I just finished a book that I have been reading for the past few days. It is called Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia. This book made me so angry I want to scream! I will try to contain my anger to explain rationally why it makes me so emotional. Sultana, the narrator of the book, is a Saudi princess. She was born in the late 1960s I'm guessing from other dates that were in the book. She describes her life growing up in the lavish palaces of Saudi Arabia. The focus of her memoir is on the horrific treatment of women. As a child, her and her sisters were completely ignored by their father. Her only brother was treated like a King and given absolutely whatever he wanted (like a Mercedes for his fourteenth birthday). The girls are given nothing. They are absolutely forbidden from receiving an education for fear that they will start to get their own ideas. As soon as they have their first period, they are forced to wear a black veil that covers their entire head and torso when they are in the presence of any male that is not an immediate relative. They are married, often just months after their first period, to a man as old as their father to serve as his second or third wife. If it is discovered that she is not a virgin, she will most likely be executed. Wives are expected to produce children for their entire child-bearing years. A baby daughter is considered reason for grieving, while a boy is lavishly celebrated.
Though all of this is horrible, what makes me most angry is the absurd laws and punishments the government and religious Saudi men enforce. In her book, Sultana tells of the fate of friends of hers to illustrate this. The most astrocious that stands out in my mind involves a thirteen year-old girl who was raped by friends of her older brother while their parents were out of the country. When she told her parents what happened, the boys said that she "seduced" them and they were helpless under her flirtacious influence. She became pregnant. The courts decided that she was at fault and would be punished. Immediately after she gave birth to the baby, she was taken into the street and publicly stoned to death. She was executed in a brutal and painful way for being raped. That is absurd. Another Sultana relates is of a young woman that she knew as a childhood playmate. Her father was unusually liberal, and allowed her to study in London for a while when she was 18. She fell in love with a man from California (a non-Muslim). When her father died while she was in London, her conservative Uncle became her guardian. He was outraged by this relationship (which was illegal because he was not a muslim) and seeked to punish her. Citing the Koran (SURA IV, 15: "If any of your women are guilty of lewdness, Take the evidence of four witnesses from amongst you, Against them; and if they testify confine them to houses until Death do claim them"), he banished her to live out the rest of her life in a dark enclosed room in solitary confinement. At 22, she was locked in an insulated, soundproof room with no windows or light and given 3 meals a day through a hole in the door. As you can imagine, she soon went completely mad, but is still imprisoned in that room to this day.
These are just two bits of the story that Sultana tells. And it is all true. Every bit of it. And this was happening 20 or 30 years ago. It is still happening today. I have never felt so passionate about anything as I do about this. The problem is, I don't know what to do about it. What can I do? Donating money will not help anything. That's obvious, because these women are filthy rich from oil. I just feel completely helpless. I am going to do some research and see what kind of movements are out there to help these women. I cannot sit here in this miraculous country of freedom and let that happen.
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