Women can't drive or vote in Saudi Arabia, but their children are largely safe from street crime
and drugs.
Teresa Malof knew she wasn’t in Kentucky anymore when a cleric issued a fatwa against her secret Santa gift exchange.
Malof proposed the idea at the King Fahad National Guard Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she has worked for more than a decade. It was supposed to be discreet, but rumours were whispered amid veils and hijabs that the lithe, blond nurse, raised on farmland at the edge of Appalachia, was planning to celebrate a Christian tradition in an Islamic kingdom that forbids the practicing of other religions.
“Even though I’m a Muslim, I like to celebrate the holidays and have gift exchanges,” said Malof, a convert to Islam who is married to the son of a former Saudi ambassador.
For American women married to Saudi men, such is life in this exotic, repressive and often beguiling society where tribal customs and religious fervour rub against oil wealth and the tinted-glass skyscrapers that rise Oz-like in the blurry desert heat.
“Haram, haram” (forbidden, forbidden). American wives know the phrase well. It is learned over years of peeking through veils at supermarkets or sitting in the back of SUVs while Filipinos behind the wheel glide through traffic. Their adopted Arab home is a traditionally close American ally. But like much of the Islamic world, Saudi Arabia’s relations with Washington have been strained since the rise of global jihad. Terrorist bombings, which have killed nearly 150 people in Saudi Arabia in recent years, have kept many American families in gated communities that have the aura of golf courses protected by small armies.
Most non-Muslim women convert to Islam as a prerequisite for marrying a Saudi and living in the kingdom. Many American women, including those who converted before they arrived, have embraced the Quran; for others, the adoption of Islam is a pantomime act, the disguise of a second self to hold them over until they peel off their head scarves and travel to the US for summer vacations.
For both kinds of women, it is a life of sacrifices and measured victories: Women can’t drive or vote in Saudi Arabia, but their children are largely safe from street crime and drugs; a wife can’t leave the country without her husband’s written permission, but tribal and religious codes instill a strong sense of family.
Freedom lies behind courtyard walls, where private swimming pools glimmer and the eyes of the religious police, known as the mutaween, do not venture. Rock ‘n’ roll is played, smuggled whiskey is sipped, and Christianity sometimes is practiced. This sequestered, contradictory experience, a number of American wives noted, can turn an expat into an alcoholic or a born-again Christian, and sometimes both.
“When I first got here, I felt naked without my head scarf. After the terrorist bombings in 2003, I even covered my face. Foreigners were a target then. I became very comfortable with my face covered. I felt safe. If you’re covered, they respect you,” said Lori Baker, who met her Saudi husband at Ohio State University in 1982.
As the wife of a Saudi living off a busy Riyadh street, she said she’s not completely embraced by Americans living in gated communities, but she also feels estranged within Saudi society.
“My mother and father were just devastated at my conversion,” said Baker, whose house was damaged in a 1995 bombing that targeted a US-Saudi military office compound. “Neither family was receptive about our marriage. With Saudi women there’s a politeness, an acceptance and a curiosity about American wives, but there’s never long-lasting friendship.”
It is a strange place, she said, to live between two worlds, one of quilting clubs and cookouts, the other of prayers and isolation. “You have to do soul searching and really define who you are,” she said. “My husband is the man of my dreams, and I decided to go wherever that took us.”
