sat excitedly in the back seat of the car. In between bounces, I snuck a glance in the rear window to make sure all was clear – only to lock eyes with my father driving behind us. Barbara and her parents, oblivious of what had just transpired, continued with their chatter as we turned off into the direction of the air base, giving my father the location of exactly where I was going. My mouth went dry and my stomach did flip-flops, not from feelings of guilt at what I had done, but at getting caught. The evening suddenly lost its lustre and seemed to drag as I played the image of my father’s grim face over and over in my head. Neither the Bingo game nor my winning first prize and collecting it from a smiling Air Force officer could redeem the evening for me. When I returned home, I prepared myself for the worst and a long lecture on morals and lying to one’s parents. To my shock, I found out that his anger was not directed at the Bingo but at my lipstick that had been so bright that he had clearly seen it through the rear window. From that day on I stopped playing Bingo as it gave me anxiety attacks and going to Barbara’s house was added to my father’s increasingly long list of forbidden activities. Matters became astronomically worse at home after I succumbed to Beatlemania. Their singular four/four beat in music, their mop tops and their cheekiness catapulted me into hopeless, boundless, shameless love. I was smitten and smitten to the point of insanity with John, Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in my head wherever I went and whatever I did. The day their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, came to our theatre I couldn’t sleep from excitement. My friends and I had formed a fan 18

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club for the Beatles and had named ourselves after our favourite member of the band. Jeanette Rebold was John, Pat McDonald was Paul, Cheryl Congleton was Ringo and I was George. On the day of the movie, and appropriately attired in Beatle costumes and Beatle haircuts, we were driven to the movie theatre by my father who was, predictably, having serious issues over my Beatlemania. I had never displayed such overt teenage antics before and he was convinced that I was going to become a ‘wild woman’ during the movie. I was very relieved that he had not outrightly forbidden me from seeing the movie, but I had no way of knowing what he actually had in store for me. To my deep and utter mortification, my father not only got out of the car to walk us to the ticket stand but also bought a ticket for himself as well, becoming the only adult in the movie theatre. He unsmilingly and resolutely sat between me and my dismayed friends to make sure I did not get out of control. I don’t recall anything from the movie except my father’s sharp eyes on me rather than on the screen. After A Hard Day’s Night, I took my Beatlemania underground along with my other Western idiosyncrasies.

* * * My identification with the Americans was not due to any lack of contact with the Arab world. I knew it well. We visited my parents’ friends in the nearby towns of al Khobar and Dammam. While my friends went with their families to Europe and the United States for their summer vacations, I went with mine to visit relatives in Damascus, Cairo and Alexandria. Now I realize how fortunate I was to have seen that part of the Arab world before it crumbled under the onus of the Arab–Israeli conflicts and dictatorships. But those were not my feelings then, although I did enjoy the change of pace I experienced during our summer holiday visits. We often began our summers in Damascus at my grandparent’s house, a beautiful white ground-floor home with high ceilings, sunlit rooms and black and white marble chequered floors. The house looked out on to an open porch and a small fragrant rose garden surrounded by a black wrought iron fence. It was located in a wide plaza known as the Raeess (leader), a reference to the Presidential Palace which was located just across the plaza from our house. To us as children, having the Presidential offices so near was a nuisance because of the constant 19

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presence of guards that stood at attention round the clock, which created a headache for my young aunts who were banished from the front porch by my conservative uncles. Damascus during the fifties and early sixties was a beautiful clean, spacious city with wide boulevards and airy three-storey apartment buildings designed by architects from Italy. Sweet-smelling trees shaded the sidewalks and the entrance to every home had a front garden that wafted the fragrant scents of the Levantine flora on to the passerby. A large green park, the Sibki, boasted a man-made lake filled with ducks and swans. Located in the centre of the city, Sibki Park divided the residential areas of the city from the ancient covered markets in the centre, the largest of which was Souk el Hamidiyeh, built by the Ottoman Sultan Abdel Hamid in the nineteenth century. The souk was lined with tiny shops that were traditionally handed down from father to son. Salesmen stood in the doorways and called out to potential customers to tempt them to buy from their wide variety of wares: iridescent damask silks, handmade mosaic boxes, embroidered tablecloths, towels, spices, 21-carat gold jewellery, satin bed sheets and risqué underwear for new brides-to-be. A maze of sinewy paths branched off from the main covered souk, crowded with intricately designed Ottoman- and Mamluk-era homes, their occupants hidden from the public eye behind thick wooden doors with heavy brass knockers in the shape of gargoyles and coloured glass windows with intricate, latticed wooden shutters. So entwined were the pathways and homes, that one exceedingly narrow and crooked lane had been named ‘where the monkey lost her son’. Our favourite quarter of the souk was the one devoted to slippers of all shapes, sizes and colours. They hung in multitudes of overlapping pairs attached by invisible wire on poles leaning on the sides of the doors. How the salesmen were able to reach out with their metal hooks and deftly pull out the exact model and size of the desired slipper from the folds of slippers without a moment’s hesitation was a mystery that we spent endless hours trying to unravel. Along the worn cobblestones under the soaring arched roof of the souk, vendors adroitly wielded their cumbersome wooden three-wheeled carts alongside men on shrilly tinkling bicycles, covered in brightly coloured feathers, and puttering mopeds. We moved slowly through crowds of pedestrians. We suffered the pushing and pinching of various parts of our bodies as we inched our way from one shop to the other, and patiently endured our aunts’ 20

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endless haggling deemed absolutely necessary before any exchange of money and wares took place, because we knew that we would eventually reach our main destination: the souk’s Arabic ice-cream parlour. The ice-cream parlour was a large cavernous room furnished with rickety white Formica tables and bamboo chairs scattered around the parlour in no particular order. Its white plaster walls were bare, save for two large black and white sepia portraits of the owner’s father and grandfather hung up high near the ceiling, identical in their red fezzes and stern moustached faces. At the parlour’s entrance, four hefty men bent over four giant vats prepared the Levantine ice cream, drumming a staccato beat with long sticks in light-hearted harmony while they pounded milk, vanilla, sugar and myrrh into a rich, smooth and chewy consistency. We tapped our table to their rhythmic beat while we waited hungrily for our treat. At long last our ice creams arrived, rising in delectable pristine white curls in engraved glass bowls, covered with generous sprinkles of crushed pistachios and crystallized rose petals. There was plenty to see and plenty to do in Damascus and the city flowed easily. Tradition and hierarchy played a very strong role within the established Damascene families, largely middle-class merchant families who anchored the economic and social network. Each religious denomination lived without any visible rancour vis-à-vis the other. All the inhabitants of the city were Damascene and Syrian before they were Jews, Christian or Muslim. This of course applied to the cities, but it was a different story in the countryside. There lived Syria’s ‘les miserables’, the Alawite minority who existed in subhuman conditions without water, electricity, roads or schools. The Alawites, a branch of Shiism, worship Ali, the grandson of the Prophet. Branded as a cult by the largely feudal urban Sunni leadership, they were shunted out of the fabric of Syrian existence: worship of a human is strictly forbidden in Islam’s basic tenets. One morning in 1958 during our summer holiday, I was showing off my brand new hula hoop to the neighbours on the front porch when I noticed a giant new flag draped along the length of the Presidential Palace. ‘We are now part of the United Arab Republic’ my Uncle Hisham informed me excitedly. ‘We are one Arab people with Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser will restore Palestine and our dignity and honour; he is an Arab Nationalist of the first calibre who will lead us Arabs in our fight for our right to be free of all types of occupation.’ I was seven, 21

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too young to grasp the politics but old enough to notice a significant change surrounding the Presidential Palace. Large cheering crowds gathered daily to hear speeches glorifying the UAR union and many Important Visitors came and went that summer led by shrieking sirens. It was all very exciting, although the enthusiasm of the women of Damascus for the UAR became dampened somewhat after large groups of free-spirited young Egyptian ladies, university exchange students, poured into Damascus and marched through the high street around the corner from my grandparents’ house, laughing and singing exuberantly ‘We want unity with Syrian husbands.’ Stirring songs were written in praise of the United Arab Republic and Gamal Abdel Nasser. My favourite song was the one that included my Aunt Firdoss as part of the chorus of the Ain Shams University students in Cairo lauding Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and the building of the High Dam of Egypt in defiance of Western opposition. Who Gamal Abdel Nasser was didn’t make much difference to me at that age, of course, but I was happy for the happiness of my aunts and uncles. The music and lyrics still remain a moving and nostalgic memory of the hope that captured the hearts and aspirations of that first emerging post-colonial generation. Three years later, in 1961, the hula hoop rage was still going strong, but the United Arab Republic was through. A group of young Alawite officers seized power in a bloodless coup d’état which brought an Alawite into the presidency. Predictably, relations with the Sunni leader of the Arab world, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, cooled and the giant UAR flag was taken down amidst cheering and clapping crowds. The Alawites overran the established Damascene society with a vengeance. Damascus was flooded with Alawite peasants looking for work through their Alawite connections in the government. Nine years later, in 1970, the Alawites were officially recognized as legitimate Muslims through Presidential decree after one of the Alawite officers who had toppled the Sunni leadership in 1961, Hafez Asad, seized power in another bloodless coup. He would reign over Syria for thirty years and would successfully steer Syrian politics away from the Sunni-dominated Pan-Arab leadership. The Alawite controlled Baathist regime was rife with corruption and nepotism that triggered a serious drain of money and intelligence out of Syria, bringing its vibrant economy to a standstill. My mother’s family began to drop their voices to a whisper at the mere mention of the 22

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Baathists even within the walls of their own homes when Sunni relatives and friends began to disappear as they left the mosque after Friday prayers. All those who chose to question the Baathists ended up in jail or dead, including the two thinkers, Michel Aflaq, a Christian Orthodox, and Salah Bitar, a Sunni Muslim, who had developed the Baath ideology in Beirut’s cafes. We watched Damascus turn into a sad, grey, crumbling city. The second part of our summers was spent in Egypt until King Sa’ud and Gamal Abdel Nasser stopped being friends after they differed on who should have the upper hand in Yemen in 1962. Post-1962, Cairo and Alexandria dropped off our summer itinerary. Until that year, we spent happy fun-filled summers switching from the long drawl of the Syrian dialect to the clipped musical staccato of the Egyptian one. I remember the Cairo of my childhood days as a brightly lit city filled with colourful people and laughter. The only place that didn’t have much laughter was the large echoing marble expanse of ‘Amti Bahija’s penthouse overlooking the Nile River. She had been married off at the age of thirteen to a man thirty-five years her senior, Saleh Mehdi Qal’aji, a southern Iraqi who had fought with Ibn Jiluwi and Abdel Aziz Ibn Sa’ud in the early days of Saudi Arabia’s conquest and was instrumental in setting up both the police and charity network for the new kingdom. The grateful king had told him, ‘I’m a simple Bedouin who does not bequeath titles such as Bek (Sir) or Basha (Lord). I will endow you with what I perceive you to be; the title of Mosleh (Benefactor).’ His efforts were further rewarded with the position of Hijaz’s General Director of Customs and a lavish lifestyle in Cairo. ‘Amti Bahija was his trophy wife. She grew into a beautiful but intensely unhappy woman whose emotional scars from her early marriage and immense wealth were reflected by her hard-faced persona. Our entrance at her door said it all. Nubian servants dressed in long kaftans bowed silently as they ushered us to ‘Amti Bahija, visible from the entrance door across the interminable stretch of marble, seated in an ornate velvet armchair with legs crossed, dressed in the height of fashion and laconically blowing smoke rings from her cigarette (a favourite pastime of hers) as she waited silently for us to approach her. We never stayed longer than it took for my father to pay his respects to his eldest sister and his mother, and continued on to the highlight of our summer in Alexandria. 23

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My mother’s grandmother – Marie Haddad, a dear white-haired Maronite Catholic from Deir al Qamar of Lebanon (the Ottoman-ruled Bilad el Sham province when she was born) – lived there. She had met my great grandfather, Mohammed Hammoud, while living with her family in Alexandria (many Bilad el Sham Christians lived in Egypt at that time); he was a merchant from Sidon passing through in the days of borderless existence and free trade in the land under Ottoman rule. They had a daughter and a son, but their marriage did not last and she returned to her family in Alexandria where she had her own apartment. For reasons no one could quite explain, their son Joseph went with my great grandmother, and their daughter, my grandmother Yisr, stayed behind with her father in Sidon. My grandmother lived a lonely life after she was abandoned to relatives by her father when he remarried, until my grandfather, a distant relative and merchant from Damascus, asked for her hand in marriage. She was thirteen and he was twenty years her senior, but she couldn’t have found a gentler and kinder man for a husband. Our trip to Alexandria was as exciting as our stay there. We travelled from Cairo to Alexandria by steam locomotive with wooden seats that were only a suggestion of how many passengers were to occupy the carriage. We squeezed into our wooden seats among loud jostling good-natured crowds of peasants carrying their farm produce on their heads in large oblong straw baskets, clasping wire cages filled with hens and roosters clucking up a storm and accompanied, of course, by many, many children who spent the trip climbing over everybody. Policemen were stationed at the doors of the train with the unenviable task of keeping off the hens and roosters, all in vain of course. The cages that were taken away at the door were quickly handed to their owners by relatives bidding them farewell through the windows of the train as it pulled away. We swayed gently and rhythmically from side to side as the train clattered down the track, passing through wide expanses of cotton fields stretching as far as the eye could see. Dotted across the fields of green and white were the fellahin, peasant men and women were bent over, spreading seeds in wide circular sprays that glinted briefly in the golden rays of the sun before settling into the mystical soil of the Nile Delta. On our arrival at Alexandria train station, we made a beeline to the semi-circle of feathered horses and black-hooded carriages, hantoors, that awaited passengers headed towards the coastal city, hoping our 24

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favourite carriage driver Hassanein would be there to take us to Tehteh Im Yousef, our great grandmother. (Tehteh is an endearment used by children for their grandmother.) She was a cheerful bundle of energy and sang happily in her Egyptian dialect as she welcomed us into her modest home in a Christian neighbourhood, a quiet genteel residential area of French-era colonial buildings filled with flower boxes and Ottoman-era villas enclosed by high walls that hid spacious courtyards which we could glimpse from her tiny balcony. A white domed church topped by a giant cross stood at the end of her narrow winding street. Tehteh’s home, a two-bedroom apartment that would easily have fitted into my aunt’s marble entrée, was immeasurable in terms of the love that abounded within its tiny walls. She had high metal-frame beds that supported stacks of mattresses, which were immediately taken down and prepared for us in all four corners of the bedroom. In a silent but clear statement about her independence of spirit in reverting back to Christianity after her divorce, my great grandmother had the cross and pictures of the Madonna and Jesus Christ in every room. It made for some whispers and nudges among our aunts and uncles, but these remained nudges and whispers; no one dared broach the topic, aware of the potential minefield that religion tended to be. Khalo (Uncle) Joseph, a Maronite Catholic like his mother, had been taught the craft of shoemaking by the nuns at the convent school he had attended and his tiny shop was underneath the house. My siblings and I took turns at sitting there; it was too small to accommodate all four of us – at least that was the excuse. But I would imagine it was more of a diplomatic way of giving Khalo Joseph a chance actually to get some work done during our visit. What a fascinating place his shop was. We all decided we wanted to be shoemakers when we grew up, and spent hours laboriously putting together our own shoemaking kit upstairs, pretending to hammer the heel of our shoe with small nails that we stuck in our mouths exactly in the manner of Khalo Joseph, vigorously polishing our shoes and anyone else’s we found lying around with a collection of toothbrushes that we swiped from the bathroom. My great uncle was in love with his profession. He approached it as an artist to a canvas as he would pull out a soft rich piece of irregular leather, turn it round and round in his hands while he got the feel for it, then finally bring out a wooden shoe dummy and began to construct his shoe. He would cut the piece with a small knife using short deft 25

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motions, then pull it over the shoe dummy, stretching it this way and that in the manner he envisioned it be, and as pieces of leather flew and his needle danced into and out of them, a shoe began magically to appear. I would sit quietly in my corner (the agreed conditions for a visit), observing him intently, and he would look up every now and then to remark: ‘I am a very lucky man, ya danaya (sweetheart), to make a living out of a craft I love so much.’ Poor ‘Amti Bahija would never know such happiness.

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eturning to Dhahran from our summer holidays, we had no trouble in slipping back into our American lives as that was our real world. What we experienced as Arabs did not affect us the way our American experiences did. When we relayed our summer experiences we were aware that Egypt and Syria were viewed as exotic and we began to view them in the same exotic light that our friends and teachers did. On occasion it wasn’t my Arabness that brought me unwarranted attention in Dhahran but my religion. During sixth grade, I was invited to the home of a new student, Cindy, a blonde-haired blue-eyed serious girl of Swedish extraction who had been in Dhahran for less than a month, along with Linda and Carolyn, two friends from my Girl Scout troop. Cindy’s mother met us at the door greeting me in the exaggerated solicitous manner I had become used to from some of the American adults in their interaction with me. Lunch was already on the table: spaghetti and meat balls with brownies and ice cream for dessert. We were starving and demolished the meal in no time. After lunch, we went into Cindy’s bedroom, a prettily furnished room with plush wall-to-wall carpeting, a four-poster bed covered by a ruffled pink bedspread, and the dream of all young girls of our generation: her very own matching pink princess phone. We spread ourselves around the room, Cindy put the Beach Boys on her compact record player, and we began a gab session about school and boys. We were on the verge of turning into teenagers and wanted to make sure we were getting the boy/girl dynamics right. 27

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Somehow, without warning, the gab session turned to religion and from there to Christianity. I suddenly found myself under the spotlight with the three girls forming a tight circle around me and pushing me to convert to Christianity. ‘But I’ll go to hell and my parents would disown me,’ I answered miserably. I really wanted to appease my friends but something told me I would be crossing a very dangerous line if I even as much as thought of going down that road. ‘Let them disown you,’ Cindy told me airily. ‘My parents would adopt you and you would live with us.’ A small temptation wiggled into my eleven-year-old mind. I looked around Cindy’s beautiful bedroom. Her parents obviously doted on her. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all; I would be doted on too and I would go to America, a magical place in my imagination, a dreamy land where it was all fun and play according to my friends. Catching a small window of opportunity, Cindy jumped up: ‘I’ll call my mom, and she’ll tell you all about Jesus and how much happier you’ll be as a Christian like us.’ Her mother walked in, looking very much like my first grade reader Dick, Jane and Sally’s mother with her peach-coloured shirtdress and small apron around her slim waist. She sat next to me and, taking my hand in hers, gently lifted my face so she could look me in the eye. She spoke for a long time about Jesus and his miracles and said that I would be treated as dearly as Cindy in their home if I decided to run away from my despotic Muslim way of life and become a Christian. I toyed with the idea of frolicking in the USA without my father’s oppressive rules to follow; it became yet more tempting to step through the door being held wide open for me, seemingly with only happy days ahead. The intensity of the girls’ and mother’s argument was disquieting. They told me that the best religion to be was Protestant and sincerely wanted to save me from the hellfire and damnation they were convinced that I as a Muslim was going into. If I said ‘no’, I would permanently shut the tempting door of being part of the American world that fascinated me; and if I said ‘yes’, I would lose everything I knew. After an intense inner struggle, I decided my answer would be ‘no’, but I did not have the courage to say it out loud. ‘I would love to be a Protestant,’ I told them and, of course, avoided them forevermore after that incident. Cindy and her family did not stay long; someone caught wind of their proselytizing and they were shipped back to America. It wasn’t through me though; I never breathed a word to anyone … I certainly didn’t want a replay of the rock-throwing incident and its repercussions ever again. 28

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Apart from that singular incident, spiritual events in Dhahran were homely occasions for inter-communal socializing. Holidays were one big visiting spree as our homes filled with American and Arab friends wishing one another well. On the days of our Islamic holidays, the Christian Aramcons dropped by to wish us a ‘Happy Eid ’ and on Christmas Day we returned the call. Dhahran’s commissary sang gaily with Christmas songs as it overflowed with Christmas ornaments and glowed with fairy lights, gold-gilded Whitman’s Sampler chocolate boxes and Drostes’ chocolates wrapped in silver with plastic fir trees sprinkled with plastic white drops of snow. I collected these trees passionately, soon amassing a Lilliputian forest on my bookshelf where I would pick one and turn it round and round in my hand trying to grasp the feel of snow that I knew only in my mind’s eye. On the tenth of every December, my siblings and I hauled out our plastic fir tree and decorated it with shiny baubles, angel hair and strings of flashing candles made of glass. We carefully placed the presents we received from our friends under the tree, not opening them until Christmas morning. At school our teacher read ‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas’ and my classmates worried about Santa skipping their houses after not finding a chimney to drop off his gifts in their fireplace-less duplexes, while I secretly wondered if he skipped my house because I was Muslim. I would stare at the pictures of the milky-white snow and ask my friends if it tasted like vanilla ice cream. ‘Of course it does, silly,’ they would laugh. ‘Can’t you tell?’ But I would eventually discover that they were only showing off because they too had never seen snow since their holidays to the States were always in summer. Bringing toys into Dhahran for Christmas was a contentious issue between Aramcon mothers and Wahhabi customs officials. According to Wahhabi beliefs, any replication of the human body is sinful and dolls were fanatically destroyed at customs before the horrified eyes of their tiny owners. Aramcon mothers eventually found a way to circumnavigate this problem: the Dhahran Women’s Group came up with the idea of bringing toys in through the annual private shipments that American Aramco employees were permitted. These shipments bypassed Saudi customs thanks to an understanding between Aramco’s Government Relations and the Saudi government. Each year, several women offered their shipment quotas which were used for importing toys and dolls for the Aramco community as a lucrative fundraiser for the Group’s various projects. To avoid the crushing rush the first toy fair experienced, with 29

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hand-to-hand combat among mothers for items such as ‘G.I. Joes’ which were in high demand by their children, a lottery was organized at which each mother would draw a number that allowed her in on a specific day and specific hour. Those who got the tail-end of the series … well too bad, better luck next year. My father didn’t believe in toys, finding them silly and a waste of money, so we had to circumnavigate our private censor at home. My mother would secretly squirrel away housekeeping money for the toy fair and come back from it laden with our hearts’ desires, as happy to give them to us as we were to receive them. Once the toys were in the house, it didn’t matter any more; my father never knew they came from the toy fair, thinking instead that they were birthday presents. The major event of the Christmas season in Dhahran was the nativity play. The children cast as Joseph and Mary became minor celebrities until the day after the show. Our nativity play in Dhahran was more striking than most, with live camels and donkeys led by their Bedouin owners (no Bedouin would trust his camel or donkey to anyone else). Having live animals as ornery as donkeys and camels made it a rare nativity which sailed through with actors, singers and animals smoothly playing their roles. One particular Christmas show, after Mary was turned away from the last inn while the angels sang ‘Silent Night’, her donkey decided it had had enough and began to bray in virulent protest, setting off the sheep and goats waiting around the stable to surround Baby Jesus when he arrived. The donkey’s owner rushed to its side and tried to calm it down by whispering in its ear, and offering it a carrot. But the donkey was inconsolable. Mary was unceremoniously ordered to climb down and the owner led away his still stridently objecting donkey. A visibly huffy Mary, considerably diminished dramatically speaking, stomped on foot into a stable in chaos with Joseph running behind her. The three kings perched on camels waiting in the wings held their breath for fear of a possible copy-cat reaction from the camels, but this time round the camels behaved. Needless to mention, the scene surrounding the new-born Jesus was minus the barnyard animals and their maestro, the donkey. We carolled the community on Christmas Eve with the rest of the schoolchildren from the back of Dhahran’s big red fire engine. Our musical tour began outside President Thomas Barger’s home, the largest house in Dhahran situated strategically on its highest point in a 30

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neighbourhood aptly named ‘The Hill’ where the top brass of Aramco (who else?) were congregated. President Barger and his strikingly beautiful wife would emerge smiling graciously followed by their five leggy, athletic and accomplished children, our Aramcon royalty, carrying trays piled with freshly baked Christmas cookies. With the cookies warming our tummies, the fire engine rolled slowly onwards past Dhahran’s duplexes and bungalows which had been transformed into a dazzling cornucopia of iridescent lights twinkling and shining in the clear desert night air. Every Christmas, this tiny speck in the Arabian Desert turned into a hushed, shimmering, magical, winter wonderland. A six-metre-high conical-shaped hedge in a roundabout in the middle of Dhahran became a resplendent Christmas tree sprayed with generous mists of artificial snow. Garlands of red and gold tinsel were draped around the tree’s clipped branches and giant glittery baubles sparkled in reflection from illuminating klieg lights within its wire frame. On the hedge’s topmost tip gleamed a colossal silver five-point star placed there with much fanfare by the President of Aramco as Aramcon families clapped down below. Circling the base of the Christmas tree hedge were Santa’s faithful reindeer forever in take-off mode as they prepared to fly a gift-laden jovial, life-size Santa over the bungalows of the little Aramcons. But there was something not quite right about this Paradise. One step beyond Dhahran’s main gate, within the kingdom proper, muttawa’a agents for the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in charge of enforcing Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Sharia (Islamic Law) were controlling the public morality of non-Aramcon Saudis with fanatical zeal. Under their watchful eyes, all Saudi subjects were forced to conduct themselves as the Wahhabi ulema (clerics) believed daily life to have been conducted in the seventh century AD during the Prophet Mohammed’s lifetime. We, the select few Aramcon Saudi citizens, were free of Wahhabi muttawa’a breathing down our necks because of an ingenious yet surreal arrangement that had been reached between Aramco, the al Sa’uds and their reluctantly acquiescing Wahhabi ulema in 1956 after Aramco had begun to grow in leaps and bounds and Saudi Arabia had become a major source of oil to the West. From the start Aramco was painfully aware that allowing Wahhabi Sharia inside the camps carried the highly likely scenario of muttawa’a running willy-nilly within the community upsetting what was sacred to all parties concerned – the flow of oil to 31

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the West. After intense negotiations between Aramco Government Relations, Public Relations, the al Sa’uds and the Wahhabi ulema of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the consensus was that it would be in all the above parties’ interests that Aramco law would rule within the confines of the community and Saudi law would rule outside the community. So it came to be by royal decree that after 1956, any woman who drove inside Dhahran wearing shorts did her errands and went home. Outside the community gates, she would be breaking the law and would go to jail. To further appease the fixated ulema, whom they recognized as the essential guardians of the al Sa’ud throne, Aramco’s American CEOs solemnly agreed that it was a ‘cultural’ matter that no Saudi should be unnecessarily exposed to any form of thought or lifestyle outside that of the Wahhabi religious tenets within the kingdom proper whether the Saudi was a Wahhabi Muslim or not. As far as the Americans running the oil company were concerned, this arrangement suited them just fine. Their primary interest was the oil and whatever measures it took to maintain control over its production and transport to the West. If the Saudi royal family felt enforcement of the Wahhabi interpretation of the ‘purity’ of Islam was a matter of national security, so be it … as long as it was outside Aramco jurisdiction. The ulema were mollified into accepting the arrangement by generous funding from Aramco oil proceeds (originally earmarked for the royal family) for their quest to convert Arabia and beyond to Wahhabism. Until the early seventies, no muttawa’a lurked where Aramcons trod in the Eastern Province. We bought our vegetables and fruit from the nearby fishing village of al Khobar in pedal pushers and T-shirts. We went on field trips to Qatif and Hofuf in the al Hasa Oasis in sleeveless dresses. My mother only wore a voile scarf on her head in case of a sandstorm starting when she was leaving the beauty shop, and never anything else at any other time. The muttawa’a’s services were not needed within Aramco. Their main role of policing the local population and any spread of anti-al Sa’ud ideas that cropped up in anti-government meetings was being handled very thoroughly by the Americans. The American government undertook the funding and training of Saudi Arabia’s army and the National Guard so that they would deal effectively with anyone who opposed the ruling family. Colonel Harry R. Snyder, a senior intelligence officer, fluent 32

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in Arabic and an expert on Arab affairs, was transferred from the CIA centre in Cairo in 1949 to lead the US training mission for Saudi Arabia’s nascent security apparatus. Once that assignment was accomplished, Snyder moved on to become the Head of the Training Department of Aramco’s Saudi Arab employees. Strikes against Aramco became a punishable offence and Arab employees who were caught agitating for better terms were deported. Trade unions and political parties were banned by a fatwa (religious decree) forbidding divisiveness among Muslim brothers. Aramco’s intelligence gathering was efficiently weeding out the ‘bad apples’. Under these conditions, and with few educated and enlightened Saudis during the early fifties, it can safely be said that no credible threat to the throne existed at that point in time. Nevertheless, Aramco did not take any chances. In its oldest records dating from its pioneer days in the late forties, there is evidence of its executives refusing to employ educated Saudis and other Arabs, or to accord them equal status with the Americans, much less allow them to reside in the American camp. But when the number of educated and enlightened Saudis began to multiply along with Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth, credible opposition appeared, dangerously enough within the National Guard itself, previously assumed to be impervious to any break within the ranks. Popular anti-imperialism among the Arab nations overflowed into Saudi Arabia, acutely embarrassing the al Sa’uds, upholders of Wahhabi Islam, protectors of Islam’s holiest cities, and patrons of the imperialists with the Dhahran Air Base then the largest American military base between Germany and Japan. Yet at the same time they needed the American defence forces to keep at bay those who challenged the al Sa’ud throne with their questionable claim to custodianship of the Two Holy Shrines of Islam and their equally questionable oil economy. The Wahhabi ulema demanded increasing funds to remain silent. Although the ulema’s job description was the same as the Americans’ with respect to maintaining the al Sa’ud throne, they wanted it under their control, not that of the Americans. Their ire weakened the incumbent al Sa’ud king who needed their religious cover to remain as official Custodian of the Two Holy Shrines before the Islamic world. The royal family’s solution was gradually to recede the American defence forces in Saudi Arabia out of sight into the distant desert and increase the Wahhabi ulema’s share of oil dollars from Aramco with yet broader powers to prevent any enlightenment educationally, socially and, most 33

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important of all, politically. The fallout, as usual, fell on the increasingly sagging shoulders of the Saudi subjects. Today the ulema and their Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are wielding the most power over Saudi Arabia’s subjects that they have ever had over the longest single stretch of time in Saudi Arabia’s modern history. They prowl at every corner of every sidewalk and alleyway in Saudi Arabia except within the walled communities of the expatriates and Aramco’s oil towns. The muttawa’a make sure that no one (outside the royal family) drinks alcohol, gambles, commits adultery or mixes with unmarried members of the opposite sex, or (if you’re a woman) laughs loudly in public places. There are signs in restaurants in Jeddah that state clearly that kahkahkah (denoting the sound of laughter in Arabic) is strictly forbidden on the premises. The sanctity of the home is no protection from the muttawa’a, who have the licence to burst in if they suspect mixed parties; they also climb into cars that have stopped at red lights if they suspect the couple inside are unmarried. The accused are hauled to jail where, more often than not, they spend at least twelve hours of degradation before being released if they are innocent. If the accusation sticks, then it’s a public lashing and a jail sentence. Non-observance of fasting in the holy month of Ramadan means jail for the Muslim and deportation for the non-Muslim. For the four out of the five required Muslim daily prayer times that coincide with opening hours, shops must close down for forty-five minutes, under the close watch of muttawa’a who patrol their assigned areas, rapping sharply on shop windows and often shouting ‘salaaah’ (prayer) at any unfortunate male caught outside the mosque. Unfortunately, women receive the brunt of the muttawa’a’s wrath. The latter crouch down in folding chairs at the entrance of shopping malls with their unkempt henna-dipped beards, three-quarter-length thobes and camel whips waving like an impatient predator’s tail, primed to pounce on any unsuspecting woman whose abaya might have slipped from her head. The Wahhabi ulema define ‘woman’ as the personification of sin, there to sway the faithful Muslim from his devotion to God and his Islam by exposing tempting parts of her body before him, and they believe it’s their God-given duty not to allow this to happen unless the man is her husband. With the muttawa’a unleashed with such intensity, sex becomes SEX in Saudi Arabia, and the muttawa’a its trigger. How can one refrain from desiring what is being denied by such absolute command? 34

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Thorough as the ulema are, a major act of one-upmanship has managed to slip from under their sharp noses – and that is the name chosen for my hometown Dhahran, which means ‘two breasts’ in Saudi lingo. Geographically, Dhahran nestles cosily between two perfectly curved mound formations. The Saudi bachelor who thought of that name saw in Dhahran what he was forbidden to see otherwise … a consummate thumb-to-nose gesture by any standard. It was not until the late sixties that schools for girls were permitted and, even then, the range of topics taught was very narrow: learning to read and write by studying the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran. Our passports contained only our names and details of our legal guardians. Not even a mention of the colour of our eyes or hair was permitted and don’t even think of a signature. Female Saudi Arabs do not exist outside of the legal guardianship of the main male head of the family. A frustrated Interpol pressured the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to join the twentieth century in 1975 and get its female subjects photographed for their passports after female (and male: who would know?) members of organized crime were criss-crossing security barriers freely, needing only to wear a veil and flash a stolen Saudi woman’s passport. My mother, sister and I were forced to have our passport photos taken three times before the police would accept them because they were unhappy that there was a hint of a smile on our faces. The more traditional women had a difficult time uncovering their faces for fear of appearing wayward and, for a while, there were many who insisted on being photographed wearing their black veils over their faces as well as around their heads. In traditional Wahhabi families, segregation of the sexes is enforced among family members from the age of seven. Women are covered from head to toe from the age of nine and forbidden to communicate with any male outside of their immediate family. Girls’ schools have muttawa’a permanently stationed at their doors to make sure no girl enters or exits the premises uncovered or unchaperoned. This unrelenting surveillance can have tragic consequences. In 2002, a fire broke out in Mecca resulting in the death of fifteen girls because the muttawa’a stationed outside their gates would not open them to allow them to escape or the firemen to enter because the heads of frantically pleading girls’ were uncovered. That the Prophet Mohammed’s wife, Khadija, had been a successful businesswoman and that he had met her after becoming her business associate was a selective detail the Wahhabi theologians preferred to ignore. 35

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Undoubtedly Ibn Sa’ud, conqueror of Saudi Arabia, was a powerful man of the desert who understood and shared the hearts and minds of the Bedouins. He was a kind man and well thought of by his people and portrayed by those who met him from the Western world as a man of indescribable charm. Among the personal characteristics known about Ibn Sa’ud was his love and respect for his father. Despite his kingship, he never entered a room where his father sat until his father invited him to enter and be seated. Sadly, as in the case of most self-made men, his success sprang from his own life experiences and intellect and these are not things which he could pass on to his forty-five sons. While his two eldest sons, Sa’ud and Feisal (who ascended the throne in 1953 and 1965 successively), had experienced a small amount of desert modus vivendi and fought battles for their father as young men, oil wealth from massive foreign investment and the Arab–Israeli conflicts came too soon and too fast for the sons to stand sturdily on their own merits. Rather than engage in the more difficult and drawn-out process of dialogue with their people, they fell back on the easy path of oil dollars, the ulema and American policy advisors within Aramco who whispered into their ears plots of potential conspiracies against them. Wahhabi Sharia became a handy bully that pushed a workforce for the oil producers into obedient shape by stamping out any forms of dissent brutally. And so it became that drinking alcohol or demonstrating for civil or labour rights are punished with public lashings and jail. Theft, including that of Aramco property, is punished by chopping off the right hand and left foot of the accused. Perpetrators of murder, drug trading, rape, and any threat against the al Sa’uds are punished by beheading. All punishments take place in a square behind the main mosque in a public extravaganza after Friday’s noon prayers. Women are shot or stoned lest the Wahhabi executioner see their bare necks before chopping them in half. For such extreme and archaic measures of punishment to remain in place in modern times and in a member state of the United Nations with a hefty oil income of US$148,000,000,000 per annum (and rising) is what raises questions of justice being fairly served. The al Sa’ud’s use Wahhabi Sharia to rein in not only Aramco’s labour dissent but also the political dissent within the traditionally inimical and still simmering territories of Northern Saudi Arabia, Southern Saudi Arabia, Western Saudi Arabia and Eastern Saudi Arabia, along with northern parts of Central Arabia. 36

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As a child on an illicit bicycle ride along the dusty road that ran parallel to Dhahran’s defining perimeter fence, I witnessed the results of Wahhabi justice at terrifyingly close range. It was strictly forbidden by company rules to go anywhere near that perimeter fence, which wound past our house turning into a narrow, rough, rock-strewn path that disappeared around a curve in the distance. Far away on its other side, tiny figures of camels could be seen grazing on thistle bushes that survived the flat dusty terrain, attended by Bedouin herdsmen. The fence was ostensibly to keep them out. The large number of signs bearing the danger symbol of the skull and crossbones splayed along the barbed-wire fence, and Aramco’s security car patrols round the clock, gave it a particularly evil aura. One afternoon, I rode my bicycle there on a dare. And on that distant curve just visible from our house, very near to the Main Gate where it stopped, I saw a chilling sight no child should see. Atop the fence’s posts, waving ghoulishly in the hot humid air, I saw a severed dark hand with dirt-encrusted fingers and, at my terrified eye level, a dismembered foot that swung uselessly at the end of a tattered rope. I gaped in open-mouthed, voiceless and, worst of all, solitary horror at the palm turned upwards, frozen in a last unanswered plea for mercy, and at rough-shod toes popping out of a torn dusty shoe splayed in the last scream of anguish of their ex-owner. My knuckles turned white as I squeezed my bicycle’s handlebars in excruciating, paralysing fear while my stomach churned, threatening to spill its contents. Far ahead I glimpsed the Aramco patrol car cresting the hill. I don’t recall how I scrambled on my bicycle or out-raced the security car in record speed to reach my impatiently waiting friends. We shared the horror, but the secret stayed with us … children of that age know how to keep such secrets. None of us would ever dare to ask our fathers. We had broken a company rule and our fathers never broke any company rules. Those dismembered appendages I saw belonged to a Saudi Arabian unfortunate not to have been invited to share in this rarefied piece of oil-wealth heaven. His ex-hand and ex-foot were graphic warnings to the uninformed non-Aramco Saudis, by order of the Emir of the Eastern Province, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi Ibn al Sa’ud, of what befell those who tried to take what Aramco did not allow to be taken. There were no white American hands or manicured fingers of al Sa’ud royalty, or the fleshy, soft palms of their well-fed sycophants who illicitly raked in billions 37

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of dollars … money that rightfully belonged in the national treasury for those Saudis whose hands and feet were left to rot on Aramco’s barbed-wire perimeter fence.

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he Wahhabi sect that Ibn Sa’ud was born into came into being when a theologian from central Arabia, Mohammed Ibn Abdel Wahhab formed an alliance with Ibn Sa’ud’s great grandfather, Mohammed Ibn Sa’ud, in the late eighteenth century. Together, they successfully spread both Ibn Abdel Wahhab’s puritan version of Islam and the al Sa’uds’ power throughout large parts of Arabia. Their glory lasted until the end of the nineteenth century after the al Sa’uds lost their conquests and were exiled to the Eastern Province by the Ottomans who did not share their puritan form of Islam. Ibn Sa’ud grew up in exile listening to regurgitated stories of what the al Sa’uds had once been. By the time he reached the age of 21 in 1902, he had decided that he was going to be the one to regain his tribe’s glory. With the support of his brothers and cousins, he dusted off his great grandfather’s battle strategy of combining politics with militant Islam and formed an alliance with revivalists of Ibn Abdel Wahhab’s teachings – militant, deeply religious Muslim Sunni Bedouin puritans who addressed one another as Ikhwan (brothers) in accordance with the Islamic teaching that all Muslims are brothers. Ibn Sa’ud calculatingly stoked the fire of evangelist fervor of these Wahhabi Bedouins (or Muwahhidun as they referred to their group) whom he knew had one aim in life: to rid Arabia from personal corruption and immorality in 39

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order to connect to God (Tawhid) by following Islam in its unadorned purity. Due to his position as the son of the Imam of the Wahhabi, Ibn Sa’ud soon amassed 100,000 Ikhwan in tightly organized fighting units in agricultural settlements known as hujar, ready to drop their hoes and pick up their swords at his command. In their unadulterated zeal to eradicate non-Muwahhidun Muslims from Arabia, the Ikhwan became widely feared as the thabaheen (throat slitters) as they struck terror amongst those Bedouins who did not share their same desire for martyrdom. With bags of silver sterling from the British to be used to persuade Bedouin tribes to support his cause than that that of the Ottomans – and with the Ikhwan as his most lethal weapon for those who needed more persuasion, Ibn Sa’ud’s political war for the conquest of Arabia had been transformed into a powerful jihad against the ramshackle, hierarchical and fractious tribes of the Arabian Desert In 1928, Ibn Sa’ud declared his conquests over Arabia complete. He had promised the British that, in return for their support of his campaign, he would not challenge their protectorates Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq. Not so for his Ikhwan allies. They refused to lay down their arms and determinedly continued to push their jihad northwards into the forbidden territory which included the deserts of Iraq, Syria and Jordan, and up to the ‘Aqaba port on the Red Sea, territories which bordered the British Empire’s troubled colony of Palestine. Too late Ibn Sa’ud realized the double-edged sword that the Ikhwan had become within the heart of Arabia They had spiraled out of control, becoming a separate power-based entity with a separate agenda. Not particularly devout himself, he had viewed them only in terms of their usefulness to his dreams for the conquest of Arabia, and had taught them the barest rudiments of religion and secular education necessary to maintain their narrow-minded zealotry, rather than Islam’s broader spiritual impact. Their lives revolved only around blood, death and Paradise in fighting for Islam’s purity and they were dedicated to ridding Arabia of immorality which they associated with the presence and power of colonialism. Now their dreams were threatening his dreams. Ibn Sa’ud relied on the colonialists’ funds and weapons to defeat rival powers in Arabia and the Ikhwans’ combative services were getting in his way. Managing to gain a fatwa from likeminded ‘ulema and backed by British support, he crushed their movement and, by 1930, they were no longer a military power. And as for their spiritual authority, Ibn Sa’ud eclipsed them by 40

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setting up his own Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice with handpicked cooperative ulema ready to bend the rules to keep him on the throne. Saudi Arabia was declared a kingdom on 23 September 1932 by ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn ‘Abdel Rahman Ibn al Sa’ud, with only those of the Muslim faith accorded the nationality. Saudi Arabia’s new Wahhabi king named the conquered area after his tribe, Saudi Arabia (the Arabia of the al Sa’uds). The ‘Arabia of the al Sa’uds’ occupies eighty percent of the Arabian Peninsula, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the east and the Red Sea to the west with borders along Yemen, Oman, the Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq. We, the modern inhabitants of this part of the Arabian Peninsula, are born with the identity of being the Arabs of the al Sa’uds whether we were originally al Sa’uds or not, and more importantly, whether we care to or not. Our ‘independent nation state’ is a theocracy with no constitution except the words of the Koran, no separation of powers, no press outside of the official thinking, no elected parliament (until 2005, where only a third of the local municipalities were elected, leaving the majority to rubber stamp for the al Sa’uds), no judicial independence, no separate identity for women, no recognition of residing non-Sunni sects like Shiites and Ismailies. The new ruler consolidated power away from his brothers and cousins who had helped him conquer the peninsula by stipulating that only his sons were the rightful heirs to the crown after his death. Every Saudi Arabian king to date has been a son of al Sa’ud.

* * * Soon after declaring his kingship, a severe drought gripped Saudi Arabia erasing all revenue from taxes on the main staple of trade in the kingdom, dates. A recession also gripped the world that affected the inflow of Hajj pilgrims further reducing Saudi income. Ibn Sa’ud found himself ruling a vast, largely illiterate desert kingdom with no resources or income and restive subjects who could only be silenced with material benefits. To add insult to injury, his previous paymasters, the British, had dropped him from their payroll after obtaining North Palestine and its valuable port outlets. At this dire moment of need, the Americans stepped in with their timely bid for permission to explore and produce 41

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oil in Saudi Arabia. Ibn Sa’ud seized the offer with both hands and just nine months into his kingship, he signed an oil concession agreement with Standard Oil of California (SoCal). Representing SoCal were two Americans: Lloyd N. Hamilton, SoCal’s chief negotiator, a UCLA and Oxford University graduate and expert in contracts who had served as a US infantry officer in France during the First World War; and Karl Twitchell, a mining engineer who was not only fluent in Arabic but also had already completed surveying the Arabian desert (the size of France), travelling with Bedouin tribes over an area of almost 515,000 square kilometres of casually mapped barren desert. On the other side of the negotiating table was Saudi Arabia’s representative: Sheikh Abdullah al Suleiman, King Abdel Aziz’s Finance Minister, who was there because he was literate. Before becoming the king’s right-hand man in legal and monetary affairs, al Suleiman had worked as a clerk in India. The Saudi Arab Finance Minister came to the negotiating table armed with knowledge of terms already won by Iraq and Iran for their oil concession contracts with the British Empire. Next to Sheikh al Suleiman was the tin trunk that contained the Saudi Arabian national treasury where revenues from taxes on pilgrims to the Hajj and camel caravans moving goods from ports on the Red Sea to the Levant went for safekeeping. That day in May the trunk was empty. Little wonder that it took just three short days for a sweeping concession agreement beyond both parties’ expectations to be reached, allowing the USA to search for oil in Saudi Arabia. The first formal contract between Saudi Arabia and the USA over oil exploration rights was signed on 29 May 1933 at Khuzam Palace on the outskirts of Jeddah. Known as the Concession Agreement, it was formally issued under Royal Decree Number 1135 on 7 July 1933 and officially proclaimed on 14 July 1933. SoCal was given exclusive rights to prospect and produce oil in the Eastern Province plus preferential rights elsewhere in the kingdom. In return, King Ibn Sa’ud would receive royalties of US$1.00 per ton of oil produced, loans of US$50,000 yearly and annual rentals of US$25,000. At that point in time this was money beyond his wildest dreams, and it was all he really cared to know about the contract. While the details of the concession were being read out in the formal signing ceremony, King Abdel Aziz Ibn Sa’ud fell asleep. 42

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Five years later, on the eve of the Second World War, while drilling at Dammam Well No. 7, 2,000 feet deeper than usual, geologists from the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC) – a wholly-owned subsidiary to which SoCal had assigned its concession rights in 1933 – hit the largest oil deposits ever found, estimated to hold 25 per cent of the known reserves in the world. This immediately turned into a serious dilemma for both parties. To the Americans, the outbreak of war brought Saudi Arabia’s infant oil industry to a halt before major drilling had started. Ibn Sa’ud found himself in a critical economic situation once more as taxes from Hajj pilgrims shrank to a trickle, both because of the war and because of a serious drought that evaporated any taxes on dates and livestock. Without money and food, he would lose the allegiance of the fickle Bedouin tribal leaders and sheikhs, and therefore control over his tenuously cobbled together kingdom where many were unhappy at his invitation to foreigners to drill for oil, accusing him of an un-Islamic act. He desperately needed money to silence his critics. Ibn Sa’ud turned to the Americans with his only trump card; he held the oil concession for ransom. No money, no oil concession. CASOC had access to the White House’s ear. In 1943, they threw their impasse on the government’s desk with the impassioned plea that their newly launched fledgling subsidiary, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), had a far more pivotal role for USA interests than just an economic one. After the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation of Burma and Indonesia, two critical sources of oil had closed down leaving Saudi Arabia as the only remaining source of free-flowing oil for the Allies. The lobbying worked. A 1943 policy paper to President F.D. Roosevelt described Saudi Arabia as the ‘bulwark against the threat of Communist aggression in the Middle East and a force for economic and political stability in the world’. By an Executive Order stating that the defence of Saudi Arabia was a vital interest of the United States, President F.D. Roosevelt gave the green light for Saudi Arabia to be eligible for US financial assistance. Key trainers and programmers were instantly dispatched to Saudi Arabia from the US army, navy, and central intelligence division to organize Aramco along the lines of the US wartime State Department, including a carbon copy of the intelligence department of the Office of Strategic Services – today’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – Middle East Intelligence and Propaganda Division, which was stationed in Cairo. It was not long before Aramco became home to many vaunted 43

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Arabists and early CIA operatives in Saudi Arabia. The oil company was granted an exclusive exploration and production concession and became subsidized by the US Treasury. Ibn Sa’ud got his wish in 1943, with US$30 million in royalty payments plus a US$25 million ‘loan’ from the US government’s Export-Import Bank. On 14 February 1945, the day after Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrapped up his historic meeting at Yalta with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, he carried out a master coup of oil diplomacy and made Saudi Arabia America’s ‘best friend’ in the Islamic world. The smile on Roosevelt’s face in a photograph with Ibn Sa’ud after their negotiations on board the USS Quincy was the smile of the cat that ate the canary. The USS Murphy, the first American warship ever to dock at the Saudi Arab port of Jeddah, had arrived on 12 February 1945 to take King Ibn Sa’ud to Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal where Roosevelt waited on board the Quincy in grand Bedouin style. Ibn Sa’ud would have been hard pressed to present a more lavish spread than the one Roosevelt had prepared for him. The bow of the USS Quincy was covered by a large tent with a decorative ‘throne’ for King Abdel Aziz placed in its centre surrounded by oriental carpets and plush seating cushions for his substantial entourage. In deference to Muslim custom, live sheep were slaughtered daily and prepared for the king to eat. King Ibn Sa’ud regaled the Americans with his military conquest of Najd and Hijaz, and the Americans regaled him in return with action documentaries of their military might shown on a large screen. Meanwhile, back in Yalta, Churchill was informed about the meeting in progress, rushed to join them, but arrived too late, leaving furious and empty-handed. By the time Churchill had knocked on Ibn Sa’ud’s door, the ‘mother of all oil deals’ had already been cut by a ‘mother of all pitches’ that triumphantly swayed the king away from the British forever. The devil’s pact was sealed by both sides from that day forward. The USA would provide security to Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia would give the USA oil. The general points agreed on were: • • •

the USA would have access to Saudi ports the USA would construct military bases on Saudi Arabian soil, renewable every five years Aramco, dominated by SoCal and other American oil companies, would build a pipeline known as the Tapline to the Mediterranean 44

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ports (Roosevelt was hoping Haifa would remain as the end port regardless of who controlled it, but Abdel Aziz refused) the USA promised not to occupy Saudi Arabian soil as the British had occupied so many of Saudi Arabia’s neighbouring countries in a successful dig against their competitors for hegemony over the Middle East’s oil resources.

Roosevelt tried to persuade Ibn Sa’ud to join those supporting a Jewish state in the Middle East by relating how horribly the Jews had suffered under the Nazis and asking the king for advice on appropriate recompense for the survivors of the Holocaust. Ibn Sa’ud logically responded that it wasn’t the Arabs who had harmed the Jews, but the Germans, so obviously the compensation should be that the Jews be given Germany. The Americans had to be content that the al Sa’uds would not order a single shot fired in the wars that would subsequently flare up between Israel and the Arabs in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. Ibn Sa’ud’s tin trunk was soon traded for a much bigger one. His Wahhabi view on usury erased any organized system of distribution through banks and he continued personally to hand out the money to his Saudi subjects at whim. This archaic distribution system left most of Saudi Arabia still living in their goat-haired tents or clustered around oases in small poorly ventilated homes of straw and mud with no electricity, no education and no medical care except for the fly-infested Arab Hospital that had no drugs or bandages. King Abdel Aziz Ibn Sa’ud spent almost nothing on public works, apart from a few water wells. As for the al Sa’uds themselves, two hospitals (built in Riyadh and Taif ) remained strictly for members of the royal family. Additionally, Aramco provided Ibn Sa’ud with a 560-kilometre railway line between his summer and winter residences, a Swiss chef, electric blankets and air conditioning, while the city of Riyadh and its 200,000 inhabitants remained largely without electricity. In return, Ibn Sa’ud kept the country open to US military bases and oil investments. Respectful of local Saudi Arabian custom, Aramco deferred, in the words of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign ‘idiosyncrasies’, referring to its manner of punishing criminals by chopping off hands, feet and heads after Friday prayers and, of course, slavery. In brief, the joy and prosperity for the Americans at the oil discovery was not shared by a large percentage of the subjects of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Today, 45

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the oil wealth has yet to reach further than those in Saudi Arabia’s ruling circles and their entourage and the United States of America’s ruling circle and their entourage. And what wonders the oil proceeds from Saudi Arabia achieved for the United States of America’s treasury. Using money from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, the USA attained a leadership position worldwide through the Marshall Plan which labelled the USA for posterity as the saviour of post-war Europe. Ibn Sa’ud’s placid cooperation with the West vis-à-vis the Zionist occupation of Palestine was a boon for the Zionist–American partnership. In 1948, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Exxon today) and Soconomy–Vacuum Oil Company (Mobil today) joined forces with two other oil giants, CASOC and Texaco to become the leading oil conglomeration worldwide against its international rivals, ready fully to exploit Saudi Arabia’s vast oil reserves for greatly expanded Western market outlets and huge (Western) capital investments post-Second World War. The powerful American oil companies now exerted full hegemony over the desert kingdom. This conglomerate of oil giants would continue to wield visible total control over Aramco and Saudi Arabia for forty years until the Saudi government and the oil company were deemed developed enough under close American tutelage for the Saudi government safely to ‘acquire’ 100 per cent interest in the company. After the Second World War the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s image as a bona fide independent nation state with a mind of its own became a necessary one for the American oil companies’ credibility before the international community. The companies needed to prove that they were ‘not snatching candy from a baby’. A national anthem was ordered to boost the notion of the kingdom’s independence, composed and arranged in New York, played by the Marine Band, recorded in RCA studios and shipped to Riyadh. Aramco not only made movies but subsidized world famous scholars such as Harry St. John Philby, Margaret Meade and Arnold Toynbee, paid journalists in Cairo and Beirut to churn out glossy magazines such as Aramco World (which featured my brother Ghassan in Bedouin garb for its Christmas issue in 1956), and built the Middle East Center for Research through which they established a slot in the American University of Beirut (AUB). One of AUB’s presidents was David Dodge, a former Aramco-affiliate CEO. Authors such as Walter Stegner, an award-winning novelist, historian and short story writer wrote Discovery! 46

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The Search for Arabian Oil which promoted Ibn Sa’ud as charting his own course in the development of Saudi Arabia when the truth was that no one wanted Arabia and he was desperate to become a protected client of the colonizers. The ‘book’ ran in fourteen issues in Aramco World and is never mentioned in his list of works. So many illustrious names began singing the praises of Aramco and Ibn Sa’ud that the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said was pushed to comment dryly: ‘Worse yet has been the amazing if often passive collaboration of intellectuals, artists, and journalists whose positions at home are progressive and full of admirable sentiments but the opposite when it comes to what is done abroad in their name.’ What I knew as a young girl about the history of Saudi Arabia was far different from the history mentioned in the last few pages. My childhood version of Saudi Arabia’s history came from a movie put together by the Aramco Public Relations Department in 1956, a documentary entitled Jazirat al Arab (The Arab Peninsula), which told the story of Ibn Sa’ud’s conquest of Arabia enfolded in mythological lore. It was so far-fetched that Ibn Sa’ud’s eldest son, Mohammed Ibn Abdel Aziz al Sa’ud, felt after seeing the film he had to comment in all honesty to a US embassy officer who had acted in it while under Aramco employ: ‘I enjoyed your acting but from the point of view of history, it was a hodge-podge of surmises and imagination.’ The Arab Peninsula was the brainchild (in 1949) of Aramco’s then vice-president Terry Duce as a public relations scheme to celebrate the ‘Warrior King, descendant of the Wahhabi conquerors of the 1700s, and the man destined to unite the Arabian Peninsula’. A fêted documentary filmmaker Richard Lyford, who had won an Oscar in 1951 for a widely acclaimed film entitled Titan (about Michelangelo), was hired for its production. While Ibn Sa’ud was remarkable in his own right, he was certainly no Michelangelo – particularly given the headaches he left behind instead of precious pieces of art. Yet, while Aramco circulated images of Ibn Sa’ud as the statesman who looked out paternally for his people’s development, privately its American executives described Saudi Arabia as ‘this land of low pay, slaves, enuchs, and harems.’ Abdel Aziz Ibn al Sa’ud had been dead for three years when The Arab Peninsula had its premiere in 1956 at the Oil Exhibit in Dhahran with King Sa’ud as the guest of honour. I was allowed to stand in the front row of bystanders waiting to greet him behind a velvet red rope (in true 47

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Hollywood style). His motorcade of glossy black Cadillacs came to a dramatic stop with motorcycles wailing and Saudi flags fluttering, and King Sa’ud stepped on to the red carpet rolled out for him. A tall broad-shouldered man with dark sunglasses and a pleasant aura, King Sa’ud was widely seen as having inherited his father’s sensuous smile and charisma. As he came closer to where I stood, being so near to such an important person dissolved me into uncontrollable giggles. ‘Mama, look! It’s the King! It’s the King!’ I yelled, jumping up and down and pointing. King Sa’ud paused in front of me, putting an immediate silence to my prattle. With an amused gap-toothed smile at my childish patter, he extended his very big hand and patted my head kindly, then continued in large measured steps up the short flight of stairs, disappearing into the Oil Exhibit where my father was designated to show him around before the documentary was shown. Of course, in my perception I saw his large gold square agal as a crown; he was a king from the stuff of fairy tales. And he was the stuff of fairy tales: Aramco-inspired fairy tales, from the expert image makers in Manhattan who had calculated the production of the movies of King Abdel Aziz Ibn Sa’ud and Crown Prince Sa’ud to be ‘for immediate and worldwide release upon the death of His Majesty Abdel Aziz as a psychological contribution to insuring the general acceptance of the accession to power of the Crown Prince as a worthy successor to his great father’. The White House chief of protocol even had a telegram of condolences prepared for delivery in March 1952 – ‘The American people were proud to count him and his nation among their most trusted and valued friends’ – but had to shelve it when King Abdel Aziz Ibn Sa’ud hung on for another year. The public relations effort continued, further cementing the USA’s unique relationship with the al Sa’uds. A showcase agricultural mission grew food for the king’s palaces and a new American consulate was opened in Dhahran in 1944 to handle thousands of Americans and their families who were now pouring into the east coast of Saudi Arabia. Colonel William Eddy, Sidon-born and Princeton-educated, who had translated for Roosevelt in his meeting with Ibn Sa’ud aboard the USS Quincy (kneeling respectfully at the king’s feet), became the ambassador in Jeddah for the rapidly increasing American enclave. Colonel Eddy would eventually quit his post as minister, in a show of indignant refusal of the United States government’s pro-Zionist policies, and sign on with 48

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Aramco as a consultant and undercover CIA agent. A US Air Force base was constructed in Dhahran in 1946, and Transworld Airlines (TWA) flew Abdel Aziz’s planes under contract and organized the kingdom’s national airlines. ITT ended the British imperial communication’s monopoly. California’s Bechtel Brothers’ firm operated countrywide as the kingdom’s de facto public works department as it constructed palaces for the royal family, and state-of-art ports; and laid out wide asphalt highways and byways – in short, all that was necessary to offload the oil out of Saudi Arabia. The Roosevelt administration began paying a regular stipend to Ibn Sa’ud and funded, armed and trained the ‘barefoot army’, as my father and his Hijazi compatriots would (sotto voce) derisively refer to his Bedouin soldiers. Too late, King Abdel Aziz Ibn al Sa’ud caught on to how little control he now had over his kingdom, saying: The whole people are saying that my country is an American colony. They are plotting against me and saying Ibn Sa’ud has given his country to the United States, even the Holy Places. They are talking against me. I have nothing, and my country and my wealth I have delivered into the hands of America.

Ibn Sa’ud’s lament was the embarrassing truth. No colony in the decade after the Second World War gave the United States of America so much for so little. Neither independence nor a rapidly multiplying income could alter the reality of Ibn Sa’ud’s powerlessness. He was a canary in a gilded cage. This oil was for the Americans, as was so bluntly expressed by President Roosevelt in an argument with the British ambassador to the USA, Lord Halifax, over the division of the oil of the Middle East postSecond World War. ‘Persian oil is yours,’ Roosevelt told Lord Halifax. ‘We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it is ours.’

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awoke on my top bunk bed to the sound of my mother humming to herself while she noisily dusted the venetian blinds, as usual first thing in the morning in our bedroom. I jumped down and gave her a hug, which was not what I would have done when I was still living with my parents in Dhahran. The last thing Fatin and I had missed since we left home was our mother’s manic need to dust our venetian blinds at six in the morning. Energized and excited, I stretched happily. Today was the first day of my summer job at the Administration Building, Aramco’s headquarters. It would be routine clerical work, but definitely better than spending the day doing nothing at home. Students returning to visit their parents in Dhahran like Fatin and I were given summer jobs in Aramco to keep them from acts of mischief borne out of boredom. Our presence wasn’t particularly welcomed by Aramco’s employees, who had to redo many of the tasks we had been given because of our lack of expertise or, indeed, motivation. The hippie movement was in full swing and many students returned having been influenced by its laid-back lifestyle and a particular distaste for bathing. Some would go to the extent of rolling in the dust of their back yard before venturing barefoot into the recreation area, parading their ultra-cool unkemptness. Fatin and I gulped down our breakfast of ‘sweet rose (rolls)’ as Mama called them and a scalding gulp of coffee to the sound of our father’s 51

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impatient honks. He was never late to work, not even by a minute. As we set off in the direction of the hospital for my sister’s job, I stared at the streaming traffic of fellow Aramcon employees dressed identically in short sleeves and tie driving white American-manufactured cars with the Aramco insignia stamped in black on the side. It suddenly struck me that an ideal topic for my senior study in Sociology was right under my nose: the American social engineering entailed in creating my hometown, Dhahran. Many Saudis could not read or write at the time of oil discovery nor did they have any knowledge of basic hand tools such as hammers, saws, screwdrivers or measuring tools, much less gauges, metres, generators and pumps. How did Aramco convert a country like Saudi Arabia that was devoid of any industrial or technical manpower into one with competent and reliable employees versed enough in the technicalities and management skills necessary to carry on Aramco’s work? The answer I would discover was through the selective training and education of Aramco’s non-American personnel by qualified American trainers, with a sharp eye on America’s interests in the region. The first person I started my research with was my father. My father’s relationship with the Americans was complex, shot through with many murky shades of grey. Aramco was my father’s first window on to the world. He had joined it at the tender age of eighteen in 1944, and in his role in public relations he became the smiling Saudi face for the Aramco Saudi–American ‘partnership’, although privately he was all too aware of the façade. He ended up viewing himself as his employers viewed him – never quite up to the standard of his American counterpart. This painful self-image turned him into a very angry adult. ‘How in the world did you end up in Aramco at such a young age, all the way across the desert from Medina?’ I asked my father. ‘Purely by chance,’ he answered, looking at me in surprise at my uncustomarily personal question. ‘My father, God rest his soul, was Hijaz’s Director General of Police Investigations. I asked him to take me on as a trainee but I never thought that the work would be so tedious. I did nothing all day except file reports in a small stuffy office. One afternoon I came across an ad for jobs for single Saudi Arab men in an oil company in the Eastern Province. No one really knew much about it except that it was run by Americans, and that it was the only job outlet in the country. I thought, “Why not? It can’t be any worse than here.” So I went to be interviewed. I was very nervous because I only had a sixth-grade level of schooling at the 52

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madrasa (mosque school) that my grandfather ran in al Haram (Grand Mosque) of Medina.’ Here my father gave a small laugh, shaking his head at the memory: ‘All the recruiter wanted to know was if I was literate!’ He went on, still smiling: ‘The recruiter placed his hand on my shoulder, looking very relieved, and said, “Okay, Fahmi Basrawi, we’re going to hire you as an English teacher.” I couldn’t believe my ears. “A teacher of English? I don’t know a word of English,” I told him, completely baffled. “Never mind, never mind,” he begged me, “we’ll teach you.” And he offered me twice what I was making as a police department clerk.’ The new ‘job outlet’ my father was referring to was, of course, Aramco. My father was packed and ready to move to his new job. But there was a major sticking point: how was he to get there? East of Jeddah was uncharted territory for the Hijazis; undeveloped and dangerous with Bedouin robbers ambushing unprotected travellers. He was led to a truck stop where Aramco received its supplies from the Jeddah port and he bought a ride to Dhahran. My father’s ride across the Rub al Khali desert was atop sacks of wheat in the back of a pick-up truck on which he bounced for thirteen-and-a-half hot dusty days before finally reaching his destination at the Dhahran oil camp then known as ‘American Camp’. ‘Upon arrival,’ my father continued, ‘I jumped off the truck with immense relief and looked around for my welcoming committee. Sure enough, the “staff ” of the school was there – two men: Vincent James [who would become my father’s mentor and Dhahran School principal] and an Iraqi translator, Wadi’ Sabbagh, who also filled in as part-time secretary and instructor. Both men were standing outside the main administration building of American Camp on Main Street, then a wide unshaded desert road rutted with the tyre tracks of heavy-duty desert trucks parked nose to pipe-rail outside Aramco’s headquarters like modern-day horses of America’s Wild West cowboys.’ My father was led by the two men to his new living quarters. ‘As we walked down the road,’ my father recounted with an ironic smile, ‘my spirits rose when I saw a group of bungalows with air-conditioning units jutting out from each house. Ice water tanks and a communal mess hall completed what looked like a dream come true in my hot, hungry and dishevelled state. As I quickened my steps in their direction, Wadi’ Sabbagh put a gentle hand on my arm. “This is American Camp,” he told me. “It’s for the American employees.” Then, pointing in another direction further down the road, he said, “Our camp is there, Saudi 53

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Camp.” The camp he was motioning to consisted of starkly barren rows of tents and barastis, wooden pole-frame abodes with dirty floors and woven palm frond ceilings and walls. It was the non-American bachelor housing camp, teeming with a multinational workforce. Signs pointing to the entrance were in Swahili, Arabic, Urdu and Italian. “Italians? What are the Italians doing here?” I asked Wadi’ in surprise. “The Italians are remnants of the Italian army, 2,000 of them, who were stranded in the shambles of Mussolini’s retreat from Eritrea in 1941. Somehow they managed to find their way to Dhahran and were employed immediately to design and build the major administrative buildings for Aramco. Their talents are in high demand but not high enough to get them to share quarters with the Americans,” Wadi’ commented to me dryly. “Two more things,” Wadi’ informed me. “You are to address the Americans as ‘memsahib’ or else a chunk of your pay cheque will be subtracted in punishment. The same punishment applies should you drink this ice water. It’s only for the Americans. We drink this,” and he pointed to a well with brackish water.’ This would be the first of many discriminatory acts my father and others like him would have to endure in the American oil company. He certainly wasn’t expecting a bed of roses (nothing in his young life so far had been), but he hadn’t been expecting such blatant racism from the touted vanguard of democracy either. ‘Walking in our direction was an American supervisor who knew of my arrival and casually nodded as we approached him, “Baswari, I’m Mr Kennedy.” I didn’t know English, but I did know my name and it wasn’t “Baswari”. I also noticed that “Mr” preceded only Kennedy’s name. “Mr Kennedy,” I answered, “ana [I] Mr Basrawi.” ’ And here my father chuckled happily at the memory. The American scowled and walked off stiffly to deal with him at some later point, leaving Vincent James and Wadi’ Sabbagh openly amused at this unusual repartee between Arab and American. There were plenty of redneck racists of Mr Kennedy’s ilk who were known to refer to Saudi employees such as Fahmi Basrawi as ‘rag heads’ and ‘coolies’. My father’s urban middle-class Hijazi background heightened his awareness of and indignation at the Americans’ racism. For the moment, however, he was content with his brief show of defiance and shelved his feelings of discrimination for another day. Now he needed to concentrate on the work ahead of him of teaching a language he knew nothing about. 54

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The training school, al Jabal School, in which my father was preparing to teach had been inaugurated that year of 1944 to educate future industrial employees from scratch. Saudi labour was desperately needed for the nitty-gritty jobs of oil production for the rapidly expanding oil company. So urgent was the demand for labourers that watering stations were erected in the middle of the Rub al Khali desert in hopes of luring the curious Bedouins who flocked to them with their camels to apply for a job. After the illiterate Bedouins began pouring in for work, Aramco headquarters soon realized they would need to do more with these incoming recruits than just issue overalls and a hard hat. This new labour force knew nothing of the world outside of the desert. My father’s job was to help the recruits gain rudimentary knowledge before entering training as office boys, waiters and house boys, and to carry out the grunt work of the refinery. On the following day, my father showed up for work bright and early and waited for the tutor who would teach him the English language as had been promised. He was introduced to his class: seventy Bedouin students ranging from the minimum age of eleven up to eighteen, classified as ‘educational trainees’. (At that point, company policy was that Saudi Arabs were not to be employed beyond running the basic services for the Americans.) My father smiled and nodded as he was informed that his job was to give these boys a start in English and Arithmetic, until they became literate enough to begin their industrial training. He stopped smiling when he was also informed that he would have to wing it on his own. There would be no one to teach him the English that he was expected to teach them. This he was not prepared for. How was he to teach something he didn’t know anything about? Determined to rise to the challenge, he cobbled together his own English language programme and managed to teach both himself and his students American English. ‘I posted new English words on the wall above my head where I slept so they would be the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I saw in the morning,’ he told me. ‘This way I was able to memorize about ten words a day out of Ogden’s Book of English which the British colonizers had used in India, and stay two or three lessons ahead of the class.’ Any student who advanced ahead of the rest was pressed into service as a teacher for the lower classes. Included among my father’s students, both the smallest and youngest of the group, was Ali al Nu’aymi, who, in 1970, became a senior staff petroleum 55

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engineer in Aramco and would later become the first Saudi Arab president of Aramco. He was subsequently appointed Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Oil and is, at present, head of OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Ali al Nu’aymi, my father laughingly remembers, was a tiny power ball of intellect and enthusiasm, who had obviously lied about his age. The age for entry was eleven and he was barely nine years old. The rest of my father’s story of his early employment years I was familiar with. As he became proficient enough in English, he began to diversify in other activities in the fledgling oil company. In his spare time, he tutored Americans in Arabic, launched the first Aramco taxi service and taught himself photography. With this new skill, he was instantly put in charge of snapping photographs of the new Bedouin recruits for their company ID cards. This job was a major feat of diplomacy in itself as the reproduction of the human figure is forbidden in Islam. It took a fatwa (Islamically condoned by religious decree) to convince the apprehensive Bedouins to accept sitting in front of a flashing camera, which to them personified the devil. The outcome of ‘Bedouin-recruitmeets-camera’ was a historical batch of ID photos with faces frozen in fear. Many years later, as a temporarily employed returning student for the summer, I was assigned to classify these same photos by alphabetical order, matching the first photo on entry with the equivalent one after the recruit had been employed and dressed in a regimental white safari outfit with all head and facial hair shaved off, save for the option of a small moustache. Shorn of their voluminous red chequered kaffiyehs, kohl eyeliner, luxurious braids, earrings and bristling beards, it was hard to match the untamed ‘before’ photos of the new recruits to their expressionless and hairless ‘after’ ones sporting small white skullcaps (normally worn under the kaffiyeh) and abbreviated clipped moustaches, the only permitted reminder of their Islamic and masculine Bedouin personas. The photography session was just one of the many firsts in Saudi Arabia that my father would spearhead in Aramco. He established sightseeing tours to the nearby al Hasa Oasis, geographically bound by the al Dahnaa and al Daman deserts, which was historically a central port of call on the ancient frankincense route that began in Abyssinia and continued onwards to Persia, India and the Far East. Until about a century ago, most of the dates in Europe came from al Hasa and the area 56

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was a thriving market centre for wheat, fruit, pottery, Arabian horses and camels. The biggest oasis in the world due to its copious reserves of underground water, it became famous for its equally copious reserves of oil after Aramco discovered the largest oil field of Shimaniya next door to al Hasa. The enormity of the oasis, its rich past and the lush greenery of the villages scattered through it gave my father the idea of arranging leisurely organized drives as a pleasant way to spend a weekend afternoon. The intrepid Americans’ dreams of ‘leisurely drives through greenery’ quickly vapourized after they were pelted with hails of small stones by mobs of local boys who chased after the cars screaming ‘kuffar’ (infidels). These boys were not only seeing foreigners for the first time in their lives but also cars as well. The 500,000 Shiites who for decades had endured severe discrimination there under the ruling Sunni Wahhabi, had remained sealed in a time warp, their mobility severely curtailed and marginalized from mainstream Saudi affairs and the rest of the world. Among the assignments given to my father was a ‘public relations’ tour of Saudi Arabia, during which he would meet the elders of various areas in the country and explain what Aramco was all about and who the Americans were. One of his first excursions was into the depths of Wahhabi territory along the northern borders with Qatar. To make his lecture more understandable, he had brought a globe of the world with him to point out where the Americans came from. On producing the globe, he was stopped immediately by one of the Wahhabi ulema. ‘What’s that?’ the old man asked suspiciously. ‘It’s the globe of the world,’ my father answered, surprised at the question. ‘You are a liar and an infidel,’ the old man screamed. ‘All true believers of Islam know the world is flat!’ And that put a quick end to that session. A controversial first for Saudi Arabia to be introduced by Aramco and one which involved my father was television. In 1955, the Dhahran Air Base introduced the first television station in the Middle East, followed three years later by Aramco TV. The major reason behind the creation of Aramco TV was to entertain its American employees; who desperately craved Western exposure of some type. Aramco employees taking up administrative and teaching jobs were streaming into Saudi Arabia, along with their families – many of whom weren’t especially adventurous. As with all firsts in the region, television had to go through the usual course of being legitimized through the ever-necessary ‘fatwa’. Television was considered the work of the devil by the Wahhabi ulema 57

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and they had been known to go on TV-smashing sprees in the non-Aramco areas of the country. After intense wrangling involving Government Relations and the public relations department of Aramco with the local government, it was finally agreed that American programmes could be aired but with all kissing edited out, men had to mimic women’s voices and translations into Arabic on the screen had to abide by the ‘no alcohol’ decree. This made for some interesting dialogue for the Arabicspeaking audience, who would watch a burly cowboy stride threateningly up to the bar, scowl meanly at the quivering bartender, and holler for ‘a glass of milk’. To lure non-television-orientated Saudi Arab clientele into becoming familiar with Aramco, my father was asked to teach English, Arabic and Arithmetic on Aramco TV and eventually to host a quiz show for Arab employees from the three Aramco oil camps of Dhahran, Ras Tanura and Abqaiq. The quiz show catapulted him into stardom. Having limited competition as a screen star, in that the only other live-action men speaking Arabic on Aramco TV were grim Wahhabi sheikhs who spoke of damnation and hellfire, Fahmi Basrawi immediately became the heart-throb of the female population of the area, resulting in overflowing bags of fan mail. All my father basically did differently from his fellow TV colleagues to earn him such adulation was look pleasantly at the camera and smile. During our first year in Dhahran in 1957, the muttawa’a’s long arm reached us through Aramco TV. A children’s show was introduced, hosted by a Palestinian family friend, Jamil Hattab. All the Arab children in Dhahran were invited to the test run, including my three siblings, myself and two boys – an energetic mix ranging in age from five to one year (Marwan). On the day of the test run, I remember the TV show’s director opening the door for us at the Aramco TV headquarters, taking one look at our heightened state of excitement and sighing deeply. We skipped and jumped and jostled as we followed him to a corner where Mr Hattab sat in lavish costume as a caliph on a gilded chair amidst a profusion of brightly coloured silk cushions and balloons, with a huge aqua-blue feather wafting from his turban. Whoever had thought of using all those balloons in a tiny area inhabited by lots of children did not have children of their own! For most of the show poor Baba Hattab was almost completely hidden from the viewer save for that long blue feather, as we exuberantly waved balloons in his face while he attempted 58

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to tell us a story in Arabic that none of us had any interest in listening to. I had chosen to wear my favourite party dress, which flew out in a circle whenever I twirled round. When I wasn’t waving balloons, I was showing off my twirling dress. On the day of the second show, I was all set to wear my party dress again but my father told me not to. ‘What should I wear then?’ I asked eagerly. ‘No need for anything, because you can’t go on the show any more,’ my father replied shortly. ‘I was a good girl: why can’t I go with the rest?’ I wailed. ‘It’s not that: it’s the muttawa’a. Your underwear showed in the trial run and they said the show could not take place with such a big girl showing her legs like that.’ Even to a five-year-old, that sounded extreme and totally unjustified. So I had a tantrum. The compromise was that I would sit at the back of the group with my fat baby brother on my lap and wear trousers; Baba Hattab would carry everyone else to pop the surprise balloon, but I had to pop the balloon standing on my own.

* * * We arrived at the Administration Building just as the siren announcing the beginning of the working day began its incremental wail. I hopped out of my father’s car and joined the crowd of employees rushing to clock their arrival at the stroke of seven. My father would be in his office on the last dying note of the siren. It would wail again three more times: twice for the lunch hour between noon and 1 p.m., and finally at five in the afternoon when work hours were complete. Growing up to its wails, it seemed a perfectly natural way to start the day, a siren announcing working hours. Everyone in Dhahran referred to the siren with respect to their daily activities – as in ‘Be sure to be home before the siren’ – and we always adjusted our clocks and watches to the first notes of its wail. I went to the information counter to inquire about my office’s location. The receptionist looked at me and, lowering her reading glasses, gazed a second too long at my pants suit, causing me to feel inordinately self-conscious. I knew that this fashion item had not yet reached Dhahran, but that was normal; the conservative Americans did not usually follow what was on the catwalks in Europe whereas Beirut did. I had chosen to wear my white pants suit thinking it most appropriate for a first day of work. More curious looks were shot surreptitiously in 59

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my direction as I walked towards my designated office, causing me to check my clothes repeatedly for any coffee stains or tears. At the end of the working day as the 5 p.m. siren screamed, the sweet secretary who had shown me around whispered softly that it was very brave of me to turn up in trousers but her boss had told her to relay the message that I was not to wear them to work any more, it being against company policy. ‘What? Are you serious?’ I was astonished by this unexpected conservatism. The secretary was embarrassed and mumbled something that sounded like, ‘Oh go ahead and wear what you please. Who are they to tell us what to wear?’ My father had not commented on my outfit because he, too, was oblivious to the fact that there was a dress code for working women in Aramco as rigid as the one for women in Saudi Arabia. The next day, other women also turned up for work in trousers, causing loud arguments in the offices. But the women prevailed and trousers were worn with a vengeance from that day forward. The buzz was that this successful mini-revolt within corporate Aramco all started when ‘the Basrawi girl waltzed into Aramco headquarters wearing a pants suit’. In the era of bloody civil rights protests, militant feminism and bra-burning in the US, I, a Saudi female, who did not exist outside of my father’s name, unwittingly became the symbol of freedom of will for the American female employees of Aramco. At the coffee machine one afternoon, I bumped into a young Saudi acquaintance who studied at the American University of Beirut. We had met at a Saudi students’ gathering in Beirut that I had reluctantly been dragged to by a common friend. Saleh was funny, informal and refreshing to talk to. ‘Fadia,’ he had exclaimed on seeing me, ‘I’m so glad we’re here together. You’re coming with me to meet the other Saudi students working in Aramco after work.’ What could I say? ‘No’ would not have worked. And I am grateful for this window of opportunity that Saleh Turki gave me to meet some of the most interesting young Saudi people I have known – educated young Saudis, both male and female, who had applied for a summer job from universities in Riyadh and Jeddah and abroad, as yet untouched by Aramco. King Feisal was the ruler of Saudi Arabia that year and education for everyone, especially girls, was a priority for him. We received full scholarships to any university of our choice with a monthly stipend of US$600 (a generous amount of money in those days). We, the young Saudi Arab generation fortunate enough to live during this crack in the 60

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totalitarian Wahhabi rule, studying abroad and coming home to a guaranteed job, were the only generation to reap the benefits of this one-time experience in the kingdom’s history. In fact, most of the effective movers and shakers for political and social reforms in Saudi Arabia come from my generation. Under King Feisal’s reign, oil revenues had increased by more than 1,600 per cent, enabling Feisal to set up a generous system of welfare benefits for all citizens. The ascetic, highly intelligent king brought in technological and educational advancement never seen in the kingdom before, as his Wahhabi religious values did diminish his secular effectiveness. To the dismay of quite a few members of his extended royal family, which included the future King Fahd (then a prince third in line of succession), King Feisal kept the oil revenues out of princeling hands and instead invested in the modernization of the kingdom. Our Saudi generation began to feel a refreshing waft of promise for self-expression. Although it was a fatwa by the ulema that had brought the new king to power, Feisal refused to allow the muttawa’a a free hand. They were infuriated but could only fume behind the rigid red line that King Feisal had firmly drawn to curtail their powers. In the euphoria of seeing our country moving forward technologically and educationally, away from the rigid, archaic rule of the ulema, we turned a blind eye to the debilitating fact that whatever changes King Feisal did, he still had to appease the conservatives to preserve his throne. King Feisal was not moving us towards self-determination and democracy. He was actually setting up a benevolent police state, a state with greater centralized control of both the economy and of the political and social system. King Feisal had come to power by deposing his half-brother King Sa’ud who had fallen foul of the Americans for his alleged profligate spending and his Pan-Arab tendencies. In that era of Arab upheaval against established monarchies (1958–1962) and the sweeping charisma of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Pan-Arabism, King Sa’ud’s inconsistent method of rule had created a dangerous risk that Western interests in Arabia’s oil might be lost as there was the possibility that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia might turn into the Arabian Republic as Saudis began to agitate for control over their oil. One such serious movement for a constitution was spurred by one of Ibn Sa’ud’s own sons, Prince Talal. Another serious challenge to Saudi Arabia’s cozy arrangement with the USA came from Sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Mu‘ammar, a Western-educated Saudi from 61

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Najd. He was in charge of the labour office overseeing the oil camps and ended up in jail because he had tried to write a constitution in an aborted ‘liberal revolution’ in 1963. I had been vaguely aware of the attempted coup from whispers to my mother by an Egyptian friend who was crying softly in our kitchen after the disappearance of her Air Force husband. No one dared enquire after him as those relatives who had done so, subsequently also disappeared. A third challenge involved Abdullah Tariki, the first Saudi to be educated by Aramco in the USA. He returned from America to challenge the existing scenario with the power of education and patriotism combined. He became the first Director General of Petroleum Affairs and one of the main founders of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 under King Sa’ud’s reign. An ardent supporter of total nationalization of Saudi Arabia’s natural resources, he attempted to introduce a program to educate the Saudi Arab public about oil affairs through the media; he also fought to improve the terms of the concessions and opened up positions for Saudis in the company management with the aim of using the country’s wealth for the benefit of all the people. Tariki was hated by Aramco. It kept him under close scrutiny, following and recording his every move. King Feisal eventually dismissed Tariki and then exiled him from his country. There were masses of public beheadings of political opponents and purging of the army and air force as Feisal built a modern police state designed to control all political activity. A US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee report of 1965 looked upon Feisal’s activities with considerable satisfaction, stating that King Feisal was finally gaining control over the proper use of the oil resources. As far as US corporate interests were concerned, the Saudi nation was back in safe hands. They looked the other way when with every forward step taken in modernizing the kingdom, Feisal placated the ulema with an equal step backwards. Thinking they could win both ways, the American oil executives watched noncommittally as King Feisal put forward non-oil based projects, five-year plans, and schools for girls, and simultaneously opened Saudi Arabia’s doors as a safe haven for extremist Muslims from Egypt and Syria to contain Nasser’s wildfire influence in the kingdom and beyond. The king invited the fundamentalist exiles who were facing persecution by their secular Pan-Arab governments to teach religion to Saudi Arabia’s youth. This act resulted in far-reaching consequences as many of today’s 62

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restive Saudis are descendents of those who had studied under these Egyptian and Syrian exiles. The Saudi students who were working for Aramco that summer formed a Saudi Students’ Society to give a formal cover for our meetings and an official agenda. We agreed to meet at the home of Nayla, an articulate and refined Saudi girl who was studying Petroleum Engineering in the USA. There were two other girls besides myself: a fearless outspoken firebrand studying at AUB, Fatima al Maneh; and her gentler but equally as forthright younger sister, Munira (who was my age). Our first meeting went immediately into full throttle when we girls confronted the six young men in our group, a mixture from all over Saudi Arabia, over the double standard of educated Saudi men towards women. Did they really want to make changes against the stranglehold of the royal family and the ulema on women’s rights? Would they allow their daughters the same freedom as their sons in their life choices? The responses of the young men were unanimous with respect to the modus operandi of the al Sa’uds and their ulema. But when the issue of women’s freedom came into their homes, they looked sheepish and avoided eye contact as they tripped over their words searching for a diplomatic non-binding way of expressing themselves truthfully. With a lot of hemming and hawing, a mixed bag of half-answers was offered, which petered into a tongue-tied silence when Fatima exploded in anger at the intolerable double standard Saudi women and many women the world over have to suffer: ‘You are the elite of the male Saudi population, educated and exposed to so many different aspects of the world and its philosophies. Yet you check out your reasoning at Saudi Arabia’s borders and become blind to any dynamic thought concerning the stagnant society we are being forced to exist in because it has so many privileges lined up for you as males and feeds your ego. What have you done to deserve this power over us except being born male?’ She turned her scorn on a hapless Najdi, Hamid, who had ventured the idea of keeping the status quo because of tribal custom. ‘The idea of an educated woman scares you, doesn’t it? It’s so much easier to be all-powerful when all you have to fall back on is “tribal custom”. Where is that taking our country, with 50 per cent of its population gagged and tied at home?’ Munira added: ‘Fatima and I are fully supported in our professional futures by our father, but he’s a rare Saudi. Why should we need to rely on coincidence or whim for our futures as Saudi women? It’s people 63

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like you, not the ignorant Bedouins, who keep this country backward.’ Nayla deftly underlined the sisters’ well-placed words and side-tracked Hamid’s retort with her tongue-in-cheek comment: ‘We’ve made groundbreaking progress here; at least we’re talking about this taboo subject without losing our honour or head.’ I nodded in earnest agreement with the daring words of my Saudi girlfriends, but I could not speak out as a Saudi as they had, handicapped as I was by the Aramco stigma I had stamped all over me.

* * * I was familiar with the households that these young men were reared in from a car trip my family made to meet the extended Basrawi family in Medina for the first time in our lives. A much fêted highway connecting the Eastern Province to the Western one was completed that year and my father jumped at the opportunity to introduce us to his home in Medina. It would be a thought-provoking journey as we confronted an integral part of our identity that we had not yet been exposed to. The first stop of our trip was Riyadh after a mind-numbing six-hour drive on flat terrain with a road that never rose or swerved and the only shifts of scenery being the glimmering mirages of water maddeningly within reach but always just ahead of us on the asphalt surface. Riyadh was a sprawling town of decrepit mud-brick buildings and a few shoddy cement ones surrounded by the ever-present desert waiting patiently to reclaim its territory at their doors. This was 1967; the excesses brought about by the petrol dollar were not yet visible under the budget-conscious King Feisal. My father stopped the car by a shop at the side of the road and, with strict instructions especially to us girls not to move out of the car, left with my mother to get some groceries. There wasn’t much to stare at from the window, so all four of us fell asleep while we waited. Suddenly I felt the sharp end of a stick poking my side. I opened my eyes to stare at close range into the crazed eyes of a muttawa’a, whose head was well into our car, screaming, ‘Cover your head, woman! Cover your head, you sinner you!’ My sister and I screamed back, ‘Get out of here, you rude man! Leave us alone!’ Fortunately for all concerned, my parents returned at this moment. I was shocked to hear the placating humble tone of voice my father used 64

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with the muttawa’a. ‘There is no other way,’ he told me as we drove off with the old man still raining curses on us. ‘The alternative would be to get hauled into the police station.’ I felt deeply insulted. A sense akin to being violated shook my whole body. Who was this creepy old pervert and what right did he have to bully us into the submission I had just seen my father displaying? I was ashamed of my father’s reaction and ashamed that we had not been able to harm this muttawa’a as much as he had harmed us. Out of Riyadh, the desert scene changed strikingly as we entered the Nufud desert on the edge of the Rubal Khali, the most majestic and formidable of all deserts, source of much lore, spirituality and hardship. Stunning formations of knife-edged sand dunes rose in graceful curves, lofty and magnificent in wondrous shades of red perpetually transformed by small puffs of hot desert air that swooped across them in short gusts and flurries. We experienced the soundless silence found only in the deepest depths of the desert. I began to understand its enduring fascination as I gazed at the trackless sand that lay in sinuous curve-like waves in the sea, rippling repeatedly on and on to the world’s end. This was Bedouin Arabia where the notion of monotheism was born. The Nufud made it clear how this came to be. Its infinity and eternity, stillness and solitude reduced us into inconsequential dots of nature within the immeasurable grandeur laid out around us. Our passage through the Nufud brought on an unusual silence in the car as we absorbed what we had experienced individually, not sharing our thoughts, until we fell asleep to the rhythmic movement of the car. We awoke with a start to my father’s happy announcement: ‘We are in Hijaz!’ Once more, the topography changed to one unlike any we knew as the inclination of the road began to slant upwards. We were ascending the Hijaz Mountains, desolate bare hills covered with dramatic black volcanic rock formations, towards Medina al Munawarra, my father’s birthplace and that of his father and about three hundred years of Basrawis, the first being a judge sent to the holy city from his home in Basra (hence our last name), southern Iraq, by the Ottoman governor. We reached the plain of Medina and saw the outline of an arresting rocky range of red, brown, black and green granite. ‘Mount Uhud,’ our father told us significantly, visibly moved. We stared back blankly. ‘A turning point for Islam occurred here,’ he explained patiently. It was a strange story that our father told us, verbatim as it was written in the 65

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Koran, but gripping all the same with the intense amount of detail describing the battle. Mount Uhud was the scene of a disastrous defeat of the Prophet and his men at the hands of his Quraish tribe from Mecca where many of his closest companions were killed. Despite this defeat, the Prophet gathered what companions had survived and attacked Mecca, bringing Uhud’s victors to their knees begging for forgiveness. He forgave them and they converted to Islam – men such as Khalid Ibn al Walid who would go on to become a famous Muslim commander credited for spreading Islam beyond the borders of Arabia and on into the legendary Islamic empires in the conquered countries that embraced Islam. Defeat was turned into victory for the Muslims by the martyrdom of the Prophet’s companions in the face of a formidable enemy and the conversion of this enemy from their pagan ways to become Islam’s most glorious warriors. The city appeared before us behind its crenellated walls; a desert oasis with a history that stretched thousands of years before the Prophet Mohammed had asked for refuge there from the irate Meccans who were pursuing him for his Islam that threatened their lucrative polytheistic events that brought them wealth and power. We could see the five slim straight minarets of the Prophet’s Mosque and its large green dome that covered the Prophet’s home where he had lived and which became his grave after he died. We drove through Medina’s walls, old and grey, built of stone and mud, bastions jutting forward here and there with some homes built directly into the walls. Fronds of countless palm trees in gardens within the city waved gently to and fro in the evening breeze. There was no denying the spell that fell over us as we drove into Medina. Even thirteen centuries after his birth and to people like us who were not devout believers, the Prophet’s spiritual presence was palpable, a unifying harmony that gently nudged us closer to the city’s inhabitants. He had found sanctuary in Medina (then called Yathrib), inhabited by a mixture of Jews, polytheists and Christians, whose elders had welcomed him. The city became known to the Islamic world as Medina al Munawarra (City of Enlightenment) after its people converted to Islam. This is a city that is loved as no city anywhere else in the world has been loved. It has no official name because no name is necessary; to its inhabitants it is simply Madinat al Nabi (City of the Prophet). And my father started to cry. We drove through a winding maze of narrow dirt paths lined by old wooden houses covered in intricate wood filigree that shaded the 66

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homes from the unrelenting sun and their women from the public eye. Along our slow drive, relatives and old friends joyfully stopped my father to hug him and welcome him, kissing my brothers but firmly averting their eyes from peering at us in the car, uncovered by the abaya. Once we were in the home of my father’s clan, all such formalities dropped. A whirlwind of socializing awaited us like we had never experienced in our young lives. Our host, my father’s cousin, was a devoutly religious old man who welcomed us with infinite warmth and generosity, leaving his door wide open to the continuous stream of relatives who came to embrace us into the family fold. We felt valued and loved. Our state of modernity did not stand in the way of their interaction with us. Our female relatives giggled at our clumsiness with our abayas. When we would forget to don them upon leaving the house, they found such detachment from the abaya intriguing, as they felt undressed without it covering them in public. Stepping into Medina was literally like stepping into another dimension of time and space. Both the calendar and the hours of the day begin from a different point in time from the rest of the world. The dates that are printed on calendars and daily newspapers, and those used by schools and offices are in accordance with the Hijra year. Year One of the Hirja year coincides with 622 AD, the year when the Prophet Mohammed was driven out of Mecca for his Muslim faith and welcomed in Medina. All activity of the day – be it work, meals, naps, sex or socializing – revolves around the hours of prayer. Those wanting to keep time with the world beyond Medina wear a double-faced watch, with one face showing Greenwich Mean Time. It was easy to slip into such a devoutly Islamic manner of life that was deeply embedded in everyone’s everyday routine. My visit to Medina was highlighted by entering the Mosque of the Prophet at prayer time. I had visited mosques before in Damascus, the most remarkable of which had been the Umayyad Mosque. Undeniably the most beautiful of mosques worldwide, it paled in comparison with the Mosque of the Prophet, not solely by its beauty, but more so by its spirituality. Regardless of one’s degree of religious devotion, it was impossible not to succumb to the hushed peacefulness that settled on us as we entered the Prophet’s Mosque. Some women sat in a circle around a Sheikha (female religious teacher) who was explaining Islamic thought; others were silently mouthing prayers; yet others tended to their children 67

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as they waited for the call to prayer. I sat down on the carpet next to my mother and our relatives and allowed myself to surrender to the piety around me. As I looked upwards at the soaring vaulted ceilings, basking in the dappled sunlight filtered through filigree stone windows onto the people below, a sudden flutter of countless white doves wove silently through the sun’s rays as though on cue with the call to prayer. The clear tenor voice of the muezzin rose and fell as he repeated the well-worn words that there is no God but one God and that Mohammed is His prophet – words that strike a deep chord in devout Muslim hearts the world over. It struck an unforgettable chord in my heart then, as if I was hearing the muezzin’s words for the first time. This part of Arabia was a radically different Arabia from the one I knew in Aramco. I befriended the younger members of our family, who were my age, two of whom were already married. The son of our host, Khaled, was seventeen and his wife, Arwa, was fourteen (a cousin as well), and they already had a baby daughter, a cherubic newborn named Zalfa. They would sit for hours with the rest of the cousins to hear about our lives in Dhahran. What they were keen to learn about was not the mixed classes we attended nor what living with Americans was like, but how our classrooms were designed, the books we read, what our teachers taught us and how they taught us. The boys told us of their studies in the Medina schools: the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran through rote memorization, maths, selective history (Saudi Arabia’s) and selective science (carefully sidestepping Darwin and the human body). Although the Wahhabi religion is described by its followers as Islam in its purity, it is actually Islam without scholarly discourse, as it flatly rejects any interpretation of the text of the Koran that takes into account humankind’s development since. For the first five centuries after the Prophet’s time, science and learning were championed in Muslim civilization and no place in the world was more secure for innovation and philosophic discourse than the land of the Muslim. Unfortunately this was no longer the case. The young people in Medina regarded their religion with fear rather than comfort. Al Deen (religion) formed the core curriculum of their studies and no student could receive their Tawjihieh diploma, which enabled them to go on to higher studies, if they did not pass al Tawhid (Unitarian dogma), which comprised details more intricate than a book on law. I looked into the faces that longed to learn about the world outside of 68

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Wahhabi theology, and I realized that sheer circumstance had put me where I was and not where they were. Marwan would pose the only glitch during our visit to Medina. With each day of our week-long stay, he became more and more unbearable as the notion of men’s privilege over women began to go to his elevenyear-old head. Even my mother voiced her annoyance, which was quite exceptional as Marwan, in her view, could do no wrong. On the fourth day of our stay, as we were preparing to leave the house to visit more cousins, Marwan strutted in imperiously and gave us an order to speed it up, the men were waiting. He also used the word hurma, a derogatory word for ‘woman’. As if on cue, Fatin and I pounced on him with pent-up fury, not releasing him until he cried. That snapped him out of his illusions of superiority. I was packing my things in preparation for our departure later in the day when Arwa whispered urgently in my ear to come into her room. She wanted to tell me something in private and needed the prayer time when the adults were otherwise occupied. With heart racing, I followed her, not knowing what to expect as there had been so much urgency in her voice. In the room was her husband, who immediately went to the door, locked it and then remained standing there to make sure we were not interrupted. She opened a drawer and pulled out a reading book for elementary students, whispering proudly ‘I’m learning to read and write.’ I didn’t understand. Her husband explained: ‘I smuggled these books in to Arwa because I feel it’s wrong for her not to be educated. If my father found out, he would force me to divorce her immediately because he has been taught to believe it’s sinful to educate women. I love Arwa dearly and would never be able to live with anyone else, but my father is the law in this house.’ He paused, looking over his shoulder nervously, and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘I know I am taking a risk but I will educate my wife and I will educate my daughter. We wanted to have a chance in private to thank you for your support and enthusiasm about learning. You are decent, and it proves that education is not the work of the devil for women, as some sheikhs like to say. I am a devout Muslim and I have read in the Koran about the importance of education, and look at all the quotes I have collected to support my argument in case my father discovers what Arwa is doing, so my conscience is clear.’ He began to read the passages he had so earnestly sought and compiled to bolster his conscience in this daring step he had taken for 69

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his wife. ‘Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman … The ink of the scholars is more precious than the blood of the martyrs … Islam directs all energies towards conscious thought as the only means of understanding the nature of God’s creation and thus his will … The superiority of the learned over the more pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over the stars … If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to paradise … The scientist walks in the path of God.’ I felt proud to be related to these devout young Saudis with such courage and such integrity. I promised myself that I would do all that was in my power with my education to overturn the appalling marginalization of the Saudi Arabian woman.

* * * I wanted to begin my research for my senior study right away, so I asked around my office and was told that there was a library in the Administration Building, although it was more of an archive in which Aramco history was stored. This was just what I needed. Without delay I made my way to the library the following day during my lunch break and asked for permission to have a look around. ‘Sure,’ the librarian beamed at me. ‘Help yourself. Just be sure to put everything back the way you found it.’ And with that easy entry, I began my study of Aramco’s history against the background of the Arab political world with which I was now fully cognizant. The 1967 war with Israel had catapulted me over the American divide into the Arab world irreversibly. The histories of Aramco and modern Saudi Arabia were interchangeable, as Aramco officials worked closely with the newly formed Saudi government creating transportation and communications infrastructures, mapping and negotiating boundaries, forming foreign policy and diplomatic relations, national education and health care. No Arab employee or trainee passed through Aramco’s employment rosters, and nothing so much as moved in the entire Peninsula, without being discussed, recorded in multiple carbon copies and stored in its ubiquitous manila files. Within the archives in the Administration Building I discovered from correspondence concerning Aramco’s interests meant only for American eyes, exactly how powerless Ibn Sa’ud and his sons actually were. 70

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As I moved methodically from shelf to shelf on to the back of the library, I came upon a dusty box file that stood out from the rest of the folders by its large size. Intrigued, I pulled it out and began to leaf through it. I had always wondered what made the Aramco bosses select my father from 9,000 Saudi workers along with nine other men to be educated by Aramco. Why he and not Ali or Hussein who were still making our hamburgers and ice-cream sundaes? They had entered at the same time as my father. The answer was Pan-Arab politics. It was not until 1956, eleven years after the company began operations, at the height of the Pan-Arab movement reawakened by Gamal Abdel Nasser, that a selection of carefully screened Saudis like my father were promoted rapidly to ‘senior staff ’ status, allowing them to live with the Americans in their air-conditioned, landscaped camps. If it wasn’t for the Pan-Arab movement, neither Aramco nor the al Sa’uds nor their Wahhabi cohorts felt it to be in their interests to open the Main Gate for Saudi Arab subjects. ‘Working for Aramco was not what I expected from a Western country,’ my father had told me resentfully when he spoke about his early days with the company. ‘Our houses in 1944 were little better than stables for camels, very primitive and very insulting. There was a hole in the ground for a toilet and one single light bulb hung from the ceiling. Some rooms didn’t have a proper roof, just palm fronds woven together. In summer we boiled from the heat, and when the shamals (desert wind storms) came we covered our bodies and faces with wet cloths so we could breathe. Of course, in the winter we got soaked and froze while the Americans were bedded and fed on Aramco’s account in large furnished air-conditioned bungalows. We knew about the privileges given to the Americans, many of whom were machine operators like many of my co-employees. The Saudi cooks who served them told us the thick steaks that the Americans love so much were imported in such quantities that the oil men would cut out the thickest part of the steak and throw the rest away. Well, my co-workers couldn’t take the discrimination any longer and there was a riot.’ In 1945, 2,000 Arab workers and eventually all 9,000 labourers rose in massive protest against being ‘ill-paid, ill-housed and ill-used in general’. My father objected but did not riot, a point well taken by Aramco’s CEOs. 71

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Not wanting the strike to spread, Aramco sent an alarm call to its protector in the Eastern Province, the Emir of al Hasa, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, to stop the rioting. He promptly obliged, as an Aramco official recorded in his diary, with savage beatings by the ‘Emir’s slave soldiers’. Although hundreds of angry American drillers had rioted and destroyed company property at the Ras Tanura site, they did not get the beatings the Saudis did. Nor did the Italians who went on strike because they got fed up with being treated ‘just like the Arabs’. ‘And do you know what we got after the strike?’ my father asked me, incensed at the memory. ‘Do you know what the improvements were that they advertised around the world as “new quarters for Arab workers that were the best in the Middle East”? We got a cement floor in our reed huts and the Italians got latrines. No Saudi was allowed to enter the part of the camp where American families lived or to remain in the camp after working hours.’ Amazingly, however, when asked if Saudi employees resented American privileges, Frank Jungers, a one-time Aramco president, replied: ‘No, not really.’ In a move to soothe ruffled feathers on both sides of Aramco’s personnel problems, Ibn Sa’ud visited Aramco on 25 January 25 1947. My father was amongst his designated translators having become proficient in English by then. He recalled the king with fondness and admiration, ‘Everything about Ibn Sa’ud was bigger than everyone else, his hands, his height, his shoulders, his laugh.’ True to his larger than life persona, the king never did anything by halves. He arrived at Dhahran’s airfield in a fleet of six airplanes, accompanied by four of his brothers, eight of his sons and as many of his royal court as he could fit in. Those of the royal court (2,000 in total) for whom there were not seats on the airplanes arrived in a fleet of 500 limousines overland from Riyadh. My father’s students sang patriotic songs at the welcoming ceremony that he had taught them for the occasion. The king showed his appreciation by shaking their hands and ordering his staff to give each of the students and staff 5 silver riyals, the equivalent of a month’s salary. Aramco’s newly built guest mansion, Hamilton House, was opened for the king while a tent city was erected for his entourage. Ibn Sa’ud politely spent one night at Hamilton House then moved in with his entourage citing difficulty in negotiating Western plumbing. Bahrain’s Emir came for a visit with his own entourage and an intense competition of banquets ensued back and forth, each more magnificent than the next. Ibn Sa’ud asked to meet all the children living in 72

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Dhahran, hauling each one onto his lap for a small tête-à-tête and a hug. After a tour of Dhahran and Ras Tanura’s refinery, Aramco’s CEOs, dressed in the same Arab garb as the king, got down to business, first asking the translators to step aside. Miffed at being shouldered aside, my father remained standing nearby and overheard their request for land to build an Eastern Province annex to the American Consulate of Riyadh. ‘Where would you like the annex to be?’ Ibn Sa’ud wanted to know. ‘Right under where you are sitting,’ was their prompt answer. Ibn Sa’ud granted the request without finding it improper as my father did that this request should come from oil company executives rather than through America’s foreign affairs department. The American Consulate went up adjacent to the American Air Base that had been completed one year previously in 1946. The ‘airbase’ as everyone referred to it began to grow in ‘fits and spurts on an annual basis’ in my father’s words, according to the increase in Aramco’s oil production and American employee influx until it almost became an extension of Dhahran. My father used to play the Bingo that I got in trouble for there and attend movies on a large screen. He also bought his groceries from a small commissary open to a select few Arab Aramco employees. ‘The open invitation to the movies for non-Americans was eventually rescinded’, my father recalled wryly, ‘as per the ulema’s instructions, but the American Air Base stayed.’ Another controversial translation stint that my father was involved in shortly after he had joined Aramco was with Aramco’s lawyer, Gary Owen and Ibn Sa’ud’s Minister of Finance, Sheikh Suleyman. The minister’s secretary Najib Salha was present, as he always was, but this time was asked to step outside. Two minutes into the meeting, my father found himself in the unenviable position of floundering in translating for a topic that he had no background or knowledge of: Saudi Arabia’s disputed eastern borders with the Trucial States. When it became embarrassingly apparent to Gary Owen that his translator was unable to deliver, Najib Salha was reluctantly recalled to carry on. After the meeting, my father apologized for the botched task and Gary patted him wryly on the shoulder, and told him that he had abbreviated his meeting as he had issues with Najib Salha’s trustworthiness and that ‘fortunately no damage was done’. 73

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By 1949, five years after it began operations, 85 per cent of the 10,000 Saudi Arabian employees were still unskilled, illiterate workers. Eighty Saudi Arabians had reached the skilled craftsman level and a few Saudis supervised other Arabs. No Saudi supervised any Americans. Such a situation spread the American trainers far too thinly as work picked up and oil input increased to feed America’s need as its economy boomed post-Second World War. There were not enough Arabic-speaking trainers to reach the bulk of labour and training began to bog down. This top-heavy Arab–American relationship changed dramatically after an influx of well-educated Palestinians began to stream into Saudi Arabia with the occupation of Palestine by the Zionists in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948. Jumping at the chance to fill in the yawning middle gap between American trainers and Saudi Arab labour, Aramco had first pick of the best and brightest of this cosmopolitan and literate group of newly stateless refugees. Palestinians began to fill the rosters of skilled craftsmen, experienced teachers and other professional positions with their high level of education and fluency in both Arabic and English.This would turn into a double-edged sword for the Americans in Aramco. In no time, the Palestinians outnumbered the Americans in training positions and outshone the presently employed Saudis in accomplishments and organizational skills. Almost immediately their organizational and social skills translated into Pan–Arab politics. One of the early Palestinian trainers, a university graduate, was aghast to discover that less than 1 per cent of the Saudis in industrial training could read or write Arabic. The Saudi trainees were literate in English and illiterate in their mother tongue, Arabic. American trainers had lifted Westernized training programmes directly from the American defence machinery plants in the USA and left them as they were. Since no Arabic was required in the USA, the American trainers concluded, no Arabic should be required in Aramco of Saudi Arabia. The wide-reaching effect by the educated and politicized Arabs on their less educated and apolitical Saudi co-workers soon became apparent and erupted into a massive strike for better labour conditions in 1950. Arab labour in Aramco was not about to go ‘gently into the night’. Labour demands, along with the increasing ratio of Palestinians to Saudis, raised a red flag of alarm among the American CEOs. When matters threatened to spill out of Aramco into the rest of the country, King Abdel Aziz was forced to complain publicly to the American 74

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ambassador that ‘some of my people have been spoken to as no man should speak to a dog’, upon which he adroitly delegated the sticky situation to his son, Crown Prince Sa’ud. Ibn Sa’ud had more than labour unrest to face. US business interests were beginning to be tied to the recognition of Israel in the heart of the Middle East during the presidency of Harry S. Truman, a staunch supporter of Israel, regardless of the Arabs it displaced. Members of the Arab League – Syria, Iraq and Jordan – as well as his sons Sa’ud and Feisal, pressured Ibn Sa’ud to cut off oil production in reaction to the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the Jewish state. This Arab nationalism aroused US foreign policy fears as expressed by George McGhee (at the time the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs) in a speech he made to Congress: At this time, the principal threat to the Middle East lies in the possibility of nationalist leaders moving to upset regimes which are relatively inept and corrupt, and not attuned to the modern world.

For American interests and Aramco’s, Wahhabi fundamentalism was just what the doctor ordered: an Islamic-flavoured totalitarian regime that would never be democratic with headaches like parliaments, elections or trade unions. Springing into action to protect Aramco’s and Israel’s existence, the US government offered the Crown Prince a secret agreement in 1950. A fifty-fifty arrangement was made between Aramco and Ibn Sa’ud with a lifetime stipend annually for every member of the royal family. You only had to be born an al Sa’ud to automatically receive up to US$270,000 monthly with nothing expected in return. Today this agreement would develop into a serious point of contention between Saudi subjects and the al Sa’uds over the burgeoning princeling mouths to feed, topping 7,000 and continues to rise. The fiscal support of the al Sa’ud’s came from diverting oil export revenues from taxes normally paid by expatriate oil companies to the US treasury directly to the royal family’s pockets, bypassing the Saudi treasury. Aramco knew the al Sa’ud king’s Achilles’ heel, and that was the continuous need for a cashflow to keep his throne intact through gifts and money on a regular basis to tribal sheikhs and the Wahhabi ulema. Ibn Sa’ud’s oil revenues skyrocketed in 1949 from the annual 7.8 million barrels which had brought in $1.7 million in royalties in 1944 to 174 75

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million barrels that brought in US$50 million in revenue. A year later, in 1950, the revenue increased to US$111.7 million. Ibn Sa’ud did not reiterate his demands for better conditions for the Saudi labourers, and deftly ignored the demands of his sons and the Arab League concerning oil cuts and Palestinian sovereignty by making sympathetic noises while straddling the fence, as he had been bought to do. In 1951, the Cold War began and Saudi Arabia became the sole source of oil for the USA’s war in Korea after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was nationalized that year. The highly educated and highly politicized Palestinian influx was turning into a major irritant for Aramco as Pan-Arabism, anti-Israeli boycotts, and the concept of ‘Arab oil’ began to be bandied about, gaining more and more advocates. That’s when Aramco decided that the only way out of this worrying situation in terms of its American interests was to develop loyal, efficient, educated Saudi Arabs closely related with the Aramco administration and with goodwill towards the USA, before the inevitable nationalizing of the industry occurred. Overnight, Aramco changed its policy that Saudis should only be trained as waiters, office boys and machine operators, and it closed down the al Jabal training school. America needed to whitewash its public façade as a benevolent humanitarian power. Instead, it began to offer scholarships for university degrees to those who did not have a history of striking but who did have a strong work performance, intelligence, flexibility and loyalty. The social engineering necessary to maintain American hegemony over Saudi oil was set in motion. By 1980, when Aramco became 100 per cent Saudi, there were enough loyal and cooperative Saudis to safeguard America’s interests by keeping the oil production and export to Western outlets and interests functioning smoothly. The scholarships for studies abroad backfired temporarily as a number of educated Saudi Arabs returned not only with technical knowledge of how to make the Saudi oil theirs but also with knowledge of their rights as hosts to foreign oil investments. Two more strikes took place while my father was in AUB, in 1953 and in 1956. Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, the Emir of Hasa, was pivotal in breaking the strike of 1956 against Aramco by sending his security guards to search (alongside an Aramco representative) room by room in ‘Saudi Camp’ for those Saudi employees on strike, and loading them on to trucks headed for Dammam jail. 76

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Strike leaders and other ‘troublemakers’ (the majority from occupied Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia and Hijaz) were rooted out, fired and deported. Two hundred strikers were arrested. Three leaders were publicly beaten to death. A law was stipulated by royal decree that strikes and labour demonstrations were strictly forbidden from that date forward. Strikes became a punishable offence, and trade unions and political parties were banned using quotations from the Wahhabi Sharia that forbade dissent among Muslim brothers. The US Council reported in a relieved statement that it was ‘abundantly clear that the firm hand of Emir Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi was a key factor in maintenance of order’, and anyone who might have been troubled by the amount of force used was reassured by the Emir that the government knew best ‘how to deal with its own people’. Thomas Barger, soon to be President of Aramco, believed that the morale of the company’s long-time Saudi employees had risen to new heights as a result of the government’s firm action against the agitators.

* * * Every lunch time I waited anxiously for the siren to release me from my office duties so that I could slide into a corner of the library and feverishly compile my research. The librarian was new in Aramco. She approached me one afternoon to sit and chat, and asked offhandedly what I was researching. ‘I’m researching the steps that were taken to produce this American outpost in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula through social engineering,’ I babbled earnestly. A frosty silence for the briefest of moments ensued, then, without losing her kindly smile, the librarian asked me, ‘So you’re not American?’ ‘Oh, no,’ I laughed, completely unguarded, ‘I’m a Saudi.’ When I arrived the next day, I walked past the librarian with my usual cheery ‘hello’ and was met by a wan smile and not so cheery rejoinder. ‘Maybe she’s not feeling well,’ I thought, trying to shrug it off, and I walked over to my corner to study the dusty files in the back of the library. When I was ready to leave I pulled out a book I needed to borrow for the day, as I had been doing since I started my research. The librarian, who looked very uncomfortable, said: ‘I’m really sorry, but I’m afraid this book is not to be read by anyone except authorized personnel.’ ‘Why now?’ I asked in surprise. ‘I can’t explain,’ she answered touchily, ‘but 77

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we’re having a revamp of the books in here and I can’t allow you to take it home because it’s classified information.’ ‘OK,’ I answered cheerfully, ‘I’ll just sit down here and read it.’ She looked back at me, now all kindness gone from her eyes: ‘I was asked not to allow you access to any of the books here … company regulations.’ ‘So,’ I sputtered, as I finally understood her drift, ‘hiding information from Saudi Arabs is one and the same with Saudi Arabia and Aramco,’ and I marched out seething with anger, unaware that yet more of this autocratic behaviour from Aramco awaited me. I went home to a stony-faced father waiting for me with a paper in his hands. ‘Why are you getting yourself and me in trouble with this notion of Aramco moulding Saudi Arabia?’ He just would not listen to anything I had to say in defence of what I was doing. ‘You are to meet the head of Government Relations tomorrow first thing in the morning. They are threatening to fire me for what you have been saying around Dhahran,’ were his final livid words. The next morning, I fearfully walked into the office of the Aramco executive. I was young and nothing in my life so far had prepared me to defend my rights against angry grown men in high office. ‘You are not an Aramco employee, just a temporary summer student who is completely out of line; the library is off-limits for you. You accessed it by fooling the librarian into thinking you were an American full-time employee. I have nothing more to say to you except to watch your words. Your father never had such Communist leanings attributed to him.’ ‘You Americans are here for the oil, not for us. You don’t want any democracy here,’ I answered, struggling to keep the tears of hurt and anger from flowing. ‘Why shouldn’t I be allowed to read the information that you have in the Ad Building’s library?’ Of course, none of the accusations being hurled at me were true, but I was unable to trust myself to withstand a minute more of his tirade and walked out for fear that my tears at this indignity would betray me. I arrived firmly at the conclusion that the Wahhabi ulema and the USA were two diligent bedfellows working in parallel with the same means of thought control to keep the Saudi in Saudi Arabia for identical end goals of power and wealth.

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The day of my run-in, I went to the hospital to have minor foot surgery, performed by Ja’afar (a pseudonym), a Shiite nurse from Qati’f with a familiar and comfortable face. Still seething with indignation, I poured out my frustrations to him while he silently worked on my foot. Without looking up he began a whispered tirade against the al Sa’ud family such that I had never heard from any living soul in Saudi Arabia. Keeping his head down he said: ‘It’s the al Sa’uds who are to blame for this. They brought the Americans in to help them stay in power. They are Godless sinners and one day their blood will fill the streets and drown their palaces.’ I barely dared to take a breath lest he should stop talking. ‘Feisal, the wonderful Feisal everyone is talking about and his progressiveness … he is the most dangerous of the lot. We, the Shiites, still don’t exist, so where’s the progressiveness and benevolence for the Saudi nation?’ I knew what Shiism was from my stay in Lebanon, so I could understand his anguish. ‘We are Saudi and we have nothing. How dare they claim in their official statements on Friday prayers that we, the Shiites, are non-Muslims? The al Sa’uds and their Wahhabi ulema are the ones who are Godless. Are you aware that the Wahhabi judges don’t accept our testimony? That any marriage between Wahhabi Sunnis and Shiites is banned? And what’s more, that they have declared all Shiite marriages illegal?’ Ja’afar wasn’t finished; in fact he was just getting started. ‘Saudi Arabia is full of religious beliefs other than the Wahhabi. There are the duodecimains (twelvers), who share the same beliefs as Iranian and Iraqi Shiites; there are Ismailies, a majority in the Najran area, and Zaydi Shiites of Yemeni origin all over the kingdom. And even those of you who are not Wahhabi, your Sunni sect, you people of the Hijaz, are not just one sect. There are Shafi’, Malki and Hanafi sects besides the Hanbali of the Wahhabis.’ Well, that was quite a bit more detail than I was able to absorb, having only recently discovered that my religion did not just consist of Sunnis. Although King Feisal had removed many restrictions against the Shiites in the 1960s, enabling them to benefit from state educational and health services, it was a pitiful drop in the bucket. The basic lines of discrimination were very much still there, as long as the radical Sunni theologians in charge of Saudi Arabia remained Wahhabi, believing they become ‘unclean’ just by shaking the hand of a Shiite. Ja’afar, now well over the hour’s time limit for prepping my foot, continued speaking. There was no pause during which I could delicately ask him to complete the treatment yet not stop his impassioned list of 79

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grievances. I needed to hear them. ‘Look Fadia,’ he said emphatically, looking up for the briefest of eye contact, ‘for there to be any hope of this kingdom progressing the Shiites must be officially acknowledged as a legitimate version of Islam. How long can they pretend that 15 per cent of their population in the richest province of Arabia doesn’t exist? We are not allowed to have our own call to prayer. Can you believe that? The books imposed by the al Sa’uds and their Wahhabi ulema that my children must read and memorize are filled with vicious lies and slanderous claims against our sect such as, and I quote, “Shiism was invented by a Jew as a means of splitting Islam” and rumours are spread that we practise horrible deeds such as incest and cannibalism in secret. Is it normal that there are no Shiite Army offices, ministers, governors, mayors and ambassadors in this kingdom? You as a Hijazi must have some inkling of the ruthlessness of the Wahhabi al Sa’uds. But I think you have no idea of what I am telling you because you grew up here. The Americans of Aramco know everything, but as long as we do our job and go back to our oasis, it’s none of their business, unless we start to be a threat to their precious oil, which will happen, mark my words.’ The Shiites of Saudi Arabia have long been known to Aramco. The more than 700 wells in al Hasa account for 98 per cent of the country’s oil production, while Shiites, who make up 10 per cent of the Saudi population, remain locked in their mud huts. Ten years after our ‘conversation’, Ja’afar and his people in Qatif, emboldened by the Khomeini Revolution in Iran, would go out publicly in the streets in December 1979, lashing their bodies with whips as martyrs to observe Ashura, the Shiite day of mourning that commemorates the death of Imam Hussein in a struggle for leadership of the Muslims. Violence would erupt after the National Guardsmen interfered with the procession, and the Shiites would continue to simmer until February 1980, when they would rise again in a bloody protest for civil rights, breaking windows and burning tyres. The National Guard would mow them down and a ring of tanks would seal the Shiites of Qatif from the rest of the country while they levelled the town. Qatif would remain sealed off by the military with road blocks for months afterwards, its fate hidden by the Saudi government’s effective censorship.

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One afternoon, I met one of the students from our group by the poolside where I usually went to grab a sandwich during my lunch break. Tall and lanky with jet-black hair and dark expressive eyes, he kept everyone in stitches with his quick wit and barbed comments. Upon seeing me, he put aside his book and smiled as I took the sun chair next to his. Like other bona fide Saudis of my generation, he found my mix of Americanisms and Saudi nationalism amusing. We started to talk about our lives and how different the student set-up was in Saudi Arabia from Beirut. Then he surprised me with a sadness I had not seen in our group meetings, where he was usually lighthearted and full of banter. ‘Yes,’ he told me, ‘we are having a renaissance, so to speak, in our country. How long will it last? Who knows? There are too many factors weighing in against us to reach the level of freedom that Lebanon now enjoys. The major drawback is the Americans; they’re the king-makers here and they’re the king-breakers. But, hold on,’ he laughed at my crestfallen face, ‘it’s not happening now and maybe we can keep our foot in the door. Who knows? I’m going to make sure to use this chink in the armour as much as possible. We’re starting sessions in our university in Riyadh where we meet with our professors to discuss our and Saudi Arabia’s futures. I feel that this will develop into a movement similar to the one you are experiencing in Beirut.’ To this day I feel sorrow when I think of the earnest young Saudi Arabs who never had the chance to make a difference. Five years later after meeting this young man, King Feisal was assassinated. He was shot by a fundamentalist nephew who killed him in revenge for the killing of his older brother by government troops when he led an attack on the first television studios outside of Aramco in 1965. King Feisal’s secular and economic closeness with the Western world disturbed a large sector of the Wahhabi who once more felt threatened in their pact with the al Sa’uds in running the kingdom. An ailing King Khalid ascended the throne and his brother Crown Prince Fahd became the de facto ruler. To keep the ulema out of his hair as he made yet more concessions to the West with Saudi Arabia’s wealth, he gave the ulema free rein in keeping the Saudis under lock and key with respect to personal freedoms. My Saudi friend whom I’d met by the pool was an activist in Riyadh University, instrumental in bringing about political discussions and social progress between faculty and students. He was rounded up with other ‘opposition’ members and 81

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dropped from a helicopter somewhere over the Rub’ al Khali desert. We were bereft at the news; our anger and grief consumed us; but we knew that we would follow the same silent path of non-existence should we make our feelings public. By then, my brother was attending the University of Petroleum and Minerals (UPM), a spanking new state-of-the-art university that Aramco had built for the Saudis in Dhahran on the other side of the electric barbed-wire fence. Former Colonel Harry Snyder, the senior intelligence officer who had headed the US training mission for Saudi Arabia’s fledgling army and airforce, was its first Dean. He had served as a senior intelligence officer in Cairo during the war before his assignment to the kingdom as head of the US training mission for its fledgling army and air force. I had known him as the jolly father of one of my close friends who spoke our Arabic language impeccably. Harry Snyder was placed in charge of training when Aramco decided to upgrade the education of its Saudi employees. Retired as the head of the Training Department, Snyder was chosen as the first Dean for UPM during Marwan’s stint there. He was well aware of what was happening to the student activists for social reform in Saudi Arabia. News of the young students’ demise reached our ears through the underground grapevine in short whispers travelling from one trusted source to another. The year my friend disappeared, new laws concerning student behaviour in the UPM were made forbidding any conversation between students and professors outside of class or any student gatherings in any public space. If there were two students greeting one another and a third chanced upon them, they would be roughed up by the security apparatus that was now out in record numbers alongside the muttawa’a. The stride towards social and political progress ground to the halt which is still the current status quo.

* * * While attending a wedding in Dammam in 1961, my mother met Princess Sara, the young wife of the notorious Emir of the Eastern Province, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi (thirty years her senior). She found my mother’s free-association form of conversation entertaining, with the added plus of her being the wife of Fahmi Basrawi, her favourite TV star, and invited 82

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her to come for dinner one day. My mother promised she would, then let it drop as just another of the niceties Arabs exchange with one another. To everyone’s surprise, a Cadillac showed up at our door the following Wednesday evening with a pleasant-faced driver called Nami. He was Princess Sara’s personal driver and she was waiting for my mother and all four of us. Mama cheerfully bundled us into our good clothes, then into the car, and from that first visit on it became written in stone that every Wednesday evening on the dot of six we went for dinner with the Emir’s wife. The half-hour drive took us to Dammam, a dreary hard-edged town designated as the central headquarters for the Eastern Province government offices and oil administrative centre. Every street in Dammam looked like the next, and every scene was the same as the one before it: rusty cars strewn at the wayside, skinny desperate-looking cats jumping into and out of overflowing garbage drums, and little boys playing soccer with their thobes clutched in their teeth for better manoeuvrability while their sisters, in mini abayas, looked on. The palace was in a secluded area away from the centre of town encircled by a four-metre-high wall that stretched around the palace grounds. Two soldiers armed with machine guns stood at its massive carved wooden entrance, which swung open at Nami’s approach. Within was a large open courtyard where the same scene on Dammam’s streets was repeated, with cats scrounging for handouts, children playing in groups, and their parents seated outside their one-room homes that encircled the courtyard. Occupying the side that faced the courtyard was Princess Sara’s palace, a one-storey turquoise-blue and white sprawling cement villa with heavily curtained windows and an ornate gold-gilded entrance door. To enter we went through something akin to a ‘pass the baton’ relay race, with us as the baton. At the bottom of the short flight of stairs leading to the gilded door were two armed guards in fatigues, one of whom knocked at the entrance door. A disembodied female voice answered, and our presence was announced. Leaving the door ajar, the guard ran back to his position and invited us to enter. The voice gained the body of one of Princess Sara’s personal attendants once we stepped in and the gilded door was shut firmly behind us. We were led down a short hallway to yet another door covered by one-way smoked-glass mirrors with yet another disembodied voice behind it. The mirrored door swung open and we 83

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stepped into the receiving salon of Princess Sara, a large rectangular room with white walls, soaring ceilings, three heavy crystal chandeliers and four buzzing air-conditioning units. The floor was covered with layers of Persian carpets atop blue wall-to-wall carpeting and a series of identical plush wine-coloured velvet sofas with brocade and silk pillows lined against three of the walls. One wall of the extensive salon was taken up by a huge gold-framed portrait of the princess’s brother, Fahd, who could have been her identical twin save for the moustache and goatee. She would speak of Fahd far more than she did of her husband, with whom she obviously had nothing in common. Another wall was taken up by three more gigantic gold-gilded frames of King Sa’ud, Crown Prince Feisal and a Koranic calligraphy in gold-tipped letters blessing the house and its occupants. Princess Sara was seated facing the entrance door staring blankly into space, her plump bejewelled fingers fiddling idly with a string of turquoise worry beads, a group of attendants at her feet to entertain her. At our entry, she looked up with a welcoming smile on her full red lips yet a smile that did not reach her large dark kohl-rimmed and heavy-lidded eyes. Her attendants jumped up, barely disguising their relief at having someone else take over their arduous task. Tall and full-bodied, like most of the royal family, Princess Sara wore a multihued satin dress embroidered in sparkly lamé thread with a tight bodice and a remarkably plunging neckline covered lightly with the transparent black gauze of the veil she wrapped loosely around her head. One of her wrists was adorned with gold bangles that covered most of her forearm, while the other had a gold watch that changed with the fashion of the week. Why she needed a watch was a mute question. Time had no meaning in the Emir’s wife’s day as she was childless and responsibility free. Her stretches of time were punctuated by sleep, meals, television, and the Emir’s visit every fourth night (he had other wives to attend to as well). As we shyly shook her limply extended hand, we were hit by the strong fragrance of her ‘ood perfume. My mother was invited to sit next to her and we politely lined up next to our mother. An attendant seated nearby picked up a large incense burner made from teakwood covered with richly burnished hammered brass and passed around whiffs of the fragrant smoke. We watched entranced as the princess fanned the smoke to her chest with several sharp twists of her wrist, lifted her thick black 84

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hair to one side waving her hand towards her over the burner, allowing the smoke to penetrate each strand, then stood next to the burner wafting the smoky perfume to permeate her skirts by swishing them lightly to and fro. Trays of fruit juices and soft drinks were repeatedly presented while Princess Sara and Mama exchanged pleasantries until dinner was announced. The large glass sliding French doors to the dining room were rolled aside to reveal a table set for twenty-five people (we were the only guests) laden with food of every cuisine imaginable: Thai, Indian, Lebanese, the meat and rice dishes of the Saudis, and a new recipe of roast beef and mashed potatoes which the princess had seen on Aramco TV. This final dish was cooked in our honour. When it came to hospitality, the princess abided by the unshakeable rules of the desert of outdoing herself in feeding her guests. She sat at the head of the table and personally kept a close eye on what each of us ate, running her poor attendants to the ground by having them carry each and every heavy tray of food to our side at the table. When we had finished, the food was cleared and dessert was served, stretching across the table in the same quantities and varieties as the savoury dishes. The meal did not end there. After dessert came the fruit, enormous trays of every exotic type imaginable. After the fruit, dinner thankfully ended and we carried our over-extended stomachs to the sofa, unable to budge or think while we tried to digest more food than we needed for a week. Our overindulgence had been necessary to show our appreciation of Princess Sara’s hospitality. Now it was the turn of the very deserving attendants and those who lived outside in the courtyard to enter the dining room through the kitchen door and eat behind the now closed glass sliding doors. The distinct aura of Arabic coffee spiced with cardamom filled the air as a servant passed it around in a curvy, domed brass coffee pot with a gracefully pointed spout stuffed with fine straw. With a rapid up and down movement of her hand, she elongated the stream of the golden-hued brew as she poured it into handleless porcelain cups embellished in thick gold leaf. Shortly after the coffee, a servant entered with a heavy silver pot with sweet green mint tea, which she poured into small delicately engraved glasses with a tiny handle at their side. Yet another servant passed around chocolates prettily wrapped in silver and aqua-blue foil and sugar-coated almonds in pastel colours of yellow, pink and pale green. After a final round of sweet mint tea and incense, 85

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we took our leave and returned home, and the attendants returned to their station seated at her feet. On one of our visits, Fatin and I were invited to stay the night. My mother could find no graceful way of saying no, although she really wanted to. Yasmine, Emir Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s eight-year-old granddaughter, was visiting Princess Sara and the little girl had started to cry when we got up to leave. She was a year younger than Fatin, and the Emir’s wife had brought her as entertainment, which she rapidly discovered was turning into work. Yasmine’s mother was a Swedish horse breeder who had met Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s son (who also raised horses) and married him. The Emir’s wife did not approve of the marriage and thought that by bringing Yasmine to her house she would persuade her husband’s son to divorce the mother … at least, that was the story we were told. So we embarrassedly accepted the invitation to stay the night. After bidding our mother and brothers goodnight, Princess Sara’s personal attendants – two live-in seamstresses from Lebanon and Palestine – invited us for a walk in the private gardens that lay in seclusion behind the palace. We stepped into jasmine-scented paradise, a heavenly garden that we had never imagined to exist behind the forbidding grey walls surrounding it. A pebble-strewn path lead to a cupola-covered swimming pool. Lining the path were orange, mango and tangerine trees, so close to one another that their branches, heavy with fruit, entwined in intricate embraces. Towering date trees circled the swimming pool and grape vines climbed the trellis enclosing the pool, alongside brilliant fuchsia-coloured bougainvillea and jasmine; the flowers of which overpowered the garden with their perfume. We heard our names being called and turned to see Princess Sara seated in her bedroom, which opened on to the garden, inviting us to enter. Dressed in a silk robe and flowing nightgown, combing her thick long silky black hair, she was another person altogether from the bored vacuous princess we knew. We entered diffidently, suddenly feeling very awkward in this informal situation without the back-up of our mother, who felt at home anywhere. Mercifully, Yasmine kept up an excited chatter. As we sat on the floor playing with a pack of cards, a large dark figure suddenly loomed at the bedroom’s garden entrance. Yasmine gave a yelp of excitement and we nearly yelped in fright. It was Emir Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, who had come to visit his wife and granddaughter. Tall and imposing, with a heavy black cloak he held closely around him and a red chequered ghutra on 86

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his head without an agal, he had a frightening, aggressively featured face largely hidden under a black untrimmed beard. His piercing black eyes softened perceptibly as his granddaughter ran to him. He turned and towered over us where we sat immobile on the carpet stupefied by his presence. With a flip of his hand, he released his cloak and a profusion of mangoes, oranges and tangerines tumbled out and rolled at our feet on to the carpet. We broke out in giddy laughter, more from relief than amusement, while he chuckled inwardly, sounding very much like a Wahhabi Santa Claus. Crouching down to our level, he hauled Yasmine on to his expansive knee and asked our names, while he picked up a tangerine, peeled it deftly and offered it to his wife who blushed prettily, animation crossing her face for the first time since we had known her. While he listened to Yasmine’s chatter he peeled tangerines for us with a soft smile on his face that remarkably transformed his scary persona. His heart was obviously wrapped around his feisty little granddaughter’s finger, not Princess Sara’s. Eventually Princess Sara tired of Yasmine, who became a demanding handful the longer she stayed away from her mother. The little girl was finally released and Princess Sara went back to her life as she was accustomed to living it, duty free and focused only on her own needs and demands. Our visits returned to being uneventful slots of time we had to endure until one Wednesday evening, almost six months later. As we entered to greet the princess, seated as usual on her velvet sofa clutching her turquoise prayer beads, I noticed a new face among the group of attendants who sat to the side waiting for orders. Her dress was different from the rest, a knee-length tunic over long embroidered pantaloons. She was a little older than I was with light olive-coloured skin and delicate features framed by a black veil wrapped under her chin and over her head. Princess Sara called out to the girl, ‘Fatin, come here.’ We giggled at the novelty of having someone else with my sister’s name. There was already a Fadia, one of the live-in seamstresses. But our giggles shrivelled into silence when Fatin came forward to sit dutifully at Princess Sara’s feet, unsmiling and hostile, her head held high as she looked straight into our eyes. ‘I bought her today,’ Princess Sara said simply as though it was the most normal everyday thing to do. I swept my hand to my mouth before I said something rash. A slave! This was 1962. We sat in silence. What can you say to someone who shows off a human being they have just bought? How can one buy a human being 87

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and show it off like a new watch? So who else was a slave among the gaggle of attendants who served us silently with eyes averted? That evening we uncovered one slave after another. The little girl we had been playing with since our first visit, Sheikha, was a slave’s daughter. Her parents had never mentioned it during the long hours we spent in their one-room concrete box watching television and cracking jokes while we waited for our mother’s visit to end. We had poured over their wedding album and they had informed us that the princess had decided they would marry one another; the father was in charge of keeping the royal cars in running order and the mother was in charge of the princess’s private quarters. I discovered that they were both slaves from Ethiopia, which meant Sheikha, their bubbling mischievous daughter who was invited to keep us company, was a second-generation slave. Princess Sara played with their lives like we played with our dolls. I went home that evening unable to get Fatin out of my mind. I wanted to know more about her and I counted the days until our next visit. Sheikha, who was nine – old enough to understand gossip and young enough to relay it for the sake of friendship – told us all she knew. Fatin was two years older than me and was proving difficult to control from the day she had been bought. She was kept under the close watch of the older attendants as she would obviously attempt to escape at her first chance to do so. I finally got my break to speak with Fatin. My sister and I had stepped outside for a walk in the courtyard, as we often did with Sheikha, and spotted Fatin by the door. I invited her to join us. She walked jauntily up to us and asked abruptly: ‘Why do you speak in English with one another? Aren’t you Saudi?’ We told her yes, we were Saudi but did not have Saudi friends. ‘All the better,’ were her bitter words. ‘I am a Yemeni. I am not Fatin. I hate the name Fatin. My name is Aysha. I was stolen from my father in Yemen while we were herding our goats and now I’m here. I hate the princess, I hate her family, I hate it here, I hate everything about Saudi Arabia.’ Silent tears slid down her cheeks, which she angrily wiped away. We stood around awkwardly at a loss for words while Sheikha wrung her hands. Her mother relayed everything to the princess, and she would have to tell her what went on between us. As though reading her mind, Aysha turned viciously on Sheikha. ‘Run to your mother and tell her everything. She should know how I feel. I have nothing to hide. It’s wrong for one human being 88

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to own another.’ Now Sheikha started to cry. She was a sweet, harmless little girl and until now did not have a care in the world. We were a group of girls with the oldest (Aysha) at thirteen struggling with a human rights issue beyond our scope of comprehension. On our way home I discussed the situation with my mother. It had disturbed her too, but she looked at it as an issue that went with the territory. Princess Sara’s driver, Nami, no last name, unexpectedly dived into our conversation. Nami never ventured any words other than the niceties of asking after our health and describing his home in Asir, the Garden of Eden of Saudi Arabia, an independent kingdom until King Ibn Sa’ud conquered it in 1925. He spoke longingly of its mountains, rainy weather, green landscapes and of his wife (only one) who worked side by side with her man with face uncovered. Now he was saying vehemently. ‘Princess Sara is a bad person. She likes to show that she is kind and generous, but she is mean and spiteful and unfair – like everyone else in the royal family. This poor girl has been wrongly sold into slavery. If Princess Sara was a good Muslim she would free her and get her retribution from God, but the royal family doesn’t know God …’ Powerful words to be spoken so openly in the minefield that was Saudi Arabia. Aysha was a very lucky girl. Her period in slavery was mercifully cut short. A decree banning slaves was announced the following year and she was the first to demand repatriation. The princess could not understand her ungratefulness. Aysha had chosen to return to her family of goatherds rather than spend years in luxury serving her. Of course, the princess was not a person who would understand the priceless value of freedom.

* * * One Friday found my sister, brothers and I milling around the house like caged animals. Our parents had gone to Jeddah for a few days and we were housebound. There was little to do in Dhahran, and even less in al Khobar, especially with the lack of an adult male to drive us anywhere. After making the ninth round of the house, Fatin suddenly burst out: ‘What the hell, let’s go to Half Moon Bay.’ We stopped in our tracks, all three of us, and stared at Fatin while thinking the unthinkable. 89

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Half Moon Bay was the usual Friday spot for our outings, a beautiful curved expanse of soft sand and sea in the form of a half-moon surrounded by towering sand dunes that plunged straight into the deep warm waters of the Persian Gulf. There was nothing more exhilarating than climbing to the top of the highest dune, falling to our sides with eyes tightly shut and rolling down the dune’s sharp steep edge, slowly at first, then gaining momentum, collecting sand in our hair and ears as we rolled faster and faster, until we suddenly dropped off into the Persian Gulf ’s deep warm waters that enveloped us gently without a splash. ‘Yes!’ we all chorused and jumped to action for our foray into the untried world of woman drivers. We ran to Marwan’s cupboard and pulled out his thobe and red chequered ghutra that he wore for official photos for various IDs, and Fatin (the only one who could drive) slipped into them, folding the ghutra into a massive pile on her head and pulling it low over her forehead to shadow her face without obliterating her eyes. She got my mother’s kohl pencil and smeared it over her face to give the impression of a day-old beard. Then we opened cupboards and the refrigerator, piling our picnic food and drinks into a cooler. We were ready to go. With Ghassan in the front seat and Marwan and me in the back, Fatin turned on the ignition and we were off in the direction of the Main Gate, our first obstacle. The duty guards knew our car; knew us and knew that our father was in Jeddah. As we approached the gate, we all stopped talking at the same time, then realized that this would be our undoing so we threw words around as if in deep conversation, passed by Juma’a, the head guard, with a casual wave and continued on into the ‘forbidden to women drivers territory’. The exhilaration one feels at such successfully accomplished steps of defiance can only be understood by those who are denied the freedom to choose. We clapped, whooped, sang, and bounced jubilantly as Fatin drove, ecstatic with the freedom of the wheel, to Half Moon Bay, half an hour away. Just before the turn-off from the main road to the beach, as Fatin slowed down at a traffic light, a pickup truck piled with Saudi labourers standing in the back slowed down alongside. We stared doggedly ahead, hearts pounding as the labourers stared at us for lack of anything else to do. Suddenly, as the light turned green, loud shouts emanated from the men in the back and they gestured wildly in our direction. Fatin stepped on the gas and sped towards the safety of the beach. Total chaos engulfed the labourers, for 90

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the one who had uncovered Fatin’s disguise had almost fallen out of the truck and was being hauled back on by the edge of his thobe while he continued to shout frantically, ‘It’s a woman! It’s a woman! She’s driving! I saw her face!’ But it was too late for any chase as we were now on Aramco property where no unauthorized man or beast could breathe. It would be a beach trip to remember because our travails against Saudi repression were not going to stop at that incident. At the beach site, we gaily set out our picnic and Fatin and Marwan, the two sporty members of the family, began a competitive game of badminton while Ghassan and I wandered off for a walk by the sea. Ghassan, as I have mentioned, is handicapped with a neuromuscular disease, which has robbed him of the ability to control his movements. Of an incredibly high intelligence, my brother is trapped in the worst hell any man could enter and his illness has no cure. Within Dhahran, he grew up with as normal a life as his physical limitations allowed. The Arabs and Americans in Aramco who watched him grow became his surrogate extended family and; in many cases; were far more understanding than my parents, who found it difficult to accept his debilitating handicap. My mother would insist when asked about her son that ‘Nothing is wrong with Ghassan; he just has a sore foot that is not allowing him to walk properly.’ This was absorbed by Ghassan, who would attempt to do what others with normal bodies did, often injuring himself in the process. Unfortunately, the emergency ward became very familiar with my brother and his frequent visits. It was taken in everyone’s stride and in many cases with humour, as his accidents thankfully were not that serious. On his trips to doctors in Europe and the USA, he had winked at many a waiter as he left the premises supported by us, with the quip: ‘Don’t worry, I’m driving.’ But in the Middle East, it was not customary for handicapped people to move freely in public and the attention he received was not always empathetic. As we walked and talked, we did not notice that we had moved beyond the protective boundaries of Half Moon Bay until a young Saudi man appeared before us. From the sneer on his face and the manner he was dressed, we realized we were about to become victims of his ignorance. This young man came from the schools under a Wahhabiimposed anti-modernist religious curriculum that turned many otherwise decent and kind young men into rigid reactionaries filled with guilt, anger and frustration at modern ‘corruption’. They became narrow-minded bullies against those they perceived were outside Wahhabi acceptable 91

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norms of behaviour. We stopped and turned to go back, but it was too late. The Saudi turned to his friends a distance away. ‘Hey, come quickly and look at this crazy drunk!’ Boundless fury at this offensive situation shot through me, catapulting me in the ruffian’s direction, along with Ghassan, who ran furiously behind with his arms and legs flailing. Then we set upon the shocked young man with a viciousness I never knew we possessed. Before his clan could catch up with him (where we would have faced serious trouble), a Saudi Arab family who had been nervously watching the interaction jumped to disperse the mob poised to set upon my brother and me. By the time Marwan and Fatin arrived, we were separated, and safely reduced to exchanging curses. Ghassan, with his unbridled strength, had left our abuser with a bloody nose and I had left him with enough scratches to keep us in his memory far longer than he would have wished. Once more I was faced with the disastrous fallout the lack of a well rounded education had on the impressionable young and what happened to those were exposed to an education that was ‘memorized and repeated’ from a curriculum filled with religious xenophobic zealotry.

* * * On the last day of my summer vacation, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Pan-Arab hero, and my grandfather, my mother’s hero, died from heart attacks. I walked into the kitchen that afternoon to find my mother sobbing loudly, telephone receiver in hand, dressed incongruously in a brightly coloured striped dress. The gaily striped dress remains indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye: after that day I would never again see the gaiety as reflected in that striped dress that had previously come so naturally to my mother. She had been the apple of her father’s eye and now he was dead and she was so far away. During our childhood summers in Damascus, she transformed magically from a harried mother into a laughing mischievous fun-loving schoolgirl the moment she stepped into her doting father’s house. She was the centre of all attention and she could do no wrong. Pulling rank as the eldest sister, she would cheerfully dump us and all the woes of running a household onto her far more serious younger sisters. After her father’s death, she would attempt to replace his adoring attention and wise advice by my father’s, but he was 92

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far too angry and judgemental to give that sort of unconditional love. Hope was erased from her life from that day forward, for she never found a replacement for those two heroes who had helped define her life: Gamal Abdel Nasser and her father.

* * * I boarded the MEA flight back to Beirut in a cloud of sadness. The summer of 1970 had ended on a sombre note both within and out of our home as troubling events shed a pall of impending doom and gloom over most of the Arab world. Hafez Asad had assumed the dictator’s chair over Syria in a white coup and had turned his attention against the Pan-Arab Sunni Arabs rather than Israel. Iraq’s governing council had experienced an American-supported purge by Saddam Hussein, who took the dictator’s chair and immediately turned his attention against Syria rather than Israel in a war of attrition and assassinations over the finer details of their almost identical far-right Baathist ideology. Meanwhile Beirut’s Pan-Arabs were becoming increasingly vociferous in their anger with the anti-Palestinian governing measures and politics of the Maronite Establishment. Both sides grew increasingly polarized after the Arab League-supported Cairo Accord had been signed in 1969 giving Palestinian militants unprecedented privileges to fight Israel from Lebanese territory. The visible shift in confessional power the Accord gave to the Pan-Arabs had alarmed the Maronite Establishment. My sophomore year’s classes at university in 1969 had been erratic as strikes and daily demonstrations had been staged in impassioned support of the Palestinian cause and civil rights for the disenfranchised of Lebanon. In addition to Hafez Asad, Saddam Hussein and the Cairo Accord, King Hussein of Jordan had added his lethal ingredient to the seething pot of Lebanon’s confessional confrontations. My mother had called me in horror early one mid-summer morning to hear the news of King Hussein’s attack on the Palestinian refugee camps on Jordanian territory. Fearing for his throne he had ordered his Bedouin National Guard army to oust Yasser Arafat’s militant arm of Fatah from Jordan in what had turned into a blood-bath known as ‘Black September’, during which Palestinian militants and civilian refugees alike were slaughtered by the 93

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undiscerning Bedouin guards. The Palestinian militants who survived the onslaught were cleared out of Jordan and joined Palestinian militants from Syria and Egypt in a one-way pass into Lebanon. As the MEA took off, I silently bade farewell to Saudi Arabia’s burning flares and reflected on what awaited me in a Beirut plunged partially into mourning and partially into celebration over Gamal Abdel Nasser’s death. I mulled over the five tough years of Lebanese acclimatization I had endured since 1965, the year I had left Dhahran for Beirut to continue my education.

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he day of reckoning of my thoroughly American upbringing came on my graduation day in 1965. Aramco schools stopped at ninth grade and the graduating students went abroad for the remainder of their education. Where would I go? I was graduating from Dhahran School fully versed in all things American and nothing Arab. Up to this point, my parents had succeeded in keeping me within the rules of decorum required of an Arab Muslim daughter; so they certainly were not about to push their luck by sending me off to a co-ed boarding school somewhere in Europe or America where most of my friends were going. Local schools were out of the question: apart from their weak level of education, I had only an elementary school level grasp of the Arabic language. Frantically, they began to search for a school where I could both continue my education in English and stay within the Arab mores and values while I was away from their watchful eyes. Their choice was the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls. Relatively nearby, it had an English language-curriculum and, more importantly, was a strict all-girl boarding school. I was unhappy with their decision. I did not want to go to Lebanon. Beirut was a city that I found confusing. Our relatives there were distant cousins of my father with whom we were not particularly close nor did they find our Americanization amusing. It was not a place that I had many fond memories of. 95

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My first introduction to Beirut had been in my infancy. I was just six months old when my father began his orientation year at AUB in 1951. From our five-year stay I remember our last day in Beirut in 1956, and my last day of kindergarten at the Al Huda School the clearest. My school was conveniently around the corner from our apartment on Hamra Street, a modest yellow one-storey building with a tiny dusty courtyard, where my father dropped me off daily on his way to AUB. My kindergarten was in a large square room that was also used for all the levels of elementary school in different time slots. We sat on benches, two to a desk and even at that tender young age spent most of our time copying lessons from the blackboard and memorizing poems. Those who didn’t recite well were given a public slap on the wrist and banished to the corner. My last day at the Al Huda School was befittingly reflective of the school’s ethos. I spent the better part of it with my face to the wall because I was impolite to the principal. She had smacked my sister for being late to return to class after recess and I had called the principal a donkey for doing so. My last farewell from Beirut did not go any smoother. In the stress and commotion of kissing everyone goodbye, including the neighbours and grocer, and of getting tons of luggage and four children into the car, we drove away without Fatin. We discovered her absence only when we glanced back through the rear window to have a last look at our aunts and uncles and saw her jumping up and down, frantically waving from the sidewalk. The images of Beirut that came to my mind’s eye were of swirls of bright lights and noise caught up in hot humid air. It was a cacophony of traffic-jammed streets where everyone drove by their horns and with a palpable death wish. People on balconies carried out animated conversations with people down below, radios blared, vendors called out their wares, roosters crowed from random rooftops and dogs barked relentlessly. It was a city that did not sleep. All night the air would resonate with raucous symphonies of crickets and the clatter and chatter of people on the streets. Then, in the early hours of dawn, there came a brief respite as the night players went to bed only to be replaced by those who got up with the sun. Lebanon’s mountain resorts were just as brash and gaudy, the difference being better weather and scenery. The resorts were full of casinos crowded with singers and belly dancers at every turn of the congested sidewalks. Open-air family restaurants stood side by side with bars and nightclubs, the heavy doors of which remained ever 96

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so slightly ajar, beckoning tantalizingly into the mysterious dim interiors within. Beirut was markedly different from the rest of the Arab cities in its audacious, chaotic, freeform way of life. Ceaselessly changing shape and colour in an ever-turning kaleidoscope, it was in stark contrast to the silent, sterile, artificial world of Dhahran. Only with time would I come to love this tiny, complex Arab country as I began to realize it was so much more than wine, women and song, after layer upon layer of history, culture, passion and collective pain peeled away before me. Judging from Lebanon’s history, I was but a drop in the sea of those drawn by this land’s siren song. Draped full length along the balmy eastern Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon lies at the crossroads to Europe, Asia and Africa. Two soaring mountain ranges run its full length in parallel from north to south, setting Lebanon permanently apart from the austere Arabian Desert beyond. Lebanon’s name comes from the Westernized word for ‘Lebnan’, Aramaic for white … the white of Lebanon’s snow-covered mountains, home to the evergreen Cedrus Libanica tree, a symbol of eternity closely entwined with the country’s long history. Through a fluke of nature, this fraction of the Levant was destined to be continuously buffeted as a geostrategic pawn while East fought West in power struggles over trade routes that passed through it, creating as much suffering for its inhabitants as riches. Natural deep-sea ports, fertile soil and four seasons allowed its inhabitants a singularly sybaritic lifestyle as far back as 5,000 bc – a lifestyle so beguiling that many would-be conquerors were fooled into judging this land of seemingly perpetually partying people an easy victory. Again and again, invading armies of both ancient and modern times would find this smiling land of ‘milk and honey’ (as Lebanon is so poetically described in the Bible) transform overnight into the dark and treacherous land of ‘shifting quicksand’. The names of some of these ambitious but thwarted conquerors are carved on the grey limestone banks of the Dog River (so-called because of the yapping sound it makes as it rushes down from the towering mountain it originates from) in what must be one of the oldest forms of graffiti. There, on the walls of the jagged cliffs that plunge dramatically into the river on its way to the sea at what continues to be a prime picnic spot, is an intriguing list of the ‘I was here’ of commanders of ancient and recent armies who felt compelled to etch their names on Lebanon’s stones as they trekked into or out of the country eastwards or 97

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westwards. It was here that Egypt’s Ramses II (who reigned 1304–1237 BC) carved his name into the stone walls of the cliff on his way to buy cedar to scaffold the great Abu Simbel. The Hittites, Assyrians, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, French and English have added their names in vertical succession to those before them who had attempted to possess an enticing part of this geography and failed. At each ebb and flow of occupiers, the area’s demography and boundaries changed, leaving war on its soil as the only constant. With all this incoming and outgoing traffic of armies marching into the welcoming arms of some segment of the population living there and being marched out in disgrace by another, the inhabitants were inevitably influenced culturally, ethnically, religiously and ideologically, forming a colourful but imperfect mosaic of humanity, beautiful in each of its parts, yet sadly flawed as a harmonious whole. Tragically, these insoluble, diverse pieces would carry on marching towards some confrontation with one another into modern-day Lebanon, in an attempt to impose the face each side believed Lebanon should wear, ultimately bringing the house down both upon themselves and their enemies. Modern Lebanon’s problems began on the first day of its modern history. It was borne out of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 30 August 1920 that left the lion’s share of the Ottoman Levantine territories under the mandate of France and Britain. The ink for the agreement was barely dry before the two powers set feverishly to work to offset the control of the other over the area’s trade and trade routes. Britain had a head start on France with its Palestinian mandate’s major port cities of Haifa and Acca to transport its trade and oil to the west. On the other hand, France’s mandates for Mount Lebanon and Syria did not currently benefit her trade interests. Mount Lebanon had the Maronite majority France needed to turn it into a supportive Christian enclave, but no sea outlet to make it a viable trading partner, while Syria had major port cities but a population that was largely Muslim and in the full throes of anti-colonialism. With the impunity of the conqueror, the French took the liberty of redrawing the maps of its mandates to serve its economic interests. They first took a census of Mount Lebanon in 1923 which established the Maronite majority that France wanted as per the imposed confessional system of rule that allotted important seats in government according to majority. Then France turned to its Syrian mandate territory and plucked what parts of the mandate it needed to make its Christian enclave in Mount 98

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Lebanon a viable trading partner. The largely Orthodox Christian and Sunni populations of the Beka’a Valley, and the port cities of Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon, awoke one morning to discover they were no longer Syrian but Lebanese under the 1923 census of Maronite majority. The new ex-Syrian Lebanese citizens, whose identity had been forcefully altered while they were in the full throes of the Pan-Arab movement in Syria against these very colonizers, immediately began to agitate for a new census that would include their numbers. The promised new census for the new Lebanese citizens never came. And the newcomers never stopped demanding one. France ignored the ex-Syrian Lebanese protesters and declared Lebanon an independent republic in 1926 with the 1923 census of the Maronite majority of Mount Lebanon as the basis of confessional division of power for the new Lebanon. Thus France baldly sealed the position of power of the Maronites politically, geographically and economically. Voila, fait accompli! Or so France thought. France had still more tangling of confessions to accomplish before its rule ended. In 1943, the Free French ousted the Vichy French from the Syrian mandate, declared Mount Lebanon a free republic and magnanimously drew up an unwritten Mithaq al Watani (national constitution). This ‘oral gentlemen’s agreement’, said that the Christians promised not to seek foreign (French) protection and to accept Lebanon’s ‘Arab face’, so long as the Muslim side agreed to recognize the independence and legitimacy of the Lebanese state within its 1920 boundaries and to renounce aspirations for union with Syria. The republic was officially recognized on 22 November 1943, hastily it seems as Lebanon’s unwritten constitution remained unwritten and the census unofficially remained the 1923 one. The republic was, predictably, a non-starter and eighteen legally recognized Lebanese confessions continued to tangle with the Maronites for supremacy. In the year that I moved to Lebanon for my education, twenty-two years after its independence, nothing had changed. The Maronites still dominated the political élite, the disenfranchised Lebanese remained disenfranchised, their poverty on the rise. The one change from 1943 was the presence of impoverished stateless Palestinian refugees: tens of thousands of them who had poured into Lebanon in 1948 across its southern borders, fleeing the killing of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Seventeen years later, they remained crammed in wretched temporary camps that dotted the full length of the country without 99

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permission to enter Lebanon’s civil society or able to return to their villages. It was into this ‘pressure cooker’ state of affairs that I stepped when I began my education in Beirut. With a powerful Israel on its northern borders with whom it was formally at war, and a sister Arab neighbour, Syria, on its eastern borders which not only never forgot what Lebanese territories belonged to it just a few decades back but also had its own designs of Arab hegemony, this tiny piece of land labelled a democratic republic was gradually bursting at the seams. Lebanon’s identity was about to be thrown onto the table of contention, to be fought over by its inhabitants.

* * * On the morning of 25 September 1965, my first day at school, I walked apprehensively through the century-old black wrought iron gates of the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls in downtown Beirut with my mother at my side. Her cheerful small talk did not match my sullen mood. Down the winding gravel path ahead of us stood the old Ottoman-style villa that housed the school, untouched, it seemed, since the days of the Ottomans. Its exterior was deceivingly beautiful with red rooftop tiles and an elegant portico. Purple wisteria intertwined around the slender columns of its archways with dark green ivy that continued onward to hug the roughly hewn limestone walls of the villa. Intricate wrought iron graced two grand windows overlooking a fragrant rose garden on each side of a surprisingly small entrance, which we now entered. A self-important usher standing in the foyer of the villa motioned for us to follow her to the boarding facilities. We fell into step behind her, our heels echoing desolately on the large well-worn slabs of black stone that paved a long, wide, dark and damp corridor. At the end of the seemingly interminable hall, we climbed up a short flight of stairs that led to the living quarters of the boarders. As we stepped into a large hallway lined with rickety single cupboards, we were met by a whirl of red, green and white streamers (colours of the Lebanese flag) fluttering behind girls dashing around in all directions getting ready for the opening assembly. Avoiding their curious glances in my direction, I kept my eyes firmly averted to the floor as we tagged behind the usher 100

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into a small alcove off the main hallway with yet more cupboards against a flimsy wall that obviously had toilets on the other side. ‘Here is your cupboard,’ the usher pointed breezily and turned abruptly on her heels obviously expecting us to follow her into another room down the hallway of cupboards. ‘Here is your bed; excuse me, I have to go,’ she told me and briskly marched out of the sleeping quarters without a second look back at us. There before me stretched a long tunnel-shaped room painted a sickening grey with tiny barred windows at ceiling level lining one wall. These unattainable slivers of the sky apparently looked out onto the backstreets of downtown Beirut, judging from the honks of the cars and snippets of salty language from the streets below. Arranged on both sides of the room, regiment style, were twenty grey metal-frame beds covered in prickly brown blankets. Memories of Dhahran, of my old friends, my old school, its shady green gardens, colourful classrooms and familiar kindred souls rushed into my already homesick heart. With the despair of a convict entering her cell, I threw myself on to my prickly bed with its lumpy pillow, a sobbing crumpled heap of utter misery. My mother could not understand my reaction: ‘Yallah, Fadia, let’s go unpack your things,’ she said, adding firmly, ‘stop your snivelling.’ Her advice went unheeded. While she unpacked, I sat on a small straw stool that was provided for each cupboard owner and wept uncontrollably, engulfed by grief at what was to be my new home for the next three years. A pretty Chinese girl and a plump, auburn-haired girl walked into the alcove in casual conversation as they moved towards their cupboards that were on each side of mine. I turned my face to the cupboard wall to make it emphatically clear that I was not interested in talking to anyone. But that did not deter the two. ‘Hi’, the Chinese smiled warmly, ‘I’m Lisa Ting from Taiwan and I live in Baghdad.’ The auburn-haired girl turned to me from rummaging deep within her cupboard and, flashing a wide gap-toothed smile, introduced herself: ‘My name’s Amber Mohr – “Amber” after my Palestinian grandmother and “Mohr” because my father’s German. We live in Jerusalem. Where do you come from?’ Heaving sobs came out of me in response. In gentle concern, they both kneeled on either side of me and patted my shoulders comfortingly. Pausing mid-sob I stole a glance at these two sweet souls who would eventually become two of the best friends I would ever have. ‘There you go,’ my mother jumped in with visible relief at this nanosecond of 101

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non-wailing. ‘You’ve made friends already.’ And to my horror she stepped out of the alcove and corralled two random girls running past, each wearing a Lebanese flag with the ever-present streamers clutched in their hands. ‘Come and meet my daughter,’ she called to them, to my deep mortification. ‘She’s new and doesn’t know anyone.’ There was a very awkward silence as the captive girls shuffled in, smiling nervously at me, obviously anxious to be somewhere else. I stared at the floor tongue-tied from acute embarrassment but knew I had to say something fast before my mother went through the whole boarding school to make her point that I was in good hands. Apologizing for my puffy red eyes I introduced myself as a Saudi Arabian from Dhahran. The two girls, nodding courteously, introduced themselves as old-guard boarders who were, judging by their names, from the Kuwaiti and Bahraini ruling families. I must have appeared as a puzzling anomaly from the Arabian Peninsula to these two girls with my awkward Arabic (I spoke a heavily American accented Syrian–Palestinian dialect) and sneakers. (No one wore sneakers in the Middle East in 1965 except labourers, as I would find out soon enough … that same day, in fact.) ‘You’ll get used to it,’ they politely reassured me before dashing off to catch up with the rest of the performers. At this point, Amber and Lisa linked arms with me and suggested escorting me to my classroom. My mother took her cue that this was the best time to leave, kissed me goodbye and turned towards the exit humming softly, as she did when she was content, fully convinced that all would be well from now on. Gradually, with time, I did begin to fall into the rhythm of life as a boarding student in BESG (the school’s acronym) and came, albeit grudgingly, to accept my new lifestyle. Amber, Lisa and identical Yugoslavian twins, named Maria and Helena Jankovic who sang moving accapello duets of Paul Anka’s ‘I’m Mr Lonely’, became my close friends and a loyal buffer group against the initial hostility to my Americanized manners that I would receive throughout my first year in BESG. As chance would have it, I had stepped into the part of Lebanon that was gripped by intense anti-American sentiments due to American foreign policy viewed widely as unfairly slanted in Israel’s favour. In Lebanon, I quickly discovered that anyone who was old enough to walk and talk had strong opinions about politics, which naturally included each and every girl of my new school. All things American screamed pro-Zionist to everyone around me and that doomed me to acutely embarrassing 102

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moments of mistaken identity. I needed to utter no more than a word to provoke anyone within listening range of my American accent to whirl around and glare belligerently at me as though I had just declared an intentional act of war. To make a painful story of my entrée into Lebanese politics short, let me just say that I learned to speak the Lebanese dialect and shed what Americanisms I could very, very quickly. From that year of 1965 on, I joined the Arabs of my generation in having Zionism, Arab politics, oil, religion, the United States of America and war as the ever-present parameters around the life choices I would make. Sadly, those parameters would still be there well into our children’s adult lives. Our daily schedule in boarding school began at six in the morning with one of the numerous unmarried boarding teachers zealously ringing a bell at the doorway of our dormitory. We were expected to put our feet immediately to the ground, with the knowledge that the icy-cold tiles would jolt us awake. We were then expected to make our beds and remain standing next to them for inspection by our headmistress, Miss Jureidini. The headmistress, alone, would have been enough to jolt any of us awake. She was a crusty old spinster straight out of a Charles Dickens’ novel. Her face, ugly to begin with, was further marred by a stroke she’d had that held one side immobilized while the healthy half remained in a perpetual sneer. The sneering half, I quickly discovered, was far more preferable than her smile. It was instant dislike between us when we met and would remain so until the end of my days at BESG. Her job was constant surveillance of the girls under her charge to make sure no one was enjoying the youth she obviously never had. We had lights out at nine when everyone was to fall immediately to sleep without any more talking – a tall and impossible order for a roomful of teenagers. It usually transpired that after the exhausted teacher on duty finished her ranting and raving to get us to follow orders, she’d leave and we would continue our gabfest. At this point we knew that the headmistress would soon be on her way to catch us in the act of disobedience, because other than their thankless job of waking us up and putting us to sleep, the boarding teachers served as Miss Jureidini’s eyes and ears. And we knew that Miss Jureidini, sporting three curlers in her balding head, wrapped in her pink woolly chamber robe and carrying a flashlight to highlight any potential culprit, would be tiptoeing towards our dorm room in fluffy pink bedroom slippers to muffle her steps. But we also knew that she was always accompanied by 103

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her terrier, Teetee (a dog even the dog lovers among us grew to hate), whose nails would scratch loudly on the ceramic tile floor, heralding their imminent arrival well before their entrance into our dormitory. She never caught a single girl awake. Not that I never got into trouble with the dour headmistress. By nature, I was outspoken on matters that I didn’t find fair and there were plenty of her rules I did not agree with. My outspokenness angered Miss Jureidini, who came to see me as a rabble-rouser out to challenge her authority (she was right). Her punishment was to find some excuse to banish me on a weekly basis for a time-out in the sick room across the hall from her room, where I was to sit and think about my bad behaviour. Whatever exams or assignments I would have for the day were to be graded as zero. Fortunately, she was one of the few bad apples in the school. My teachers and classmates were very sympathetic and there would never be exams or assignments for me to miss on the day of my solitary confinement. I was never particularly religious. Both of my parents were hazy about the finer points of Islam. They were Muslim because they were born Muslim. The Koran was memorized and repeated verbatim, not necessarily internalized. My father prayed five times a day, fasted during Ramadan, went to the Hajj, drank alcohol and ate pork. My mother didn’t pray five times a day and never wore the headscarf. At the same time, she didn’t drink alcohol or eat pork. I was in the same category vis-à-vis being a Muslim; I was born that way. So when Ramadan came around, I was relieved to be away from under my father’s watchful eye and relished not having to fast. My father had been very strict about fasting and we did not want to get on his bad side (this included my mother, who wasn’t too keen on fasting either), so as far as he knew when we gathered around the Iftar (breaking the fast) table, we were all ‘breaking our fast’. That was my ambivalent attitude towards being a Muslim until the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls gave me and my Muslim co-boarders a whole new perspective with respect to our Islamic identity. Miss Jureidini gathered the Muslim boarders in a private meeting on the first day of Ramadan and informed us that fasting was not allowed among the boarding students because it was bad for our health. Suddenly fasting took on a whole new meaning, one of self-worth. We gave a resounding and unanimous ‘No!’ completely taking the 104

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headmistress by surprise because it was school policy that Muslim boarders did not fast in Ramadan. We held a meeting among ourselves to discuss our next move. ‘What was she thinking?’ we asked one another angrily. ‘Did she really think that any of us would accept? How did she think she had that kind of authority?’ We were a group of ten Muslims and our ringleader, Khairiyeh Rehaimi from Jeddah, was a very devout Saudi Arabian girl who, unlike me, knew her religion and followed its strictures faithfully with conviction. Khairiyeh immediately called her father to relay this infringement on our Muslim rights. As boarding students we had been obliged to go to church, which we had accepted with grace. But here we drew the line. We were not about to melt into the woodwork with respect to our right to choose to fast or not to fast. That evening, we went obediently to dinner at the usual hour although it was not the hour of breaking our fast. The headmistress smirked victoriously at our meek entrance into the dining hall. We sat down at our places after grace was said, waited for the helpers to serve the food on to our plates, then on cue and in joint protest turned our full plates upside down on to the tablecloth in full view of the teachers’ table just behind us. Everyone froze. Not a clink or clank of cutlery was heard, not even the tiniest whisper. The head cook, eyes flashing daggers at us, folded her arms across her massive chest and named each and every one of our group scattered across the dining hall at different tables. Miss Jureidini was apoplectic and screamed in a shrill voice shaking with rage, ‘Get out of here! Go to my office at once. Shame! Shame on all of you!’ We didn’t care. On the contrary, we were elated at seeing her fury. She had no problem in disrespecting us and our religion; why should we be any different? Miss Jureidini marched into her office, gave what she thought was a withering stare and threatened us with expulsion. We smiled back silently (I personally really, really, relished the idea) except for Khairiyeh who was not going to allow the Evangelists to get the upper hand as far as respect for her religion was concerned. The following morning, Khairiyeh’s father called the principal. He was going to raise the case with the King and ask him to pass a decree forbidding Saudi Arabs from attending any evangelical schools in Lebanon. The Saudi Arab students formed the majority of boarding students in Lebanese schools, and Khairiyeh’s father hit the winning number by hitting their pockets. We fasted the whole month of Ramadan in triumph albeit hungrily as none of the delicacies of the Iftar tables of our homes were 105

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prepared by the head cook, who didn’t waste much love for us. But we had won and that was all that counted that Ramadan. The positioning of our dorm room provided sources of amusement that were not included in the glitzy brochure our parents had pored over. The windowless walls of our dormitory blocked out the sights of the back streets of downtown Beirut, but did not block out the sounds. Every night, titters would ripple up and down the rows of beds, as our virginal ears would hear loud bargaining between prostitutes and their prospective customers in the streets below. Occasionally, drunken brawls would break out well into the night, punctuated with beer bottles shattering to the ground, instantly followed by loud sirens of police cars and culminating with angry curses from men and women being unceremoniously bundled off to the precinct. This was certainly not part of the education our parents had had in mind. Among the myriad rules and regulations made to keep the boarding school’s reputation as one of stellar propriety was that we could only leave the school premises with a chaperone designated by our parents. One very long and boring Sunday, a group of us who had no one to take us out started exploring the school building. One of the group gave us an inside tip that there was a music room on the top floor of the villa which she had been allowed to enter to practise her piano skills. We climbed hesitantly up the steep narrow staircase that led to the roof and opened the door to a darkened classroom, which seemed to be frozen in a time warp of students past and present. The piano was there as old as the school itself. There were yellowed pictures of Beirut and of BESG many decades back, hung crookedly on the wall around a calendar dated 1933. A mixture of dusty musical instrument cases, old cardigans and straw hats lay in aged silence on equally aged school desks and chairs. What caught our attention and made us brave through this uncomfortable eerie room was the rooftop terrace just beyond its closed shutters. We pushed in concert against the stiff rusty doors tumbling out into the bright sunlight with only the unlimited clear sky above us. Without any ado, we immediately made a beeline to gaze on the street below our dormitory so that we could finally match the faces to the nameless voices that continued to give us such entertainment. We adopted this terrace as our secret hideout, spending long hours sunbathing and sticking pins into makeshift voodoo dolls of our headmistress, interspersed with writing maudlin poetry filled with 106

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teenage angst. Often, our conversations would turn to politics. The boarders were a combination of nationalities from countries surrounding Lebanon – daughters of professionals, rulers and government officials from Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia (other than me and including three daughters of the late King Sa’ud), Sudan and Lebanon. Fahda, King Sa’ud’s daughter from his Syrian wife who lived in Beirut, and two of her sisters, Madawi and Sheikha, had decided to join our boarding school that year to have a taste of a normal life. Fahda, the eldest, was the most striking. She reflected the beauty and grace of the Saudi women of Central Arabia with her tall broad-shouldered physique, large dark luminous eyes, generous forehead, aquiline nose, and full lips with a smile that lit up her face. Fahda carried a decidedly royal aura that was made all the more poignant as it was juxtaposed with her heartfelt desire for normalcy in her relationships with people and notions of dialogue between leader and nation that were not mainstream al Sa’ud fare. We hit it off well as we were both curious about each other – coming, as we did, from backgrounds that did not cross one another in Saudi Arabia. In any given discussion on that terrace, there would be at least three sides to the same issue as each of the girls argued in favour of her country’s take on whatever political dilemma was dominating the news, and it invariably centred on the Palestinian issue. We argued at length whether all Jews were the enemy or only the Zionists. Our discussions would time and again focus on the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was espousing a militant course of action for the return of Palestine by Palestinians. I learned much from my half-Palestinian friend, Amber. Amber’s youthful rebellion, sense of fun and mischief, loud laughter and devil-may-care approach to the world had her sent into solitary punishment almost as often as I was. She didn’t care too much about studying, preferring dancing, singing and boys far more. On her serious side, Amber’s dreams of being a writer and her love for Palestine stemmed from her love for Jerusalem and for her extended family there. Her grandparents were Christian Palestinians whose ancestry went back generation upon generation in a town that seemed to be a haven of peace and harmony among its residents. In Amber’s and other pre-1967 Arabs’ take on the world, their fight for Palestine was against the Zionists, never against the Arab Jews who, until then, had been firmly woven into the fabric of Levantine society, culturally and historically. 107

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The Levantine multi-religious character of Beirut was markedly demonstrated on our weekly Sunday walks through the city. Due to the strictly enforced policy controlling our weekend outings, Amber, Lisa, the twins Maria and Helena, Hana Azzouni (a giggly Palestinian-Saudi who would eventually become my sister-in-law) and Khairiyeh Rehaimi (who was as serious as Hana wasn’t) and I were the ‘usuals’ left hanging around the school grounds, as none of us particularly got along with our parentally appointed guardians. A kindly spinster teacher of Christian Assyrian descent who lived next door to the school would invite our motley crew to have tea at her house and then take in a movie at one of the brand new, lavishly furnished theatres in Hamra, the high street of Beirut. We looked forward to our walks with Miss ‘Ashoor and loved sitting in her immaculate little living room eating small cakes and sipping tea, doing our best to fight back waves of nostalgia for the living rooms of our homes. After finishing our tea, we would stroll to Hamra Street, passing through the historic old quarter of Beirut. First came the Jewish quarter, Wadi Abu Jmeel, marked by its synagogue built in the refined, proportionate architecture of the Ottoman era and its adjoining school, a compact red-tiled two-storied affair with yellow walls and red wooden shutters. It was known simply as ‘the Jewish School’ and catered for students of all denominations. The Jewish neighbourhood was one like any other with its narrow streets, small grocery stores, artisan shops and modest but charming three-and four-storey buildings dating back to the Ottoman and French colonial eras; it was also home to Assyrians, Kurds, Orthodox Christians and Sunni Beirutis. Wadi Abu Jmeel opened on to a major thoroughfare leading to the centre of Beirut where a mix of houses of worship dotted its wide sidewalks. A short distance down from the synagogue was the Greek Orthodox church covered in giant slabs of polished white stone and stained glass windows. Crowned by a towering succession of eye-catching terracotta-tiled domes of varying gradations, the church spread its impressive beauty over an entire block. In stark contrast, a few buildings away the Catholic church stood tall, narrow and sombre in its unadorned yellow limestone walls, small wrought-iron-clad windows, and pointed gothic-style arched façade. Not to be outshone by its neighbours, the Maronite church stood aloof from the rest of the churches across the thoroughfare, boasting a seamless Romanesque-style arch of stone, framing 108

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giant wooden doors that dwarfed the modern office buildings from the 1950s next door. Surrounding the Maronite church in casual array were ancient Mamluk-era mosques with their perfect spherical domes and graceful muezzin spires defining the skyline of downtown Beirut. As we ambled through Wadi Abu Jmeel on any given Sunday, a medley of religious calls for prayer would fill the air as they echoed from one muezzin spire to the next and from each church’s bells as they chimed and clanged festively up and down the musical scale. The faithful would stream into their respective houses of worship, while the less faithful tended to their mundane Sunday activities. Such cohabitation was nothing remarkable in the everyday lives of the Levantines. My mother’s best friend was a Jewish Syrian called Anna who lived next door in the heart of Damascus. I grew up listening to my mother’s stories of her escapades with Anna and how she would offer to help with small tasks for Anna’s family on the Sabbath Day. These stories always ended with how my mother’s family hid Anna and her family from the Vichy French during their occupation of Syria in 1940. In those days, the Levantines judged one another by how one abided by their time-honoured norms of decency and decorum, and not by what religion one was. This code of honour was highlighted one morning in BESG. Every morning before classes began we would troop out to the chapel on the school grounds to hear a short prayer from the principal, a large German-American evangelist, Miss Else Farr. She wasn’t the most scintillating of speakers, nor were the girls the keenest of listeners, but it was all taken in stride by the largely Muslim student body as just another routine of BESG school life … until one Monday morning when Else Farr learned another side of the Arab psyche that she had never factored in during her long stay in Lebanon. That Monday morning, Miss Else Farr walked up to the pulpit as usual, asking the students to rise. ‘I am going to give you a surprise today,’ she told us over the microphone. The girls giggled in anticipation of this unusual change of routine. Miss Else Farr opened her mouth (quite a substantial one) wide and a song celebrating the birthday of her dog, Tina, began to warble forth. A sudden deathly silence gripped the entire student body as the feeling of deep insult simultaneously hit the girls. There are red lines in Arab dignity, as Else Farr learned that unhappy Monday morning. Observing rituals of religions not their own was no problem, but singing to dogs was. 109

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Outside of that one experience, the chapel was a place of refuge for me. It was the most beautiful building on the premises. Set in the midst of an exquisitely kept garden filled with fragrant gardenias and roses, it was an oasis of loveliness and tranquillity. The chapel was the one spot where I could sit quietly with myself and read after taking permission from the sisters in charge. I often went there to rest my mind whenever I felt overwhelmed by my new confusing surroundings. A co-boarder, a Jordanian of Circassian origin, Aida Mufti, joined me one afternoon. Emboldened by one another’s presence, we decided to put down our books and explore the stage beyond the pews and the pulpit. As we lifted the heavy velvet curtains on the stage, we discovered a hidden revolving door. Timidly, we pushed it and it flew open, exposing the busy street outside of the school grounds with cars whizzing past and pedestrians of all shapes and sizes. We had just uncovered the door the priest used to enter the chapel on Sunday mornings. It took no longer than a second for us to realize that we were experiencing a golden opportunity of unsupervised liberty and unfettered freedom. ‘I’ve heard of this up-to-the-minute cafe called Automatique that makes a new kind of coffee called cappuccino. It’s just down the street; let’s go!’ Aida shouted happily above the din of the traffic. The coffee shop in question was at the end of the sloping street down from our school in the exact centre of Beirut, an airy expansive restaurant enclosed in floor-to-ceiling glass windows where everyone who sat in it could see and be seen, a favourite Lebanese activity. Espresso and cappuccino machines had just hit town and they were the latest coffee drink of the season. The café of the moment, the Automatique was a-buzz with the ultra-chic business and social world of Beirut. Sliding breathlessly behind a table in a prime position next to the glass window, we gave our order with what élan we could muster to an openly amused waiter as he took in our school uniforms and obvious youth. Turning towards the glass façade, we stared enthralled at the teeming sidewalks beyond, the hustle and bustle of a dynamic city. Our cappuccinos arrived, generous frothy affairs sprinkled with chocolate and cinnamon. My first taste of coffee of this kind will remain forever entwined in my memory with my first taste of freedom in Beirut at its finest hour. The Beirut I was seeing that day in 1965 was the Beirut my generation will always hold in our nostalgic hearts. At the crossroads to Europe, Asia and Africa, Lebanon was the glamorous money processor 110

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for Arabia’s oil fields. Three billion dollars per year in revenue were pouring into the coffers of Lebanon’s treasury from the oil industry of the Arabian hinterland’s reservoirs. Arabs and non-Arabs from everywhere flocked in droves to Lebanon’s cool green mountains and fun-filled nightclubs, arriving at the pride of the Middle East, Beirut’s state-of-the-art airport and its spanking new Middle East Airlines 707s. Very few others could afford to travel, so visiting the airport was the next best thing. Beirut International Airport became the place to take one’s children on a Sunday outing. Everyone – young and old – got their thrills from watching airplanes take off and land standing in excited anticipation on a spacious curved balcony overlooking the tarmac built expressly for that purpose. There was a top-notch restaurant for the fancier crowd … for those less affluent, the ice cream was well worth the trip. It was called Merry cream, the brand name of the machine that squeezed out fat tantalizing swirls of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. No visitor to Beirut at that point in time (or Lebanese for that matter) looking up to see such happy, waving crowds upon arrival at Beirut airport could conceive that ‘things were not always as they seemed’ in Lebanon, to paraphrase the Cheshire cat of Alice in Wonderland. But in 1965, those in power were still able to keep the discontented inhabitants carefully invisible. In spite of the major flaw in its constitution and lack of transparency in its economy, Lebanon seemed to have all the outward signs of being an icon of stability compared with its fellow Middle Eastern neighbours who were also emerging from centuries of colonialism. Egypt’s, Iraq’s and Libya’s people overthrew their kings and colonizers in popular moves for self-determination and the Cold War superpowers installed far-right dictatorships in the vacated positions, with the job of throwing leaders of such promising popular movements to rot in their rapidly increasing dungeon populations. As the British Empire breathed its final death rattle, its former colonies were quartered into sparsely populated sheikhdoms and kingdoms, while Syria went into a series of coups that seemed to have no end. I experienced these Syrian coups ad nauseum during the summers I spent with my grandparents in Damascus. A coup d’état could occur once a summer, sometimes twice. A collective groan of frustration would rise across Damascus and from us in my grandfather’s house when the all-too-familiar military jingle accompanied by a self-important voice announced a coup as it interrupted regular radio programmes. 111

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The new leader would pop up on the television screen promising eternal stability and the fight against the Zionists to the end, and a curfew would be slapped on us for three days (the time needed to mop up what remained from the previous president). To pass the time under curfew, we would play-act ‘coup d’état’ and march in housebound demonstrations led by Uncle Hisham, in his mid-teens, who had issues with my grandmother. She would come in from the garden to find placards denouncing her as we marched in circles repeating Uncle Hisham’s chants for whatever grievance he needed resolved. ‘Faltaskut Yisr Hammoud’ (‘Down with Yisr Hammoud’) and our response was ‘Taskut! Taskut! Taskut! ’ (‘Down! Down! Down!’). That aside, what really annoyed us during those coups d’état was the lack of television or radio, as these would be reserved for the numerically arranged military announcements about the progress of the coup and what was expected from the population (100 per cent support for the coup leaders). Bursts of gunfire would follow very near to our home in the neighbourhood of the much-moved-into-and-out-of presidential palace. This included the coup d’état of Hafez al Asad against Salah Jedid in 1970, the year my grandfather died. It was scarier than the others because one of my uncles was pinned down in the crossfire. Fortunately, it was over quickly and my uncle came home safely. After that coup the fun stopped both in my grandparents’ house, which lost much in Asad’s policy of land appropriation in favour of his minority Alawite group, and in Syria in general after his deadly clampdown on the majority Sunni Muslims. Lebanon on the other hand appeared immune to the contagion of dictatorships that ate up the newly emerging Arab states. It became the poster boy of Western capitalism in the Middle East with its bank secrecy laws, flexible bankers, multilingual Western-orientated entrepreneurs, elected parliament and a judiciary based on the Napoleonic code of law. Back then in the 1960s, no one was afraid of war or gave it any sobering thought. The Lebanese felt invincible. Their freedom of thought was non-existent in the Arab countries that stretched from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf, particularly where I came from. That politics was discussed so openly was in complete contrast to what I had become accustomed to in Saudi Arabia, primarily within the confines of the American community. No one ever discussed anything in Dhahran when in a group situation outside of sports, the weather, Vietnam and the current price of crude oil. More liberating than its politics was the 112

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Lebanese sense of fashion. In less than a month after arriving at BESG, I carefully relegated my sneakers and collared shirts to the back corner of my cupboard, replacing them with mod op-art mini dresses and clunky shoes. In spite of my struggle to be accepted by the Lebanese, given the choice between the insular and apolitical Saudi Arab world and the spirited, avante-garde Lebanese one, I chose Lebanon, hands down. During my stay in BESG, my sister joined me briefly but decided that it was too foreign for her and moved to England to continue her studies. We visited our relatives in Damascus often during our months together in Beirut. One November weekend, in spite of the heavy clouds and inclement weather, Fatin and I decided we had to visit our grandparents if only to get some distance from our boarding school. The taxi station was a five-minute walk from our school and we had become regular patrons. We were met with a lot of fanfare at the door of the Alamein (two flags) taxi office, and much discussion went into choosing comfortable seats that had us protectively ensconced away from possible physical contact with any males sharing our taxi. Our driver that November day was an old man, Abu Maher, who wore a tarbush, (a red fez with a black tassel), that swung vigorously to and fro when he talked – and he was a very talkative old man. As we climbed higher into the mountains that divided us from Syria, the air around us became perceptibly colder with heavy grey clouds that hung very low in the sky and seemed to be falling yet lower the higher we climbed. Nodding to the rhythm of our driver’s story, I gazed sleepily out of the car window and saw what looked like small confetti swirling around us. My eyes popped open, all sleep rubbed out. Could it be? Was it? Was it SNOW? YES! It was SNOW! My sister squeaked as though afraid her voice would stop the snowflakes. ‘Fadia, it’s snowing!’ We were transfixed in saucer-eyed wonder, our noses glued to the window pane of the car at the snow flurry, oblivious to its freezing temperature. Our driver’s tassel whirled as he turned to catch our wonder. ‘You’ve never seen snow?’ he asked in surprise. We both shook our heads mutely, still gripped by the wonder of the snowflakes swirling outside the car. The driver looked at us in kindly empathy. ‘I have to stop here to put chains on my car. Why don’t you step out for a bit?’ ‘Oh please! Yes please!’ we chorused, fumbling with the handle of the car door as we slowed to a stop by the roadside to tumble out into the freshly fallen snow, sinking into its softness with our lightly clad feet. 113

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A world of wondrous white met our unbelieving eyes … the mountain slope to the valley down below was covered in white, bright blinding white that muted sound and transformed the familiar into the strange and the hushed. Rocks and tufts of grass and dark earth, touched by the glitter of the snow fairy of our girlhood dreams, disappeared under veils of shimmering white. We stared at the imprint of our feet defiling the snowdrift’s pure surface. We dug our hands into it and brought handfuls into our mouths … realizing a longing from our childhood to taste the milky white snow. What a let-down to all our delicious Epicurean fantasies as the powdery snow reached the tips of our tongues in a melting metallic gravelly spoonful of ice water. We dug our hands again into the snowdrift, bringing up handfuls of airy snowflakes and watched them rapidly shrink into tiny compact ping-pong balls and then disappear. We had to make a snowman. And what a sorry snowman it was. Barely a foot off the ground, he had a misshapen head with gravel stones for two unevenly positioned eyes and a twig with several small branches for a mouth. Two more hairy twigs stuck out from his neck for arms. For us he was the most beautiful snowman that existed … our first snowman ever on the topmost peak of Lebanon’s anti-Lebanon mountain range on Dahr el Baider. Our driver coughed politely. We came back to reality. Our hands were raw from the freezing wind and snow, our shoes were soaked through and our cheeks were bright red from euphoria. Now we knew what snow was! With this important experience a part of our knowledge of the world, we climbed back into the car, changed girls.

* * * My induction into the Arab world in general and the Lebanese world in particular proceeded in discomfiting fits and starts as I learned about me as an Arab and me as a Muslim in a manner that embarrassingly exposed my ignorance and naïveté before my thoroughly politicized and informed Lebanese peers. One such unforgettable incident was the day that I discovered that Islam consisted of more than only the Sunni sect. A day-student was describing her hometown to me, Nabatiyeh, an ancient market town in the south of Lebanon, and mentioned that the majority of the inhabitants were Mettawlehs. She could immediately tell 114

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by the blank look on my face that Mettawleh did not register so she replaced it with ‘Shiite’, Mettawleh, it turned out, being a colloquial word for Shiite. Not a particularly sweet girl by nature, she quickly spotted sufficient confusion written across my face that said quite clearly I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about, and she and her group of friends couldn’t stop laughing wickedly at my abject ignorance. As a child in Dhahran School I had studied the Koran with a Palestinian teacher, Mrs Darwish, who had the thankless task of stemming the Americanization that was overtaking my siblings and me by having us memorize it. Of course, most of the hour was just ‘blah blah blah’ to us as she never once veered from the text and we never asked her to. She did not inform us that there was a Shiite sect because there are no Shiites in Palestine, so it didn’t seem to be a particularly important detail to educate us about – not that we would have known what she was talking about, because there were no Shiites in Damascus in my mother’s circles either, and in Saudi Arabia the Shiites were so oppressed that the majority of the non-Shiite population grew up ignorant of their existence. In Lebanon, the Shiites fared only slightly better, the difference being that the Lebanese acknowledged their existence openly. My induction into the wider world of Arab politics was becoming more and more sophisticated as the days passed. My second year at BESG, 1967, was nearing its end. We were getting ready for our finals, which were doubly difficult to prepare for as we were already in summer holiday mode. One beautiful morning in June, my co-boarders and I straggled late into class (as usual), looking forward to continuing our morning sleep during our first period of the day, Ethics. Taught by a timorous white-haired old American lady, Miss Donk, who was as shy as she was big, it was normal to see the girls grouped in gaggles while she attempted to get the day started. But this morning was different. The girls were in one big crowd around a transistor radio, clapping and cheering in response to the voice of a very frantic and already hoarse announcer over the airwaves: ‘We have vanquished the enemy! We have shown the world our prowess. We have taught the Zionists a lesson they will never forget. The count of fighter planes shot down by our brave Arab pilots has gone to fifty-six … no, it’s one hundred and fifty-seven. The Zionists are dropping like flies …’ The infectious euphoria that was whipping the girls into a hysterical frenzy, including Esther, the Jewish girl in our class, now gripped us, 115

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exceeding that of the radio announcer’s (if that could have been humanly possible). ‘We’re fighting the Zionists,’ the girls exclaimed exultantly. ‘We’re decimating them. Palestine will be ours once more.’ Miss Donk chose this moment of hysterical invincibility among the girls to assert her authority. ‘Girls, turn off that radio and sit down right this minute,’ she ordered in her quivering falsetto voice. Her timing could not have been more unfortunate. The girls stopped mid-cheer and turned silently in her direction. What they saw was not a flushed old lady trying to get her class in order. They saw the ENEMY. They rose slowly to their feet and menacingly advanced towards her. ‘You Americans are responsible for our suffering. You support the Zionists. You hate us. We will show you what we will do to ALL the Americans in this country,’ they shouted, as they began threateningly to crowd around Miss Donk. Our poor, terrified teacher did not wait to hear any more. She ran out of the classroom panicstricken, sobbing loudly, never to be seen in the area again. Had she waited around for just five more days, she would have seen another scenario altogether. She would have witnessed the Arab world reeling in disbelief as its triumphant dreams of might and invincibility came crashing to the ground in their abysmal defeat by the Zionist war machine and all-out American support in what came to be humiliatingly known as the Six Day War. At the first lull in the ongoing hostilities of the war, schools were closed, finals were cancelled, and we were told to pack our bags and leave for our respective homes. But before leaving, my friends and I begged permission to visit Amber, who had not appeared at school since the outbreak of the war. She had moved out of the boarding school that year. We walked into Amber’s home and it was a house in mourning. Her mother was dressed in black, the normally impeccable apartment was in complete disarray and suitcases were ready by the door. They met us with tears streaming down their faces. ‘What has happened to our home in Jerusalem?’ Amber cried. ‘Do we still have one? My grandfather’s dead, Fadia, he couldn’t handle it. They’ve taken his home. It’s been in our family forever …’ And she broke down in loud wails and sobs. The Israelis were emptying Jerusalem brutally and systematically of all its Arab inhabitants and her beloved grandfather was now dead from a heart attack after being turned out of his ancestral home. I will forever remember her mother’s grim, pain-wracked face as she endured 116

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the bleakest moment of her life. Amber would never regain her teenage light-heartedness. The following day, all of us were shipped off on chartered flights from an airport in complete pandemonium, as no one yet knew what air battles were raging in the Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian air space. The fallout of the 1967 War came soon enough. It brought in the darkest hour to the Arab world since the Arab–Israeli war of 1948. What was most painful of all was that Gamal Abdel Nasser had not calculated that this war would happen; he had merely been bluffing in a game of brinkmanship with the Zionist entity. In May 1967, riding high on the adulation of the ordinary Arab people and in a show of bravado of Arab might, Nasser had abruptly dismissed a UN peacekeeping force that kept the Straits of Tiran of Egypt open for the oil tankers and Israeli shipping to the West. Less than two weeks later and with no attendant sabre-rattling, Israel attacked Syria, Egypt and Jordan in a US-supported blitzkrieg. Six days later, the holy city of Jerusalem, the fertile, cosmopolitan and historically rich West Bank of Jordan, the oil-rich Sinai of Egypt and the water-rich and highly strategic Golan Heights of Syria – an area three times the size of Occupied Palestine of 1948 – were captured by the Zionists, who made it no secret that these territories were theirs to keep. Gamal Abdel Nasser lost the war and, more importantly, he lost his credibility with the Arab populace. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat, one important change came about for Arab citizenry. No longer could the Arab rulers control their populations by soothing them with the magic balm of the Arabic word that rose like a mighty but imaginary sword as it fought the Zionist occupation of Palestine. The humiliating defeat of the Arabs in 1967 was a reality check for the Palestinians now into their second generation of refugees – a wake-up call to take up the armed struggle and regain Palestine with their own men. The loss of so much territory in so little time was more than the Arab world could bear. The reaction on the streets of the Arab cities was growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause and wide support for the fedayeens. In Lebanon it let loose the passions not only of 150,000 Palestinian refugees crammed into the camps but of the Pan-Arabs, young and old, in support of the fedayeens. The Palestinian guerrilla movement and the mass Arab move to support it posed a threat to the Arab despots who had reached their seats of power through subservience to the superpowers of the Cold War. The 117

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Achilles’ heel of these Arab potentates, with their love of power that exceeded their love for their fellow Arabs, was now plainly exposed. It became clear to all that the tears shed for Palestine were but crocodile tears, and a growing divide grew between the governors and the governed, particularly in Lebanon. What the 1967 War did to our generation was demarcate our lives as Arabs into black and white: Arabs versus Zionists. Those supporting the Palestinian cause were friends; those supporting the Zionists were the enemy. The Palestinian right of return became tied to the Arab honour and dignity that was now in tatters. Dejection and despair gripped the Arab world as the harsh iron fists of its dictators, purportedly secular rulers, became even more absolute, needing only the accusation of ‘consorting with the enemy’ to rid themselves of any opposition. The beautiful dream of secular rule that had moved generations of Arabs to aspire to a united Arab world was hideously disfigured as secular rule morphed into ruthless demagoguery. Meanwhile, the democracies of the West looked discreetly away as puppet rulers provided easy access to the desert statelets’ oil fields at the cost of the livelihoods and dreams of generation upon generation of Arab citizens held hostage under their rule. I regarded my acclimatization as an Arab to be complete the day I was invited to spend an afternoon with my American friends attending the American Community School (ACS) of Beirut (exclusively open to Americans). As I stepped into the room full of young American teenagers, I felt surprisingly overwhelmed by the same oddness I had felt on entering BESG that September morning in 1965, seemingly so long ago. That feeling of disaffection was now transferred to the crowd in ACS. Sprawled in cliques on sofas in the living room and standing around in groups in the corridor, they squealed and laughed loudly and spoke to one another across the room in self-consciously staged soundbites. I felt worlds apart from these young Americans. A flashback to my first day of first grade came vividly to mind with its accompanying feeling of alienation. I had come full circle, returning to the point I had started from. The Arab–Israeli conflict didn’t mean much to these teenagers and none had more than a passing interest in the countries they were living in, and in which their parents worked, whether it was Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia or Iran. I could no longer relate to their general topics of interest of sports and dances. An overwhelming 118

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desire to return to BESG and sit on our tiny straw stools with my new friends on the other side of the teachers’ toilets tugged at my heart. I now felt at one with my new BESG friends who shared the same destiny as mine. Graduation day from BESG finally arrived on 16 June 1968. I opened my eyes blissfully that morning with the liberating thought that today would be the last day I would ever have to answer to Miss Jureidini. My three long years at the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls had finally come to an end. Our day began joyfully as we laid out our beautiful white dresses that were the customary graduating outfits for high school girls. When it was time for the ceremony, we settled down in our chairs convinced that the best part of the day was now behind us and resigned ourselves to two long hours of empty words by the authorities of BESG. After the perfunctory ceremonial steps of the national anthem, word from the principal and a prayer from the evangelical priest, our guest speaker was introduced. A gasp of wonder escaped from the audience as a tall, handsome Shiite sheikh in black flowing robes and a black turban pushed back rakishly to expose a charming forelock, approached the podium in big confident strides. Waves of whispers sotto voce rippled up and down the rows of parents, asking one another incredulously ‘Who is he?’ and even more urgently, ‘A Shiite sheikh at the Evangelical school?’ Giggles emanated from our section seated behind the podium at this novel choice of speaker. Upon reaching the speaker’s stand, the cleric formally greeted the parents and teachers, and then stunned the audience even more as he slowly turned his back on them and faced us. His piercing green eyes mesmerized us into a rapt, respectful hush. Our high school graduation speaker was none other than the Imam Moussa al Sadr, an Irani Shiite cleric of Lebanese descent, mufti of Tyre, the future champion and icon of the militant Lebanese Shiite movement who would be the first in modern Lebanese history to put a face and a voice to the as yet invisible Shiites. This man, with his larger-than-life persona, instantly turned our mundane graduation ceremony into a singularly unique one. He addressed us as the ‘ummahat al sighar’ (young mothers) who would be the power behind future Arab patriots. At our age motherhood was not something immediate, but the manner in which he spoke his simple words of guidance made the contents special. As he had promised, his speech was brief but for those of us who 119

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had become captivated by the expressive rise and fall of his mellifluous voice, it was all too brief. Very few of us had any notion who this blackturbaned sheikh with the incredible eyes was before he spoke, but none of us forgot him after he spoke. On this particular graduation day, BESG seemed to have done something close to revolutionary for the first time in its conservative history. Why would a school with such an openly pro-West outlook with respect to education and politics choose someone like Imam Moussa al Sadr to be the guest speaker in 1968? The answer would become apparent with time and it would keep BESG true to its conservative mould. The answer was tied in with the Arab–Israeli conflict and the Cold War. In the early days of the Palestinian resistance, before the formal inauguration of the PLO under Yasser Arafat in 1964, the Shiite Lebanese in the south warmly welcomed, protected and fought with the PLO commandos. Angered by the protection the southern villagers provided for the Palestinian commandos, the Zionists bombed Lebanese territory with air and mortar attacks that destroyed homes, harvests and livestock; they also kidnapped suspected Lebanese pro-Palestinian guerrilla sympathizers (many of whom are still incarcerated in Israeli prisons to date) as a collective punishment, thinking this would stir the Lebanese against the Palestinian resistance movement. Such aggression by the Israelis did stir the Lebanese villagers into action, but not in the direction the Zionists wanted. Instead, the enraged villages demanded air raid shelters, trenches and arms from their government to defend themselves from the enemy. The government’s response was to send armoured personnel, forcibly evacuate the inhabitants under the threat of Zionist attacks, then studiously ignore what damage befell their livelihoods after the attacks occurred, rendering the Shiites of the south as invisible. Displaced and forsaken, many villagers had no choice but to abandon their destroyed villages and become Lebanese refugees alongside the Palestinian refugees and Lebanese poor in Beirut’s ever-expanding misery belt. Small Communist parties established in Lebanon from the 1940s began to fill the vacuum of the non-existent government in the south with humanitarian needs and sympathetic politics, gaining strength among the southern Lebanese villagers (a mixture of Shiites, Maronites and Druze) who became increasingly drawn to the nascent left-wing political movement. Bolstered by Communist support, villagers began to refuse to vacate their villages under threat from Israel in unprecedented 120

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open acts of civil disobedience that made it clear that the Communist Party was making headway among the southern villagers. A gathering of such frustrated and angry villagers in Bint Jbeil, the southernmost town bordering Israel, brought Imam Moussa al Sadr to their side. He addressed them as the ‘Disinherited of the Earth’, a stirring phrase that hit a raw nerve in the Shiite villagers, answering their anguished cries with the open challenge to those most hated by the Shiite villagers: the Shiite feudal landlords. Imam Moussa al Sadr called for the creation of Lebanese resistance to prevent the loss of Lebanon as Palestine had been lost. By attaching the Palestinian question to the Shiites’ civil demands, he brought on board those who had issues with the Maronite Establishment alongside the Lebanese Shiites, further broadening his base of supporters. With his charisma, commanding physique and rousing oratory, Imam al Sadr won their hearts and allegiance and, most importantly, turned them away from the Communist Party. A nationwide strike called by Imam Sadr to ‘make the South a part of Lebanon’ paralysed the country, with demonstrators shouting, ‘We want arms.’ When they began to rally around him in their tens of thousands, and militant groupings began to form, this new face and voice of Lebanese Shiites, leaning a great deal to the right, began to be heard by the very hard of hearing – the Maronite Establishment. The government decided to woo Imam Moussa al Sadr – hence his appearance at our graduation ceremony.

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6 Come with me to Lebanon '( y summer vacation of 1970 was confirmed as ended when my flight began to circle for its descent into Beirut International Airport. Down below, Beirut was blocked from view under a thick black pall of smoke that I knew came from burning tyres, the traditional manner of expressing rage in the Levant. I disembarked and climbed into a taxi with a driver dressed in black in mourning for the Egyptian president. As he drove me towards my university in Ras Beirut, he tearfully expressed his personal grief over the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser. No Arab leader has ever had such adulation. We passed through streets that were empty of traffic but full of angry men in black armed with Kalashnikovs that they fired into the air in wild bursts of frustration as they thrashed about in rudderless confusion. My taxi driver fell silent as he concentrated on weaving in and out of alleys to avoid the acrid smoke from the fiercely burning bonfires – a presage of what awaited Beirut and Lebanon five years in the future when the fury of such young men could no longer be contained. Back in 1970, the anger on the streets seemed only an isolated outpouring of grief by politically and economically frustrated young men. My college lay in the part of the capital known as Ras Beirut (the head of Beirut). Its name was derived from the rocky promontory on which it lies that juts out into the Mediterranean Sea. Lebanon’s mountains encircle the promontory in a protective backdrop, creating an exceptionally beautiful panorama, a sweeping vista with incredible

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sunsets and a built-in weather forecast system. The only downside of this wide open vista is the fate of pelicans that are genetically wired to fly in this stretch of geography on their annual migrations from north to south and back again. Each year, their razor-sharp V-formations glide gracefully into the azure Lebanese skies, heralding autumn and spring. As they dip closer to the temptations of the Mediterranean Sea’s fish, they inevitably turn into target practice for trigger-happy urban hunters. Widely acclaimed as the hippest part of the capital and the whole of the Middle East, Ras Beirut was unique. Two major universities anchored it at both ends: Beirut College for Women (BCW) at one end and American University of Beirut (AUB) at the other. With their international academic populations, these two universities gave Ras Beirut a particular élan, a cosmopolitan fusion of Eastern and Western thought and culture. BCW shared many activities with AUB – including the library, student lounges, party halls, and male students – pretty much erasing the whole idea behind its ‘all girls’ exclusivity. (Many parents were mercifully kept in the dark.) AUB and BCW had a mixture of Arab and international students who brought their politics with them. Each nationality had an active club (Turkish, Greek, Sudanese, Egyptian, Jordanian, Palestinian, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Cypriot and Armenian, to name a few) and all had a go against their traditional enemies on campus at one point or another (for example, the Armenians versus the Turks, and the Phalanges Lebanese versus the Palestinians). The National Day of each country was an unabashed display of patriotism and partisan politics. This was the early seventies and students ruled. Many of the student leaders went on to become leaders of opposition parties in their own countries, having honed the fine art of vocal (and otherwise) combat on AUB’s grounds. Such a liberal multinational learning environment influenced the Arab students of AUB and BCW, giving rise to a distinct subculture and a manner of interaction that set them apart from other university graduates in the Arab world. Top co-ed preparatory private schools, teaching in Arabic, English and French, were scattered throughout this part of the city along with an Italian school and a German one. These schools had sprung up during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the foreign missions which had jostled for a foothold in this valuable junction between East and West, with a new method of colonization via education. 124

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The education was excellent save for its effect on the Lebanese identity. As no serious unified civics or history programme or Arabic language instruction was imposed by the Ministry of Education on the private sector, private schools taught history and literature through the eyes and language of the Western colonizer that skimmed vaguely over the Lebanese–Arab connections. This further increased the on-going confusion amongst the Lebanese over Lebanon’s identity. Before becoming the Street of all Streets in the Arab world, Ras Beirut’s high street Hamra was filled largely with red sand, giant cacti and herds of goats that wandered past small grocery shops, sandwich stalls and Nouveautees (catch-all shops selling women’s, men’s and children’s wear and underwear, gift items and cosmetics). As Ras Beirut became more cosmopolitan, these small shops were replaced by ultra-fashionable boutiques and sidewalk cafes – save for one particular grocery store off Hamra Street called Smith’s where Ras Beirut housewives, tourists, spies, professors, students and journalists have been its regulars for years. It is owned by the quintessential Lebanese, Mr Patrick Smith, who has nothing Arab in his lineage but grew up in Beirut. His father was English and his mother was Armenian. Nevertheless he and his sons, Nael and Tareq (close friends and classmates of my children who accepted the proper pronunciation of their last name as ‘Smiss’ – the Arab way of pronouncing the ‘th’ sound), have turned the store into one of the landmarks of Ras Beirut. Smith’s can be seen as a reflection of Ras Beirut, maybe even of Lebanon itself: so tiny and unassuming on the outside, but once one enters its doors, one becomes an involuntary but integral part of a refined mixture of humanity and alluring Epicurean delights from both East and West. Hamra’s cafes brimmed with bon vivants, wine, wit and laughter. The academic, political and social register of Lebanon gathered in these places where political discourse and gossip flew from one table to the next, to reappear in a column of one of Beirut’s trilingual daily newspapers. Bookstores owned by Palestinian Christians overflowed with controversy and academia. It was from such an eclectic milieu of thinkers and poets that most of the books read by the Arab world were born. These books with random titles such as Ibrahim Salameh’s Funeral of a Dog were published and printed under the protection of the only Arab government that allowed freedom of the press. Such freedom of thought turned Lebanon into a safe haven for those periodically out of favour with their 125

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political regimes in adjacent Arab states. And as each tiny oil rich and almost population-free sheikhdom gained a seat in the United Nations, it turned to these creative Lebanese minds for the necessary paraphernalia of a nation of national anthem and flag. The most popular meeting place to eat and talk was Feisal, across the street from AUB. It was a home from home for students, professors and journalists that served a daily lunch their mothers would cook. Its two head waiters – Amin (a large pleasant-faced maitre) and Anwar (as serious as Amin wasn’t) – had divided the restaurant into zones of influence. If no seat was available for an Amin adherent, he or she preferred to starve rather than be caught eating under Anwar’s hegemony. As for the other cafes dotting Hamra Street, there was the Horseshoe (due to its shape), dark and brooding like the poets and philosophers it attracted, and the Modca (surviving the longest but succumbing to the developers wrecking ball in 2003), which was the glitziest and most modern of the sidewalk cafés in which politicians, Communists and exiled Arab thinkers spent most of their waking hours.

* * * My taxi approached the uphill climb to my dormitory, Nicol Hall, on BCW’s upper campus, bringing me closer to my final destination and to seeing Adnan. My parents’ concerns of keeping me away from Lebanese men had been thwarted after I met Adnan while walking late one afternoon in the AUB area with my close girlfriend from boarding school, Hana Azzouni. Engrossed in deep conversation we had walked past Adnan while he was having his shoes polished in the traditional Levantine way by a shoe shiner. Two hands had surreptitiously stretched out behind us to tug gently on our shirt collars, stopping us (and our hearts momentarily) in our steps. ‘Adnan!’ Hana had smiled in relief. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.’ ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ he smiled, looking straight at me. I was hooked from that look. At the giant wrought iron gate of BCW, the doormen greeted me with excess cheer as they opened the gates to allow the taxi to drive through. I soon found out why they had been so cheerful. Waiting for me at the door of my dormitory was Adnan with a big welcoming grin and a dozen fragrant pearly white zambaqs, my favourite flowers. Persuasive, 126

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witty, impulsive, eloquent and fiercely patriotic, Adnan was undoubtedly Mediterranean in both looks and demeanour. His wavy brown hair, large, expressive hazel-green eyes and playful smile gave him a light-hearted air that magnetically drew random strangers to strike up conversations with him. As I drew closer, Dhahran and Saudi Arabia were relegated to a distant slot of space and time far, far away. Our first date had been to his hometown, Sidon, lyrically known as the ‘Bride of the South’. We drove there late one afternoon along the meandering southern coastal road accompanied by the powder blue of the Mediterranean Sea and its sky. The heady, uplifting fragrance of orange blossoms heralded our entrance into Sidon as citrus orchards in their first flush of spring appeared on both sides of the road, escorting us into town. But as we drove further, the colourful citrus groves were unexpectedly replaced by drab, generic grey buildings, apartments built in haste and economy to accommodate a rapidly growing population. Adnan quickly assured me this was not yet Sidon … just the outskirts of an expanding town. Sure enough, after he swung on to a palm-treelined avenue that ran along the coast, a visual feast materialized. The Mediterranean Sea came into view once more, lapping softly against the rickety sidewalk railings to our right. To our left, venerable Ottoman-era houses in white stone lined the waterfront, flanked by grand buildings from the French mandate era, long past their prime yet still elegant with finely carved balustrades and small compact balconies enclosed by intricate wrought iron. Mosques from the early Islamic empires that spoke of a long and continuing history stood at the ancient gate of old Sidon. Beyond the Lower Gate (as the Sidonians referred to it), Roman archways were visible, framing cobbled streets and winding alleys that led to houses of wood which seemed to lean on one another for support. The houses – replicas of which I had seen in Medina al Munnawarah with their trellised wooden musharrabiyeh that protected the women of the house from the public eye – encircled a piazza with a marble fountain, once refreshing in its cool gush of water but now spouting a small sad trickle. Fishermen’s cafés lined the sidewalk along the water’s edge filled with a hodgepodge of old and young men laughing and playing cards, drinking tea or gazing pensively out to sea puffing at their narghilas (water pipes). Facing them was the fisherman’s harbour, which we smelled before we saw. Fish fresh from the sea were displayed on roughly built wooden stands and the usual cheerful repartee of haggling filled the air. Behind the 127

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fish market I saw the brightly coloured fishing boats of Sidon, traditionally handed down from father to son through generation upon generation. Some were going out to sea, some coming in to shore, while others were in dry dock on the gravelly shore for waterproofing and a new paint job. Any fishermen not involved in these activities sat on the beach near their boats repairing fishing nets spread in a wide circle, anchored by their toes. This was the heart of Sidon, and these fishermen were the true Sidonians. As Adnan greeted the men, I noticed an egalitarian banter that transcended the usual social barricades between the haves and the have-nots in Beirut. ‘This is Sidon,’ was Adnan’s simple response to my comment. ‘These men have known me since I was born and their fathers and grandfathers have known mine from birth … and so it goes back for centuries. The majority of these fishermen you see here have been Sidonians far longer than they have been Lebanese and they are proud to be Sidonians. Maybe a number of the people that you see are illiterate but you won’t find a single Sidonian among them who doesn’t know Sidon’s ancient history, geography and genealogy by heart. It’s not surprising that Sidon has been mentioned in the Bible as full of fat and contented men.’ Nodding towards the well-endowed fishermen, he added dryly, ‘Some things never change.’ On a more serious note, Adnan continued: ‘Sidonians are impatient with deceit. Only those who have been accepted as truthful by the Sidonian community survive … and these men never forget. Another ingrained Sidonian quality is their lively and fearless curiosity.’ Again he nodded at the fishermen engaged in animated conversation at the top of their lungs across the table from one another. ‘In the first World War, the British navy besieged the coastal towns belonging to the Ottoman Empire and Sidon was bombarded for several days in a row. Everybody in Sidon who had a roof or a neighbour who had a roof ran up there to watch the bombardment. The British commander marched into Sidon in a huff and demanded to meet with the mufti (my great uncle) to inform him that in all his combat years he had never seen such foolhardy cheek in the face of danger and formally requested that everyone clear out from the rooftops so they wouldn’t get killed. The Sidonians accepted evacuating their rooftops but not their city. The notables of the city refused to pull out to the hills for security, and only the children and old people were relocated to the surrounding villages in the hills. Sidon has been burned down seven times by its own people, who burned 128

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with it rather than be captured. That’s how much we Sidonians love our city.’ Adnan had just finished this statement when he suddenly raised both arms in greeting to a heavy-set white-haired man who got up from his seat among a group of fishermen gathered around a table drinking tea. ‘Abu Mustafa,’ Adnan called out happily, ‘it’s so good to see you.’ Abu Mustafa hugged Adnan and shook my hand energetically, looking to Adnan for an introduction. ‘I’m going to let you figure out where my friend comes from. Fadia, I’d like you to meet the most important personality in all of Sidon, Mr Ma’arouf Saad. Abu Mustafa, this is Fadia Basrawi.’ Guessing where any Lebanese comes from is a favourite pastime among them and a necessary detail before any conversation of consequence can take place. ‘That’s easy,’ Ma’arouf Saad answered in his rich baritone voice. ‘She’s obviously not Lebanese from her demeanour.’ [I hadn’t said a word other than a polite greeting.] ‘Her name puts her as a Palestinian.’ ‘Well, what if I tell you that she’s from Saudi Arabia?’ Adnan interposed laughingly. Ma’arouf Saad took a long look at me and replied, ‘Okay but she’s mixed. She’s too white to be a pure Saudi, am I right?’ ‘Yes, my mother’s Syrian,’ I answered. ‘All the better,’ he chuckled heartily. ‘So you’re a mutt like me; my mother’s Egyptian. Look, my dear,’ he patted me paternally, ‘the best minds come from mixed breeds. Mutts survive the harshest conditions and the same applies to humans.’ ‘Keep her’ were his parting words to Adnan as he shook hands with us, giving him a thumbs-up sign. ‘And remember,’ he winked at me playfully, ‘mutts rule!’ ‘You’ve just met our mayor – the most compassionate, generous and patriotic man in Sidon’, was Adnan’s heartfelt reply to my query about Ma’arouf Saad’s identity. ‘He’s dedicated his life to helping the Sidonian poor and the Palestinian refugees, and not just for politics and glory. Every penny that goes into his pocket is spent lobbying for their rights. The Popular Nasserite Organization he has established is probably the only genuinely democratic political party in this country. He has the credentials to vouch for his genuine patriotism for the Arab cause,’ Adnan puffed with pride. ‘Sidon is the first city in Lebanon to elect to Parliament, a man from the rank and file. Ma’arouf Saad was a policeman and a gym teacher, a wrestler as you may have noticed from his physique. Palestine is his rallying cry; he fought for it in 1948. One of his greatest achievements is undermining the power of the feudal families of the South that sleep in the same bed as the Maronite Establishment.’ 129

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We crossed the street from the fishermen’s cafés to our destination, Sidon’s only restaurant of repute known as the Istirahah or Place of Rest. It was built of large yellow slabs of stone to blend harmoniously with Sidon’s Crusader fortress, the Qala’a (Citadel), a short distance away, surrounded by sea and accessible only by its original drawbridge permanently lowered for visitors. It was built on the remnants of a Phoenician lookout and was remarkably intact, particularly its lookout perches which have witnessed many a conqueror’s advance from sea and many a defender’s attempt to repel him. We were ushered to a table in the Istirahah so close to the water’s edge that each wave seemed to stretch out to touch us, impishly spraying Adnan and myself with a fine mist of salty sea. Looking out on to the view, I could trace the winding southern coastal road we had just taken. As the evening sky grew darker, the steady line of traffic transformed the coastal road into an uninterrupted ribbon of light. The sun, now a ball of deep orange, was melting languidly into water as smooth as glass. Sprays of villages nestling in the velvety black folds of the undulating Chouf hills, winked and shone like diamonds. How scenic Lebanon was and how peaceful it looked as it shimmered in the clear night air. However, the feeling of harmony and tranquility that I was enjoying came to an abrupt end as our conversation moved on to the political discord that was consuming Lebanon. Adnan turned almost immediately to the Palestinian issue and the fedayeens – the militant arm of the Palestinian refugees on Lebanese soil, newly accredited by the 1969 Cairo Accord. Violently averse to bloodshed, I was of the opinion that the negotiating table was preferable to armed resistance. Adnan disagreed. A sour note had crept into our conversation. Stretches of silence became uncomfortably long, particularly on our drive back to Beirut. ‘Oh well,’ I thought to myself as I stepped into my dorm room, ‘that’s that.’ But I was wrong: personal intrigue and chemistry won out over our political discord and ‘that was’ definitely not ‘that’. Not one to pass up the chance to support his argument, Adnan invited me the following morning to accompany him to the Ain El Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in Sidon to visit one of Fatah’s military commanders, a former schoolmate. ‘Ain el Hilweh is as influential in Sidonian society as its fishermen and they’re allies’ was how he described the camp. 130

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As I followed Adnan into the camp that afternoon, I felt out of my league. It was with plenty of trepidation that I had accepted an invitation to go with Adnan to the camp, not understanding Arabic well being the major sticking point. Adnan would not take ‘no’ for an answer; I had to see the facts on the ground before I shaped my opinions. He had a point, but he had also not warned me of the human misery I was about to see, choosing for once to have me see for myself. We picked our way through narrow dirt and rock-strewn alleys between rows of ‘houses’ composed of breeze-blocks, plastic-covered spaces for windows and corrugated-iron rooftops. Notwithstanding the abject poverty indicated by these houses, and as is typical of all homes on the Mediterranean, clothes-lines with sparkling white laundry and children’s garments criss-crossed whatever space was not taken up by riots of jasmine, roses, gardenias and sweet-smelling carnations planted in recycled tins, previously used for milk and cooking oil. Fat luscious grapes hung from trellises of vines that began at the entrance of one home and continued down the alley on through neighbours’ houses. Astonishingly, there was space for a small vegetable patch adjacent to every home, providing the staples of the Levantine diet – an assortment of mint leaves, parsley, coriander, basil, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, green beans, garlic and spring onions. Eating is a very serious activity for the Arabs, especially for those from the Fertile Crescent, no matter how poor. Music blared from all directions from diverse radio stations, each competing in volume to drown out the others. Running around in this jumble of humanity living as best they could under such dire conditions, were children of all ages doing what children do – eating, arguing and carrying whatever makeshift toys they could salvage (be they dolls’ heads or a single wheel of a bicycle). Adnan stopped before a house that looked like all the rest but was guarded by armed young men wearing the trademark kaffiyeh around their shoulders. They shook Adnan’s hands warmly and ushered us in with a lot of fanfare. Adnan was obviously among friends. They were, in fact, childhood friends, as the Fatah commander had attended the same school courtesy of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for the Palestinian Refugee (UNRWA) that provided scholarships to the Palestinians of the refugee camps. The person we were there to see jumped up from his desk and hugged Adnan. ‘This is Fadia Basrawi,’ Adnan introduced me. ‘She’s a Saudi Arab who lives in the American oil 131

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town of Dhahran and is interested to know more about your armed struggle for Palestine.’ I listened to the plight of the Palestinian refugees from the young Fatah commander’s perspective. ‘Whichever way you look at our situation,’ he said, ‘we are the victims. The squalour you are seeing here is not how these people used to live in their homeland. Granted they were poor, but they lived in historically well-established villages that go back many centuries with land that was handed down from father to son. We are asked to sit in these camps and wait and wait and wait. We saw the result of waiting in 1967. No one will help the Palestinians except the Palestinians themselves. Our young men are strong, healthy and filled with the desire to regain the identity and self-respect that we have been robbed of, and death is nothing compared to the life we’re living. We are not leftists or rightists or Communists, just hard-working Palestinians who have lost their land and dignity. In these camps there is no light at the end of the tunnel. In our armed struggle, there is.’

* * * A fascinating new window into Lebanon’s political scene opened for me through my introduction to the staff of the AnNahar newspaper. Adnan was a journalist for the widely read AnNahar while he worked on his MBA in AUB and gave lectures on labour rights and business at the Lebanese University. After we began to go out together on a regular basis, many of our dates ended at the AnNahar offices where Adnan was on first-name terms with everyone, beginning on the first floor where the telephone operators worked, up to the sixth floor where the publisher of the newspaper, an icon of the Lebanese intelligentsia, Ghassan Tueni, had his offices. The AnNahar experience was another university education to me with its window on to every aspect of Lebanese life. Its prime mover and shaker was Michel Abu Jawdeh, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, unsurpassed among the now nearly extinct breed of influential opinion-editorial Arab journalists. Michel’s acerbic column was anticipated every morning and discussed widely throughout the Arab world. Everyone who cared about the events of the day had to know what Michel thought. He had taken a strong liking to Adnan, appreciating his playful curiosity in people, and the door to his office was always held wide open for our 132

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visits. There, in his office, we would spend long fascinating soirées as every Arab and non-Arab who was anyone or wanted to be someone in the Arab world would stream in to thrash over matters of the moment, giving Michel grist for his column and the AnNahar cartoonist, Pierre Sadiq, inspiration for his statement on the politician of the day. Michel’s regular visitors were men like Yasser Arafat, Kamal Nasser Fatah’s (the urbane spokesman for Fatah), the worldly journalist Eric Rouleau, all of Lebanon’s future warlords including Kamal Jumblatt, his son Walid Jumblatt (who was interning at the AnNahar printing quarters in the basement), Camille Chamoun and his sons Dory and Danny, Pierre Gemayel and his sons Amin and Bashir, the Edde clan including Pierre and Raymond … the list went on and on. All of these men needed Michel’s good graces far more than he needed theirs. In that period of Beirut’s history, the written word had far-reaching clout and very few minds could rise to match his dry wit and keen insight into Lebanese politics and politicians. And Michel Abu Jawdeh’s office was where we were heading after my arrival from Dhahran. I had speedily dumped my luggage in my room and jumped into Adnan’s miniature Honda, a stark innovation from the giant wing-tipped gasoline-guzzling American cars of the sixties. We drove up to AnNahar’s headquarters, a large square featureless cement block building dating to the fifties. As we walked towards Michel Abu Jawdeh’s office, a colleague of Adnan’s, Farid Sa’ab, popped out of his office door with dramatic flourish for a quick exchange of stanzas for Qatar’s national anthem. Qatar’s anthem was an ongoing work in progress between them. Michel greeted us at the door to his office with a wide welcoming grin that curved slightly down at the edges with a rakish, cynical touch. ‘Ahlan wa sahlan with our Saudi friend. So any signs of revolution yet?’ he asked me, half jokingly. Michel had absolutely no faith in the governing abilities of any of the desert statelets that had cropped up in the Arabian Desert, leaving the biggest portion of his scorn for Saudi Arabia. A politician, Pierre Edde, was already seated in Michel’s office, and as we took a seat, Michel began his free-association conversation with Adnan and me: ‘I was just discussing with my dear friend Pierre here how transforming money can be with respect to our people. Take, for example, humour. Have you noticed how hilarious any joke coming from the mouth of a rich man is to its listeners? And it’s rarely funny. But for the poor man who has nothing in his pocket, his 133

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jokes will always fall flat, no matter how witty. Tsk … tsk … tsk. The same you’ll agree applies to fashion. You have a politician who turns up in grease-spotted ties like Mr Pierre Edde here,’ and he motioned to the startled gentleman sitting next to us, ‘and sycophants will ooh and aah about the grease spots on his tie and it’ll become all the rage. While Mr “Nobody” there [who had mercifully just left the room] spends his salary on the latest trend and no one cares … Ah, the magic wand of social climbing in our zuama- [power-wielding and rich heads of confessional communities in Lebanese society] controlled politics.’ Everyone was welcome to visit Michel Abu Jawdeh for a first time, but any subsequent visits were strictly filtered by him. Michel did not suffer fools lightly. If such a perceived fool made the unfortunate mistake of a repeat visit, Michel, ever the gentleman, would hop out from behind his desk and enthusiastically greet the person while firmly escorting him by the arm into the elevator with a ‘so lovely of you to pass by; you shouldn’t have troubled yourself ’, then reach into the elevator and press the ground floor button. Thankfully, we never had anything but kind words on our entrance. In 1970 Lebanon was a delightful place to be young and in love. Many of our evenings were spent carousing along the long coastal highway that hugged both the Mediterranean coast and Lebanon, where the gentle hills of the south remained visible from the northern coastal road and the majestic peaks of Mount Lebanon remained visible from the southern coastal road. Hundreds of romantic restaurants dotted the country – whether in the cool pine-laden breeze of the mountains in Brumanna and Aley, where the Middle East gathered during its eventful summers, or along the seashore on the rocky beach of the northern coastal road, where we wined and dined, walked and talked, and I learned to skip pebbles across the water. Feisal’s remained our favourite hangout under the hegemony of Amin, who brought us what we wanted without waiting for our order, then leaned on our table for brief gossip sessions full of small witty asides, invariably about his rival, Anwar. My first meeting with Adnan’s parents was totally impromptu: one Sunday morning Adnan hijacked my friends and I and took us to Sidon! Hana, Fatin and I were walking into the neighbourhood bakery for a Lebanese breakfast of manakeesh (thyme and olive oil on pitta bread) when we suddenly heard Adnan calling us. He had ‘happened’ to be driving in circles around our dormitory in BCW and had spotted us. 134

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As soon as he caught our attention, he stopped in the middle of the road, refusing to budge. Traffic piled up noisily until we agreed to join him for a short drive. So we got in, feeling awkward in our casual weekend dress, with Hana in her bedroom slippers. In those days, casual clothes were worn only at home, never in public (the bakery was just around the corner from our rooms). Adnan started the car and sped off in the opposite direction of our dorms. Our hearts sank when he told us we were on our way to Sidon to meet his mother. ‘She’ll prepare a breakfast like you’ve never seen’ was his cheerful answer to our panicky pleas to return us to our bakery. Adnan’s mother, Munira Fawaz, known by her eldest son’s name as Im Bashar, could be heard welcoming her son before opening the front door, having recognized his special ring. She didn’t miss a beat on seeing him surrounded by three very casually dressed girls that she was meeting for the first time. ‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ she greeted us warmly. ‘Welcome, welcome, come in, come in.’ Im Bashar gave an aura of being much larger than her physique suggested with her strong features, broad capable shoulders and thick grey hair tied back in a casual bun. She ushered us into the living room, seated us and gazed at us with large chocolatebrown eyes that missed nothing. Those eyes now lit on me: ‘And, are you Adnan’s colleague?’ As I stammered and stuttered in response, she cast a sidelong glance at Adnan and winked. She had immediately picked out the girl her son had wanted her to meet. With an infectious laugh that shook her belly, she led us to the dining room where she prepared a breakfast fit for a king. And that was vintage Im Bashar … generous, playful, disarming, witty, candid and immeasurably sharp. Sunday was the day that Adnan never scheduled anything except seeing his mother, and his mother, of course, would never have had it any other way … a custom we would carry on whenever possible for the rest of Im Bashar’s life. We were winding up our visit with a final cup of coffee when Adnan’s father walked into the living room, a serene, patrician, silver-haired gentleman with noble features and expressive eyes of blue-green (very similar to Adnan’s). Abu Bashar was quieter than Im Bashar but conveyed the same spirit, humour and intellect. I was already familiar with Adnan’s parents from stories he had relayed to me, always brimming with reverent awe and affection. It was an informal manner in which I met my future parents-in-law, but then they were not ceremonial people by any means, so it probably wouldn’t have made sense to meet them any other way. 135

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I was curious about Adnan’s parents’ input concerning Lebanon’s independence, and now was as good a time as any to ask them. Im Bashar was noncommittal: ‘I didn’t hear about it until much later. Nothing changed for us and the men who were involved in this independence charade have less than stellar patriotic commitments.’ Abu Bashar, seated across from us with his arms folded across his chest, began to laugh silently at his wife’s sour take on the much-touted Independence Day. ‘She’s right,’ he said, still laughing. ‘No one took any of the brouhaha seriously. There was no written constitution, and the census was the one the French had cooked up so the Maronites would stay the most powerful. We knew how flawed “the National Pact” was demographically and that it did not reflect the reality of the Lebanese population, that it was unsustainable and that it would be only a matter of years before everything fell apart.’ Adnan’s father, Mohammad Salaheddine Mohammad Tahseen Khayyat, or Salah for short, was born in Sidon in 1902, a Syrian subject of the Bilad al Sham province under Ottoman jurisdiction. He had attended an Ottoman nursery school briefly and his formidable memory still retained the Turkish nursery rhymes they had taught him. He would recite the rhymes, with a twinkle in his eyes and a suppressed smile, with all the accompanying arm waving. By the time he reached middle school, the Ottomans were weakening and his devoutly religious father enrolled him in an Arab Sunni Muslim school. There, the first seeds of secular Pan-Arab fervour were implanted in his young heart when his school took its young students to the streets to march against the Ottoman Empire for Arab independence during the Arab Revolt. This would be the beginning of many such protests. He would go on to march against the Sykes-Picot agreement that left the promised dream of an independent Arab nation no more than a dream, and once, twice and many times more against the Balfour Declaration that legitimized the Zionists on Palestinian land. During his law school years in Damascus, where he studied the Napoleonic Code in French under the French mandate, my father-in-law joined the new breed of secular thinkers and activists in the Arab world leading the Pan-Arab movement as it marched in protest after protest against the European ‘Powers’ and their designs to control the Levant. He and men of his calibre never met the carving up of the Middle East with resignation or defeat. This ardour for the Pan-Arab dream that gripped him in his youth would not diminish until his last breath. 136

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Ironically enough, Pan-Arabism was of the making of the colonizers themselves in their strategy to destabilize the Ottoman Empire’s firm hold on its constituents. The Europeans were aware that gaining control over the inhabitants of this area would not be the piece of cake the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula had been. With a rich history of political intrigue, the Levantines were nobody’s fool. So they played on their dreams for self-determination. What could be more potent in challenging the yet uncontested guardianship over Islamic culture and political dogma held by the Ottomans with respect to the Arabs than awakening a Pan-Arab dream for independence? And what could be more powerful to push this dream forward than the Arabic word that held its speakers and readers spellbound by its depth and breadth of description? Arabic was a complex language that could capture in a word the most ephemeral nuances of life, nuances as fleeting as the fluttery shadow of eyelashes on a cheek (reef ). Helpfully, the Europeans stimulated the publishing industry to encourage the revival of Arabic literature. Once the printed books spread throughout the Arab world the beauty and power of the Arabic word turned into a lethal weapon of subliminal sabotage against the Ottomans as it touched readers far and wide, creating a massive wave of passionate Arab nationalism. This wave did challenge the Ottoman’s authority, but to the dismay of the mandate powers, did not crest with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, it emerged as a powerful political phenomenon in the Middle East and turned the colonizers into the enemy. In 1926, my father-in-law graduated among the third group of Lebanese-Syrian students to receive university diplomas, becoming one of the few educated men of Sidon. He had left his birthplace to study law in Damascus as a Syrian, and now, at the height of this passionate Arab awakening, was returning to Sidon as one of the disenfranchised Lebanese in the freshly created ‘Greater Lebanon’ under the French mandate. My father-in-law’s commitment to a Lebanon free from the French mandate was tested soon enough as a young, freshly minted judge in Nabatiyeh, the legal seat of South Lebanon. The French were staging the charade of elections to install their puppets in Lebanon in 1936. As a legal officer, my father-in-law was appointed to authenticate the vote count at the end of the day to uphold the election’s transparency. Early on the morning of Election Day, the French mandate’s High Commissioner Comte Damian de Martel in 137

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Nabatiyeh sent after him for an urgent meeting. My father-in-law complied, knowing pretty much what was in store. Upon entering the French High Commissioner’s office, the official de Martel glanced up arrogantly from his desk, whipped out a blank piece of paper and brusquely demanded his rubber-stamp legal signature to confirm the French mandate’s choice in the rigged election for deputy of Nabatiyeh. My father-in-law gazed quietly into the High Commissioner’s eyes and refused. This response was totally unfactored into the High Commissioner’s plan for the day’s proceedings. ‘Do you know what you are saying?’ he sputtered angrily. My morally upright father-in-law repeated what he had just said, making it clear he understood perfectly what he was saying. Glaring intently into the young Sidonian judge’s eyes, the French de Martel hissed, ‘This legal signature for our man is going to happen whether you accept to do it or not, so why not benefit from it, get a year’s worth of salary in gold pieces and everyone will sleep well tonight.’ ‘I will sleep well tonight knowing I have behaved as my conscience bids me to,’ was my father-in-law’s unyielding and final statement. No amount of pressure, threatening or monetary, could sway him to do as he was ordered. That evening Abu Bashar recorded and confirmed the name of the winner of the elections (Yousef el Zein), and he was not France’s man. He awoke next morning to read across the newspapers’ front page the name of the French mandate’s man (Mohammad al Ass’ad) as the winner. So the French got their way, but it did not happen through Salaheddine Khayyat. This rare quality of fearlessly sticking up for his principles would give him much grief later in life and would keep him from filling his pockets from the coffers set aside in the Lebanese Treasury for graft and corruption. It wasn’t easy, but my father-in-law persevered in remaining an icon of truth and fairness in life, politics and religion. Islam was a fascinating philosophy for Abu Bashar, one that he admired and respected in its profound and extensive deliberations on life and death. But he did not respect the application of Islam by the prevalent sheikhs and muftis with their restrictions on freedom of thought that included such matters as women’s equality and interactions between the sexes. Although he came from a long line of muftis (the top position of a Sunni Muslim cleric), he opted to become an agnostic early in his manhood, unheard of among men of his generation. His nature was to question everything in life, which included his religion. Indeed, 138

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blind belief in the words attributed to God was one of his bêtes-noires. Because he could not deal with hypocrisy of any sort, the double standard that men of religion applied to themselves and others disgusted him. He saw organized religion exactly as it was: politics for personal gain and glory. On many occasions he would tell me wistfully, ‘Just take a look at how happy the Christians in our neighbourhood are when they go to church, especially the young. They dress in their finest clothes in anticipation of meeting other young people after the sermon in the churchyard. Why can’t our sheikhs and muftis allow our young people to do the same? I know for a fact that very few of our muftis and sheikhs are the paragons of virtue that they pretend to be.’ The prevalent unfairness towards women particularly angered him and he did not suffer this feeling of outrage silently. My mother-in-law recalls him coming home one Friday early in their marriage fuming at the rantings of a sheikh during noon prayers which focused on binding the honour of the Muslim man with the veil of his wife. ‘Munira,’ he told her abruptly, ‘I hope it’s fine with you to stop wearing the veil from now on.’ My mother-in-law remembers laughingly at how it took her no seconds of deliberation before becoming one of the first women in Sidon to discard the veil and bob her hair (to the shock of the surrounding Sidonian society) at the hands of a fashionable young male hairdresser my father-in-law brought to the house. Whenever he chanced on an acquaintance or relative with a wife wrapped in the traditional Islamic veils, especially on hot summer days, he would tackle the issue of enforced cover-ups by ordering his acquaintance to take off his wife’s veils and wear them himself. This courage in freedom of thought and religion continued into his old age, when all expected him to start playing it safe ‘just in case’. ‘I have a clear conscience,’ he would tell me. ‘I have nothing to fear. My heaven is here on Earth. When I die I will stop existing. So I will enjoy life now and it’s nobody’s business.’ During the late 1930s, my father-in-law broke the rules of established Sidon (again) and moved into a beautiful Ottoman-era villa in an entirely Maronite-inhabited neighbourhood outside of the city walls with his young family (where Adnan was born). The conventional Sidonians viewed this as a highly irregular move but by then everyone who knew him came to expect the unexpected. Traditionally, all the established Jewish, Orthodox Christian and Sunni families of Sidon had homes within the city’s ancient walls (that included my father-in-law’s extended 139

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family). The Maronites in this ‘new’ neighbourhood outside of Sidon proper were descendants of Christians who had fled the civil war in the Chouf Mountains with the Druze back in 1860. My in-laws were met by a wary silence rather than the jovial welcome that is normally the traditional neighbourly Lebanese custom. The ‘events’, as this bloody chapter in 1860 was referred to, were still deeply embedded in the neighbourhood’s collective memory, leaving them suspicious and mistrustful of anyone not of their faith. However, it did not take the neighbours long to discover that here was a family who was radically different. Adnan’s mother threw open her door to all the young children of the neighbourhood, inviting them to play with her children and offering a warm meal to anyone who was hungry. Her wisdom and common sense soon made her the trusted peacemaker. Every Sunday morning, Im Bashar sent her children with their Maronite neighbours to the church down the street to attend the sermon. ‘They couldn’t lose,’ she would smile as she recalled those long ago days. ‘The preacher would tell them stories on how to behave, they’d socialize with children their age, listen to beautiful music from the organ, and I’d get a chance to cook in peace.’ Christmas would find part of a fir tree with tinsel and baubles on it in their living room. Easter would find her boiling eggs and colouring them in the kitchens of her Christian neighbours. Fresh herbs were wrapped around each egg, held in place by filmy gauze, then dipped in orange dye derived from onion skins soaked in water. The dye would trace the outline of the delicate lacy herb leaves on to the egg. Her neighbours would reciprocate and join Im Bashar in her kitchen to help her prepare the labour-intensive date, pistachio and walnut semolina sweets particular to the Muslim holidays. Im Bashar never learned to read or write only because she couldn’t deal with the boredom she had to suffer through traditional teaching methods of rote memorization (listen-and-repeat), and because of the interminable sewing and embroidery that females of her era had to endure. When it came to enrolling her two eldest children, Bashar and Bushra, in school she took the matter very seriously, keeping the rote memorization turn-off factor in mind, and began to visit the available schools to see what was best for her children – not a common pastime for women of her generation considering the heavy shroud of domesticity that was imposed on them. After making the rounds of the French nun 140

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school, the Frères (Franciscan priests), and the Makassed (Orthodox Sunni), she secretly visited the relatively new Evangelical American School of Sidon and loved what she saw. The large airy classrooms with bright colours, child-sized furniture and educational toys were a novelty she never knew to exist in schools. This, she instinctively realized, was what children needed to love learning. She came to the final and revolutionary conclusion that only the American School would do. This was an especially unconventional and discordant step to make considering the background of Abu Bashar’s family (a succession of sheikhs and muftis) and his political leanings (Pan-Arab, against anything smacking of the West, especially from the USA). Quietly, she slipped into the American school one day with little Bashar and little Bushra in tow. The principal of the school, Dr White, an elegant theologian who spoke fluent Arabic, liked to reminisce in amusement to Adnan the unusual circumstance in which he met his mother. He recalled looking up from his desk to see a woman covered in the traditional Muslim veil (she had not yet removed it) standing before him flanked by two shy elementary-aged children who were pushed forward to greet him. ‘These two children, Bashar and Bushra, are to be signed up in your school,’ she told him decisively. ‘My children are very intelligent and deserve the best education,’ she added, disarming him enough not to ask any further questions. That the school’s raison d’être in Sidon was to woo what Lebanese they could to the Protestant fold away from the Catholics who answered to France was unimportant to my mother-in-law. She was never one to fear outside influences, having seen so many changes on her country’s soil. She was so firmly entrenched in her Arab identity that it never occurred to her that a school system or different religion could sway it. What Im Bashar saw was the future for her children in the new Lebanon that was quickly taking shape. Modern Lebanon was moving away from the slow pace of the pleasure-seeking landed gentry (which had included her husband) into a world of business-orientated young men when she observed were forging successful and lucrative careers. Determined not to let politics get in the way of her children’s education, she turned a deaf ear to the strident objections of the extended family of sheikhs and muftis in what they described as a sellout to the colonizers. Her decision was irreversible and she eventually won her husband to her side and enrolled all six children.

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* * * ‘I’m going to show you exactly how tiny Lebanon is,’ Adnan announced one spring Sunday morning. ‘We’ll be at my mother’s house by lunchtime after crossing it from tip to tip.’ We began our drive from Beirut and headed north along the Corniche that led to the port area, then crossed over the Fouad Shehab bridge, a soon-to-be infamous landmark where ill-fated Muslims would line up at a Phalange checkpoint in 1975 thinking they were having their papers checked only to have their throats slit instead. Three hundred Muslims died that cold December day in retaliation for four Phalange Christians who were found shot to death in a car outside the Electricity Company. The young warlord of the Phalange, Bashir Gemayel, was purported to have asked for forty dead Muslims in reprisal for the four murdered Christians. Instead, his gunmen gave him a bumper return. But on this refreshing spring morning in 1971 there was no hint of the evil that would befall this city, as traffic began steadily increasing with weekend picnickers travelling from what would become the ‘West’ Beirut (Muslim-dominated) side of the green line during the civil war to spend the day by the Dog River in what would become ‘East’ Beirut (Christiandominated). We finally reached the highway that would take us towards Tripoli, the northernmost city of Lebanon. All of a sudden the road improved dramatically. Potholes were replaced with wide smooth asphalt roads; what a luxury not to lurch left and right as we had on the southern coastal road to avoid gaping holes that spelled certain ruin for the unfortunates who ploughed into them. This luxurious highway fell under the home turf of the Maronite Establishment, whose municipalities received a large part of the money coming from Arabia. At the outskirts of Tripoli, Adnan announced, ‘It’s half an hour more of Lebanon from here to the Syrian borders. Keep that in mind. We’ve been driving for an hour, now we’ll start back through the mountains.’ The route Adnan was taking back to Sidon was not the coastal road but rather the one that cut through the heart of Lebanon. We drove through sweetly scented pine forests; the smell of pine cones tickling our noses as it wafted into our car. Rivers and waterfalls gurgled along our winding mountain path. We were now in the midst of those villages that 142

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had twinkled so enchantingly from the folds of the Chouf Mountains on our first date in the Istiraha of Sidon. They were villages with mixed populations of Druze and Maronites living side by side in hand-hewn white limestone homes with red-tiled roofs and brightly coloured shutters. This bucolic co-habitation had another ten years before the pictureperfect homes would become rubble and a generation lost (with many of them killing before they reached puberty) while others grew up in classrooms of abandoned schools without any education, to be known as the war displaced, victims of the mountain war, a war of pointless battles of calculated convenience between two warlords Jumblatt and Geagea. Hamlets dotted the hilltops with houses surrounded by rose bushes, fruit trees, mulberry trees, olive trees and grape vines. The mulberry tree, home to the silkworm that placed the Lebanese at the centre of the highly lucrative silk trade hundreds of years ago, grew close to the villagers’ abodes, where it spread its welcome shade from the bright summer sun. Each home, no matter how modest, had an alfresco seating arrangement under its mulberry tree for family and friends to gather in their leisure hours. Some villages sported a muezzin spire, some a church tower and many had both. Tall graceful pine trees, their foliage concentrated on top like afros and their trunks bare and willowy, lined up along the far hills on the horizon, closely resembling the male line-up for the Lebanese national dance, the dabke. Even the trees of Lebanon did not escape the confessional divide of the Lebanese, Adnan informed me. ‘Those trees so integral to the Lebanese landscape are the one good thing the mandate era gave to Lebanon. Where you see them in large numbers is where the Maronites live. The French decreed that with every tree that fell, four must be planted in its place. The Maronite villagers under the counsel of their monks and nuns did just that. Where you see barren ground is unfortunately around the Muslim villages, both Shiite and Sunni.’ As we drove further south, the sharp mountain edges of the north gave way to a range of gentle hills, arrayed in multihued layers stretching to the horizon. Our car rose and dipped through hills and lush valleys carpeted with crimson red poppy flowers. Then without warning, the road abruptly ended and only thorn bushes could be seen ahead. We had reached Naqoura, the southernmost village in Lebanon. ‘That’s it,’ Adnan commented with finality, ‘Lebanon ends here. Palestine starts there.’ We turned back to Sidon, 45 minutes away, to join Adnan’s family for the Sunday lunch Im Bashar customarily prepared for at least twenty random guests. 143

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My remaining years at university flew by as we criss-crossed Lebanon in all of its geographical, social and political strata. The longer I stayed in Lebanon, the greater became my attachment to this arbitrary, impetuous and reckless Arab country, and to Adnan. The looming date of my graduation in 1972 finally arrived and the inevitability of facing my parents over my relationship with Adnan raised its fearful head. Our relationship had been open to everyone in Lebanon but to none of the adults in my family. As I had feared, all hell broke loose on my graduation day when I attempted to broach my parents with the fait accompli of our relationship and our desire to marry. My father flatly refused to accept the idea. A resounding ‘NO!!!!!!, NO, NO, a thousand times NO,’ was his (expected) vicious response. My mother, unsurprisingly, sided with his decision; there was no contest on that one. Adnan and I both had the same religion and Arab identity and there was no problem here for my father. It was tribalism that had caused his response. As far as he was concerned, the problem was that I was a Saudi Arab female and, by Saudi Arab law, was therefore forbidden to marry a non-Saudi Arab man. He was fully aware that I could not go ahead without his written permission and also that of the Minister of Interior of Saudi Arabia and of the king, as per Saudi Arab law. Suddenly, the veneer of a modern education dropped and my father reverted to being an extremely law-abiding Saudi Arab male citizen. How dare I choose the man I wanted to marry? My graduation ceremony passed in a blur through tear-filled eyes and a broken heart, and afterwards I was forbidden to see or speak to Adnan. My mother did not let me out of her sight. With barely time to pack my belongings from seven years of student life, I left Beirut escorted on both sides by my parents and sympathetic but powerless siblings. My last contact with Adnan was a stolen whispered farewell over my dorm’s telephone, with vows to reunite no matter what. I don’t recall my flight back to Dhahran. Once I was in Saudi Arabia, I made half-hearted attempts to get my father to see things differently and give permission for me to marry Adnan. Deep within my aching heart I knew that my parents were never going to consent to our marriage. I was on their home turf and the walls closed around me yet tighter and higher. I was not a person in my own right, merely a physical extension of my parents. My father was crushing me into the mould he had envisaged for me, educated but unaltered. 144

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We had never had the best father–daughter relationship, and now it worsened profoundly as he became even more tyrannical and suspicious of my every move. He had never met Adnan to judge him, but the idea of my marrying outside of his circle was unthinkable. With my father’s close watch it became very difficult to contact Adnan or any of his family. The only ray of light was through my own post-office box, separate from my father’s, which had been given when I became a first grade teacher’s assistant in my old school in Dhahran. Adnan’s brothers Bashar and Hassan lived with their wives in al Khobar where they both ran successful businesses. All attempts on their part to contact my father in the traditional Arab way were rudely rebutted. Naturally, they stopped trying and turned to Adnan with some brotherly advice, ‘Start looking for someone else.’ My father had made it embarrassingly clear to them that getting him to accept graciously was not going to happen. My mother, basically a kind soul but weak before my father, put in her own two bits, if only to protect herself from any fallout from him. ‘Stop calling Fadia; she doesn’t want to talk to any of you,’ she told my good friend Hana, who was newly married to Bashar as a result of Adnan’s matchmaking talents. I was not told of these exchanges between my parents and Adnan’s family until many years later. After exhausting all possible avenues, Adnan wrote to me that there was no other option but to elope. Before I had the chance to write back, he called me on the school telephone one morning in December from Bahrain, where he had gone on assignment for AnNahar. This was the first time we had spoken since my dreadful graduation day in June. ‘Adnan!’ I yelled, when I heard him across the static. ‘Shshshsh! ’ was his endearing reply, ‘someone will overhear you,’ and the line went dead. I was frantic with fear. What if someone had heard us? So omnipresent was the feeling that someone was always looking over my shoulder – and now it appeared that way to Adnan. I stared hopelessly at the phone, then it rang again. I picked it up to hear Adnan talking rapid-fire – ‘Do you accept?’ ‘YES!’ – and I hung up before anyone joined us on the line. Adnan’s plan came in the mail. I would meet him in Maidstone, England, where my sister Fatin was studying for her pre-med requirements, and we would fly back to Beirut. (Fatin’s determination to be a doctor managed to convince my father to give her permission to continue her studies in England, thus accomplishing a feat that I would never have imagined possible. Her poor Arabic plus the opportunity of living 145

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with an uncle in Maidstone also softened my father as far as Fatin was concerned.) He would contact Fatin and tell her the time and place of our rendezvous once she knew when I would arrive. Clear enough, but now came the most difficult hurdle … reaching Maidstone. I had to find a way to leave the country. It could only happen with my father’s written permission and physical presence, and there was no way he would let me out of his sight as long as he thought I was still trying to see Adnan. I had to convince him that it was all over between Adnan and me well before the Christmas holidays, when Dhahran School was let out. Once I felt I had control over my destiny, I snapped out of my depression and began to interact with my surroundings. As an Aramco employee, I was living in the singles’ efficiency apartment on Seventh Street with a friend from university in Beirut. I had repeatedly rejected the notion of mixing with any of the neighbours. I had no illusions about my popularity on the singles scene, with a statistic of one female to every hundred or so males. But I needed to celebrate my window of freedom and, to my room-mate’s surprise, accepted an invitation to attend a party next door. It took just one party for us to decide that watching television, even listening to the sheikhs of hellfire and damnation, was a far more entertaining option. We were met at the door by the already inebriated host (an American engineer), with music, laughter and the clink of ice cubes in glasses of whisky coming from twenty-five bachelors and three other women. ‘Uh oh,’ I warned my room-mate, who stood expressionless, as she did when she was overwhelmed. ‘Let’s say hello and sneak out. Five minutes, OK?’ we agreed as a deluge of men spotted us and began charging in our direction. We were separated as each of us got our own pack of admirers whose conversation was limited to ‘So how do you like it here? There’s a beach party next week; wanna come?’, ‘Give me the pleasure of this dance, pleeeeeease’, ‘Dave’s having a barbecue tomorrow, lots of booze, it’ll be a blast. Don’t say no’, and the best one, ‘I have a very interesting pottery collection at my efficiency just next door. Let’s ditch and I’ll show it to you.’ I backed into the kitchen planning to continue on out the back door, when I found myself stuck in a corner next to the washing machine by the host. A well-placed kick and I was out the door, with my room-mate right behind me as we ran to the safety of our apartment. We collapsed on to our Aramco sofas helpless with laughter at our ‘femme fatale’ effect on the poor desperate bachelors of Dhahran. 146

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Saleh, my friend from university days, called me one afternoon to invite me to meet his brother Khalid and his American bride Sally; both were Ivy League graduates. They had just arrived in Dhahran and Saleh told me that he felt that his sister-in-law and I would click. We rang the doorbell to their brand new bungalow, a newer model than the one I had grown up in, sleeker with a larger garden. Khalid opened the door and greeted us jovially, calling loudly for Sally. A big man with thick straight black hair and strong dark features, Khalid was quite different from Saleh, who was much milder in approach and appearance, but both shared the same engaging smile and gregariousness. The Turkis were urbane, educated, modest, smart businessmen. Educated in Lebanon, they had attended the same school as Adnan (Gerard Institute), where their elder brother Abdel Aziz left a lasting legacy in soccer, then continued on to AUB and the USA for further studies to become a major business mover and shaker in Saudi Arabia today. I felt very much at ease and more so after meeting Sally. As tall as her husband, with a lithe sporty body that moved with purpose and direction, she had an open face and an infectious laugh. It was impossible not to succumb to her warmth and intellect. Saleh was right and we became fast friends. I was instantly taken by Sally Turki – beautiful, effervescent and excited about her new life with her new husband in Saudi Arabia. I noted with irony that she was embracing a life I was trying to leave, meeting its challenges head on after she had fallen in love with her Saudi Arab husband. I was preparing to take a different path in a different kind of Arabness after I had fallen in love with a non-Saudi Arab. A few weeks after I met Sally, she invited me to lunch at her house. I walked into an elegant spread in full view of the inviting swimming pool they had just finished installing in their back yard – their pièce de résistance as Sally laughingly referred to it. Her husband smiled at my delight with the beauty of the layout: ‘Looks like Sally is wining and dining you; company silver is on the table.’ She grinned broadly and dived right in. ‘Yes, I would like to ask you if you would join me in establishing a school here in Khobar.’ I was at a loss for words. With this simple suggestion she had unknowingly put my two most intense dreams on to a collision course. The dream of the school had been my passion for as long as I could remember. And now the dream was literally being offered to me on a silver platter. I looked at Sally’s intelligent open 147

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face so full of hope and promise and looked inside my heart. I couldn’t do both. Here were the two roads of Robert Frost’s evocative poem The Road Not Taken laid out before me. I returned home that day in deep conflict, mulling the project Sally had proposed over and over in the confused state of my mind. Before I reached our house, I turned left towards our green playground across the street and lay on my back in the soft green grass as I had done so many times before in my childhood gazing up at the sky as dusk turned into night and a sprinkling of stars began to twinkle. A slight breeze alleviated the humidity of the day but I was too deep in thought to care. Was I doing the right thing by leaving my home and my family to be with Adnan? I knew I would never belong in Lebanese society; did that matter to me when I had never fitted in the American or the Saudi Arab one? I imagined life without Adnan and all colour and enchantment drained from my world. That clinched my decision. I loved him too much, I needed to live my life with him and we would realize our dreams together. Sally’s school, the Dhahran Ahliyeh School, would go on to become the most important school in the area. She too realized her dream with her husband at her side, effectively negotiating her way through the potential minefields of education for girls in Saudi Arabia. It took many dress rehearsals on my own before I gathered the courage to go ahead with my plan for escape from home. Finally I broached my father and informed him solemnly that I was through with pining for Adnan. He listened intently and told me I had made a wise decision, I was Saudi after all. Silently I snorted, ‘Saudi as in a female Saudi?’ Despite making my decision to leave Saudi Arabia, maybe for good, I continued to spend long hours in lonely debate. I could not burden any of my Arab friends with the very personal and law-breaking step I was about to make. It was in the midst of my ongoing battle with my demons that Anne, the teacher I was assisting in Dhahran School, approached me. She had noticed that something was seriously preoccupying me and gently asked if I would like to talk. I had liked Anne from the first day of my job. She had gone out of her way to guide me at work, and gave me engaging and challenging assignments once she discovered my affinity for children. I let out a deep sigh of relief as I looked into her kind, honest eyes, and could only see her as an angel sent from Heaven to help me assuage my fears. I told her of the painful decision I had decided to make and my qualms over the negative and 148

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long-term repercussions it would have on my future relationship with my parents. I can still remember her thoughtful smile as she took a deep breath and told me her own story. She had been a nun before she came to work in Dhahran School. Saudi Arabia was the farthest point she could find to escape the wrath of her strict Catholic family and community in mid-western America for the life decision she had made, and that was to break her vows of lifelong celibacy, remove her habit and marry. ‘I can only tell you what I feel. Today I am happier than I have ever been in my life. I will continue in doing what I set out to do in this world but without the nun’s habit. It’s really nobody’s business and when the dust settles they’ll all go back to their lives and you’ll be stuck with their decision for your life. So let them go on with their lives while you go on with yours. Go for it, Fadia. I’m sure this young man is worth it if you love him that much.’ After what I felt was a reasonable amount of time since I had told him about my break-up with Adnan I asked my father for permission to visit Fatin in England. He stared into space for what seemed like eons, then grudgingly gave it, but with one condition. My mother would be at my side as his ‘trusty liaison officer’ as he so endearingly put it. On 26 December 1972, my mother and I flew to England. My mother chattered happily throughout the seven-hour flight from Dhahran to London about our upcoming holiday with Fatin and Marwan, while I sat consumed with guilt over what awaited her in the next twenty-four hours. If only my marriage to Adnan could have happened under happier circumstances. When we arrived at Heathrow we picked up our bags and rushed expectantly outside to see Fatin and Marwan. They were nowhere to be seen. How could that be possible? They knew the exact time of our arrival. After waiting for an hour we decided to board a bus to Maidstone, not knowing what else to do. We reached Fatin’s bedsit in a picture-book cottage tucked into a quiet cul-de-sac in Maidstone. Her old landlady greeted us at the door, surprised to see us without Fatin and Marwan. They had left Maidstone early that morning to make sure they would be on time for our arrival, she told us. ‘They’re probably right behind us,’ my mother remarked to me and went upstairs to my sister’s room to unpack. As I watched her bustling around the room chattering, I thought in silent panic, ‘What if something terrible had happened to them on the highway? It would be entirely my fault.’ Nightfall came and there was still no sign of my sister and brother. My mother was climbing into bed when I exploded, unable to contain my 149

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anxiety any longer. ‘Why aren’t you worrying?’ I cried out in exasperation. ‘What if something terrible has happened to them?’ She answered me uncharacteristically quietly, with a rueful smile and small shrug: ‘Go to bed, Fadia. There is nothing in our power now. What will be will be, and it is in God’s hands. God willing they will be here soon. Maybe Fatin took a wrong turn. They’ll turn up. If they don’t come by morning, all we can do is check with the police.’ And with that she closed her eyes and fell asleep, leaving me alone with my private agony and despair as I did not share her enviable belief in fate. Despite all efforts not to fall asleep, I nodded off, with terrible visions of what could have become of my sister and brother and of Adnan waiting forlornly for a Fadia who would never arrive. At 3 a.m. Fatin and Marwan shuffled in. I never imagined I could be so grateful to God and fate for their safe homecoming. ‘It was too foggy, so we stopped by the side of the road and we fell asleep,’ was my sister’s curt explanation. ‘Where’s Adnan?’ I whispered anxiously. Fatin answered in the same impatient tone she’d used in response to my other frantic questions: ‘He’ll be waiting for you in an hour with a cabbie, so get ready.’ This undercover action had put my sister into extreme militant mode. The hour remaining gave me just enough time to write my mother a letter of farewell in Arabic and two letters in English to my brother and sister to cover up any suspicions of their complicity in this cloakand-dagger scheme. We drank a cup of tea in silence in the remaining fifteen minutes, while my mother snored softly in the bedroom next door. It was going to be as difficult for them as it was for me. At precisely 4 a.m. we stepped outside into the cold grey pre-dawn air and peered nervously for Adnan. There he was … a tiny waving figure at the far end of the road. Careful as ever, he had made sure to keep his distance should my mother appear behind me. Hardly believing that all was truly going according to plan, I raced down the road to reach Adnan as quickly as my legs could carry me, leaving my poor sixteenyear-old brother huffing behind me with my suitcase. Just as I was about to fall into Adnan’s arms, my hand was suddenly grabbed and pumped ardently by a very overwhelmed cabbie. ‘I can’t believe I’m part of this, ma’am, I’m so honoured.’ ‘This is Ben,’ Adnan introduced us rather belatedly, raising his voice to be heard over Ben’s emotional outpourings of happiness for us. I gave a final heartfelt and tearful hug to my sombre brother and sister, who were left to weather the storm that would erupt in 150

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the wake of my disappearance, and slipped into the cab, finally reunited with Adnan. Whatever Adnan and I had to say to one another after a separation of six months was not going to be said en route to the train station because Ben was not going to let us talk. He had tips to give us about married life with especially stern advice to Adnan to forget about taking in three more wives after having gone to so much trouble for this one. At the station door, we bade Ben goodbye, touched by the goodness of this man’s heart. Turning to enter the station, we were stopped by two policemen standing at the entrance door. I knew there was a curfew in Maidstone and that only authorized personnel were allowed to walk the streets before 6 a.m. Our train was the milk train, the first train of the day, for milk transportation only, and it was leaving at five. If we didn’t make it, we would miss our flight to Beirut. My heart sank. Suddenly the two policemen broke out in smiles, slapped Adnan on the back, and tipped their hats in greeting to me, congratulating us wholeheartedly. ‘You did it old chap; congratulations, ma’am!’ They had met Adnan at 3 a.m. while he was standing around waiting for zero hour and had inquired politely what he was doing loitering in front of the train station at that hour. ‘I’m waiting for my future wife,’ he had told them; ‘we’re eloping.’ And that was how they ended up waiting excitedly for Adnan to show up with his future bride. ‘Right this way,’ they laughed as they gave us a bona fide police escort on to the train. A surprised guard greeted the four of us with a raised eyebrow. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked politely alluding to our illegal presence on his train. ‘Yes, John, these two young ones have a plane to catch or else they won’t get married. You wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?’ the two policemen winked and nudged laughingly. ‘Congratulations! Please have a seat wherever you would like,’ the guard beamed, becoming, along with our policemen friends and Ben the cabbie, another impromptu but significant player in our romantic drama. We arrived at London Heathrow simultaneously with the announcement for our flight to Beirut on the public address system. As we ran to catch it we were unable to refrain from nervously looking over our shoulders to double-check we were still in the clear. Meanwhile my sister was busy driving my frantic mother in circles at the other end of London until she was sure our flight had gone. They arrived at the airport just as our flight was taking off. I was now on my way to a brand new life of my choice. 151

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At Beirut International Airport, we stepped into the welcoming arms of my father-in-law, who revelled in our audacity. He immediately whisked us off to the Mufti of Sidon, Sheikh Salim (a first cousin), and handed him a marriage contract he had written based on his intimate knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence in marriage procedures. Sheikh Salim, a dour, thin serious cleric who was the opposite of everything my father-in-law was, took the contract to verify it legally and routinely asked me for my identity papers. When I pulled out my Saudi passport, his jaw fell open and he turned his gaze, eyes narrowed, to his cousin. ‘Salah Bek,’ he addressed him peevishly, ‘how do you expect me to verify this marriage of your son to a Saudi Arab lady without all the required signatures needed on it? We have a circular from the Saudi Embassy that threatens legal punishment should we validate any marriage of a Saudi woman without the required signed papers from the Saudi Arab Ministry of Interior and her father ... and you know that,’ he added accusingly. I can still see the small, barely suppressed smile on Abu Bashar’s lips and the twinkle in his eye that relayed how much he was enjoying this challenge. He was one of the pillars of jurisprudence throughout the south of Lebanon, where he had been posted as a judge, and was famous for his creativity in twisting the law with his flawless legal arguments to benefit the poorer or weaker plaintiff. Here was a case that spoke to his heart. Salaheddine was taking on the Wahhabi usurpation of Islamic jurisprudence single-handedly. ‘Is it not a known fact that marriage in Islam is the acceptance of the two people involved without the need of a witness, should they so wish?’ ‘Yes,’ Sheikh Salim nodded, cautiously, ‘go on.’ ‘And here you have a written contract with their signatures and mine. This is a de facto contract of marriage as per the literal instructions of the Koran and we are here to have you legally register it, not question it,’ my father-in-law declared triumphantly. Muttering under his breath, Sheikh Salim ordered a witness be brought in before confirming our marriage contract. Adnan stepped out into the corridor briefly and brought back to the room a very amused random passer-by. Now the marriage ceremony began. I was given strict orders to nod my head for a ‘yes’ whenever any question was sent my way, as my grasp of classical Arabic was weak. Five minutes later, we were husband and wife. We returned to Adnan’s home where my mother-in-law was waiting with bated breath. My in-laws became my surrogate parents as they embraced me into their fold and loved me as one of theirs, wholeheartedly and unconditionally. 152

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My mother arrived three days after we sealed our marriage contract. I went to see her at ‘Amti Bahija’s apartment (she had been forced to leave her penthouse and a large part of her money with Abdel Nasser after his fallout with King Feisal). I knew the meeting would be fine with my mother, and it was. She hugged me and scolded me for leaving before my twenty-second birthday, which she had looked forward to celebrating in England with my siblings. Disappearing briefly into her room, she returned with a gift, handing it to me as she smiled sadly, lifting her shoulders in a small shrug – her way of accepting my marriage as fate. This was to be the last gift I would receive from her as my father subsequently forbade the mention of my name in his presence for decades, thus altering our relationship permanently. The following day, my father stomped into Beirut Airport and publicly accused Adnan and Abu Bashar of committing ‘an act of piracy’, causing them to break out in private giggles and causing me to break out in an unprecedented case of hives. Unhappily, but predictably, I was never able to regain a normal relationship with my parents, so deep was my father’s anger at what I had done.

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7 The Tides of War '( o the naked eye, Beirut of 1973 was still the same frivolous and fun-loving city all the tourist brochures made it out to be. However, those in tune with Lebanon’s darker side could already sense the rumbling undercurrents of discontent steadily gaining in strength as they surged and gathered. What was happening to this dynamic, vibrant country? I had been away for just six months but the scene was palpably more sinister, especially among our circle of journalist friends. Censorship was beginning to rear its ugly head and our beloved Michel Abu Jawdeh was no longer the devil-may-care wit we knew him to be. Although he remained ever the gentleman and warm friend, he was deeply disturbed at the direction politics was taking in Lebanon. His columns were becoming increasingly critical and scathing, at times even going so far as to losing the objectivity that had always been his trademark. Lebanon was teetering dangerously on the edge of civil war. Our first year of marriage often predicted to be bumpy was bumpy, but not because of personal matters. We did not need anyone’s approval for being together and we weathered whatever family disapproval came our way from both Adnan’s family and mine. But what we had not anticipated affecting our dreams for our life together was the fallout of Lebanon’s politics on us. Lebanon’s new president, Suleiman Franjieh – a feudal Maronite chieftain, traditionally and historically more connected to Syria than to the Maronites, and with a history of bloody vendettas under his belt – had squeaked into power in the elections by just one

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arm-wrestled vote. With such a colourful background it was no surprise that Franjieh’s presidency would be marked by corruption and nepotism that would effectively erase the small steps that had been achieved towards giving Lebanon a solid productive economy. The Palestinian issue had seeped into the social fabric of Lebanese society. The Maronite clan leader, Sheikh Pierre Gemayel, already head of a quasi-militant party for the preservation of Christian Lebanon since the days of the French mandate, was developing a deep hatred and mistrust of Muslims among isolated Christian villages in the mountains and in the south. He hammered into them the credo that they could survive as Christian communities only through refusal of an Arab face to Lebanon. And the Palestinian issue was connected with its Arab face. Religious leaders of the rest of the Christian population rose in anger against Gemayel’s blatant exploitation of religion for his political ends. In defiance to Gemayel’s militias, many Christian Lebanese joined Muslim Lebanese militias in support of armed Palestinian resistance. Lifelong friends and family members stopped speaking to one another. Angry demonstrations filled the streets of Beirut daily condemning the lack of representation in the government for the Arab face for Lebanon. The march towards self-destruction that repeatedly thundered across this star-struck piece of geography was on the move once more. Through this crack of vulnerability, the Zionists cunningly struck into the heart of Beirut and of Lebanese cohesion. On 10 April 1973, an Israeli terror squad beached a rubber dinghy on the southern coastal road leading into Beirut. On board was an assassination squad led by Ehud Barak (who was dressed as a woman). As they made their way in the pre-dawn hours through a shanty town of Shiite refugees who had escaped from the daily shelling of their villages in the south and Beka’a, the Israelis murdered nine members of the same family for getting in their way en route to their targets – three Palestinian writers who resided in a fashionable residential neighbourhood, ‘Verdun’, two streets from where we lived. The Internal Security Forces (ISF) received news immediately that a night raid was underway but were ordered by President Suleiman Franjieh to go back to bed. Prime Minister Saeb Salam was tipped off about the operation and frantically ordered the army to stop them. President Suleiman Franjieh gave counter-orders to ignore the prime minister. The three terrorists passed within yards of a major army barracks well within sight of the soldiers inside, and felt secure enough to direct early morning traffic at the 156

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crossroads. Continuing on, they entered the designated apartment bloc and murdered three Palestinian intellectuals with a silenced gun. The intellectuals died at the hands of these Zionist assassins while the rest of Beirut slept – along with President Suleiman Franjieh, the ISF and the army. Lebanon awoke the following morning to the terrible news. Splashed across the front page were the bullet-ridden bodies of Kamal Nasser, Mohammed Yousef Najjar, Kamal Adwan, Kamal Adwan’s wife who had moved in front of Najjar in an attempt to shield him from fire, and a neighbour who had opened her door out of curiosity. The three Palestinian activists had been chosen to die by Golda Meier, a grandmother and the Prime Minister of Israel in response to a botched PLO hostage-taking during the Munich Olympics in September 1972 that had resulted in the death of eleven Israeli athletes. Although their names had been officially removed from the hit list Mossad had drawn up in order to spread terror amongst the Palestinians in retaliation for Munich, the Israeli government wanted them dead anyway. Israel wanted to make it clear that the Palestinian freedom fighters would not be safe anywhere from Mossad. In 1973, dead people were not shown in cold blood in the media out of respect for both them and their families – an act of decency that would be horrifically erased with the passage of time. A black and white photo taken from a respectful angle exposed one of the dead writers, Kamal Nasser. He was dressed elegantly in his dressing gown and bedroom slippers, as though he were fast asleep on his living room floor, and, for the first time in my life, I was looking at a dead man whom I knew. Even through the barrier of print, the horror of the finality of death gripped me and strangely the most random of thoughts raced through my mind. He must have hurriedly put on his robe and slippers before opening the door, I thought inanely, maybe expecting the ISF or a courier from the PLO to be there at that hour of the night, but never an Israeli terrorist squad. They probably exchanged words before verifying his identity, then shot him as his horrified family rushed to his side. Tears of sympathy at this image welled up in my eyes for Kamal Nasser who had died so violently because he stood for a cause he believed in. He had been among the usuals at Michel Abu Jawdeh’s soirées at AnNahar, a jovial, wisecracking Palestinian who had chosen to write rather than to carry arms. But, as time would tell, men like him would remain at the top of Zionist (and other closer neighbours’) hit lists because 157

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they knew, as had the colonizers before them, what great magnitude the well-written Arabic word had in making a difference among the Arabs. How vulnerable and exposed we were to such evil forces, which decided at will who could live and who must die. Adnan and I and most of our generation were too young and idealistic to absorb that such forces were beyond our control; that death could be at such close quarters to us. Ehud Barak, having committed the necessary Zionist right of passage of killing Arabs, gained the necessary credentials to become Israel’s prime minister in 1998. We joined 250,000 others in the assassinated Palestinians’ funeral procession in a replay of the anger on the streets at the 1968 destruction of Lebanon’s airplanes and airport. President Suleiman Franjieh’s response to this massive outpouring of support was to bomb the Palestinian headquarters in the north and south of the capital in an attempt to erase them from the Lebanese equation once and for all. The operation began at dawn on 1st May. I sat bolt upright in bed that early dawn at the first stomachchurning crash of Franjieh’s bombing, one block away from our apartment. Adnan was awake, but lying silently in bed, eyes wide open. Feelings of helplessness and rage took over my entire being as I found myself shaking uncontrollably at my first brush with the sounds of war. My husband and I were pinned down in our apartment for three days under the crossfire. We had not yet reached the first anniversary of our marriage and we were already facing hurdles far beyond those of two newly-weds merging their lives and dreams together. Our lot in life was tied in with that of the Arab world and we were marked to undergo many more such battles for merely existing as Arabs in an Arab land. But as Suleiman Franjieh and everyone else with thoughts like him would discover, the Palestinian issue was not going to go away until justice was served. Six months later in that watershed year of Middle East turmoil, the October War of 1973 broke out. Spearheaded by the Egyptians in conjunction with Syria to regain land lost to the Zionists in 1967, the October War went down in military history for its initial surprise offence, the meticulously planned and executed crossing of the Suez Canal by elite commando forces that caught the Israeli army asleep in a pre-dawn attack. This required engineering and logistics that no one credited the Egyptian army with having, least of all the Egyptian 158

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president, Sadat. Sadly, this brilliant manoeuvre would end in failure after heavy air support by the Americans carpet-bombed the Egyptian forces and extracted the cornered Israeli Defense Force from their tight spot. In the midst of the war, the Arab League successfully pressured King Feisal into an oil boycott against the West and Aramco was ordered to stop pumping. The reasons were not as altruistic as many Arab nationalists then believed. When Saudi oil disappeared from the market, world oil prices quadrupled and money began pouring into Saudi Arabia’s treasury as never before. President Nixon sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on an urgent mission to remind Feisal of their oil for security pact and to warn him that unless different measures were taken, the Pentagon was threatening military action against Saudi Arabia. The American government was concerned not because its populace was suffering from the oil price rise, but because of the negative impact the embargo was having on its war machinery in Vietnam. King Feisal gave the USA a win-win solution. While the Arab world was lauding him as the unsmiling Arab hero who had kept Kissinger waiting for several days before seeing him, he secretly passed an agreement that Saudi oil would be covertly supplied to the US navy during the oil embargo and that the embargo itself would not last longer than 1974. The October War was not so opportune for the poorer Arab economies. They felt the bite of Secretary of State Kissinger’s ‘carrot and stick’ policy that tied American economic aid to compliance with American strategic policies. Saudi Arabia’s oil bonanza was ‘America’s economic aid’. The cash strapped one-party Arab leaders soon fell in line, taking their disenfranchised nations with them, after deciding that armed resistance against Israel was unproductive and problematic. My previous aversion to armed resistance disappeared. We were thoroughly disorientated by the political and social fallout on Lebanon of the October War defeat. We were no longer clear about what to believe or expect. Who was a friend and who was a foe? The concept of Arab versus Zionist was no longer spelled out in black and white as it had been after the 1967 War. Both sides were turning into shades of grey as they bled into one another’s corner. And where did we belong? The emerging Lebanese warlords became intransigently belligerent at opposite ends of the political spectrum in the Lebanese arena. Those self-same movers and shakers who had met nightly in Michel Abu Jawdeh’s office in AnNahar were fast becoming archrivals 159

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and their meetings were turning into shouting matches. Lebanon had more problems than it could handle. Israel nudged the Lebanese further towards self-annihilation in 1974 by officially announcing ‘organized and systematic’ patrols and roadblocks on Lebanese territory and preemptive attacks on the Palestinians without any provocation, to prevent infiltration across the border, adding salt to the wound of Lebanese divisiveness with the communiqué on its forays into Lebanese territory ending with ‘our troops encountered no resistance from the Lebanese army’. In cooperation with the Israelis, the ISF stepped up its cordon around pro-Palestinian activists and the Lebanese army repeatedly bombed the Palestinian refugee camps across the country, taking turns with the Israelis. ‘Unless we accept carrying arms, we do not belong here. Rivers of blood are going to gush across this country, and soon,’ Adnan prophesied to my horrified ears. We shelved our visions of a life together in Lebanon and grudgingly packed our bags for what was being touted as the new Eldorado: the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi.

* * * We moved to Abu Dhabi in September 1974 adamantly insisting we would never be swayed by material temptation to stay away from our beloved Lebanon for longer than a couple of years. Despite the increasing tensions, Lebanon’s playfulness, beauty and joie de vivre surpassed the rest of the Arab countries. Abu Dhabi was still a stretch of barren desert so desolate, so hot and so humid that even the poorest of the Bedouin tribes had shunned it. We stepped into Abu Dhabi at the same time as its new-found oil wealth and Sheikh Zayed, its new ruler. The desert statelet did not yet have sidewalks. Rats ran boldly among towering piles of garbage. Goats wandered in the parking spaces of the ministries, chewing contentedly on any paper folders or mail-bags forgotten outside the buildings. What rain fell, no matter how meagre, became a carwashing fest for taxi drivers in pools of muddy water that gathered in the poorly drained streets and empty lots. We were there to run a bookstore recently opened by my brotherin-law Tahseen, a flamboyant, sharp-as-nails businessman. Tahseen had 160

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instantly jumped at the opportunity of extending his publishing and printing business in Kuwait to the fledgling emirate, where bookstores were almost non-existent. His bookstore, All Prints, was the only one of substance in Abu Dhabi, and the run on the bookstore from the intellectually starved professionals putting Abu Dhabi together was more than the available labour could answer to. As well as being a bookstore, All Prints was the only distributor in the area of newspapers and periodicals from around the world and therefore an important outlet for expatriates, predominantly French, English, Egyptian and Sudanese military advisors and professionals – all avid readers. It would be another ten years before five- and six-star hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, air-conditioned shopping malls and beach clubs would crop up throughout the Gulf emirates. We arrived to find it in the same chaotic, jumbled state of transition that the remainder of the sheikdom was in. All Prints’ two main pillars were an old Coptic Egyptian clerk, Saadallah (a determinedly confirmed bachelor) and Hilda, a plump, cheerful Indian secretary from Goa. The salesmen and drivers were an international collection from Baluchistan, Palestine, Jordan, Yemen, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The difficulty with this mix of employees was that they all hated one another personally, religiously and politically. The only two who got along were Saadallah and Hilda. They attended the same Indian social centre and its Friday night dances. I was twenty-three and Adnan twenty-eight, and we were in charge of employees who were twice our age and who, save for Saadallah and Hilda, made it no secret they were less than overwhelmed by our fresh-faced entrée into their lives. More daunting than the international tangle among our personnel was the appallingly chaotic state All Prints was in. Boxes of stationery covered in thick layers of dust and teetering towers of paperbacks swayed precariously on whatever floor and shelf space was free. Well-fed cockroaches and mice had the run of the place. The customers were desperate enough for reading material to forgo dignity and squat with legs akimbo while they sorted through piles of paperbacks in English, French and Arabic. Hilda and Saadallah had an ‘office’ at the back of the bookstore. A stool and a school desk were provided for Saadallah to do his accounts. Hilda had a three-legged desk (her knee providing the fourth) to do her typing, one hand on the keys, the other to keep the typewriter from slipping to the floor. We dived in head first (literally in some sections of the store) to turn the bookstore into a bookstore, prodding a very reluctant staff who 161

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had been quite comfortable with the non-work they were being paid for. It was the cleaning that got on everyone’s nerves. They’d been doing fine, they could be overheard grousing as they slapped a dirty rag back and forth across a counter. So why were we insisting on making them do what they regarded to be outside of their job description? Adnan and I plunged in, hoping to set an example and lure them into action. Naturally we ended up doing most of the work. On one of those early days of putting the shop in order, Adnan walked in with a group of book publishers to introduce them to me as I was in charge of ordering the books in English (and French, which I barely understood). I popped out dishevelled and dust-covered from under a shelf of stationery that I had just begun to negotiate. Before I could say a word, I heard Adnan, turning slightly in my direction with a warning but ever so polite nod, apologetically inform his guests, while standing next to me, that he couldn’t find his wife, who must have gone to walk the dog. Everyone in Abu Dhabi came to our bookstore. The global collection of humanity that had congregated in this tiny but loaded emirate was staggering. Abu Dhabi nationals visited our bookstore with falcons perched on their arms, fearsome even with the hand-stitched leather hoods that covered the birds’ piercing eyes. Other more benign locals came asking for pens that wrote English! Ambassadors, office boys, doctors, lawyers, janitors, urban planners, telephone operators, house helpers, the top brass of Abu Dhabi’s brand new army on loan from Pakistan, Sudan, Jordan and Egypt, rubbed shoulders in our bookstore as everyone partook equally in the common pursuit of the written word. Despite the physically challenging work we undertook (Adnan woke up every morning at 3 a.m. to get the newspapers personally from the airport to keep them from being sold to rival newspaper distributors by our own employees), it was an exciting time to be in the Gulf. Most importantly, Abu Dhabi was not Saudi Arabia. It had a wise ‘open door’ policy for any potential entrepreneur, a blank slate for anyone who wanted to have a go at striking it rich. The modest hotels were overwhelmed with demand for rooms. Businessmen decked out in suit and tie asleep on sofas in the lobby became a common sight. The sofas went for a fee, of course. And those who had found a sofa to sleep on considered themselves fortunate among the rush of hopefuls landing in droves in this desert oil bonanza of opportunity. The prospects for success were infinite, as Abu Dhabi had nothing but money and needed everything. 162

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Lucrative deals abounded as Abu Dhabi acquired everything – from traffic lights to supermarkets, uniforms for the army, navy and police, and desks for them to sit behind – for the first time. A cacophony of construction surrounded us as government ministries, palaces for the sheikhs, villa compounds for the expatriates, school buildings, apartment high rises and, of course, floods of five-star hotels went up. The building crane began to be referred to as Abu Dhabi’s national bird. Streets were paved and, at long last, we had sidewalks. Buildings sprouted at unbelievable speed in lots that had been empty seemingly the day before. Architects from around the world had carte blanche from the yet unsophisticated nouveau riche Bedouin owners to embellish the streets of Abu Dhabi with whatever design ideas they desired. It became commonplace to see Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Cadillacs filled to capacity with wives, helpers and children in the front seats, and goats placidly chewing their cuds in the back, where they lay on bales of alfalfa recently bought from the market. Abu Dhabi’s security personnel were a hastily put-together hodgepodge of impoverished Omanis, Baluchis and Pakistanis, poorly qualified and poorly outfitted. We watched parades celebrating Sheikh Zayed’s ascension to the throne. The army in those early years was a confusion of arms and legs that rose and fell in utter disharmony to an equally disharmonious band. We had two soldiers from this army on sentry duty outside a government ministry next door to our apartment. They played cards during the day and when we went to bed so did they. Then one night, we heard the unmistakable pop of a gunshot. Rushing to the balcony we saw one of the guards prostrate on the ground with his partner desperately trying to revive him. Adnan ran down in his pyjamas to assist in what way he could. He reached the guard lying face down on the sidewalk, his hand still clutching his aged rifle, while his partner forgot any Arabic he knew with the emergency at hand and panicked in Baluchi. Adnan gingerly felt for injuries in the tiny guard’s body dressed in a uniform five sizes too big for him, then turned him over for any stomach injuries, while a crowd from the neighbouring apartments gathered silently. As he cradled the guard’s head in his arms, the man opened his eyes, took one look at the crowd and Adnan, and shut them tight again with a groan of embarrassment. His blunderbuss had accidentally fired while he was cleaning it and he had fainted from shock. To give credit where it’s due, Sheikh Zayed was a wise leader for his tiny emirate. With the lucid Bedouin sense of reality, he had no illusions 163

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concerning the weight of his power internationally. He concentrated on what power he did have and with his endless budget set about making Abu Dhabi as accommodating and beautiful as possible for his people and those who came to find their fortune. He remained dedicated to his people, and as he grew richer so did they. The majority of those with an Abu Dhabi nationality came from Oman, but that was not an important factor; Abu Dhabi was a part of Oman before the English sliced it off for its oil and unpopulated swaths of desert. The distribution of wealth remained even-handed, tribal traditions remained strong and women played a visible role. Women were recruited as passport officials and police officers, encouraged to open their own businesses, and to be as educated as they aspired to be without censor, so long as they remained respectful of their family’s values and the norms of Islam. Raised in a world of plenty, the young Abu Dhabians, male and female, grew into respectful, soft-spoken, slim and graceful adults with large soulful eyes and an ingrained Bedouin commonsense about life matters, but far more naïve than the old Abu Dhabians, who were as sharp as their beloved falcons. Our landlord, Meezar al Suweidi, was one of the old Abu Dhabians who had grown up with Sheikh Zayed, fought with and against the British, and was now a tremendously wealthy real estate landowner. But he still wore his three-quarter-length thobe and carried his slippers under his arms when he didn’t need to wear them outside of government ministries, and addressed Sheikh Zayed and every man he met by his first name. His sons kissed his hand respectfully before they spoke to him and were the epitome of graciousness. They were all educated and occupied important government positions. Old habits die hard and Meezar’s biggest gag was bumming cigarettes from anyone smoking around him. They were always two, one in his mouth and the other behind his ear. Another successful joke involved cash that could never pass hands in his presence without making a disappearing act into his front pocket as he took advantage of its rightful owners by pointing to an imaginary distraction. There were no barbed-wire-fence-surrounded communities, as in the Aramco oil camps. Those in Abu Dhabi and the other nearby emirates of Bahrain, Dubai, Sharjah, Um el Guwein and Ras al Khaima minded their own business, literally. Sheikh Zayed did not lose his throne when girls in sundresses walked along the Corniche and revellers 164

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drank to their hearts’ content. International decree prevented Saudi Arabia from forbidding such liberties in the emirates. Why were religious extremists given so much power over the people of Saudi Arabia and why were they curtailed in the emirates even though both peoples shared the same Islamic conservative values and traditions, and both lacked control over their country’s oil politics? It lay with the al Sa’uds and their fear of losing control of Saudi Arabia. The ruling family was all too aware of the question in every Muslim’s mind over their legitimacy as rulers over Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Abu Dhabi and the Gulf emirates were based on the same tribal structure as Saudi Arabia but that was the only common ground they shared. The emirates developed so differently from Saudi Arabia because they were not Wahhabi. They followed the traditional conservative Muslim Sunni beliefs within tightly knit extended families, and as long as Arab and Muslim mores were observed, modernity and progress were accepted by elders of the family. There was plenty for everyone. Fountains and public gardens sprouted everywhere as Sheikh Zayed developed a particular love affair with water and greenery. This was especially interesting to Adnan and turned out to be our pot of gold as he focused his attention on the ‘greening’ of Abu Dhabi, leaving the daily responsibility of running the bookstore to me now that it was finally running smoothly. Our days were full but we never forgot our promise to ourselves that we would go back to Lebanon in the very near future.

* * * We were driving home to Abu Dhabi City from the desert oasis of al Ain on 9 February 1975, four months after we had left Lebanon, when a newsflash interrupted the regular radio programme. Adnan hurriedly stopped the car at the side of the road to make sure he caught every word. The announcer read the headline: Ma’arouf Saad has been shot. Clamping his hands on his face, Adnan let out a grief-stricken moan. Mr Ma’arouf Saad, the magnetic former mayor of Sidon, had been hit by a bullet that seemed to come from nowhere as he led Sidon’s fishermen in a peaceful protest march against a planned fishing monopoly by a powerful Christian Maronite and former president of the republic, Camille Chamoun. The bullet came from a Lebanese ISF sharpshooter, 165

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which crumpled Ma’arouf Saad to the ground in full view of a horrified Lebanese public watching the evening news. He died nine days later. Adnan’s heart broke over the loss of his boyhood hero, whom he regarded as the only humane and reasoned voice in the babble of the shark-infested Lebanese political scene. The people of Sidon completely lost control in their grief and rage. Massive anti-government demonstrations by Palestinians and Lebanese took place on the streets of Sidon, and the Lebanese army sharpshooters kept on shooting. Nineteen people died and ninety-one were wounded. Tension jumped from a shaken Sidon in late March to Tripoli where it exploded in bloody clashes between Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and the Lebanese army. Adnan’s predicted ‘rivers of blood’ gushed forth with a vengeance. Militant extremists from opposite sides of the Israeli–Palestinian issue took their positions in the Lebanese arena in preparation for a mad killing spree. Many site the bullet that killed Ma’arouf Saad as the spark that ignited Lebanon’s civil war. Alongside 9 February 1975 is another date marked as the formal beginning of the Lebanese civil war, 13 April 1975, depending on which side is debating the issue. On this day, Pierre Gemayel was consecrating a local church in Ain Rummaneh, a poor Christian neighbourhood, when shots were fired, again seemingly from nowhere, killing his bodyguard. At the sound of the first bullet in Pierre Gemayel’s direction, the Phalange militia, armed and simmering, snapped into action, fanning out up and down the street, itching for revenge. A city bus filled with Palestinian refugees haplessly trundled into the ambush on its scheduled routine. Twenty-seven Palestinian men, women and children were killed at point-blank range. News of the shooting spread at lightning speed throughout Beirut, where tensions were already high, to armed and simmering members of the Palestinian and Lebanese pro-Palestinian militias, who raced to pre-designated battle stations on street corners and rooftops all over the city. Many previous shootouts had taken place between the Phalange, the government forces and the Palestinians. Some say the attempted assassination on Pierre Gemayel was in retaliation for the shooting of two Palestinians at a Maronite roadblock the preceding week (whose memorial service the Palestinians on the ill-fated bus had just attended). There is an ironic Arabic saying Adnan likes to repeat that seems fitting here concerning what sparked the civil war: ‘The reasons are many but the death is one.’ 166

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The rivers of blood were held back temporarily in a quick-fix ceasefire in July 1975 and a lot of wishful thinking. Beaches filled with sunbathers, traffic jammed the streets and restaurants overflowed with holiday-makers. The incumbent prime minister, Rashid Karami expressed similar wishful thinking when he announced the ‘all clear’ signal. Most preferred to ignore the signs that all was not clear, despite the swimmers who sunbathed on Lebanon’s placid shores while remaining firmly attached to their machine guns or the militiamen who strutted about openly, armed to the teeth. What most preferred to see was that the militias had dismantled the barricades, and had removed the bags of sand and cement blocks. But what no one wanted openly to admit was that these barricades still remained very much there in everyone’s mental vision of the ‘other’. Throughout that ‘peaceful summer’ the protagonists continued to stockpile weaponry which arrived at a steady pace via all the deep sea ports along Lebanon’s coast and overland through Syria. Some weapons came courtesy of the Zionists, some courtesy of Libya, some from Iraq, and still others from the United States and the Soviet Union. Most were funded by Saudi Arabia through its agent, a billionaire businessman from Sidon, Rafik Hariri, who would eventually become Lebanon’s longest-reigning post-war prime minister and most powerful. No one outside the militias gave the weapon stockpiling any weight, sweeping away any thought of war from their field of vision. ‘Just sabre rattling,’ was everyone’s hope against hope – myself and Adnan included. We actually spent part of our summer holiday that July with my in-laws who had rented a beautiful old house deep in the Chouf Mountains in a village called Souk el Gharb. Souk el Gharb was still untouched by the war. We could revert to life as we knew it amongst runaway jumbles of orange and pink bougainvillea that spilled over low-lying garden walls. We took leisurely walks along old cobblestone pathways that meandered among clusters of white limestone houses smothered with fragrant jasmine and fat pink roses. We settled back on our exclusive perch above the city and relaxed in the soft breeze of the mountain’s evenings. Aromatic and cool, the summer mountain breeze wove its hypnotic magic on us as we gazed at a view that changed colour with every variation of light and cloud. The village commanded a striking view overlooking all of Beirut, its airport, its seaport and the mountains beyond. Sadly, this quiet village of Orthodox Christians and Druze who whiled away their evenings in communal harmony playing cards would 167

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not survive the war. Its breathtaking sweep over the coastal terrain, the mountains and the city of Beirut was exactly what the warring factions needed to control the capital and particularly the Palestinian refugee camps that sprawled around its airport. But that would come five years into the war. For now, the battles were halted, a truce had been signed and a new cabinet was assigned with the main goal of restoring security. Although people still hurried home when night fell, during the day life was continued as usual. We convinced ourselves that war was at bay and made plans for some badly needed R&R in Europe. On the day before our trip to Europe, I discovered that I was pregnant. We were ecstatic, but none more so than Im Bashar, who immediately asked me not to travel. It was non-negotiable for me; how could travel upset a pregnancy? More important, planning and saving for this visit to Europe was what had kept us going during our gruelling hours of hard work in Abu Dhabi, and the trip was a treat we were not ready to drop. So, against Im Bashar’s advice, we travelled to Italy. Two weeks later Adnan and I returned to a quiet Beirut. All seemed well with Lebanon but it was not with me. On the last leg of our trip in Florence, I had lost the baby. I was rushed to a hospital run by nuns, who gave information on a need-to-know basis in Italian, a language we did not yet understand. What we did understand was that I was to remain hospitalized until the nuns decided I was well enough to travel. Maybe they were right to insist on such caution, but we were not about to spend the rest of the summer locked up in a hospital room (Adnan had insisted on staying with me). So we slipped out after paying what was to be ‘the first instalment’ of our stay and flew immediately back to Im Bashar’s capable hands. She was gracious enough to remind me (gently) only once to listen closely to the advice of those older and more experienced in the future. I took her words to heart and they would be the mainstay of my sanity in the difficult years awaiting us. On 28 August 1975, we were booked to return to Abu Dhabi. Still feeling weak, my mother-in-law convinced me to stay while I regained my strength, so Adnan reluctantly said goodbye and returned to attend to important business. His trip to the airport was through a bustling city filled to capacity with summer visitors. But as his MEA flight took off, Beirut imploded. The civil war thundered at breakneck speed from the northern city of Tripoli, consuming Beirut. His flight’s wheels were barely inside 168

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the carriage when mortar shells landed on the airport, killing a pilot and co-pilot as they waited in their cockpit on an MEA flight to Jeddah. An ill-fated traveller at the front of the passenger bus just minutes away from the airplane was also killed. It was madness, all-out war. As the fighting engulfed the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Palestinian camps and all roads leading to the airport, the Phalange forces launched a furious mortar attack on downtown Beirut, its commercial centre where all of its banks with their towering piles of gold reserves were lined up grandly on Bank Street. That day of 17 September 1975, when blood and gore and gold bullion mixed with twisted ideology, organized crime and just plain stupidity, was the day that Beirut died. We watched in breathless horror from our eagle’s nest as the battles blazed below in a macabre display of fireworks, made all the brighter in the clear summer night air as they devoured the city’s heart. What words can I use to express what we felt? Disbelief? Naked vulnerability? Rage? Torment? Panic? Disorientation? Revulsion? A heavy unshakeable weight clamped down on our shoulders while we sobbed at the nightmare burning below. That night, my health took a sudden turn for the worse. My miscarriage in Italy had not been handled properly and I was overcome with sharp jabs of pain and a raging fever. My sister-in-law, Bushra, awoke to my moans at dawn, took one look at my condition, bundled me into the car, and sped southwards towards Sidon, as yet unscathed by the civil war. A schoolfriend of hers owned a hospital across the street from her parent’s home. ‘We’re just going to get his opinion, Fadia. If I don’t feel convinced, we’re going to Beirut no matter what.’ I was too wracked with pain to answer but prayed silently that some miracle would confine our trip to Sidon. The doctor examined me and I hit the roof from pain. That did it. We were back in the car, this time speeding northwards down a frighteningly empty highway in the direction of the American University Hospital, the best hospital in the Middle East and a five-minute walk from the centre of the battle zone. Bushra’s daring gamble to heal me is sealed in my heart with eternal gratitude. To grasp the depth of Bushra’s bravery, I must explain my sister-in-law. Bushra never needed to lift a finger throughout her pampered life. Her parents doted on her and her brothers outdid one another in showering her with gifts. Although she had a younger married sister, Malak, it was Bushra as the eldest daughter who reigned in my husband’s family. Now she was hurtling with me towards an active combat zone in order to save my life. 169

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For the first time in our experience of Lebanese roads, there was no traffic; just terrifying empty silence. Then a jeep suddenly appeared careering towards us, zig-zagging wildly from side to side with a grenade launcher strapped to its back. Clinging to it from all sides were young men decked in sleeveless vests and the outfits of their favourite war movie characters, their heads wrapped in red and black strips of cloth with bullet belts criss-crossing their chests and several machine guns apiece hanging from their shoulders. The reason for their wild driving became frighteningly clear when the deadly pinnngg of a sniper’s bullet bounced off our car. ‘Shit!’ my sister-in-law screamed. ‘Get down, Fadia! Get down!’ I slid to the bottom of the car and she did too, guiding the steering wheel with the tips of her fingers, her eyes barely above the dashboard. We turned to check each other out, when simultaneously and shockingly we were hopelessly overcome with laughter. Tears streamed down our cheeks as we mutually grasped the folly of our circumstance and the unreal get-up of the young fighters-to-be. We locked eyes briefly with the militiamen as they sped past us staring slack-jawed at what possibly surpassed the joke of their war costumes. There we were, two petrified women, one dressed to the nines, the other in a dressing gown, our heads barely visible over the dashboard, laughing madly while racing at breakneck speed towards a battle zone ten minutes away. Bushra drove up to the emergency centre of the American University Hospital (AUH) at the same time as an onslaught of dead and wounded from the battle for downtown Beirut and its port. Fully armed militiamen accompanied their wounded comrades, raising the situation to a highly charged danger level as they met at the emergency ward’s doors with opposing militiamen and their wounded comrades. Curses, shoves and cocked machine guns caused more casualties at the entrance of the emergency ward. The helpless medical staff caught in the middle struggled to maintain a professional calm in a desperate attempt to save lives as battle-crazed militia shot wildly, demanding immediate medical attention for their wounded. My gregarious sister-in-law had friends in the hospital who promptly paged my doctor, a childhood friend of the Khayyats. One of the best and brightest of the Lebanese medical profession and one of the few intrepid doctors who hung on grimly at the hospital, Dr Karam Karam came running in our direction in a blood-spattered white coat, ordering four sturdy nurses to fall in behind him. Gingerly, he helped 170

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me out of the car, where Bushra had left me to do her reconnaissance work, and guided me to a gurney in a far corner of the emergency ward. One quick look at the source of my pain was all he needed to decide to operate on the spot. I found out soon enough that the four sturdy nurses were Dr Karam’s necessary alternative to an anesthetic. The rapidly dwindling supply of painkillers was saved for the miserable souls pouring in by the minute. Dr Karam softly apologized for the pain I would endure but he had no other choice. At a signal from the doctor, the nurses took their positions and pinned me down sympathetically but firmly as he deftly dealt with the source of my agony. My cry of pain was lost among the exponentially more desperate screams and wails of the young men strewn all over the hospital’s sidewalks and corridors. That ‘flash’ of time remains permanently embedded in my memory – sirens wailing, men cursing, bullets flying, mortar shells crashing and the pale face of Bushra standing helplessly in the shadows of my corner of the emergency ward. Then it was all over. I had mercifully fainted, and came to as I was being trundled into the eerily dark and empty obstetrics ward. Bushra was appointed as my head nurse as all hands were needed for the tragedies unfolding in the emergency ward. In the darkened ward Bushra, myself and Fadia Tarraf (a close friend of Bushra’s who had been stranded in her office as the battles had cut her off from her home in Ashrafiyeh, the traditionally Christian sector of old Beirut) waited as I slowly came too. Eventually Bushra kissed me goodnight and left with Fadia; there was nowhere for them to sleep in my room and I was stable. I lay in my bed staring silently out the window, a square of pitch-black night, listening to the insanity of people killing and people dying. It did not feel real. This was not how I imagined my first pregnancy. There was nothing to distract me from the ugliness surrounding me. Where was my mother and why was I alone without her? I yearned to hear her comfort me with her unshakeable belief in fate. I imagined her small shrug and rueful smile while she gently smoothed my hair, consoling me. I heard her words in my head that what had happened was meant to happen, that it would all pass, that it was God’s will, as she had quietly told me during our agonizing wait for Fatin and Marwan in Maidstone. That day was in a far-away world, another world that had been so full of hope and love, a world that now seemed unreal, dreamlike. I lay on my hospital bed removed from my present in darkened solitude while butchery and screaming violence took place outside my window. 171

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I was jolted from my fitful sleep at dawn the following morning by a thundering explosion that came from the direction of the sea a five-minute walk from the hospital. I did not expect to survive, thinking that the hospital had been the target. My sister-in-law Bushra rushed in, her face as white as a sheet. ‘A charter plane has crashed into the sea just over the Corniche,’ she whispered, desperately trying not to panic. It was widely rumoured but never absolutely verified that the gold bullion stolen from the banks in downtown Beirut was being smuggled out of the country on that plane, and it was shot down by those who also claimed it. Mafias were already hard at work stoking the fires of this indiscriminating war. There was no stopping the killing. My period of convalescence at AUH became involuntarily longer than necessary as we waited for a truce long enough to ensure our safe passage home. But my stay was put to good use by the AUB Medical School’s professors. A few days into my recuperation I discovered I had been turned into a live model for lectures on emergency measures in a war zone. Daily, a group of young students trooped into my room behind their professor, who acknowledged my humanness with a curt perfunctory greeting before launching into a detailed description of the methods Dr Karam was forced to apply to heal what was a small but potentially life-threatening health problem. As he pointed to particularly important details on my person, the medical students jostled to have a better look while attentively following their professor’s explanations. I tried to look as wooden as possible as I thought to myself over and over, ‘This too shall pass.’ At long last, a two-day ceasefire took hold. It was payday and the guns fell silent. Adnan, who had flown back to Beirut on the first flight in, was finally able to reach me in my hospital room, where he found me dressed, packed and ready to shut the door firmly behind me in a desperate gesture to lock away all that had transpired. We drove through a silent city shrouded by war. The devil-may-care vibrancy of Beirut had vanished. The guns were silent but this time the city’s inhabitants had no illusions of peace. There were no vendors selling their wares, no housewives gossiping from balcony to sidewalk, no horns blaring, no traffic on the streets and no children’s laughter. Pedestrians moved wordlessly, keeping close to the protective walls of buildings, hunched over their jerry cans of water, flashlights in hand. They bought whatever foodstuffs they could find in the few stores that dared to open, 172

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their heads down, fearful of arousing the unpredictable wrath of the trigger-happy gunmen who now owned the streets. The National Alliance militia lead by the Druze chieftain Kamal Jumblatt had won this battle against the Phalange Maronites … one battle down and twenty-five more years of battles to go.

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he absurdity being played out before us was painful to watch. One Arab country was being built at a mad pace by both Arab and foreign hands, as another was being torn apart at an equally mad pace by the same Arab and foreign hands. Adnan’s predictions for Lebanon proved sadly all too true; the war became more and more monstrous with each passing day as it fed on itself, sprouting a confusion of tentacles that choked everyone and everything in its path. What is sadder yet is that the self-serving politics that led to the intolerable and unnecessary bloodshed of Lebanon’s civil war would remain entrenched in Lebanon’s psyche through the sons of those who sparked the conflagration. Allies turned against one another, and then became allies once more. Each warring faction without exception had a turn of being friend and foe to the other. Generous benefactors from the neighbouring Arab one-party states stoked the fires as each party leader chose the side that would further his personal power. Their agents swarmed everywhere. Mercifully for my own well-being, it did not take me long to get pregnant again. When I entered the final trimester of my pregnancy, my parents-in-law were forced to leave their home after the Soviets, Americans, Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Iranians, Irish, Cubans and Palestinians clashed in every corner of the tiny country, literally leaving no stone unturned. My parents-in-law’s arrival brought the number of adults waiting for my baby up to six, an event that became both an occasion of joy and a 175

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very welcome distraction. With Im Bashar, Abu Bashar, Bushra, Tahseen, Adnan and I all focusing on my delivery, the developments of my pregnancy naturally became communal ones and with each week that passed the anticipation heightened. Any trip to the bathroom (which increased with each passing day) would trip the alarm that I might be ready to have my (our) baby. I would end up ensconced, as they gathered chattering excitedly outside the door for news. I would finally emerge to face their animated, expectant faces, squeak ‘not yet’ and dash in flaming embarrassment to my room. I began to dread going to the bathroom as my due date came closer, and particularly when I became overdue. So it was for more reasons than just having my baby that I was ecstatic when my pains finally came. Abu Bashar, Im Bashar, Bushra, Adnan and I headed for Rashid Hospital in Dubai, the best in the area, with Bushra driving the 160 kilometres as Adnan could not trust his nerves. We arrived at the hospital reception desk, the entire extended family of six jovial adults carrying our luggage, and asked for my doctor and a room. A formidable-looking Indian head nurse met us unsmilingly, ordered me to be whisked into the labour room and asked my in-laws and husband to leave. Looks of disbelief gripped our faces; they were not going anywhere, my in-laws told her. Impassively she informed them they would be contacted after I had given birth and gave them the visiting hours. This, predictably, did not go down well. Adnan, having been warned of the strictness of the British-run hospital, realized there was no use in arguing and turned to leave. Not so Bushra or Im Bashar, who couldn’t bring themselves to let me face the trials of having my first baby alone. They put up a fight to stay next to me. The Indian head nurse fought back. She had the final word and Im Bashar and Bushra were banished from the hospital premises. They left, but the moment they reached their hotel room Bushra was on the phone demanding to speak to me, to the head administrator, to my obstetrician … and to anyone who she could catch to try to force them to allow her to be with me while I was in labour. She made that day a very difficult one for the maternity hospital. Meanwhile, I lay in an empty room with a single window to my right where I could see only the cloudless sky. A large round clock with a minute hand ticked away on the wall in front of me. I was ordered to count the minutes between my contractions, and no television was provided to detract me from concentrating. No phone calls were passed to me. And that’s how I spent 176

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the next sixteen painful hours watching the minute hand move minute by tortuous minute. The baby was ready to arrive and I was at last released from my mind-bending solitary confinement. I was wheeled in absolute joy at my freedom from that clock into the birthing room. The Indian head nurse, Indian midwife and two (smiling) Indian nurses awaited me. As I was wheeled into position I was suddenly overcome by what seemed to be a gigantic pincer grasping my back. No one had had the heart to warn me how painful childbirth would be. While I struggled to regain my breath, the Indian midwife who had been receiving Bushra’s hate calls went into an angry monologue about the arguments she’d had with my sisterin-law as she mechanically prepared me for the birth. She was livid and needed to recount every word the two of them had exchanged, stopping only to demand an opinion from me. In between pants and soul-shattering cramps (I had breezily waved away any painkillers – before having the pain, of course), I tried to partake in the conversation as diplomatically as I could. After all, the midwife did have my life and my baby’s in her control. My English obstetrician walked in at the moment of birth and double waves of relief washed over me, one in getting closer to being with my baby and the other in having the midwife become otherwise occupied. Munira was born into the two smiling nurses’ arms. They held up my surprisingly plump, pink, furious baby, with a shock of black hair that stood in soft spikes all over her head, with her back towards me. Both politely ignored my repeated question concerning my baby’s gender: ‘Girl? Boy? Girl? Boy?’ While one laid the baby tenderly on my stomach upside down, the other patted my cheeks with a cool cloth, but neither answered my question. With the prevalent pressure in the Arab world to have sons, it was hospital regulations not to reveal the sex of the baby to protect the mother from possible complications should her disappointment be strong enough to interrupt the birthing process. My first rush of mother love and bonding was directed at the tiny delicate pink soles of my baby’s feet. I fell in love with my baby daughter before knowing what sex she was and that is one of the wisest birthing customs I have ever come across for our part of the world. Bathed and wrapped, but still protesting furiously, Munira was carried to her father, who had spent the hour and a half of his daughter’s birth standing forlornly outside the door under the watchful eye of two 177

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alert Filipino nurses. It was unheard of back then that a father could or even wanted to attend the birth of his child. The two watch nurses ran into the labour room giggling, to relay Adnan’s first meeting with his baby to me. ‘Madame, he just looked and looked at her. Then, Madame, he started to speak to her. He introduced himself and said, “Munira, I am your father Adnan. I love your spirit and I love your hairstyle. You’re beautiful, Munira, and I’m proud that you will carry my mother’s name.’ I was wheeled into my cool, darkened room. I did not feel my bed. I did not feel any of the discomfort of having just given birth. I was enveloped by a profound sense of accomplishment and floating on a soft cloud of euphoria. I was a mother to a daughter. A pretty young Indian nurse appeared at the door with a freshly bathed and wrapped Munira lying contentedly in her bassinet, her hair standing straight up and her large oval eyes wide open. I looked with wonder at my tightly bundled little girl, trying to grasp the concept of being a mother. I meant to ask if I could hold Munira but blurted instead, ‘Is she mine?’ The nurse laughed heartily, ‘Yes, Mrs Khayyat, she’s your very own daughter,’ as she carried her from the bassinet and placed her expertly in my arms. ‘Here,’ she told me still laughing, ‘Relax. You will know what to do. Just follow your instincts. You’re her mother.’ Adnan walked in and sat down uncharacteristically silent, at a loss for words for the first time in his life. And he remained silent while we gazed at Munira, who eventually tired of us and fell asleep. I wanted a perfect world for my perfect baby’s life. So I wrote in her baby book under ‘Events of the day on her birth day’: ‘A peace treaty has been signed and this time it seems definite.’ Why did she have to suffer for being born Lebanese and have unhappy entries in her baby book just because she happened to be born at this point in her country’s history? I resented the intrusion of the civil war into my baby’s life. I did not mention that the Maronite Phalange forces had attacked the Tal el Za’atar Palestinian refugee camp north of Beirut because it commanded the main road from Beirut towards the Christian heartland, killing 600 Palestinians, Kurds and Lebanese poor and leaving 200,000 homeless; or that in revenge for Tel el Za’atar, the Palestinians with Syrian Palestinian forces had attacked the Christian-populated southern coastal towns of Damour and Jiyeh, killing 500 and displacing 5,000; nor did I mention that Beirut was now formally divided between West and East under the security of the Syrians. The peace I had mentioned was under the auspices 178

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of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt and the USA, and a 30,000 Arab Deterrent Force in what would turn into a failed mission to keep the peace. How I wished I could wave away the ugliness of war from our baby’s life as easily as I could keep it out of her baby book. We clung to Im Bashar, listening to her voice of reason and hope. She had the joie de vivre and daring of youth, feared no one and spoke her mind freely. Im Bashar never railed against circumstance; I never heard any statement remotely close to ‘woe is me’. What she could not prevent, she accepted and made the best of, whatever was to evolve. Im Bashar was a woman of spirit who was never impeded by age or infirmity in her zest for life. She met each and every challenge head on and attempted to exit with as much justice delivered as she could manage. Her mantra throughout the war was that right must prevail, that those fighting for freedom from occupation could only come out as victors. On an airplane trip back to Beirut from Europe during a relatively quiet patch of the civil war, an incident that encapsulated Im Bashar’s fierce patriotic resolve was played out. On board with us was a Lebanese soccer team from Sidon, young men who were returning from travelling abroad for the first time in their lives. They had stayed away from Lebanon longer than intended due to fighting over control of the airport road. Now they were on their way home and could not contain their joy. As the Middle East Airline airplane dipped into its usual sweep over the city before touching land, the soccer team got up en masse from one side of the airplane to the other to catch their first ever glimpse of Beirut from the air. The sudden shift in weight seriously upset the equilibrium of the airplane. While we grasped our lurching seats, the co-pilot rushed out from his cabin yelling urgently for everyone to go back to their seats. The head stewardess put in her own two bits and yelled at them to shut up and buckle up. They obediently sat down and buckled up, but were unable to shut up. It was impossible for them to contain their excitement at returning home and they broke into song with the words of Lebanon’s favourite singer Feyrouz’s nostalgic salute to embattled Beirut. The same stewardess reappeared from first class, her face screwed into a paroxysm of elitist rage, and furiously stamped her foot. ‘You are disturbing other passengers!’ she screamed, pointedly referring to the first-class passengers. We were sitting right behind her in the first-class compartment. I watched Im Bashar, who had been observing the stewardess with a baleful eye, resenting her by the minute. As the 179

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stewardess turned to smile at us in triumph, Im Bashar unsmilingly picked up her cane and moved the separating curtain aside. She looked piercingly at the young men, who sat upright under her stare like schoolboys. ‘SING!’ she commanded the young men, to an outbreak of song and applause from the other passengers as well as the soccer team.

* * * We celebrated Munira’s first birthday on 12 October 1977 in Sidon at her grandmother’s request. The weather was cool and crisp, the battles had subsided and the Sidonians were living life as normally as possible with the ongoing civil war. Every household had jerry cans to fill with water when fighting erupted, candles to light when the electricity was sabotaged and plenty of bread to lessen the chances when out shopping of turning into unnecessary target practice for snipers. Surrounding my in-laws’ apartment were olive groves and orange orchards. We never had a problem with the extended family’s children running underfoot when the weather was fair. They would ramble through the olive groves, climbing trees and paddling in the shallow brook that meandered through, and return red-cheeked and happy, clutching bouquets of bright poppies, delicate daisies and grass. When it rained we managed to enjoy a cup of coffee in peace by sending them down to hang out in the shop at the entrance to the building, a treasure chest of sugary treats and small plastic toys run by a Maronite villager, Tanios. On the day before Munira’s birthday, Nicola, one of Tanios’s son who was also a congenial, energetic employee in our bookstore in Abu Dhabi, invited us to his grandfather’s house for lunch in the nearby village of Bramiyeh. Im Bashar uncharacteristically agreed to accept the invitation and accompany us. She liked Nicola and his grandfather, although she had some reservations about Tanios. She knew the family well. They were descendants of the Maronites who had fled the Druze massacre during the 1860 civil war. As our car turned into the curve of the hilltop stone-covered house belonging to Nicola’s grandfather, Abu Tanios, he stood up to welcome us, honoured that Im Bashar had joined us. We were led to his sun-dappled patio under a grapevine trellis packed with clusters of mouthwatering purple grapes, and Im Bashar was given the place of honour in the centre of a flowery-covered divan. Nicola’s grandmother came bustling out of 180

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the kitchen, kissing us all and repeating her warm welcome, ‘Ahlan ahlan bil hilween, tsharraffna.’ (‘Welcome, welcome, with the beautiful ones, we are honoured.’) An endless array of Lebanese mezza, delicacies of rural cuisine, appeared one after the other, varied and rich and labourintensive in their preparation. Short, plump and pleasant-faced, Nicola’s grandparents were the picture of Lebanese exuberance and hospitality. Abu Tanios proudly took us around his small orchard crowded with orange trees, apple trees, almond trees and tangerines. Then he led us to his pièce de résistance, two ancient clay jars that reached the height of a full-grown man. ‘These khabias are my babies,’ he told me proudly, patting them lovingly. ‘We store our olive oil in one and our drinking water in the other, where it remains cooler than it would in the refrigerator. They’ve been in our family for many many generations, handed down from father to son. My grandparents fled the mountain during the “events” of 1860 with nothing but these two ‘khabias’ on the back of their donkey. My father’s dying words to me were to look after his khabias and make sure they were passed on to my children.’ ‘They are his one link to his past,’ Nicola commented, laughing affectionately over his grandfather’s love for the khabias. ‘Tehteh [Grandma] has serious competition in his heart with those khabias!’ Im Bashar was up at dawn the following morning with Munira at her side (also an early riser). I listened contentedly to their voices laughing and talking against the whir of the juice machine in preparation for a lavish breakfast. Squeezing oranges was an honoured rite of passage for every young grandchild and Im Bashar’s chance for a ‘one on one’ she so enjoyed with each child. By noon, the extended family was extended even further with the neighbours and their children. A three-tiered birthday cake was brought in and Munira and all sixteen children present blew out the solitary candle several times with loud applause and laughter as we gathered happily around a table groaning with the food prepared by Im Bashar and her Palestinian helper, Ameenah. After lunch we clapped and danced to the catchy rhythm of the Tanios boys Khaled, Massoud and Dodo’s dirbakeh (a hand-held drum played by rapid rhythmic finger tapping) while Munira tore through her presents, glancing briefly at the toys and hugged the pretty wrapping paper. Meanwhile, far in the distance, the dull thunder of cannons on the hills continued their deadly pounding, keeping the civil war and Israel firmly in everyone’s mind in Lebanon. 181

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The beauty of life is particularly striking in times of war. Munira was life celebrated. She began each day in the wee hours of the morning with the joyous announcement ‘I woke up!’ We loved children and Munira’s entry into our lives made us love children all the more. We decided to go ahead with our plans for a large family, war or no war. Our son Amer was born on 24 May 1978 in Abu Dhabi at the Corniche Hospital; this time Adnan was in the labour room with me. As our sleepy, unexpectedly golden-haired son was laid in my arms, Adnan thanked my obstetrician profusely for his little boy. Dr John, a no-nonsense Indian from Kerala, glanced at him with a rare smile: ‘Don’t thank me; your wife did all the work.’ As was to be my custom, I mentioned none of the civil war’s events in Amer’s baby book. Our serene baby son was named ‘Amer’ by Bushra in a plea to the Heavens to stop the war in Lebanon. ‘Amer’ is a wish Arabs give to one another for a home blessed with peace, harmony and achievement. Amer’s birth year was the year of Ariel Sharon’s scorched-earth invasion of the south. On 31 March, Sharon invaded, allegedly to clear out 7,000 PLO commandos across the Zionist border but in reality to make a grab for Lebanon’s Litani River and divert its waters to Israel. He occupied one third of Lebanon’s territory, rich farmland and villages surrounding the Litani, killing 700 and uprooted 160,000 Shiite villagers, in the process sending them in panic and chaos into Sidon. When Sidon’s government ministries, schools and sidewalks were filled to capacity, they continued on into Beirut, already a highly polarized city, a smouldering tinder box that was unprepared for the overwhelming numbers of refugees. Sharon made it clear that he had every intention of settling down solidly in the south but international pressures forced him to withdraw under Security Council Resolution 425. The United Nations Interim Forces Lebanon (UNIFIL) arrived to observe the withdrawal. On 24 May 1978, the day Amer was born, Sharon finally withdrew, but not before formally handing over twenty-three key positions spread across Lebanon’s south to Sa’ad Haddad, a renegade Maronite officer from the Lebanese Army who took command of Israel’s proxy army, the South Lebanese Army (SLA) ostensibly to keep out Palestinian infiltrators. The Israeli/SLA controlled enclave was declared the ‘State of Free Lebanon’ where no UNIFIL, Arab Deterrent Forces or Lebanese Army could enter, but Israel could. 182

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The SLA replaced the Israeli guns with theirs on the hilltops surrounding Sidon and continued the policy of spreading terror amongst the civilians, using random shelling as a daily bloody reminder of who controlled the south. Sa’ad Haddad and his guns became the source of nightmares for our children as they grew up. Nothing was scarier in their world than Sa’ad Haddad. It would take twenty-two bloody years before UN Resolution 425 would be implemented, not through UNIFIL, but through a homegrown Lebanese resistance, Hizbollah, stirred into being by none other than Sharon and his ‘scorched earth’ strategy.

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t the first streak of dawn, Muslims around the world turned on their televisions and radios to listen to King Khalid lead the morning prayers. Instead, the radio and television audience and 50,000 worshippers gathered in the courtyard of the Haram of the Great Mosque of Mecca became a captive audience to Juheiman Ibn Mohammed Ibn Saif al ‘Utaybi, an ex-National Guardsman and a Wahhabi Bedouin from the powerful ‘Utaybi tribe, direct descendants of the Ikhwan, who had barricaded himself within the Haram’s walls with hundreds of Muwahhidun Muslims. King Khalid, spotted preparing for the morning prayers, was bundled away by his security in the blink of an eye. Juheiman had one demand: to cleanse Arabia from the corrupt al Sa’uds and their foreign lackeys. He declared his brother-in-law, Mohammed Ibn Abdullah al Qahtani, a member of another powerful tribe, to be the promised Mehdi, the saviour who would bring justice to the Islamic world. Juheiman’s chilling pronouncement of the arrival of the Mehdi was the most serious challenge to the al Sa’uds since the Ikhwan’s jihad against Ibn Sa’ud in 1929. Yet more threatening for the al Sa’uds was that ammunition for the rebel Wahhabis had been transported to the mosque by members of the National Guard, the private protectors of the royal family, in National Guard trucks. Where better to strike the al Sa’uds than at the heart of their claim to legitimacy to rule over Arabia and its oil fields? 185

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Seizing thirty random hostages from the crowd of worshippers, the rebels retreated to the massive underground labyrinth of the Haram where they had stored a vast supply of ammunition, dates and water and vowed to fight against the al Sa’uds to the last man. The shaken al Sa’uds ordered their ulema, protectors of their rule and of their oil, to come up immediately with a fatwa that would give the al Sa’uds Islamic cover for an attack on the House of God by Muslims against Muslims. Obediently, the ulema promptly issued a fatwa against Juhayman for committing ‘ignoble crimes and an act of atheism in the House of God’. A jihad was declared against the ‘atheists’. The Muslim world immediately saw through the hastily declared fatwa that provided an excuse to protect the al Sa’uds rather than Islam. Furious Muslims worldwide demonstrated violently outside American embassies and American interests, and held the USA responsible for the events in Mecca. The fighting against Juheiman and his men continued to rage for fifteen days around the Haram without any signs of abating. The majority of the soldiers were firing into the air, not at the insurgents. Sector after sector of the Saudi army began to desert the al Sa’uds and join Juheiman’s forces. The soldiers that remained laid down their arms and refused orders to attack. Those fighting with Juheiman now outnumbered those following the ulema’s orders. In complete panic and terror, the al Sa’uds, omnipotent caretakers of the two holy shrines, ordered in Special French Commandos to retake the Haram. Adding insult to injury, the French Special Forces were given permission to land in Mecca and ordered to start combat before any ulema could be hauled back in to issue a covering fatwa permitting Christians to battle devout Muslims in Islam’s holiest mosque. It was only after Juheiman and his rebels ran out of ammunition that they were overpowered on 4 December 1979. 117 insurgents had been killed along with a dozen of their hostages in the onslaught of the French soldiers. The official death toll was 127 soldiers dead with 461 injured, but everyone knew the figures were much higher. Juheiman was dragged out and paraded, head held high and defiant. The Wahhabi insurgents comprised a group of highly educated and sophisticated logistical planners from a mixture of nationalities including: forty-four Saudis, seven Egyptians, six from the People’s Republic of Yemen, three Kuwaitis, one Sudanese, one Iraqi, and one from the Arab Republic of Yemen. Charged as atheists, Juheiman and his men were sentenced 186

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to death. Sixty-eight heads rolled on 9 January 1980 in an execution extravaganza held across the country in carefully selected hot spots for all to see what happened to those who challenged not Islam, but the al Sa’uds. We were relieved that Abu Dhabi was so safe and uneventful. Everyone kept their politics to themselves. Politics belonged in the homelands. To most of its population, Abu Dhabi was a long-distance commute, a place where people did their jobs. Once they accomplished their goals, they returned home, leaving nothing behind by way of culture or history, just their vacated villas that were refilled in record time. Our Abu Dhabi lives revolved around our business and our rapidly increasing family. Of course, and always, the Lebanese civil war’s highs and lows coloured our own highs and lows. Adnan and I had planned to have a large family. We both loved children and Abu Dhabi’s bland, predictable lifestyle was just the perfect, secure backdrop for raising babies. Two years after Amer’s birth, I became pregnant with our third baby. And that year, 1980, Abu Dhabi ceased to be the terra firma we had taken for granted. Fate was not going to hand us uneventful birthdates for our children, no matter how hard we tried to outwit it. In mid-September 1980, two months before my due date, war broke out between Iraq and Iran across the Persian Gulf, just a half-hour flight away from Abu Dhabi. Iraq, serving as the USA’s proxy in its eternal push for oil supremacy, attacked Iran in the mistaken belief that Iran’s political disarray after the 1979 Islamic Revolution would guarantee a quick victory. At the first exchange of hostilities between Iraq and Iran, foreign ships cropped up in the seas around the Arabian Peninsula to protect Arabia’s oil fields. American, French, British and Austrian flags were raised on willing Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil carriers to hide them from Iranian jet fighters. We wondered rhetorically to one another, ‘Why did the Arab ships need such Western protection when they spent the biggest chunks of their budgets on the latest technology in weaponry?’ The declaration of war turned Abu Dhabi into a ghost town as no one wanted to be a martyr from the war, including the nationals. Just to be on the safe side, Adnan and I decided to have our baby, which was due in November, in Sidon – ironically the least combat-ridden of choices around us, and the calmest it had been since the civil war had broken 187

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out in 1975. We had our third child on 8 November 1980, a son we named after my brother Ghassan. We and the rest of Abu Dhabi flew back in when it became clear that the red line for the proxy war between the Cold War’s superpowers encircled Iraqis and Iranis only. Matters quickly settled back to normal and I felt blessed to have a chance to lead a humdrum, predictable life.

* * * Ghassan had just turned a year old and was at the height of discovering his gymnastic abilities (which allowed him to reach previously unreachable shelf heights and open the door to disappear on to the street) when I discovered I was pregnant again. This time the pregnancy was unplanned and this time it was with twins. Putting the challenges of suddenly having five children under the age of six to one side, we had to deal with the more pressing issue of where to have them. Abu Dhabi’s hospitals had taken a serious nosedive after the population explosion among the newly affluent nationals and expatriates had stretched the health services to capacity. Lebanon was out of the question altogether, as everyone was at everyone else’s throat with a vengeance once more. We mulled the possibilities over and over until Providence sent us an answer through a close English friend Peter Snow. He told us in no uncertain terms over lunch that we should settle in Graz in Austria, ‘a peaceful heaven on earth’ in his words. And Graz was everything he described: a beautiful garden city in southern Austria with ten universities and the cleanest air and water in Europe. Alas, despite having found our safe haven, the war was not going to allow us to have our babies in peace. It was 1982 and the civil war was worsening in Lebanon, reaching indescribable levels of death and destruction. One bloody event led to another until they all rose into one gargantuan bloody crescendo with the second Ariel Sharon-led invasion of Lebanon on 13 April 1982. Code named ‘Peace for Galilee’, it was a pre-planned invasion, activated on the pretext of the assassination of Israel’s ambassador to England by Syrian-backed Palestinians. Again, Sharon’s excuse for his second invasion was rooting out the PLO. My parents-in-law arrived in Abu Dhabi, escaping the Zionist invasion of Sidon by a hair’s breadth. Both were in a state of shock of living to witness the occupation of their city. 188

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Typically, Im Bashar had absolute faith in the Sidonians’ ability to regain their city. Abu Bashar remained uncharacteristically quiet, speaking little, eating even less. He was unable to accept his beloved Sidon under Israeli occupation. The twinkle in his eye and dry humour were replaced with a sadness I had never seen in my father-in-law before. We tried everything to help Abu Bashar regain his zest for life and when he expressed the desire to travel with us, we packed up and flew to Austria earlier than planned. Bushra was already there, having offered to furnish our new country house ten minutes from Graz in the tiny village of Niederschockl, a village that abounded with flower-bedecked houses and cows grazing placidly in stretches of brilliant green pasture. As the days passed, Abu Bashar seemed to improve amidst the tranquility and beauty that surrounded us. As we sat outside our new summer home watching the children play with our spitz, Thatchy (she had the same biting habit as Margaret Thatcher), I asked him hopefully, ‘Are you happy here?’ ‘It doesn’t compare to the view of the olive groves, orange orchards and the sea that we have from our balcony,’ he answered wistfully. Sensing my disappointment at his answer, he patting my hand kindly. ‘This is beautiful too, Fadia. The Austrians are lucky. They have already had their wars.’ Unable to shake off the vision of his fellow Sidonians baking in the hot sun on Sidon’s beach for three days under the orders of the IDF invaders who had rounded every able-bodied man from sixteen to sixty for interrogation, and unable to accept the deafening silence from the rest of the Arab world’s leaders over Lebanon’s invasion and occupation, Abu Bashar stopped wanting to live any longer. His dream that one day a strong nationalist movement would overcome those who collaborated with the enemy against his country’s sanctity was not happening. The Sidon that he knew and the Lebanon he had been a part of was no more. We were having our after-dinner tea one evening when he put down his untouched drink and announced he was going to bed, as though on a mission. ‘Stay with us awhile, Abu Bashar; it’s still early for sleeping,’ Im Bashar coaxed gently. He replied, without looking back as he continued resolutely in the direction of his bedroom, ‘Ya reit ya [I wish] Im Bashar, but I need to sleep. How I wish from the depths of my heart to be transported to my bed in Sidon to sleep there forever; my heart cannot take any more pain.’ And after that revelation, Abu Bashar stopped eating. Im Bashar tried to cajole him in every manner possible, 189

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but he was adamant. No food was going to go down his throat until he went home to Sidon. She even sent his favourite grilled-cheese sandwiches with Munira and Amer. ‘Eat, Jiddo, you’ll grow big and strong,’ they would entreat him earnestly as they raised the sandwich to his mouth. He would take the sandwich graciously, smiling at his grandchildren’s heartfelt concern, and would actually take a bite to humour them, but as soon as they left the room he would turn in his bed to face the wall, determined not to face life any longer. Sharon’s invasion had a far bigger agenda than merely rooting out the PLO after the number of the invading Israeli soldiers ballooned to 80,000. His aim was to establish a new status quo in Lebanon by creating a permanent 40-kilometre-deep buffer zone under Israeli control and its proxy Lebanese milita, and to set up a government sympathetic with Israel. They laid siege to Beirut, cutting off water and food with hundreds of bombing sorties on the city to pressure the PLO to leave the city. They demolished whole apartment blocks in their raids, their bombs exploding deep inside each building, pancaking thousands of tons of concrete floors, balconies and stairways on to their inhabitants. On 23 August, while he sat outside in the mid-morning sun, Abu Bashar heard the news of Bashir Gemayel’s election as President on the shortwave radio that never left his hands. To Abu Bashar Bashir Gemayel represented capitulation to Israeli domination. He called out to us urgently in distress while we were indoors preparing lunch: ‘This is it, I will never see Sidon again. The Israelis will not leave until they have destroyed every vestige of civility in Lebanon. The violence and occupation by the Zionists will not stop here.’ On 28 August, the PLO was formally evacuated from the port of Beirut to Tunis; multinational forces were called in to protect the men, women and children who remained behind in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. Ariel Sharon refused to vacate a key position in West Beirut that overlooked Sabra and Chatila with the insistence that, despite the formal exodus of the PLO militants, not all of the fighters had been deported. He refused to leave his post until the last fighter was handed in to the Lebanese Forces, the militant arm of the Phalange. Sharon solemnly pledged that no unarmed Palestinian refugee would be harmed on his watch. The bright ray of sunshine that summer of 1982 was the birth of our twin daughters, Yasmine and Rola on 9 September. This time it was not only Adnan accompanying me in the birthing room, but Im Bashar 190

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as well. The midwife rolled in two lace-covered cribs and left them next to me, side by side with a pale blue velvet pyjama folded neatly in each one. I had chosen the traditional boy colour in deference to my motherin-law’s preference, after we had been informed that the sonogram showed two identical boys. As the first baby entered the world, Im Bashar raised her hands to the heavens. ‘Allahuakbar [God is great],’ she exclaimed. ‘Thank you God for this beautiful baby boy!’ It was actually a beautiful baby girl, Yasmine. To state the obvious, the interpretation of the sonogram was wrong. I heard Adnan asking the doctor softly, ‘Madchen [girl], no?’ The obstetrician sheepishly grunted and I shut my eyes tight, pretending I’d passed out from the painkiller. I could not bear to see Im Bashar’s disappointment. Although Munira was the apple of her eye, Im Bashar couldn’t help it; she loved the idea of baby boys being born. And she still wasn’t about to give up hope; after all, there was another baby coming. Two and a half minutes later our second baby girl, Rola, was born and laid gently in the adjoining crib to Yasmine who turned solemnly to have a look at her sister. Moreover, they were fraternal twins; the one placenta that had indicated identical twins in the sonogram had actually been two merged placentas. Who would have thought a sonogram could be so wrong? After our daughters’ birth, Abu Bashar perked up noticeably and we heaved a sigh of relief when he asked for a toasted cheese sandwich. Yet, our relief at Abu Bashar’s turn for the better was short-lived. On 14 September 1982, Bashir Gemayel was blown up. Abu Bashar did not celebrate the event; he waved away the news wearily as just more senseless violence and repeated what he always believed: ‘Violence only begets more violence.’ He started to demand to go home. His sons respected his wish, sadly facing the reality that their father was preparing for his death. Abu Bashar’s health began to deteriorate rapidly and speedy arrangements were made for his return home. I was unable to accompany them; one of my twin daughters, Yasmine, had developed an alarming case of septicaemia and had been whisked to the new-born intensive-care department. Abu Bashar had been very concerned for his tiny granddaughter sleeping alone away from us in the hospital and had asked about her constantly. ‘Who does she look like?’ ‘Are they looking after her well?’ ‘Is she improving?’ ‘When will she come home?’ ‘I wish I had the strength to visit her.’ On 16 September 1982, I bade farewell to the 191

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kindest, most gracious man in my life, a father I loved dearly. Abu Bashar apologized to me for leaving me alone and for not being able to visit his sick granddaughter in hospital. I gave him one last hug, painfully aware of the finality of it as I felt how thin and frail he had become. When the taxi taking them to the airport was no longer visible, I turned back into the house with Rola in my arms and Ghassan toddling behind me. Feeling a need to hear voices, I turned on the television. Ghassan climbed on to my lap sensing my sadness, and sat quietly in a rare gesture of empathy, while I aimlessly switched from one station to the next. Suddenly, a newsflash appeared in German, and flickering before me on the television screen was the scene of the Sabra and Chatila massacre of Palestinian refugees at the hands of Phalange militiamen. Crazed with grief, women wailed and men sobbed as they milled around a long line of shrouded bloodied bodies while their children stared mutely at the camera and at the signs of violent death around them. I could only think inanely while I tried to absorb the sheer magnitude of evil and horror displayed in graphic detail before me. Mercifully, there would be no access to television or radio or newspapers for my father-in-law that day. The first stop for Abu Bashar, Im Bashar, Bushra, Adnan, Munira and Amer was Abu Dhabi to make arrangements to enter Lebanon through special contacts via Syria. Abu Bashar’s sons and daughter were desperate to make sure he had no access to any television, radio or newspaper – no small feat. Five days after arriving in Abu Dhabi, Abu Bashar suffered a minor heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. Thankfully, he survived it but was kept in hospital for observation. Adnan called me with intense relief that his father seemed to have turned a corner health-wise and some colour had returned to his face. ‘He’s still as sharp as ever,’ Adnan told me happily, ‘He’s himself again and has already managed to give his doctor a piece of his mind.’ His doctor, a jovial Egyptian, was reassuring Abu Bashar about his health. ‘You’re a spring chicken again. Get well soon so we can go to the Hajj together.’ Abu Bashar had straightened up, removed his oxygen mask and, with the old familiar twinkle in his eyes, retorted in his customary defiance of tradition, ‘I’ll save my energy for more entertaining events. I’m afraid you’ll have to go without me.’ This was the indication Adnan and his mother needed to feel that all would be right with Abu Bashar. He still had the ability to shock. The following morning, on 24 September, at a moment when Abu Bashar was alone and wide awake, with Im Bashar, Bushra and Adnan 192

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on the way for visiting hours, a nurse turned on the TV to entertain Abu Bashar and left. On the screen before his horrified eyes was a replay of the Sabra and Chatila massacre. He saw in grisly detail amidst the smouldering ruins of their shacks the bloated bodies of young men shot with their arms tied behind their backs, the sprawling bodies of old men next to their canes caught in flight, pregnant women and mothers with their dead children under their bodies in failed attempts to protect them, babies shot in the head while suckling at their mother’s breast and dead grandmothers still clutching their Lebanese IDs, all in failed attempts to stay alive. My father-in-law went into irreversible cardiac arrest despite the oxygen mask over his mouth. It was ‘code blue’ as the doctors and nurses rushed to his side, just as Im Bashar, Adnan, Hassan and Bushra were arriving. While the unattended television continued to relate the massacre, frantic attempts were underway to resuscitate Abu Bashar. Im Bashar turned to the television and saw what Abu Bashar had seen. She knew instantly that this was the end for her husband and friend of fifty-two years. He had seen the horrors on television and had irrevocably given up the fight to live. She began to recite the Koran as a gesture to God of her acceptance of His will and asked Abu Bashar to give his blessings to his children and grandchildren, who she named before his tortured soul made its escape from an ugly world he could no longer face. In one final breath, my father-in-law opened his eyes and breathed, ‘Allah yirda ‘alayhun kullhun [God bless them all],’ and laid himself in peace.

* * * It was Abu Bashar’s express desire to be buried in Sidon, and Adnan and his brothers were determined to carry out his wish, occupation or no occupation. Chartering a private plane, they flew with Im Bashar and Bushra to Damascus. An influential Syrian Alawite neighbour, Buthaina As’ad (a pretty young dentist married to a childhood Lebanese friend of the Khayyats, Jawdat Dada), waited for them at Damascus Airport ready to smooth what obstacles might arise. She guided them successfully through the Syrian Lebanese borders on into Lebanon. There was a loophole in the red lines drawn between the Syrians and the Israelis that allowed them to enter Lebanon through Buthaina’s connections. Passage 193

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through the Syrian border went smoothly. Now they had to negotiate their way past the Israeli checkpoints within Lebanon. Their convoy was halted well within the Lebanese borders by an Israeli military checkpoint at Sofar overlooking the Beka’a Valley, the same spot where Fatin and I had had our magical encounter with snow. The coffin and my husband and his family’s grief-stricken faces said it all, but the Phalangist manning the checkpoint with the Israelis chose to ignore the gravity of their circumstance. He gave a harsh disrespectful order that the coffin be opened to check its contents, glancing behind for approval from the Israeli officer in command. What he never expected was the invective that rained upon him from Im Bashar: ‘Your dirty hands will not tarnish my husband’s coffin. My husband is a Lebanese nationalist. He lived for his country and he died for his country, and he will lay to rest in his country. He was a patriot, unlike you … you despicable traitor.’ She seemed to have hit a nerve as, to everyone’s surprise and the Maronite’s dismay, the Israeli officer overrode his order and waved them on. How difficult it was for them to enter Occupied Sidon. The streets were empty; checkpoints were at ten metres distance from one another, and a silent miserable pall had gagged this noisy city. Throughout the week-long ceremony for Abu Bashar, men and women sobbed over the loss of this gentle, dignified man who had never found any point in war, preferring the power of the written word and debate instead. The written word counted for nothing now. Any thought of co-habitation among confessions had become buried by Arab collaborators and the calculating foreign policy of the superpowers. A simple fellow whom Im Bashar had raised from infancy, Ali Majjaj, recounted to me many months later the days of the Israeli occupation of Sidon as he had experienced them. With the rest of his rounded men, he had endured three days on the beach crouched on his haunches with his hands on his head while the Israelis processed them one by one, taking away those suspected of sympathy with the PLO. Ali Majjaj’s turn came up with four other Sidonians. It was usually easy to figure Ali Majjaj out, but the Israelis underestimated the defiance that exists in the simplest to the most complex of Lebanese when cornered. The Israeli interrogator, who spoke Arabic, started with Ali first. ‘What is your name?’ Ali gave it to him. ‘Do you know any mukharribbeen [terrorists, the Israeli name for the fedayeen] here among you?’ Ali answered sneeringly, ‘Even if I did, do you really think I’d tell you?’ Ali’s facial expression changed to 194

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one of horror at the memory of what happened next, ‘The Israeli picks up this huge piece of wood with rusty nails in it and slams it into my back, and he asks again, “Do you know any mukharribbeen here?” I thought to myself, “I’m going to have a hell of a time recuperating from my injury from that damned piece of wood he’s waving around,” so I answered, “No, I’m just a poor peddler who sells vegetables; I don’t have time for anything else.” And I was saved from another whack, and you know what? That beach was teeming with Sidonians who fought with the PLO. The man next to me refused to be humiliated by the arrogant Israeli interrogator, and before the son-of-a-bitch could begin his interrogation, he looked at the Israeli square in the eye and spat into it. They killed him on the spot. They did not know he wanted to die a martyr and that they had realized his wish. He was a Sidonian fighter with the PLO.’ The resistance to the Israeli occupiers of Sidon was already beginning in small spurts and starts. Housewives with shopping bags filled with vegetables, and children playing on street corners, signalled with a backward wave of their hand to young Palestinian and Sidonian men of any approaching Israeli troops, who were hauling in men and boys based on their age. Sheikh Salim, the mufti who had written our marriage contract, had refused to meet the Israeli occupiers when they commanded the elders to convene a meeting with them, and had been placed under house arrest. Sheikh Salim went down in Sidonian lore of patriotism as he rebuked Amin Gemayel, Bashir’s brother, for pandering to the Israeli occupation on a first visit to Sidon by a Lebanese president, with a line from a poem by a venerated Pan-Arab Egyptian poet, Ahmed Shawki: ‘Freedom’s door can only be knocked by the hand that is covered with the blood of sacrifice.’ There were many unsung heroes, young men not affiliated to any political party who turned into suicide bombers and hit-and-run attackers in reaction to the occupation of their city and who were pivotal in driving the Israelis out of Sidon to contain their losses. Once the occupation ended, those Sidonians who had become informers for the enemy received their retribution from other Sidonians ‘who never forget’, as Adnan had once described them long ago.

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After Abu Bashar’s death, the Khayyats were submitted to a long stretch of personal tragedy. Adnan’s older brother Hassan, a quiet man with a wry sense of humour and a heart of gold, died in a freak car accident along the desert highway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi just eight months after Abu Bashar passed away. He left behind a vivacious young widow, Mona, barely thirty years old, two spirited young daughters Nadine (twelve) and Zeina (ten), and a much fêted baby son Bashar, who had not yet turned two. Under the guidance of the most bereaved of us all, Im Bashar, we rallied around Mona and her children in a fiercely protective and loving circle. Sadness was everywhere, both for those inside Lebanon or for Lebanese around the world, and it was hard not to become resigned to it as our fate.

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10 War and Dreams '( wo years after the Israeli invasion of 1982, promises of peace were made and the fighting suddenly stopped under the purported protection of multinational forces which had been hastily brought back in a quick attempt to cover the disaster that had befallen Lebanon and the Palestinian refugees. The news was that the warlords had drawn clear lines of demarcation throughout Lebanon and that from now on negotiations would be carried out on paper only. We chose to believe the hype and with stars in our eyes, gave the go-ahead for construction to begin of our dream home in Doha, a hilly suburb, south of Beirut, a nature reserve where peacocks and deer ran free. Tahseen had already bought a beautiful house there in 1976 from an American couple who had chosen this spot to pursue their art and photography. It had been a very difficult decision for the couple to sell their home, but they were old and had seen enough of the civil war to read the end of Lebanon as they knew it, at least within their lifetime. We had visited Tahseen frequently in his new home and had found it a peaceful, neutral spot in contrast to the chaos of the divided capital. Our architect promised us that we could move into our dream home in no more than six months time and we had taken his word for it. On 18 September 1984, we bade farewell to staid, predictable Abu Dhabi, where tomorrow was pretty much the same as yesterday and took the plunge back into Lebanon. When it comes to love and country, reason flies out the door. Now I look back and wonder, ‘What were we thinking?’ Actually, we weren’t

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thinking, we were dreaming. Never mind that they were dreams made of gossamer fluff, we jumped in anyway with our trademark determination to make our dreams become reality. From day one in our rented villa across the street from the construction site of our new home, it was crystal clear that the Israeli invasion had put an end to Doha’s raison d’etre. All that remained of Doha were large empty ransacked villas. Tahseen’s family and ours were the only homes where children played, music blared and calls could be heard for meal times. Our children and Tahseen’s merged into one extended family, eating, playing, arguing and studying together, the one bright spot of promise in the dismal war-torn suburb. Overgrown vines and thorn bushes had reclaimed the once landscaped gardens; wild dogs howled all night and a bevy of abandoned housecats quickly zoned in on our house as a steady source of food. Outside our two homes, Doha was a ghost town, empty of its original inhabitants. It was now under the watchful eye of its new inhabitants, displaced southern Lebanese families who looked after the dream homes that had died before they had a chance to live. Our temporary home was an accurate reflection of the events of the war. Originally it had been lovingly designed by an artistically inclined Maronite Lebanese architect as a weekend retreat where he could entertain Lebanese style with al fresco mezza spreads in the summer and spring amidst sweet-smelling jasmine and gardenias. A boisterous vivid red bougainvillea covered the length of the wrought iron fence that encircled the villa. Within the cool interior of the house was a circular sunk-in seating arrangement covered with Persian carpets, soft silk floor cushions and a brick fireplace for fondue nights in the winter. The owner was the kind who insisted on leaving cobwebs because they added to the oneness with nature that he wanted his summer retreat to reflect. Tenacious vines of ivy that covered the outer stone walls were invited inside through small openings he made near the ceiling to expose pieces of the sky when he was indoors. The entire Mediterranean flora was present in his garden: in addition to jasmine and gardenias there were pink roses, orange and tangerine trees, pine trees and a wondrous camellia that took centre stage in the front garden. Originally built to look like a Swiss chalet, the entrée had been left to soar to the roof. The entrance was overlooked by a half-floor, with a fireplace flanked by two wall-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, where the owner used to read or survey 198

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his garden through floor-to-ceiling French windows in winter and from a wide, curved balcony that they opened onto in fair weather. Alas, in 1975, just three years after he moved into his dream house, the civil war crashed into his little heaven when he became the targeted religion in this particular area. He panicked and, overnight, sold the house for a song, packed up and fled. Its new owner, a staid Muslim Sunni from Beirut, altered the house into a formal area with blanket disregard of what the original space was designed to express. He began by sealing off the open terrace that lured the front garden indoors through the French windows and turned it into a formal living room that no one could sit in as the poor workmanship allowed in blasts of cold air during winter. As for the open seating area where the fountain had gurgled and ivy had wound its way through small portlets near the high ceiling, that too was transformed into a second formal receiving area. A faux fireplace, composed of two truncated ornate plaster columns topped by a slab of black marble for a mantelpiece, was reduced to midget size where it stood against the soaring two-storey-high wall. Flanking the useless fireplace were two sets of highly uncomfortable Louis XVI sofa copies. A circular piece of wood covered the sunken fountain in the centre of the salon so no one would fall in during the blackouts. The space had all the charm of a vacuous government ministry. Standing in the middle of all this was a life-size plaster Venus de Milo that looked on morosely at the cacophony of interior design around it. Soon after he moved in, the new owner became so terrified of the war reaching him in Doha that he returned to live in Beirut and sold the villa to a Palestinian entrepreneur based in Saudi Arabia. In a Shakespearean twist, the Beiruti died when an incendiary mortar shell landed on his Beirut penthouse during a militia battle for turf and he suffered a heart attack. The villa’s Palestinian owner was not interested in living in his new purchase and the house remained boarded and forsaken until Israeli foot soldiers arrived to occupy it en route to invading Beirut on 6 June 1982. Pleased with its strategic position overlooking the city, airport and Palestinian camps, the 91st division’s task force commander, Major General Yekutiel Adam found Doha the ideal spot for reconnaissance in the siege of Beirut. He gave orders to requisition villas and hunker down until the rest of the invading troops, who were stuck in the infamous mother of all traffic jam of tanks and bulldozers along the 199

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Israeli–Lebanese border, caught up. The Palestinian’s villa was turned over to a troop of foot soldiers. Apparently it was a longer wait than the young men occupying our villa had expected, judging from the graffiti we came upon, scrawled in Hebrew on each and every wall expressing their boredom and homesickness. Boxes of unspent bullets were stored in what was known as the ‘cave’ of the villa, where its original owner had stored an extensive wine collection and held his weekend dancing parties. Major General Adam’s decision to wait in Doha was a fatal one. He became Israel’s highest ranking officer ever to die in combat. And part of the credit goes to Tahseen’s German shepherd, Bonny. The major general was stepping out of his jeep to move into Tahseen’s villa when Bonny barrelled towards him and sank her fangs into his thigh. The major general changed his mind about moving into the villa because of the bad karma generated by the attack. But not before his soldiers had ransacked the house, emptying it of everything valuable, and smeared their faeces on the beds and sofas in salute. Major General Adam’s next choice was the Zantout villa, brand new and not yet lived in by its owners. But he was unaware that it was also the choice of three Palestinian commandos on a reconnaissance mission on the movements of the Israeli army. Caught by surprise, the commandos managed to slip undetected into the basement while the 91st’s division command force’s six officers plus Adam moved in. When the Palestinian fighters realized who was sharing the villa with them, they made their move that night. It was a moonless night. Under cover of the darkness, they crept out of the basement and burst into the living room in a barrage of machine gun fire, killing Major General Adam and the Israeli officers with him as they sat on the balcony drinking and playing a game of cards. The commandos retreated to the basement where they kept the Israeli soldiers at bay until they ran out of ammunition. The IDF brought the house down on them, ordered the concierge of the villa next door – our gardener, Abu Ali, an old man from the south – to bury them and forbade their families to reclaim their sons for weeks. The construction of our new house proceeded in fits and starts. Actually there were more fits than starts as the labourers’ movements depended upon the confessional colour of the winning side in the street battles that erupted without warning in lawless Beirut. Although the Lebanese warlords and their militias were no longer under any visible 200

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hands of tutelage, they had bitten into the lucrative fruits of warmongering and were coveting one another’s territories. The battles for control over Lebanon and its trade routes that included West Beirut, the port areas, the southern coastal road, the inland routes that went through the mountains and the airport, were raging once more. The Shiite-controlled, Syrianbacked Amal militia, in control of most of the south and the southern suburbs of Beirut, began to push for total control over West Beirut. To accomplish this, they needed first to neutralize the Druze who were in control of West Beirut and the southern coastline and to subdue the Palestinians who were showing similar signs of hegemony over West Beirut. Amal ’s encroachment on the Druze militia’s turf in West Beirut triggered a new alliance between the Druze and the Palestinians against Amal. In brief, there was now a vile tangle for power amongst former comrades-in-arms against the Israeli enemy. We had unwittingly brought our children to witness the ugliest chapter of Lebanon’s war. Our labour force was composed of Palestinians, Syrians, Kurds, Armenians, and Lebanese Sunnis, Shiites, Druzes, and Orthodox Christians. This wide range meant there was always someone who couldn’t reach work because his confession’s number was up at flash checkpoints. The absent worker would hold up the rest because, as per Murphy’s Law, his job would need to be completed first (electrician before plasterer, plasterer before painter, etc.). We paid protection money for our truckloads of building material to a shuffle of militia members from each warring faction which took control over the checkpoints that pointed south at the fork in the road that led to Doha. Electricity was erratic and we used a car telephone in our home to connect to a group of bribed telephone operators for communication with the outside world. Our children moved within a narrow shuttle from Doha to their school near the airport road to their grandmother’s house in Sidon. They knew nothing else of Lebanon. Beirut was their school, Sidon was their grandmother’s home and Doha was their home; their cousins were their friends. For much of her early childhood, the words ‘cousin’ and ‘friend’ were one and the same word for Munira. Our toddling twin daughters were even more home-bound. Too young for school, their only contact with the real world were trips to the park or the supermarket or on our trips to Europe. Early one morning in 1984, a few months before the Israelis retreated from Sidon, a very old woman appeared at my door. ‘Please, please,’ 201

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she begged me, ‘please help me find my sons. I am Palestinian and I have not seen my sons since 1982 when the Israelis invaded. I have been searching for them for the past two years. Allah is merciful to me; He has not taken my sons. I have been told that they are still alive and are moving from one location to the next. They are good boys. I know who I have raised and they have never carried a weapon in their lives. Please can you lead me to them? I have been told they are working as plasterers in Doha, and your house is the only one going up here. No one would talk to me at the site. You’re a mother; you will understand.’ With tears streaming down both of our faces, we silently made our way to the construction site where I knew that two very quiet and diligent young Palestinian men had been working as plasterers and sleeping on the site for the past two weeks. And they were her sons. Sobs of relief escaped from her as they dropped what they were doing and ran to their mother, first kissing her hands before embracing her. She came to see them every day, laden with food and clothing, content to sit silently on a stool in their company while they worked. Not a word passed between us, as the less everyone knew the safer it was for all. When the two young finished their consigned work, they and their mother parted ways once more as they melted into the backdrop of the pointless Lebanese civil war. My introduction on how to deal with our new modus vivendi took place very soon after our arrival in Beirut. We were invited to dinner to friends of ours who were celebrating their wedding anniversary in Beirut. The situation was not very settled that day and deep rumblings of cannon fire could be heard intermittently in the distance. I was not yet the battle-seasoned Beiruti that most had become after ten years of civil war and the sound of a cap gun made me jump. So it was with some trepidation that I ventured out that evening. We walked into a festive room filled with wine, laughter, song and dance with live music from a troupe of musicians and singers. In the midst of the festivities, a gun battle broke out a few streets away between Amal and Hezbollah. Hezbollah was an opposing Shiite militia that had risen out of the ashes of Sharon’s ‘Peace for Galilee’. It rattled Amal with its superior organization, militancy and professionalism and its unwavering focus on the Israeli occupiers of the south rather than warmongering like the rest. Amal felt its power challenged and chose to stem the flow of Shiite young men attracted to Hezbollah by killing them. The staccato of Kalashnikov machine gun fire and the occasional crash of mortar shells 202

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from rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers seriously competed with the songs. The party continued in its gaiety without missing a beat and it was only I who wondered out loud, rather shamefacedly, ‘What’s going on?’ ‘They’re shooting at one another down the road. We’re not within their target range,’ the lady next to me answered smilingly as she as she patted my leg comfortingly and dived back into clapping and singing for the men and woman who were dancing. The party carried on into the early hours, and so did the shooting. Both decided to stop within minutes of one another, the militia picking up their dead and wounded and the partygoers their coats and hats, and all went home to rest before continuing the same irrational lifestyles that would continue for another fifteen years. Sick of fearing death every minute of their daily routines, the Beirutis developed homegrown and rather desperate early warning systems of predicting flash battles by studying the activity around them very closely. In many fortunate instances, rumours did accurately pinpoint the location of the battles-to-be: ‘Fi ‘alka [They’re going to tangle]’, and people stayed home. The alkas were never innocent spur-of-the-moment clashes. Rather, they were choreographed confrontations for turf, and victory depended on the surprise factor. An argument over right of way would accelerate into a full-blown gun battle in three minutes and the gunmen would run to their sandbagged battlements and start shooting. Too many would die in this inane war for no reason other than being in the way of a bullet. Weaponry meant for distances of kilometres were used against targets tens of metres away. Silencing the guns often went according to a well-written script and with well-versed actors. After a certain amount of shooting, one side either retreated from the area or held its ground, but in any case both sides would have gauged the strength of the other for future alkas and would be ready to stop shooting. A maskool (thug-in-charge) of a certain level of influence on both sides was brought from his house to the area of the mashkal (problem) by ‘neutral’ elements. He would force a junior maskool from each side to communicate with the other over walkie-talkies. Once an agreement to stop the shooting was reached, the two junior maskools would appear at each end of the alley-turned-battleground and walk to the middle where the important maskool would be standing amidst a retinue of sycophants. The junior maskools would shake hands and hug, giving the all-clear signal that declared the gun battle over as suddenly 203

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as it had begun. Meanwhile the ambulances would already be at their daily task of picking up bodies and body parts, and fire engines would be dousing flames of shattered homes and dreams. Much of our militia education came from our then driver, Mohammed Mzannar, an ex-Amal militiaman. With war came severe unemployment, and a large percentage of poor and uneducated young men found no other income outside the militias’ monthly stipend that was temptingly generous. Drugs were passed around freely to increase the killing potential of the inexperienced young boys, and atrocities were committed under the influence by otherwise decent men had they been born in times of peace. One of Mohammed’s comrades-in-arms’ favourite pastime while they whiled away the long hours in empty buildings waiting for the signal to start shooting: ghoulish contests of who could blow bigger holes into buildings on the ‘other side’ with their RPGs, or ‘RPG roulette’ as it was called. The high point of the game was to watch the walls collapse from the targeted building and expose terrified or dead apartment dwellers as they cowered under sinks or on stairwells. In those days of social turmoil, random destruction and triggerhappy militia men, one never knew what to expect to see on the streets. I was doing my grocery shopping one afternoon when two militia boys rushed past, yelling urgently into their walkie-talkies about some gun battle that had just broken out somewhere in West Beirut. One had three revolvers stuffed in his belt, and the other had two bullet belts criss-crossing his chest and two Kalashnikovs slung over his shoulders. Both were carrying a bouquet of red roses. It was Mother’s Day. In 1983, the USA formally became one of the factions fighting in Lebanon. It permanently lost its exalted role as arbiter after the US warship New Jersey lobbed a shell into the Chouf Mountains in support of the Phalanges militias and killed a Druze sheikh. In response to its impressive military action, omnipotent New Jersey was nicknamed the New Jursah (embarrassment) by the irrepressible Lebanese. This jursah was followed by yet another embarrassing but far bloodier failure: the CIA-funded car bomb targetting Hezbollah’s spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah, exploded in a southern suburb of Beirut, killing eighty civilians and missing Fadlallah by minutes. The USA’s might and power weighing in behind local supporters for Israeli control over Lebanon had the opposite effect of its intention to weaken those who resisted Israeli hegemony. Not having the necessary weaponry to retaliate 204

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in kind, young Shi’a, Sunni and Christian Orthodox men and women turned their bodies into mighty and powerful human bombs as they detonated themselves against Western and Israeli targets in Lebanon. Westerners began to be abducted in increasing numbers and our blonde children suddenly came under closer scrutiny than usual at checkpoints en route to school. They learned to speak only Arabic when the driver slowed down at the checkpoints. Irrespective of whether we had made the right decision to bring our children into the height of the civil war or not – and there was much heated discussion on this topic, mainly instigated by me in moments of frustration – we could not turn back. Adnan and I had become irreversibly committed. So I reverted to my time-honoured tactic of weaving a cocoon around our children’s world to keep the ugliness of the war in Lebanon out of their lives. We did not tell them the complete story of what was happening in their country. There was no religion in our house and they spent most of their early childhoods vaguely thinking they were Christian because of our frequent visits to various cathedrals on our trips to Europe and Adnan’s collection of Byzantine icons displayed throughout our house. Once they started school, they realized that everyone else had a religion, Muslim Sunni, Muslim Shiite, Druze, Christian Maronite, Christian Orthodox, Christian Protestant etc. My answer to their question of religion was always the same, ‘It doesn’t matter now, maybe it will later in your life, but not now, just be good.’ At some point they settled on being Muslim but weren’t too clear whether they were Sunni or Shiite. We left them to find their way. They were young and loved everyone. Why burden them with unnecessary hate? I carefully monitored their exposure to the media to exclude anything related to violence whether it was in movies, television programs or the evening news, particularly the evening news. The moment they heard the signature tune for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), the local television network, they knew that they had to be in bed or else. But it was like trying to hide behind one’s finger, as they always uncovered the truth. Children are far more attuned to the truth than adults. Six months after we moved back to Beirut, Amal began a long siege of Palestinian camps in southern Beirut and around Sidon to crush the Palestinian presence in Lebanon’s politics after it became apparent that Tunis-exiled PLO militants had reentered Beirut, regrouped, rearmed 205

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and were threatening Alawite Syrian hegemony over Lebanon. The Lebanese Preparatory School that our children attended was a street away from both the airport road and the Sabra and Chatila camps. The ‘War of the Camps’, between Amal and the Palestinians broke out at noon on a school day, when Adnan was in Abu Dhabi and I was alone in the house. I didn’t need to hear any radio news; I could clearly hear the rat-tat-tat of the artillery and the crashes of the mortars from my house. No matter which radio station I turned to, I heard nothing that eased my panic. Each radio station gave the slant that supported its side and if they had no vested interest, I got music and propaganda. I shut my eyes tight, trying very hard not to think the unthinkable, my knees buckling beneath me as my ears heard of battles raging around my children’s school with the injured and dead by the dozens and heavy artillery from all sides. I found myself running out of the house and dashing up and down the street, willing my children to be transported into my arms. I gasped for air from sheer anxiety and prayed in loud sobs to God to bring my children home safely. While I prayed and panicked, our driver had herded Munira, Amer, Ghassan and their cousin Bushra into the car and was speeding through a deadly gauntlet of indiscriminate fire as both sides let loose with all the weaponry they possessed. When the car finally crested the curve leading to the house, I collapsed to the sidewalk, numb with relief. They tumbled out of the car, wild-eyed and frantic, interrupting one another about being thrown into the car like bags of potatoes by Mzannar who had ordered them to bend over double in the car with their hands over their heads, and of the sound of bullets flying around their car. I could only stare blankly in a catatonic state of intense relief, with only one thought going round and round in my head: how right my mother was in her unshakeable belief in fate. Only such faith could keep one sane in insane moments like these. The children were running into the house still reliving their ride and cursing the Israelis for the shooting and I did not correct them. That evening, I stood with my eight-year-old daughter Munira and six-year-old son Amer on our terrace overlooking the southern entrance to Beirut where Sabra and Chatila lay and watched the battle below. Streaker bullets and artillery shells arched over our house from Amal ’s position around the camps below, crashing into the mountains behind us. Amal ’s shells were aimed at none other than Souk el Gharb, the tranquil village in which we had spent the last summer of 1975 206

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before Lebanon began to self-destruct. Its sweeping view of the coast from south to north had turned it into an artillery vantage point for the Druze and Palestinian fighters against the Alawite Syrians and Lebanese Shiites for control over Beirut. Amer, keeping his eyes straight ahead as he traced the path of the streaker bullets, declared heatedly, ‘Mom, I hate the Israelis, they’re killing our people.’ Munira turned to me wide-eyed and waited silently for my response. She knew that the case wasn’t so; she had heard snippets from Mzannar’s conversation with me. Oh no, I thought in panic to myself, what should I tell them? How could I word the truth without confusing them? These people fighting one another had been allies against the common enemy. And now one faction, Amal, was doing exactly to the Palestinians what the Zionists and the Maronites had wanted to do. If only Adnan were here. He had his mother’s knack for choosing words that made matters seem so much less disastrous. He was trapped in Abu Dhabi, trying desperately to join us through overland routes or sea as the airport was now officially closed and would remain so for another year. I had no choice but to tell it like it was. ‘These are not the Israelis this time,’ I answered quietly. Amer looked up at me, eyes round with astonishment, while Munira turned away and shut her eyes tight. ‘What do you mean? Who are they then?’ Amer demanded angrily. I chose my words carefully: ‘Some Lebanese with lots of guns who want to control everything that gives them more power and money are shooting at the Palestinians because they don’t want them to be stronger than they are. From the hills behind us other Lebanese have sided with the Palestinians to keep the Lebanese down there from winning.’ ‘Oh’ was their brief answer as they both turned back to gaze at the hellhole in front of them. Then with a deep sigh far older than his years, Amer shrugged his shoulders silently and walked slowly back into the house. Munira remained rooted on the terrace, fixated by the mortar shells as they exploded in a blinding white light below. I felt sick to my stomach with confusion. We had brought our children to Lebanon in a fit of patriotism to bring them up in their natural surroundings and have them identify with their people. All night the mortar shells continued to whistle and crash. Whoosh! Crash! Whoosh! Crash! I lay down on the bed at the feet of my sleeping children and began to count the dull thuds of the cannonballs from the mountains beyond the valley. How did we end up 207

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in such danger? The thud thud thud of the cannonballs became one with the beat of my heart as I drifted into an uneasy sleep. Car bomb assassinations and ethnic cleansing killed and maimed countless of innocents. The vestiges of community and decency as we knew them collapsed into abject apathy. Shopkeepers stopped dressing their dummies or replacing their broken glass façades. Once-grand buildings were reduced to pock-marked shells stripped down to their skeletal frames. Nonetheless they provided a place to sleep for the steadily increasing homeless from the south. Car windows were smashed so often from wayward bullets that owners strapped for cash stopped changing them altogether. It was no longer a strange sight to see a man with his elderly mother in a car bereft of windows wearing ski hats and goggles against the wind. Signs in elaborate Arabic calligraphy were posted on the entrance to government buildings, hospitals and public parks requesting all entrants to check in their guns at the door. Candles were the most important item to store in our homes. They replaced the erratic electricity that was more often off than on. For a modern touch, portable gas lights replaced the candle, their white glow a distinct memory for students during those dark days as they prepared for their diplomas and final exams. Gaily-coloured jerry cans in different categories of quality lined the kitchens in both rich and poor homes to keep everyone as clean and well hydrated as possible on days when the water supply shrank to a trickle or stopped altogether. As the years dragged on in internecine turf battles, water-drilling rigs began their rhythmic beats for artesian wells, and private diesel motors spewed their black smoke to supply electricity to hospitals, homes and blocks of apartment buildings as poor and rich alike gave up on their government and turned their homes into self-sustaining units. As is often the case, our children’s play reflected their reality. They spent long hours with their cousins and neighbouring children piling cement blocks one on top of the other to build a checkpoint in the middle of the street that ran past our house. They divided themselves into two groups: one group designated themselves ‘militiamen’ manning the checkpoint (the older ones); the rest (the younger ones) were designated ‘normal citizens’ passing through. Safe passage was only possible by uttering the magic word, majlis nuwwab (Member of Parliament), and that magic word was given to a select few (the relatives) while others (the neighbours) were kept in ignorance and frisked, gagged and tied up for 208

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having no important connections to protect them. The children bought militia fatigues and alarmingly realistic Kalashnikov machine guns. There was no way we could dissuade them; they needed to act out their fears. Every afternoon, they marched out in single file, appropriately attired and armed, into the bushes surrounding our house on reconnaissance missions against the enemy to find it before it found them. Politicians changed sides; militia men did too. Truces were brokered, often coinciding with the end of the month so that the necessary salaries could be distributed (often from the same paymaster). Christian militias held their fire in Ramadan at the hour of breaking the fast for the Muslim militiamen; Muslims held theirs during Christmas mass. Weaponry was tested freely on a nation considered outside of existence and outside of any human rights. In spite of all of this, the Lebanese grimly hugged their tiny strip of land on the Levant. There was no mass exodus. When the guns paused for replenishing, those who had left their homes under fire returned, rebuilt and started over. We became part of this grim shuffle. Twice during the war years we packed up and went to Vienna to fill in the necessary empty patches in our children’s education. The war pressed on, destroying livelihoods and souls. With the small shrug and rueful smile of accepting what was their fate, battle-weary Lebanese civilians faced circumstances and did what was in their power to keep their heads above water and their families fed and safe. West Beirut turned into a grey and bleak city criss-crossed with electricity wires stolen from government lines, broken glass windows replaced with cardboard or black plastic garbage bags, and mounds of rubbish everywhere. Shabbily dressed people shuffled expressionless back and forth, crossing streets at a swift pace regardless of the traffic. There were no longer any sidewalks or streets, only potholes and checkpoints. Beirut now belonged to the displaced refugees from the south. Many were born in the capital and knew their now-vacated and uninhabitable village only by name. There was no femininity or masculinity on the streets, no pride or self-respect, no tears, just apathy and blank stares which saw nothing while everyone plodded on, ticking off one day after the next in a country where bread and parsley prices were pegged to the dollar, as were the rocks that came from the sides of the mountain. The roads jammed with trucks and dilapidated cars in a continuing shuttle of exhausted humanity that stretched the length of the coastline, laden 209

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with mattresses, cooking utensils and children as they edged forward from south to north and once more from north to south, moving out of the frying pan and into the fire on Lebanon’s potholed roads. West Beirut was the final destination for most, at the rate of 20,000 a day, crowding sidewalks and vacant parking lots. Those with connections moved into apartments requisitioned by local militias, their owners having either fled or been forcibly removed by the militia, who saw them as expendable. A gentle friend of my son Ghassan, a Palestinian Orthodox Christian boy, Marwan Menneh, was terrorized as a young child when militiamen broke into the family home and locked him and his handicapped brother, Emil, in the bathroom. They knocked his mother unconscious and the attack was enough to frighten them into leaving their apartment in Ras Beirut. Another dear friend of mine, whose husband was a Protestant from the Chouf Mountains, opened her apartment door in the residential Ein el Teeneh area of Beirut to be greeted by well-placed sons of a politician favoured by the Syrians giving them a non-negotiable offer to sell their apartment for peanuts or face the consequences. They sold and bitterly watched these sons and their father rise meteorically during the developments of the civil war as icons of nationalism and piety. And yet, I could not write off Lebanon in my heart as evil. It remained a country of stark contrasts in human nature, cruel at times and at others tenderly compassionate. I walked out of a bookstore off Hamra Street one afternoon to see a crowd of young armed men staring intently upwards with a lot of agitated arm-waving and instructions ‘to the left, no to the right’. Curiosity got the better of me and I stepped closer to the crowd despite their obvious job description of hired fighters. I looked up in the direction of all the gesticulation with some trepidation, expecting to see someone threatening to jump. Instead I saw a distraught old woman on her balcony with a militiaman standing next to her. They were both staring with much consternation at the balcony below. The object of all the traffic-stopping attention was a lone canary, obviously much loved and just as obviously terrified of flying. The young militiaman next to the old woman bent over the balcony rail as the canary edged within his grasp and scooped it up to a loud roar of claps and cheers from the militiamen below. The next morning, in a parking lot nearby, a 44-year-old Druze lawyer was neatly gunned down by two teenagers on a motorbike, very likely from that canary-loving crowd of militiamen. 210

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Time magazine labelled Beirut as ‘the most stressful city in the world’ during the eighties and the city’s name became a catchword to depict ‘anarchy’, ‘urban warfare’, ‘divided city’, ‘radical extremists’, ‘war torn’ and ‘war weary’. A similar scene can be seen today in Palestine and Iraq. Those who resist occupation are killed in the name of liberation, democracy and freedom – three words that have lost their meaning in the ‘doublespeak’ of today’s colonizers.

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ife during the civil war evolved with its own routine. So long as people were not in the immediate line of fire, they dressed up for dinner parties, played cards, cried, loved and died normal deaths. We did the same. I started each day with a schedule that I stuck to religiously, and at times pathetically, as I tried to keep things ‘normal’. Rola and Yasmine, for example, grew up vaguely wondering why they had to hide under the sink every time it ‘thundered’ which was my way of explaining the cannon thuds when they came uncomfortably near. At long last on 28 February 1988, we moved into our new house. It coincided with the coldest day of the year, and as we didn’t know how to work the heating, we slept with our coats on. Despite this minor hitch, it became home very quickly as its walls filled with sounds of life and laughter of our children and their friends and ours. Our children attended a reinvented American Community School (ACS), headed by the urbane and compassionate American from Philadelphia, Mrs Katherine Bashour. She made the Americans look good. Tall and slim with short white-blonde hair, Katherine Bashour had the kind of blue eyes that provoked confessions from wayward students with just one piercing look. She had moved to Beirut with her husband Dr Munir Bashour, Dean of the Education Department of the American University of Beirut, whom she had met while they were both graduate students in the University of Chicago. As ACS was next door to AUB, it was an easy commute for the young bride and she signed on 213

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as an English teacher. When the kidnapping of foreigners became a deadly political statement and the American Embassy was blown up by a suicide bomber, all the Americans were ordered to leave Beirut by their government and ACS closed down as there were no pupils. Mrs Bashour refused to leave despite intense pressure from her government. She loved Lebanon and she just wasn’t the type to pick up her skirts and run. Later, in 1985 after the dust had settled, the Americans renewed their presence in Lebanon, and asked Mrs Bashour to breathe life into ACS once more. As she was of a practical nature and she knew that its former raison d’etre was no longer there, she opened the doors of the school to non-Americans for the first time in ACS’s history. She had never understood the elitist segregation policy of the former ACS in the first place. The first wave of Lebanese children to fill the student roster consisted of a total of seventy students, eleven of them Khayyats. They feel fortunate to have been under Mrs Bashour’s guidance, particularly during the dark and confusing days of the civil war. On those days, when deafening crashes of artillery and mortar shells would come out of nowhere, she was always there to wipe their noses and dry their tears and soothe their terrified teachers who would sob with fear as they tried to distract the children with a book. No sooner were the guns silenced, than we would push them out of our immediate world and go on with our lives. We proudly watched our children celebrate the four seasons and the holidays in song and dance on their school’s stage, determinedly ignoring the distant crashes of mortar fire so long as they were out of range. Birthday parties and play dates at our home were scheduled when circumstances allowed. When circumstances didn’t allow, we brought birthday cakes and party favours to our children’s classrooms. Returning at the end of the day from school the children bubbled over with stories about their teachers and classmates. I hardly knew who to turn to first. Rola would laugh as she tried to show me how her music teacher taught them rhythm; Yasmine would proudly sing the new Arabic songs she’d learned over and over and over again; Munira would excitedly run her words together as she described a baby kitten she’d saved with her friends in the street; Amer would wonder how his friend managed to get away with murder just by using his charm; Ghassan would inform me proudly that he scored a goal in soccer. Lebanon had become home. The unceasing battles around our children’s lives became 214

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their normal world. To the world outside Beirut, Shakin’ Stevens’ lyrics for a Christmas song were ‘Snow is falling all around me / Children playing, having fun / It’s the season for love and understanding / Merry Christmas, everyone.’ To our children, the lyrics became ‘Bombs are falling all around us / people dying everywhere / It’s the season for death and destruction / Merry Christmas, Lebanon.’ Standstill traffic at Israeli and militia checkpoints was taken in their stride on their way to Beirut or Sidon; they stocked up on books to read in the car, sometimes finishing a novel at a time during long hours of what was ordinarily a ten-minute ride home. Cars bursting into flames after overheating in the hot summer sun, Syrian soldiers shooting machine guns in the air to keep traffic moving, and irate drivers at each other’s necks were routine scenes on their car rides. The faces, haircuts and uniforms invariably changed at the self-same checkpoints at different turns of the war, depending on whether the soldiers were from Arab Deterrence Forces, Multinational Forces, Israeli soldiers, Lebanese Forces, Amal militiamen, Druze militiamen or Syrian soldiers. The remarkable outcome of our travails during Lebanon’s civil war was that, in spite of all this, our children did not waver in their love for their country or in their love for life in general. They proved to be the proverbial stoic Lebanese. Our five children did most of their schooling in Beirut, graduated with honours, continued into prestigious universities for their postgraduate studies and are now in careers that are firmly grounded in what they can contribute to their part of the world. In their sensitive and highly charged developing years they were forced to pass through the gauntlet of the arbitrary death and destruction that occurred all around them, and they emerged all the stronger, in many ways wise beyond their years and with no illusions about the absolutes of life, most importantly loving life and embracing it. Their teenage years were defined by growing up with war, which affected their outlook on life and world matters. The war appeared in their university application essays and school assignments and how they sized people up. Munira had reached the conclusion of philosophical existentialism early in her life at the tender age of eleven: ‘I think there are no such thing as “facts”. What is considered as fact is really “in my opinion …”, especially here in Lebanon.’ Aged thirteen, Ghassan wrote a poem capturing the awakening of a war child to reality.

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My ears can hear it clearly ’Cause they are not too far The waves which roll lonely Which sweep through my back yard But I am safe to float My table it is steady Boating … yes I’ve mastered My fishing rod, it is ready And so I fish the sea In two ways I do that For to my catch I am the creator And the hungry fisherman But one day a storm came up And I was lost at sea Lost my childhood’s interest But caught the memory.

* * * My refuge was Im Bashar. She was my mentor, parent, judge and best friend. She certainly had no illusions about life – after all, this was the third or fourth war she had witnessed in her long life. She had learned not to put any store in politicians or religious leaders. There was no problem, she was firmly convinced, that could not be solved so long as one had a brain and good health. Family, and especially children, were a sacred first in her list of priorities. After Abu Bashar had died, she made it clear she was not going anywhere. She was staying put in her apartment and we were all invited to move in with her if we so wished. Her independence was non-negotiable. And she remained in her home, where we would continue to congregate. In 1984, the Israelis retreated into the deeper south, unable to stem the attacks against them by the Lebanese resistance which caused politically damaging losses of Israeli lives. Hard on the Israelis’ retreating heels came their proxy Lebanese militia, who hoped to gain control over East Sidon (where Im Bashar lived), which was strategically located on the highway that connected 216

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the southern coastal road to the SLA-controlled Christian enclave in the south. To accomplish this goal, it was necessary for the proxy militia to carry out ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims from all of East Sidon. The ethnic cleansing of East Sidon began in broad daylight. Young men who had grown up in the neighbourhood became the enemy. On a rainy autumn morning in 1984, a month after we had moved to Beirut from Abu Dhabi, they burst into Im Bashar’s apartment building brandishing their weaponry and pushed, shoved and terrorized the occupants of each floor to the top-floor apartment where she lived. Her next-door neighbours were having their usual morning coffee in Im Bashar’s kitchen when the men burst in, along with the terrified neighbours, shouting and cursing their captives, prodding them like cattle with the butt of their machine guns. Her Syrian neighbour, Buthaina Dada, the same lady who had been so helpful in transporting Abu Bashar’s body through Syria to Sidon, was singled out and taken to another room, where her screams for mercy pierced through her neighbours’ hearts. Im Bashar was unable to contain her distress for her neighbour, whom she loved as a daughter, and shouted in protest at the gunmen. The leader of the group turned on her with a vengeful grin and hit her with the full force of his rifle butt, throwing her to the ground, hissing, ‘Shut up old woman, or I’ll kill you.’ Mercifully, no one was killed. No men were among the neighbours as it was a work day and they were in their offices. What’s more, the young children were all in school. A Red Cross ambulance was ordered and Im Bashar and her neighbours were shoved unceremoniously into it with only the clothes on their backs. Our children returned from school that afternoon to find their grandmother and her neighbours, now united with their husbands and children, sitting in stunned silence, dishevelled and disheartened. They found it difficult to accept their eviction at the hands of teenage boys they had known from early childhood although they knew the reason: the poison of Confessionalism that turned people into categories – ‘If you are not with us then you are against us’, as George W. Bush would say in support of his ill-conceived invasion of Iraq seventeen years on. Im Bashar pined for her home but she put on a cheerful face for the sake of her grandchildren who never left her side. They worried about their grandmother who had never been this despondent before. She had always been their cheerleader and now they wanted to be hers. 217

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Im Bashar awoke each morning with a prayer that this would be the day that she would go home. The longed-for moment finally came in the spring of 1985. The Sidonian nationalists, under the late Maarouf Sa’ad’s son Mustafa Sa’ad, fought the South Lebanese Army’s occupation of East Sidon and defeated them. We all piled into the car to share one of Im Bashar’s happiest days in her long lifetime. She thanked God repeatedly for letting her live to see her home once more. Her infectious laughter had us all laughing, and Lebanon and Sidon never looked more beautiful than that day. We entered her apartment preparing ourselves for the worst and our predictions were not wrong. Cupboard doors hung limply, exposing empty shelves, a safe that had nothing in it had been shot at close range with a grenade launcher, bullet holes riddled Abu Bashar’s portrait on the living room. ‘I don’t care,’ Im Bashar commented defiantly, ‘they’ve been routed out of Sidon and my home is mine once more.’ We cleaned up what we could. Im Bashar packed a few items of clothing and we set out for Doha until the apartment was habitable once more. Our driver, Mohammed, whose village was still under occupation by the Israelis and the SLA, decided to take us back through Bramiyeh, where we had lunch in 1977 with the grandparents of Nicola, our employee at the bookstore in Abu Dhabi. Bramiyeh, the village of the gunmen who had been instrumental in insulting Im Bashar and driving her out of her home at the butt of their machine guns, was no more. The Sidonian Muslim nationalists had destroyed it in a clear message that the SLA proxy members and their families were no longer welcome to return. The well-tended stone houses we had admired on our way to Nicola’s grandparents were now piles of rubble and so was the house of Nicola’s grandfather. The hatred and rage in this violent act of revenge were understandable. But revenge did not exist in Im Bashar’s heart. She was unable to bear the sight and shut her eyes tight, sobbing, ‘Oh those poor souls. Where are they sleeping? Abu Tanios loved his khabias so much and look at them, powder and dust.’ Mohammed realized he had made a big mistake but he had the sense to know that the less said the better to Im Bashar in this moment of unanticipated sorrow.We attempted to speak of other topics, but to no avail. By the time we arrived home, Im Bashar was in a state of deep depression, unable to leave the car unassisted. Frightened, we immediately called for her doctor, who ordered us to take her straight to the emergency ward. She was in the full throes of a heart 218

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attack triggered by the sight of Bramiyeh’s destruction. Im Bashar had lived long enough to know the futility of war. This was a lesson she passed onto her children and they learnt it well. Adnan’s dream of owning his orchards was realized with our return to Lebanon. The land was on the hills overlooking Sidon’s entrance just beyond the Awali River which flowed into the sea, creating one of the most fertile areas of the region. While his bulldozers ploughed and prepared the earth for his trees, he set up greenhouses growing tomatoes. Next to his greenhouses were those belonging to Walid Jumblatt, the Druze warlord who had wrested control over the Christian villages of the area. Adnan visited the greenhouses often to glean ideas and direction, as he was relatively new in the profession. Among the workers, he noticed a pleasant-faced, red-haired middle-aged man who carried himself in a manner different from the Syrian workers who tended the tomatoes. He did not look like a Syrian labourer. Curiously and typically, Adnan struck up a conversation with the gentleman, diving immediately into his question, ‘So where are you from?’ The man smiled sadly: ‘I’m from Remaileh and this is my land and these are my greenhouses.’ Adnan was moved by the man’s dignified response. ‘How can I help you?’ he asked him. ‘Only God can help me now. I’m happy to have the chance to work on my land, and I am a patient man. This war will end one day.’ He was known as Abu Mansour and was a distant relative of our friend Elias Attalah, who was in hiding during that year from the Amal militias and Syrians, who were hunting down Communist Party members like rabbits. Adnan kept his friendship with Abu Mansour going and at the first chance he had to meet with Walid Jumblatt, he asked for Abu Mansour’s rights. They eventually came after the Remaileh villagers were invited to return to their village at the war’s end through the efforts of Elias and his close friendship with Walid Jumblatt. Abu Mansour never forgot Adnan’s compassion, and from that day forward both Christian and Muslim holidays would see him at our door with Im Mansour, a plucky smiling grandmother with trays of homemade bread, pickled cucumbers, coloured eggs, Christmas sweets or apricot syrup according to the season. On 27 June 1994 the saddest farewell happened. Im Bashar died peacefully in her bed as she had always wished. I was lying next to her, holding her tightly as though that might keep her soul from leaving her body, and Bushra was holding her hand and reciting Koranic verses. We were prepared, as was Im Bashar, for her last breath. Sadly for Adnan, he 219

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was far away in Abu Dhabi. There is a Muslim belief that the angels remain at the bedside of those who have undertaken good deeds for humankind in order to carry their soul to Heaven. At the moment of her last breath, Im Bashar pushed herself into a seated position, her back ramrod straight, and gazed ahead as though truly seeing her angels. We suppressed cries of sorrow as Im Bashar, true to form, faced death face to face. Her six grandsons carried her coffin, followed by the townspeople of Sidon, in a silent entourage to her final resting place next to Abu Bashar in the cemetery in the heart of old Sidon. As her funeral cortège wound slowly through her beloved town, shopkeepers closed down their stores and bowed their heads with palms turned upwards, silently mouthing a prayer for Im Bashar’s soul.

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ur first year without Im Bashar was very difficult. We tried to accept the finality of her absence, but we missed her more with each day that passed. The pain of parting just did not get better with time. That same year, 1995, I received news that my mother was not feeling well. Marwan called me to come to Saudi immediately; our mother had breast cancer. She had discovered a lump the size of a pea in her breast and was in the hospital undergoing tests in preparation for a mastectomy. I dropped everything and took the first flight to Dhahran. It had been ten years since I had last seen my father and three since I had seen my mother during her visit to her family in Damascus. I had been unable to see her as much as I would have liked, mainly due to my estrangement with my father. Any possibility for reconciliation had been erased on my part after my father took in a second wife. It shattered us all and it took a big toll on my mother’s already fragile mental health. The emotional effort that it would take to face my father was a step I could not make. I needed all the strength I could muster in dealing with living in a war-torn country where nothing functioned properly and with five teenagers in university and high school. Marwan met me at the airport in a highly agitated state and we drove directly to the hospital in Dhahran. Our father was in his second home in Marbella, Spain with his other wife and was unable to find a plane seat back to Saudi for a week. Mama beamed happily at my appearance at the door. I hugged and kissed Mama and gave her the 221

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perfume she loved: Dolce Vita by Christian Dior. ‘Spray some, please,’ she asked, in a childlike request. ‘I have breast cancer,’ she told me matter-of-factly while I helped her into the new nightgown I had brought for her in her favourite shade of blue. ‘No problem, Mama, I answered breezily. ‘You’re in good hands here.’ Aramco’s hospital was top-notch. ‘They said it was malignant and want to remove my breast. I told them no,’ she continued, in the same childlike tone. Marwan, seated behind me, began to scold her, fear in his voice for his mother’s life, ‘Of course you should remove it. Do you think you know better than the doctors?’ ‘No, I won’t remove the breast,’ Mama answered, with a finality that put a halt to any further discussion. My mother would not budge from her refusal to have the operation. She would not listen to her doctor or oncologist, or me or Marwan, or the sweet Irish nurse who was specialized in treating cases like my mother’s. My father finally arrived. It was difficult meeting him after all that had passed between us. My five children did not know their grandparents or my country or my hometown because of my father’s intransigence. But we had to talk, there was no escape; we needed to help my mother together. ‘Zeina,’ he greeted her gently, using the nickname she had called herself during our years in Aramco, ‘we want you to live a long and healthy life, and we want you in our lives. You should accept your doctor’s advice.’ ‘OK,’ she nodded, compliantly. It was as easy as that; she had been waiting for her husband, whom she loved to distraction, to tell her that he loved her and was fine with her being without a breast. After all these years of pining for my father’s attention, she got it only after she became seriously ill. The doctors were jubilant with this breakthrough, particularly her long-time heart doctor who knew her well. In addition to her diabetes and breast cancer, my mother had undergone a bypass in London for two blocked arteries. ‘She’ll be fine,’ he reassured me when I voiced my worries about her other maladies. My mother’s operation went well; she healed nicely despite her diabetes and did not need chemotherapy. Her oncologist had commented in admiration, ‘Many other women would not have paid attention to such a tiny lump.’ Now I could breathe freely; my mother was recuperating happily, basking in the rare solicitous care of her husband. My brother and his wife insisted that I leave the hospital and join them for lunch. ‘Fadia,’ my sister-in-law Raja urged on the phone, ‘we’re 222

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not going to have lunch without you. Come on, your Mom’s fine.’ I had opted to stay with Mama in the hospital during the build-up to the operation, just in case, and this would be my first venture out since my arrival. I blinked my eyes at the flash of bright white sunlight as I walked in the direction of Marwan’s house ten minutes away. He was a civil engineer working for Aramco, the second generation of Basrawis in Dhahran, and, from the manner he was raising his sons, the possibility of a third Aramcon generation was very likely in the offing. He was having a slight problem with his gentle eldest son in getting him to like baseball. Their baseball practice often ended on a sour note with Marwan fuming and Joudi in tears because every time Marwan threw the ball, Joudi ducked. Maybe his hyperactive red-headed second son, Murad, would be more baseball-minded. His thoughtful three-year-old daughter, Dunai, was far from sporting. She walked around the house with a book half her size waiting to catch anyone seated to read it to her. Her younger sister – another red head – was as noisy at just over one as Dunai wasn’t! How changed Dhahran was since I had last seen it. It had grown five times its original size and had three schools to accommodate the children of its employees. However Saudis were no longer allowed to study past first grade, as per the orders of the ulema. Main Street, the Dining Hall and Fourth Street with House 4595-B were all still there. I was steeped with nostalgia. Life had been so much simpler and so much easier then. I thought of my mother; she seemed so uncharacteristically childlike. She had always been childlike but now was more so than ever. ‘Oh well,’ I shrugged silently to myself, ‘as long as she’s at peace with the world, it should be all right.’ I rang the doorbell to Marwan’s house, a modern stucco villa, low and sleek with a beautifully landscaped garden. He opened the door, smiling happily, with his four tow-headed children peering behind him. The combination of his red-head genes and his wife’s Circassian blondeness had produced four new Saudis that were even further from the stereotype than we had been. We walked into the television room, and on top of the television I saw a miniature American flag and a miniature Saudi Arab flag entwined. The presence of the children kept me from fully expressing my distaste at what I viewed to be misplaced patriotism. I understood where Marwan was coming from, but I found it hard to accept that he would have no compunction in displaying the 223

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American flag so freely. Try as I could, I was unable to resist comment altogether. ‘Marwan, what are you thinking by displaying the American flag?’ Marwan looked pained. ‘Fadia, come on, lighten up. So what? A marine gave it to me, one of those guys stationed in the desert for the Gulf War. I went there on a special pass out of curiosity. Those poor soldiers have absolutely no clue where they are and what the point of their mission is. All they see is the desert. It’s a job.’ It was four years since the first Gulf War had ended and the marines my brother was talking about were those who had fought Saddam Hussein from Saudi soil and with Saudi money, US$51 billion of it. Marwan and I were never going to see eye to eye about America, the Arab world and Saudi Arabia. My brother had spent a total of four years abroad – three in England and one for his master’s in Washington. The rest were in Saudi Arabia. He had received his engineering degree from the University of Petroleum and Minerals right next door to Aramco. And he had never experienced war, been exposed to the cross-currents of conflict or experienced the unsavoury fallout of America’s push for supremacy. Had I not experienced the heart-wrenching repercussions of that push for economic and strategic control over Arabia in Lebanon, I might have displayed the American flag as lightly as my brother; who knew? Thankfully, my brother was not reflective of post-Gulf War I Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabs more confrontational and more immersed in Arab culture than Marwan was were challenging the absoluteness of the ulema’s decrees in street demonstrations, unprecedented in Saudi Arabia’s modern history. It was natural that the Saudi women would be amongst the first to demand their rights. Women were a force that the al Sa’ud’s ulema demanded be kept under control for reasons no one could fully comprehend. And there was no power with clout in the world that cared to discuss this abysmal breach of human rights. Women were barred from major areas of employment in Saudi Arabia such as law, engineering, architecture and mass communication. A Saudi woman could not study or take a job without the explicit approval of her closest male relative. At the outbreak of the first Gulf War, when the widespread exposure of uncovered US women soldiers driving army jeeps went unchecked, Saudi women decided to challenge restrictions on their rights, particularly the right to drive. On a designated day and at a designated hour, 47 women got into cars behind the driver’s wheel and drove in circles 224

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around the office of the governor of their city in protest at their lack of civil rights and in protest of the Gulf War. The women were arrested by the muttawa’a but released that same night under orders of Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh. In a fit of rage at this unprecedented defiance from the female Saudi population, the ulema called their driving a depravity and issued the names and numbers of all 47 women, urging clerics to punish these women as they see fit. The al Saud royal family was prompted to publicly reassert the ban on women drivers. The Saudi women’s ten-minute drive shook the kingdom and, unhappily, shook their futures and their husbands’ futures as well. Unable to throw them in jail because of their important families, the Saudi security forces took the electronic information highway instead and circulated an email to all the businessmen of Saudi Arabia with the warning that anyone who countenanced employing the husbands of these women would have hell to pay. The women were vilified as Communist whores. Predictably, the bold and daring act of these women was forcibly pushed into the black hole of collective amnesia, where it joined similar acts of defiance against the unjust Wahhabi rule that found such strong support from the West with its bottomless appetite for Saudi Arab oil. No one was heard to mention this incident in public thereafter. In 1998, the British government declared in a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Commission that Saudi Arabia was doing very well with respect to human rights. After lunch, we drove in the direction of my parent’s house in al Khobar to pick up my brother Ghassan to visit Mama. He had already called five times, which was uncharacteristic of him; Ghassan never called anyone. I prepared myself psychologically for the sight of American soldiers roaming freely in my country; after all, I had been raised among their people, hadn’t I? ‘We have to pass by Yousef,’ Marwan told me. ‘He wants to visit Mom too.’ Yousef, our cousin, was married to a beautiful, blue-eyed goldenhaired distant Lebanese relative, Thuraya. He came lumbering out of his house in Dhahran, cursing and grumbling as usual. I was familiar with his character: he had a heart of gold but a very short fuse. And, accustomed as I was to his temper, this time it was fiercer than I had ever seen. He threw himself into the back seat. ‘So have you seen the American soldiers roaming around al Khobar like it’s their goddam backyard?’ Yousef was among the first batch of Saudi Arab petroleum engineers to 225

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graduate from the Aramco-initiated UPM, which my brother had gone to as well. ‘We haven’t gone there yet,’ I answered. ‘Man, you’re going to love the scene,’ he grinned wickedly, in anticipation. Our home in al Khobar was on the outskirts, but Marwan took me through the centre of town and down the Corniche road, where all the American fast food franchises were and, naturally, the American soldiers. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, Marwan told me, ‘Look to the left.’ I looked; four American soldiers were perched on a wall watching the Saudis walk by. ‘Look to the right,’ Marwan continued in his monotone. I looked; I could see four American soldiers, two males and two females, in military fatigues and combat boots lounging in chairs and sprawled on the sidewalk. Marines were everywhere, laughing and talking while they ate their hamburgers and drank their cokes, fully aware of the attention they were gathering. ‘What do those guys care? They’ve got the ulema’s cover, they’re guests of the al Sa’uds,’ Yousef groused. I turned to see his expression. Yousef had loved the Americans; what a turnaround. ‘It’s one thing having Americans in Aramco, and it’s another seeing them above the law while we get our asses kicked,’ he continued bitterly. ‘A month ago, Thuraya and I spent the night in jail. Know why? Because the genius muttawa’a saw Thuraya’s blue eyes and said I was going around with an American soldier. For God’s sake, she was covered from head to toe. So the idiot demands our marriage certificate. Who, just tell me, who in this world walks around with their marriage certificate in their wallet? Or even knows where he’s stashed it? So we were put in jail while our sons turned the house upside down for it. They finally found it at dawn.’ How was the outright presence of the American military on Saudi soil going to play out with the Saudis, the non-Aramcon ones that is? The 1979 Mecca Mosque uprising, denouncing American ties with al Sa’ud, had occurred without the scenes of American soldiers laughing and talking with American female soldiers dressed in shorts in fast food joints along the al Khobar Corniche. Juheiman, leader of the Mecca Mosque uprising, had given his life in objection to the ‘special relations’ between the USA and Saudi Arabia. And post-Gulf War I, twelve years after the Mecca uprising in 1991, the ulema gave political cover to the al Sa’uds through a fatwa which stated that American troops were allowed to remain in Saudi Arabia because they were the al Sa’uds’ guests. 1991 Saudi Arabia was full of young Saudis who had spent their youth in 226

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Wahhabi-run religious schools that taught them Wahhabi dogma and to hate everything progressive. Not enough had been done to prepare the Saudi youth to work for a living. In 1991, although the GDP was US$148 billion and the per capita was US$5,800, infant mortality was as high as 59 per 1,000 live births, the life expectancy of women was 68 years, that of men 65 and literacy was 62.4 per cent of the adult population, little more than half. I saw my first Saudi beggar on that visit, a Saudi Arabian beggar woman. She sat huddled in a strip of shade against the wall of the mall with one hand out for alms and the other holding her identity card to prove her nationality. ‘I know, I can’t believe it either,’ Marwan commented as we passed by. The billions of dollars of US weapons and finance of US-led military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere had left Saudi Arabia deep in debt. Its youth are at pains to find jobs and houses in the suburbs, let alone palaces. Many families in the capital, I am told, are so poor, they can’t afford electricity. Raw sewage runs through parts of Jeddah. It was hard not to notice the extreme wealth in al Khobar, with the designer shopping malls and the dozens of palaces under construction. When an ailing King Fahd vacationed in Spain, he took 50 black Mercedes, 350 attendants and a 234-foot yacht, and had US$2,000 worth of flowers and 50 cakes delivered each day. Adnan personally met with the increasing poverty of the Saudis around the time of the first Gulf War. One Friday afternoon in Abu Dhabi, he heard a sharp knock on his office door. He opened it to see a kohl-eye-rimmed Bedouin staring belligerently back at him and holding out his identity papers that identified him as a Saudi Arabian. Until that Friday afternoon, Adnan had the impression that Saudi Arabia’s Bedouins were the most protected and looked after by the al Sa’uds. ‘I need money,’ the Bedouin ordered Adnan. ‘Why are you asking for money from me, a poor Lebanese? Go and get it from your king.’ Adnan replied flippantly, and swung the door to shut it. The Bedouin forcefully pushed it wide open. ‘Do you see my name? I am not a beggar. I am from North Arabia from the Shummar tribe and I have been abandoned by the king you are talking about. He has only money for America and his prostitutes. My tribe is far more important in the Arabian Peninsula than Fahd or his tribe. We get nothing and I need to feed my family. You are working here and getting Zayed’s money, so I deserve some.’ Of course, the Shummari 227

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got his money but from Adnan’s money, not Zayed’s, as Adnan was sure to make clear to the Bedouin.

* * * I flew back to Lebanon with a completely different impression of Saudi Arabia than I ever expected to have. What I had seen and felt, exciting but frightening at the same time, forced me to erase the stereotypes that I had carried with me for years and to think of it afresh, with a clean slate. Lebanon was in the same state of turmoil and political discord as it always had been. However it too was about to undergo a major change to the stereotypical image which everyone held, including the Lebanese themselves, concerning their ability to stand up to Israel or to the confessional straitjacket that controlled the social order. And the credit for this fundamental and important change goes to Israel, Shimon Peres and Hezbollah. Israel struck again in 1996. Prime Minister Shimon Peres unleashed Israel’s fourth military offensive into Lebanon, the ‘Grapes of Wrath’, in what he predicted would be the end of terrorist activity in the south. Hezbollah’s elite core of 5,000 fighters was making Israel’s occupation of Lebanon costly. The guerilla group’s tactics relied on tight cells of no more than two to three fighters who carried out professional, creative stealth attacks on the enemy with a high ratio of success. To Israel’s dismay, the more they attempted to pummel and vilify them, the more passion Hezbollah aroused amongst the Lebanese. Unhappily for Peres and for Israel, ‘Grapes of Wrath’ would mark two unprecedented victories for Hezbollah: the beginning of the end of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon and of the IDF’s uncontested image of absolute might and power, and the sending of Peres to join Begin and Sharon amongst others in the category of those who sank in the shifting quicksands of Lebanon. The ‘Grapes of Wrath’ offensive opened with a screaming blitzkrieg that carpet bombed anything and everything that had a semblance of life all across the south, north of the Litani. We learned of the offensive when, oblivious to any attacks happening, we casually switched on the television the morning of 18 April 1996 and 228

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saw the headless body of a baby flopping in the arms of a crying UNIFIL soldier. Well-aimed Israeli fire (supported later by a UN report) had just massacred 107 villagers at the Cana UNIFIL headquarters where they had taken refuge from the Israeli blitzkrieg. Meanwhile, Israel’s fighter jets screamed over the south, carpeting anything that moved and creating terror and havoc amongst the villagers who panicked, not knowing which way to escape the unrelenting campaign. Careful not to repeat the mistakes of previous refugee crises, Hezbollah meticulously and speedily organized a relief effort to receive the deluge of refugees in Sidon and Beirut. In an unanticipated reaction, unprecedented in Lebanon’s long bloody war with Israel, Muslims and Christians alike condemned the attack on Cana. Our children joined the wave of relief efforts organized by school and university students in coordination with the Red Cross and the Red Crescent for the first time in their young lives. They fanned out with their schoolmates to distribute food, clothing and toys in the schools that had closed their doors to students and opened them for the refugees. Donation spots were announced on television and radio for the general public. Never had Lebanon been so organized in facing the fallout of Israeli attacks in its short turbulent history and the credit went to Hezbollah with its meticulous attention to the importance of containing the refugees and wise use of the media. They focused on the basics: regaining their land from the occupiers. The media was united against the Israeli attack and broadcast footage of the civil war and Israeli invasions. I caught Yasmine, Rola and Ghassan mesmerized and disbelieving, dumbfounded by the images on the screen of battles that they had lived through without being aware of, images of the past that had been rolled up and put away out of sight to enforce a collective amnesia. I stood watching the footage with them, unsure of what to say. Enforced amnesia was something I was ashamed to admit I had been guilty of doing as well. By my omissions of the events in their baby books and any objective debate on who was shooting at whom and why, I was guilty of thinking that ‘ignorance was bliss’. Yasmine turned to me, eyes wide open with shock having suddenly made a connection, ‘So that was the thunder that you kept hiding us from under the sink!’ The ‘Grapes of Wrath’ offensive returned all the anguish and pain that Lebanon had suffered to the young, relatively unscathed generation that had been growing up apolitical and oblivious. They reacted to the scenes of death and destruction by turning into 229

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fervent activists against the Israeli occupation and supporters of the resistance movement. Pictures of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s military leader, went up on Rola’s bedroom wall next to Eddie Vetter of Pearl Jam. They bought cassettes of military songs about fighting for their country sung by Hezbollah militants. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah spoke of liberation and knew personally of sacrifice for one’s sovereignty. When his son was killed in combat, he accepted condolences with the words, ‘Now I can face parents who have lost sons fighting for their country and not feel ashamed’. The aftermath of the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ proved to be very sour for Peres and moved his own people to question Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. While he struggled with the legal fallout and the angry Israeli mothers who were losing their sons in droves for a cause they did not believe in, Hezbollah launched a massive offensive against the SLA positions, always abiding by its rules of civilized combat and always video-recording them for evidence. Hezbollah’s trump card was its even-handed approach to resistance and religion. They followed the democratic Islamic tenet of accepting all monotheistic religions and confessions. Its fighters were a mix of confessions and professions and fluent in at least three languages, Hebrew and Arabic being the staple two. Its spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah speaks of love as being the ultimate mover of all religions, not war, on his website where he discusses the finer points of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This was a militia unlike any other. As Moussa al Sadr gave a face and a voice to the invisible impoverished Shiite southerner, Nasrallah and Fadlallah gave a face and a voice to the Lebanese Resistance and set an example to the rest of the Arab world of what a small group of brave, motivated, highly organized Resistance fighters could do against ‘the army that can not be defeated’ as the IDF likes to be known. We are grateful to Shimon Peres for giving us the chance to give the Lebanese, or a faction of them at least, the chance to prove their mettle under the right leadership. This was the leadership that my father-in-law had yearned for and this was the victory he could only dream of, of how brave and motivated the Arab can be under the right leaders. Yasmine and Rola became activists for the liberation of the south after the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and brought in speakers to shed light on the atrocities being committed against those who stood up for their rights 230

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against Israel. It was shortly after the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ that Mrs Bashour’s true mettle shined through. While the world at large voiced moral outrage against the atrocities committed by Israel and the USA against those who resisted their hegemony, Yasmine and Rola had their own enforcer of American and Israeli hegemony right there in ACS in the form of the Dean of Students, an Arab who did what she could to undermine their activism. Mrs Bashour, on the other hand, wielded her clout in Yasmine and Rola’s favour. It all came to a head during an awards ceremony on 22 June 1998 on the last day of Yasmine and Rola’s junior year in high school. Present at the awards ceremony was a group of American educators there to check ACS’s readiness for accreditation, something Mrs Bashour had worked very hard to accomplish. The Lebanese national anthem was played, followed by the American national anthem. Yasmine and Rola and their close friend Dalia Halabi stood up for the Lebanese national anthem, then quietly remained seated during the American. Sitting next to them were the American educators. The Dean of Students came rushing at them with a hiss and ordered them furiously to stand up immediately. They refused. She dramatically expelled them from the Assembly Hall. They left without objection. After the awards ceremony, Yasmine, Rola and Dalia were summoned to the Dean’s office where she informed them in a voice quivering with anger that their behaviour was unacceptable. Had it not been the last day of school, they would have been suspended and if it were her personal choice, she would have expelled them. At the very least she told them that she was going to forbid them from sitting for their final exams until she saw their parents. She forbade them forevermore from joining any politically-oriented groups such as Fight Israeli Terrorism (established by an American teacher) where, as she so ingeniously put it, they would have an excuse to express their political opinion. Her assistant entered at this point, another Arab, and told them they were following the path of all the other ‘loser Arabs’ because they were speaking from their hearts and not their brains. She went on to tell them that because of their ‘stupid’ behaviour, they had turned the clock back and now the administration would have to start all over again convincing the Board of Trustees that the student body really does see the ‘other side’ of the story (meaning the Israel–Arab conflict and here in particular referring to the Israeli side). What exactly did she mean by ‘the other side’, the girls wanted to know? Was she implying 231

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that the aim of the Board of Trustees was to induce the students to accept the American-supported peace process and the subsequent imposed normalization between Israeli and Lebanese? ‘If you don’t agree with the American government’s official policy vis-à-vis the Arab world, then get your parents to take you out of ACS’, was the Dean’s final comment before she sent them to the Student Affairs Counselor, a new American educator in Lebanon for the first time. The counselor told them that he had reviewed the situation in a calmer manner and had decided to lessen the punishment. They would not be expelled but would be placed on disciplinary probation for the fall semester. This meant that these top students would only be allowed to attend classes in their senior year and then go straight home afterwards. Any parties, extracurricular activities and social events would be off limits to them. These three girls were effectively being put into solitary confinement for voicing their opinions and their love for their country. While they were in counseling receiving their punishment, the Dean contacted me with an order that I attend a meeting the following day; if I did not Yasmine and Rola would not be allowed to sit their exams. ‘Do you know what your daughters did?’ was how she begun the phone call. She then went on to describe exactly what they had done. She was speaking to the wrong person. I felt incredibly proud of my daughters, I told her, and I would not have expected them to behave otherwise. I was abruptly told that if I did not agree with the American point of view then I should look for another school. My answer to that was that I would see to it that that no action was taken against our daughters. They had committed no crime and should not be allowed to think that they have. There is nothing in the ACS charter that states that the students must stand up for the American national anthem, or that it is to be played in general assembly twice a year, or that they and their parents must share the same politics as that of the administration. I went to the assigned meeting the following day. The Dean and her assistant were there with a formal letter ready for me to sign putting my daughters on disciplinary probation. I told them what they could do with that letter in no uncertain terms and stormed out. The day after that, Adnan was asked to come in for round two. This time, Mrs Bashour was in attendance, along with the Dean and her assistant. The meeting was very brief: the Dean handed Adnan the letter, Mrs Bashour took it from him and put it at the bottom of a pile of papers on her 232

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desk. She had obviously decided that it was time to end this circus. Shaking hands with Adnan, she commended him on his talented children and removed all of the restrictions placed on our daughters. Yasmine, Rola and Dalia sat for their final exams, continued with FIST, and the American national anthem was not played during the opening assembly of the following fall semester. The year was 2000. The date was 24 May, Amer’s 22nd birthday, and it was his graduation day for his Master’s in Environmental Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Adnan was the only family member attending his graduation. The rest of us were huddled around the TV and radio, following minute by minute developments in Hezbollah’s offensive against the IDF and the SLA positions in the south. Munira was working as a journalist with the Daily Star, an English-language local newspaper, and she heard the news of the retreating Israeli soldiers as it happened. The moment we heard her excited voice on the phone relaying the news, Yasmine, Rola and I left our lunch still warm on the table and sped in the direction of the south, tailgating cars waving Hezbollah flags and passed through one liberated village after another, filled with dancing villagers throwing rice and rose petals on the visitors. We stopped at SLA posts, still smoking from fires hastily lit to destroy incriminating evidence. My children finally came face to face with the big guns that had terrorized them on their childhood visits to their grandmother’s house in Sidon. We entered the Khiam concentration camp, liberated just an hour before our arrival. It was teeming with pale, dazed, unwashed prisoners blinking in the unaccustomed sunlight and freedom, weeping with their families. We saw the graffiti on the prison cell walls marking decades of incarceration on calendars marked off day by painful day, the prisoners’ belongings piled on rickety shelves next to bunk beds in threes in blackened, damp, windowless rooms. Finally, at Fatima’s Gate, the furthest point in south Lebanon along the Israeli borders, we saw the Galilee hills on the other side of the dividing barbed wire fence, its kibbutzim with tidy rows of white houses and distant figures of Israelis, so near yet so unreal. Near the Israeli border, we saw the discarded suitcases of panic-stricken fleeing SLA men and their families who had abandoned their cars and run on foot to line up in terror at the border, as Hezbollah fighters approached. And we witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime experience along the IsraeliLebanese border when the Israelis inexplicably, in the heat and madness 233

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of the moment, decided to embark on a public relations campaign with the Palestinians stranded on both sides of the border. They sent out invitations to Palestinians from the Israeli refugee camps to come and connect with their families from the Lebanese refugee camps. The Palestinian refugees piled into buses and stood in families on opposite sides of a kilometre-long wire-mesh fence, divided by a path down the middle. To complete the surreal scene, the pathway dividing the two Palestinian-lined sides was manned by young Israeli soldiers, with orders to be nice to the Arabs and pass messages and coffee with a smile from one side to the other. The Palestinians shouted their village’s name across the divide and those from the named village shouted back. Names were called out with questions about their well being and whereabouts, and answers of affirmation of their existence or death were shouted back in response. Old Palestinian men and women on the Lebanese side were carried by their sons and daughters on chairs up the difficult rocky slopes to the dividing fences so their parents would have a final chance to come as close as they ever would to what they had only dreamed of doing for the past six decades. My daughters and I stood by trying to absorb as much of the scene around us as possible. We stared at a young Israeli soldier who was barely eighteen, the same age as my twin daughters, as he stood, unsure of how to behave. The young Israeli seemed both bemused and amused at being ordered to take a message from an old white-haired Palestinian man to his equally white-haired brother on the other side of the barbed wire fence, rather than to shoot him. At the same time as we were on our expedition to the liberated south, Amer’s graduation ceremony was taking place. As he walked to the podium to receive his Master’s degree, he unfurled the Lebanese flag to cloak his graduation gown in a master statement of pride at his country’s liberation: he received a standing ovation from the audience.

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13 The Road Not Taken '( t was 2001 and I was back in Saudi Arabia, again to visit Mama, but she was no longer the Mama I knew. My mother had gone into the perfect escape to rest her mind from its tortuous conflict. She had overcome diabetes, heart surgery, breast cancer and a broken ankle but she could not keep her mind from slipping away. She drifted into her own world where she slept and ate and called insistently for her mother and her father. She would only sleep peacefully when we reassured her that her parents sent their love. The doctor told me she had an early onset of senility. I felt fortunate that she still recognized me. She smiled happily at me. ‘You’re my eldest daughter, and you are my heart,’ she said, adding, ‘you’ve grown older.’ Mama knew us all – Ghassan, Marwan, Fatin and, of course, her husband Fahmi. But she did not recognize anyone else. I missed my mother and I miss her every day, I regret the days we were unable to share because of my father’s intransigence and her weakness to his commands. This had been a war too and the outcome was the same as in all wars: we had all lost. My sister-in-law, Hana, invited me to a luncheon held by a good friend of hers. ‘You’ll meet wonderful Saudi women,’ she had promised. And she was right. Our hostess was a prominent Saudi artist and her home was of her design, a Palladian villa all light and graceful in proportions with soaring vaulted ceilings artfully decorated by swirls of pastel-coloured arabesque design, and slender marble columns that led the eye to the garden through French doors framing a turquoise-blue oval swimming

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pool which lay sparkling invitingly in the midst of tall mature palm trees and emerald-green grass. Tasteful objects of art were sprinkled tastefully in the airy salon on consoles and small side tables beside groups of sofas, thoughtfully arranged for easy conversation. She had her paintings, giant canvases that burst with colour and shape, like her house. Elegant and petite, she was modest and soft spoken and moved effortlessly among her guests, who must have numbered at least fifty. The women attending the luncheon were the cream of Saudi society, professionals in their own right: university professors, television producers, writers, school supervisors, doctors and engineers. A small feeling of yearning stirred deep within me to be part of this group of women who had accepted their birthright and gone on to do what they could to the best of their abilities, while they remained within the system. They were all politicized and sharp about their opinions, far more than the men I had met. At my table was a tall dignified American woman who spoke in the lilting Hijazi dialect with her teenage daughters, each of whom had their mother’s height and their Saudi family’s smooth olive skin and delicate features. Sitting across from me was a foreign-looking woman dressed in an exquisite silk caftan, who had a strangely familiar face, although I knew I had never met her before. Hana leaned over to whisper, ‘She was married to Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s son and never left the country in order to stay near to her daughter Yasmine.’ I gasped; Yasmine was the image of her mother with the difference of having the olive-coloured skin of the Saudis. Yasmine’s mother, understandably, was not too keen on the memory of Princess Sara, so we moved on to different topics, but an important piece of the puzzle was now in place. No wonder Yasmine had kicked up such a fuss to return to her mother. With such a doting Mama, who wouldn’t? I looked around at the animated faces of the women in the room and the tables humming with conversation. The Saudi women there were the agents of change in Saudi Arabia, as they worked quietly to overcome the restrictions they were born into. This was the road not taken. I had chosen a different challenge, one that fluttered like a diaphanous mirage, there one minute, gone the next, while I tried to make sense of a post-war Lebanon. For Saudi Arabian women, the path was crystal clear and they were already making headway. If it were women leading Saudi Arabia, the nation would be in far better hands. These days, the young Saudi Arabs are radically different. Many have had the opportunities, like me, to venture outside of Saudi Arabia 236

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for an education that is free of the hatred and anger inherent in the Wahhabi-imposed curriculum. I went to a large shopping mall with my brother Ghassan, who was now in a wheelchair, and entered the elevator with a young Saudi Arab man who helped me manoeuvre the vehicle. He gazed sympathetically at Ghassan, then asked him softly what his illness was. Ghassan answered in a matter-of-fact manner: ‘I was sick as a child and the motor nerves in my brain were destroyed.’ The young man nodded thoughtfully, ‘That’s what I thought. I’m a physiotherapist. God-willing a cure will be discovered to help you.’ Ghassan and I exchanged glances, remembering our run-in with a similarly aged man many years ago in Half Moon Bay when he accused Ghassan of being a drunk. I would see yet more heartening signs that Saudi Arabia was changing. I wanted to exchange some dollars and walked into the first bank I saw in the mall. A young man at the counter smiled politely when I approached, listened to my request, then told me apologetically: ‘There is a bank next door, Madam, for women. Would you like to step over there and they can help you.’ I paused, then thought about it and told him, ‘OK but if it’s crowded, I’ll come back to you.’ I walked out of the bank and walked back in again. He had seen that I had not gone to the bank next door. He gave me a sympathetic look and processed my request. I said goodbye to Mama before I left to go to the airport to return to Beirut. She opened her eyes to give me a sweet smile, then went back into her reverie. She was in good hands with two devoted Filipino nurses, Maria and Dolores, and Ghassan kept a watchful eye over her. And, most importantly, my father was always nearby. I climbed into the car with Marwan and we drove to Fahd Airport in Dammam. My father was in Jeddah and I had not seen him this trip. Before reaching the airport, I checked my papers for the fifth time to make sure I had everything I needed. I wanted to go home; I missed my family: the world was always an exciting place in their company. Marwan checked my papers again, permission signed by my father being the most important. Yes, it was there. At the airport I kissed him goodbye and insisted that he go home; no need to wait for me. As we lined up for the passport control, a smiling Lebanese businessman stood behind me and asked if it was OK for me to say we were together since the line for the non-nationals was so long. ‘Sure,’ I chirped. It was 237

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my turn to present my passport. I gave it to the passport official, dressed in a green uniform reflecting the official stamp Saudi Arabia was giving to its government employees. I handed him my passport and every paper I had, which included my father’s permission in ten copies, my marriage certificate, permission from my husband that I could travel, and, as a safety precaution, the permission Adnan had signed to Marwan to take care of any official signatures I would need in his absence. The Lebanese businessman smiled sympathetically as I gave him a rueful smile. This was 2001 and I was fifty years old. The skinny passport official, who had not returned my smile, shuffled through my papers, then stated in a monotone that I did not have the necessary permission to pass through. My heart jumped into my mouth. ‘What do you mean? It says here over and over that I am married to a Lebanese, my father has signed these permission slips and I have the marriage certificate to prove it.’ The passport official did not change his expression and repeated in a monotone that I did not have the necessary paper and he did not have the authority to let me pass; he would lose his job if my papers were double-checked by a second airport officer at the exit to the airplane. The Lebanese businessman fidgeted, the time for boarding had been announced. I stepped aside to let him through. The passport officer stamped his passport absentmindedly, not bothering with his non-national status in a national line. I was the one he was after, a Saudi woman trying to leave the country without the original copy of my father’s written permission to allow me to travel out of the country unchaperoned … at the age of fifty with five grown children. I did not exist in my own right, even had I been the head of the United Nations. The passport officer was unyielding, and so to get rid of me he motioned to the head officer’s office behind me. I was in a state of panic I had not felt under the worst bombing I had endured in Lebanon. A sense of deep insult was shaking my very being, of being buried alive in a dark, locked coffin. I took a deep breath and decided to use diplomacy instead. The official was a tall dark man with an accent that placed him from Central Arabia. My heart sank, knowing my chances of a sympathetic hearing had plummeted. And I was right. The man threw my papers back to me with a brief dismissive, ‘Go back home and come back with your father.’ That did it. I stood at his office door to make sure every national and non-national and passport official and airport janitor could hear me and let my voice soar about my unjust treatment as a Saudi 238

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woman and about the al Sa’uds and about his unfairness in blindly following edicts that did not make sense. The officer said nothing, except repeating what he had been ordered to say. A young pleasant-faced Saudi Airlines employee approached and softly asked me to follow him. I did. When he was out of the airport officer’s hearing range, he expressed his support for my case and apologized for my pain and insult. ‘You have been wronged,’ he told me sympathetically, ‘but aren’t we all being wronged by this corrupt government? I will do what is in my official power to get you on board.’ I was touched by this young man’s empathy. My countrymen were as anxious for personal freedom as my countrywomen. Unfortunately, he was unable to get the edict reversed. It was written in stone by the official Saudi government law that as long as I was a Saudi Arab woman I was not to leave the country without the original of my father’s written permission or male custodian even if I was a hundred years old. Defeated and depressed I called my brother and returned to Dhahran, crying myself to sleep from my feelings of insult and subjection. The next morning I hauled my suitcase into Marwan’s car once more. We were going to try to make it out of Saudi Arabia through the Bahraini borders. Marwan had suggested the idea. ‘They usually just wave us through,’ he had encouraged me. ‘I’ve never needed to show my passport entering Bahrain; it’s always on the way back.’ Heartened, we drove, listening to the Beatles and Bob Dylan and reminiscing about our childhood days. We slowed down at the Saudi Arab passports cubicle on the mouth of the bridge that connected mainland Saudi Arabia to the island of Bahrain. There was a traffic snarl as a bus-load of non-nationals were checked. We would never make my flight at this rate. Finally, our turn came. Marwan held up his Saudi passport and I held up mine while Marwan called out ‘Ukhti’ [my sister] in reference to me. The Saudi officer nodded and waved us on. The euphoria I felt was the same we had felt when we had driven with Fatin to Half Moon Bay. Freedom. I recalled the modern, sophisticated, professional Saudi women, so tasteful, graceful and well spoken. Before any of us could benefit from any political reform, we needed to be recognized as full-fledged citizens first. To enshrine women’s rights Saudi law did not need to look very far for the correct implementation of the law within the Islamic parameters. Sharia, as Abu Bashar had explained to me, gave Muslim women legal rights which even their Western counterparts don’t have. 239

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I sat back, overwhelmed with feelings of intense relief. Saudi Arabia was awash with foreigners and Americans, who lived their lives freely within their compounds, and we, the subjects in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, were forced to live in tightly locked cells. No one cared. Oil profits depended on working with those forces that could guarantee the political control of Arabia, and those forces were the al Sa’uds and their Wahhabi ulema. We slowed down once more at the Bahraini passports cubicle. Marwan waved his Saudi passport smilingly once more. The Bahraini official leaned out of his cubicle and took his passport, leafing through it. In spite of Marwan’s assurances, my mouth went dry with anxiety, ‘You’re a Saudi? I can’t believe it. Where did you get the red hair?’ ‘My mother’s Syrian,’ Marwan laughed back. ‘I should have guessed, and your name is Marwan, my favourite name. Have a nice afternoon,’ the Bahraini officer grinned, waving us through. It was as simple as that. And had the airport official at Fahd Airport wanted it, it could have been as simple as that too. We sped on to Bahrain Airport and were rushed to the flight by the Middle East Airlines Bahraini official. ‘Hurry, Madam, what kept you?’ he asked me, as we ran to the airplane that had already closed its passenger list. He spoke urgently on the two-way radio and ordered the flight to open its door for one last passenger. ‘We were held up at the Saudi borders,’ I breathlessly answered as we ran. He laughed at the obvious insinuation. ‘You’re in good hands here in Bahrain. We don’t hold anyone up.’ As I buckled up among the chatter of the Lebanese passengers, who had the knack of turning any gathering into a festive gabfest, I closed my eyes, feeling happier than I had in a long long time. There was hope. Tens of thousands of young, educated men and women within Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Bahrain, with a fair sense of justice, were fighting the ‘infidel policies’ of the al Sa’uds, if only to tear off the mask of piety they hid behind.

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t is early morning and I am standing on our balcony overlooking Beirut and the airport. This is where I have spent the better part of the past month, ever since Israel’s latest war on Lebanon erupted on 12 July 2006. The breeze is amazingly soft and fresh this morning, the bougainvillea is in full purple dress, and one could surely be forgiven if the amount of carnage this poor country is suffering again is momentarily forgotten. But more than a thousand have perished so far in this latest onslaught. The thick stream of black smoke which stretches across the first pink blush of dawn is a permanent reminder that we are in the war zone. Fat plumes of mottled smoke from bombs that were dropped on the airport’s fuel storage depot and the persistent buzz of the spy drone defile the clear summer sky above. It is at night that the ugliness of the carnage is brought home. The bright twinkling lights of the airport and the Shiite southern suburb of Dahiyeh have been obliterated. Deathly silent black ‘blankets’ suffocate the view instead. We had greeted the first shuddering blasts on the airport’s runways with a sort of nervous laughter; their ‘shock and awe’ tactics were not going to faze us this time. The only ones with the commonsense to feel afraid were the dogs. Our three German shepherds, Lea, Eva and Schwarz abandoned their sentry duties with sharp barks of alarm and retreated to the safety of the most inner recesses of their cages where they whimpered pitifully. Shnoodles, our Bolognese-mix terrier did not react any more bravely. He served merely as an early warning system by 241

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suddenly jumping from the sofa and squeezing his fat torso under it, seconds before the ‘smart’ bombs pinpointed their targets. However, our initial uneasy bravado has long since disappeared as bombs continue to crash into the schools, hospitals and civilian homes of Dahiyeh and to flatten entire towns and villages in the south, dawn after dawn after dawn. Pancaked buildings fill the television screen daily as do images of terrified children separated from their mothers in the panic of flight, and those of old people carried on the backs of their sons as they flee on foot. It is impossible to think of anything other than the war. I look at the book I was reading before war broke out – The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell – and it just doesn’t make sense to read it any more. The author talks about penguins and Chile, and all I want is more information about the war: we are glued to the TV, radio and internet for the latest updates.

* * * The summer of 2006 was slated to be Lebanon’s best since the days before the civil war. Tourists were arriving in droves by air, land and sea. Families previously scattered across the globe were reuniting in Lebanon, and there was a bumper season of weddings lined up. Cultural events were boasting international heavyweight names. Brand new ultra-modern beach resorts of a luxurious standard never seen before in Lebanon now lined the southern coastal road leading to Sidon. Gulf Arabs were pouring into Lebanon, as happy to return to their old watering holes as the Lebanese tourist industry was to receive them. In addition to the party atmosphere gripping Lebanon, there was World Cup football fever everywhere. The national flags of FIFA’s favoured teams fluttered from balconies in every town, village and suburb in a time-honoured Lebanese custom since there was no participating team from our own country. Brazil, Germany and France were the clear favourites. We were content with our lives. Business was good, our orchards were flourishing, our children were grown and following their hearts and minds in five different directions. We were now the proud grandparents of a new Khayyat, Munira’s son Nessim, born on 1 October 2005. She had married a German Middle East scholar, Heiko Wimmen, and he had 242

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conceded his name in favour of hers as a last name for their son. Nessim quickly became the primary focus of each and every one of us, and Munira was hard put to find some private time with her baby without one of us turning up on her doorstep. Then war struck. On the eve of the war, Yasmine and Rola were in the midst of arrangements for their summer holiday. Each was heading in a different destination: Rola to Perugia in central Italy for a summer art program and Yasmine to New York to begin her Ph.D. at Columbia University in Comparative Literature. Munira and Ghassan were in their respective apartments in Beirut. They too were getting their travel plans in order, Munira to New York for her Ph.D.’s oral defence at Columbia and Ghassan to London for a Master’s degree in Journalism. Amer had long moved out of Lebanon and was now living and working in Aberdeen as an executive account manager with Schlumberger. Returning home from dropping Adnan off at the airport as he went on a short business trip, I lazily flicked from one TV station to the next as I waited to be summoned into the girls’ rooms for further travel discussion. Suddenly, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, appeared on the screen. In his customary calm and clear voice, he announced the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others along the Israeli–Lebanese blue line in the south. Nasrallah gave his conditions for the hostages’ repatriation which essentially was along the lines of ‘give us back our men and we’ll return yours’. Bushra and I were on the phone immediately. ‘It’s war,’ we nervously said simultaneously. On hearing the news, Adnan immediately tried to book a flight back to Beirut. But it was too late. Almost immediately the airport had been bombed, and a tight air, sea and land barricade was thrown around the country. Ghassan and Munira and her family both lived in reasonably safe quarters of the city, but I was terrified that the roads would become cut off and the children would be unreachable. We had no idea where the bombs were going to fall next. I could not rest until they stepped through the door. Nessim’s wide hazel-flecked eyes, toothy smile and baby bear hug reminded me of all that is beautiful and really important in life. He was discovering the world and loving it. We so wanted to keep it that way. Ghassan’s MSN messenger tag quickly became ‘digging up trenches in my backyard’. 243

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‘This is a war like no other, and we will win like no Arab has won before,’ I repeated to my forlorn husband-in-exile in our hourly telephone updates and to Amer who had cleared his desk in Aberdeen of office work to order to make room for a TV. Our first experience of close range bombardment was electrifying. I was drifting off to sleep whilst the girls were gossiping when the sharp sound of claps of thunder multiplied a thousand times rattled the house and left us breathless with shock. The twins ran for their cats, and Munira ran for her sleeping son and stood shaking in the hallway, covering his ears. He looked around groggily, saw his mother, then went back to sleep. This was also Heiko’s first ever war experience and yet he was taking it a lot better than the rest of us. We wandered aimlessly around in circles, unaware of quite how exposed we were to danger. Bashar and Hana called me from their house 50 metres away. This was their first experience of war too and they were trying to remain composed. Yet when the next bomb crash landed, it had the exact same effect on us as the first. An opaque grey blanket of debris hovered over Dahiyeh the following morning. The deafening bombs that had fallen around us were angelic in comparison to the state-of-art silent bombs used against Hezbollah’s ‘Security Zone’ – the block where Nasrallah, Fadlalah and many of the Hezbollah officials either lived or had their offices – imploding the buildings into minute rubble. From our balcony where we were permanently rooted, we stared in mesmerized horror at the flicker of silver sparkles that appeared after the bombs’ impact: these came together into a terribly beautiful shimmering fountain of glitter that fluttered gently down to cover the confetti of body parts and homes strewn under it. The term ‘Security Zone’ (the words reminding one possibly of the ‘Pentagon’ or the ‘Green Zone’ of Iraq) provokes images of a formidable military complex surrounded by laser-guided missiles. In reality, it is actually just another densely populated neighbourhood in Dahiyeh, composed of apartment buildings, car repair shops, internet centres, mini-markets, bookshops, bakeries and butchers. Other people with no connections to Hezbollah lived there as well. Of course, the enemy knew that Hezbollah’s leadership was not waiting in their offices and living rooms to be bombed in Dahiyeh and that those who were being torn into unidentifiable body parts were innocent civilians. The smart bombs killed and destroyed in a ghoulishly 244

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selective manner. The national flags of Brazil and Germany, Dahiyeh’s favourite soccer teams, still flapped in the summer breeze, but they were now on the ground level instead of on the topmost floors of apartment buildings that peered out of a moonscape crater where their lower floors had vanished. Entrance exam papers lay in folders next to dozens of brand new graduation caps in tight but dusty rows piled next to one another where they had settled in one undisturbed heap close to a jumble of school desks and chairs. A sofa sat primly in an exposed living room on the third floor of a building with a cheap landscape painting firmly in place on the wall behind it and a gaudy chandelier hanging from the ceiling above it. The façade of this ten-storey building had been neatly sliced, leaving the remaining three walls of the apartments intact. Amongst the twisted metal and broken glass rendered asunder by the smart bombs, lay children’s schoolbags with their books and homework papers still in them, an unblemished teddy bear, a garlic bowl and pestle, and a doll that did not survive, beheaded and face down in a stream of black slippery oil from gnarled blackened cars everywhere. Inside a gift shop, whose front window and wall had been ripped open, stood a clock with Nasrallah’s smiling image on its face, its pendulum swinging methodically to and fro in total oblivion of the war crimes strewn around it. In the rubble of the street, a video cassette lay next to a destroyed video recorder with the label ‘Wedding 1969’. War brings out the best in some of us and the worst in others. Tahseen’s television station New TV, a relative newcomer to the Arab satellite television market, soared in popularity through the even-handed slant it chose to give to its war coverage. NTV gave a podium to those out of favour with the government, including the two odd bedfellows fighting Israel: Hezbollah, led by Shiite clerics sympathetic to Syria and Iran; and the Free Patriotic Movement, a political party led by a former Maronite Army General, Michel Aoun, who had fought Syrian hegemony in Lebanon in a fierce war in 1989 but had lost and gone into exile. Both parties had three things in common: keen strategists, loyal supporters and an unarguable dedication to Lebanon’s sovereignty. Bushra who had been weathering the incessant bombing in and around Sidon, got a phone call at 4 am: a recorded voice said to her in Hebrew-accented Arabic that she should not throw her fate in with those Hezbollah ‘terrorists’. ‘The State of Israel will utilize any and all forms of force to exterminate those terrorists hiding in their caves,’ 245

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the recording said. Bushra was furious: ‘If Olmert wants to threaten me, then why doesn’t he call me himself? I want to curse him to his face, what’s the point of shouting at a lifeless recording?’ she said angrily over the phone. During a lull in the bombing, we drove down to the untargeted sections of Beirut where the Pro-American government officials lived under heavy protection. People were in the streets going about their daily tasks without needing to look nervously up at the sky. Nevertheless, there was no avoiding the war’s presence: supermarket shelves were emptying fast and the newspaper vendors had only the local newspapers. But what brought the war firmly into Beirut’s untargeted sections were the wretched refugees crowded into the schools, unfinished buildings, parks and car parks. For most, this way of living had become as normal as living in their village homes. The ordinary Lebanese embraced them as they had in 1996. There was no hide or hair of government assistance or even presence, only Hezbollah and various grassroots NGOs. Many young people fanned out to assist in any manner they could to those who had lost everything except their pride and dignity. Rola and her cousins formed their own private NGO of four to give what assistance they could to the hapless group camping out in the municipal park of Sanayeh. The road back home to Doha along the southern Khaldeh highway from Beirut was eerily empty, save for white-flagged vans and cars filled with three times their capacity fleeing the fighting in the south. Khaldeh was strewn with garbage. The hired foreign street cleaners had all fled. We raced at top speed under each overpass, terrified of being bombed. Israel’s methodical destruction of most of Lebanon’s highway overpasses was inexplicable except to those who ordered it. This did not faze the Lebanese, and advertising agencies expressed Lebanon’s spirit with humour. Not surprising for those in tune with Hezbollah’s machination: the most successful adverts in support of Hezbollah’s resistance were Johnnie Walker and Absolut Vodka: Johnnie Walker’s advert portrayed its mascot, a spirited golden gentleman in top hat and waistcoat, striding jauntily across a destroyed bridge, having successfully leapt over the bridge’s gaping chasm to the logo of ‘keep walking’; Absolut Vodka’s advert shows its bottle tipped on one side, emptying crowds and crowds of returning Lebanese from Middle East Airlines, the national carrier. Israel was unable to achieve any of its widely trumpeted goals for this war despite flooding its borders with Lebanon with war traffic. 246

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Crowding the border region were tens of thousands of foot soldiers, F16 landing pads, artillery lobbing their lethal munitions from the safety of the Israeli borders, rows of bulldozers and Merkava tanks, all state-ofthe-art weaponry. But the hubris of the ‘army that cannot be defeated’ was smashed into the same little pieces that they had reduced Lebanon’s infrastructure to. As the war progressed, the Israeli army discovered that in addition to motivated fighters, Hezbollah had state-of-art weaponry too that sent back those Merkavas that weren’t reduced to scrap metal, limping back into Israel followed by foot soldiers, many of them in tears. To be fair, Nasrallah had warned them early in the war, ‘I tell the Zionists: You can come to any place; you can stage an incursion; land your airborne troops; and enter this village or that point. However, all of this will cost you a great deal. You will not be able to stay on our land. If you enter it, we will drive you out by force. We will turn the land of our precious south into a graveyard for the Zionist invaders.’ Olmert, Peretz, Halutz, Bush and Blair had brushed it off as just more sabre rattling. Olmert’s stated goal was to wipe 35 villages off Lebanon’s map and to have them occupied by NATO. The 35 villages were reduced to rubble and filled with the dead, dying and the homeless but they remain free. Throughout the 34 days of pummelling Lebanon, Israel was unable to claim an inch of Lebanese territory or repel a single Hezbollah fighter from the border. A month of battle has the Israelis still running back and forth across the same terrain a stone’s throw away from the Israeli borders. ‘Lebanon is dead,’ King Abdullah of Jordan had chortled triumphantly to a BBC interviewer at the outbreak of the war. This was a view he shared with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Sanyourah and his allies, Bush’s neo-cons, Israel, Egypt’s Mubarak and Saudi Arabia’s rulers. They had bleated in tandem, accusing Hezbollah of ‘uncalculated adventurism’ and all clearly hoped that Israel would punish it. To their deep dismay, like Lazarus, tiny Lebanon rose from the bloodiest Israeli blitzkrieg that the Middle East has ever witnessed very much intact, and she threw Arab defeatism back into their faces. Despite Israel’s bombs that rained down on schools, hospitals, ambulances, electricity plants, petrol stations, bridges, overpasses, airport runways, oil storage depots, and the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon stood firm, the Arab world’s unlikely hero, bloodied but unbowed. The Lebanese, or factions of them at least, were proving their mettle under the right leadership. 247

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Munira, Ghassan and Yasmine were suffering moral and emotional issues about evacuating. ‘It would be so much easier if you came with us,’ they told me in the typical child-mother framed relationship. What made them safe should also apply to me. ‘I’m staying,’ I responded firmly. And Rola stayed too. She had felt that it would be too frivolous to be studying with strangers while her country was on fire and she cancelled her upcoming summer art course. Unlike the rest, Rola and I were the only ones with the luxury of choice. The rest had their decision made for them. Ghassan, Yasmine and Munira and her husband and baby were evacuated by the Austrian embassy overland to Damascus in a Nissan suburban driven by Austrian cobra crack-troops. As they reluctantly waved farewell to Rola and I, Munira commented almost to herself, ‘Who would have thought I’d be a war mom and Nessim a war baby so soon in our lives together?’ Here is my daughter’s voice as she is pushed to step into my shoes as a mother torn between her country and the safety of her child in the last entry of her war diary before she was evacuated: I was never very brave when it came to war things, even though (or because?) I grew up in civil-war Beirut. Every day I struggle more with the thought of leaving. I know it is my responsibility to take my child to safety, I know that out there the daily life of the world is going on as before, can I deal with re-entering that sphere of existence, knowing that my family, my country, (even my cats!) are in mortal danger? I don’t know, I just don’t know. At night I am sure I will leave tomorrow. But when the morning comes, like this morning, and the night before has been quiet, I think: this will all be over tomorrow and we will all be safe in spite of Olmert, Peretz, Bush and Rice. Where is everybody, world! Have you seen all the children dying? All the old people heaving their old bodies onto sheets on the sidewalk, displaced from their homes for the hundredth time? They buried 70 bodies in Tyre yesterday in a mass grave, plywood coffins lined up side by side. The death toll is topping 1,200 and thousands have been wounded. Has everyone forgotten 1982 and the 17,000 who perished because of the Israelis and their vicious hubris? When will this stop? I am boiling with rage. How many more will have to die before anyone intervenes?

The jets are overhead again. 248

1944: Fahmi Basrawi’s first day of work as an Aramco employee.

1947: Fahmi Basrawi in traditional dress.

1956: Myself and my siblings, newly arrived in Dhahran.

1964: My parents.

1965: My father and I at a history exhibition at Dhahran school.

1967: Me sunbathing in Dhahran.

1967: My siblings, my father and myself outside Medina.

27 July 1970: Adnan and I, outside the AnNahar newspaper office in Beirut. The photograph was taken by the Armenian photographer George Samarjian, who was later killed by a fire ball during the civil war.

January 1976: Adnan and I in Abu Dhabi.

9 September 1982: Adnan with Yasmine and Rola, just hours old.

March 1981: Im Bashar and Abu Bashar

October 1983: Im Bashar tipping a saucer of Turkish coffee into her granddaughter Rola’s eager mouth, in a time-honoured Levantine custom between grandparents and grandchildren.

24 May 2000: Israeli soldiers, the occupiers, become messengers between Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Israel.

24 May 2000: Once-in-a-lifetime window of opportunity on the day of the SLA and IDF retreat: Palestinian refugees of Lebanon are permitted to talk to relatives from Palestinian-occupied villages in Israel, through the go-betweens: Israeli soldiers carefully trained to be pleasant.

24 May 2000: Lebanese pride cloaking Amer’s shoulders on his graduation day at MIT, Boston.

16 June 2003: The final family graduation: all my children at Yasmine and Rola’s graduation.