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

277 Pages·2007·1.54 MB·English

by  Fadia Basrawi

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rabia s
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H idden
merica
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A S a u d i Wo m a n ’ s M e m o i r
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rabia s
A
’
H idden
merica
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A S a u d i W o m a n’ s M e m o i r
F a d i a B a s r a w i
South Street Press
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ARABIA’SHIDDENAMERICA
Published by
South Street Press
8 Southern Court
South Street
Reading
RG1 4QS
UK
South Street Press is an imprint of Garnet Publishing Limited
Copyright © Fadia Basrawi, 2007
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information
storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing
from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
brief passages in a review.
First Edition
ISBN-13:978-0-86372-309-4
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typeset bySamantha Barden
Jacket design byDavid Rose
Printed in Lebanon
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Contents
(cid:2)(cid:3)
Preface:Desert Surburbia … Desert Kingdom vii
1 Brave New World: Growing Up in Aramcon 1
2 The Devil’s Pact 27
3 Making and Taking: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco 39
4 Social Engineering, Yankee Doodle Dandy Style 51
5 Lebanon: My Past, My Future 95
6 Come with me to Lebanon 123
7 The Tides of War 155
8 Life will go on 175
9 Dignity or Death 185
10 War and Dreams 197
11 Lessons in Love 213
12 What goes around comes around 221
13 The Road Not Taken 235
Postscript 241
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Preface
Desert Surburbia … Desert Kingdom
(cid:2)(cid:3)
The Saudi Airlines Boeing 707 banked to the left and began its
descent to Dharan International Airport. I peered excitedly out of
the airplane’s window to catch my first familiar signs of home … the
hundreds of flickering orange-yellow flares that dotted the sea of red
sand below. They were admittedly an odd bonding link, these flares that
defined the skyscape of Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. From above
they winked and glowed so prettily in the oncoming dusk; on the
ground they filled the air around us with a nauseating stench of rotten
eggs – pungent testimony to Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth that was keeping
the industrialized world so well-oiled and so well-heeled.
A flurry of traffic suddenly crowded the airplane’s aisle as the Saudi
women on the flight, clad in the season’s light summer attire, disappeared
one by one into the bathroom to reappear incognito moments later,
enshrouded from head to toe in voluminous black abayas (cloaks).
Glancing briefly at the mounds of black that now occupied the seats
around me, I turned quickly back to the window, unable to hide my
anger at this enforced double standard of veiling. We landed; I was
1970
home for the summer of from my sophomore year of university in
Beirut. Before exiting the airplane’s cool interiors, I paused and fortified
myself with a deep gulp of oxygen before plunging into the airless furnace
of Saudi Arabia’s summer. I’d lived here most of my life but had yet to
become inured to that initial blast of roasting heat and humidity.
Clutching my green Saudi passport tightly, I wended my way, uncovered
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(cid:2) ARABIA’S HIDDEN AMERICA (cid:3)
by abaya or veil, towards the Saudi Arab ‘nationals’ passport sector
bypassing a long winding line of non-‘nationals’, largely from the Third
World. I felt a wave of empathy for them as they waited with resignation
for the passport officer to ask them the most inane questions just because
he could. My being a Saudi Arabian female travelling alone did not
make my entrance into Saudi Arabia (or exit) much easier.
The passport officer, a dark and scrawny man with a pointed
scraggly beard, stared dourly at my uncovered head. His beady eyes
darted censoriously over the giant square buckle in my short hair, my
psychedelic orange tunic, low-slung leather belt, and white bell bottoms,
and, leaning forward, took in my red cork platform sandals. Lifting his
frizzy eyebrows, he asked derisively: ‘You are a Saudi?’ Rolling my eyes
to notify him of my attitude, I pointedly nudged my passport closer in
his direction. He scrutinized my photo-less passport closely to check if I
was from the ‘first tier’ of Saudis (that is, born from a Saudi Arabian
father, or second tier (that is, naturalized). ‘Really?’ he said, answering my
silence sarcastically. ‘And from Medina al Munawarra? You don’t look
Saudi Arab,’ he spat, throwing the holiness of the city at my uncovered
face. I rose to the bait. ‘Yes I do … I am a Hijazi.’ ‘Why don’t you speak
the dialect? Eh? Eh? You sound Syrian. Answer me. What kind of a
Hijazi are you?’
I lost my struggle to contain my temper and pounded the counter
defiantly: ‘IT IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. YOUR JOB IS
TO STAMP MY PASSPORT.’ His voice rose into an enraged squeal:
‘Woman, SHUT UP!’ Well, I’d come this far, and I wasn’t about to back
down: ‘No, YOU shut up!’
In the split second that the officer’s face froze in confusion between
shock and fury, my father grasped the situation from where he stood
watching us behind the barrier, spoke briefly to the police officer next to
him and materialized between us smiling his famous smile. He was a
television celebrity in the Eastern Province due in large part to his good
looks and that smile. ‘How are you? I’m Fahmi Basrawi,’ he greeted the
passports officer in lilting Hijazi Arabic, shaking his hand. ‘Fahmi
Basrawi?’ the passport officer croaked as he gaped at my father, the
perfect image of modern Saudi elegance with his clipped moustache,
immaculate white thobe (Arab long robe), gold cufflinks and one side of
his white ghutra (triangularly folded voile cloth covering the head)
flipped neatly over the agal (a thick black circular cord that held the
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(cid:2) PREFACE (cid:3)
ghutra in place) falling in picture-perfect alignment down the other side
of his face.
Caught mid-sneer, the passport officer hastily passed his hand over
his face in embarrassment, transforming instantly both in expression
and voice. ‘This is your daughter?’ he inquired in what he hoped was a
mellifluous tone of voice. ‘I would never have guessed … no actually,
yes … now that you mention it, I do see the resemblance. I simply
was doing my job, but your daughter misunderstood me,’ he added,
with an ingratiating smile. ‘Hah!’ I threw in with all the indignant fury I
could muster. My father, continuing to smile, took me firmly by the arm
and walked us away from the passports division. Then, as we rounded a
corner, he dropped the smile. ‘Do we have to go through this every
time?’ he exploded in exasperation, shelving his charm for people other
than me.
We drove away from the airport in an uncomfortable silence. My
relationship with my father was a strained one. We had never been able
to reach a middle point where we could see eye to eye on life matters
and my education abroad was not making it any easier. ‘Why should
I keep my mouth shut when he didn’t shut his mouth?’ I blurted,
still smarting from the passport official’s disrespect. Keeping his eyes
rigidly focused on the road ahead, my father did not answer, leaving my
question to dangle awkwardly in the prickly air between us. I settled
back resignedly in my seat and looked out at the drab desert landscape,
rusty billboards and the occasional nondescript cement block building. I
hadn’t expected my father to engage in any sort of critical dialogue with
me. He was a Saudi senior staff employee of Aramco (Saudi Aramco
today, the largest oil company in the world), and his long years there
had effectively sealed his mouth and any independent form of thought
1922
that he may have had as a young Hijazi. Born in Medina in when it
was under the Hashemite Sherif Hussein’s Kingdom of Hijaz, he was ten
when Saudi Arabia (with everyone in it) was internationally recognized
by the world community as the property of King Abdel Aziz Ibn
1932
al Sa’ud in . He rarely mentioned that period of politics in his life,
or any politics for that matter.
Turning left, we approached Dhahran, Aramco’s administrative
centre and home to me from the age of five. We passed under an arched
gateway emblazoned with ‘Go in safety’, in Arabic and English …
Aramco’s Arche de Triomphe, then slowed down at the ‘Main Gate’, a
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