PART TWO
So intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.
—Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
CHAPTER 14
“It was a Wednesday night, going into Thursday morning,” remembers Ahmed Badeeb, who received a call in the small hours from the director of the Saudi intelligence bureau in Kuwait. “He told me he was up on top of the office with his binoculars—the Iraqis had driven over the border, and he was watching them. They were heading into the city with armored cars and tanks.”
Helicopters were landing special forces troops in the city, guided down by men on the ground waving flashlights—a group of Iraqi air-traffic controllers, it was later discovered, that had come to Kuwait pretending to be a football team.
Badeeb put in a call to King Fahd, who was cruising in the Red Sea on his yacht.
“Nonsense, Ahmed” scoffed the king. “You’re making it up. I was on the phone just five minutes ago with the emir of Kuwait.”
But Fahd called the Saudi ambassador just the same, and Badeeb listened on the line as the ambassador climbed the stairs to report from his own roof.
“There’s nothing at all, tal omrak [may your life be long]. I can’t see anything. Wait a minute—wallahi [by God], I am mistaken! I can hear bullets!”
“Escape at once!” Badeeb heard the king shouting. “Line up the cars! Get yourself out of there now!”
“Sons of the Arabian Gulf!” ran a plaintive and unsourced statement issued on a Kuwait radio frequency that was picked up by the BBC that morning. “Men of the desert shield . . . an Arabian Gulf country is asking for your help. How could an Arab occupy the land of his Arab brother? . . . Kuwait of Arabism, which has never abandoned its pan-Arab duty, today appeals to Arab consciences everywhere. God is above the aggressor . . .”
And with that pious expression of hope, the BBC’s monitors could pick up no more.
A few hours later Prince Mohammed bin Fahd was awoken in Al-Khobar by a call from the captain of the Al-Khafji frontier post on the Saudi-Kuwait border—the emir of Kuwait had just driven in and wanted to speak to him.
In fact, the emir wanted to speak to Mohammed’s father, the king, but no one knew his number in Jeddah. For two hours Fahd and his son tried to persuade Emir Jaber, a timid and depressive man, to stop waiting at the border and drive down the coast to Dhahran. In the end, Fahd told his son to drive up and get him.
Mohammed bin Fahd and his guards jumped into a 4x4 and headed northward up the coast road, past a long stream of Kuwaitis heading south.
“The emir did not want to leave the border,” he recalls. “He kept looking across at his country and phoning to Kuwait City to try and find out what was going on.”
Fahd was phoning his son every half hour.
“ ‘You’ve got to bring him south,’ he told me. ‘It’s not safe! You’ve got to move! Now!’ ”
Eventually Mohammed bin Fahd persuaded Jaber to leave the border. The prince drove the now stateless ruler south and delivered him to Dammam late that afternoon.
If Saddam’s invasion surprised the Saudis, they were still more shocked by the reaction of countries they had considered their friends—especially that of the biggest client on their payroll, Yasser Arafat, who came out for Iraq. By one estimate, the Saudi government had paid $1 billion or more to the Palestine Liberation Organization in the course of the 1980s. Then, as now, Saudi Arabia was by far the largest financial supporter of the Palestinians.
“We watched the Palestinians chanting against us on television,” remembers Princess Latifa bint Musaed. “I couldn’t believe what they were shouting: ‘With chemicals you must kill them, Saddam!’ I was so angry. Ever since I could remember I had been sending riyals to help support the poor oppressed Palestinians every month. So did my friends. Helping the Palestinians was a thing that good Saudis did.”
King Hussein of Jordan also came out in support of the Iraqi invasion, telling CNN that Saddam could be forgiven for assimilating Kuwait—the little emirate, he said dismissively, was “a British colonial fiction.” This was rich coming from a man for whose family the British had invented the Kingdom of Transjordan only two generations previously, but Hussein seemed to have forgotten that particular episode in Hashemite history.
“Even if I were not a king, I would still be the ‘shareef ’ [descendant of the Prophet],” he told a gathering of Jordan’s tribal and parliamentary leaders, referring back to the title his ancestors had borne for the seven pre-Saudi centuries during which they had ruled in Mecca. “Indeed, now you may call me shareef.”
To emphasize his claim to rule on Saudi soil, the king chose this moment to grow a beard that made him look remarkably like the last but one shareef, his great-grandfather Hussein, who had packed up his gold and fled from Jeddah in 1924 as the Saudi armies approached. Sixty-six years later, it seemed, the great-grandson was ready to return.
Yemeni television redrew its television weather map to relocate its borders hundreds of miles northward, painting vast swaths of Saudi territory in Yemeni colors. The electronic land grab crossed the peninsula just south of Riyadh. When the Saudi government revoked the favored-neighbor privileges extended to Yemeni workers in the Kingdom, the Yemenis walked off jauntily.
“We’ll be back,” chortled one group to their Saudi employers, “and when we come back, we’ll be occupying your houses.”
It was the revolt of the have-nots who had long resented the Saudi blend of windfall wealth and self-righteousness. Now they showed their true feelings. Libya, Tunisia, Sudan, Algeria, Mauritania—even the Afghan government recently installed in Kabul with Saudi money—all distanced themselves from Saudi Arabia. A leaked recording from the Cairo summit summoned to discuss the crisis exposed Arab leaders shouting insults at one another across the table.14 Saddam had not disclosed the direction he would be heading after he had swallowed Kuwait, but it did not sound as if his freshly declared friends would object too much if he staked his claim to the oil fields of the Kingdom.
Fahd said nothing—in public. Behind closed doors the Saudi king was on the phone constantly to his allies, particularly President Mubarak of Egypt, who, like Fahd, had accepted Saddam’s personal assurance that he would not invade Kuwait. Like Fahd, the Egyptian felt bitterly betrayed. But the king kept his counsel. As the days went by, it seemed possible to some observers that Saudi Arabia might be planning to accept the Iraqi occupation in some messy compromise that would be covered up with assurances of Arab brotherly love. The Desert Leopard, they insinuated, was in a funk.
“Not at all,” recalls a member of his kitchen cabinet. “He did not want to show his hand too early. It was a tactic he took from poker. Fahd never took any decision without running it right through the consensus—all his brothers, the main ministers, the military, the tribes, and the religious sheikhs.”
The sheikhs most of all. Faced with an armed threat on his border, Fahd obviously spoke to his military, but his most important calls were to the religious establishment, and to Abdul Aziz Bin Baz in particular. Would the ulema support him, asked the king, if he had to turn to America for military assistance?
The answer was a prompt and unanimous no. The Wahhabi tradition—upheld in the past by the “Son of the Tiger” and by Bin Baz himself when he was qadi of Al-Kharj—was to seek separation from nonbelievers: “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.” This well-known hadith was one of several authorities that fundamentalists liked to cite as prohibiting the presence of infidels in the Kingdom. There remained many a true believer in the towns of Unayzah and Buraydah who would walk the other way if he saw a foreigner in the street. Such cautious and fearful folk constituted the deep roots of the Kingdom’s believing community, and it was for them that the sheikhs now had to speak.
Fahd kept on trying, recruiting his brothers Salman and Nayef, who had more pious reputations. All the senior princes maintained close ties with the ulema, and with Bin Baz in particular, some of them visiting him in his home and seeking spiritual guidance. The keener princes rather enjoyed sitting in Bin Baz’s majlis to watch the blind sheikh conduct his teachings, when his students would read out sections of the Koran or Islamic writings, then earnestly scribble down the wisdom that the great man delivered at the end of every paragraph.
The scholar’s home was a little cluster of modern two-story buildings where he lived with his wives and children in the Shumaysi neighborhood of Riyadh. This was royal territory. Talal bin Abdul Aziz and other princes had palaces nearby. In fact, the compound had been a gift to Bin Baz from the royal family. This did not make it a bribe. All senior Saudi clerics lived in homes that were gifts from rich benefactors and foundations. Still, it was a reminder of the underlying reality of the royal-Wahhabi alliance. The Al-Saud needed the Wahhabi clerics for their legitimacy, but the clerics, for their part, depended equally upon the Al-Saud. In no other Muslim Arab country did senior religious figures enjoy such prestige and closeness to the government centers of power. There would be no more cars and plush houses for the sheikhs if Saddam Hussein marched into Riyadh.
It took a few days of arguing, but once the discussion had started, Fahd reckoned that the initial No would not stand.
“’Praise be to God, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the worlds,” came the announcement, eventually, on August 13, 1990. “The board of senior ulema has been aware of the great massing of troops on the Kingdom’s border and of the aggression of Iraq on a neighboring country. . . . This has prompted the rulers of the Kingdom . . . to ask Arab and non-Arab countries to deter the expected danger.” It was the duty of the good Muslim ruler, continued the statement, “to take every means to deter aggression and the incursion of evil. . . . So the board thus supports all measures taken by the ruler.”
It was hardly a ringing endorsement, but it would do. In the meantime, the Saudi king had been talking to Washington. On Saturday, August 4, General Norman Schwarzkopf received a phone call from his boss, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“King Fahd is asking for someone to brief him on the threat to his kingdom,” said Powell. “When you get there, you’ll have to play it by ear.”
“Is the U.S. government saying we’re prepared to commit forces?” asked Schwarzkopf.
“Yes,” replied Powell. “If King Fahd gives his permission.”
The bulky figure of the Saudi king was waiting for the Americans in the far left-hand corner of the majlis in his Jeddah palace beside the Red Sea. Down one side of the plush green and gold room were lined the princes—Abdullah; Saud Al-Faisal, the foreign minister; Bandar bin Sultan, just in himself from Washington; Abdul Rahman, Sultan’s Sudayri brother and vice defense minister—all in robes, headdresses, dark mustaches and beards. Down the other wall, dressed in shirts, ties, and Western business suits and every one of them clean-shaven, were seated the American officials—Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Pentagon strategist Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates (later defense secretary to both George W. Bush and to Barack Obama), and Ambassador Chas Freeman, along with their bemedaled and uniformed military delegation.
Schwarzkopf strode forward with his array of charts and aerial photographs, and, since there was no seat available, he went down on one knee in front of the king to begin his presentation.
Embarrassed, Fahd called for a servant to bring a chair, so the husky four-star general found himself seated with his display materials in his lap, while the Saudi king looked over one shoulder and Crown Prince Abdullah peered over the other.
“I had imagined,” Schwarzkopf recalls, “that they would listen to my briefing politely, then go away to discuss it among themselves.”
In fact, he found himself in the middle of an animated discussion in Arabic, only snippets of which were translated into English by Bandar. The U.S. photographs, taken a few days earlier by surveillance planes and satellites, showed Iraqi armored vehicles and troops massed in the desert along the Saudi border, with a handful of tanks—no more than five—clearly inside Saudi territory. Schwarzkopf was inclined to think that this was unintentional. The Saudi-Kuwaiti border was not delineated on the ground at that point. But Fahd took it very seriously.
“I don’t care if it’s only one tank!” said the king indignantly. “They’ve trespassed on Saudi sovereignty.”
Schwarzkopf said bluntly that America had no inside intelligence of Iraqi intentions, and he now laughs at the often-canvassed Arab conspiracy theory that the United States had doctored the aerial photographs to make the threat seem worse than it was.
“They were regular reconnaissance photographs, sharp and clear, taken on some very bright days, but they did not show a definite picture. If we had doctored them we could have done a much better job. I explained that we could only make an educated deduction from the facts on the ground: these were identifiably some of the Iraqi Army’s very best units; they were clearly pausing to rearm, refuel, and reequip as taught by their Soviet instructors. We had observed them regroup that way during the Iran-Iraq War. They might or might not be preparing to attack. But it could hardly be said that their posture looked defensive. The tanks were facing south.”
Schwarzkopf concluded with a presentation of the substantial forces that the United States could provide to protect the Kingdom, then he yielded the floor to Cheney for a final statement. President Bush was willing to make this military commitment immediately, said the defense secretary: “If you ask us, we will come. When you ask us to go home, we will leave. We will seek no permanent bases.”
This was the point at which Schwarzkopf had expected the Saudis to retire to conduct their deliberations privately. But the princes continued their discussion briskly and briefly in front of their visitors—with the turning point coming in a sharp exchange between Fahd and Abdullah.
“We must be careful not to rush into a decision,” said the crown prince.
“Like the Kuwaitis!” retorted Fahd caustically. “They did not rush into a decision, and now there is no Kuwait.”
“There is still a Kuwait,” persisted Abdullah.
“And its territory,” replied Fahd, “consists of hotel rooms in London, Cairo, and elsewhere.”
Abdullah conceded the argument, and as the other princes in the room agreed, the king turned to Cheney and spoke his first and only word of English—“OK,” he said.
Within days U.S. planes and troops were flooding into Saudi Arabia’s airports and bases in every corner of the country. Schwarzkopf ’s rule of thumb was simple. He wanted five U.S. soldiers on the ground for every Iraqi, and by the end of September thousands of young Americans in combat gear were driving their jeeps around the streets and highways of the east. The trouble was that quite a number of these Americans were women—attractive young female GIs who swung their vehicles around as if they were back in North Carolina. This set alarm bells ringing in the Saudi Ministry of Defense, and, after talks with General Schwarzkopf, the U.S. lady drivers were confined to U.S. camps, the Aramco compound, and out in the desert (where bedouin women also drove).
But the ban did not apply to the several thousand Kuwaiti women who had recently arrived in the Kingdom. They went on driving their cars to the shops—they could be seen every day in Al-Khobar and the sprawling cities of the oil fields, loading their cars with groceries and ferrying their children to and from the beach. There was no law that explicitly banned women from driving in Saudi Arabia. There is none today—the Kingdom’s notorious female driving ban is a matter of social convention, fortified by some ferocious religious pressures. So some Saudi women started looking thoughtfully at their Kuwaiti sisters.
Dr. Aisha Al-Mana came from a religious family on her mother’s side—“all imams and bearded ones,” she recalls. Her father was Mohammed Al-Mana, Abdul Aziz’s literate companion and translator whose charming memoir, Arabia Unified, vividly captures the leisurely atmosphere of Riyadh before the oil wealth came.
“My father,” she remembers, “always warned me against joining parties and factions, either left or right. ‘Be yourself,’ he used to say.”
Aisha took his words to heart. As a politically active student in America she had fought a losing battle against the Islamist takeover of the Arab student organizations in the 1970s.
“In those days the U.S. government encouraged the religious hard-liners as a counterweight to the Arab nationalists,” says Aisha. “I remember how the State Department used to give money to the fundamentalist students—the Arabs and also the Iranians. They gave them air tickets for their conferences and helped them organize. I saw it myself. They thought they were fighting Communism, and they ended up with Khomeini. All this Islamism—it’s not religion: it’s only politics, and it was America that helped create these extremists. They just ride on religion, these born agains—in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, and in the southern states of America too: they’re all after their own piece of the cake.”
Expressing such views forthrightly after she returned to Saudi Arabia got Dr. Al-Mana into trouble with the Ministry of the Interior. Her work as a school principal, lecturer, and women’s activist in Riyadh and the Eastern Province earned her invitations to foreign conferences, but the Mabahith had other ideas.
“They call you in and ask you to sign a taahud, a pledge, in which you promise not to repeat something you have said which they do not like. So you sign it. Then you say the same thing again, or write it in an article, and when you go to travel you get to the airport and discover there’s something on the computer: they won’t let you leave. You’re there with your bags all packed, and you have to go home again. Then after a year or so you hear from a friend who was also banned, but has now been allowed to go. So you try again, and this time you find that you can walk through the barrier. They don’t tell you officially. The ban just melts away—till the next time you annoy them.”
A wife, mother, school principal, and activist, Aisha Al-Mana had been banned like this on four occasions, and she found the battle tiring.
“I’ve been active in women’s rights since my personal awakening. I used to refuse to wear the abaya. I thought I could change the world single-handed.”
The war rekindled her fire. It was Friday, October 19, 1990, and Aisha was traveling inland from Al-Khobar, heading down the highway to Riyadh, with heavy U.S. trucks and desert-camouflaged troop transporters rumbling on either side, towering over her car.
“I believe that wars are fought by rulers, not by the people—it’s the people who suffer. So when I saw those huge American convoys traveling, I knew that they had not come here for me, for my people, or for my government. What a nonsense to say that they had come halfway round the world to protect me! They had come to protect their own interests—because they didn’t want Saddam to control their oil. It made me feel bad. People were taking decisions about me somewhere else. Then I thought, Why shouldn’t I have a say? There is something I can do.”
Aisha Al-Mana told her driver to stop the car, get out, and go and sit in the backseat. Then she got into the front, took her place behind the wheel, and drove all the way to Riyadh—a distance of nearly two hundred miles. She had learned to drive as a student in America and, like many Saudi women, was accustomed to driving whenever she was abroad.
“I felt wonderful. I felt like I was flying. When I came to the checkpoints along the road, the guards asked, ‘What’s going on?’ I told them, ‘What’s going on is what you can see is going on.’ I laughed and showed them my ID, so they laughed. ‘That’s all we have to check for,’ said one. They were bedouin. They were not shocked. They had seen women drive. Their wives could have been driving the family pickup somewhere over the hill at that very moment, for all we knew. I smiled at them and they smiled at me. They waved me through. We were all kind of happy.”
When Aisha Al-Mana got to Riyadh, she shared the tale of her glorious journey with a group of women who had gathered to discuss what they could do to help the national emergency.
“They asked me to join them. We all wanted to help—to help with first aid, perhaps, if there were going to be bombs and missiles. We wanted to do something. But a lot of us were helpless. Many of our foreign drivers had been repatriated. How could we get to hospitals or schools, or wherever we might be volunteering? So here was a good reason to ask for permission to drive—it was religious. Islam is a very flexible religion. If you are traveling, you can delay or combine your prayers. If you have nothing to eat, you can eat pork. So we said, ‘Let’s start with this.’ Let’s get in touch with some officials and say we want to help with the defense of our country, and to do that we need to be able to drive ourselves—like the Kuwaiti women are already doing.”
In the days that followed, Aisha spoke to some ministers she knew, while others of the group spoke to officials and princes who might be favorably inclined. A week later the women convened again.
“We had all received the same answer. ‘Thank you very much. It’s a kind offer and a great idea—but this is not the best moment.’ That is what you are always told when you suggest change in Saudi Arabia—‘I agree with you, of course, change has to come. But just wait a little. Be patient. Now is not the right time.’ We had had enough of that. We decided that now was the right time.”
The women agreed to meet the following Monday.
“I arrived late, and by the time I had got there, they had taken the decision to drive. They had fixed the location and the route. We decided to dress properly, with abayas and veils (head scarves, not full niqab), and to send a letter to Prince Salman [the governor of Riyadh] telling him what we intended to do, why we thought it was the right time. I delivered the letter to his office first thing next day.”
The letter, if delivered, did not reach the prince, who would proceed through his working day in blithe ignorance of the planned demonstration—until he was woken from his afternoon nap with the news.
The women had chosen a circular route through some of the busiest and most modern shopping streets of Riyadh, along King Abdul Aziz Road, down Tahliah (Desalination) Street, through the Olaya district and back. There were forty-seven of them in fourteen cars.
“We could have had more. We could have had hundreds. But we’d decided just the evening before—in less than twenty-four hours. And we didn’t want to make it too big. We wanted this to be symbolic.
“Look,” explains Aisha Al-Mana. “I don’t like driving. I never did. But it is a basic necessity for ladies who work and are supporting families. A foreign driver costs you seven hundred to a thousand riyals [$180 to $250] per month. Then there is his food and health care and his accommodation—which may be in bachelor accommodation with other drivers, which causes problems in its own right. There are more than a million male foreign drivers in Saudi Arabia, doing nothing else but driving the women around.
“So say a lady who works earns four thousand riyals [$1,000] a month. A third of that has to go on paying her driver—money that goes out of the country. Then think of the mother who stays at home and doesn’t work—how is her husband to afford a driver for her if he is a teacher or a civil servant? He has to do all the driving himself, taking her to the shops, taking the children to and from school. Think how the productivity of those men would rise, if they were not taking time off work every day to act as chauffeur.”
The economic arguments in favor of women driving seem irrefutable to a Western sensibility, as does the main religious one—that the effect of the driving ban is to place a respectable Saudi woman, usually alone and often for long periods of time, in a confined space with a single man who is not her husband or permitted male relative. One might have thought that this last argument would have some purchase with the members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.
“This is what shows you that none of this is religious,” says Aisha. “It’s all social. These men need to keep control of their womenfolk. It’s a matter of their pride. And as part of their pride, they cannot believe that a decent Saudi woman would choose to misbehave with a non-Saudi man.”
The convoy of cars had made their planned progress nearly twice around the circuit, when a traffic patrolman spotted them. Reem Jarbou, then a teenager sitting excitedly beside her mother, Wafa Al-Munif, a business-woman and charity worker in Riyadh, saw the policeman look casually across the road, then look back again in a horrified double-take at the procession of women sedately driving their cars down Tahliah Street.
“He had no idea what to do. I saw him reach for his radio, and his call must have been monitored by the religious police, because suddenly they were all over us—jumping out of a dozen or so of their huge trucks and swarming everywhere in their headdresses and thobes and long beards. Then the regular, uniformed police arrived, and there was a standoff. Here we were, a group of women, standing by our cars, a little shaken, wondering what would happen next and rather proud of what we had done, while the men were standing round in the street arguing. Whose jurisdiction was it? Which of them would have the honor of taking us into custody?
“Luckily all the police, religious and regular, answered to Prince Salman. He was not going to let us fall into the hands of the religious maniacs, and they were furious—beside themselves. One got into our car beside the policeman who drove us to the police station. He was just steaming, a great big angry lump of indignation in the front seat: he kept muttering curses and insults as we drove. He said he wanted to kill us, and I really think he meant it.”
Among those arrested was a happily pregnant Fawzia Al-Bakr. Her time in prison eight years previously had not hampered her marriage prospects—on the contrary. Her notoriety had attracted the attention of Fahd Al-Yehya, a young medical student who would become one of the Kingdom’s most eminent psychiatrists. The couple had got married in 1985—“I think he liked my writing,” says Dr. Al-Bakr, who earned her Ph.D. in comparative education at the Institute of Education, University of London, in 1990.
Fawzia had borrowed her brother’s car to take part in the demonstration, and as she stood beside it, she recognized one of the policemen who came toward her out of the melee.
“ ‘Dr. Fawzia,’ he said, ‘do you remember me?’ It was one of the Mabahith who’d interviewed me all those years back when I was locked up in the villas. ‘You never stop, do you?’ he said, and he sort of smiled.
“Later on, when we got to the police station, he came across to me again and told me what to write on the report form as I was filling it in. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t say your brother knew that you were borrowing his car. He’ll only get in trouble. Say that you took the car without his consent.’ ”
Unlike the Mabahith, the religious police could not see the funny side. As darkness fell, husbands and brothers started arriving at the station to take their womenfolk home. They were showered with scorn by the bearded ones.
“Weaklings!” They hissed. “Don’t you know how to control your women?”
The insult went to the heart of the matter, for control of womenfolk is the basis of every tribal society: let your women go off (and therefore, ultimately, procreate) with anyone they choose, and that is the end of male tribal authority—of the tribe itself, in fact. Whatever the military outcome of King Fahd’s war, the women’s driving demonstration made clear that the social consequences were going to be incalculable.
While Prince Salman was wrestling with the problems caused by one demonstration in Riyadh, his nephew Bandar in Washington was trying to encourage another. To help sway U.S. public opinion behind the war, the ambassador called a meeting of Saudi students in Washington. The embassy sent airline tickets to fly in the leaders of the Saudi student clubs from universities all over the country.
“This is a grave moment in your country’s history,” he told them as they gathered in the Radisson Renaissance hotel on Seminary Road in Alexandria, Virginia. “Now is the time for you to go out and demonstrate. Show the Americans how you feel. Be vocal! Make banners! Think up slogans! Go out into your campuses and in the streets and make your feelings felt!”
There was an awkward silence.
“Thank you, Your Royal Highness,” said one of the students. “But how shall we do this? We have never been educated to do such things—we’ve always been told that it’s un-Saudi to demonstrate. How do you expect us to do this now?”
Back in Riyadh, the demonstrators who had made their feelings plain were suffering the consequences. All the women lecturers at King Saud University were suspended and banned from the campus. Religious conservatives denounced them fiercely in the newspapers, and their criticisms seemed to meet with popular support. The loudspeakers of the Friday sermons positively quivered with fury. Abdul Aziz Bin Baz issued a fatwa against women driving.
“The situation of women,” declared one of the milder cassettes that circulated, “is the reason for all these woes that are falling on the nation.”
It was a reprise of the arguments that had followed the uprising of Juhayman ten years earlier—with a sinister edge. Leaflets were distributed that publicized the names of the women and their husbands. Good Saudis and Muslims were urged to take action against these “Communist whores.” The cruelest cuts came from young traditionalists among the lecturers’ own female students—they spat on their teachers.
“The king was truly shocked,” remembers one of the royal family. “After the war he invited the women to his majlis to let them know that he felt for their suffering. ‘You are our daughters,’ he told them.”
Dr. Aisha Al-Mana did not attend the meeting.
“So far as I know,” she says, “that meeting was not the king’s idea. It was requested by some of the women who wanted to say they were sorry—they were worried about their jobs. They felt they needed to apologize, and that is their right. But I am not sorry. In my opinion we did nothing for which we should apologize. To drive as Saudi women—that is our right.”