Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman's Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

d n a s e i Brown s v o k i n h Kalas A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

Fadia Basrawi

d n a s e i n w o r B s v o k i n h s a l Ka A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

d n a s e i n w Bro s v o k i n h Kalas A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

Fadia Basrawi

SOUTH STR EET PR ESS

BROWNIES AND KALASHNIKOVS A Saudi Woman’s Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut

Published by South Street Press 8 Southern Court South Street Reading RG1 4QS UK Copyright © Fadia Basrawi, 2009 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: 978-1-902932-25-5 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 Cover illustrations used with permission of Fadia Basrawi, istockphoto.com/ Stephen Mulcahey (gun), istockphoto.com/Felix Moeckel (bullets), istockphoto.com/ Royden Juriansz (flags), istockphoto.com/Sandra Nicol (brownies), Nicholas Holroyd (passport stamp) and George Baramki Azar/ Saudi Aramco World/PADIA (Beirut street scene). Printed in Lebanon

In memory of my parents-in-law Im Bashar and Abu Bashar and my mother Zeina

Contents '( Acknowledgements

ix

Part I: Aramcoland 1 Desert Suburbia – Desert Kingdom

3

2 Brave New World: Growing Up ‘Aramcon’

17

3 Disneyland Within, Desertland Without

45

4 Hidden America

57

5 Yankee Doodle Comes to Town

69

6 Forbidden Knowledge

91

Part II: Heartland 7 Lebanon: My Past, My Future

119

8 Hello … I Love You

147

9 Go Up to Lebanon and Cry – Jeremiah 22:20

169

10 Tides of War

183

11 Life Will Go On

203 vii

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12 Dignity or Death

213

13 War and Dreams

225

14 Lessons in Love

243

15 What Goes Around Comes Around

253

16 The Road Not Taken

269 277

Postscript

viii

Acknowledgements '( A large part of the raison d’être for this book has come from my life as the daughter of Fahmi Basrawi and Muzayyan Kotob as they faced life in the brave new world of an all-American Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia without losing their identities; and as the daughter-in-law of Salaheddine Khayyat and Munira Fawaz as they faced civil war in Lebanon without compromising their integrity or love for their country. One day in 2003, I casually mentioned that I was thinking of writing a memoir to my husband Adnan and five children: Munira, Amer, Ghassan, Yasmine and Rola (ages ranging from 31 to 25). No sooner were the words out of my mouth than this manuscript was dug up from my bottom drawer and my nose stuck firmly to the grindstone. With the willing enlistment of Munira’s husband Heiko, they all took precious time away from their various jobs and studies to edit my book very, very candidly. Despite our ‘frank’ editing sessions that usually ended with me in time-outs and my toddler grandson Nessim as the only common focus of affection, I am indebted to them for insisting on ‘getting it right.’ Thank you my family for your unwavering faith in the potential of my story. I am equally grateful to my dear friend, Vonnie Nasr, for doing what she does best: ‘saying it like it is’ as she reviewed and re-reviewed my book in its various stages over the past three years. My publishers South Street Press were notable in their patience with my slow progress as one failed deadline followed another while war, peace and war once more in Lebanon took their toll on my concentration. To them and to all who have touched my life indirectly or directly in large and small ways, I thank them.

ix

PA RT I

A RAMCOLAND

1 Desert Suburbia – Desert Kingdom '(

Home … The Saudi Airlines Boeing 707 banked to the left and began its descent to Dhahran International Airport. I peered out of the airplane’s window to catch the flickering orange-yellow flares that dotted the sea of red sand below. They said home to me, 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 of Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth that kept 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 into the bathroom and reappeared incognito enshrouded from head to toe in voluminous black abayas. Glancing briefly at the mounds of black that now occupied the seats around me, I turned quickly back to the window to hide my anger at this enforced double standard of veiling. We touched ground. I was home for the summer of 1970 from my sophomore year of university in Beirut. At the exit from the airplane’s cool interior, I paused to inhale a fortifying 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 first initial blast of 3

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roasting heat and humidity. Clutching my green Saudi passport tightly, uncovered by abaya or veil, I headed 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 with them as they waited with resignation for the airport official to ask them the most inane questions just because he could. My being a Saudi Arabian female traveling alone did not make my entrance into Saudi Arabia, or exit for that matter, much easier. The passports officer, dark and scrawny with a pointed scraggly beard, stared dourly at my uncovered head. His censorious eyes darted over the giant square buckle in my short hair, psychedelic orange tunic, low slung leather belt, white bell bottoms, and leaned forward to continue on down to my red cork platform sandals. Lifting his frizzy eyebrows, he asked derisively, “You are a Saudi?” I rolled my eyes and with an exaggerated sigh, 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, i.e. those born from a Saudi Arabian father, or second tier, i.e. those who had been naturalized. “Really?” he said, answering my silence sarcastically. “And from Medina al Munawara? 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 was standing behind the barrier. He 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. 4

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“How are you? I’m Fahmi Basrawi,” he greeted the passports officer in lilting Hijazi Arabic, shaking his hand. Caught mid-sneer, the passports officer hastily passed his hand over his face in embarrassment. “Fahmi Basrawi?” he croaked as he gaped at my father, the perfect image of modern Saudi elegance with his clipped moustache, immaculate white thobe and gold cufflinks, his white ghutra flipped neatly over the agal, falling in picture-perfect alignment down the other side of his face. Delicately clearing his throat, the flustered officer continued in what he hoped was a more mellifluous tone of voice. “This is your daughter?” he asked, then added with an ingratiating grin, “I would never have guessed … actually, yes, now that you mention it … I do see the resemblance. I simply was doing my job but your daughter misunderstood me.” “Hah!” I threw in with all the indignant fury I could muster. My father, continuing to smile, firmly took me by the arm and walked us away from the passports division. As we rounded the corner, the smile disappeared. “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 passports official’s disrespect. Keeping his eyes rigidly on the road ahead, my father did not answer leaving my outburst to dangle awkwardly in the prickly air between us. I settled back resignedly in my seat and turned to stare at the drab desert landscape, rusty billboards and the odd nondescript cement block building slipping by. I had not expected my father to engage in any sort of critical dialogue with me. He was a Saudi senior staff employee of Aramco (formerly Arabian American Oil Company – 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 years old when Saudi Arabia (and everyone in it) was internationally 5

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recognized by the world community as the property of King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud. He rarely mentioned that period of politics in his life, or any politics for that matter. Turning left, we approached Dhahran through an arched gateway emblazoned with “Go in Safety,” in Arabic and English, Aramco’s ‘Arc de Triomphe.’ We slowed down at the Main Gate, a brick and glass guard post that continuously crackled with disembodied voices over a shortwave radio. Manned by a joint patrol of Saudi police and Aramcon Saudi security guards, it was the only point of entry into Dhahran, and only permitted to Aramco’s ‘Senior Staff.’ Everybody else, particularly Saudis, could not enter this ‘Forbidden City’ except through invitation. The host had to personally meet his guests with Aramco ID in hand, stating name, rank and serial number and introduce them to the guards who wrote their names down on the Aramcon host’s file. Juma’a, the head security officer, gave my father a smart salute and a wide grin then peered into the car to give me a warm welcome for my safe arrival. He had known me since early childhood and a kindred feeling existed between us. I was five when my father and a few other Saudi employees were singled out by Aramco to live the ‘American Dream’ in Dhahran. My father was given due esteem for his senior staff status by the Arab labor, particularly those Saudis who did the grunt work for Aramco. Aramco’s three oil towns, Dhahran, Ras Tanura and Abqaiq, were so insular that American employees and other Westerners could work for ‘the Company’ as it was popularly known, for up to thirty years within their barbed wire perimeter fences and not make the acquaintance of a single Saudi Arab or learn a single Arabic word, save for politically correct terminologies such as “sadiqi” (my friend), “shukran” (thank you), “inshallah” (God willing), “bukra” (tomorrow) and “ahlan wa sahlan” (welcome) … useful words of greeting for the annual functions held for Saudi Arab and American employees. Such barriers between Saudi and American helped keep a lid on unchecked Saudi voices that might want answers to 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. Turning right, we continued on down Main Street, a wide asphalt 6

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lane with cement sidewalks lined with sheltering banyan trees, mature palm trees and pink flowering oleander bushes. Single story homes with shingled roofs and well-tended gardens stood in square blocks along both sides of the road. Not a muttawa’a (enforcers of Wahhabi Puritanism) in sight. Sounds of laughter and music drifted from the ‘efficiencies’ (single bedroom studios) on Seventh Street where the unmarried Aramco employees resided in U-shaped blocks that shared a common square grass space. The singles’ housing was positioned a safe enough distance away from family housing in Dhahran’s lay-out. Many of Aramco’s American employees harked from the ‘Bible Belt’ of the American Midwest and did not approve of the liberal values of some of the unattached young employees. These Puritan Christian Americans were cut from the same cloth of religious fundamentalism as the Wahhabi Muslims in control of Saudi Arabia. But within Aramco’s oil towns, islands of exception at the heart of the Kingdom’s oil industry, the freedom of ‘to each his own’ was conveniently granted. 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 it from the others in 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 honor, 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 favorite food: deep dish macaroni, 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 center as my sister Fatin, my brothers Ghassan and Marwan and I chattered in American, switched to Arabic with our mother and spoke a mixture of both languages with our father, whom we addressed as ‘Baba.’ But this evening, Baba was in no mood for conversation. He was 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 7

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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 Sa’adoun tribe of Southern Iraq. Out of my siblings, I was the closest in appearance to my father but the farthest 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 four-byfour-meter room with white frilly curtains, two standard wooden desks, an American bunk bed and a Persian carpet spread over tan linoleum tiles. I plopped contentedly into an easy chair by the large window that looked out onto our back yard, now awash with light from the corner street lamp. Just beneath our window was the shared bane of us all and of TC, 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 profusion of marigolds, petunias and periwinkles that nodded gently in the night air around 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, “ya wardati, ya wardati …” (my flowers). TC hopped onto 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 smoke screen. Tiny but muscular, her physique reflected her tough inner self. With her 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 her native tongue. Ghassan on the other hand was obviously my brother. He 8

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was 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 storm with my father over his hairstyle which brought about a worried expression on Marwan’s face, a Beatles fan as well but far less confrontational. Marwan, the youngest, at fourteen, was due to graduate from ninth grade at Dhahran Senior Staff School in another week. He was joining Fatin and Ghassan in England to study for his GCEs at summer’s end at Bryanston School for Boys. Marwan’s copper-colored hair, freckled button nose and white skin had almost resulted in my father being carted off for kidnapping at Cairo Airport in 1960. At Cairo Airport, a guard had noted Marwan’s coloring and his American prattle 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, foreignlooking child could be the biological son of this Saudi Arabian man with black hair and moustache. But perhaps 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 child 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 blond brother, Khalo Adnan, who was studying Agriculture at ‘Ain Shams University in Cairo, was trotted out from the reception sector to show where Marwan got his fair looks from, but all to no avail. The security guards were not going to be budged from their accusation. We suffered several noisy and exhausting hours in the airport until Amti (Aunt) Bahija, my father’s sister who lived in Cairo in palatial style, contacted friends in the right places, and only then was the confusion finally sorted out. Now Marwan was regaling us with impersonations of Mama during yet another clash with Aramco’s long-suffering personnel department over her accusations of shoddy workmanship in the maintenance of our 9

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bungalow (Marwan was the shanghaied interpreter with the Filipino clerks). I knew I could count on shared feelings of outrage at the insolence of the Dhahran Airport passports officer towards me away from Baba’s unsympathetic ears. Our father wanted us educated but unaltered, an impossible task. 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 tell them about my new Lebanese boyfriend, Adnan, a young journalist for the influential Lebanese newspaper, An Nahar. I smiled inwardly as Fatin and Ghassan interrupted one another amidst loud laughter at the confusion they’d cause after disclosing their real nationality to new English acquaintances and then watch them politely and discreetly attempt to 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 a lot less hilarity. Neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia was particularly popular in Beirut against the ever-present turmoil of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that defined everyone’s identity and politics. 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.’ Circumstance alone would pull only me into an Arab awakening while my siblings would remain firmly as American as the apple pie we had just eaten for dessert. Eventually we would inhabit two separate worlds at extreme odds with one another…

Desert Dust to Desert Gold Dhahran began as a dusty collection of makeshift tents and palm tree frond huts in 1933 to house American oil men of 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: 10

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‘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?’1

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 to be worth the trouble. Doggedly, the first American geologists 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. Expectedly, 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 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.”2

The American geologists finally struck oil in the Eastern Province on March 3, 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 United States 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, outsizing 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 11

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paved; trees, flowers and green grass grew in abundance everywhere. Each of the three communities had its own library, golf course, clay tennis court, bowling alley, yacht club, horseback riding stables and Olympicsized swimming pool. All were Saudi Arabia’s firsts, as were 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 or Chopin. Dhahran even made 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, television and brightly lit, air-conditioned homes, each with their own yards and hedges. Such mundane details about Dhahran deemed worthy of mentioning by the reporter underlined in bold red the backwardness of the rest of the country. Well-known scholars such as historian Arnold Toynbee, Arabist H. St. John Philby, and anthropologist Margaret Mead accepted Aramco’s invitations to give lectures to members of the community. All three also gave warnings of an eventual backlash against Aramco’s stiff 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 liquor flowed freely. We bought our food from the company’s ‘commissary’ that 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 Shi’a Saudis that the Americans (and we) 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 dispensers to combat the intense heat. We camped out with our scout troops on Aramco’s private beach, Half Moon Bay. We competed at 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’ that ranged 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 12

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Friday. That day of the week was the one non-negotiable 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 to Boy and Girl Scouts of America. On Halloween we went trick-or-treating with our friends dressed up as ‘G.I. 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 of Dhahran School on the rings. We hung out with our friends in the pool hall in the Recreation area in the center of Dhahran. There was a ‘Teen Canteen’ set up especially for young teenage Aramcons replete with a jukebox, soda fountain and a Filipino barman 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, Shi’a Saudi Arab personnel, from the neighboring Al Hasa oasis towns of Qatif and Hofuf. On every American Independence Day, July 4th, Dhahran held a parade led by baton twirling, mini-skirted majorettes and a spiffily costumed brass band which included my sister on the clarinet at one point. 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 sun dresses rolled past clapping crowds followed by Americans on spirited Arabian horses and elementary school children dressed as Cowboys and Indians. To the rat-tat-tat of the drums and the blare of the trumpets, the parade moved triumphantly down King’s Road on to the County Fair spread out in Dhahran’s Recreation area. There we wolfed down hot dog buns smothered in relish and ketchup and washed them down with root beer. We bought rides on laconic camels, paying the outstretched hand of their equally laconic Bedouin owners before embarking. Then there were three-legged races and donkey races to join, and bakery contests to nibble from. 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 miniscule backs. By day’s end, with 13

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our prize turtles still racing round 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. My siblings and I 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 while 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 repetition of the raven’s “Nevermore” we became aware of a different kind of silence. An eerie red light had stealthily permeated the air 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-“Nevermore” and walked rapidly to the window. As she stared at the unfolding scene outside, she underwent an astonishing transformation from a stodgy school marm into an 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 about to be amongst the few, other than the Bedouins, to witness a shamal’s birth.” With the somber mood of the raven’s “Never more” still upon us, and the unexpected change that our English teacher had undergone, we entered a surreal world as the shamal unfolded before us. The red glow deepened to shades of darker red and increased in its 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 of the shamal’s angry winds shattered the silence, attacking our window panes 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 14

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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 spellbound 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 neighborhoods 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 lightning, then ceasing as abruptly as it began, leaving very soaked Aramcons to drift back to their homes wearing big smiles on their faces. Across the street from our house was a baseball diamond complete with bleachers where family and friends watched the young players strike in or strike out. Beyond the baseball diamond was a vast circular expanse of soft grass for American football games and 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 next-door neighbors, Candy, Crystal and Kelly Riley. We often pitched a tent in its midst for sleepovers where, snug in our sleeping bags, we spent the night talking and singling out our favorite constellations. Sleep would finally overtake us as we gazed in silent wonder at the Milky Way that cascaded in a spectacular explosion of celestial glitter across Arabia’s infinite ink black sky. I could see our ‘green playground’ from where I sat next to my bedroom window stroking TC. The full moon appeared on the horizon, a golden benevolent smiling face, so bright that it outshone the myriads of 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 have 15

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formally moved out of Dhahran. It would gradually recede out of 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 young life.

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Firsts The 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 the American oil camp of Dhahran. We had arrived in Dhahran from Beirut a week before school began on a TWA caravelle, TWA then functioning as Saudi Arabia’s official airline. As the plane rolled slowly to a stop, the first image we caught of Saudi Arabia from our airplane window was of our father waving to us just a few meters away on the tarmac. Behind him was a dusty hangar with a fat propeller airplane inside and a second hangar, open at both ends, with a long table running down its middle. We headed towards the open-ended hangar where we were ordered to stop at the long table with our luggage. Unsmiling Saudi customs officials rifled rough shod 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 before us under shimmering waves of 17

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steaming air, uninterrupted stretches of toneless beige that extended flatly in all directions to the distant horizon save for one single slash of black: the asphalt road that led to Dhahran. Our first introduction to our homeland’s topography was anticlimactically aggravating. Scorching sand, mixed with broken shards of miniscule seashells, slipped into our brand new shoes and chafed our feet through our socks as we trudged to the car. Our shuffling feet 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 drove us to our new home 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 loudly honking cars, no vegetable vendors calling out their wares, no shoppers and no shops, no families out on the streets, not a sound of human life as I knew it in Beirut. All we saw were identical one-story houses, one row after the next, with fenced-in gardens. We drove up to our new home, a grey, square house with white windows with a pointed grey shingled roof and a garden surrounded by a thick dark green hedge. 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,” my father explained. “More houses will come and our neighborhood will soon look like the rest.” As we eagerly crowded through the garden gate, we brushed past the hedge’s tiny white flowers releasing their sickly sweet perfume into the hot humid 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 watered by a lone, desperately twirling sprinkler. We dashed into our new home up three white wooden steps leading to a swinging screen door that slammed shut behind us with a loud clap. We caught our breath when we found ourselves standing directly in the living room. In the homes we knew in Beirut and in Damascus, the living rooms contained the fanciest furniture and ornaments of the house, and were strictly off limits to us, their doors opening only for special guests. Our Dhahran living room was a far cry from any living room we knew. It was a plain rectangular room with taupe colored walls and carpet. Four armchairs of polished wood with taupe colored cushions stood stiffly around a low polished wood rectangular 18

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table. Two metallic standing lamps with white conical lampshades shed triangles of light over the rigid 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. Each room had a built in cupboard, two single beds, 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, and large white 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 in Beirut. We reveled 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 had been needed to cool a room. We adjusted to our new home easily (age was a helpful factor) while Mama took longer to fully appreciate the hassle-free conveniences of an American home. Damascene kitchens smelled of babboor gaz (Bunsen burners) used for cooking that needed to be pumped and lit at the same time. Dry goods stored in burlap bags in the mezzanine attic above the kitchen needed to be hauled down. Vegetables were bought from roving vendors who advertised their wares in catchy throaty cries such as “Assabee’ al bubboo ya khiar” (cucumbers like a baby’s fingers) as they trundled past on colorful heavily laden wooden carts. The fresh vegetables then needed to be sorted and cleaned preferably in gossip sessions with the next door neighbor and any visiting friend or relative, before being placed in a copper pot on the noisy Bunsen burner for a labor-intensive slow-cooked meal. Meat came daily 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 vendor 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 handheld cloth. There would be none of that in my mother’s new modern, efficient suburban life. 19

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* * * 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 from the night before. I was the kind of child who loved school. I carefully slipped the crisp white cotton pique dress over my head, and tied the sash loosely behind my back. Then I sat on the bed and pulled on a brand new pair of lightly woven white cotton socks that folded twice at the ankle. I was told that they were called ‘bobby socks’ by Mrs. James, the wife of the school principal, a kindly lady who had helped my mother find my ‘first day of school’ clothes. She had called the black and white shoes that I was now slipping my feet into ‘saddle shoes.’ I painstakingly knotted the shoelaces into a ‘rabbit ears’ bow 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 onto a chair in front of the bathroom mirror to observe closely how my mother fashioned my bangs 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 spoke no Arabic,” a concept difficult to absorb. How could they not speak Arabic? Everyone in my world up till now spoke Arabic. The children lived 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, quickly exhausting my American vocabulary. We parked the car and climbed a short flight of steps to the school, a sprawling modern building with glass facades and brick walls in the midst of well-tended squares of green grass and palm trees. We walked into a large airy reception area straight on through to the office of the principal, Mr. Vincent James, a good-humored, grey-haired bear of a 20

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man with a laughing smile. Mr. James stood up and clasping my hand playfully, boomed cheerfully in fluent Arabic, “Ahlan wa sahlan, Fadia!” (Welcome). 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 color 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 colorful, light-filled room with large windows shaded by venetian blinds across one wall. Drawings, pictures, and a large green blackboard filled the remaining walls. Big and small lines (the English alphabet) were printed on a banner that circled the classroom near the ceiling, stopping before what I would learn was the flag of the United States of America. Children seated at small wooden desks in tidy rows turned in unison to stare unblinkingly at me. Hopping up from behind her desk, my teacher came forward and kneeled smilingly at me, eye level. Tall and willowy with short auburn hair and wispy bangs that emphasized her big green eyes, I found her even prettier than my mother. “Marhaba (hello), Fadia,” she told me, “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-onlyAmerican 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, fighting 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. A petrifying sense of alienation crept over me and my heart began to beat so hard, I was afraid it was going to jump out of my chest. Unaware of the panic rising within me, Miss Thornton gently took my hand and led me to a desk in the front row, pulled out a chair, and motioned for me to sit down. Looking around at the silent wideeyed children in my class, I made another frightening discovery. Not a 21

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single child in the classroom had black hair! They were a sea of blondehaired heads with delicate 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, 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 any one so skinny or so freckled 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 react like a trapped cat. Miss Thornton stepped in swiftly and hauled me and my wildly flailing arms and legs onto her lap and held me closely to her with my back to the class while she rocked me gently back and forth, soothingly patting my back .When my tears and sobs finally subsided, I slid down slowly from the safety of Miss Thornton’s lap but kept my fingers tightly entwined around the edge of her skirt for the rest of the day. The classroom was a treasure-trove of fascinating new things I had neither seen nor touched before. Fat brightly colored 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 fit perfectly in my hand, all of which I was unable to explore fully as I needed to both 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 persuasion 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 to Miss Thornton. She applauded happily and asked me to stand in front of the class where I proudly read out my Oh! Oh! Oh! They all 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, Mr. Suleiman Rubayi’, to come in daily to give me Arabic lessons across the hall from my classroom. 22

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Everything about Mr. Rubayi’ was dark and serious. He was short, with thick black eye brows, a bushy black mustache 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 mustache 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 Miss Thornton very much and I was desperate that she remained as proud of me as she had been the day that I had 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 brown eyes, rosy cheeks, straight brown hair and short bangs 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 Nayna did, I did. If she sharpened her pencil, I did too. If she put one foot across 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 many years later during a summer job at Dhahran School from Miss Kant, my second grade teacher when she reminisced about my early days there. “Fadia,” she had 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 your 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 been a permanently scarring experience in the 23

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tender years of my early childhood was turned into an empowering one by Miss Thornton’s intuitive grasp of a frightened child’s world. I wish I could say the same about all the teachers in Dhahran School. Unfortunately, my sister Fatin had a horrific kindergarten experience after she too went through the same copying-what-others-are-doing act. Indeed, she almost flunked kindergarten due to her teacher, Miss Waldish, who misconstrued her inability to speak American or act like one as a learning disability. Fatin was saved from permanent impairment of 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 buzz cut and a long tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, Mr. Goellnor was beloved by everyone both young and old … beloved enough to endure listening to his WWII stories of battle in the Pacific theater many times over. He noted Fatin’s gymnastic talents and turned her into Dhahran School’s star gymnast. Unluckily for Fatin, her training stopped after she graduated from Dhahran School as physical education for girls in Saudi Arabia is forbidden by royal decree to this day.

Of Arabs and Americans As Aramcon-bred Saudi Arabians functioning in the world at large, 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 trying to look like my blonde-haired, 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 one morning 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 neighborhood had the proverbial neighborhood 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 bulk, a gruff harsh voice and an ability to throw rocks with deadly precision. Fed up with his swagger and checkpoints that interrupted our 24

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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. We 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 of his handlebars. With a roar of anger, he looked behind him and saw us clapping and cheering and taunting him. He threw his bike aside, 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 out 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,” and 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 spectacular than serious with all the blood that gushes out. Bobby froze at the sight of my bloodied head, terrified at 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 rushed me to the emergency 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 who was 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 Palestinian lawyer friend 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 to 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-American ‘partnership.’ 25

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On my first day of injury, my teacher, Miss Danforth, 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, refusing 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 had been to become a toughie and fit in with the popular crowd. What was I to do with all of 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 almost in tears, 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. The incident passed and we ended up becoming fast friends. But I was left with the niggling unease of always wondering if I was being treated nicely because I deserved it or because I was the 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 in Aramco: not American.

* * * Aramcon Mama … Syrian Style It was no 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. She 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 soft 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, it bordered 26

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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 colors 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 thumb, my mother discovered the one indoor plant that thrived in the shady, artificiallycooled homes of Dhahran, the coleus, a shade-loving velvety leafy plant that she nurtured into a vibrant richly variegated bushel-sized shrub from mere rooted cuttings and won first prize for her entry, annually, in the annual Women’s Group houseplants competition. She fed us our favorite cereal that she knew as kornaflek which we ate with thawed milk from ‘Minute Maid’ frozen milk cans imported from the United States. 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 toast bread sliced diagonally down the middle. From the day she discovered the wonder of non-iron American ‘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 27

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were undercover by speaking American. A well placed sherrub (shut-up) with pursed lips and a knowing sidelong glance reduced us to helpless laughter and put 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 Texan 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 distaste for their handshakes in my mother’s learning curve vis-à-vis American habits was the Americans’ manner of feeding their guests. She was exposed to it in the first week of her life in Dhahran at a dinner for the new Saudi employees and their wives. Whatever the hostess offered her, my mother 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 starving 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 and brought us up in the traditional, authoritarian manner of most households in the Arab world. My argument with the passports officer was a disquieting show 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 perceived his edicts. But my father’s censure was not strong enough to stem our rapid Americanization. As we partook in all the rites of passage of any American youngster which included Valentine’s Day card counts, Easter egg hunts and sleepless slumber parties, we became immersed in a western culture which our parents did not understand or accept and we drifted into uncharted waters where our parents could not guide us. This created tense relations 28

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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 that my parents listened to such as Shadia or Sabah or Um Kulthoum, but rather 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 program 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 the 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. We went ahead and collected them anyway, making sure they were stashed out of sight. He would eventually uncover the stashes 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, there was 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 again. Our Arabic language and our Arabness were fast becoming pointless irritants in our young Aramcon lives. Our parents were unable to give us 29

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a role model in our Arab world that we could emulate, but we had plenty in our American one. We began to dream, behave and speak exactly as our American peers did. The differences between our parents and those of our American friends began to embarrass 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 had pulled her out of school to help at home. My gentle, peace-loving and devout grandfather who doted on my mother 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 a PTA member. She turned our side yard into a chicken coop so we could eat fresh eggs and brought about complaints from the neighbors 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. Typical to my mother, her hysterical build-up was exponentially more than the norm at the thought of the inevitable 30

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demise of her beloved plants and flowers. Not one to take assault sitting down she requisitioned us on the blighted 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 presaged 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 hopes that her prayers would touch base. But it never happened. In a final deafening roar, a thick black sheet of starving locusts dropped from the sky over Dhahran. 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 stationary 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 in its skinned limbs, our grass no more, the ensuing silence as deafening and terrifying as the locust attack.

Politics and Pain Another major way in which our home differed markedly from our American friends’ was that the noise decibel within our home was incrementally louder, whether in discussions between parent and child or the absence in American homes of loud radio newscasts at the break of dawn. Ever since I could remember, we awoke to the solemn newscasts turned up to the highest volume from Sawt al Arab min al Qahira (Voice of the Arabs from Cairo). The ‘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. 31

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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, who was a delightful looking man with light brown hair that waved in ripples, rosy cheeks, a blonde mustache and a very sweet smile. He had asked me 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 any more different than I already was, I had been dutifully parroting the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ with the rest of my classmates every morning, with my hand on my heart to the American flag on the upper corner of our classroom wall. “Fahmi?” Mr. Shafiq 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. A deep silence suddenly blanketed the room. I felt sorry for my father who was very, very embarrassed by my disclosure. Only with the firm promise that this would stop would Mr. Shafiq 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. Shafiq’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 next door as Mr.Shafiq 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. Shafiq’s voice rose to a loud, tense level as he spoke about the Zionist terrorist group, Irgun, and I caught his shouted words “… the 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 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 neighbor 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 smoldering ruin …” Mr. Shafiq was interrupted 32

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by a bloodcurdling 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. Shafiq 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 horror 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. With the exception of the presence of the Saudi flag in the classrooms after my father followed up on his promise to Mr. Shafiq 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 nor the beauty of the Arabic word, nor the history behind the Muslim civilization. I had no idea who the Ummayyads, Abbasids or Fatimids were or what Salaheddine el-Ayyubi or Harun al Rashid did or where. I barely knew the facts surrounding our prophet. But I did learn that “in fourteen hundred and 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 at 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 a favorite subject for us girls, as we 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 Black’s 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. 33

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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 favorite male teacher is crying his heart out? We began to cry too, silent tears rolled 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 out of Dhahran with his wife and two children for his annual leave, 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 children 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 which I was oblivious to and frankly did not identify with. There were 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 had broken out 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 didn’t even register the power struggle that was paralyzing Saudi Arabia for kingship between Sa’ud and Faysal right on the homefront. 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 Arab in Dhahran of Saudi Arabia.

* * * Bingo and Beatlemania The 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 34

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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 better understand 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 that 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. Pretending to study overnight with my friends, I went to school dances in Abqaiq and Ras Tanura, and beach parties at Aramco’s yacht club and one Bingo night at the American Air Base overlooking Dhahran. By ‘one Bingo night’ I mean one Bingo night. When Barbara invited me to join her and her parents to play Bingo, I said yes happily 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 forbidden by my father in no uncertain terms. Outside of 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 breach I was committing, I dared Barbara to wear lipstick, a very big dare for us at our tender age of twelve. Barbara ran into her mother’s room and returned with the brightest color 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 horseplayed in the back seat of the car. In between bounces, I snuck a glance in the rear view window to make sure all was clear only to lock eyes with my father driving behind us. Barbara and her parents, oblivious 35

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of what had just transpired, continued with their bantering chatter as we turned off into the direction of the Air Base, giving my father precise information 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 luster and began to drag on as I replayed the scenario of my father’s grim face over and over. Neither the Bingo game nor my winning first prize that gave me stage center as I received 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 because of the Bingo but at my lipstick that had been so bright that he saw it clearly through the rear view 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 lengthening list of forbiddens. Matters became astronomically worse at home after I succumbed to Beatlemania. Their singular four/four beat in music, mop tops, and 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 where ever I went and whatever I did. The day that their first movie ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ came to our theater I couldn’t sleep from excitement. My friends and I had formed a fan club for the Beatles and had named ourselves after our favorite Beatle. Jeanette Rebold was John, Pat McDonald was Paul, Cheryl Congleton was Ringo and I was George. On the day of the movie, appropriately attired in Beatle costumes and Beatle haircuts, we were driven to the movie theater 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 forbidden me outright 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 bought a ticket for himself as well, becoming the only adult in the movie theater. 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 36

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screen. After ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ I took my Beatlemania underground along with my other western idiosyncrasies.

Ottomanesque Summers: Damascus and Alexandria My identification with the Americans was never due to any lack of contact with the Arab world; I knew it well. We visited my parents’ Arab 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 in Syria, and Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt. Now I realize how fortunate I was to have seen that part of the Arab world before it crumbled under the burden of the Arab–Israeli conflicts and various 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 grandparents’ house, a beautiful white ground floor home with high ceilings, sunlit rooms and black and white marble checkered floors. The house looked out onto an open porch and a small fragrant rose garden enclosed by a black wrought iron fence. It was in a wide plaza known as the Ra’eess (the leader) in reference to the Presidential Palace that 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 guards that stood at attention round the clock, creating 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-storied 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 onto the passerby. A large green park, the ‘Sibki,’ boasted a man-made lake filled with ducks and swans. Located in the center of the city, Sibki Park divided the residential areas of the city from the center of the city with its ancient covered markets, the largest of which was Suq El Hamidiyeh built by the Ottoman Sultan Abdel Hamid in the nineteenth century. The suq was lined with tiny shops traditionally handed down from father to son. Salesmen stood at the door to their shops and called out to potential 37

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customers to buy their wares of iridescent damask silks, handmade mosaic boxes, embroidered tablecloths, towels, spices, 21 karat gold jewelry, satin bed sheets and risqué underwear for brides to be. Branching off from the main covered suq was a maze of sinewy crowded paths lined 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 colored glass windows with tightly latticed wooden shutters. So entwined were the pathways and homes, that one exceedingly narrow and crooked lane had the name: ‘where the monkey lost her son.’ Our favorite quarter of the suq was the one devoted to slippers of all shapes, sizes, and colors. They hung in multitudes of overlapping pairs attached by invisible wire on poles leaning on the sides of the shops’ 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 suq, vendors adroitly wielded their cumbersome wooden three-wheeled carts alongside puttering mopeds and men on shrilly tinkling bicycles covered with brightly colored feathers. We inched our way slowly through crowds of pedestrians from one shop to the other, we elbowed the pushing and pinching males in the crowd and we patiently endured our aunts’ 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 suq’s Arabic ice cream parlor. The ice cream parlor was a large cavernous room furnished with rickety white Formica tables and bamboo chairs scattered around the room in no particular arrangement. Its white plaster walls were bare, save for two large sepia portraits of the owner’s father and grandfather strung up high near the ceiling, the men identical in their red fezzes and stern mustachioed faces. At the parlor’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 as they pounded milk, sugar, and miskeh (gum Arabic) into a rich, smooth and chewy consistency. We tapped our table to their rhythmic beats as we waited for our treat. At long last our ice creams arrived, rising in delectable pristine 38

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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 amongst the established Damascene families, largely middle class merchant families who anchored the economic and social network. Each religious denomination lived without any visible rancor vis-à-vis the others. All the inhabitants of the city were Damascene and Syrian before they were Jews, Christian, or Muslim. That of course applied to the cities. The countryside, on the other hand, was a different story. There lived Syria’s ‘miserables,’ the peasants, who subsisted in subhuman conditions without water, electricity, roads or schools. Amongst them were the Alawites, worshippers of Ali, the Prophet’s grandson. Branded as a cult by the largely feudal urban Sunni leadership, they were shunted out of the fabric of Syrian existence along with the other non-urban groups. One morning in 1958 during our summer holiday, I walked out to the front porch to show off my brand new hula hoop to the neighbors when I noticed a giant new flag draped along the length of the Presidential Palace. “We are now part of the United Arab Republic,” Uncle Hisham, my mother’s youngest brother, informed me excitedly. “We are one Arab people with Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser will restore Palestine and our dignity and honor; he is an Arab Nationalist of the first caliber who will lead us Arabs in our fight for our right to be free of all types of occupation.” I was seven, 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 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 grandparent’s 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 favorite song was the one that included my Aunt Firdoss as part of the chorus of the Ain Shams University in Cairo in a song lauding Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the 39

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Suez Canal and the building of the High Dam of Aswan in defiance of the West. Who Gamal Abdel Nasser was didn’t make much difference to me at that age of course but I was content with 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 that 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 clamoring 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 successfully steer Syrian politics away from the Sunni-dominated Pan-Arab leadership. The Alawitecontrolled Baathist regime was rife with corruption and nepotism that triggered a serious drain of money and brains 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 Baathists even within the walls of their homes after Sunni relatives and friends began to disappear as they left the mosque after Friday noon prayers. All those who chose to question the Ba’athists 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 Ba’ath ideology in Beirut’s cafés in 1943. We watched Damascus turn into a sad, gray, 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 control over Yemen in 1962. Post 40

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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 sparkling city filled with colorful people and laughter. The only place that didn’t have much laughter was the large echoing marble expanse of my father’s sister’s penthouse overlooking the Nile River. Amti Bahija had been married off at the age of thirteen to a man thirty-five years her senior, Saleh Mehdi Qal’aji, an Iraqi from Baghdad. He had fought with Ibn Jiluwi and Ibn Sa’ud back in the early days of Saudi Arabia’s conquest and had been instrumental in setting up both the police and charity network for the new kingdom. A grateful King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz had told him, “I’m a simple Bedouin who does not bequeath aristocratic titles such as Bek or Basha, I will endow you with what I perceive you to be, the title of Mosleh (Benefactor).” Saleh Mehdi Mosleh’s efforts were further rewarded by Ibn Sa’ud 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, the emotional scars of an early marriage and immense wealth permanently etched on 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 the entrée. Dressed in the height of fashion, seated in an ornate velvet armchair with legs crossed, she laconically blew smoke rings from her cigarette (a favorite pastime of hers) while 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 then continued on to the highlight of our summer in Alexandria to visit my mother’s grandmother. My great-grandmother, Marie Haddad, was a dear white-haired Maronite Christian from Deir al Qamar in Lebanon (which was a part of the Ottoman-ruled Bilad el Sham when she was born). She had met my great-grandfather, Mohammed Hammoud, while living with her family in Alexandria and he was a merchant from the Lebanese port city of Sidon, passing through in the days of borderless existence and trade between the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. They had a daughter and a son but their marriage did not last and she returned to her family 41

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in Alexandria where she owned her own apartment. For reasons no one could quite explain, their son Joseph went with his mother 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 after his remarriage until my grandfather, Hamdi Kotob, 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 traveled 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 rhythmically from side to side as the train clattered down the track through wide expanses of cotton fields that stretched as far as the eye could see. Dotting the fields of green and white were the fellahin, peasant men and women, some bent over, others 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’s train station, we made a beeline for the semicircle of brightly befeathered horses and black hooded carriages, hantoors, which awaited passengers headed towards the coastal city, hoping our favorite carriage driver, Hassanein, would be there to take us to Tehteh (Granny) Im Yousef, our great-grandmother. She was a cheerful bundle of energy and always sang happily in her Egyptian dialect as she welcomed us into her modest home in a Christian neighborhood, a quiet genteel residential area with French era colonial buildings decked 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 42

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narrow winding street. Tehteh’s home, a two-bedroom apartment that could 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 metalframe 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 devout attachment to Christianity despite her brief marriage to my Sunni Muslim great-grandfather, my great-grandmother had the cross and pictures of the Madonna and Jesus 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, being the potential minefield that religion tended to be. Khalo Joseph, who followed the Maronite creed 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 reason Khalo Joseph gave. But I would imagine it was more of a diplomatic way of giving Khalo Joseph a chance to actually 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. We pretended to hammer the heel of our shoe with small nails that we stuck in our mouth exactly in the manner of Khalo Joseph and vigorously polished our shoes and anyone else’s 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 brown piece of irregular shaped leather, turn it round and round in his hands while he got the feel for it, and then finally bring out a wooden shoe dummy and begin to compose his shoe. He would cut the soft leather with a small knife using short deft motions, then pull it over the shoe dummy, stretching it this way and that in the manner he envisioned it to be, and as pieces of leather flew and his needle danced in and out, a shoe would magically begin to appear. I would sit quietly in my corner observing him intently, and he would look up at me 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. 43

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Returning to Dhahran from our summer holidays, we had no trouble 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.

Spiritual Encounters On occasion it wasn’t my Arabness that brought me unwarranted attention but my religion. During sixth grade, I was invited along with Barbara and Carolyn, two friends from my Girl Scout troop, to the home of a new student, Cindy, a blonde-haired blue-eyed girl of Swedish extraction who had been in Dhahran for less than a month. 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 45

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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. 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 the mother of Dick, Jane, and Sally in my first grade reader in her peach-colored shirtdress and a 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 a United States where I wouldn’t have to follow my father’s oppressive rules; it became yet more tempting to step through the door being held wide open for me seemingly with only happy days ahead. The girls’ and mother’s argument was unsettling. They told me that the best religion to be was Protestant and they 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 to 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 46

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Protestant,” I told them, and, avoided them forever more after that incident. Cindy and her family did not stay long in Aramco: 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. Apart from that singular incident, spiritual events in Dhahran were homely occasions for intercommunal socializing. 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; holidays were one big visiting spree as our homes filled with American and Arab friends wishing one another well. Dhahran’s commissary sang gaily with Christmas songs as it overflowed with Christmas ornaments and fairy lights, gold-gilded Whitman’s Sampler chocolate boxes and Drostes chocolates wrapped in silver and red decorated 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 the 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 happily 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 in the ‘States’ were always in summer. Bringing toys into Dhahran for Christmas was a prime contentious issue between Aramcon mothers and Wahhabi customs officials. In 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 47

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this painful course of action. The Dhahran Women’s Group came up with the idea of bringing toys in through the private shipments that American Aramco employees were permitted annually from mail order catalogues such as Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. These shipments bypassed Saudi customs on an understanding between Aramco’s Government Relations and Saudi Arabia. Each year several women offered their shipment quotas to be filled with toys and dolls for the Aramco community as a lucrative fund raiser for the Group’s various projects. To avoid the crushing rush the first toy fair experienced with handto-hand combat among mothers for highly coveted items such as ‘G.I. Joes,’ a lottery was organized where each mother drew 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’ desire, 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 any one 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 48

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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 around the camels behaved. Needless to say, the scene surrounding the new-born Jesus was minus the barnyard animals and their maestro, the donkey. We caroled the community on Christmas Eve with the rest of the school children from the back of Dhahran’s big red fire engine. Our musical tour began outside Aramco President Thomas Barger’s home, the largest house in Dhahran situated strategically on its highest point, in a neighborhood aptly named ‘The Hill’ where the top brass of Aramco 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 oven-warm Christmas cookies. With the cookies warming our tummies, the fire engine rolled slowly onwards past Dhahran’s duplexes and bungalows now transformed into a dazzling cornucopia of iridescent lights that twinkled and shone in the clear night air. Every Christmas, this tiny speck in the Arabian Desert turned into a hushed, shimmering, magical, winter wonderland. A six-meter 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 takeoff mode, ready 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 the Prevention of Vice in charge of enforcing Shari’a (Islamic Law), were controlling the public morality of non-Aramcon Saudis with fanatical zeal. Under their vigilant eyes, all Saudi subjects were forced to conduct themselves as the Wahhabi ulema believed daily life to have been conducted in the 7th century AD during Prophet Mohammed’s lifetime. 49

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We, the select few Aramcon Saudi citizens, were free of muttawa’a breathing down our necks because of an ingenious understanding reached in 1956 by Aramco with the Al Sa’uds and their reluctantly acquiescing ulema, after Saudi Arabia became a major source of oil to the west. From the start, Aramco’s CEOs were painfully aware that allowing Shari’a inside the oil camps carried the highly likely scenario of muttawa’a running willy-nilly within the community and upsetting what was sacred to all parties concerned: namely, the flow of oil to the West. After intense negotiations by Aramco’s Government Relations and Public Relations Departments with the Al Sa’uds and the ulema of the Committee for Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a common consensus was reached that it would be in all the above parties’ interests that Aramco law rule within the confines of the community and Saudi Shari’a law rule outside of the community. So it came to be by royal decree in 1956, that any woman who drove inside Dhahran wearing shorts, did her errands and went home. Driving outside the community gates, however, she went to jail. To further appease the ulema whom they recognized to be 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 the Wahhabi religious tenets within the Kingdom, whether the Saudi was a Wahhabi or not. As far as the Americans running the oil company were concerned, this arrangement suited them 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 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 for their quest to convert Arabia and beyond to Wahhabism, from Aramco oil proceeds earmarked for the royal family. 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 never wore anything on her head except a voile scarf in case of a sandstorm breaking out when she was leaving the Beauty Shop. 50

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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 could crop up in anti-government meetings was handled very thoroughly by the Americans. The American government funded and trained Saudi Arabia’s army and the National Guard first and foremost to deal effectively with those who opposed the ruling family. Men like Colonel Harry R. Snyder, a senior intelligence officer, fluent in Arabic and an expert on Arab affairs, were appointed to this job. Snyder was amongst the first batch of American intelligence officers transferred in 1949 from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, today’s CIA) headquarters of the Middle East Intelligence and Propaganda Division based in Cairo. He led the first US Training mission for Saudi Arabia’s nascent security apparatus, then supervised Aramco’s Training Department for its Saudi Arabian employees, where he became my father’s boss. During the late forties and early fifties, with few educated Saudis, no credible threat to the throne existed. Nonetheless, Aramco did not take any chances. According to its oldest records dating to its pioneer days of the late forties, Aramco’s then executives refused 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. This created a backlash in the late fifties and sixties when the number of educated and enlightened Saudis began to multiply along with Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth. Popular anti-imperialism among various Arab nations found sympathetic Saudi ears, acutely embarrassing the Al Sa’uds, upholders of Wahhabi Islam, protectors of Islam’s two holiest cities, and patrons of the imperialists (the Dhahran American Air Base was easily the largest American military base between Germany and Japan). Aramco’s alarm bells jangled after King Sa’ud was denounced as “the slave of imperialism” by Cairo’s influential ‘Voice of the Arabs’ prompting the ulema to demand increasing funds to remain silent about the American ‘infidels’ protecting the Al Sa’ud throne. Although the ulema’s job description was the same as the Americans with respect to maintaining the Al Sa’ud throne, the ulema wanted it under their control and not that of the Americans. Their ire weakened the incumbent Al Sa’ud king who needed their religious cover to remain credible as the official ‘Custodian of the Two Holy Shrines’ before the Islamic world. 51

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The royal family’s solution was to gradually recede the American defense forces in Saudi Arabia out of sight into the distant desert and augment the Saudi ulema’s share of oil dollars with yet broader powers to prevent any enlightenment educationally, socially and most 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 more power than ever over Saudi Arabia’s subjects in the history of the Kingdom. 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, and (if you’re a woman) laugh loudly in public places. There are signs in restaurants in Jeddah that state clearly that qahqaha (laughter) is strictly forbidden on the premises. The sanctity of the home is no protection from the muttawa’a who have the license 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 is a public lashing and a jail sentence. Non-observance of fasting in the holy month of Ramadan means jail to the Muslim and deportation to 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 by rapping sharply on shop windows and often descend on any unfortunate male caught outside the mosque, shouting ‘salaaah’ (prayer). Unhappily, women are the ones who receive the brunt of the muttawa’a’s wrath. The muttawa’a, with their unkempt henna-dipped beards and three-quarter-length thobes, stalk women in public with their camel whips waving like an impatient predator’s tail, primed to pounce on the unsuspecting woman whose abaya has slipped from her head. The Wahhabi ulema define ‘woman’ as the personification of sin, there to sway the faithful Muslim male from his devotion to God and Islam 52

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by exposing tempting parts of her body before him. They believe it is their God-given duty not to allow this to happen except within the bounds of marriage. With the muttawa’a unleashed with such intensity, sex becomes S-E-X in Saudi Arabia and the muttawa’a, is its trigger. How can one refrain from desiring what is being denied by such absolute command? 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’ means ‘two breasts’ in Saudi lingo. Geographically, the camp nestles cozily between two perfectly curved mound formations. The Saudi bachelor who thought of that name saw in Dhahran’s layout 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 curriculum was limited: learning to read and write by studying the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran. Our passports as females contained only our names and details of our legal guardian. Not even a mention of the color of our eyes or hair was permitted. And don’t even think about 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 began crisscrossing 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 re-taken three times before the police would accept them because they were unhappy at the hint of a smile on our faces. The more traditional women had a difficult time uncovering their faces for fear of appearing wayward and insisted on being photographed wearing their black veils over their faces as well as around their heads. In such conservative families, segregation of the sexes is enforced among family members from the age of seven. Their 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 has had tragic consequences. In 2002, a fire broke out in a girls’ school in Mecca resulting in the death of fifteen girls after the 53

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muttawa’a stationed outside their gates refused to allow them to escape or the firemen to enter because the heads of the frantically pleading girls were uncovered. That the Prophet Mohammed’s wife, Khadija, was a successful merchant that he met through trade is a detail lost on Wahhabi fundamentalists. Undoubtedly, King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud (or ‘Ibn Sa’ud’ as he was widely known), the 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, described by those who met him as a man of indescribable charm. But sadly, as in the case of most self-made men, his success as a leader sprang from his life experiences, something he could not pass on to his progeny, forty-five sons and twenty-three daughters in total. While two of his eldest sons, Sa’ud and Faysal (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 Wahhabi ulema, and American policy advisors within Aramco who whispered plots of potential conspiracies into their ears. Wahhabi Shari’a became a handy bully that pushed a work force for the oil producers into obedient shape by brutally stamping out any forms of dissent. And so it came to be that the acts of drinking alcohol or demonstrating for civil or labor rights are punished by 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 cutting off the head of the accused. 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 male Wahhabi executioner see their female bare necks before chopping them in half. For such extreme and archaic measures of punishment to remain in place not only in modern times but also in a member state of the United Nations that has a hefty oil income of $348 billion dollars per annum 54

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(and rising) raises hard questions about the double standards of justice and human rights. The Al Sa’uds allowed Shari’a to rein in not only Aramco’s labor dissent but also those political dissenters in the traditionally inimical and still simmering territories in Northern Saudi Arabia, Southern Saudi Arabia, Western Saudi Arabia, Eastern Saudi Arabia … and Northern parts of Central Arabia (the Al Sa’ud homeland). As a child on an illicit bicycle ride along the dusty road that ran parallel to Dhahran’s defining perimeter fence, I witnessed Wahhabi punishment at terrifyingly close range. It was strictly forbidden by company rules to go anywhere near the perimeter fence that ran close to our house where the asphalt street stopped and a narrow, rough, rock strewn path took over, disappearing around a curve in the distance. Far away on the fence’s 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 and Aramco’s security cars patrolling it round the clock gave the fence a particular aura of evil. 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. 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, paralyzing fear. 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 onto my bicycle or outraced the security car in record speed to reach my impatiently awaiting 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. The dismembered limbs I saw belonged to a Saudi Arabian unfortunate, not invited to share in this rarefied piece of oil wealth heaven. 55

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His ex-hand and ex-foot were graphic warnings to the non-Aramco Saudis by order of the Emir of the Eastern Province, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi 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 on that perimeter fence, or manicured fingers of Al Sa’ud royalty, or the fleshy, soft palms of their well-fed sycophants that illicitly rake in billions of dollars into their pockets … money that rightfully belongs 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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The Wahhabi movement that Ibn Sa’ud (1880–1953), first king of Saudi Arabia, was born into was founded by a theologian from central Arabia, Mohammed Ibn Abdel Wahhab. The theologian had teamed up with Ibn Sa’ud’s great-grandfather, Mohammed Ibn Al Sa’ud, in the late eighteenth century and together they had successfully spread both Ibn Abdel Wahhab’s puritan version of Islam and the Al Sa’uds’ realm of power over large parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Their glory lasted until the end of the nineteenth century when inter-family squabbles caused the Al Sa’uds to lose their conquests to the Ottoman’s protégé, the Al Rashid, who sent them into exile to Arabia’s then backwater in the Eastern Province. Ibn Sa’ud grew up in exile listening to stories of what the Al Sa’uds had once been. By the age of 21 in 1902, he had heard enough lamenting and vowed that he would be the one to regain his tribe’s lost glory. With the support of his brothers and cousins, he dusted off his great-grandfather’s battle strategy that had combined Wahhabi Islam and tribal politics and teamed up with the Ikhwan, militant, puritan offshoots of the Wahhabi movement who had given up the roaming Bedouin ways and had settled in exclusive agricultural settlements known as hujar. They referred to one another as ‘Brother,’ hence the name Ikhwan, which means ‘Brotherhood.’ Through his charisma and capacity as the son of the Imam of the 57

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Wahhabi, Ibn Sa’ud calculatingly stoked the Ikhwan’s fire of evangelist fervor to spread Islam in its unadorned pure form throughout Arabia and beyond by ridding Arabia of all moral corruption. 100,000 Ikhwan soon rallied behind Ibn Sa’ud in tightly organized fighting units, ready to drop their hoes and pick up their swords at his command. With their zeal to eradicate non-Wahhabi 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 desire for martyrdom. Bolstered with bags of silver sterlings from the British to support him in swaying Bedouin tribes to his side (and away from the Ottomans), and with the Ikhwan as his weapon for those who needed more persuasion, Ibn Sa’ud’s political war for the conquest of Arabia transformed into a powerful jihad against the ramshackle, hierarchial and fractious tribes of the Arabian Desert In 1928, Ibn Sa’ud declared his conquest of Arabia complete. He had promised the British, in return for their support of his campaign, that he would not challenge their rule over the protectorates of 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 up to the ‘Aqaba outlet on the Red Sea, territories bordering the British Empire’s troubled mandated territory 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 his control, and were now a separate power-based entity with a separate agenda. He had initially viewed them only in terms of their usefulness to his dream to conquer Arabia, and for that had taught just the barest rudiments of religion necessary to maintain their single-minded zealotry, rather than Islam’s broader spiritual impact. Their lives revolved around blood, martyrdom and Paradise in their jihad for Islamic purity. Now their dreams were threatening his dreams. The Ikhwan were dedicated to ridding Arabia of immorality, which they associated with the presence and power of the imperialists. Ibn Sa’ud relied on the presence and power of the imperialists to defeat rival tribes in Arabia. The Ikhwan’s combative services were getting in his way. Managing to gain a fatwa from like-minded ‘ulema and backed by British support, he crushed their movement and by 1930 they were no 58

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longer a military power. As for their spiritual authority, Ibn Sa’ud eclipsed them by 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 the Al Sa’ud in power … so long as the Al Sa’ud returned the favor. Saudi Arabia was declared a kingdom on September 23, 1932 by ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn ‘Abdel Rahman Ibn Al Sa’ud, with only those of the Muslim faith accorded the nationality. Ibn Sa’ud named the conquered territory after his tribe, the Al Sa’ud. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia occupies eighty percent of the Arabian Peninsula, stretching from the Persian Gulf in the east and the Red Sea to the west, with borders (albeit troubled) along Yemen, Oman, the Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. We, the modern inhabitants of this part of the Arabian Peninsula, are born as subjects of the Al Sa’uds whether we belong to the Al Sa’ud tribe or not, or, more importantly, whether we care to be subjects or not. Our ‘independent nation state’ is a theocracy with no constitution except the words of the Qur’an, no separation of powers, no press outside of the official line, no elected parliament, no judicial independence, no separate identity for women, no recognition of residing non-Sunni sects like Shi’is and Ismailis. 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 ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud.

Oil and Dollars Soon after declaring his kingship, a severe drought gripped Saudi Arabia, erasing all revenue from taxes on dates, the main staple of trade in the kingdom. In addition to the drought, a recession gripped the world and affected the inflow of Hajj pilgrims, seriously 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 Palestine and its valuable port outlets. At this dire moment of need, the Americans stepped in with their timely bid for 59

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permission to explore and produce oil in Saudi Arabia. Ibn Sa’ud snapped up the offer. Just nine months into his kingship, the king 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 (roughly the size of France), traveling with Bedouin tribes over an area of almost 515,000 square kilometers of uncharted 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 Arabian 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. That day in May, the trunk was empty. Little wonder then that it took just three days for them to reach a sweeping concession beyond the expectations of both parties, allowing the United States to search for oil in Saudi Arabia. The fledgling Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States of America signed the first formal contract over oil exploration rights on May 29, 1933 at Khuzam Palace on the outskirts of Jeddah. Known as the ‘Concession Agreement,’ it was formally issued under Royal Decree Number 1135 on July 7, 1933 and officially proclaimed on July 14th of that year. SoCal was given exclusive rights to prospect and produce oil in the Eastern Province as well as preferential rights elsewhere in the Kingdom. In return, Ibn Sa’ud would receive royalties of $1.00 per ton of oil produced, loans of $50,000 yearly, a total of $170,000 in gold and annual rents of $25,000. At that point in time, these were riches 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, Ibn Sa’ud fell asleep. Five years later, on the eve of the Second World War, while drilling at Dammam Well No. 7, 2000 feet deeper than usual, geologists from 60

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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 to have been found, estimated to hold 25 percent of the known reserves on earth. This immediately turned into a serious dilemma for both parties. To the Americans, the outbreak of the Second World War brought Saudi Arabia’s infant oil industry to a halt before major drilling could be started. With respect to Ibn Sa’ud, his tin trunk was empty once more as taxes from Hajj pilgrims shrank to a trickle due to the war and another severe drought had wiped out livestock and date tax revenue. Without money and food, he would lose the allegiance of the capricious Bedouin tribal leaders, the ‘ulema, and ultimately control over his tenuously cobbled-together kingdom where many were unhappy with his invitation to foreigners and non-Muslims to drill for oil. Although he had fended off criticism by citing the Qur’an’s exhortation to accept unexpected help as a gift from God, he desperately needed a flow of money to keep his critics silent. Ibn Sa’ud turned to the Americans with his only trump card; he held the oil concession for ransom. No money, no oil concession. This put the Americans in a real bind. Two critical sources of oil to America had been halted after the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation of Burma and Indonesia, leaving Saudi Arabia as the only remaining source of free-flowing oil for the Allies. Casoc went straight to the White House and threw their impasse on the government’s desk in 1943 with a policy paper addressed to the US president describing 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.”3 Their newly launched fledgling subsidiary, Aramco, they declared, would play a far more pivotal role for US interests in the region than just an economic one. The lobbying worked. President Roosevelt gave the green light for Saudi Arabia to be eligible for US financial assistance by Executive Order stating that the defense of Saudi Arabia was of vital interest to the United States. Key trainers and programmers were instantly dispatched to Saudi Arabia from the US Army, Navy, and Central Intelligence divisions to organize Aramco along the lines of the US wartime State Department, including a carbon copy of the intelligence department of the Cairo 61

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based Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In no time Aramco became home to many vaunted Arabists and early CIA operatives. 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 $30 million in royalty payments plus a $25 million ‘loan’ from the US government’s Export-Import Bank. This marked the beginning of the tight Al Sa’ud-American political-economic bond. The clincher to the Al Sa’ud-American political-economic bond took place on February 14, 1945, the day after American President Roosevelt wrapped up his historic meeting at Yalta with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet President Josef Stalin. The American President carried out a master coup of oil diplomacy on that day, which 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 February 12, 1945 and had taken Saudi King Ibn Sa’ud to the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal, where Franklin D. Roosevelt awaited on board the USS 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 the Saudi king in its center surrounded by Persian 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 documentary movies of their military might on a large screen. Meanwhile, back in Yalta, Churchill got wind of the meeting in progress and rushed to join them but arrived too late. He left furious and empty handed. By the time Churchill 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 snatched the Saudi King away from his former supporters, the British, forever. The mother-of-all-oil-deals was sealed by both sides and endures until today whereupon the United States would provide security to Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia would give the United States oil. 62

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The general points agreed upon were: • • •

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The United States would have access to Saudi ports. The United States would construct military bases on Saudi Arab soil renewable every five years. Aramco, dominated by SoCal and other American oil companies, would build a pipeline known as the ‘Tapline’ to Mediterranean ports (although Roosevelt tried to pitch conquered Haifa as the end port regardless of who controlled it, but ‘Abdel ‘Aziz refused). The United States promised not to ‘occupy’ Saudi Arabian soil in a swipe at the British who had occupied so many of Saudi Arabia’s neighboring countries. (In actual fact, the promise was more of a successful ‘new’ approach to hegemony over the Middle East and its oil resources.)

In conclusion, Roosevelt tried to persuade Ibn Sa’ud to support a Jewish state in the Middle East by relating how horribly the Jews had suffered under the Nazis and asked the King for advice on an appropriate recompense for the survivors of the Holocaust. Ibn Sa’ud logically responded that it was not the Arabs who had harmed the Jews but rather the Nazis, so obviously the compensation should be that the Jews be given a homeland in Germany. Ibn Sa’ud’s tin trunk was soon traded in for a much bigger one … but not to the benefit of the Kingdom’s subjects. Ibn Sa’ud’s 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-hair 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. Ibn Sa’ud spent almost nothing on public works, apart from a few water wells. The benefits for the Royal Family, on the other hand, were plentiful. Aramco built two hospitals in Riyadh and in Taif which treated members of the Al Sa’ud only. Aramco also provided Ibn Sa’ud with a 560-kilometer railroad between his summer and winter residences, a Swiss chef, electric blankets and air conditioning, while the city of 63

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Riyadh and its 200,000 inhabitants remained largely without electricity. The Americans outdid themselves in remaining ‘respectful’ of local Saudi Arabian customs – slavery and punishing criminals by chopping off hands, feet and heads after Friday prayers – by delicately referring to them (in the words of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles) as Saudi Arabia’s ‘sovereign idiosyncrasies.’ In return, Ibn Sa’ud kept the country open to US military bases and oil investments. In a word, the joy and prosperity from the oil discovery was not shared by a large percentage of the subjects of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Until today, the oil wealth has yet to reach other than those in Saudi Arabia’s ruling circles and their entourage and the United States’ ruling circle and their entourage. And what wonders the oil proceeds from Saudi Arabia achieved for the United States’ treasury! With the oil money, the United States attained a leadership position worldwide through the Marshall Plan which labeled the United States for posterity as ‘the savior of post war Europe.’ Ibn Sa’ud’s non-commital cooperation with the West vis-à-vis the Zionist take-over of Palestine was a boon for the Zionist-American partnership. In 1948, 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 their international rivals. With their undisputed hegemony over the desert Kingdom, the powerful American oil companies were now ready to fully exploit Saudi Arabia’s vast oil reserves for greatly expanded Western market outlets and huge Western capital investments. The conglomerate of oil giants would continue to openly wield total control over Aramco and Saudi Arabia for forty years until the Saudi government and Aramco were deemed developed enough under close American tutelage to safely ‘acquire’ 100 percent interest of the company.

Made in the United States After World War II, 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. A national anthem was ordered to boost the notion of the 64

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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 wrote national anthems 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 glossies 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-affiliated CEO. Authors such as Walter Stegner, an award-winning novelist, historian and short-story writer, wrote books such as Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, which promoted Ibn Sa’ud as charting his own brave course in the creation and development of Saudi Arabia. The book ran in fourteen issues in Aramco World, but for some reason it is never mentioned in his list of works. What I knew as a young girl about Saudi Arabia’s history came from a movie put together in 1956 by Aramco’s Public Relations Department: a ‘documentary film’ entitled Jazirat al Arab (The Arabian Peninsula) which told the story of Ibn Sa’ud’s conquest of Arabia. The movie was so far-fetched that even Mohammed Ibn ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Sa’ud, Ibn Sa’ud’s eldest son, commented to an American employee from the US embassy who had played a small role in the movie, “I enjoyed your acting but from the point of view of history, it was a hodge podge of surmises and imagination.”4 Jazirat al Arab was the brainchild of Aramco’s then Vice-President, Terry Duce, as a public relations scheme in 1949 to promote Ibn al Saud as “the ‘Warrior King,’ descendant of the Wahhabi conquerors of the 1700s and the man destined to unite the Arabian Peninsula.” A feted documentary filmmaker Richard Lyford, who had won an Oscar in 1951 for a widely acclaimed documentary film, Titan, about Michelangelo, was hired for its production. While Ibn Sa’ud was remarkable in his own right, he was certainly no Michelangelo, particularly with the headaches he left behind instead of precious pieces of art. Yet while Aramco circulated images of King ‘Abdel ‘Aziz Ibn Al Sa’ud as the proud warriorstatesman who looked out paternally for his people and spearheaded their development, privately, its American executives described Saudi Arabia as “this land of low pay, slaves, eunuchs, and harems.”5 65

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Ibn Sa’ud had been dead for three years when Jazirat al Arab had its premiere in 1956 at the Oil Exhibit in Dhahran with his son, King Sa’ud, as the guest of honor. I was allowed to stand in the front row of the bystanders waiting to greet him behind a velvet red rope (in true 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 onto 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 end to my excited prattle. With an amused gap-toothed smile indulging my childish exuberance, he extended his very big hand and patted my head kindly then continued in large measured steps up the short flight of stairs before disappearing into the Oil Exhibit where my father was designated to show him around before the documentary began. Of course in my perception, I saw his large gold square agal as a crown. To me 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. They had calculatingly programmed Jazirat al Arab “for immediate and worldwide release upon the death of His Majesty ‘Abdel ‘Aziz as a psychological contribution to insuring general acceptance to 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 condolence 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 Al Sa’ud hung on to life for another year.6 The public relations effort continued, further cementing the United States’ special 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, Lebanese-born and Princeton educated, who had translated for Roosevelt in his meeting with Ibn Sa’ud aboard the 66

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USS Quincy (kneeling respectfully at the King’s feet), became the ambassador in Jeddah for the rapidly-growing American enclave. Colonel Eddy would eventually quit his post as minister to show his indignant refusal of the United States government’s pro-Zionist policies and sign on with Aramco as a consultant … and undercover CIA agent. A US Air Force base was constructed in Dhahran in 1946 and 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 country-wide as the Kingdom’s de facto public works department, constructing palaces for the royal family, state-of-the-art ports and laying out wide asphalt highways and byways – in short, all that was necessary to offload the oil as efficiently as possible 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 the Bedouin soldiers. Too late, Ibn Sa’ud caught on how little control he now had over his Kingdom: “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.”7 Ibn Sa’ud’s lament was the sad 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 practical powerlessness. He was a canary in a gilded cage. Saudi oil was for the Americans, as was so bluntly expressed by President Roosevelt in an altercation with Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, over the division of the oil of the Middle East post the Second World War: “Persian oil is yours,” he told Lord Halifax. “We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it is ours.”8

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I 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 if I had still been living with my parents in Dhahran. The last thing Fatin and I missed since we had 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 was 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 often 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, influencing many returning students with its laid-back modus vivendi and a particular distaste for bathing. Some would go to the extent of rolling in the dust of their back yard before venturing barefoot to the recreation area to parade their ultra cool unkemptness. Fatin and I gulped down our breakfast of ‘sweet rose’ (rolls) as Mama called them and scalding Nescafe to the sound of our father’s 69

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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 Aramco 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 before my eyes: namely the American social engineering entailed in creating my hometown, Dhahran. Many Saudis could not read or write at the time when oil was discovered in Arabia, nor did they have any knowledge of basic hand tools such as hammers, saws, screwdrivers or measuring tools, much less gauges, meters, generators and pumps. How did Aramco convert a country like Saudi Arabia, which 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 large blocks of Aramco’s work? The answer I would discover was through 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.

The Wild Wild East My father’s relationship with the Americans was complex and shot through with many murky shades of gray. Aramco was my father’s first window onto the world. He had joined it in 1944 at the tender age of eighteen and became the first smiling Saudi face used by Aramco’s Public Relations Department to portray Aramco’s benevolent Saudi-American partnership. Privately, he was all too aware of the façade, and he ended up viewing himself as his employers viewed him during his 40-yearlong stint in Aramco – as never quite up to the standards of his American counterparts. This painful self image turned him into a very angry person. “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. 70

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“My father,” he continued, “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 by the local recruiter. I was very nervous because I only had a sixth grade level of schooling.” My father gave a small laugh shaking his head at the memory: “All the recruiter, Ahmad Rashid Muhtasib, wanted to know was if I was literate! Ahmad Rashid placed his hand on my shoulder looking very relieved and said: ‘Okay, Fahmi Basrawi, we’re going to hire you as an English teacher.’ ‘A teacher of English? But I don’t know a word of English!’ I told him, completely baffled. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he reassured me, ‘we will teach you.’ And he offered me a salary twice what I was making as police department clerk, 35 dollars.” The new ‘job outlet’ my father was referring to was, of course, Aramco.

* * * My father turned up the following morning at Aramco’s recruitment office, packed and ready to move to his new job. But there was a little problem: how was he to get there? It was not the first time he had traveled, he had spent his childhood visiting Egypt, Syria and Lebanon with his family, but east of Jeddah was uncharted territory. The urbane Hijazis, whose social and economic networks historically tied them to the other metropolitan cities of the Ottoman Empire, viewed the Eastern Province of Arabia as undiscovered desert wilderness. Separating the old cities of Arabia’s west and its backwaters in the east was the scorched desert aptly named the Rub’ al Khali (the desolate quarter), undeveloped and dangerous desert terrain where Bedouin robbers regularly ambushed and killed unprotected travelers. 71

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Aramco’s office led my father to a truck stop where Aramco received its supplies from the Jeddah port and he bought a ride to Dhahran. His ride across the Rub ‘al Khali atop sacks of wheat in the back of a pickup truck was with two others, the driver and an armed Bedouin to fend off Bedouin robbers. The trip took thirteen and a half hot, dusty days with bread and dates for sustenance and water from the oases they passed through. Half the time was spent bouncing atop the sacks of wheat and the other half digging the truck out of the sand. Upon arrival my father jumped off the truck with immense relief and looked around for his welcoming committee. Sure enough, the ‘staff ’ of the school were 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 part-time instructor. Both men were standing outside the main administration building of Dhahran, known then as ‘American Camp’ on what became ‘Main Street,’ then a wide unshaded desert road rutted with the tire tracks of the heavy-duty desert trucks parked nose-to-pipe-rail outside Aramco’s headquarters … the modern day horses of America’s new oil cowboys. As he walked down the road flanked by the two older men to his new living quarters, my father’s spirits rose. In his parched, disheveled and hungry state he saw a dream come true: a group of neat bungalows with air-conditioning units jutting out from each house. Ice water tanks and a communal mess hall completed the dream. As he quickened his steps in their direction, Wadi’ Sabbagh put a gentle hand on his arm, stopping him. “That is American Camp,” he said, “It is for the American employees only.” He pointed in another direction farther down the road, “Our camp is there, Saudi Camp.” The camp he was motioning to consisted of starkly barren rows of tents and barastis, wooden pole frame abodes with dirt 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 Arabic, Swahili, Urdu and Italian. “Italian? What are Italians doing here?” My father asked Wadi’ in surprise. 72

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“The Italians are remnants of the Italian army – 2000 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 dryly. “And two more things,” Wadi’ informed my father, “You are to address the Americans as sahib or else a chunk of your paycheck will be subtracted in punishment. The same punishment applies should you drink this ice water. It is only for the Americans. We drink this,” and he pointed to a well with brackish water. Those were the first of many discriminatory acts my father and others like him had 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 unequal treatment from his new employers. Walking in their direction was an American supervisor who knew of my father’s arrival and casually nodded, “Baswari, I’m Mr. Kennedy.” “I didn’t know English, but I did know my name and it wasn’t ‘Baswari,’ ” my father recounted. “I also noticed that Mister preceded only Kennedy’s name. ‘Mr. Kennedy,’ I answered, ‘Ana Mister Basrawi.’ And here my father chuckled happily at the memory of the scowling American walking off stiffly leaving Vincent James and Wadi’ Sabbagh grinning widely at this unusual repartee between Arab and American. There were plenty of racists of Mr. Kennedy’s ilk known to refer to Saudi employees as ‘rag heads’ and ‘coolies.’ My father’s urban middle-class Hijazi background heightened his awareness of, and indignation at, the Americans’ disrespectful treatment. For the moment, however, he was content with this brief show of defiance. Now, he needed to concentrate on the work ahead of him, namely teaching a language he knew nothing about. Six thousand one hundred new employees were hired along with my father that year. Aramco was actively recruiting new hands from the United States and from Saudi Arabia in anticipation of demand for more Arabian oil to feed the war machine in the Pacific theater. One year previous to my father’s arrival, the California Arabian Standard Oil 73

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Company (Casoc) had changed its name to become the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), in preparation for a massive new construction project of the oil refinery in Ras Tanura. Saudi labor was desperately needed for the unskilled physical work of oil production in the rapidly expanding oil company. So urgent was the demand for laborers that watering stations were erected in the middle of the Rub’ al Khali desert to lure curious Bedouins who flocked to them with their camels to apply for jobs. As the illiterate Bedouins began pouring in for work, Aramco headquarters realized that this new labor force knew nothing of the world outside the desert. They needed to do much more with these incoming recruits than just issue overalls and a hard hat. My father’s job was to help these new recruits gain some sort of rudimentary knowledge before they entered training as office boys, waiters, house boys, and most importantly as the unskilled labor force of the refinery.

Learning the Ways of the West On the following day, my father showed up for work bright and early and waited patiently to meet 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, all classified as ‘educational trainees.’ At that point Company policy ruled that Saudi Arabs were not to be employed for anything more than running the basic services for 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? Determined to rise to the challenge, he cobbled together his own English language program 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 74

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was able to memorize about ten words a day out of Ogden’s Basic Ways to Wider English, Books 1 and 2, which the British had used in India, and stay two or three lessons ahead of my class.” Any student who advanced ahead of the rest was pressed into service as a teacher for the slower learners. Included among my father’s students, both the smallest and youngest of the group, was Ali al Nu’aymi presently head of OPEC. He had entered Aramco’s Senior Staff in 1970 as a petroleum engineer and went on to become Aramco’s first Saudi Arab President and subsequently Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Oil. Ali al Nu’aymi, my father remembers with a fond smile, was a tiny power ball of intellect and enthusiasm who had obviously lied about his age to gain entry to the Aramco workforce. The age for entry was eleven and he was barely nine years old. The rest of my father’s early employment years I was familiar with. As he became proficient enough in English, he began to diversify into 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 to convince the apprehensive Bedouins to accept to sit in front of a flashing camera, which to them personified the devil. The outcome of ‘Bedouin-recruit-meets-camera’ was a historical batch of ID photos of faces frozen in fear. Many years later, as a temporarily employed returning student during the summer, I was assigned to classify these same photos in alphabetical order, matching the first photo on entry with the equivalent one after the recruit had become employed. The new employees were issued regimental white safari outfits with mandatory instructions to shave off all head and facial hair with the only option of a small mustache. Shorn of their voluminous red checkered kaffiyehs, kohl eyeliner, luxurious braids, earrings, and bristling beards, it was hard to match the untamed ‘before’ photo with the expressionless and clean shaven ‘after’ photo where all that remained of their manly and poetic Bedouin personas was a small white skull cap (normally worn under the kaffiyeh) and an abbreviated mustache. 75

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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, which was historically a central port of call on the ancient Frankincense route that began in Abyssinia and continued onward 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 was a thriving market center for wheat, fruit, pottery, Arabian horses and camels. As the biggest oasis in the world due to its copious reserves of underground water, it became famous for its equally copious reserves of oil when Aramco discovered the world’s largest oil field of Shimaniya right next door to it. 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. But the intrepid Americans’ dreams of ‘leisurely drives through greenery’ quickly vaporized after they were pelted with hails of small stones from 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 cars as well. The 500,000 Shiites of Al Hasa, severely marginalized from mainstream Saudi affairs, endured brutal discrimination for decades under the ruling Sunni Wahhabis who blatantly curtailed their mobility, sealing them in a time warp out of sight from the rest of the world.

* * * Among the assignments given to my father by Aramco was a ‘public relations’ tour of Saudi Arabia where he was to 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 present. “What’s that?” the old man asked suspiciously. “It’s the globe of the world,” my father answered, surprised at the question. 76

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“You are a liar and an infidel!” the old man screamed. His scraggly beard quivering in anger. “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 introduced by Aramco, and which centrally involved my father, was television. In 1955, the Dhahran Air Base inaugurated the first television station in the Middle East, followed a year later by Aramco TV. The major reason behind the creation of Aramco TV was to entertain the American employees of Aramco, especially those of the non-adventurous type who were streaming into Saudi Arabia along with their families to take up clerical administrative and teaching jobs. Of course, television had to go through the usual course of all the ‘firsts’ in Saudi Arabia, and that was the need to be legitimized through the ever necessary ‘fatwa.’ Television was considered the work of the devil by the Wahhabi ulema, who had been known to go on TV-smashing sprees in the non-Aramco areas of the country. After intense wrangling between Aramco’s Government Relations and Public Relations departments and the local government, it was finally agreed that American programs could be aired but with all the kissing parts edited out, men had to mimic women’s voices in the dubbed women’s parts, and all Arabic translation had to abide by the ‘no alcohol’ decree. This made for some interesting dialogue for the Arabic speaking 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 the non-television-oriented Saudi Arabian 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 Arabic-speaking personalities on Aramco TV were grim Wahhabi sheikhs expounding on damnation and hellfire, Fahmi Basrawi immediately became the heartthrob of the female population of the area, receiving overflowing bags of fan mail. All my father did differently from his fellow TV colleagues to earn him such adulation was look pleasantly at the camera and smile. 77

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In 1957, during our first year in Dhahran, 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 years to one year (Marwan). On the day of the test run, I remember the 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, dressed as a caliph on a gilded chair with a huge aqua blue feather wafting from his turban, amidst a profusion of brightly colored silk cushions and scores of balloons. Whoever had thought of using all those balloons in a tiny area with 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 to tell us a story in Arabic that none of us had any interest in listening to. I had chosen to wear my favorite party dress for the TV show which flew out in a circle whenever I twirled. 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 you, 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. A compromise was eventually reached whereby I would sit at the back of the group with my fat baby brother on my lap, wearing trousers. Baba Hattab would carry everyone else to pop the surprise balloon, but I had to pop the balloon standing on my own.

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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 one o’clock, and finally at five in the afternoon when work hours were through. 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 initial notes of its wail. I went to the information counter to inquire about my office’s location. The receptionist looked at me and then lowering her reading glasses gazed a second too long at my pants suit, causing me to feel inordinately self conscious. I had chosen to wear a white pants suit thinking it most appropriate for a ‘first day of work’ outfit. 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, the stylish Lebanese capital where I was studying, did. More curious looks were shot surreptitiously in my direction as I walked towards my designated office, pushing me to check my clothes repeatedly for any coffee spills or tears. At the end of the working day, as the five o’clock 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, their 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 female employees turned up for work in trousers, causing loud arguments in the offices, but the women prevailed and trousers were 79

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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 United States, I, a Saudi female, who did not exist outside of my father’s name, unwittingly became the symbol of feminist liberation for the American female employees of Aramco.

Saudi Student Society At the coffee machine one afternoon, I bumped into a young Saudi acquaintance who was studying 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 and 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 in meeting some of the most interesting young Saudi people that I have ever met: educated young Saudis, both male and female, who had applied for a summer job from universities in Riyadh and Jeddah and abroad, and as yet untouched by Aramco. King Faysal was the ruler of Saudi Arabia then and education for everyone, especially girls, was a priority for him. All Saudi students received full scholarship to any university of their choice with a generous monthly stipend of $600 (lots of money in those days). We, the young Saudi Arabian generation fortunate enough to have lived during this brief progressive phase in Wahhabi rule were enabled to study abroad and come home to a guaranteed job. We would be the only generation to reap the benefits of this short-lived opportunity in the Kingdom’s history. Unsurprisingly, most of the present-day effective movers and shakers for political and social reforms in Saudi Arabia come from my generation. Under King Faysal’s reign, oil revenues had increased by more than 1,600 percent, allowing him to set up a generous system of welfare benefits for all Saudi subjects. The ascetic, highly intelligent King brought in 80

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technological and educational advancement never seen in the kingdom before, as he did not let his Wahhabi convictions stand in the way of his political savvy. 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 Faysal channeled oil revenue out of greedy princeling hands and invested them in the modernization of the Kingdom and its subjects. 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 due to his half brother’s alleged profligate spending and his vacillating Pan-Arab tendencies, Faysal refused to allow the muttawa’a a free hand. They were left fuming but powerless behind the rigid red line that King Faysal drew curtailing their presence in the everyday lives of the Saudi subjects. 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 Faysal achieved, he still had to appease the conservatives to preserve his throne. In fact, King Faysal 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. In that era of post-colonial Arab upheaval against established monarchies (1958–1962) and the sweeping charisma of Egyptian President and Arab nationalist hero Gamal Abdel Nasser, King Faysal was there to ‘correct’ the anti-west movement spurred on by his deposed half-brother Sa’ud’s flirtation with Arab nationalism. Western interests in Arabia’s oil began to be seriously threatened when increasing number of Saudis began to agitate for control over their oil. The last thing the Americans wanted was to have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia turn into the People’s Republic of Arabia. The first open challenge to the Al Sa’uds as absolute rulers came from one of Ibn Sa’ud’s own sons, Prince Talal, in the first serious bid for a constitution which went nowhere. Another serious challenge to Saudi Arabia’s cozy arrangement with the United States came from Sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Mu‘ammar, a western-educated Saudi from Najd in charge of the labor office overseeing the oil camps. He was jailed when he tried to write a constitution in an aborted ‘liberal revolution’ in 1963. I had been vaguely aware of the attempted coup from whispers overheard between 81

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my mother and an Egyptian friend who was crying softly in our kitchen after the disappearance of her husband, who was in the Saudi Air Force. No one dared to inquire after him anymore, when those relatives who had done so disappeared as well. Yet another challenge to the American sponsored monarchy involved Abdullah Tariki, the first Saudi to be educated by Aramco in the United States, who came back to challenge them 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 put a program in place that would educate the Saudi Arabian public about oil affairs through the media, and fought to improve the terms of the concessions, opening 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 until King Faysal dismissed Tariki and exiled him to Lebanon. There were masses of public beheadings of political opponents and purging of the army and air force as Faysal built a modern police state designed to control all political activity. A US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee report of 1965 looked upon Faysal’s activities with considerable satisfaction, stating that the King 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. Thinking they could have it both ways, the American oil executives watched noncommittally when, with every forward step in modernizing the Kingdom, Faysal placated the ulema with an equal step backwards. He simultaneously initiated non-oil based projects, five year plans and schools for girls, while opening Saudi Arabia’s doors as a safe haven for extremist Muslims from Egypt and Syria who faced persecution by their secular Pan Arab governments to teach religion to Saudi Arabia’s youth. This act would result in far-reaching consequences as many of today’s restive Saudis were students of these Egyptian and Syrian fundamentalist exiles.

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The Saudi students who were working for Aramco that summer and I formed a ‘Saudi Students Society’ with an official agenda, to give a formal cover for our meetings. We agreed to meet at the home of Nayla, an articulate and refined Saudi girl who was studying Petroleum Engineering in the United States. There were two other girls besides myself, a fearless outspoken firebrand studying in the American University of Beirut, Fatima and her gentler but equally 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 different provinces in Saudi Arabia, over the double standard that educated Saudi men held towards women. Did they really want to mount a challenge 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 their disapproval towards 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 that ended abruptly in 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 percent 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 83

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on coincidence or whim for our futures as Saudi women? It’s educated people 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 honor or head.” For my two bits, I nodded in earnest agreement with the daring words of my Saudi girl friends but I could not speak out as a Saudi as they had, handicapped as I was by the Aramcon stigma I had stamped all over me.

The Enlightened City of Medina al Munawara I was familiar with the households that these young men were reared in from a car trip my family made in 1967 to meet the extended Basrawi family in Medina for the first time in our lives. A much feted highway connecting the Eastern Province to the Western one had been 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 on 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 were glimmering mirages of water, maddeningly within reach but always just ahead on the asphalt surface. We entered Riyadh without knowing this was Riyadh, the capital city; there was hardly any difference from the terrain we had been driving through. It was a sprawling town of decrepit mud brick buildings and a few shoddy cement ones surrounded by the ever-present desert patiently waiting 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 Faysal. 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 84

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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 very moment. I was shocked to hear the placating humble tone of voice my father used 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 get even. Out of Riyadh, the desert scene changed strikingly. We had entered the Nufud desert on the edge of the Rub’ al 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 in short gusts and flurries. We experienced the soundless silence found only in deepest depths of the desert. I began to understand its enduring fascination as I gazed at the trackless sand that lay in the sinuous curves of the waves of the sea, rippling repeatedly on and on to the world’s end. This was Bedouin Arabia where monotheism was born. The Nufud made it clear how this came to be. Its infinity and eternity, stillness and solitude reduced us into insignificant mortal dots within the immeasurable grandeur spread out all 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 took unfamiliar shape and the inclination of the road began to slant upwards as we ascended the Hijaz Mountains, desolate bare hills covered with dramatic black volcanic rock formations. On the other side of the Hijaz Mountains was Medina al Munawara, my father’s birthplace and that of his father and about three hundred years of Basrawis before them, the first being a 85

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judge sent by the Ottoman governor to the Holy City from his home in Basra (hence our last name) in southern Iraq. 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 word for word as it was written in the Koran, gripping in its intense amount of detail describing the battle with the recurring phrase of how defeat turned into victory by the martyrdom of the Prophet’s followers. Mount Uhud was the scene of a disastrous defeat of the Prophet and his men at the hands of his Quraish tribesmen from Mecca where many of his closest companions were killed. The Prophet turned his defeat and the martyrdom of his closest companions into victory after he led an attack on Mecca which brought Uhud’s victors to their knees, begging for forgiveness. The Prophet forgave them, and they converted to Islam. Of the new converts were notable warriors such as Khalid Ibn Al Walid, who became a famous Muslim commander and conqueror credited with spreading Islam beyond the borders of Arabia and initiating an era of legendary, enlightened Islamic empires. The city appeared before us surrounded by its crenellated walls; a desert oasis with a history that stretched thousands of years before the Prophet Mohammed made it his home. He had asked for refuge there from the irate Meccans who were pursuing him for his Islamic creed that threatened their lucrative polytheism, and Medina’s Elders, a mixture of Jews, polytheists and Christians, had welcomed him with open arms. We could see the five slim straight minarets of the Mosque of the Prophet and its large green dome that covered the Prophet’s home, where he lived and which became his grave after he died. There was no denying the spell that fell over us as we drove through Medina’s walls. Fronds of countless palm trees in gardens within the city waved gently to and fro in the evening breeze. 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. The city is known to the Islamic world as Medina al Munawara (City of Enlightenment) after its people converted to Islam, but to its inhabitants it is simply Madinat al Nabi (the City of the Prophet). And my father had started to cry. 86

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We drove through a winding maze of narrow dirt paths lined with old wooden houses covered in intricate wood filigree that shaded the 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 looking at our unveiled bodies. 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 alien 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 abayas intriguing, as without it covering them in public, they felt undressed. Stepping into Medina al Munawara was like stepping into another dimension of time and space, literally. 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 the calendars, on the daily newspapers, used by schools and at offices are in accordance with the Hijra year. Year One of the Hijra year coincides with 622 AD, the year that the Prophet Muhammad was driven out of Mecca for his Muslim faith and welcomed in Medina. All activity of the day, whether it is work, meals, naps, sex, or socializing, revolves around the hours of prayer. It was easy to slip into such an Islamic manner of life, so profoundly did it constitute everyone’s daily routine. The highlight of my visit to Medina was my visit to 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 one of the most beautiful and grand of mosques worldwide, it paled in comparison with the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, 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 serenity that settled on us as we entered the Prophet’s Mosque. Some women sat in a circle around a Sheikha, a female religious teacher, who was explaining Islamic thought; others were silently mouthing prayers; 87

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yet others tended to their children as they waited for the call to prayer. I sat down on a 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 and the dappled sunlight that filtered through filigree stone windows onto the people down below, a sudden flutter of countless white doves wove silently across 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 words: la ilaha illallah wa Muhammad rasul allah (there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet), words that strike a deep chord in 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.

Worlds Apart 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, also a cousin, was fourteen 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 rather how our classrooms were designed, which 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 curriculum included the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran through rote memorization, math, selective history (the Al Sa’ud version), and selective science (carefully sidestepping Darwin and the human body). Al deen (religion) formed the core curriculum of their studies and students could not receive their Tawjihieh diploma that 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. The young people in Medina regarded their religion with fear rather than comfort. I looked into the young faces that longed to learn about the world outside of Wahhabi theology and I realized that sheer circumstance had put me where I was and not where they were. 88

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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 eleven-year-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 (protected one), a dismissive word for woman in our view. As if on cue, Fatin and I pounced on him with pent-up fury and we didn’t release 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 took advantage of the prayer time when the adults were otherwise occupied. I walked in with a beating heart not knowing what to expect, there had been so much urgency in her voice. In the room was her husband who immediately went to the door, locked it and remained standing to make sure we were not intruded upon. 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 stepped in. “I smuggled these books in to Arwa because I feel it is 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 behind his shoulders edgily 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.” And he began to read the passages he had so earnestly compiled to bolster his conscience in this daring step he had taken with his wife. 89

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“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 toward 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 the way to paradise easy.” … “The scientist walks in the path of God.” I felt proud to be related to these devout young Saudis possessing 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.

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I wanted to begin my research on the social engineering of Dhahran for my senior study right away so I asked around my office and was told that there was a library in the Administration Building which was more of an archive where 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 said smiling cheerily, “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 that I was now fully cognizant of thanks to my life in Beirut. The 1967 war with Israel had catapulted me irreversibly over the American divide into the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia Inc. The histories of Aramco and modern Saudi Arabia became entwined as Aramco executives worked closely with the newly formed Saudi government to create from sand and dust and goat-hair tents: transportation and communications infrastructures, maps and negotiated boundaries, foreign policy and diplomatic relations, national education, and health care. No Arab employee or trainee passed through Aramco’s employment rosters, nothing so much as moved in the entire Peninsula, without being 91

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discussed, recorded in triplicate and stored in Aramco’s ubiquitous manila files. Within the archives in the Administration Building I discovered from correspondence meant only for American eyes exactly how powerless Ibn Sa’ud and his sons actually were concerning Aramco’s interests. As I moved methodically from shelf to shelf on to the back of the library, I came upon a large dusty box file that stood out from the rest of the folders by virtue of its sheer size. Intrigued, I pulled it out and began to leaf through it. I had always wondered what made the Aramco bosses select my father along with nine other men from 9000 Saudi workers to be the first Saudis to be educated by Aramco. Why him and not Ali or Hussein, who were still making our hamburgers and ice cream sundaes? They had joined Aramco 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 ’ to serve as showcase Arabs and give a veneer of ‘equality and diversity’ to the American project in Aramco. This senior staff status permitted my father and those select Saudis like him to live with the Americans in their air-conditioned, landscaped camps. If it hadn’t been for the Pan-Arab movement, neither Aramco nor the Al Sa’uds nor their ‘ulema would have felt it to be in their interest to open Dhahran’s Main Gate to Saudi Arabians. “Working for Aramco was not what I expected,” my father had told me when he spoke about his early days at Aramco. “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 came we covered our bodies and faces with wet cloths so we could breathe. Of course in the winter we froze while the Americans were bedded and fed on Aramco’s account in large furnished climate-controlled bungalows. We knew about the privileges given to the Americans, many of whom were machine operators like many of my Saudi co-employees. The Saudi cooks who served them told us that 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 92

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and throw the rest away. Well, at some point my co-workers couldn’t take the discrimination any longer and there was a strike that escalated into a riot.” In 1945, 2000 Arab workers and eventually all 9000 laborers rose in a 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. Not wanting the strike to spread, Aramco sent an alarm 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 for pay raises and had 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 as well, fed up with being treated ‘just like the Arabs.’ “And do you know what we got after the strike?” my father asked, “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 Frank Jungers, a one-time Aramco President, was asked if Saudi employees resented American privileges, he had 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 January 25, 1947. My father was among 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, and his laugh.” True to his larger-than-life persona, the King never did anything half-baked. He arrived at Dhahran’s airfield in a fleet of six airplanes accompanied by four of his brothers and eight of his sons and as many of his royal court as he could fit in. Those of the royal court (2000 in total) who did not find seats on the airplanes arrived in a fleet of 500 limousines overland from Riyadh. At the welcoming ceremony, my father’s students sang patriotic songs which he had taught them for the 93

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occasion. The King showed his appreciation by shaking their hands and ordering his staff to give each of the students and staff five 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 nearby 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 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, but first asked the translators to step aside before sitting down with the King. 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, in tandem with 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 into 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 Al Suleiman. The minister’s secretary Najib Salha was present, as he always was, but this 94

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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 (the United Arab Emirates today). 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.” In 1949, five years after Aramco began operation, 85 percent of the 10,000 Saudi Arabian employees were still unskilled, illiterate workers. Merely 80 Saudi Arabians had reached the skilled craftsman level and a small handful of Saudis supervised other Arabs. No Saudi supervised any Americans. Post World War Two, Aramco found itself overwhelmed with an unabating demand for oil to fuel America’s economic boom and not enough Arabic-speaking American trainers to upgrade the level of the present Saudi Arabian manpower. This top-heavy Arab-American relationship changed dramatically after the occupation of Palestine by the Zionists in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948. An influx of well-educated Palestinian refugees began to stream into Saudi Arabia looking for work. Aramco jumped at the chance of having first pick of the best and brightest of this cosmopolitan and literate group of newly stateless refugees to bridge the yawning middle gap between American trainers and Saudi Arab labor. Palestinians began to fill the rosters of skilled craftsmen, teachers, and other professional positions with their high level of expertise and fluency in both Arabic and English. In no time, the Palestinians outnumbered the Americans in the training positions and outshone the presently employed Saudis in both accomplishments and organizational skills. This soon turned into a double-edged sword for the Americans in Aramco. Almost immediately, the Palestinian employees’ organizational and social skills translated into Arab nationalist politics. Aramco’s hallowed image as educator and modernizer of the Saudi populace was one of the first to come under fire. One act of calculated social engineering by Aramco was uncovered by a Palestinian trainer, a university graduate, who discovered that less than one percent of the Saudis in industrial 95

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training in Aramco could read or write Arabic. The Saudi trainees were literate in English and illiterate in their mother tongue. American trainers had lifted westernized training programs directly from the American Defense machinery plants in the United States and had left them as they were. Since no Arabic was required in the United States, the American trainers concluded, no Arabic should be required in Aramco of Saudi Arabia. English was the language of oil in Aramco and they meant to keep it that way. Aramco’s American CEOs quickly noted that labor demands were becoming more organized with the increasing ratio of Palestinian to Saudi employees. The wide-reaching effect of the educated and politicized Palestinians on their less educated and as of yet unpolitical Saudi co-workers became most apparent in a massive strike for better labor conditions in 1950. Ibn Sa’ud realized that Aramco’s Arab labor was not going ‘gently into the night,’ and threatened to spill over into the rest of the country. Swiftly, he stepped in with damage control by publicly complaining to the American ambassador that “some of my people have been spoken to as no man should speak to a dog,” then adroitly delegated the sticky situation to his son, Crown Prince Sa’ud.9 Ibn Sa’ud had more than labor unrest to face. US business interests were beginning to be tied to the recognition and support of Israel in the heart of the Middle East regardless of the Arabs that it displaced during the presidency of Harry S. Truman, a staunch supporter of Israel. Members of the Arab League, Syria, Iraq and Jordan, as well as his sons Sa’ud and Faysal, 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 solidarity aroused US foreign policy fears, which were expressed by George McGhee (the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs at the time) 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.”10

For American interests and Aramco’s, Wahhabism was ‘just what the doctor ordered’: an Islamic-flavored totalitarian regime which would 96

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never be democratic enough to bother 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 profits arrangement was offered with a lifetime stipend annually for every member of the royal family. From that day forward, one only had to be born an Al Sa’ud to automatically receive up to $270,000 dollars monthly with nothing expected in return. Today, this agreement has developed into a serious point of contention between Saudi subjects and the Al Sa’uds, as the burgeoning princeling mouths to feed has topped 12,000 and continues to rise. The United States’ fiscal support of the Al Sa’uds would come from taxes normally paid by expatriate oil companies to the US treasury. In the new arrangement, they would go directly to the royal family’s pockets, bypassing the Saudi treasury. 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 million barrels that brought in $50 million in revenue. A year later in 1950, the revenue increased to $111.7 million. The king did not reiterate his demands for better conditions for the Saudi laborers 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 United States’ 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 (or better yet indebted) to the Aramco administration with goodwill towards the United States, before the inevitable nationalizing of the industry occurred. Thus they would ensure a smooth transition when the oil company was put in the hands of Americanized loyal Saudis who would continue to operate putting America’s interests first. The process of transferring the oil resources into Saudi hands needed to be carried out under an American public facade as a benevolent 97

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humanitarian power. Overnight, Aramco changed its policy that Saudis should only be trained as waiters, office boys and machine operators and closed down the al Jabal training school. Instead it began to offer scholarships for university degrees to those who did not have a history of agitation and striking, but who did have work performance, intelligence, flexibility, and above all, unquestioned service and loyalty. The social engineering necessary to maintain American hegemony over Saudi oil was set in motion. By 1980 when Aramco became one hundred percent 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. There was a slight hitch when the scholarships for studies abroad backfired after 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 (such as Tariki and Mu’ammar). But as has been previously mentioned, that hitch was quickly taken care of. Two more strikes took place while my father was at the American University of Beirut in 1953 and in 1956. Again, Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi, Emir of Hasa, was pivotal in breaking the strike of 1956 against Aramco by sending his security guards alongside Aramco representatives to search room by room in Saudi Camp for those Saudi employees on strike and loading them into trucks headed for Dammam jail. 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 and fatwa that strikes and labor demonstrations were strictly forbidden from that date forward. Strikes became a punishable offence and trade unions and political parties were banned using quotations from Wahhabi Shari’a that put dissent among Muslims as fitna (an act against Islam) and strikes were declared as fitna, as they created dissent among Muslim brothers. The US Counsel 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 the 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.”11 Thomas Barger, soon to be President of Aramco and credited with being the first 98

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to bring in the highest profits from Saudi oil to the United States, 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 controversial 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 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 the chilliness off and 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 just 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 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.” “Okay,” 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 to not allow you access to any of the books here. Company regulation.” 99

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“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 marched out seething with anger, unaware that yet more of this autocratic behavior from Aramco awaited me. I went home to a stonyfaced father waiting for me with a paper in his hands. “Why are you getting yourself and me in trouble with this notion of Aramco molding Saudi Arabia?” He just would not listen to anything I had to say in defense 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 walked fearfully 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; and 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 United States were two diligent bedfellows working in parallel with the same means of thought control to keep the Sa’ud in Saudi Arabia for identical end goals of power and wealth.

Keeping the Faith The day after my run-in, I went to the hospital to have minor foot surgery done by Ja’afar, a Shi’a nurse from Qatif, a familiar and comfortable face. Still seething with indignation, I poured my frustrations out to 100

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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.” I barely dared to take a breath lest he should stop talking. “Faysal, the wonderful Faysal everyone is talking about and his progressiveness … he is the most dangerous of the lot. We the Shi’a still do not exist here in Saudi Arabia, so where’s the progressiveness and benevolence for the Saudi nation?” Now that I knew what Shiism was from my stay in Lebanon, I could understand his anguish. “We are Saudi and we have nothing,” he continued. How dare they label us in their official statements on Friday prayers that we the Shiites are non-Muslims? Are you aware that the Wahhabi judges, do not accept our testimony? That any marriages between Wahhabi Sunnis and Shiites are banned and what’s more, they have declared all Shi’a marriages illegal!” Ja’afar wasn’t finished; in fact he was just getting started. Saudi Arabia is full of religious beliefs other than those of the Wahhabis. There are the Twelver Shi’a, who share the beliefs and practices of the Shi’a of Iraq and Iran, there are Ismailis, a majority in the Najran area, and Zaydi Shi’a 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’i, Maliki and Hanafi Sunni beside the Hanbali Sunnism 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 Faysal had removed many restrictions against the Saudi Shi’a in the 1960s that had enabled them to benefit from state educational and health services, it was a pitiful drop in a very large ocean. The basic lines of discrimination were very much still there, and would remain as long as the Sunni theologians in charge of Saudi Arabia remained Wahhabis, believing they would become ‘unclean’ just by shaking the hand of a Shi’a. 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 101

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ask him to complete the treatment yet not stop his impassioned list of grievances. I needed to hear them. “Look Fadia,” he said, emphatically looking up for the briefest of eye contact, “For any hope for this Kingdom to progress, the Shi’a must be officially acknowledged as a legitimate sect of Islam. How long can they pretend that 15 percent 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 rumors are spread that we practice horrible deeds such as incest and cannibalism in secret. Is it normal that there are no Shi’i army officers, ministers, governors, mayors, and ambassadors in this kingdom? 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, we’re none of their business, unless we become a threat to their precious oil … which will happen one day, mark my words.” The Shi’a of Saudi Arabia have long been known to Aramco. The more than 700 wells in Al Hasa account for 98 percent of the country’s oil production, while the Al Hasa Shi’a, who make up 10 percent 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 the tenth day of Ashura, the Shi’a period of mourning commemorating the death of Imam Hussein in the struggle for leadership of the Muslims. Violence erupted after the National Guardsmen interfered with the procession and the Shi’a continued to simmer until February, 1980 when they rose again in a bloody protest for civil rights breaking windows and burning tires. The National Guard mowed them down and a ring of tanks sealed off the Shi’a of Qatif from the rest of the country while they leveled the town. Qatif remained sealed off by the military with roadblocks for months afterwards, its fate hidden by the Saudi government’s effective censorship. The fate of Ja’afar, tied up as it was with the Shi’a uprising and the silence that descended upon them ever since, has remained unknown to us. 102

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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 blossoming Saudi nationalism amusing. We started to talk about our lives and how different the student setup 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 light hearted 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 kingmakers here and they’re the king breakers. But, hold on,” he laughed at my crestfallen expression, “The door leading to personal freedom has opened a crack and maybe we can keep our foot in that door. Who knows? I’m going to make sure to use this chink in the armor 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 future. 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, King Faysal 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 Faysal’s secular and economic emulation of the West had disturbed a large number of the Wahhabis, 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, 103

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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 dropped from a helicopter somewhere over the Rub’ al Khali’ Desert. We were bereft at the news, and we knew that we would follow the same silent path of nonexistence 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. Colonel Harry Snyder, the former OSS senior intelligence officer in Cairo who had headed the US training mission for Saudi Arabia’s fledgling army and air force and Aramco’s Training Department, was chosen as its first Dean during Marwan’s stint there. I had known him as the jolly father of one of my close friends, who spoke our Arabic language impeccably. News of the young students’ demise reached our ears through the underground grapevine in short whispers traveling from one trusted source to another. The year my friend disappeared, new laws concerning student behavior in the University of Petroleum and Minerals were made, forbidding any conversation between students and professors outside of class, and any student gatherings in a 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 a halt that remains the status quo today.

The Princess of Plenty 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, who was 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 favorite TV star, and invited her to come for dinner one day. My mother promised she would then let it drop as just another of the niceties Arabs exchange 104

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with one another. To everyone’s surprise, a Cadillac showed up at our door the following Wednesday evening with a pleasant-faced driver named Sultan. 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 and 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 at the ‘Mir’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 center. Every street in Dammam looked like the next and every scene was the same as the one before: 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 maneuverability while their sisters in mini abayas looked on. The palace was in a secluded area away from the center of town enclosed by a four-meter-high wall. Two soldiers armed with machine guns stood at its massive carved wooden entrance, which swung open at Sultan’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. Across 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 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 105

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of Persian carpets atop blue wall-to-wall carpeting and a series of identical plush wine-colored 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 mustache 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 Faysal and Qur’anic 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 bejeweled fingers fiddling idly with a string of turquoise worry beads and a group of attendants sat at her feet to entertain her. At our entry, she looked up with a welcoming smile on her full red lips 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 lame 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 encrusted with diamonds. Why she needed a watch was a mute question. Time had no meaning in the ‘Mir’s wife’s day as she was childless and responsibilityfree. 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 ‘oud, her musk 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 bakhour. We watched entranced as the princess fanned the smoke towards her bosom with several sharp twists of her wrist, then lifted her thick black hair to one side and waved her manicured fingers delicately over the burner, allowing the aromatic bakhour to penetrate 106

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each strand. Next she stood next to the burner wand and swished her skirts lightly to and fro through the smoky perfume to permeate her skirts with the sweet and woody smell of the bakhour. 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 25 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 honor. The Princess abided by the unshakable rules of generosity of the desert 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 savory dishes. The meal did not end there. After dessert came the fruit, enormous trays of every exotic type imaginable. After the fruit, the dinner thankfully ended and we carried our overextended stomachs to the sofa unable to budge or think while we tried to digest more food than we needed for a week. Our overeating 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. A 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 handle-less 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 colors of yellow, pink and pale green. After a final round of sweet mint tea and of incense, we took 107

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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 at the Mir’s wife’s home. 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 Mir’s wife had brought her as entertainment which she was rapidly discovered was turning into work. Yasmine’s mother was a Swedish horse breeder who had met and married Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s son, who raised horses. The Mir’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 to stay the night. After bidding our mother and brothers goodnight, Princess Sara’s personal attendants, two live-in seamstresses from Lebanon and Syria, invited us to go for a walk in the private gardens that lay in seclusion behind the palace. We stepped into a jasmine-scented paradise, a heavenly garden that we had never imagined existed behind the forbidding four-meter high walls surrounding it. A pebble strewn path led 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 an intricate embrace. Towering date trees circled the swimming pool and grape vines climbed the trellis enclosing the pool alongside brilliant fuchsia bougainvillea and the jasmine flowers that overpowered the garden with their perfume. We heard our names being called, and turned to see Princess Sara seated in her bedroom that opened onto 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 Sara that we knew. We entered diffidently, suddenly feeling very awkward in this informal situation without the backup 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 108

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imposing with a heavy black cloak he held closely around him and a red checkered ghutra on his head without an agal, he had a frightening, aggressively featured face largely hidden under a black untrimmed beard. His razor sharp 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 onto the carpet and rolled at our feet onto the carpet. We broke out in giddy laughter, more from relief than amusement while he chuckled, sounding very much like a Wahhabi Santa Claus. Crouching down to our level, he hauled Yasmine onto 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. 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-colored 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 already was a Fadia, the Syrian live-in seamstress. But our giggles shriveled 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 casually informed us. I swept my hand to my mouth before I said something rash. A slave! This was 1962. 109

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We sat in silence. What can you say to someone who shows off a human being she has just bought? How can one buy a human being and show it off like a new watch? So who else was a slave amongst 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 pored 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 their daughter 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 had been proving difficult to control since the day she had been bought. She was kept under the close watch of the older attendants as she was obviously going to attempt to escape at her first opportunity. 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 110

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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 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, Sultan unexpectedly dived into our conversation. Sultan 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, “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.” 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 her years in luxury serving her. Of course the Princess was not a person who would understand the priceless value of freedom.

Half Moon Bay One Friday that summer of 1970 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 heck, let’s go to Half Moon Bay!” We stopped in our tracks, all three of us, and stared at Fatin, while thinking the unthinkable. 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 111

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into the Persian Gulf. There was nothing more exhiliarating than climbing to the top of the highest dune then falling to our sides with eyes tightly shut and rolling down the dune’s sharp steep edge, slowly at first then gaining momentum and rolling faster and faster, all the while collecting sand in our hair and ears until we fell into the Gulf ’s deep warm waters that languorously enveloped us 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 checkered ghutra that he wore for official photos for various IDs and Fatin, the only one who could drive, slipped into them. She folded the ghutra into a massive pile on her head pulling it low over her forehead so as to shadow her face without obliterating her eyes. She got my mother’s kohl pencil and smeared it on her face to give the impression of a day old beard. Then we opened cupboards and the refrigerator and piled 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 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 territory forbidden to women drivers. 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 on to Half Moon Bay, half an hour’s drive away. Just before the turn off from the main road to the beach as Fatin slowed down at a traffic light, a pick-up truck piled with Saudi laborers standing in the back slowed down alongside. We stared doggedly ahead, hearts pounding as the laborers 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 gesturing wildly in our direction as they grasped who was driving. Fatin stepped on the gas and sped towards the safety of the beach. Total chaos engulfed the laborers, for the one who had uncovered Fatin’s disguise had almost fallen out of the 112

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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 can endure 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 up 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 humor, as his accidents thankfully were not that serious. On his trips to doctors in Europe and the United States, 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 at that point in time, 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 of his dress, we realized that we were about to become victims of his ignorance. This young man came from the schools under the Wahhabiimposed anti-modernist religious curriculum that was turning many otherwise decent and kind young men into rigid reactionaries filled with guilt, anger and frustration at modern-day moral ‘corruption.’ 113

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They became narrow-minded bullies against those they perceived as outside Wahhabi acceptable norms of behavior. 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 comment shot through me, catapulting me into a blind rage in the taunting Saudi’s direction, along with Ghassan who ran furiously behind me with his arms and legs flailing. Then we set upon the shocked young man with a viciousness we 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 which was 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 that the lack of a well-rounded education had on the impressionable young: what befell those 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, both Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab nationalist 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-colored striped dress. The gaily striped dress would remain imprinted indelibly in my mind’s eye because after that I would never see the gaiety 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 summer visits to Damascus, she transformed magically from a harried mother into a laughing mischievous fun-loving school girl the moment she stepped into her doting father’s house. She was the center 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 with my father, but he was far too angry and judgmental to give that sort of unconditional love. 114

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Hope was erased from her life from that day forward, as she never found a replacement for those two heroes who had helped define her life: her father and Gamal Abdel Nasser. I boarded the MEA flight back to Beirut in a cloud of sadness. The summer of 1970 had ended on a somber note both within and without our home, as troubling events shed a pall of impending doom and gloom over most of the Arab world. Hafez Asad, an Alawi, had assumed the dictator’s chair over Syria in a bloodless coup and had turned his attention against the Arab nationalist 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 governed by the finer details of their almost identical but opposed Baathist ideology. Meanwhile, Beirut’s Arab nationalists were becoming louder and more vociferous in their anger with the anti-Palestinian politics of the Maronite establishment. Both sides grew increasingly polarized in Lebanon after the Arab League signed the Cairo Accord in 1969, which gave unprecedented privileges to fight Israel from Lebanese territory. 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 of 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 morning mid-summer to hear the news of King Hussein’s attack on the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Fearing for his throne, he had ordered his Bedouin National Guard to oust Yasser Arafat’s militant arm of Fatah from Jordan in what turned into a bloodbath known as Black September where Palestinian militants and civilian refugees were slaughtered alike by the 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 flight took off, I silently bade farewell to Saudi Arabia’s burning flares and reflected on what awaited me in a Beirut plunged partially in mourning and partially in celebration over Gamal 115

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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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The day of reckoning for 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 could I go to continue my education? 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 of an Arab Muslim daughter, so a co-ed boarding school in Europe or America, where most of my friends were going, was not even an option. Local schools, too, were out of question. Apart from their weak level of education, I had only an elementary-school-level grasp of the Arabic language. Frantically my parents began to search for a school where I could both continue my education in English and stay within Arab mores and values while I was away from their watchful eyes. Their choice landed on the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls (BESG). Relatively nearby, it had an English-language-based curriculum, and more importantly it was a strict all-girls 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’s whom we were not particularly close to, nor did they find our Americanization amusing. It was not a place that I had many fond memories of. 119

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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 the American University of Beirut in 1951. From our five year stay I remember most clearly our last day in Beirut in 1956, and my last day of kindergarten at the Al Huda School. My school was conveniently around the corner from our apartment on Hamra Street, a modest yellow one-story building with a tiny dusty courtyard, where my father dropped me off daily on his way to AUB. My kindergarten class 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 to Beirut did not go any smoother. In the stress and commotion of kissing everyone goodbye including the neighbors 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 swirls of bright lights and noise caught up in hot humid air. It was a cacophony of traffic-jammed streets, where everyone drove with their horns, curses and hairpin misses of other cars … people on balconies carried out animated conversations with friends down below, radios blared, vendors called out their wares, roosters crowed, donkeys brayed, and street dogs barked relentlessly. It was a city that did not sleep. The night air would resonate with raucous symphonies of crickets and the clatter and chatter of people on the streets until the early hours of dawn. There came a brief respite of calm 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 as its capital, the difference being better weather and scenery. The resorts were 120

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full of casinos crowded with singers and belly dancers at every turn of their congested sidewalks. Open-air family restaurants stood side by side with bars and nightclubs, whose heavy doors remained ever so slightly ajar, beckoning tantalizingly into the mysterious dim interiors within. Beirut was markedly different from every other Arab city in its audacious, chaotic, free-form way of life. Ceaselessly changing shape and color in an ever-turning kaleidoscope, it was a stark contrast to the silent, sterile, artificial world of Dhahran. It would be only with time that I would come to love this tiny, complex country as I began to realize it was so much more than wine, women and song, as 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 word leban, Aramaic for white … the white of Lebanon’s snow-covered mountains, home to the Lebanese Cedar tree, the evergreen Cedrus Libanica, a symbol of eternity closely entwined with the country’s long history. Through a fluke of nature, this tiny corner of the Levant was destined to be continuously buffeted as a geo-strategic pawn while East fought West in power struggles over trade routes that passed through it, creating as much suffering for its inhabitants as it did riches. Natural deep-sea ports, fertile soil and four seasons allowed its inhabitants a singularly sybaritic lifestyle as far back as 5000 BC, a lifestyle so beguiling that many would-be conquerors were fooled into judging this land of seemingly perpetually partying people to be an easy victory. Again and again, invading armies in 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 in what must be one of the oldest forms of graffiti on the gray limestone banks of the Dog River (so-called because of the yapping sound it makes as it rushes down from the melting ice and snow of the towering mountain tops). There, on the walls of the jagged cliffs that 121

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plunge dramatically into the river on its way to the sea, is an intriguing list of “I was heres,” who stopped for a brief respite at what continues to be a prime picnic spot today. It was here that Egypt’s Ramses II (reign 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. Hittites, Assyrians, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, French and English commanders 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 segments of the population and being marched out in disgrace by others, the inhabitants were inevitably influenced ethnically, religiously, and ideologically, creating an 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 further confrontation with one another into modern-day Lebanon, as each attempted to impose the face they 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 May 16, 1915 that left the lion’s share of the Ottoman Bilad al Sham territories under the mandate of France and Britain. The ink of 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 oil routes. Britain had a headstart on France with its Palestinian protectorate’s major port cities of Haifa and Acca to transport its trade and oil to the west. France’s mandates, Mount Lebanon and Syria, on the other hand did not benefit her trade interests as they stood. Mount Lebanon had the Maronite majority France needed to turn it into a supportive Christian enclave, but no sea outlet to turn it into a viable trading partner, while Syria had major port cities but a population that was virulently anti-colonialist. 122

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With the impunity of the conqueror, the French took the liberty of redrawing the maps of its protectorates to serve its economic interests. They took a census of Mount Lebanon which established the Maronite majority that both France and the indigenous Maronite dwellers of the mountain needed as per the new republic’s confessional system of rule that alotted important seats in government according to majority. The French then turned to the map of the Syrian mandate and shifted vital port cities and fertile land out of Syria, added them to Mount Lebanon and called it ‘Greater Lebanon.’ 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 now the citizens of a ‘Greater Lebanon’ ruled by a Maronite majority. The response of the new Lebanese citizens, whose political identities had been altered while in the throes of Arab nationalist fervor against these very colonizers, was to immediately begin agitating for a new census that would include their numbers. France ignored the Arab nationalist protesters and declared Lebanon an independent republic in 1926. Once more in 1932, the French took a census that was fiercely boycotted by Arab nationalists, largely Sunni Muslims, which gave the majority to the Maronites. Voila, fait accompli! Or so France thought. France did yet more tangling of the confessions before the end of its mandate. After overthrowing the Vichy French in 1943, the Free French declared Lebanon an independent nation-state. They magnanimously drew up an unwritten Mithaq al Watani (National Pact), an oral ‘gentlemen’s agreement,’ whereby the Christians promised not to seek foreign (French) protection and agreed to accept Lebanon’s ‘Arab face,’ as long as the Muslims 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 November 22, 1943, hastily it seems, as Lebanon’s as yet unwritten constitution remained unwritten and the census remained the Muslim Sunni boycotted 1932 one. Democracy was bequeathed on the favored few. The Republic was, unsurprisingly, a non-starter and eighteen now legally-recognized Lebanese confessions continued to tangle with the Maronites (and each other) for supremacy.

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It was this pressure-cooker state of affairs that I would step into when I began my education in Beirut in 1965. Twenty-two years after its independence, nothing had changed. The Maronites still dominated the political elite, 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 violence and killing of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Seventeen years later, they remained crammed in wretched refugee camps that dotted the full length of the country, without permission to enter Lebanon’s civil society, or to return to their villages. With a powerful Israel on its southern borders with whom it was formally at war and a sister Arab neighbor, Syria, on its eastern and northern borders, which had her own hegemonic designs, this tiny piece of land labeled a democratic republic was slowly but surely unravelling at the seams. Lebanon’s political identity was on the verge of being thrown onto the table of contention once more to be fought over amongst its inhabitants.

BESG Boarding Blues On the morning of my first day of 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 patter of 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 two fragrant rose gardens 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 124

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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 (colors of the Lebanese flag) fluttering behind girls dashing around in all directions getting ready for the opening assembly. Avoiding their curious glances, I kept my eyes firmly fixed to the floor as we tagged behind the usher. She turned 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 gray with tiny barred windows at ceiling level lining one wall. These unattainable slivers of the sky apparently looked out onto the back streets of downtown Beirut judging from the honks of the cars and snippets of salty language from the streets down below. Arranged on both sides of the room, regiment-style, were twenty gray metal frame beds covered in prickly brown blankets. Memories of Dhahran, of my old friends, my old school, its shady green gardens, colorful classrooms and familiar kindred souls rushed into my already homesick heart. With the despair of a convict entering her cell, I threw myself onto 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 sniveling.” 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 either 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 girl smiled warmly, “I’m Lisa Ting from Taiwan and 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, 125

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“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 nano second of 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 dialect) and my sneakers. NO ONE wore sneakers in the Middle East in 1965 except laborers, 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 and came, albeit grudgingly, to accept my new lifestyle. Amber, Lisa, and a pair of identical Yugoslavian twins, Maria and Helena Jankovic, who sang moving accapello duets of Paul 126

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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 from Arab students 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 favor. 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 moments of mistaken identity. I needed to utter no more than a word to provoke anyone within listening range 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 that we 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. 127

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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 had obviously never enjoyed. 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 teenage girls. 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 her terrier, Teetee (a dog even the dog lovers amongst 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 that 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 office where I was to sit and think about my bad behavior. 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.

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Muslim. The Qur’an was memorized and repeated ad verbatim, not necessarily internalized. My father prayed five times a day, fasted during Ramadan, went on the Hajj, drank alcohol and ate pork. My mother didn’t pray five times a day and never wore the head scarf. 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 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 amongst 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 headmistress by surprise, because it was school policy that Muslim boarders did not fast in Ramadan. We held a meeting amongst 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 Muslim girls 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 and with conviction. As boarding students we were obliged to go attend chapel, 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 into our plates, then on cue turned our full plates upside down in joint protest onto the tablecloth in full view of the teachers’ table just behind us. Everyone froze. Not a clink or clank of cutlery was 129

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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 us 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. Khairiyeh immediately called her father to relay this infringement on our Muslim rights. 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 at their pockets. We fasted the whole month of Ramadan in triumph, albeit a hungry one as none of the delicacies of the Iftar tables of our homes were prepared by the head cook, who didn’t waste much love on us. But we had won and that was all that counted that Ramadan.

Beguiling Beirut 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 seedy 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 by the sound of beer bottles shattering to the ground, instantly followed by loud sirens of police cars and culminating with angry curses from men and women 130

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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 the rule 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 them out started exploring the school building. A girl had given 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 hone her piano skills. We climbed hesitantly up the steep narrow staircase that led to the attic 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, hanging crookedly on the wall around a calendar dating 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 and tumbled out into the bright sunlight with only the unlimited clear sky above us. Without any ado, we immediately made a beeline to gaze down on the street below our dormitory to 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 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, with two of her sisters, Madawi and Sheikha, had decided to join our boarding school that year to have a taste of normal life. Fahda, the eldest, was the most arresting. 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, 131

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aquiline nose, full lips and 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’s path 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 favor of her country’s take on whatever political dilemma was dominating the news, and discussions invariably centered on the issue of Palestine. 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 me. She didn’t care too much about studying, preferring dancing, singing, and boys far more. On her serious side, Amber’s dreams of becoming 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 generations upon generations in a town that seemed to be a haven of peace and harmony amongst 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 had been until then firmly woven into the fabric of the Levantine society culturally and historically. 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), 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 132

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the brand new, lavishly furnished theatres in Hamra, the high street of Beirut. We looked forward to our walks with Miss Ashooh 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 stone walls and red wooden shutters. It was known simply as ‘the Jewish School’ and catered to students of all denominations. The Jewish neighborhood was one like any other with its narrow streets, small grocery stores, artisan shops and modest but charming three- and four-story 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 onto a major thoroughfare leading to the center 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 somber in its unadorned yellow limestone walls, small wrought-iron clad windows, and pointed gothic-style arched façade. Not to be outshone by its neighbors, the Maronite church stood aloofly apart from the rest of the churches across the thoroughfare, boasting a seamless Romanesque arch of stone that framed giant wooden doors which 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 that defined 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 133

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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 named 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-honored norms of decency and decorum, and not by what religion one was. This code of honor 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 mixed student body as just another routine of BESG school life … until one Monday morning when Miss Farr learned another side of the Arab psyche that she had never factored in during her long stay in Lebanon. That Monday morning, Miss Farr walked up to the pulpit and as usual asked the students to rise for song. “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 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 feelings of deep insult hit the girls simultaneously. There are red lines in Arab dignity as Miss Farr learned that unhappy Monday morning. Observing rituals of religions not their own was no problem, but singing to dogs was. 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 tranquility. 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 134

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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. Cars whizzed past and pedestrians of all shapes and sizes walked up and down the sidewalk. 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 café 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 center of Beirut, an airy expansive restaurant enclosed in floor to ceiling glass windows, where everyone sitting at the tables could see and be seen, a favorite 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 abuzz 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 cappuccino 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 for Arabia’s oil fields. Three billion dollars per year in revenue poured into its coffers from the oil industry of the Arabian hinterland. 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. Although very few Lebanese could afford to travel, 135

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they visited the airport anyway. 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 as they stood in excited anticipation on a spacious curved balcony that overlooked the tarmac built expressly for that purpose. There was a top-notch restaurant for the fancier crowd and 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 the 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, as those in power were still able to keep the discontented carefully invisible.

Coup d’Etats, War, and Snow Despite the major flaws in its constitution and a 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 neighbors, 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 dictators in the vacated positions with a job description that included throwing the leaders of such promising popular movements in their rapidly growing dungeons to rot. As the British Empire breathed its final death rattle, its former colonies in the Arabian Gulf 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 interrupted regular radio programs to announce a coup d’état. The new leader would pop up on the television screen promising eternal stability and to fight against the Zionists to the end and a curfew would be 136

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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 lead by Uncle Hisham who was in his mid-teens and had issues with his mother, 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 percent support for the coup leaders). Bursts of gunfire would follow very near to our home that was in the neighborhood of the much moved into and out of presidential palace. This included Hafez al Asad’s coup d’état against Salah Jedid in 1970, the year my grandfather died. It was scarier than the rest 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 that lost much in Asad’s policy of land appropriation in favor of his minority Alawite group, and Syria in general after his deadly clampdown on the majority Sunni Muslims. Lebanon appeared to be immune to the contagion of dictatorships that was eating up the newly emerging Arab nation-states. Lebanon was the poster boy of capitalism in the Middle East with its bank secrecy laws, flexible bankers, multilingual western-oriented 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 nonexistent in the Arab countries stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. 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. As refreshing as its liberalism, was the Lebanese sense of fashion. Less than a month after arriving at BESG, I carefully relegated my sneakers 137

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and collared shirts to the back corner of my cupboard, and replaced them with mod op-art mini dresses and clunky ‘pilgrim’ shoes. In spite of my struggle to be accepted by the Lebanese, when asked to choose between the insular and apolitical Saudi Arab world and the spirited, avant garde Lebanese one, I found myself choosing Lebanon, hands down. In my junior year in BESG, my sister joined me briefly but quickly decided it was too foreign for her and moved to England to continue her studies under the close supervision of Uncle Adnan, there for his PhD in agriculture. During our stay together in Beirut, we visited our relatives in Damascus often. 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 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 that swung vigorously to and fro when he talked and he was a very talkative old man. As we climbed higher up the mountains that divided us from Syria, the air around us became perceptibly colder and the heavy grey clouds that accompanied us from Beirut became discernibly thicker and lower in the sky. Nodding to the rhythm of our driver’s story, I gazed sleepily out of the car window at 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 became transfixed in saucer-eyed wonder, our noses glued to the window pane of the car oblivious to its freezing temperature. Our driver’s tassel whirled, “You’ve never seen snow?” he asked in surprise. We both shook our heads mutely. 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 jump out, the imprint of our feet defiling the snow drift’s pure surface. 138

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A world of wondrous white met our unbelieving eyes … the mountain slope to the valley down below … blanketed 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 had disappeared under veils of shimmering white. We dug our hands into the mouth-watering snowdrift and brought fistfuls into our mouths … what a letdown to all our delicious epicurean fantasies when the powdery snow reached the tips of our tongues and melted into metallic gravelly ice water. Laughing giddily, we grabbed more snow to form into balls only to have them disappear into tiny puddles in the palm of our hands. 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 thorny twigs stuck out from his neck for arms. For us he was the most beautiful snowman ever … our first snowman on the topmost peak of Lebanon’s Ante-Lebanon mountain range of 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 by the blank look on my face that ‘Mettawleh’ did not register so she replaced it with ‘Shi’a’ as ‘Mettawleh’ was a colloquial word for ‘Shi’a.’ 139

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Not a particularly sweet girl by nature, she quickly spotted sufficient confusion written across my face that said quite clearly that I had no clue what she was talking about to throw her and her friends into paroxysms of laughter 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 teaching us Arabic by having us memorize its contents. Of course most of the hour was just ‘blah blah blah’ to us as she never veered from the text and we never asked her to. She did not inform us that there was a Shi’a sect because there are no Shi’a 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 Shi’a in Damascus in my mother’s circles either and in Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a were so oppressed that the majority of the non-Shi’a population grew up ignorant of their existence. In Lebanon, the Shi’a 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 gaggle crowded 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 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, exceeding that of the radio announcer’s (if that could have been humanly possible). 140

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“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 amongst 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 to crowd threateningly around Miss Donk. Poor, terrified, Miss Donk did not wait to hear any more. She ran out of the classroom panic-stricken, 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 go to 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 141

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grim, pain-wracked face as she endured the bleakest moment of her life. Amber would never regain her teenage lightheartedness. 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 spaces. 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 brinksmanship with the ‘Zionist entity.’ In May of 1967, riding high on the adulation of the Pan-Arabs 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, and moved troops to Israel’s border. Less than two weeks later and with no attendant saber rattling, Israel attacked Syria, Egypt, and Jordan in a US-supported blitzkrieg. Six days later, the bulk of Arab armies were destroyed, and 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 Abdul Nasser had lost the war. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat, one important change came for Arab citizenry. No longer could their rulers soothe them with the magic balm of the Arabic word that was raised like a mighty but imaginary sword to fight 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 ‘fedayeen’ (Palestinian guerrillas). In Lebanon it not only let loose the passions of 150,000 Palestinian refugees crammed into the camps but those of the Arab nationalists, young and old, in support of the fedayeen. The Palestinian guerilla movement and the mass Arab move to support it posed a threat to the Arab despots who had reached their seats of power through 142

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subservience to the superpowers of the Cold War. The 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 and those supporting the Zionists were the enemy. The Palestinian right of return became tied to Arab honor 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. The dictators needed only the accusation of ‘consorting with the enemy’ to rid themselves of any opposition. The 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 them easy access to the desert statelets’ oil fields at the cost of the livelihoods and dreams of generations upon generations of Arab citizens being 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, which was exclusively open to Americans only. As I stepped into the room full of young American teenagers, I felt surprisingly overwhelmed by the same oddness I had felt upon entering BESG that September morning in 1965, seemingly so long ago. That feeling of disaffection was now transferred to the ACS crowd. Sprawled in cliques on sofas in the lounge 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 sound bites. I felt worlds apart from these young Americans. A flashback to my first day of first grade came vividly to my mind with its accompanying feeling of alienation. I had come full circle and returned 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 Middle Eastern countries they were living in and where their parents were working, be it Iraq, 143

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Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. I could no longer relate to their general topics of interest of sports and dances. An overwhelming desire to return to BESG and sit on the tiny straw stools with my new friends on the other side of the teachers’ toilets tugged at my heart. I now felt as one with my new BESG friends, who shared the same destiny as mine. Graduation day from BESG finally arrived on June 16, 1968. I opened my eyes blissfully that morning with the liberating thought that today would be the last day I would have to answer to Miss Jureidini. My three long years at the Beirut Evangelical School for Girls were finally at an end. Our day began joyfully as we laid out our beautiful white dresses that were the customary graduating outfits for high school girls. After we paraded to our seats, 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 opening with the national anthem, word from the principal and a prayer from the evangelical priest, our guest speaker was introduced. Suddenly, a gasp of wonder escaped from the audience. A tall, handsome Shi’a cleric in black flowing robes and a black turban pushed back to expose a charming forelock, was climbing the steps to the podium in big confident strides. Waves of whispers rippled up and down the rows of parents asking one another incredulously, “Who is he?” and even more urgently, “A Shi’a 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 intelligent 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 Shi’a 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 Shi’a. 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’ (the young mothers) who would be the power behind future Arab patriots. At our young age motherhood was not something immediate, but the manner in which he spoke his simple words of guidance made 144

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the contents special. As he had promised, his speech was brief, but for those of us who had become captivated by the expressive rise and fall of his mellifluous voice, it was too brief. Very few of us had any notion who this black-turbaned 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 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 bonded with the stateless refugees who they viewed to be in the same boat with respect to human rights and the Israeli aggressor. The southerners 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 kidnapped suspected Lebanese pro-Palestinian guerilla sympathizers (many of whom are still incarcerated in Israeli prisons to this day) 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 armored 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 Shi’a of the south invisible once again. 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 nonexistent government in the south with humanitarian needs and sympathetic politics, gaining strength among the southern Lebanese villagers (a mixture of Shi’a, Maronites 145

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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 open acts of civil disobedience that made it clear that the Communist Party was making headway amongst the Southern villagers. A gathering of such frustrated and angry villagers in Bint Jbeil, the southernmost town bordering Israel, brought Imam Moussa Al Sadr, then mufti of Tyre, to their side. He addressed them as the ‘Disinherited of the Earth,’ an electrifying prophetic phrase that hit a raw nerve in the Shi’a villagers. It answered their anguished cries and threw an open challenge to those most hated by the Shi’a villagers: the Shi’a feudal landlords. Imam Moussa al Sadr called for the creation of a Lebanese resistance to prevent the loss of Lebanon in the way that Palestine had been lost. By attaching the Palestinian question to the Shiites’ civil demands, he brought on board those whose voices were not being heard alongside the Lebanese Shi’a, 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 the people of the South away from the Communist Party. A nationwide strike called by Imam Al Sadr to “make the South a part of Lebanon” paralyzed the country with demonstrators shouting, “We want arms.” When they began to rally around him in the tens of thousands, and militant groupings began to form, this new face and voice of the Lebanese Shi’a, leaning a great deal to the right, began to be heard by the very hard-of-hearing Maronite Establishment. The government decided to woo Imam Moussa al Sadr – hence his appearance at our graduation ceremony.

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1944: My father’s first day of work as an Aramco employee.

1949: My father embarking an Aramco flight from Dhahran Airport to his first orientation year at the American University of Beirut.

1950: My father interpreting for Crown Prince Sa’ud during his tour of Aramco’s industrial training department and refinery.

1956: My siblings and I, newly arrived in Dhahran.

1963: My girl scout troop. I am fourth from the left in the second row (the only Arab).

1964: Me sitting on our car on my 13th birthday, in front of our home 4595-B on Fourth Street.

1964: My parents.

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

1967: Me sunbathing in our front yard in Dhahran.

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

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

January 1978: Munira (age 2) with Adnan, being introduced enthusiastically to the revered Bedouin sport of falconry.

March 1981: Im Bashar and Abu Bashar.

August 1987: Children see, children do. Ghassan (age 7) as armed militiamen at a checkpoint, with co-militiaman cousin Bashar (age 6), frisking youngest cousin Nadia (age 4).

24 May 2000: Lebanese pride cloaks Amer’s shoulders on his graduation from Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston, United States. The graduation took place at the same time as the Israeli Army’s routing from South Lebanon by homegrown Lebanese Resistance fighters, ending 25 years of occupation.

16 June 2003: A celebration dinner at home for Yasmine and Rola’s graduation from the American University of Beirut, with guest of honor Mrs Catherine C. Bashour, their beloved former principal of the American Community School (ACS). Left to right: Amer, Munira, Rola, Mrs Bashour, Yasmine and Ghassan.

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My summer vacation of 1970 was confirmed ended when my flight began its descent into Beirut International Airport. The MEA made a half circle over the Mediterranean Sea and approached Beirut. A thick black pall of smoke blocked the city from view underneath, from burning tires, 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 empty of traffic but full of angry men in black, armed with Kalashnikovs that they fired in wild bursts of frustration into the air 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 when the fury of such young men could no longer be contained – in just five more years. But on that day in 1970, the anger on the streets seemed to be an isolated event of massive outpouring of grief by politically and economically frustrated youths. My college lay in what was known as Ras Beirut (the head of Beirut). Its name was derived from the rocky promontory at the western 147

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tip of the city 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 sunsets and a built-in weather forecast system. The only downside to this wide open vista is for the unfortunate pelicans that are genetically wired to cross 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 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, which included the library, student lounges, party halls, and male students … pretty much erasing its “all girls” exclusivity. Many parents were mercifully kept in the dark about this. 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 vs. Turks, Phalange Lebanese vs. Palestinian, etc.). 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 … or otherwise … combat on AUB’s grounds. Education in this 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 that taught in three languages, Arabic, English, and French, were scattered throughout this part of the 148

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city along with an Italian school and a German one. All these schools had sprung from foreign missions which had jostled for a foothold in this valuable western junction between East and West during the mid nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth with a new method of colonization through education. The education was excellent save for its fallout on the Lebanese identity. As no serious unified civics or history program 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, skimming vaguely over Lebanon’s connection to the Arab world. 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, Hamra, Ras Beirut’s high street, was filled largely with red sand, giant cacti and herds of goats who wandered past small grocer 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, the small shops were gradually replaced by ultra fashionable boutiques and sidewalk cafés … save for one particular grocery store off Hamra Street called ‘Smith’s’ where housewives, tourists, spies, professors, students and journalists have been its regulars for years. It is owned by the quintessential Lebanese, Patrick Smith, who has nothing Arab in his lineage. He only grew up in Beirut. His father was English and his mother Armenian. Nevertheless he and his sons, Nael and Tarek (close friends and classmates of my children, who accepted the Arab pronunciation of their last name as ‘Smiss’), turned the store into one of the landmarks of Ras Beirut. Smith’s can be seen as a reflection of Ras Beirut, one could say 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 the East and from the West. Hamra’s cafés 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 149

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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 favor with their 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 the creative minds of the Lebanese for the necessary paraphernalia of a nation: a national anthem and flag. One very popular meeting place to eat and talk was ‘Faisal’s,’ across the street from AUB. It was a home away from home for students, professors and journalists with a daily lunch such that their mothers might cook. Its two head waiters, Amin, a large pleasant-faced maitre, and Anwar, as serious as Amin was not, 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 cafés dotting Hamra Street, there was the ‘Horseshoe’ café (shaped like a horseshoe), dark and brooding like the poets and philosophers it attracted; and the ‘Modca’ on Hamra Street, the glitziest and most modern of the sidewalk cafés, where 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 Adnan. My parents’ warnings to stay away from Lebanese men had been dashed to the wind after I met Adnan while walking late one afternoon near the American University of Beirut area with my close friend from boarding school, Hana Azzouni. Engrossed in deep conversation we had strolled 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 momentarily our hearts, in our footsteps. “Adnan!” Hana had smiled in relief, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.” “Aren’t you going to introduce me?” he had smiled back, 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 the excess cheer. Waiting for me at the 150

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door to my dormitory was Adnan with a big welcoming grin and a dozen fragrant pearly white zambaqs, my favorite flowers. Persuasive, witty, impulsive, and fiercely patriotic, Adnan was undoubtedly Mediterranean in both looks and demeanor. 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 walked closer to those eyes and that smile, Dhahran and Saudi Arabia were relegated to a distant slot of space and time far, far away.

Sidon by the Sea 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 along both sides of the road, escorting us into town. But as we drove further, the colorful citrus groves were abruptly replaced by drab, gray buildings which took over the sides of the road, 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 onto a palm-tree-lined avenue that ran along the coast, a visual feast materialized before us. The Mediterranean Sea came into view once more, lapping softly against 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 with trellised wooden musharrabiyeh-enclosed balconies, encircled a piazza with a marble fountain, once refreshing in its cool gush of water but 151

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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. Facing them was the fisherman’s harbor 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 fish market I saw the brightly-colored 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 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 rooftop terrace or had a neighbor who had a rooftop terrace ran up there to watch the bombardment. The British commander 152

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marched into Sidon in a huff and demanded to meet with the Mufti, my great uncle. He wanted 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 roof tops 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 farther away from the shore. Sidon has been burned down seven times by its own people who burned 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 amongst 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 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. Maarouf Sa’ad. Abu Mustafa, this is Fadia Basrawi.” Guessing where any Lebanese comes from is a favorite pastime amongst them and a necessary detail before any conversation of consequence can take place. “That’s easy,” Maarouf Sa’ad, answered in his rich baritone voice, “She’s obviously not Lebanese from her demeanor,” (I hadn’t said a word outside of the polite greeting). “Her name puts her as a Palestinian.” “Well, what if I tell you that she’s from Saudi Arabia?” Adnan interposed laughingly. Maarouf Sa’ad 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!” 153

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“You’ve just met our mayor, the most compassionate, generous, and patriotic man in Sidon,” was Adnan’s heartfelt reply to my query about Maarouf Sa’ad’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 that 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. Maarouf Sa’ad 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 ruling Maronite Establishment.” We crossed the street from the fishermen’s cafés to our destination, Sidon’s only restaurant of repute known as the ‘Istirahah’ or ‘Resthouse.’” It was built of large slabs of yellow stone to blend harmoniously with Sidon’s Crusader fortress which was a short distance away surrounded by sea and accessible only by its original drawbridge permanently laid out for visitors. The Citadel, or qala’a as it is called by the Sidonians, was built on remnants of a Phoenician lookout and was still remarkably intact, particularly its lookout perches, witness to 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 be stretching out to touch our hands then impishly spraying us with a fine mist of salty sea. Looking out at the seascape, 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 accompanying 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 was about to reach an abrupt end as our conversation moved to the political discord that was consuming Lebanon. 154

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The Passion of Palestine 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. An edge 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 Ain El Hilweh, the 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. I felt out of my league as we approached the entrance to the camp. It was with plenty of trepidation that I had accepted the invitation, 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 breezeblocks with plastic-covered spaces for windows and corrugated iron rooftops. Notwithstanding the abject poverty indicated by these houses and typical of all homes on the Mediterranean, clothes lines with sparkling white laundry and children’s garments crisscrossed whatever space was not taken up by riots of jasmine, roses, gardenias, and sweet-smelling carnations planted in recycled milk and cooking oil tins. Fat luscious grapes hung from trellises of vines that began at the entrance of one home and continued down the alley on through neighbors’ houses. Astonishingly, there was space for a small vegetable patch adjacent to every home which provided 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 155

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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 rest. Running around in all of this jumble of humanity, living as best as they could under such dire conditions, were children of all ages doing what children do, eating, arguing, carrying whatever makeshift toy 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 youths wearing the trademark kuffiyeh around their shoulders. They shook hands warmly and ushered us in with a lot of fanfare. Adnan was obviously amongst friends. They were, in fact, childhood friends, as the Fatah commander had attended the same school courtesy of the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian Refugee) that provided scholarships to the Palestinians from the 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 Saudi Arab and lives in the American oil town of Dhahran and is interested to know more about your armed struggle for Palestine.” I listened carefully to the plight of the Palestinian refugees from the young Fatah commander’s perspective: “Whichever way you look at our situation, we are the victims. The squalor 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 went back many centuries with land handed down from father to son. We are asked to sit in these camps and wait and wait and wait to return to our homes. 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 hardworking 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.”

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A new and fascinating window into Lebanon’s political scene opened for me through my introduction to the staff of the An Nahar newspaper. Adnan was a journalist for the widely-read An Nahar while he worked on his MBA at AUB and lectured on labor rights and business at the Lebanese University. Many of our dates ended at An Nahar, where he was on a first-name basis with everyone beginning from the first floor where the telephone operators worked, on up to the sixth floor where the publisher of the newspaper, an icon of the Lebanese intelligentsia, Ghassan Tueni, had his offices. Its prime mover and shaker was Michel Abu Jaoude, the editor-inchief of the newspaper, unsurpassed amongst 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 and the door to his office was always held wide open for our visits. There, in his office, we spent long fascinating soirées as everyone who was anyone or wanted to be someone in the Arab world streamed into his office to hash over matters of the moment, giving Michel grist for his column and the An Nahar cartoonist, Pierre Sadek, inspiration for his lampoon of the day. Michel’s regular visitors were men like Yasser Arafat, Kamal Nasser, Fatah’s urbane spokesman, the worldly journalist Eric Rouleau, all of Lebanon’s future warlords that included Kamal Jumblatt, his son, Walid Jumblatt (who was interning at the An Nahar printing quarters in the basement), Camille Chamoun and his sons Dory and Dany, 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.

* * * Michel Abu Jaoude’s office was where we were heading after my arrival from Dhahran. I had speedily dumped my luggage in my room and 157

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jumped into Adnan’s tiny Honda, a stark innovation from the giant wing-tipped gasoline guzzling American cars of the sixties. We drove up to An Nahar’s headquarters, a large square featureless cement-block building dating to the fifties. As we walked towards Michel Abu Jaoude’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 grin that curved slightly down at the edges, lending him a rakish cynical touch. “Ahlan wa Sahlan (welcome), to 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 statelet rulers that had cropped up in the Arabian Desert, reserving the biggest portion of his scorn for the Al Sa’uds. His office was filled with visitors seated in casual array except for one politician, Pierre Edde, who sat ramrod straight in his chair and gave us a brief self-important smile in greeting. Michel launched into his usual free-association conversation. “I was just discussing with my dear friend Pierre here how transforming money can be with respect to our people. Take for example, humor. Have you noticed how hilarious any joke coming from the mouth of a rich man is to its listeners? … without being funny? As for the poor man who has nothing in his pocket, how his jokes 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, “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 of the moment and no one cares … Ah, the magic wand of social climbing in our zuama–controlled politics.12 Everyone was welcome to visit Michel Abu Jaoude for a first visit but any subsequent visits were strictly filtered according to Michel’s whim. 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 persona non grata, smiling broadly. Before the yet oblivious guest had a chance to sit down, Michel would link arms with him and escort him 158

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casually to the elevator, pat his arm 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 before the elevator doors closed on the mystified almost-guest. Thankfully, we never had anything but kind words upon 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. The gentle hills of the south remained visible from the northern coastal road and the commanding 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, or along the seashore on the rocky beach of the northern coastal highway where we wined and dined, walked and talked, and I learned to skip pebbles across the water. ‘Faisal’s’ remained our favorite 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.

* * * Breaking all the Rules My first meeting with Adnan’s parents was totally impromptu. Hana, Fatin, and I were walking into the neighborhood bakery one Sunday morning for a Lebanese breakfast of manakeesh13, when a car suddenly screeched to a halt next to us and Adnan waved from its window. He had ‘happened’ to be driving his Honda by our dormitory in BCW and had just spotted us. We embarrassedly exchanged quick pleasantries as traffic began to pile up behind his car and politely refused his invitation to go for a short spin. His reponse was to step out of his car and refuse to budge despite the increasingly strident traffic pileup unless we accepted his invitation. So we got in, feeling awkward in our casual weekend dress and with Hana in her bedroom slippers. In those days, casual clothes were worn only at home, never in public; we had felt free to slip out to the bakery as it was just around the corner from our dorm. Adnan started the car and sped off heading south. Our hearts 159

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sank when we discovered that 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 panicked pleas to return us to our bakery. Adnan’s mother, Munira Fawaz, known as Im Bashar, could be heard welcoming her son even before opening the front door, having recognized his special ring. She didn’t miss a beat upon 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.” Although relatively small in stature, Im Bashar gave an aura of being much larger than her physique suggested with her strong features, broad capable shoulders and long thick gray hair tied back in a casual bun. She ushered us into the living room, seated us and gazed at us with large chocolate brown 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. And that was vintage Im Bashar … generous, playful, disarming, candid and immeasurably sharp.With an infectious laugh that shook her belly, she led us to the dining room where she had prepared breakfast fit for a king, the king being her son. 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 we were in proximity with one another for the rest of Im Bashar’s long life. We were winding down our visit with a final cup of coffee when Adnan’s father walked into the living room, a serene, patrician, silverhaired 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 largesse of spirit, humor and intellect. I was already familiar with Adnan’s parents from stories he had relayed to me that were 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 wouldn’t have made sense to meet them any other way. I was curious about Adnan’s parents’ input about Lebanon’s independence from the French, and now was as good a time as any to ask them. Im Bashar was non-committal, “I didn’t hear about it until 160

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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 Khayyat or ‘Salah’ for short, was born in Sidon in 1902, a Syrian subject of the Bilad al Sham province of the Ottoman Empire. He had attended an Ottoman nursery school briefly and his formidable memory retained the Ottoman nursery rhymes they had taught him. He could still recite the rhymes, with a twinkle in his eyes and a suppressed smile and 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 the secular Arab nationalist fervor were implanted in his young heart when his school took its young students to the streets to march against the Ottoman Empire for the independence of the Arab provinces 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’ presence 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 caliber never met the carving up of the Middle East with resignation or defeat. This ardor for the Arab dream that gripped him in his youth would not diminish until his final breath. 161

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Ironically enough, Arab nationalism was of the making of the colonizers themselves in their strategy to destabilize the Ottoman Empire’s firm hold on its geo-strategic Arab provinces. 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 fools. So the Western Powers played on the Arabs’ dreams for self-determination. What could be more potent a challenge to the as yet uncontested guardianship over Islamic culture and political dogma held by the Ottomans with respect to the Arabs than an awakening of the Arab dream for independence? And what could be more powerful a tool to push this dream forward than the Arabic language, which 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 it 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 Salaheddine Khayyat received his law degree amongst the third wave of Lebanese-Syrian students to receive university diplomas, becoming one of the few educated men of Sidon. He had left Sidon in 1920 to study law in Damascus as a Syrian Ottoman subject and now, at the height of this passionate Arab awakening, was returning to Sidon as one of the disenfranchised Lebanese in the freshly created ‘Republic of Lebanon’ under the French mandate. My father-inlaw’s commitment to a Lebanon free from the arbitrary rule of the French was tested soon enough as a young, freshly-minted judge in Nabatiyeh, the legal seat of South Lebanon. In 1936 the French were staging the charade of elections to install their puppets in Lebanon. As a legal officer, Salah Khayyat was appointed 162

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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 in Nabatiyeh, Comte Damien de Martel, sent after him for an urgent meeting. He complied, knowing pretty much what was in store for him. Upon entering the French High Commissioner’s office, Comte Damien de Martel glanced up arrogantly from his desk, whipped out a blank piece of paper and brusquely demanded Salah’s rubber-stamp legal signature to confirm the French mandate’s choice in the rigged election for deputy of Nabatiyeh. Salah Khayyat 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?” the High Commissioner sputtered angrily. The young judge repeated what he had just said, making it clear that he understood perfectly what he was saying. Glaring intently into the young Sidonian judge’s eyes, Comte Damien de Martel hissed, “This legal signature for our man is going to happen whether you agree to do it or not, so why not benefit from it, get a year’s worth of salary in gold pieces and every one will sleep well tonight.” “I will sleep well tonight knowing I have behaved as my conscience bids me to,” was Salah Khayyat’s unyielding and final statement. No amount of pressure, threatening or bribery 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, who was not France’s man. He awoke the next morning to read the name of the French mandate’s man, Mohammad Al Ass’ad, as the winner, splashed across the newspapers’ front page. 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 on in his 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 he 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 163

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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 government post for a Sunni Muslim cleric), he opted to become an agnostic as a young adult, unheard of amongst men of his generation. His nature was to question everything in life, including his religion. Indeed, blind belief in the words attributed to God was one of his bête-noirs. 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 neighborhood 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. Im Bashar recalls him coming home one Friday early in their marriage fuming at the rantings of a sheikh during noon prayers that focused on binding the honor of the Muslim man to the veil of his wife. “Munira,” he told her abruptly, “I hope its fine with you to stop wearing the veil from now on.” My mother-in-law remembers laughingly 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 that my father-inlaw 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 on 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 is nobody’s business.” During the late 1930s, Abu Bashar broke the rules of established Sidon (again) and moved into a beautiful Ottoman-era villa in an entirely 164

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Maronite-inhabited neighborhood outside of the Old City walls with his young family. 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 and that included my father-in-law’s extended family. The Maronites in this ‘new’ neighborhood 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 the traditional neighborly Lebanese custom. The ‘events’ of this bloody chapter in 1860 were still deeply embedded in the neighborhood’s collective memory, leaving them suspicious and mistrustful of any one not of their faith. However, it did not take the neighbors long to discover that here was a family who was radically different. Im Bashar threw open her door to young and old and a ready meal for anyone who was hungry. Her wisdom and common sense soon made her the trusted peacemaker of the neighborhood. Every Sunday morning, Im Bashar sent her children with their Maronite neighbors 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 told them stories with lessons on how to behave, they socialized with children their age, listened to beautiful music from the organ, and I had a chance to cook in peace.” Christmas would find part of a fir tree with tinsel and baubles in the corner of their living room. Easter would find Im Bashar helping her Christian neighbors in their kitchens coloring Easter eggs in a tradition that went back centuries. Fresh herbs were wrapped around each egg, held in place by filmy gauze. The wrapped eggs were then dipped in orange dye derived from onion skins soaked in water that traced the shape of the delicate lacy herb leaves onto the egg. Her neighbors would reciprocate and join Im Bashar in her kitchen to prepare labor-intensive date, pistachio and walnut semolina sweets on 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 165

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endure. But 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 who were left immobile under the heavy shroud of domesticity that was imposed on them. After making the rounds of the French nun 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 colors, child-sized furniture, and educational toys were a novelty she never knew existed in schools. This, she instinctively realized, was what children needed in order 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 (Arab nationalist, against anything smacking of the West, especially the United States). 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 which she had not yet removed, 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 its establishment in Sidon was to woo what Lebanese they could to the American Protestant fold away from the Catholics who answered to France was unimportant to Im Bashar. 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 166

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moving away from the slow pace of the pleasure-seeking, landed gentry which included her husband, into a world of business-oriented young men whom 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 of her children.

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“I’m going to show you exactly how tiny Lebanon is,” Adnan announced one 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 but had 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. His gunmen gave him a bumper crop of 300. But on this refreshing Sunday morning in 1971, there was no hint of the evil that would soon befall this city as traffic began steadily increasing with weekend picnickers traveling from what would become ‘West’ Beirut, the 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, the Christian-dominated side of the green line. We finally reached the highway that would take us towards Tripoli, the northernmost city of Lebanon. 169

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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 northern highway fell under the home turf of the Maronite Establishment whose municipalities received a large part of the money coming from Arabia. “It’s half an hour more of Lebanon from here to the Syrian borders,” Adnan told me at the outskirts of Tripoli. “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 the 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 had twinkled so enchantingly from the folds of the Chouf Mountains on our first date in the Istiraha of Sidon. They were inhabited by Druze and Maronites who lived side by side in hand-hewn white limestone homes with deep-red roofs and brightly-colored wooden shutters. This bucolic co-habitation had another ten years before the picture-perfect homes would become rubble and their young generation lost, many of them killing before they touched puberty. Others would grow up in classrooms of abandoned schools without any education as ‘war-displaced’ victims of the ‘mountain war,’ a war of pointless battles of calculated convenience between two warlords, Jumblatt and Geagea. The hamlets dotting the hilltops were filled with rose bushes, fruit trees, mulberry trees, olive trees and thick trellises of grape vines. The mulberry tree, home to the humble silkworm that had catapulted the mountain Lebanese to the center of the highly lucrative silk trade hundreds of years ago, grew close to the villagers’ abodes spreading its welcome shade from the 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 with foliage concentrated on top and trunks bare and willowy, lined up along the far hills on the horizon, closely resembling the male lineup for the Lebanese national dance, the dabke. Even the trees of 170

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Lebanon did not escape the confessional divide of the Lebanese, Adnan informed me. “Those trees so integral to the Lebanese landscape are one of the rare items that both the Ottomans and the French shared for the good of the country, and both succeeded because of the confessional setup of the country. Where you see trees in large numbers is where the Maronites lived. The Ottomans gave a decree that those Christian families who planted forests around their properties would not be forced to give their sons to serve the Ottoman army. 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 Shi’a 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.

* * * Romantic Drama My remaining years at university flew by as we crisscrossed Lebanon in all of its geographical, social, and political strata. The longer I stayed in Lebanon, the greater my attachment became to this arbitrary, impetuous, and reckless Arab country and to Adnan who exhibited the same characteristics. 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. 171

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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!!!!!!” was his expectedly 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. But neither religion nor Arab unity figured in my father’s idiosyncrasies, only tribalism did. I was a Saudi Arab female and by Saudi Arab law, I was forbidden to marry a non-Saudi Arab man. He was fully aware that I would not be able to go ahead, as Saudi law also stipulated that I could not marry without the written permission of him as my father, of the Minister of Interior of Saudi Arabia and of the King. Suddenly the veneer of a modern education dropped and my father reverted to an extremely law-abiding Saudi Arab male citizen. How dare his daughter choose the man she wanted to marry? My graduation ceremony passed in a blur through tear-filled eyes and a broken heart. 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 me permission 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 mold he had envisaged for me, educated but unaltered. We had never had the best of father-daughter relationships 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. Under 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 I had received when I became a first grade teacher’s assistant in my old school in Dhahran. Adnan’s brothers Bashar and 172

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Hassan lived with their families 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 brotherly advice: “Start looking for someone else.” My father had made it embarrassingly clear that getting him to accept graciously was not going to happen. My mother, basically a kind soul but weak before my father’s anger, put in her own two bits if only to protect herself from any fallout from him. “Stop calling Fadia,” she told my good friend Hana, who was now married to Adnan’s older brother, Bashar. “She doesn’t want to talk to any of you.” 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 An Nahar. 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. 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. 173

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Once I felt I had control over my destiny with hope of finally being with Adnan, 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 neighbors. I had no illusions about my popularity in the singles scene with the statistic of one female to every hundred or so males. But I needed to celebrate my window of freedom and to my roommate’s surprise, accepted an invitation to attend a party next door. It took just one party for us to decide that watching television, even 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 roommate, who stood expressionless as she did when she was overwhelmed. “Let’s say hello and sneak out. Five minutes, O.K.?” we agreed as a herd of men spotted us and began plowing their way 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 roommate right behind me as we ran to the safety of our apartment. We collapsed onto our Aramco sofas weak from laughter at our ‘femme fatale’ effect on the poor desperate bachelors of Dhahran. 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 his sister-in-law and I would click. We rang the doorbell to their brand new bungalow, a newer model than the one I 174

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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, the Gerard Institute in Sidon, where their elder brother Abdel Aziz left a lasting legacy in soccer then continued on to the American University of Beirut and the United States for further studies to become a major business mover and shaker in Saudi Arabia today. I liked Sally immediately on her entrance into the room. 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, vibrant, and thrilled with her new life with her new husband in Saudi Arabia. I privately noted the irony of our situation; 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 “piece de resistance” 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 like to 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 onto 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 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. 175

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I returned home that day in deep conflict, mulling the project Sally had proposed over and over in my confused state of 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. As I gazed up at the sky and watched dusk turn to night, a sprinkling of stars began to twinkle in the rapidly darkening sky. A slight breeze playfully ruffled through my hair, as it chased away 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 into the American or the Saudi Arab one? I imagined life without Adnan and all color 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, 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 as she effectively negotiated her way through the potential minefield 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 retorted, “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 lawbreaking step I was about to make. It was in the midst of this ongoing silent 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 176

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make and my qualms over the negative and long-term repercussions it would have on my future relationship with my parents. I can still remember her thoughtful smile as she in turn, 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 Midwestern 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 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 all 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 December 26, 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 would await 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 two-up two-down bed-sit 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 177

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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 anxiety any longer. “Why aren’t you worrying?” I cried out in exasperation, “What if something terrible 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 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 gray pre-dawn air and looked 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 178

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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 sixteen-year-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 honored.” “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 somber brother and sister who were left to weather the storm that would erupt in the wake of my disappearance, and slipped into the cab finally united 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. 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’s 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 to meet me 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 onto the train. A surprised conductor greeted the four of us with a raised eyebrow. 179

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“What can I do for you?” he politely alluded 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 take a seat wherever you like,” the conductor 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 that 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. At Beirut International Airport, we stepped into the welcoming arms of my father-in-law, who reveled in the audacity of what we had just pulled off. 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 everything my father-in-law wasn’t, 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 the marriage of your son to a Saudi Arabian 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 180

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south of Lebanon, where he had presided as High 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 Khayyat 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 Qur’an and we are here to have you legally register it, NOT to question it,” he declared triumphantly. Muttering under his breath Sheikh Salim ordered a witness brought in before confirming our marriage contract. Adnan stepped out into the corridor briefly and brought back a very amused, random passerby. 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, holding her breath. My new in-laws became my surrogate parents as they embraced me into their fold and loved me as one of their own wholeheartedly and unconditionally. 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 Faysal after which all Saudi subjects were ordered to leave Egypt). I knew it would be fine with my mother, and it was. She hugged me and scolded me for leaving before my twenty-second birthday on January 24th, which she had looked forward to celebrating in England with my siblings. Disappearing briefly into her room, she returned with a gift, a beautiful leather shoulder bag, 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 the last gift I would receive from her after my father forbade the mention of my name in his presence for decades, altering our relationship permanently. The following day, my father stomped into Beirut Airport and publicly 181

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accused Adnan and Abu Bashar of committing “an act of piracy,” causing them to break out in silent giggles and me to break out in an unprecedented case of hives. Unhappily, but predictably, I was never able to regain normal relations with my parents, so deep was my father’s anger at what I had done, breaking the rules of behavior and decorum expected as his obedient daughter and as a docile daughter of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

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‘Come with me from Lebanon, my bride’. Song of Solomon 4:8

To the naked eye, Beirut of 1973 was still the same frivolous and funloving city all the tourist brochures made it out to be. However, to those in tune with Lebanon’s darker side, the drumbeats for armed conflict amongst the Lebanese were becoming increasingly loud. What was happening to this dynamic, vibrant country? I had been away for just six months but the scene was palpably more sinister, especially amongst our circle of journalist friends. Censorship was beginning to rear its ugly head and our beloved Michel Abu Jaoude 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 lose the objectivity that had always been his trademark. Lebanon was teetering dangerously on the brink of civil war. Our first year of marriage, often predicted to be bumpy, was bumpy, but not because of personal matters. We were prepared to weather disapproval from both Adnan’s family and mine, as we hadn’t banked on 183

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anyone’s approval for being together. But what we had not anticipated affecting our lives together was the fallout of Lebanon’s politics on our dreams. Lebanon’s new president, Suleiman Franjieh, a feudal Maronite chieftain, traditionally and historically more connected to Syria than to the Maronites, had squeaked past the post in elections by just one arm-wrestled vote. With such a colorful background it was no surprise that Franjieh’s presidency would be marked by corruption and nepotism that would effectively erase what baby steps had been taken to give 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 amongst remote Christian villages deep in the mountains and the far 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 of 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 of Lebanon. The march towards self-destruction that repeatedly thundered across this star-crossed 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 April 10, 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 inhabited by Lebanese Shi’a refugees who had escaped the daily shelling of their villages in the south and the Bekaa Valley, the Israelis killed nine members of the same family for getting in their way. The killers’ targets were three Palestinian writers residing in Verdun, a fashionable residential neighborhood, two streets away from where we lived. The Internal 184

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Security Forces (ISF) received the news immediately of the night raid underway but were ordered to go back to bed by President Suleiman Franjieh. 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 safe enough to direct early morning traffic there. Continuing on, they entered the designated apartment bloc and murdered the three Palestinian intellectuals with a silenced gun. The Palestinian intellectuals died at the hands of the 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 and a hapless neighbor caught in the crossfire. The three Palestinian activists had been chosen to die by Golda Meir, 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 the Mossad had drawn up to spread terror amongst the Palestinians in retaliation for Munich, the Israeli government wanted them dead anyway. Israel wanted to make it clear that Palestinian freedom fighters would not be safe anywhere from the Mossad. Kamal Nasser, Kamal Adwan, and Mohammed Yousef Najjar were the designated targets because they were intellectual Palestinian activists. In 1973, dead people were not shown 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 exposing one of the dead intellectuals, Kamal Nasser, was circulated in the press. He was dressed elegantly in his dressing gown and bedroom slippers and seemed to be fast asleep on his living room floor. 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 at that early hour of the 185

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morning, but never an Israeli terrorist squad. They probably exchanged words to verify his identity then shot him before his horrified family. Tears of sympathy 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 Jaoude’s soirées at An Nahar, 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 close neighbors) hit lists because 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, who decided at will who could live and who must die. Ehud Barak, having committed the necessary Zionist right of passage by 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 by the Israeli air force. 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 on May 1st at dawn. 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 more than the usual hurdles of newlyweds merging their lives and dreams together. Our lot in life was tied 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 every one 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 186

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conjunction with Syria to regain land lost to the Zionists in 1967, the October War went down in military history for its initial surprise offensive, 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 president Anwar Sadat. Sadly this brilliant maneuver ended in defeat after heavy air support by the Americans carpet-bombed the Egyptian forces and extracted the cornered Israeli Army from their tight spot. In the midst of the war, the Arab League successfully pressured Saudi King Faysal into an oil boycott against the West and Aramco was ordered to stop pumping. The reasons were not as altruistic as many Arab nationalist believed then. When Saudi oil disappeared from the market, world oil prices quadrupled and money began pouring into Saudi Arabia’s treasury as it never had before. President Nixon sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on an urgent mission to remind Faysal of their oil-for-security pact and unless different measures were taken, the Pentagon threatened 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 Faysal gave the United States 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-one-man Arab leaders soon fell in line, taking their disenfranchised nations with them, after deciding that armed resistance against Israel was unproductive and problematic for them. My previous aversion to armed resistance disappeared. We were disoriented by the political and social fallout on Lebanon of the October War. We were no longer clear about what to believe or 187

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expect. Who was friend and who was 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 gray 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. Those selfsame movers and shakers, who had met nightly in Michel Abu Jaoude’s office at An Nahar, were fast becoming archrivals and their meetings were turning into shouting matches. Israel nudged the Lebanese further towards annihilation in 1974 by officially announcing ‘organized and systematic’ patrols and roadblocks on Lebanese territory and pre-emptive attacks on the Palestinians, without any provocation, to prevent infiltration across the border. Adding salt to the wound of Lebanese divisiveness, they regularly gave out a communiqué after their forays into Lebanese territory that ended with “our troops encountered no resistance from the Lebanese army.” In cooperation with the Israelis, the Lebanese 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 agree to carry 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 plans for a future in Lebanon and grudgingly packed our bags for what was being touted as the new Eldorado: the Gulf Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

* * * Exile in Boomtown Adnan and I 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 188

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same time as its newfound oil wealth and Sheikh Zayed, its new ruler. The desert statelet did not yet have sidewalks. Rats ran boldly amongst 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 meager, became a car-washing 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, a flamboyant, sharp-as-nails businessman. He had instantly jumped at the opportunity of extending his publishing and printing business in Kuwait to the fledgling emirate, where bookstores were almost nonexistent. 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 labor 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, which made it an important outlet for the 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 begin popping up across the Gulf Emirates. We arrived to find the bookstore in the same chaotic, jumbled state of transition that the remainder of the sheikhdom was in. In charge of All Prints were its two main pillars, Sa’adallah, an old Coptic Egyptian clerk and 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 Sa’adallah and Hilda. They attended the same Indian social center and its Friday night dances. I was twenty-three and Adnan twenty-eight and we were in charge of men and women twice our age who, save for Sa’adallah and Hilda, made it no secret they were less than overwhelmed by our fresh-faced entrée into their lives. But more daunting than the international tangle among our personnel, was the appallingly chaotic state All Prints was in. Boxes of stationery covered in 189

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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 forego dignity and squat with legs akimbo while they sorted through piles of paperbacks in English, French and Arabic. Hilda and Sa’adallah’s had an ‘office’ at the back of the bookstore. A stool and a school desk were provided for Sa’adallah 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 that had been quite comfortable up until now with the non-work they were being paid for. It was the cleaning that got on everyone’s nerves. They’d been doing just 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 disheveled and dust-covered from under a shelf of stationery I had just begun to negotiate. Before I could say a word, I heard Adnan apologetically inform his guests while standing next to me that he couldn’t find his wife, turning slightly in my direction with a warning but ever so polite nod, she must have gone to walk the dog! Everyone in Abu Dhabi came to our bookstore. The global collection of humanity that congregated in this tiny but loaded emirate was extraordinary. Abu Dhabi nationals visited our bookstore with falcons perched on their arms, fearsome even with the hand-stitched leather hood that covered their 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. 190

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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 demands 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 that 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. 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, all 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 an unbelievable speed in lots that had been seemingly empty the day before. Architects from around the world had carte blanche from the as 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, servants and children in the front seats and goats placidly chewing their cud 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 hodge-podge of impoverished Omanis, Baluchis, and Pakistanis, poorly qualified and poorly outfitted. We watched army parades in those early years celebrating Sheikh Zayed’s ascent to the throne that were a confusion of arms and legs that rose and fell independently of one another to a band that struck more sour notes than correct ones. Outside a government ministry next door to our apartment, there were two army guards on sentry duty. They played cards during the day 191

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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 and his partner trying desperately to revive him. Adnan ran down in his pajamas to assist in any 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 outfitted in a uniform five sizes too big for him, then turned him over to check his heart and any stomach injuries while a crowd from the neighboring 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 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 is due, Sheikh Zayed was a wise leader for his tiny Emirate. With the lucid Bedouin sense of reality, he had no illusions of his global power and set out to make 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 distribution of wealth remained evenhanded, tribal traditions remained strong and women played a visible role. Women were recruited as passports 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 common sense 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. 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. But Meezar 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 192

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every man he met by their first name. Old habits die hard and Meezar’s biggest gag was bumming cigarettes from anyone smoking in his environs. There 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 fences surrounding expatriate communities as there had been in Aramco’s oil camps. Those non-nationals in Abu Dhabi and the other nearby Emirates of Bahrain, Dubai, Sharjah, Um el Guwein and Ras el Khaima minded their own business, literally. Sheikh Zayed did not lose his throne when girls in sundresses walked along the Corniche and revelers drank to their heart’s content. International decree prevented Saudi Arabia from forbidding such liberties in the Emirates. Why were religious extremists allowed so much power over the people of Saudi Arabia, and why were those same extremists curtailed in the Emirates, even though their peoples shared the same conservative Islamic values and traditions, and both lacked control over their oil politics? The answer lay with the Al Sa’uds and the Americans in their fear of losing control over Saudi Arabia’s oil. The ruling family was all too aware of the big question concerning their legitimacy as rulers over Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Abu Dhabi and the Gulf Emirates had 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-controlled. 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 the 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 to be our pot of gold as he focused his attention on the ‘greening’ of Abu Dhabi, while I ran the bookstore that we had finally whipped into shape. Our days were full but we never forgot our promise to ourselves that we would go back to Lebanon in the very near future.

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We were driving home to Abu Dhabi City from the desert oasis of Al Ain on February 9, 1975, four months after we had left Lebanon, when a news flash interrupted the regular radio program. Adnan hurriedly stopped the car at the side of the road to make sure he caught every word. The announcer read the headline, “Maarouf Saad has been shot.” Clamping his hands on his face, Adnan let out a grief-stricken moan. Mr. Maarouf 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 and crumpled Maarouf Sa’ad 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 had regarded as the only humane and reasonable voice in the sharkinfested Lebanese political scene. The people of Sidon completely lost control in their grief and rage. Massive anti-government demonstrations took place on the streets of Sidon and the Lebanese army sharpshooters kept on shooting. Nineteen people died and ninety-one were wounded. Tensions 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 cite the bullet that killed Ma’arouf Sa’ad as the spark that ignited Lebanon’s civil war, but alongside February 9, 1975 is another date marked as the formal beginning of the Lebanese civil war: April 13, 1975, depending on which side is debating the issue. On this date, Pierre Gemayel was consecrating a local church in Ain Rummaneh, a poor Christian neighborhood, when shots were fired at him, 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 route. Twenty-seven Palestinian men, women and children were killed at point-blank range. News of the shooting 194

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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 of 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 that seems fitting here concerning what sparked the civil war: “The reasons are many but the death is one.”

* * * Angel of Mercy The projected rivers of blood were held back temporarily during the summer of 1975. A ceasefire took hold that July bringing with it the illusion that the conflict was over. 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 … that despite the beaches on Lebanon’s placid shores being filled with sunbathers, there was a significant number of these sunbathers whose machine guns remained firmly at their side. What most preferred to see was that the militias had dismantled the barricades and had removed the bags of sand and blocks of cement. But what no one wanted to openly admit was that these barricades still remained in everyone’s mental vision of the ‘other.’ Throughout that ‘peaceful’ summer the protagonists continued to stockpile weapons that 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 Israelis, 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, an upcoming billionaire businessman 195

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from Sidon, Rafik Hariri, who would eventually become Lebanon’s longest-reigning and most powerful post-war prime minister. No one outside the militias gave the weapon stockpiling any weight, sweeping away any thought of war from their field of vision. “Just saber rattling,” was everyone’s hope against hope, including mine and Adnan’s. 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 Suq el Gharb. Suq 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 everywhere over low-lying garden walls. We took leisurely walks along meandering cobblestone pathways among clusters of white limestone houses, whose walls were covered with fragrant jasmine vines and climbing roses. We settled back on our exclusive porch above the city and relaxed in the soft breeze of the mountain’s evenings. Aromatic and cool, the summer breeze wove its hypnotic magic on us as we gazed at a view that changed color 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 Christians and Druze who whiled away their evenings in communal harmony playing cards, would not survive the war. Its breathtaking sweep over the coastal terrain, the mountains, and the city of Beirut and its airport 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, life continued as usual during the day. 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 importantly, planning and saving for this visit to Europe was what had kept us going during our grueling 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 traveled to Italy. 196

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Two weeks later Adnan and I returned from our trip to a quiet Beirut. All was 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 taken to a hospital run by nuns who gave us 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. So we slipped out after paying what was to be the first installment of our stay and flew immediately back into Im Bashar’s capable hands. She was gracious enough to gently remind me only once to listen closely to older and more experienced people’s advice 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 August 28, 1975, we were booked to return to Abu Dhabi. I was still not well and my mother-in-law convinced me to stay while I regained my strength. Adnan reluctantly said goodbye and returned to Abu Dhabi to attend to his business. His trip to the airport was through a bustling city filled to capacity with summer holidaymakers. But as his MEA flight took off, Beirut imploded. The civil war thundered at breakneck speed from the northern city of Tripoli and consumed Beirut. His flight’s wheels were barely inside the carriage when mortar shells landed on the airport, killing a pilot and copilot as they waited in their cockpit on an MEA flight to Jeddah. An ill-fated traveler at the front of the passenger’s bus just minutes away from the airplane was killed too. 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 center where its banks with their towering piles of gold reserves lined up grandly on Bank Street. That day, September 17, 1975, when blood, gore, and gold bullions mixed with twisted ideology, organized crime and just plain stupidity, was the day that Beirut died. We watched in horror from our eagle’s nest at the macabre fireworks of battle, blindingly bright in the clear summer night as they devoured the city’s heart. What words can I use to express what we felt? Disbelief? Rage? Horror? Panic? Torment? Revulsion? A heavy, unshakeable weight clamped down upon our shoulders while we sobbed at the nightmare burning down below. 197

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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, which was as yet battle free. A school friend of hers owned a hospital across the street from her parent’s home. “We’re going to get his opinion only as a first 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 limit 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 (AUH), the best hospital in the Middle East and a stone’s throw from the epi-center of the battle zone in the hotel district and downtown area. Bushra’s daring gamble to heal me is sealed in my heart with eternal gratitude. To grasp the depth of Bushra’s act of bravery, I must explain my sister-in-law. Bushra had 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. For the first time in our experience of Lebanese roads, there was no traffic … only terrifying silence. Suddenly, a jeep careened towards us, zigzagging wildly from side to side of the road with a grenade launcher strapped to its back. Clinging to it from all sides were young men in sleeveless vests and outfits of their favorite war movie characters, their heads wrapped in red and black strips of cloth, and bullet belts crisscrossing their chests and several machine guns apiece hanging from their shoulders. The reason for the wild driving became chillingly clear when the deadly pinnngg of a sniper’s bullet bounced off our car. “Shit!” Bushra 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 198

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cheeks as we mutually grasped the folly of our situation 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 center of AUH at the same time as an onslaught of the 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. 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 militiamen shot wildly, demanding immediate medical attention for their injured. My gregarious sister-in-law had friends in the hospital who promptly paged my doctor, Dr. Karam Karam, a childhood friend of the Khayyats. One of the best and brightest of the Lebanese medical profession and one of the few intrepid surgeons who refused to abandon the hospital, Dr. Karam came running in our direction in a blood-spattered white coat, shouting instructions to four sturdy nurses to fall in behind him. Gingerly, he helped 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 pain killers 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 amongst 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 as sirens wailed, men cursed, bullets flew, mortar shells 199

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crashed and the pale face of Bushra stood 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 where she worked as a secretary to Dr. Phillip Salem, today, a world-famous oncologist) waited as I slowly came to. The battles had cut Fadia off from her home in Ashrafiyeh. Eventually, Bushra kissed me good night and left with Fadia; there was nowhere for her to sleep in my room and I was stable. I lay in my bed and stared silently out of the window, a square of pitch black night, as I listened to the insanity of people killing and people dying. It did not feel real. This was not how I imagined my first pregnancy would be. 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 faraway world, another world that had been so full of hope and love, a world that now seemed dreamlike. I lay on my hospital bed in darkened solitude while butchery and screaming violence continued outside my window. I was jolted from my fitful sleep the following morning in sheer panic 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 of the explosion. Bushra rushed in, her face as white as a sheet. “A charter plane has just crashed into the sea just over the Corniche,” she whispered, desperately trying not to panic. It was widely rumored but never verified that the gold bullions stolen from the banks in downtown Beirut were being smuggled out of the country on that plane and it had been shot down by those who also wanted the stolen gold bars. Mafias were already hard at work, stoking the fires of this indiscriminating war. There was no stopping the killing. 200

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My period of convalescence at the AUH became 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’s Medical School professors. A few days into my recuperation I discovered that I had become a live model for lectures on emergency measures in a war zone. Daily, a group of young students trooped into my room led by their professor who acknowledged my humanness with a curt perfunctory greeting, before launching into a detailed explanation of the methods Dr. Karam had needed to use to heal what was a small but potentially life-threatening complication. As he pointed to particularly important details on my person, the medical students jostled for a better look while attentively following their professor’s lecture. I did my best to look as wooden as possible throughout the ordeal, thinking 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. I shut the door firmly behind me in a desperate gesture to lock away all that had transpired. We drove through a silent city with war hanging heavily in the air. The devil-may-care vibrancy of Beirut had vanished. The guns were silent but this time there were no illusions of peace. There was no electricity and no water. 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 had dared to open, keeping their heads down, fearful of arousing the unpredictable wrath of the trigger-happy gunmen who now owned the streets. ‘Amneh’ (safe) and ‘Salkeh’ (free from holdups), terminologies normally used on Beirut radio to advise motorists on streets best avoided due to traffic congestion or heavy snow, began to be used as a warning on streets best avoided due to sectarian kidnappings and sniper fire. They became the catchwords of the war. The National Alliance led by the Druze chieftain Kamal Jumblatt had won this battle against the Phalange Maronites … one down and fifteen more years of battles to go. 201

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The 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 selfsame 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 was sadder yet was that the self-serving politics that had lead to the unnecessary bloodshed of Lebanon’s civil war would remain entrenched through the sons and daughters 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 neighboring 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. During the final trimester of my pregnancy, Adnan’s parents 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. 203

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My parents-in-law’s arrival at our Abu Dhabi home brought the number of adults waiting for my baby to arrive to five, an event that became both an occasion of joy and a very welcome distraction. With Im Bashar, Abu Bashar, Bushra, Adnan and I all focusing on my delivery, my pregnancy naturally became a communal one and with each week that passed the anticipation heightened. Any trip to the bathroom, and the number of trips increased with each passing day, would sound the alarm that I might be ready to have my/our baby. I would end up ensconced in the bathroom as they gathered chattering excitedly outside the door, while they waited for an update. 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 most particularly after I became overdue. So it was for more reasons than 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 the nearby Emirate of Dubai, the best hospital in the area, with Bushra driving the 160 kilometers as Adnan could not trust his nerves. We arrived at the hospital reception desk, the entire family of six jovial adults and asked for my doctor and a room. A formidable looking Indian head nurse met us unsmilingly with her arms folded sternly across her chest. She ordered me with unarguable authority to be whisked away to the labor room and ordered my in-laws and husband to leave. Looks of disbelief gripped our faces. They were not going anywhere, my in-laws told her, this was my first baby and they were not going to leave me to have it without their support. Unmoved, the nurse informed them punctiliously that they would be contacted after I had given birth and handed them the visiting hours. This, predictably, did not go down well with my in-laws. Adnan, having been warned of the strictness of the British-run hospital, realized that there was no use in arguing and turned to leave. Not so with Bushra or Im Bashar, who could not bring themselves to let me face the trials of having my first baby alone. They put up a fight to remain next to me. The head nurse fought back. She had the final word and Im Bashar and Bushra were banished from the hospital premises. They left in an unmitigated huff. But the moment they stepped into their hotel room, Bushra was on the phone demanding to speak to me, to the head administrator, to my 204

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obstetrician, in brief, to any one she could catch on the line to reverse the head nurse’s orders. She made that day a very difficult one for the maternity ward. Meanwhile, I lay in an empty room with a single window to my right where I could see only the white cloudless October 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. No phone calls were passed to me. And that’s how I spent the next sixteen painful hours: watching the minute hand move, minute by tortuous minute. The baby was finally ready to enter the world, and I was at last released from my mind-bending solitary confinement. I was wheeled into the birthing room in absolute joy at freedom from that clock. 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 launched an angry monologue about the arguments she’d been having with my sister-in-law as she mechanically prepared me for the birth. She was livid and needed to recount every word both of them had exchanged, stopping every now and then to demand an opinion from me. In between pants and soul-shattering contractions (I had breezily waved away any painkiller – before having the pains of course), I tried to partake in the conversation as diplomatically as I could. After all, she 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 because I was closer to being with my baby and the other was because the midwife became otherwise occupied. Munira was born into the two smiling nurses’ arms. They held up my surprisingly plump, pink, furious baby with her back towards me. Both politely ignored my repeated question concerning the baby’s gender: “Girl? Boy? Girl? Boy?” While one laid my baby tenderly on my stomach upside down, the other patted my cheeks with a cool cloth. 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 motherly love 205

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and bonding was directed at my baby’s tiny delicate pink soles. I fell in love with my daughter before knowing what sex she was and that is one of the wisest birthing customs I have ever come across in 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 delivery standing forlornly outside the door under the watchful eye of two 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 labor 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 discomforts of having just given birth. I was levitated from all of my surroundings on a soft cloud of euphoria enveloped by a profound sense of accomplishment. I was a mother to a daughter. A pretty, young Indian nurse appeared at the door and with her was Munira tightly bundled in her bassinet and finally at peace with the world. I stared with awe and wonder at Munira while she stared back steadily through large oval eyes. Instead of asking to hold Munira, I blurted out, “Is she mine?” The nurse laughed heartily, “Yes, Mrs. Khayyat, she’s your very own daughter,” she said 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 both 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 of her birthday’: “A peace treaty has been signed and this time it seems definite.” Why did she have to suffer for being born Lebanese 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 the Phalange attack on the Tal el Za’atar Palestinian refugee camp north of Beirut, killing 600 and displacing 200,000; or that in 206

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revenge for Tal el Za’atar, the Palestinian-Syrian attack on the Christianpopulated southern coastal towns of Damour and Jiyeh, killing 500 and displacing 5000; nor did I mention that Beirut was now formally divided in half by the ‘Green Line’ into West and East under the ‘security’ of the Syrians. The peace treaty I had mentioned had been signed under the auspices of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt and the United States, creating a 30,000-strong Arab Deterrent Force, in what would become a failed mission to keep the peace. To the world at large and in Munira’s Baby Book, the civil war was legally over. 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. At 72 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 her age in her zest for life. She met each and every challenge head-on and attempted to exist with as much justice delivered as she could manage. Her repeated words during the war was that right must prevail and those fighting for freedom from occupation could only come out as victors. On a Middle East Airlines trip back to Beirut from Europe during a relatively quiet patch of the civil war, an incident that encapsulated Im Bashar’s spirit was played out. On board with us was a Lebanese soccer team from Sidon, young men who were returning from traveling abroad for the first time in their lives. They had been forced to stay 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 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 207

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returning home and they broke out into song with the words of Lebanon’s favorite singer Feyrouz’s nostalgic salute to embattled Lebanon, ‘Bhibbak ya Lubnan.’ 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 and resenting her more by each minute. As the stewardess turned to smile at us in triumph, Im Bashar unsmilingly picked up her cane and moved the separating curtain aside. She looked commandingly at the young men who sat upright under her stare like schoolboys. “SING!” she ordered 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 October 12, 1977 in Sidon, at her grandmother’s request. The weather was cool and crisp, the battles had subsided for now, and the Sidonians were living life as ‘normally’ as possible with the ongoing civil war. Every house had a line up of jerry cans filled with water in anticipation of sudden shelling, bundles of candles to light when the electricity was sabotaged and plenty of bread in the freezer to lessen the chances of becoming unnecessary target practice for snipers while lining up at the bakeries. Surrounding my in-law’s 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 splashing their feet in the shallow brooks that ran through them, and return red cheeked and happy clutching bouquets of bright red poppies, delicate daisies and blades of grass. When it rained we managed to enjoy a cup of coffee in peace by sending them down to hang out with the neighbors’ children in the shop at the entrance to the building, a treasure chest of sugary treats and small plastic toys owned by a Maronite villager, Tanios. On the day before Munira’s birthday, Nicola, one of Tanios’s sons, a congenial, 208

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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, a rare event as she preferred to feed people in her own house. She liked Nicola and his grandfather, Abu Tanios, and knew the family well. They were old neighbors from the descendants of the Maronites who had fled to the coast after the Druze massacres in the mountains during the 1860 civil war. As our car turned into the driveway of the stone farmhouse, Abu Tanios stood up to welcome us, honored that Im Bashar had joined us. He led us to his sun-dappled patio under a shady grapevine trellis dotted with delectable clusters of fat purple grapes within arm’s reach. Im Bashar was given the place of honor in the center of a divan decked out in freshly laundered flowery chintz. Nicola’s grandmother came bustling out of the kitchen kissing us all and repeating her welcome, ‘Ahlan ahlan bil hilween, tsharraffna.” (Welcome, welcome, with the beautiful ones, we are honored.) She lead us to a long wooden table decked out in an exuberant flowery tablecloth covered from one end to the other with every known Lebanese mezza delicacy there was. Im Bashar was forced to sit in the seat of honor at the head of the table and the feasting began. Short, plump and pleasant faced, Abu Tanios and Im Tanios 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 piece de resistance, 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 the khabias and make sure they were passed on to my children.” “They are his one link to his past,” Nicola commented affectionately about his grandfather’s attachment to the clay jars. “Tehteh (Grandma) has serious competition in his heart with those khabias!” 209

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Im Bashar was up at dawn the following morning with Munira, who was also an early riser, at her side. 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 honored right 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 neighbors and their children. A three-tiered birthday cake was brought in and Munira and all sixteen children blew out the solitary candle several times with loud applause and laughter as we gathered happily around a table groaning with 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 hugging the pretty wrapping paper. Meanwhile, far in the distance, the dull thunder of mortar fire continued its deadly pounding, keeping the threat of civil war and Israel firmly in everyone’s mind.

* * * 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 May 24, 1978 in Abu Dhabi, which in the meantime had upgraded its hospitals, and this time Adnan was in the labor room with me. As our sleepy golden-haired son was laid in my arms, Adnan thanked my obstetrician profusely. 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 habit, I did not mention any 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, forever. 210

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Amer’s birth came in the midst of Ariel Sharon’s scorched earth invasion of the south, ‘Operation Big Pines.’ On March 31, Israel invaded, allegedly to clear out 7000 PLO commandos from the south, but everyone knew that this was yet another attempt to make a grab for Lebanon’s Litani River. On April 18, 1978, Israel easily occupied the vulnerable and unprotected rich farmland and villages surrounding the Litani, one third of Lebanon’s territory. Seven hundred villagers were massacred and 160,000 villagers fled in panic and chaos into Sidon. After Sidon filled to capacity, the refugees trekked north to Beirut. Already a dangerously polarized city, and unprepared for the overwhelming numbers of the refugees, Beirut was turned into a smoldering tinder box. Sharon made it clear that he had every intention of settling down in the south. International pressures forced him to withdraw under Security Council Resolution 425. The United Nations Interim Forces Lebanon (UNIFIL) arrived to observe the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. On May 24, 1978, the day Amer was born, Sharon did withdraw but not before ‘formally’ handing over twenty-three key positions spread across Lebanon’s south, forty kilometers deep, to Major Sa’ad Haddad, a renegade 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 Force or Lebanese Army personnel could enter, but Israel could. The SLA replaced the Israeli guns with their own on the hilltops surrounding Sidon and continued the policy of sowing terror amongst the civilians by random shelling as a daily bloody reminder of who controlled the south. Sa’ad Haddad and his big 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 movement, Hezbollah, stirred into being by none other than Sharon and his ‘scorched earth’ strategy.

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While war, invasion and resistance were raging in Lebanon, resistance was stirring elsewhere in the Arab world. This time it was in the least imaginable of all Arab states, in my country Saudi Arabia and in my province the Hijaz and in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca. On November 20, 1979, New Year’s Day of the Muslim Hijra calender year 1400 we awoke to an unprecedented challenge to the Al Sa’uds’ acclaimed role as the invincible caretakers of the two holy shrines of Islam. At the first streak of dawn on that New Year’s Day, an untold Muslim radio and television audience around the world and 50,000 worshippers in the courtyard of the Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, gathered to listen to King Khalid lead the morning prayers. Instead they became captive audience to Juhayman 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 angrily denounced the Al Sa’uds’ moral and financial corruption. Under cover of the night preceding the New Year, Juhayman had barricaded himself within the Haram’s walls with hundreds of fundamentalist supporters. King Khalid immediately vanished from sight, bundled away by his guards. Juhayman 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 savior who would bring justice to 213

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the Islamic world. Juhayman’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 protectors of the royal family, in National Guard trucks. The rebels seized thirty hapless hostages from the crowd of worshippers and retreated to the massive underground labyrinth of the Haram, where they had stored a vast supply of ammunition, dates and water, vowing 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.’ But this did not go down well with the rest of the Muslim world outside of the Al Sa’ud circles. Many saw the hastily declared fatwa as a pretext to protect the Al Sa’uds rather than Islam. Furious Muslims worldwide demonstrated violently against American embassies and American interests, and held the United States responsible for the events in Mecca. The fighting against Juhayman and his men raged for fifteen days around the Haram without any signs of abating. It became apparent that the majority of the soldiers were firing in the air, not at the insurgents, and sector after sector of the Saudi army began to desert the Al Sa’uds and join Juhayman’s forces. What soldiers remained laid down their arms and refused orders to attack, bringing those fighting with Juhayman to outnumber those following the ulema’s orders. The Al Sa’uds, omnipotent caretakers of the two holy shrines, were in total disarray and terror with nowhere to turn except to the West. They 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 were 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 Juhayman and his rebels ran out of ammunition that they were overpowered, on December 4, 1979. One hundred and 214

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seventeen insurgents were 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. Juhayman was dragged out and paraded, head held high and defiant. The Wahhabi insurgents were led by a group of highly educated and sophisticated logistical planners, a mixture of nationalities that included: 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,’ Juhayman and his men were sentenced to death. Sixty-eight heads rolled on January 9, 1980 in an execution extravaganza held across the country in carefully selected hot spots for all to see what happened to those who challenged the Al Sa’ud.

* * * We were relieved that Abu Dhabi was so safe and uneventful. Its nationals were satisfied with their ruler and its non-nationals 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 went to work. Once they accomplished their goals, they returned home, leaving nothing behind by way of culture or history except empty villas that were refilled in record time. Abu Dhabi was a comfortably humming town to live in, low key and routine. The major events in our Abu Dhabi lives revolved around our business and our children. Abu Dhabi’s bland, predictable lifestyle was just the perfect secure backdrop for raising babies. With Munira and Amer now in playschool, we felt it was a good time to have a third child. 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. In mid-September of 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 United States’ proxy in its eternal push for oil supremacy attacked Iran in the mistaken belief that Iran’s political disarray after the 1979 Islamic Revolution 215

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would guarantee a quick victory. At the first exchange of hostilities, foreign battleships cropped up in the seas around the Arabian Peninsula to protect Arabia’s oil fields. American, French, British and Austrian flags were raised above 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 these Arab countries spent the biggest chunks of their budgets on the latest technology in weaponry?” The declaration of war turned Abu Dhabi into a ghost town. No one wanted to be a martyr from this war, including the nationals. Just to be on the safe side, Adnan and I decided to have our baby in Sidon, ironically the least combat ridden of destinations available to us. We had our third child on November 8, 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 Iranians only. Matters quickly settled back to normal and I felt blessed to have a chance to lead a humdrum, predicatable life.

* * * Ghassan had just turned a year old and was at the height of discovering his gymnastic abilities in reaching previously unattainable shelf heights and opening doors to disappear onto the street, when I discovered I was pregnant again. As surprises come in bundles, the pregnancy was both unplanned and I had twins. Outside of the challenge of suddenly having five children under the age of six by the year’s end, we needed to deal with the more pressing issue of where to have our twins. Abu Dhabi’s hospitals had taken a serious nose dive, its health services stretched to capacity as a result of the population explosion of the newly affluent nationals and expatriates. Lebanon’s civil war had reignited to unprecedented levels of violence and anarchy after the brief pause of comparative quiet. We mulled the possibilities over and over until Providence sent us an answer through a close friend of ours, an English author, Peter Snow, who told us in no uncertain terms over lunch, that we should settle on Graz in Austria, “a peaceful heaven on earth” in his words. And Graz was 216

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everything he described, a beautiful garden city in south-eastern 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. Lebanon imploded that year. Raging street battles, targeted killings, kidnappings, and car bombs wreaked carnage and butchery everywhere. But nothing prepared the Lebanese for the most gargantuan bloodbath of all: Israel’s second invasion of Lebanon, code named ‘Peace for Galilee,’ Sharon’s pre-planned second invasion of Lebanon. Again, Sharon’s excuse was rooting out the PLO from the south under the pretext of avenging the attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador to England by Syrian-backed Palestinians. My parents-in-law arrived in Abu Dhabi ahead of Sharon’s assault on Sidon by a hair’s breadth. Both were in a state of shock at having lived to witness the Israeli occupation of their city. 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 humor were replaced with a sadness I had never seen in him 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 in Niederschockl, a rural paradise ten minutes outside of Graz, a tiny village with family-owned farms, flowerbedecked homes and cows that grazed placidly in large stretches of pasture. As the days passed in Niederschockl, Abu Bashar seemed to improve amidst the tranquility and beauty that surrounded us. One afternoon, as Abu Bashar and I sat in the garden watching the children play with our spitz, Thatchy (she had the same biting habits as Margaret Thatcher), I asked him hopefully, “Are you happy here?” He answered wistfully, “It doesn’t compare to the view of the olive groves, orange orchards and the sea that we have from our balcony.” Sensing my disappointment, he patted my hand kindly, “This is beautiful too, Fadia. The Austrians are lucky. They have already had their wars.” No matter how hard he tried and how hard we tried, Abu Bashar was unable to shake off his depression. News of his fellow Sidonians 217

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baking in the hot sun on Sidon’s beach for interrogation by the Israeli Army and the deafening silence from the Arab world’s leaders over Israel’s invasion and occupation of Lebanon added to his feelings of despair. 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. To him, the Sidon that he knew and the Lebanon he had been a part of was no more. We were having our tea after dinner 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 him gently. He replied without looking back as he continued resolutely in the direction of his bedroom, “Ya reit (I wish), ya Im Bashar. How I wish I could be transported to my bed in Sidon to sleep there forever; my heart can not take any more pain.” And after that expression of yearning, Abu Bashar stopped eating. Im Bashar tried to cajole him in every manner possible, but he was adamant. No food was going down his throat until he went home to Sidon. She even sent his favorite 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. Smiling at his grandchildren’s heartfelt concern, he would actually take a bite to humor 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 7000 PLO fighters. His aim was to establish a new status quo in Lebanon. In addition to occupying a 40-kilometer-long buffer zone along Lebanon’s common borders with Israel ruled by a proxy force, the SLA, Sharon aspired to set up a Lebanese government obedient to Israel. He threw an unprecedented siege around Beirut. For two of the hottest months of the year, Sharon cut off all water, supplies and electricity. He ordered hundreds upon hundreds of bombing sorties that threw every untried and illegal bomb in the book on the hapless poor who had nowhere to run or hide. On August 23, Abu Bashar heard the news of Bashir Gemayel’s election as President on the shortwave radio that never left his hands. 218

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To Abu Bashar, Bashir Gemayel represented capitulation to Israeli domination. “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 from the occupation of the Zionists will not stop here.” On August 28 the PLO was formally evacuated from the port of Beirut to Tunis. Multinational forces were called in to protect unarmed Palestinian men, women and children left 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 under his watch. The one bright ray of sunshine that summer of 1982 was the birth of our twin daughters, Yasmine and Rola, on September 9. This time it was not only Adnan accompanying me in the birthing room, but Im Bashar as well. Next to my birthing bed were two lace-covered cribs with a pale blue velvet pajama folded neatly in each. I had chosen the traditional boy color in deference to my mother-in-law’s wish, after my obstetrician informed me (unprompted) that the sonogram had revealed two identical boys. As the first baby entered the world, Im Bashar raised her hands to God, “Allahuakbar” (God is great), she exclaimed, “What a beautiful baby boy!” It was actually a beautiful baby girl, Yasmine. I heard Adnan ask 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 could not help always wanting the newborn to be a boy. And she still wasn’t about to admit defeat; there was one more 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 stare at her twin sister. And they weren’t identical either. After our daughters’ birth, Abu Bashar perked up noticeably and we heaved a sigh of relief when he asked for the toasted cheese sandwich. 219

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Yet, our relief at Abu Bashar’s turn for the better was short lived. On September 14, 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 rapidly deteriorate. Speedy arrangements were made for his trip home. I would not be leaving with them; one of my twin babies, Yasmine, had developed an alarming case of septicemia and had been whisked away to the intensive care unit. Thankfully, the septicemia was treated, but the doctor ordered that she remain two weeks longer to regain her strength and immunity. Abu Bashar had been very concerned for his tiny granddaughter sleeping alone away from us in the hospital and asked about her repeatedly, “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 September 16, I bade farewell to the kindest, most gracious man in my life, a father I loved dearly. As he climbed into the taxi taking them to the airport, Abu Bashar apologized to me for leaving me alone and for not being able to visit his newborn granddaughter in the hospital. I gave him one last hug, painfully aware of its finality as I felt how thin and frail he had become. When their taxi was no longer visible, I turned back into the house carrying Rola in my arms and Ghassan toddling behind me. Feeling a need to hear voices other than my own, I turned on the television. Sensing my sadness, Ghassan climbed onto my lap and in a rare gesture of empathy sat quietly, while I aimlessly switched from one station to the next. Suddenly, a news flash appeared in German about Lebanon. Fearfully, I leaned forward closer to the screen to catch what few German words I understood. I did not need to hear any words to understand the news bulletin. It was the massacre of the Sabra and Chatila refugees by the Phalange militia. Women wailed and pulled their hair crazed with grief and men sobbed loudly into their hands as they moved from one shrouded bloodied body to the next, searching for their dead loved ones. Children stared mutely at the camera as they stood motionless in the midst of violent death. I struggled to absorb the magnitude of the evil 220

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and horror displayed before me; only one thought crossed my stunned mind repeatedly, “Thank God Abu Bashar is not here to see this.” The first stop for Abu Bashar, Im Bashar, Bushra, Adnan, Munira and Amer was in Abu Dhabi to make arrangements to enter Lebanon through special contacts via Syria. But before doing anything, the most important matter at hand was to make sure Abu Bashar had no access to television, radio or newspapers … no small feat. Five days after arriving in Abu Dhabi, Abu Bashar suffered a minor heart attack and was rushed to the hospital. To everyone’s intense relief, he survived, but was kept in hospital for observation. Adnan called to inform me with intense relief at his father’s improving health. “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 good-humored 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 had 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, Bushra, and his mother needed to feel that Abu Bashar was on the mend. He still had the ability to shock. The following morning, on September 24, at a moment when Abu Bashar was alone and wide awake, with Im Bashar, Bushra and Adnan on the way for visiting hours, a nurse turned on the TV to entertain Abu Bashar and left the room. On the screen before Abu Bashar’s horrified eyes was a replay of the Sabra and Chatila massacre. He saw in grisly detail amidst the smoldering 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 keep them safe, babies shot in the head while suckling at their mother’s breast, and dead grandmothers still clutching their Lebanese IDs 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, simultaneous with the arrival of Im Bashar, Adnan, and Bushra. 221

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Im Bashar turned to the unattended television. She saw the massacre on the screen and knew 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 words from the Koran as a gesture of acceptance of God’s will and asked Abu Bashar for his blessings for his children and grandchildren naming them one by one. In one final breath, my father-in-law opened his eyes wide and breathed, “Allah yirda alayhun kullhun” (God bless them all) and left this disappointing world.

* * * It was Abu Bashar’s dying wish 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 neighbor, 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. There was a loophole in the red lines drawn between Syria and the occupying Israelis that allowed them to enter Lebanon through Buthaina’s connections. Passage through the Syrian border went smoothly. Once past the borders, they faced the difficult task of negotiating their way past the Israeli checkpoints in Lebanon. Their convoy was halted by an Israeli military checkpoint at Sawfar, once a bustling summer resort overlooking the Beka’a Valley, the same area where Fatin and I had had our magical encounter with snow. The coffin and the family’s grief stricken faces said it all, but not to the Phalangist co-manning the checkpoint with the Israelis. He gave a harsh disrespectful order that the coffin be opened to check its contents. 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 be buried in his country. He was a patriot unlike you … you despicable traitor.” She seemed to have hit a nerve as, to everyone’s surprise, particularly the Phalangist’s, the Israeli officer overrode his order and waved them on. 222

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How difficult it was for them to enter Occupied Sidon. The streets were empty; there were checkpoints every ten meters, and a silent miserable pall covered the town. Throughout the week-long condolence 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 cohabitation amongst 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 as he had experienced them. With the rest of the rounded-up men, he had endured three days on the beach crouched on his haunches with his hands on his head, while the Israelis processed their prisoners one by one, taking away those suspected of sympathy with the PLO. Ali Majjaj’s turn came up with four other Sidonians. It was easy to figure Ali Majjaj out, but the Israelis underestimated the Lebanese defiance that surfaces in the simplest to the most complex of the 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 amongst you?” Ali sneered back, “Even if I did, do you really think I’d tell you?” Here, Ali’s facial expression changed to 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?’ So 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 that he wanted to die a martyr and that they had realized his wish. He was a Sidonian fighter with the PLO.” 223

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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, signaled 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 for doing so. Sheikh Salim went down in Sidonian lore for his bravery and patriotism. On meeting President Amin Gemayel, Bashir’s brother, in a first official visit of its kind by a Lebanese President to Sidon, Sheikh Salim refused to shake his hand, and rebuked him instead for pandering to the Israeli occupation with a line from a poem by a venerated Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawki: “Freedom’s door can only be knocked on 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 against the occupiers of their city and were pivotal in driving the Israelis out of Sidon if only to contain their losses. Once the occupation was ended, Sidonian informers received their death sentences from fellow Sidonians ‘who never forget,’ as Adnan had once described them to me.

* * * After Abu Bashar’s death, the Khayyats went into a long stretch of personal sadness in addition to the strains of occupation. Adnan’s older brother Hassan, a quiet man with a wry sense of humor and a heart of gold, died in a car accident along the desert highway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, just eight months after Abu Bashar passed away. He left behind a vivacious, pretty young widow, Mona, barely thirty years old with two spirited daughters, Nadine (twelve) and Zeina (ten), and a much-feted 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 for the Lebanese whether it was personal or not. 224

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Two years after the Israeli invasion of 1982, promises of peace were made and the fighting suddenly stopped. Despite the continued presence of the multinational forces, Israeli occupation of Sidon and the south, Beirut divided into East and West and sporadic clashes amongst the heavily-armed militias, the news going around was that war was over. The local warlords had drawn clear lines of demarcation throughout Lebanon, we were told, and 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. My brother-in-law 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 my brother-in-law 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 longer than six months time and we chose to take his word for it. On September 18, 1984, we bade farewell to staid, 225

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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 can only look back and wonder, “What were we thinking?” We weren’t thinking actually, 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 happen. From Day One in our rented villa across the street from the construction site of our new home, it became 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. My brother-in-law’s family and ours were the only homes where children played, music blared, and calls could be heard for meal times. Our children and my brother-in-law’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 of 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. The two-story villa was designed in the shape of a Swiss chalet as a weekend retreat for an artistically inclined Maronite Lebanese architect. The entire Mediterranean flora was present in his garden where he entertained, Lebanese style, with al fresco mezza spreads under a towering jacaranda tree. Tangles of jasmine clambered along the open terrace’s walls and rows of lavender, roses and gardenias encircled the terrace’s railings. A boisterous bright red bougainvillea covered the length of the wrought-iron fence that encircled the villa. In addition to jasmine, roses and gardenias, there were orange and tangerine trees, evergreens, and a wondrous camellia that took center stage in the front garden. Within the cool interior of the house, the entrée had been left to soar to the roof with an open floor plan that combined spacious seating areas that surrounded a circular sunken fountain and a cozy handcrafted kitchen with a seated bar that lead to the terrace and a secluded back 226

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garden. Vines of ivy on the outer stone walls were invited indoors through small portlets lined up along the two-story high walls near the ceiling to frame pieces of the sky. Spiders were left to weave their cobwebs unharmed because they added to the oneness with nature that the owner wanted his summer retreat to reflect. A half-floor with a fireplace flanked by two built-in oak bookshelves overlooked the ground floor. There in his aerie, the original owner read and surveyed his garden and the Mediterranean coastline through wall-to-wall French windows in winter and from the wide curved balcony that the French windows opened onto in fair weather. Under the half-floor, facing the kitchen on the ground floor, was a circular sunk-in seating arrangement covered with Persian carpets, soft silk floor cushions and a brick fireplace for fondue nights. Alas, in 1975, just three years after he had 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, sold the house and all of its belongings overnight for a song and fled to the Christiandominated area of Lebanon. Its new owner, a stolid Sunni Muslim from Beirut, altered the house into a formal area with blanket disregard of what the original space was designed to express. He sealed off the front open terrace that had served as the main entrance and turned it instead into a formal living room that no one could sit in as the poor workmanship allowed in blasts of cold air during winter. A second formal receiving area replaced the open seating area where the fountain had gurgled and ivy had wound its way through small portlets near the high ceiling. The portlets were sealed shut, the spiders and their webs zapped and a faux fireplace of two truncated ornate plaster columns topped by a slab of black marble for a mantelpiece was installed against the soaring two-story high wall. Flanking the useless fireplace, reduced to midget size where it stood, were two sets of highly uncomfortable Louis XVI sofa knock-offs. A circular piece of wood covered the sunken fountain in the center of the salon so no one would fall in during the blackouts. The former poetic space now exuded all the charm of a vacuous government ministry. Standing between the two receiving areas was a life-size plaster Venus di 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 sold the villa to a Palestinian 227

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entrepreneur based in Saudi Arabia and returned to his penthouse in Beirut. In a twist of Shakespearean tragedy, an incendiary mortar shell landed on his penthouse during a militia battle for turf, and he died from a heart attack. The villa’s new Palestinian owner was not interested in living in his new purchase and the house remained boarded-up and forsaken until Israeli foot soldiers occupied it en route to invading Beirut on June 6, 1982. Pleased with its strategic position overlooking the city, airport and Palestinian camps, the 91st Division’s Task Force Commander, Major General 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-ofall-traffic-jams of tanks and bulldozers along the 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 expected, judging from the graffiti we came upon, scrawled in Hebrew on each and every wall expressing boredom and intense homesickness. Major General Adam’s decision to wait in Doha was a fatal one to him. It was there that he would become Israel’s highest-ranking officer ever to die in combat. Playing a major role in his demise was my brother-in-law’s female German shepherd, Bonny. Adam had liked my brother-in-law’s house and its sweeping view over the southern coastal road and the Palestinian camps surrounding the airport. He decided to make it his headquarters. As he stepped out of his jeep to inspect the estate, Bonny barreled towards him and sank her fangs into his thigh. His soldiers killed her on the spot. The bad karma generated by the attack soured the Major General’s enthusiasm for my brother-inlaw’s villa and he decided to look elsewhere. But not before he allowed his soldiers free range to ransack the house, empty it of everything valuable and smear their excrement on the beds and sofas in salute. Adam’s next choice was the Zantout villa, which seemed far better than my brother-in-law’s. It was brand new and not yet lived in by its owners, with an even greater vantage point over Beirut and the southern coastal highway leading to the capital. But what Adam was not aware of was that it had also been chosen for the same reasons by three Palestinian commandos on a reconnaissance mission to monitor the movements of the Israeli army. Caught by surprise, the commandos managed to slip 228

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undetected into the basement while Adam and his officers moved in, six in total. As soon as the Palestinian fighters realized exactly who was sharing the villa with them, they made their move that very same night, a moonless night. Under cover of the darkness, they crept noiselessly out of the basement towards the unsuspecting Israeli officers as they sat on the balcony laughing and drinking while they played a game of cards. The commandos attacked in a barrage of machine gun fire that killed all six, including Major General Adam, and retreated unscathed back to the basement where they braced for the expected reprisal. In spite of the IDF’s superior firepower, the young Palestinian fighters kept on shooting until they ran out of ammunition and were finished off cornered in the basement. Our gardener, Abu Ali, an old man from Ramieh, a village on the southern border of Lebanon, was then the terrified concierge of the villa next door who was marched out and ordered to bury them. The bodies remained in their shallow grave for three weeks before their families were allowed to reclaim their sons.

* * * Soon after we moved into our temporary quarters, it became clear to us that our architect’s promise of moving in within six months was laughable and frivolous. Although the Lebanese warlords and their militias were no longer under any visible 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 Syrian-backed 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 that, it 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, creating a vile tangle for power amongst former comrades-in-arms against the Israeli enemy. 229

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We had unwittingly brought our children to witness the ugliest chapter of Lebanon’s war. Stubbornly, we continued the construction of our new house regardless of its progress in fits and starts … naturally, more fits than starts. The laborer’s movements depended upon the confessional color of the winning side in the street battles that erupted without warning in lawless Beirut. Our labor 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 before the rest could do theirs (electrician before plasterer, plasterer before painter, etc.) We paid protection money for our truckloads of building material to a round robin shuffle of militia members from each warring faction of the civil war that took control at some point in time over the checkpoint at the fork of the road on the southern coastal highway that lead to Doha. Electricity was erratic and the telephone system was a joke. We used a car telephone in our home to connect to a group of bribed telephone operators for any contact with the outside world. Our children moved within a narrow shuttle between Doha, their school near the airport and 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 the longest time in her early childhood, the words ‘cousin’ and ‘friend’ were one and the same for Munira. Our toddling twin daughters were even more homebound. Too young for school, their sole contact with the real world through trips to the park or to the supermarket or of meeting people outside their family, happened only during our visits to Europe.

* * * Early one morning, a few months before the Israelis retreated from Sidon, a very old woman appeared at my door. “Please, please,” 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 230

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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 that 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 are 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 men 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 first lesson in how to deal with our new lifestyle took place very soon after our arrival in Beirut. We were invited to dinner by friends of ours who were celebrating their wedding anniversary in Beirut. The situation was troubling that day and deep rumblings of mortar fire could be heard intermittently in the distance. I was not yet the battle-seasoned Beiruti that most were after ten years of civil war and the sound of a cap gun made me jump, so it was with some trepidation that I accepted to venture out that evening. We walked into a festive room filled with laughter, song, and dance to live music from a troupe of musicians and singers. In the midst of the festivities, a gun battle broke out two streets away between Amal and Hezbollah, an opposing Shi’a militia that had risen out of the ashes of Sharon’s ‘Peace for Galilee’ invasion. Hezbollah rattled Amal with its superior organization, militancy and professionalism and its unwavering focus strictly on the Israeli occupiers of the south and their Lebanese lackeys rather than warmongering for material benefits like the rest. Amal felt its power base threatened and decided to stem the flow of Shi’a young men attracted to Hezbollah by killing them. The staccato of machine gun fire with the 231

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occasional crash of the RPG (rocket propelled grenade) mortars drowned out the melodious voice of the singers and guests now and then but the party continued in its gaiety without missing a beat. It was only I who could not withstand the travesty of the situation without mentioning it and asked out loud, “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 patted my leg comfortingly then 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 stopped 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 absurd lifestyle for 15 more years. Too many innocents would die in this inane war for no reason other than being in the way of a bullet. Weaponry meant for distances of kilometers were used against targets only meters away. Sick of fearing death every minute of their daily routines, the desperate Beirutis eventually developed homegrown early-warning-systems for predicting flash battles after studying the activity around them very closely and uncovering certain constants common to all. In many fortunate instances, rumors did actually pinpoint the location of the battles-to-be, ‘Fi ‘alqa’ (they’re going to tangle) and people stayed home. The Lebanese universally recognized that the ‘alqas were never spur-of-the-moment clashes. Rather, they were intricately choreographed confrontations for turf control and victory depended solely on the surprise factor. The script invariably went as follows: A faction representing one of the big warlords would decide they needed to test a competing faction’s power. The easiest and shortest test was by wresting full control over a particular street. The challenging faction would cook up a pre-decided argument over right-of-way with the first car from the opposing faction to drive through. The argument would accelerate into a full-blown gun battle in a matter of three minutes and gunmen from both sides would dash to their sandbagged battlements beginning their shooting en route cowboy style. After several deafening and lethal rounds of gunfire and death and destruction of everyone and everything in that street, the guns would suddenly fall 232

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silent and one side would withdraw from the area. Both protagonists would have seen enough of the fighting prowess of the other for future ‘alqas … the only raison d’etre of the battle. Silencing the guns went according to a well-written script and with well-versed actors as well. For the disengagement of the two, the script went as follows: A masqool (thug-in-charge) of a certain stature with a certain level of influence on both sides would be brought in from his house to the area of the mashkal (problem) by ‘neutral’ elements in a convoy of identical bullet-proof SUVs, all carrying the same license plate or none at all. He would force a junior masqool from each side to communicate with the other over walkie talkies. Once a final agreement to stop the shooting was reached, the two junior masqools would appear at each end of the alley-turned-battleground and walk to the middle, where the important masqool would be standing amidst a retinue of sycophants. The junior masqools would shake hands and hug, then give the all-clear signal that declared the gun battle over as suddenly 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 driver, Mohammed Mzannar, an ex-Amal militiaman. With war came severe unemployment and a large percentage of poor and uneducated young men such as Mzannar 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 his comrades-in-arms’ favorite pastime while they whiled away long hours in empty buildings waiting for the signal to start shooting, was a ghoulish contest of who could blow bigger holes into buildings on the ‘other side’ with their RPGs. They called it ‘RPG roulette.’ 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. The quick-witted Lebanese turned the radio into a lifesaver. Beirut 233

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radio’s terminologies normally used to inform motorists which streets to avoid due to congestion, amneh and salkeh (safe and clear) began to be used by one creative rado announcer to warn motorists which streets were free of kidnapping and sniper fire. The two words quickly became the catchword for the civil war, so much so that a Beiruti couple named their newborn twin girls Amneh and Salkeh. 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 crisscrossing his chest, and two Kalashnikovs slung over each shoulder. Both were carrying bouquets of red roses. It was Mother’s Day.

* * * In 1983, the United States formally became one of the factions fighting one another in Lebanon. It permanently lost its exalted role as arbiter after its US warship New Jersey lobbed a shell into the Chouf Mountains in support of the Phalange militias and killed one 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 targeting Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, which exploded in a southern suburb of Beirut, killed eighty civilians and missed Sheikh Fadlallah by minutes. The United States’ might and power, weighing in behind local supporters for Israeli control over Lebanon, had the opposite effect of the intention to weaken those who resisted Israeli hegemony. Not having the necessary weaponry to retaliate 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 golden-haired 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. 234

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Irrespective of whether we had made the right decision to bring our children into the height of the civil war or not … and there were 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-honored 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 mention of religion in our house and they spent most of their early childhoods vaguely thinking they were Christian because of our frequent visits to cathedrals on our trips to Europe and Adnan’s collection of Byzantine icons that were displayed throughout our house. Once they started school, they realized that everyone else had a religion, Sunni Muslim, Shi’a Muslim, Druze, Maronite Christian, Orthodox Christian, Protestant Christian 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 Shi’a. 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 that related to violence whether it was in movies, television programs or the evening news – particularly the evening news. The moment they heard the signature opening 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 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 PLO militants exiled to Tunis had reentered Beirut, regrouped, rearmed and were threatening Syrian hegemony over Lebanon. The Lebanese Preparatory School (LPS) 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 235

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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 helped still 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 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 8-year-old daughter Munira and 6year-old son Amer on our terrace that overlooked the southern entrance to Beirut where Sabra and Chatila lay and watched the battle raging below. Streaker bullets and artillery shells arched over our house from Amal’s position around the camps below to crash into the Chouf Mountains behind us. Amal’s shells were aimed at none other than Suq el Gharb, the tranquil village where Adnan and I had spent the summer of 1975 with his family before Lebanon began to self-destruct. Suq el Gharb’s sweeping view of the coastline from south to north had turned it into a vantage point for the artillery of the Druze and Palestinian fighters in the battle against the Alawite Syrian and Lebanese Shiite for control. Amer kept his eyes straight ahead as he traced the path of the 236

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streaker bullets, and 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 to myself in alarm, “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 to the Palestinians exactly 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 so that they could grow amongst their compatriots. 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 cannonballs from the mountains beyond. How did we end up in such danger? The thuds of the cannons become one with the beats of my heart as I drifted into an uneasy sleep. Car bombs, assassinations, and ethnic cleansing killed and maimed countless of innocents in the coming years. The vestiges of community 237

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and decency as we knew them collapsed into abject apathy. Shopkeepers stopped dressing their dummies or replacing their broken glass facades. 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 refugees from the south and other uninhabitable parts of the country. Car windows were smashed so often from wayward bullets that owners strapped for cash stopped replacing them altogether. It was not strange 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 candles, their white glow embedded into the memory of those who were students during those dark days as they prepared for their diplomas and final exams. Gaily-colored 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 piling cement breeze-blocks with their neighbors and cousins to build a check point in the middle of the road running 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 whispered into the ears of a select few (the relatives) while others (the neighbors) were kept in ignorance and frisked, gagged, and tied for having no important connections to protect them. The children bought militia fatigues and alarmingly realistic Kalashnikov machine guns. 238

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There was no way we could dissuade them; they needed to act out their fears. Every afternoon, they marched 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; militiamen did too. Truces were brokered, often coinciding with the end of the month so the necessary salaries could be distributed (often from the same paymaster). Christian militias held their fire in Ramadan against the Muslim militias at the hour for breaking the fast; Muslims held theirs during Christmas and Easter mass. Weaponry was tested freely on a nation considered outside of existence and outside of any human rights. In spite of all this, the Lebanese grimly hugged their tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea. There was no mass exodus. When the guns paused for replenishing, those who 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 left for Vienna to fill in 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 faced circumstance 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 crisscrossed 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 to and fro, oblivious to any traffic. There were no longer any sidewalks or streets, only potholes and checkpoints. Beirut now belonged to the displaced refugees, mainly of the south and Bekaa. Many were born in the capital and knew their forcefully vacated 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 an endless convoy of exhausted humanity stretching the length of the coastline laden 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 239

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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 onto sidewalks or vacant parking lots. Those with connections moved into apartments requisitioned by local militias, their former owners having either fled or been forcibly removed by the militias who saw them as expendable. A gentle friend of my son Ghassan, a Palestinian Orthodox Christian boy, 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 is a Protestant from the Chouf, the losing confession in the Christian–Druze ‘War of the Mountains’ in the mid-eighties, opened her apartment door in the upscale residential Ain el Teeneh area of Beirut to be greeted by well-placed sons of a politician favored by the Syrians, giving them a non-negotiable offer to sell their apartments 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. In my heart, I could not write off Lebanon as evil. It remained a country of stark contrasts, cruel at times and at others tenderly compassionate. I walked out of a bookstore off Hamra Street one afternoon and saw a crowd of young armed men looking agitatedly up at something with a lot of 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 and a militiaman next to her, 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. The old woman hugged the militiaman thanking him profusely. The next morning, a 44-year-old Druze lawyer was neatly gunned downed in a parking lot ten meters 240

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away from the canary’s balcony by two teenagers on a motorbike, very likely from that canary-loving crowd of militiamen. Time magazine labeled 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,’ ‘war weary,’ ‘dangerous,’ or ‘destroyed.’ Today, Palestine and Iraq are suffering what Lebanon suffered because they too are refusing occupation. 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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Life during the civil war evolved 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 February 28, 1988, we moved into our new house. It coincided with the coldest day of the year, and we didn’t know how to work the heating, so 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 an urbane and compassionate American from Philadelphia, Mrs. Catherine C. Bashour. She made the Americans look good. Tall and slim with short white-blonde hair, Catherine 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. Mounir Bashour, Dean of the Education Department of the American University of Beirut, whom she had met while they were 243

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both graduate students in the University of Chicago. ACS being next door to AUB made it an easy commute for the young wife and she signed on 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 for lack of customers. 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. After the dust settled somewhat, the Americans renewed their presence in Lebanon in 1985, and turned to Mrs. Bashour to breathe life into ACS once more. Of a practical nature, knowing 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 elitest 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 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 their presence 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 favors to our children’s classrooms. Returning home at the end of a school day, the children bubbled over with stories about their teachers and classmates. I would hardly know who to turn to first. Rola would giggle helplessly as she acted out 244

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how her stiff and formal 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 from 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 their normal world. To the world outside Beirut, Shakin’ Steven’s 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 for hours at Israeli and militia checkpoints was taken in their stride on their way to Beirut or to Sidon; they stocked up on books, sometimes finishing a novel at a time in what was ordinarily a ten-minute ride home. Cars bursting in 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 en route. Faces, haircuts, and uniforms invariably changed at the selfsame checkpoints at different turns of the war. Whichever fighting force had a stake in the war, our children met them at those checkpoints. At various points in time, they were waved through by Arab Deterrence Forces, Multinational Forces, Israeli soldiers, American Marines, Lebanese Forces, Amal militiamen, Druze militiamen and 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. They proved to be the proverbial stoic Lebanese. They did most of their schooling in Beirut, graduated 245

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with honors, continued to prestigious universities for postgraduate studies and are now in careers that are firmly grounded in what they can contribute to their 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 around them. They emerged from the events all the stronger, in many ways wise beyond their years with no illusions about the absolutes of life and most importantly, loving life and embracing it. Their teenage years were defined by the edge of growing up with war, which affected their outlook on 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 relativism early in her life at the tender age of eleven, “I think there are no such things as “facts.” What is considered as fact is really ‘in my opinion’ … especially here in Lebanon.” Aged twelve, Ghassan wrote a poem capturing the awakening of a war child to reality: My ears can hear it clearly ‘Cause they are not too far The waves which roll lonely Which sweep through my backyard 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

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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 fourth war she’d witnessed. She had learned not to put any store in politicians or religious leaders. Despite all the hardships she lived through, no one could shine a remote candle to her verve, love of life, and ability to always look on the bright side of life. It was her firm conviction that no problem was unsolvable 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 died heartbroken without seeing his beloved hometown that he had yearned for, Im Bashar 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 Israeli retreated into the deeper south unable to stem the attacks against them by the Lebanese resistance, which was inflicting politically damaging losses of Israeli lives. Immediately swarming into the vacated Israeli positions in Sidon was their proxy, the SLA, who wanted to control East Sidon (where Im Bashar lived) as it fell on the highway that lead to the SLA-controlled Christian enclave in the south. To wrest control over the southern highway, the proxy militia decided to first ethnically cleanse East Sidon of all of its Muslims. The ethnic cleansing of East Sidon began in broad daylight. Young men who had grown up in the neighborhood transformed into the enemy. On a rainy autumn day in 1984, a month after we had moved to Beirut from Abu Dhabi, the SLA militiamen burst into Im Bashar’s apartment building yelling and cursing, bristling with machine guns. They kicked open the apartment doors of each apartment, and pushed, shoved, and terrorized the occupants of each floor as they herded them en masse upwards until they reached Im Bashar’s top-floor apartment. Her next door neighbors were having their usual morning coffee in Im Bashar’s kitchen when the militia men burst in with the terrified neighbors, shouting and cursing their captives, prodding them like cattle with the butt of their machine guns. Her Syrian neighbor, 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 the 247

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neighbors’ hearts. Im Bashar was unable to contain her distress for her neighbor whom she loved as a daughter and pleaded with the gunmen to have mercy. 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, and spat, “Shut up old woman or I’ll kill you.” Mercifully, no one was killed. No men were among the group as it was a work day and they were at their offices. Thankfully, the young children were in school. A Red Cross ambulance was ordered and Im Bashar and her neighbors were shoved unceremoniously into it with only the clothes on their backs. Our children returned to Doha from school that afternoon to find their grandmother and her neighbors, now united with their husbands and children, sitting in stunned silence, disheveled and dispirited. 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 political sectarianism that turned people into categories of friend or foe. As days turned into weeks, Im Bashar pined for her home but she put on a cheerful face for the sake of 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. 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 as we headed to Sidon. All through the trip, 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 spring 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 in 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.” 248

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We cleaned up what we could, Im Bashar packed a few items of clothing and we set out for Doha to return after 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. As we approached its location we saw that Bramiyeh was no more. It no longer existed. The Sidonian Muslim nationalists had destroyed it in a clear message that the Maronites 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 tonight? Abu Tanios loved his khabias so much and look at them now, 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 had fallen into a deep state of depression and was 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 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 on to her children and they learned it well. Adnan’s dream of owning his own orchards was realized with our return to Lebanon. The land was on the hills that overlooked Sidon’s entrance just beyond the Awali River that flowed into the sea, creating one of the most fertile areas of the region. While his bulldozers plowed 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 forcibly depopulated 249

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Christian villages of the area. Adnan visited the greenhouses often to glean ideas and direction as he was relatively new to the profession. Amongst the workers, he noticed a pleasant-faced, red-haired middleaged man who carried himself in a manner different from the rest of the workers who tended the tomatoes. He did not look like a Syrian laborer. 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 Abu Mansour from Rmaileh and this is my land and these are my greenhouses.” Adnan was moved by the man’s painful but dignified response, “How can I help you?” he asked him. “Only God can help me now,” he answered ruefully. “I’m happy to have the chance to work on my land and I am a patient man, this war will end one day.” Adnan maintained his friendship with Abu Mansour and at the first chance that he had to meet with Walid Jumblatt, he asked for Abu Mansour’s rights. They eventually came after the Rmaileh villagers were invited to return to their village at war’s end. Abu Mansour never forgot Adnan’s compassion and from that day forward, every Christian and Muslim holiday would see him at our door with Im Mansour, a plucky smiling grandmother with trays of homemade bread, pickled cucumbers, colored eggs, Christmas sweets or apricot syrup, according to season.

*

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On the dawn of June 28th, 1994, the saddest farewell took place. Im Bashar died peacefully in her bed as she had always wished. I was lying down next to her, holding her tightly, as though that might keep her soul from leaving her body. Bushra was seated next to her holding her hand and reciting Qur’anic verses. We had been prepared, as was Im Bashar, for her last breath. Sadly for Adnan, he was far away in Abu Dhabi. There is a Muslim belief that the angels remain at the bedside of those who have done good deeds to mankind to carry their soul to Heaven. At the moment of her last breath, Im Bashar pushed herself 250

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into a seated position, her back ramrod straight, to meet her angel. We suppressed cries of sorrow as we watched Im Bashar, true to form, meet her Maker face-to-face. Her six grandsons carried her coffin at the lead of a silent entourage of the townspeople of Sidon to her final resting place in the cemetery in the heart of old Sidon next to Abu Bashar and her son, Hassan. As her cortege wound slowly through her beloved town, shopkeepers shut down their stores and bowed their heads with palms turned upwards silently, mouthing a prayer for Im Bashar’s soul.

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Moments of Truth Our 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, I received the news that my mother was not feeling well. Marwan called me to come to Saudi Arabia 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 out 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 was 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 and it took a big toll on my mother’s already fragile mental health. The emotional effort then that it would have taken to face my father was something I was not able to make. I had needed all the strength I could muster just to deal with living in a war-ridden country that had nothing functioning properly and 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 at his second 253

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home in Marbella, Spain with his second wife and was unable to find a plane seat back for another week. Mama beamed happily at my appearance at the door. I hugged and kissed her and gave her the perfume she loved, Dolce Vita by Christian Dior. “Spray some, please,” she asked, childlike in her request. “I have breast cancer,” she told me simply while I helped her into the new nightgown I had bought for her in her favorite 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 of voice. Marwan, seated behind me, could not contain his anxiety any longer. With fear in his voice for his mother’s life, he scolded her harshly. “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. 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 Mama 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, we want you in our lives. You should accept your doctor’s advice.” “Okay,” 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 254

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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 then for lunch. “Fadia,” my sister-in-law, Rajaa, urged me on the phone, “We’re waiting to have lunch with 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 bright white sunlight as I walked in the direction of Marwan’s house ten minutes away. He is a civil engineer working for Aramco, the second generation of Basrawis in Dhahran, and from the manner he was raising his sons as American as he was, 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. How changed Dhahran was since I had last seen it. It had grown to 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 updated orders of the ulema. Main Street, the Dining Hall and Fourth Street with House 4595-B were all still there. I was steeped in 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 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 tow-headed children peering behind him. The combination of his redhead genes and his wife’s Circassian blondeness had produced new Saudis that were even further from the stereotype 255

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than we had been. We walked into the TV room and on top of the television I saw a miniature American flag and a miniature Saudi 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 American flag so freely. Try as I might, 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, 51 billion dollars 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 degree in Washington, DC. The rest were spent in Saudi Arabia. He had received his engineering degree from the University of Petroleum and Minerals that was right next door to Aramco and immediately became employed by Aramco after completing his education. And he had never experienced war, never been exposed to the crosscurrents of conflict or experienced the unsavory fallout of America’s push for world 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 did; who knows? 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 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 256

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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, fortyseven women got into their cars behind the driver’s wheel and drove in circles around the office of the governor of their city in protest at their lack of civil rights and in protest at 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 forty-seven women, urging clerics to punish these women as they saw fit. The Al Sa’ud 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 due to their important families, the Saudi security forces took the electronic information highway instead and circulated an e-mail 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 the group was forcibly pushed into the black hole of collective amnesia by the West, with its bottomless appetite for Saudi Arabian 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 257

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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, a University of Petroleum engineer working for Aramco as well, was married to a blue-eyed, blonde 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 with Yousef ’s 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 Goddamn back yard?” “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 first drove through the center 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 murmured, “Look to the left.” I looked. Three American soldiers were perched on a wall, openly amused at the Saudis walking by. “Look to the right,” Marwan murmured again. I looked. I saw a group of American soldiers, male and female in short-sleeved military fatigues and combat boots lounging outside Hardees, some with their legs up on the tables, others sprawled on the sidewalk as though on the beach. Marines were everywhere, laughing and talking while they ate and drank, 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 growled. I turned to see his expression. Yousef had loved the Americans; what an about-face. “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 258

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around with an American soldier. For God’s sake, she was covered from head to toe. So he 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 uprising denouncing American ties with the Al Sa’uds had occurred without the scenes of American soldiers laughing and talking, with female American soldiers dressed in shorts in fast food joints along the Al Khobar Corniche. Juhayman, leader of the Mecca uprising, had given his life to protest the ‘special relations’ between the United States 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 on Saudi soil because they were the Al Sa’ud’s guests. Saudi Arabia in 1991 was full of young Saudis who had spent their youth in 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 148 billion dollars and the per capita income was around $5800, infant mortality was as high as 59 per 1000 live births, the life expectancy of women was 68 and that of the men was 65 and literacy was 62.4 percent 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 in answer to my obvious look of alarm as we passed by. The billions of dollars of US weapons and the finance of US-led military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere had left Saudi Arabia in deep debt. Its youth are at pains to find jobs and cheap enough accomodation. Many families in the capital, I was 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 in the designer shop-filled malls and 259

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the dozens of palaces under construction. When ailing King Fahd vacationed in Spain, he took 50 black Mercedeses, 350 attendants, a 234-foot yacht, and had $2,000-worth of flowers and 50 cakes delivered each day. Adnan personally encountered the increasing poverty of the Saudis around the time of the first Gulf War. One Friday afternoon in Abu Dhabu, he heard a sharp knock on his office door. He opened it to see a Bedouin with kohl-rimmed eyes staring belligerently back at him, 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,” he 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 Shummari tribe and I have been abandoned by the King you are talking about. He has only money for America and his harem. 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 got his money but from Adnan’s money, as Adnan was sure to make clear to him.

* * * Sour Grapes I flew back to Lebanon with a far 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 reassess everything afresh from 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 260

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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 the belligerence of Israel and the resistance led by Hezbollah. Israel struck Lebanon again in 1996. Prime Minister Simon Peres unleashed Israel’s fourth military assault on Lebanon, code named ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ in what he promised would wipe out ‘terrorist’ activity in the south. Hezbollah was the main target. This elite core of 5000 Lebanese resistance fighters was making Israel’s occupation of the south costly and bloody. The guerrilla group’s tight cells of no more than two to three fighters were carrying out unstemmable 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 the eradication of the Israeli Army’s uncontested image of absolute might and power. Peres would become yet one more of those who fell and floundered in Lebanon’s shifting quicksands. On April 11, 1996, ‘Grapes of Wrath’ opened with with a screaming blitzkrieg that carpetbombed anything and everything that had a semblance of life north of the Litani River. Five years after the end of the civil war, Lebanon became a war-zone once more. A week later on the morning of April 18, 1996, with the bombing still in full force, we turned on the television first thing in the morning to be met with the sickening image of a headless baby flopping in the arms of a crying UNIFIL soldier. Well-aimed Israeli fire (as documented later by a UN report) had just massacred 107 villagers at the Fijian UNIFIL headquarters in Qana where they had taken refuge from the Israeli blitzkrieg. Turning a deaf ear to the international outcry over Qana, Israel’s fighter jets continued to carpetbomb without reprieve. And this was where Peres’ calculations fell flat. The ‘iron fist’ against the resistance did not have any effect on the ground. Hezbollah speedily organized large convoys under the protection of its fighters to move large swathes of the southern population to safety in Sidon and Beirut. Careful not to repeat the mistakes of previous refugee crises, 261

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Hezbollah promised the villagers that they would be able to return to their homes with compensation for any damage from the bombing while at the same time cooperating with a wide-spread relief effort in the two cities that were receiving the deluge of refugees who had only the clothes on their back. 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 to 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. What made it different from all the others was Hezbollah, who underlined the importance of aiding the refugees through homegrown relief work and ultimately returning them to their homes, thus keeping the south alive and kicking. In an unanticipated reaction, unprecedented in Lebanon’s long bloody war with Israel, both Muslims and Christians alike vehemently condemned the attack on Qana. The Lebanese media joined in as well in another first. For the first time since civil war broke out in Lebanon, all the stations began to broadcast identical newscasts. Footage of the 1982 invasion and attacks during the civil war were replayed in between the hourly updates and newscasts. Rousing patriotic songs by Lebanon’s sweetheart, Feyrouz, and the firebrand with the honeyed voice, Marcel Khalife, filled the airwaves in nostalgic salutes to Lebanon. I caught Yasmine, Rola, and Ghassan staring at the television screen with disbelieving eyes at images of battles and events that they had lived through but had been oblivious of … events that had been rolled up and out of sight in an act of enforced collective amnesia. I stood staring at the footage with them, unsure of what to say. I was ashamed to admit I had been guilty of this enforced amnesia in my own home with my own children, thinking that ‘ignorance was bliss.’ Yasmine turned to me eyes wide open in shock, “So that was the thunder that you kept hiding us from under the sink!” The Grapes of Wrath offensive forced opened the eyes of this young, apolitical and relatively unscathed Lebanese generation to all the 262

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anguish and pain that their tiny country had suffered. Their reaction to the death and destruction around them was to turn into fervent activists against Israeli occupation and fervent supporters of Hezbollah. Pictures of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Secretary General, went up on Rola’s bedroom wall next to Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. To Rola, now, the words of Nasrallah’s talks made far more sense than Eddie’s lyrics. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah spoke of liberation and personally knew of sacrifice for his beliefs. When his son was killed in combat, he had 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’ was painful for Israel. Not only did they suffer a first-time-ever defeat by a handful of resistance fighters, increasing numbers of Israelis began to question Israel’s illegal occupation of Lebanon. Daily protests by angry mothers who were losing sons in droves for a cause they did not believe in were staged across Israel. Meanwhile, support in Lebanon for Hezbollah’s fight to regain the south was growing stronger. Its trump card was its even-handed approach to resistance and religion. The fighters, a mix of professions who were fluent in several languages including Hebrew, were from the occupied Lebanese territories, homegrown soldiers who carried out their mission and melted back into civilian life as teachers, newspaper vendors, mechanics, etc. Secrecy was paramount and no one outside of the fighter’s cell had any clue to the fighter’s role in the resistance. On the website of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Fadlallah discusses the finer points of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and of love as the ultimate mover of all religions, not war. This was one resistance unlike any other. As Moussa al Sadr gave a face and a voice to the invisible impoverished Shi’a southerners, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah and Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah gave a face and a voice to the Lebanese Resistance. They set an unparalleled example to the rest of the Arab world of what a small group of dedicated, highly organized resistance fighters could do. The Lebanese, or factions of them at least, were able 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 have dreamed of. 263

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My School, the Enemy Yasmine and Rola became activists for the liberation of the south after the ‘Grapes of Wrath.’ They brought in speakers to their school to shed light on the atrocities commited against those who resisted occupation in the south. It was shortly after the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ that Mrs. Bashour’s true mettle shone through. While the world at large voiced moral outrage against the atrocities committed by Israel and the United States towards 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 favor. It all came to a head during an awards ceremony on June 22, 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 long and 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 one. 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 they had done the 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 them expelled. They were forbidden from sitting for their final exams until she saw their parents. And they were forevermore banned from joining any politically-oriented groups such as FIST (Fight Israeli State 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” 264

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behavior 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 that the aim of the Board of Trustees was to induce the students to accept the American-supported peace process and subsequently the imposed normalization between Israel and Lebanon? “If you don’t agree with the American government’s official policy in 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 revised 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 at 3:05 pm. Any parties, extracurricular activities and social events would be off limits to them. These three girls were effectively being put on trial 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 for their exams. “Did you know what your daughters did?” was how she began the phone call. She then went on to describe what they had done. If she was looking for support, 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 they were staying in ACS and I would see to it that no action of any kind was taken against our daughters. They had committed no crime and should not be allowed to think that they had. There was nothing in the ACS charter that stated that the students had to stand up for the American national anthem, or that it had to be played in the general assembly twice a year, or that they and their parents had to share the same politics as that of the administration. 265

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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 that would place my daughters on disciplinary probation. I told them what they could do with that letter 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 and Mrs. Bashour took it from her and put it at the bottom of a pile of papers on her 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 at the school’s opening assembly the following fall semester.

* * * At Last … The year was 2000. The date was May 24, Amer’s 22nd birthday and his graduation day for his Master’s degree 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 in Lebanon following Israel’s retreat from the south. Munira was working as a journalist at the time and she was relaying the developments on the ground to us as they happened. As soon as we heard Munira’s excited voice on the phone yelling out the news of the liberation of the southern villages from occupation, Yasmine, Rola and I left our still-warm lunch on the table and sped in the direction of the south. We fell in line behind hundreds of speeding cars wrapped in Hezbollah flags, filled to capacity with men, women, and children recklessly hanging out of car windows in extreme degrees of euphoria, clapping, singing and waving victory signs. The whole stretch of the southern coastal road filled with bumper to bumper traffic, turned into one huge party. Loudspeakers blasted songs and speeches and people danced in and on their cars. The Israeli Army was in full retreat and the SLA was in a panic-stricken shambles. 266

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We finally entered the south proper and drove through one liberated village after another filled with exhiliarated villagers throwing rice and rose petals on the visitors. We stopped at freshly abandoned SLA posts still smoking from fires desperately set to burn incriminating evidence. There, my children finally came face to face with the big guns of their nightmares that had terrorized them on their childhood visits to their grandmother’s house in Sidon. We arrived at Khiam and drove up to Khiam Prison, liberated just an hour before our arrival. With beating hearts, we slowly walked through the metal gates of the prison camp. A deep sad hush covered the newly liberated prison. Its grounds teemed with dazed prisoners who blinked in unaccustomed sunlight and freedom while they wept bittersweet tears of relief and sorrow with their families over time lost, never to be regained. Graffiti on the prison walls expressed the decades of incarceration on calendars marked off day by painful day, year after year after year. The prisoners’ belongings were still piled on rickety shelves next to narrow bunk beds of threes in dark, dank, and windowless rooms. The evil still lingered in the damp dark halls. Finally, at Fatima’s Gate, a crossing point into Israel from the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Kila, we saw the hills of Galilee on the other side of the dividing barbed wire fence for the first time in our lives. We saw its development towns and settlements, tidy rows of white houses, small figures of people and pets doing what people do when they are not under occupation, so near, yet part of another universe. The path leading to the Israeli border guard post and Israel beyond was strewn with discarded suitcases, their contents scattered where they fell or plastered by the wind on the dividing barbed wire fence. These belonged to panic-stricken SLA officers and their families who had abandoned their cars and run on foot, to pile up in terror at the Israeli borders, begging to be let in as the Hezbollah steadily approached closer, reclaiming every inch of the south. And we witnessed a magical moment along the Israeli–Lebanese frontier when Palestinians from both sides of the uncrossable border found a way of reconnecting after 50 years of separation. Refugees piled into the buses and stood in families on opposite sides of a kilometer-long wire mesh fence divided by a path down the middle. To complete the surreal scene, the pathway dividing the Palestinian-lined sides was 267

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manned by young Israeli soldiers whose job it was to pass messages and coffee 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 close to what they had dreamed of doing for half a century. My daughters and I stood with them along the fence to absorb as much of the scene as we possibly could. We stared at a young Israeli soldier barely eighteen, the same age as my twin daughters, as he stood around, unsure of how to behave. The young Israeli seemed both annoyed and amused at being ordered to take a message from a 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 our trek through 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 beautiful statement of pride in his country’s liberation: he received a standing ovation from the audience.

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It 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 father. She would only sleep peacefully when we reassured her that her parents sent their love. The doctor told me she had early-onset 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 recognized 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 grace with soaring 269

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vaulted ceilings decorated by swirls of pastel-colored arabesque designs. A row of slender marble columns led the eye to the garden through French doors that framed a turquoise blue oval swimming pool, sparkling invitingly surrounded by tall fruit-laden palm trees and emerald green grass. Tasteful objects of art were sprinkled throughout the airy salon on consoles and small side tables next to sofas arranged for easy conversation. Her paintings hung on the salon’s walls, giant canvases that burst with color and shape, like her house. Elegant and petite, she was modest and softly spoken and moved effortlessly amongst 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 went 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 Saudi men I had met. At my table was a tall dignified American woman who spoke in the lilting Hijazi dialect with her teenage daughters who 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 kaftan who had a strangely familiar face, although I knew I had never met her before. Hana leaned over to whisper, “She was married to Prince Sa’ud Ibn Jiluwi’s son and never left the country so she could stay near to her daughter Yasmine.” I averted my eyes to my lap at this revelation so as not to stare. Yasmine was the image of her mother with the difference of having the olive-colored 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 I had chosen not to take. I had chosen a different challenge, one that fluttered 270

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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 opportunities, like I did, to venture outside of Saudi Arabia for an education that is free of the hatred and anger inherent in the Wahhabiimposed curriculum. I went to a shopping mall with my brother Ghassan who was now in a wheelchair and entered the elevator with a young Saudi Arabian man who helped me maneuver the vehicle. He gazed sympathetically at Ghassan, and 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 young man who accused Ghassan of being a drunk, many years ago in Half Moon Bay. 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, Madame, for women. Would you like to step over there and they can help you.” I paused, then thought about it and told him, “Okay but if it’s crowded, I’ll come back to you.” I walked out of the bank, then decided not to bother and walked back to him again. He saw that I had not gone to the bank next door, gave me a sympathetic look and processed my request. I said goodbye to Mama before I left for 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 who kept a watchful eye over her. Most importantly, my father was always nearby. I climbed into the car with Marwan and we drove to Fahd International Airport in Dammam. My father was in Jeddah and I had not seen him this trip. 271

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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 to travel 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 passports control, a smiling Lebanese businessman stood behind me and asked if it was okay for me to say we were together, since the line for the non-nationals was so long. “Sure,” I chirped. It was my turn to present my passport. I gave it to the passport’s official who was 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 passports officer who had not returned my smile shuffled through my papers then stated in monotone that I did not have the necessary permission to pass through. My heart jumped into my throat. “What do you mean?” I asked him nervously, “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 passports officer did not change his expression and repeated in 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 entrance to the airplane. The Lebanese businessman fidgeted, the time for boarding had been announced. I stepped aside to let him through. The passports 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 her father’s permission … at the age of 50 … with five grown children. I did not exist in my own right regardless of whether I were the head of the United Nations. The passports officer was unyielding, and to get me off his case he motioned to the head officer’s office behind me. I was in a state of panic 272

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I had not felt under the worst bombing in Lebanon. A sense of deep insult shook my very being and feelings of being buried alive in a dark locked coffin engulfed me. I took a deep breath and decided to try diplomacy. The official was a tall dark man with an accent that placed him from Central Arabia. My heart sank when I heard his dialect. My chances of a sympathetic hearing had plummeted. And I was right. The man threw my papers back at 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 passports officer and airport janitor could hear me and let my voice soar about my unjust treatment as a Saudi woman and about his unfairness in blindly following edicts that did not make sense. The officer said nothing, only repeating what he had been ordered to say. A young pleasant-faced Saudi Airlines employee approached and asked me softly 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, “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 I, as a Saudi Arab woman, could not leave the country without the original copy of my father’s written permission or any male custodian, even if I were a hundred years old. Defeated and depressed I called my brother and returned to Dhahran crying myself to sleep from feelings of 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 busload 273

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of non-nationals was checked. We would never make my flight at this rate. Finally our turn came up, 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 that I had met, so tasteful, graceful and well spoken. Before any of us could benefit from any political reform, we needed to be recognized as equal 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. The Shari’a, as Abu Bashar had explained to me, gave Muslim women legal rights which even their Western counterparts didn’t have. I sat back overwhelmed with feelings of intense relief. Saudi Arabia was awash with foreign and American interests who lived their lives freely within their compounds, and we, the subjects of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, were forced to live in tightly locked cells. Oil profits depended on working with those forces that could guarantee political control over Arabia and those forces were the Al Sa’uds and their Wahhabi ‘ulema. Saudi oil was more important to the West, for all its discourse about democracy and human rights, than the equality of Saudi women. 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. Despite 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. “I should have guessed, and your name is Marwan, my favorite 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 there too. We sped to Bahrain Airport and were rushed to the flight by the Middle East Airlines Bahraini official. “Hurry, Madame, 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. 274

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“We were held up at the Saudi borders,” I breathlessly answered as we ran. He laughed at the obvious insinuation, and turned to wink at me smiling, “You’re in good hands here in Bahrain. We don’t hold anyone up.” As I buckled up in my airplane seat listening to 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 felt in a long long time. There was hope. Tens of thousands of young, educated men and women within Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the Emirates with a strong sense of justice were no longer taking subjugation sitting down.

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Back to the Future It is early morning and I am standing on the balcony overlooking Beirut and its airport. This is where I have spent the better part of the past month, since Israel’s latest war on Lebanon erupted on July 12, 2006. The breeze is amazingly soft and fresh this morning, the bougainvillea is in full purple dress. One could surely be forgiven in the midst of all this loveliness if one momentarily forgot the war. But the thick stream of black smoke stretched across the first pink blush of dawn brings me back to the war zone. More than a thousand so far have perished in this latest onslaught. Fat plumes of mottled smoke from bombs 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 Shi’a southern suburb of Dahiyeh have been obliterated. There is a deathly silent blanket of black instead. We had met the first shuddering blasts on the airport’s runways with nervous laughter. Their ‘shock and awe’ was not going to faze us. The only ones with the common sense to feel fear were the dogs. Our three German Shepherds, Leah, Eva and Schwarz, abandoned their sentry duties with sharp barks of alarm to the safety of the most inner recesses of their cages where they cowered, whimpering pitifully. 277

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Shnoodles, our Bolognese mix terrier, did not fare much better. He served merely as an early warning system by suddenly jumping from the sofa and squeezing his fat torso under it, seconds before the ‘smart’ bombs ‘pinpointed’ their targets. However our 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 except the war. I look at the book I was reading before war broke out, The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrel, 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 minute by minute 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 scattered across the globe for schooling and employment 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, 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 fever gripping Lebanon, there was World Cup soccer fever everywhere. National flags of Fifa’s favored teams fluttered from balconies in every town, village and suburb in a time-honored Lebanese custom of compensating for not having a participating team of their own. Brazil, Germany, France, Italy … and Saudi Arabia were the clear favorites. 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 October 1, 2005. She had married Heiko Wimmen, a German scholar of the Middle East and he had conceded his name in favor of hers as a last name for their son. 278

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Nessim quickly became the primary focus of each and every one of us and Munira was hard put to have private time with her baby without one of us turning up at her doorstep. Then war struck. The famed Baalbeck Festival was hosting Lebanon’s famous diva, Fairouz, that night in a sold-out nostalgic salute to Lebanon’s dolce vita in the 1960s, when she used to perform there. The audience ended up being captive to more than Fairouz’s voice. With bombs hailing around them, they remained trapped in the only modest hotel in Baalbeck for 24 hours, before a brief respite allowed them to reach their homes. That terrible night, Yasmine and Rola were in the midst of arrangements for their summer holiday. Each was heading to a different destination, Rola to Perugia in central Italy for a summer art program and Yasmine to New York to begin her PhD at Columbia in Comparative Literature. Munira and Ghassan were in their successive apartments in Beirut. They too were getting their travel plans in order, Munira to New York for her PhD’s oral defense at Columbia and Ghassan to London for a Master’s degree in Journalism. Amer had long moved out of Lebanon and was now in Aberdeen as an executive account manager with Schlumberger. We had just returned from dropping Adnan off at the airport for a short business trip and I was lazily switching from one TV station to the next while I waited to be summoned into the girls’ rooms for further travel discussion. Suddenly, Sheikh 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 three others along the Israeli-Lebanese blue line in the south. Nasrallah gave his conditions for the hostages’ repatriation: “Give us back our men and we will return yours,” in reference to Lebanese resistance fighters in Israel’s prisons. Bushra and I were on the phone with one another immediately. “It’s war,” we nervously said simultaneously. Adnan immediately tried to fly back to Beirut. But it was too late. Before he could do any booking that night, the airport was bombed and a vicious air, sea and land blockade was thrown around Lebanon. I was immediately on the phone ordering Munira and Ghassan to come to Doha. Although both lived in reasonably safe quarters, I was 279

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terrified that the roads would be cut off and they would become unreachable. We had no idea where the bombs were going to fall next. I did not rest until they stepped through the door. Nessim’s wide hazel flecked eyes, toothy smile, and baby bear hug brought me back to all that is beautiful and important in life. He was discovering the world and loving it. We so wanted to keep it that way. Ghassan’s MSN messenger tag became “digging up trenches in my backyard.” “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 updates by phone and to Amer who had cleared his desk in Aberdeen of Schlumberger’s office work to make room for a TV. Our first close range bombardment had an electrifying effect on us. I was drifting off to sleep to the voices of the girls’ chatter when a crash of claps of thunder multiplied times a thousand rattled the house and jolted us into breathless 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, and went back to sleep. This was Heiko’s first ever war experience and he was taking it a lot better than the rest us. We milled around in circles desperate to find out exactly how exposed we were to danger. Bashar and Hana called me from their house, 50 meters away from ours. This was their first war experience and they were trying very hard to remain composed. When the second bomb crashed, 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 the night before were angelic in comparison with the state-of-the-art silent smart bombs that would target Hezbollah’s ‘Secure Quarter’ in the midst of Dahiyeh in the following days and nights. Those bombs imploded buildings with ne’er a whisper into minute rubble. The target, the Secure Quarter, was where Hezbollah officials had homes and offices. ‘Secure Quarter,’ a name evoking the ‘Pentagon’ or the ‘Green Zone’ of Iraq creates images of a formidable military complex surrounded by laser-guided missiles. In reality Hezbollah’s ‘Secure Quarter’ is just another densely populated Dahiyeh neighborhood of apartment buildings, car repair shops, internet centers, mini-markets, bookshops, and bakeries where other people seeking cheap housing with no connection to Hezbollah 280

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lived as well. From our balcony where we were permanently rooted, we stared in mesmerized horror at laser-guided smart bombs that glinted briefly in the sky before making earth-shattering impact with their target. The moment of mute impact created a burst of iridescent silver sparkles that came together into a terribly beautiful shimmering fountain of glitter that fluttered lackadaisically to cover the confetti of body parts and homes strewn beneath. The enemy knew well that Hezbollah’s leadership were 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 selective manner. Brazil’s and Germany’s national flags, Dahiyeh’s favorite 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 moonscape craters 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 next 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 from the ceiling above it. The façade of this ten-story building had been sliced neatly off, 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, lay beheaded and face down in a stream of black slippery oil from gnarled blackened cars everywhere. Deep within a gift shop whose front window had been ripped away, 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.’ Bushra, who had been weathering the incessant bombing in and around Sidon, got a 4 am phone call: a recorded voice in Hebrew-accented Arabic that said to her that she should not throw her fate in with those Hezbollah ‘terrorists.’ “The State of Israel will utilize any and all forms of 281

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force to exterminate those terrorists hiding in their caves,” 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 told me angrily over the phone. During a lull in the bombing, we drove down to the untargeted sections of Beirut where the American-supported 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 newspaper vendors had only the local newspapers. But what brought the war firmly into Beirut’s untargeted sections were the wretched refugees crowded in schools, unfinished buildings, parks and parking lots. For most, this way of living has 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 but their pride and dignity. Rola and her cousins formed their own private NGO of four to give what assistance they could to a hapless group camping out in the municipality park of Sanayeh. The road back home to Doha along the southern Khaldeh highway from Beirut was frighteningly 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 frozen with fear 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 humor. Not surprising for those in tune with Hezbollah’s machination, the most successful ad in support of Lebanon’s resistance was a Johnnie Walker one. The Johnnie Walker’s advertisement portrayed its mascot, a spirited golden gentleman in top hat and waistcoat, striding jauntily across a destroyed bridge, having successfully leaped over the bridge’s gaping chasm to the logo of ‘keep on walking.’ Israel was unable to achieve any of its widely-trumpeted goals for this war despite jam-packing its northern border with war traffic. Crowding 282

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the border region were tens of thousands of foot soldiers, F16-landing pads, artillery lobbing their lethal munitions from the safety of Israel, rows of bulldozers and Merkava tanks, all state-of-the-art weaponry. But the hubris of the ‘army that cannot be defeated’ was smashed into the same size confetti they had reduced Lebanon’s infrastructure. As the war progressed, the Israeli army discovered that in addition to motivated fighters, Hezbollah had state-of-the-art weaponry too that sent back those Merkavas that weren’t reduced to scrap metal on the battlefield, limping back into Israel followed by harrowed 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.” Protagonists from within and without Lebanon had brushed it off as mere saber rattling. Olmert’s stated goal was to wipe 35 villages off Lebanon’s map and fill them with NATO troops. The 35 villages were reduced to rubble and were filled with the dead and dying and the homeless but they remained free. Israel was unable to claim an inch of Lebanese territory or repel a single Hezbollah fighter from the border. A month of battle had the Israelis still running back and forth across the same terrain a stone’s throw away from the Israeli borders. To their deep dismay, like Lazarus, tiny Lebanon rose from the bloodiest Israeli blitzkrieg that the Middle East had ever witnessed very much intact and threw Arab defeatism back in their faces. Despite Israel’s smart 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. Again, the Lebanese were proving their mettle under the right leadership. 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. 283

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“I’m staying,” I responded firmly. And Rola stayed too. She felt frivolous studying with strangers while her country was on fire and 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 decisions made for them. The Austrian embassy evacuated Ghassan on a Greek warship, and Munira, Heiko, Nessim and Yasmine left overland in a Nissan suburban under the protection of two 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 country and safety for 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. Everyday 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 tired bodies onto sheets on the sidewalk, displaced from their homes for the 100th time? They buried 70 bodies in Tyre yesterday in a mass grave, plywood coffins lined up side by side. The death toll is topping 1200 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 …

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1 Walter Steiger, Discovery! (Beirut: Aramco, 1971). 2 Nassir Al-Ajmi, Legacy of a Lifetime, quoted in Thomas A. Pledge, Ali Dialdin and Muhammad A. Tahlawi, Saudi Aramco and Its People, A History of Training (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: The Saudi Arabian Oil Company, 1998). 3 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude: An Essay on American Exceptionalism, Hierarchy and Hegemony in the Gulf,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring 2002). 4 Jidda to State, Dispatch 26, 20 July 1959. RG59, 786A.00/7-2059. “Prince Mohammed Deplores Arab Disunity, Attacks the Arab Press and Extols Former King Abdel Aziz.” 5 Department of State Instruction, CA-3384, 29 December 1953. RG59, 886A.062/12-2953. “Comment on the October–November 1953 Strike at the Arabian American Oil Company Installations in Saudi Arabia.” 6 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit. 7 Childs to State, Enclosure no. 3, 22 April 1948. RG59, 890F.20/4-2948. “Memorandum of Conversation with His Majesty.” 8 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 401. 9 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit. 10 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit. 11 Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude,” op. cit. 12 Power-wielding, rich heads of confessional communities in Lebanese society. 13 Thyme and olive oil on pita bread.

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