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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN April 13, 2003 Issue 
Princess Sultana's Daughters as told to Jean Sasson 
Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia Last Tuesday evening I attended the prestigious annual Morrow-McCombs Memorial Lecture co-sponsored by CSUSB and the San Bernardino City Human Relations Commission and established to foster inter-religious understanding. The theme this year was "What You Need to Know about Me and My Religion: Jewish, Christian & Muslim Responses." A number of speakers were featured. The packed hall at First Presbyterian Church where the lecture was held vibrated with intellectual energy. I assumed that most people attending had some rudimentary knowledge of Christianity and Judaism and were, like me, interested in acquiring some new knowledge that would enable them to reconcile the teachings of Islam with certain Muslim practices we have seen of late. Although I was born and nurtured in the Balkans where Islam has been the historical nemesis of Balkan Christians, my knowledge of it was and still is, extremely limited. Regrettably, the discussion of Islam was not as enlightening as I had hoped it would be. There were a lot of the usual clichés about universal love and peace, but I personally had hoped to get some insights into the practices of Islam that to us, of the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman civilization, appear odd. Specifically, I had hoped to understand how does the professed love for peace and freedom of religious expression translate into the slaughter of Christian Armenians, or into the atrocities committed against the people of the Christian and Jewish milets in the Ottoman Empire, or how does the professed respect for women translate, for instance, into the widespread practice of Muslim female circumcision. The audience, grounded in western-style democracy and egalitarianism, was too polite, too politically correct to press for explanations. Perhaps I was more sensitive to it all because of my Balkan experience and because scenes of raw pain from the just-finished book "Princess Sultana's Daughters" as told to Jean Sasson were still fresh in my mind. Princess Sultana (the name is a pseudonym) is a daughter of the royal house of Saudi. Jean Sasson is a writer who lived in Saudi Arabia for more than ten years where she befriended Sultana. This is the second book about the Princess. The first book - "Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia," published in 1992 and a long-time best seller on most lists, is reputed to be even more gripping and devastating than the book I just read. Sultana risked everything, including her life, to tell her story to Jean Sasson so it would become known in the West. Consequently, the book is written in the first person as if Sultana herself is writing it. "Though the words are mine," the author tells us in the "Foreword", "the voice is that of the Princess, whose experiences are, therefore, recounted in first person." Counting on anonymity and her family's lack of interest in books, Sultana hoped against hope that her revelations, tantamount to family betrayal, would never be discovered. But as ill luck would have it, her diabolical brother discovers the first book shortly after its publication and brings it to the attention of her father. However fearing the wrath of the king for the expose' of ugly family secrets, her cold-hearted father and brother decide not to punish her. It is an entirely different matter with her husband. He is dismayed and because of his superb Western education is somewhat embarrassed that Sultana has told the naked truth about him - about his "weekly adventures of sex with strangers" resulting in a venereal disease infection for Sultana, about his desire to take another wife and the subsequent disintegration of their family because of it, about her resignation to stand by her husband "for the sake of the daughters" even after the realization that "their wonderful love has vanished." Sultana, her husband and their son and daughters live in opulence and luxury, but have no freedom. She tells of the trials of Saudi women who are not allowed to drive, may not travel without the explicit permission of husbands or fathers or brothers, until very recently could not have their own IDs but were identified through a spouse or a male relative and could be arrested and prosecuted by the "Committee for Enforcing the Right and Forbidding the Wrong" if they appear unveiled in public. Educated and enlightened men like Sultana's husband and son also feel trapped by these codes of behavior imposed on them. For even if they wish to treat the women and girls in their families differently, they have no options but to abide by the strict laws and traditions. "Few people know the facts that the Koran does not call for veiling," Princess Sultana tells us, "nor the restrictions women endure in the Muslim world. It is the traditions passed down that so hinder us from moving forward," she says. In spite of Sultana's enlightened marriage, the conflict between exposure to Western life and the laws governing the lives of women in Saudi Arabia, causes the daughters terrible emotional and spiritual anguish. They pay a heavy price - both suffer breakdowns. "The female most blessed is she that has never been born! Next to her in happiness is the female who dies in infancy!" laments Fatma, the Egyptian grandmother of a girl about to be circumcised. The book weighs heavily with descriptions of heart wrenching episodes from the lives of Saudi Arabian women. But it ends on a note of hope: "The men of my land will grow to mourn my existence," Sultana says, "for I will never cease to challenge the evil precedents they have allowed to prevail against the women of Saudi Arabia." Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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