This paper is based on a unique experience I gained from teaching a research-based course at a university in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The course involved interviewing five Saudi women writers with the hope that the interactive conversation would help my class, all young women, write their term papers on different facets of modern Saudi literature. Initially, my idea started with grounded apprehensions, but what started as a challenge turned out to be a most rewarding exercise to the whole class. My students wrote their papers, each on her favorite topic; and I found myself writing this piece, resting it not only on the wealth of biographical information we all gleaned from the writers’ modes of living and thinking, but also on my impression of what it meant to my class to be in touch with important creative women. This paper is a journey into the minds and lives of writers who managed to bridge the gap between worlds of conventions and modernity, which they straddled themselves and tried hard to make big dents on various barriers to fulfillment and freedom of speech.
This paper is based on a project I introduced when I was teaching an undergraduate research course, Senior Seminar, to a group of fourth-year students at Effat University, a new private university for women in Saudi Arabia, in 2013. My realization that many of my students were nfot well read in Saudi literature written by women (or men) prompted me to think of acquainting them with some of these writers in person. Luckily for me, five well-known writers accepted my invitation to meet with the class, as well as with other interested university students and faculty.
The choice fell on these writers not just because of their reputation and availability but also for the fact that, as individuals, they introduced a variety of personal beliefs as well as literary output. Although the writers have all dealt with social, economic, and political issues, they have been differently perceived by the media and the reading public. Some of them have had their works banned in the country for being outspoken about religious, political, and sexual issues; others have been met with mild reactions or described as “non-abrasive.” In other words, the views expressed by the writers portrayed here stem from different positions and beliefs, ranging from outright opposition to moderate or total acceptance of traditional social values. Interestingly, even before the interviews had taken place, the writers’ reputation (as conformists or non-conformists) largely determined my students’ initial opinion of the writers and hence the questions they prepared.
The students were very much on their guard when
Who are these writers? Zainab Hifni, now in her fifties,
This was all fascinating, but having met Zainab Hifni and Maisah al-Sobaihi, whose visits were photographed and videotaped, the students had to be reminded that the present writer did not want her picture to be taken or her voice to be recorded. She had intended to sing her children’s songs and act some scenes from her plays; therefore, she didn’t want any of that to be available outside the circle of female audience she came to address. “God has given me a singing voice, how could I disobey him by entertaining other [male] audiences?” Shata is referring here to the “temptation” involved in the singing voice of a woman. One must, however, clarify that Shata does not support the strict, conservative belief that a woman’s speaking or writing voice should not be heard in public. In her fiction, she criticizes society’s tendency to regard a female’s voice as a source of embarrassment and shame.
My family loved folktales and folksongs. My grandmother was a first-rate storyteller and reciter of poetry. And there are women in my family who love to sing, and when they get together, they chant all kinds of folksongs and recall the occasions for which they were composed. In other words, these women created an oral theater. Although I chose the written word, the folk memory in my family was so rich that it left its impact on me. I have inherited the gene of storytelling.
Albeshr is a staunch believer in women’s rights, having dedicated many of her novels and short stories, as well as her journalistic articles, to this cause. However, as a sociologist, she also believes that it is not only women who are born with preconceived roles and duties; men, too, experience the same dilemma. When a male child comes to the world, he is expected to live by a prepackaged code of behavior that determines his manhood and view of the other sex. These social roles, Albeshr says, alienate both men and women from their real identities and hinder proper communication between them. The writer’s insight into the inner dynamics of her society has influenced her fictional writings, where men come across as products of a social system that has made them dissatisfied with their lives and eager to escape the narrow spheres of patriarchy.
All the five writers have straddled two worlds, one closer to their parents’ and grandparents’, the other being a world of rapid change, globalized information, and crowded cities, in which emerging modernity is constantly met with resistance from earlier and deeply ingrained religious establishments with considerable political clout. One is the well-known religious awakening movement (called, briefly, al-Sahwa in Arabic), which sets out to control comparatively liberal groups by calling for and implementing puritanical modes of living and thinking.
Zainab Hifni, who shows herself as a distinctly progressive writer, speaks favorably of change and turning one’s back on conventions that cripple the writer’s pen and dampen creativity. Coming from a family with a moderately liberal father, Hifni grew up to be a self-assured and aspiring teenager; and at the young age of twelve, she inscribed the phrase “Owned by the writer Zainab Hifni,” on the inside of each book she possessed, hardly paying any attention to her sisters’ open laughter at her “pretensions.” Like many other writers, Hifni found in Scheherazade of
The private school Hifni went to, Dar al-Hanan in Jeddah (established by Queen Effat, wife of the late King Faisal Al-Saud), helped shape her dream of being a writer. At a time when girls in government schools were forbidden to read fiction and most other secular material because such readings were deemed corruptive to students’ morals and Islamic upbringing, Hifni had the option to borrow various books from the school’s “rich” library every weekend. She was also lucky, she said, to have had a Syrian teacher for her composition classes, a woman who encouraged reading and writing and saw in the young Zainab Hifni the signs of a future writer. Unlike many other writers who suffered from the austere curriculum of government schools, Hifni speaks fondly of Dar al-Hanan and the teachers who nurtured her mind during her formative years.
Hifni, however, reminded the students that they were lucky to be living in a world full of possibilities that were not there for her own generation. When she started to write articles and personal reflections in the 1980s, she had to work hard in order to have them published in a newspaper or a magazine. She would wait for many months for a response: “Today you have wider fields for self-expression. You have Facebook and Twitter, and all the on-line literary clubs.” One person in the audience, a faculty member, reacted by saying that the Internet and social media have created a generation impatient with words and all extended reflective and creative writings, a generation that is also superficial and incapable of pursuing dreams entertained by earlier writers. Hifni disagrees, insisting that people brought up on on-line communication of ideas have better access to global knowledge. Life used to have many closed doors; information technology has made the youth more open-minded than ever before:
Why do we want the new generation to follow in our footsteps? Each generation must live its own time. I believe that today’s youth should be encouraged to follow new lines of thinking and pursue new trends. Civilized societies have been built on innovation and renewal, not on imitation. As for short expressions on Twitter, today we have the very short story, which may not go beyond three lines. I am fascinated by this genre and would like to try it; it is a short expression that imparts so much meaning. I think we are living in times of speed and of art that glows intensely though for a short time.
Hifni was asked whether there was anything called women’s literature and if she could briefly describe it. Hopelessness and disappointment, Hifni says, drive the female to tread unfamiliar grounds, unique to her own experience, something which makes her literature a clear reflection of her society due to its literary truthfulness and the desire to confront naked reality though the framework is hedged with perils. Generally, it is a revolutionary literature since it aims at changing the status quo. “It is true that the distinctness of feminist writing will decline with the expansion of social awareness and the absence of discrimination; however, women today are still concerned with women’s issues and there are many of these occupying the creative woman in Saudi Arabia.”
Writing about women’s struggles with political and religious systems, Hifni has been ostracized by Saudi authorities, who have banned many of her books and prevented her from travelling abroad for a few years. She agrees with Edward Said that the writer who, out of honesty, insists on introducing social change often lives on the periphery, while those who use their pen for personal goals and social climbing often manage to occupy the center. “It’s a sickness, mental and economic, that has hit the innermost structure of the Arab World. I sincerely hope that the educated Saudi individual would follow and tell the truth,” she said in our meeting. Hifni refuses to be intimidated by those who attack her writings as immoral, provocative, and aiming for fast fame. But as a woman who lives in a society that considers females of all ages as legal minors, Hifni cannot hide her anger and frustration:
I often asked myself during moments when I was in harmony with myself: Why did I decide to write? Is it because I insist on leading a life that respects my identity as a female? Is it because I want to unleash the anger smoldering inside me against all that my mind rejects and my heart abhors? I fondly recall Virginia Woolf’s assertion that anger is the companion of the gifted woman—Woolf herself lived in conflict with what she was and what she was expected to be.
Daring to say what other writers opted to be silent about out of fear of being censored or ostracized, or simply for being too shy to write about intimate scenes,
It is courage and the desire to break away from outmoded ways of thinking, especially about women, that brought Maisah al-Sobaihi to Effat University to perform her play
Al-Sobaihi seems cautious about what she says to those who probe her personal life and thinking. Has her play or performance been restricted by society’s expectations of what is “proper”? Her response is open-ended. Although she feels she is not controlled by society and she is doing what she wants to do, she cannot ignore the fact that she is performing at a place that supports what she does; for the situation may be different if she were to act outside these premises and amongst people who might see the need to limit what she does. “As you can see, if my training just opened up to the public, we will have people who think differently and might need to impose some control over me. But I haven’t had this experience, not yet.” She adds that theater art may demand different methods and more freedom, but “I don’t know.” In any case, al-Sobaihi seems content with what she has so far accomplished in a society where iconography and impersonation, whether in pictures or on the stage, has been outlawed by many religious groups on the premise that “creation” should be reserved for God alone. She appreciates the “trust” accorded to her by Effat University and by the encouragement she derives from the audience she meets there. She has managed to promote her career as a performer by attending available workshops and conventions in the field, but she is unsure about the future of her training in Saudi Arabia. “This is why I always have a security method involving another job, such as teaching. There is always that fear. But I think the more I discover myself, the more I feel confident that this is what I want to do.”
Al-Sobaihi maintains that although she is a comedian treating lightly certain facets of Saudi society, she would like to see her play raise awareness about existing social problems. Yet she doesn’t like to be judgmental; her mission is to share her ideas with the audience without dictating a certain behavior. What does she think of
I think all types of marriage can probably work. In Islam, there is no doubt that the concept of
In the
However, her response was totally unequivocal when she was told her performing the play abroad (in New York) could easily give outsiders the wrong view of Saudi society. She completely disagreed. For one thing, she said, she is herself a full-fledged Saudi woman, not half American or half British, performing on the stage and doing what comedians usually do: exaggerate to generate laughter. “We shouldn’t worry too much about trying to always show others a pleasant image.” Al-Sobaihi’s New York audience enjoyed and was even touched by her performance. One “Jewish” woman told al-Sobaihi that “the issues raised in the play are human and universal, very much about us in every society.” Cheating and lying are very human, al-Sobaihi adds, and she has no intention to either stereotype, as some think, or betray her society to “foreigners.” In fact, another member of her Western audience told her that she had no idea that Saudi women did resent having a co-wife. So her play, she asserts, helps to educate those who have erroneous notions about her Eastern world. In addition, al-Sobaihi reminds her audience, the anger and jealousy exhibited by one wife in the play have been acknowledged by Prophet Mohammed himself on the grounds that generally a man cannot be fair to both (or all) wives, and things of this nature have to come out; “We need not hide who we are: yes, religion is a big part of our society; yes, we are human; yes, we have feelings; yes we get angry; yes, we have this or that; but we are alive; we are not just sitting at home doing nothing, and I think this is the most important thing.”
“Do you label yourself a feminist? I hear feminist undertones in your play and I have fallen in love with them,” one student asked al-Sobaihi. Although the writer responded by saying that she did not label herself as anything but a Muslim, she surely believes in women’s rights. But one needs to understand what the word means in one’s own social context:
Women should have their right, but they also should know their rights, because a lot of us women don’t even know our rights. Somebody asked me to do an exercise a few weeks ago. Write your rights as a Muslim, they said. Where do I start? So I had to go read about my rights, of inheritance, for example. These things are very important and if that’s what you mean by feminism, then yes, I am a feminist.
To my students, al-Sobaihi was a fresh presence, someone whose ideas they readily espoused. When Amal Shata came to Effat University and firmly asked not be photographed or recorded, some students were disappointed, despite the fact that they themselves often object to having their pictures taken by others, even with hijab. Their disappointment did not last, and soon they were treading on familiar grounds with Amal Shata. They applauded her personal ethics, which affirmed the principles they grew up on and for which they seemed to seek confirmation through the example of a multi-talented woman: a medical doctor, a writer of more than one genre, a singer, and an actor, all within the framework of the dedicated Muslim woman. She writes out of a personal need for self-expression, not for fame, she asserts, fame being the offspring of pride. What primarily drives her to write plays and songs for young children is her desire that they know their heritage and develop their Arabic skills.
Shata insists that the writer’s pen must be guided by “moral principles” despite all the restrictions this obedience to morality can impose on the freedom of expression: “A pen controlled by moral principles has a hard time gliding on the page; conversely, the “free” pen has the power and feasibility to express the writer’s innermost thoughts.” However, she adds, writing involves the communication of one’s ideas to other people. “Writers, therefore, must bear responsibility for what they say, during their life and after their death. Reckless writers are those who write outside what decent people find acceptable.” When she was asked to comment on the current tendency among Saudi writers to be explicit about sex, and whether this is an imitation of the “West” brought on by globalization, she expressed “zero tolerance” for this trend: “Sex and rubbish is not
Perhaps it is Shata’s opinion about the duties of women as wives that elicited some protests from two or three students. A woman with young children, the writer said, ought to spend her evenings at home with the family, helping the children with their homework and seeing to her husband’s needs. When her own children were young, her family was her priority in the evening, especially after she had gone back to work. Only when her youngest was older did she start attending cultural and literary gatherings. “I liked my home,” she said, and I would like “to form a group to be called ‘
“My feeling is that,” one student said, “you encourage the traditional picture of women, but you put it in a positive way, and yet the outcome is the same: the woman whose life turns around her children and husband, and you make this the highest goal for woman as a human being.” In a calm voice, Shata responds, “This may seem so, but my female characters are very strong and can shoulder their responsibilities singlehandedly, as mothers and breadwinners, in the absence of men.” However, she adds, “a woman needs a man, a male companion, to satisfy her needs; and pleasing him is important if she is to live in harmony with him.” Another student referred to a story short included in Shata’s
Shata may sound “traditional” to some young students who are anxious to see women reach a higher ceiling of freedom in an ostensibly patriarchal society, but she is quite a feminist within an Islamic framework. She emphatically supports women’s rights, and she faults society for not wanting to recognize them. It is true, she says, “a woman’s responsibility is to coddle her husband, to be close to him, and to do things that he loves, including cooking and cleaning; but the man, too, should serve himself and his household.” As a writer, she draws the line between social conventions and true Islamic principles, blaming both men and women for selfish behavior that masquerades as Islamic:
Prophet Mohamed had wives and a servant but he did his own chores around the house, something that we ought to follow instead. How can we forget that? It is good for the marriage that the woman establishes a good relationship with her husband, but it is her husband’s duty to aid her, comfort her, and lighten her burdens. Men choose what they think is religion to serve their interests. Women have been forced to do disagreeable things, not just nowadays but at all times when men don’t know the rights of women. For example, it is not right for a man to marry a woman just so that she can serve his mother, and this is what frequently happens in our society, thus turning the wife into a servant. Islam is not like that. A woman is not obligated to serve her mother-in-law, and she should ask for a divorce if she is forced to do that—despite all the emphasis the religion has placed on glorifying mothers.
Along with other women writing today in Saudi Arabia, Amal Shata has taken it as her mission to address the hardships women continue to face in her society, to point out their rights in Islam (which many women are not aware of, she says, echoing al-Sobaihi above), and to place her heroines in situations where they learn how to claim what is theirs from manipulative family members such as husbands and brothers. Financial independence is a major theme in her novel
To bolster her endeavors to distinguish between the tenets of Islam and social conventions, Shata juxtaposes her male characters. Her upright, considerate man stands in sharp contrast to the oppressive father, brother, or husband often found in Saudi fiction. His piety shines through his leniency and open-mindedness, especially in matters that relate to women. In many ways, he is a vehicle for the writer’s ideology about the genuine Muslim man. One student asked the writer if there are men as good as the father figure in
Shata’s ideas left an impact on the students: “How healthy it is to feel that way about love that turns sour!” one student felt the need to say. Yet they all related to the anguish that follows frustrated love expressed in the works of the next writer to be interviewed, Laila al-Juhani. When asked if she thinks that love leads to destruction, al-Juhani denies entertaining such a belief. Love should never lead to heartache in normal circumstances; but she deals with conventions that do not give love the chance to be fruitful. When Saba, her female character in
My students have classified al-Juhani as “moderate” in her ideas and beliefs, except perhaps where she touches upon the subject of political and religious hypocrisy in her country. “We are a people who claim to believe in ideas we don’t follow and act in ways we preach against,” al-Juhani says, repeating a phrase often used to describe insincere and duplicitous leaders and corporations. Besides her belief that the current massive commercial enterprises have eroded the landmarks, the culture, and the holiness of her city, Medina (“all that expresses the city has been wiped out”), al-Juhani closely examines the racial and class discrimination in a country priding itself on following Islam, but forgetting that it is a religion that did away with the rigid and fanatical practices of pre-Islamic
Al-Juhani rails against other forms of bigotry and extremism, especially in religion. To the writer, the idea of the archetypal fall from God’s grace closely parallels the fall of the cities of Saudi Arabia from the former “innocence” they had. She speaks nostalgically of a past that is not so far away, a past that witnessed larger spaces of freedom, as compared with a present where modernity can often be just a façade camouflaging materialism, extremism, and spiritual destitution. One of the factors that contributed to this loss of innocence and spontaneity is the religious awakening movement (al-Sahwa), which became most active during the 1980s and 1990s, and which still exerts control over the lives of Saudi people:
I remember when I was young, the neighborhood boys used to come to our house to say hello, and it was a normal thing to be escorted by one of them as I went out to run an errand. We could also get together as neighbors to chat or watch a movie. My brothers loved movies, so they would rent a projector and we would have a movie night with the help of a white sheet draped on a wall. I watched all James Bond films when I was young. We girls sat in front and the boys sat in the back without creating any suspicion or distrust. This has all disappeared from our lives; the rule now is to suspect and doubt. Gone is the way of accepting life as it is. This extremism has brought out the worst in people […] Fasting, praying, and the
Is it corruption to express sexual scenes explicitly? One student had asked. Al-Juhani didn’t like, she said, “artless” depiction of sexuality, as in writings not meant to impart human truth but to create a scandal or to achieve personal goals. This kind of writing does not stem from real struggle or the desire to portray authentic situations. However, she says, to read Mohammed Shukri’s
My students were curious to know what the writer, now in her forties, thought about university students, whom she has been teaching for the last decade or so. Her response showed mostly admiration. Her students are new models of womanhood, and she feels hopeful about them. They are capable of discussing momentous issues and asking critical questions; they are much more receptive of new social trends and confident about the world than she had ever been at their age. Owing to them, society is becoming freer to question traditional values. However, she adds, because of their daily engrossment in the Internet and social media, some of them don’t readily engage in extended arguments. “These young women are fully aware of impending social issues, but they tend to lack the depth that usually comes from more serious reading.” Speaking about her own experience with on-line social media, she confesses that she is lagging behind her students. She has a website, but it was built by her younger sister, Nada; and she rarely goes there, waiting for her sister to tell her whether there are any important messages she needs to look after: “To me these things may waste time, may take me away from other areas where I am more productive. I don’t have a Twitter account and I believe that if I am to go there I won’t succeed. But even if I have the time, I would like to spend it on reading and writing according to the ‘traditional’ way.” However, she cannot deny that her students have been able to use Twitter to their advantage in the field of the very short story and in poetry. It is a medium that suits their literary tastes and provides them with the means for self-expression.
Reflecting on self-expression, she speaks about the restrictions imposed on secular readings the girls of her generation had to face in school. Random searches in schoolbags for fictional and other non-religious books and individual reflective journals was something her high school performed on a regular basis, often exposing the students to humiliation if not suspension and dismissal.
In high school, I went through a situation I will never forget. There was then an inspection campaign, and I had in my bag a red notebook in which I recorded my ideas and some stories and other things I’d thought about. The inspectors confiscated it. I went to complain to the principal, to say that the notebook was my possession; I wrote it, no one else did. But she was totally unmoved by what I said. She did not return the notebook even when my father asked her on my behalf. There was nothing embarrassing about my writings, or else I wouldn’t have taken the notebook with me to school. But it was believed that fiction had a negative effect on morality.
Like Zainab Hifni and Amal Shata, al-Juhani stresses the importance of reading beyond school texts in forming her writing career. Being so much in love with books, she made her father buy her novels by Naguib Mahfouz at an age when the Nobel Prize winner was beyond her comprehension. Unable to go through these works, she gifted them to her teacher. A few years later, she found herself hooked on Mahfouz’ works, to which she is indebted as a writer.
The series of interviews was concluded (temporarily at least) with a meeting with the writer Badriah Albeshr, whose reputation as a versatile author of novels, short stories, sociological books, and journalistic articles has secured her a place among the most important women writing today in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world. Like Zainab Hifni and some other contemporary writers, Albeshr has been candid about social issues that curtail individual freedom and creativity, including the censorship imposed on literature and the media by the religious authorities in her country. Albeshr became especially voluble about religious policing when the famous Ramadan TV comedy series
One of the first questions the students asked Albeshr was about the storm her novel
was no more than a small percentage of what other writers have published; but this novel was picked to be maligned by some groups who believed that it was to their advantage to silence me. They chose to attack me in a very noisy way, using different methods to stir the emotions of those who don’t use their minds but only submit to what is being said. I think what happened had more to do with a political game than with honest literary criticism. We can’t judge literature in a legal court; we can’t say this is halal and this haram … It seems that attacking novels in the Arab world is a most successful way to have free advertisement for certain ideologies, and it works.
Like al-Juhani, Albeshr makes it clear to the students that the critic must differentiate between the writer and the character, for the latter may be saying things that do not necessarily reflect the writer’s beliefs.
The students, however, were not done with the question. They wanted to know why preachers, both men and women, still exert considerable influence on people’s minds through oral discourse. Albeshr explained that oral discourse, to deliver knowledge or to entertain, was the norm in her society; it was a means of instruction during times when many people did not know how to read. “At the cafes one heard about Bani Hilal
Albeshr developed her talent for social criticism early in life, in the 1980s, when she started working as a columnist for the
What are the social conventions Badriah Albeshr finds most oppressive? “Most conventions,” she says, especially the ones “dedicated to seeing women as incomplete, with a mind and abilities less than those of a man.” This kind of thinking “does not seem to be influenced by the fact that women assume high positions in the world and they did undertake leadership roles in our history.” Underrating women’s abilities deprives them of having choices—of education and career, of husband and number of children. “It is against the humanity of a woman.” Albeshr proceeds to speak about a short narrative, “Al-Shabah” (The Ghost) in which she tells the story of a girl who is about to marry a young man according to the traditional way:
Throughout the engagement period she keeps thinking about what [her fiancé] would look like: her father? Her brother? Or someone on TV who works, like him, in the airlines? On her wedding day, when he enters the field of her vision, she sees first with downcast eyes his brown shoes, then his socks, then his
This is not a marriage but a “kidnapping operation,” Albeshr concludes; “And in one night this man becomes the person most intimate with her.”
Conventions can be so relentless, Albeshr adds, that they have turned society into a military ground, and the army may not be necessarily men. Many women have adopted the very views that combat and restrain their sex. These women turn into soldiers, like Hend’s mother (in
It’s a training that breeds women’s oppression. But perhaps mothers have no knowledge that this is cruelty. What do they know behind their closed doors? They think that safety is in their staying inside the house. They find it hard to adventure or give their daughters the chance to even open the door because what lies behind it is a scary world, which a mother should not expose her daughter to. A woman’s surrender to this massive amount of fear makes her cruel towards her daughter; those who see her think that she is a monster, but she is a human being terrified of what lies beyond her closed door. Even today many women don’t have choices. They have become frozen in time, for they must silence pain and questions and rebellion. In today’s world, their insistence on being faithful to tradition makes them lose their identity as mothers.
Yet reflecting on the present situation of women in her country, Albeshr is simultaneously optimistic, attributing the improvement in women’s conditions to several factors—one of which is the establishment of progressive private universities for women, “such as Effat, Dar Al-Hekma, Prince Sultan, and Al-Yamama, whose programs are noticeably more advanced than the ones run by many governmental universities.” It is something to cheer about, she says, that the Saudi woman is no longer the submissive individual who accepts what others plan for her; for now she can choose her education and career, and even her husband and the number of children she wants to have. Change is a universal phenomenon, says Albeshr, who did her PhD on globalism in the Gulf countries, examining the roles played by the Internet, mobile phone, and satellite TV in connecting these countries to the outside world. “I thought about this generation, which has been brought up on Turkish and Latin American soap operas. These young people know about other worlds, much more open and flexible and indulgent than theirs. They cannot escape change.” In addition, she says, financial well-being has enabled people to travel, to Bahrain and Dubai, if not to the States and Europe. Scholarship programs, too, send thousands of female students abroad to get their education. All these influences, Albeshr concludes, have created a generation of women that is not only more progressive but better able to communicate and negotiate, and bring solid change to society.
As a young women going to university herself, Albeshr was forward looking, embracing social change and making decisions that were considered unconventional for a woman of her generation. “How did you meet your husband, the comedy star, Nassir al-Qassabi?” asked one student, marking the first question directed to the writer in the interview. Her response charmed the students, who live in a world where arranged marriages are still the norm. She was involved in an amateur college theatrical dealing with women’s issues, and she decided to make it a hit by asking al-Qassabi to help her write one of the scenes:
When I phoned him, he was obliging, but not prompt. He wanted to know more about the problems that we faced as students, and the time it took to go over the details gave us the chance to get to know each other. I was surprised a month later when he said that he was ready to write the scene if I consented to marry him. I thought at first he was joking, so I said, “Fine, finish the scene and I’ll marry you.” I never thought this was going to be real. I took some time to think about this proposal because I thought it might not be easy to become an actor’s wife. Then I thought why not, and the whole thing turned out to be much more simple than I had expected.
Judging by what Al-Qassabi and his team have given the public in
What have my students and I learned from this interaction with five distinguished Saudi writers? A great deal, one can readily say. The students’ term papers showed pride, appreciation, and acceptance of ideas they could not have easily accepted in the past. Reading some of the writers’ works prior to the interviews, the students could ill-afford to hide their judgment: “But Hifni is too bold! I don’t think the bedroom scenes she depicts give a good image of our society? Is this the best language to use?” Towards the end of the project, Badriah Albeshr’s daring language, as well as content, may not have fallen so vehemently on the untrained sensibilities of the students, but some members of the class found the writer’s “transgression” against religion hard to take. I had my fears for the interviews; something might happen to unhinge “my project.” I had to wait to see my fears eventually allayed and to be pleasantly surprised when the girls gradually exchanged their earlier conclusions for a better understanding of what “freedom of expression” means to the writer. “We can’t take literature to court,” one student said, quoting Albeshr; “We can’t take a character to jail just because he or she has killed another.” They are indeed the target audience for whom Albeshr says she writes, the audience not yet set in their own ways.
Needless to say, this development in my students was the result of “exposure” to what they had not known before. And much of the influence was occasioned by the writers themselves, their being far above what the press had made of them, far above stale conventions. Perhaps the glamor of being a writer, which the women all too well radiated, has something to do with this readiness to discard preconceived notions of what is “proper” and what is not. At the end, I was left to wonder whether Amal Shata’s sincere piety, so winsome and easy to relate to, fared much better than the “sacrilege” some of the girls found so shocking in Zainab Hifni or Badriah Albeshr.
In their essays, which came at the end of the project, my students thought more in terms of what the writers have in common than of their different views. They noted that all the writers encouraged reading, thinking, sensitivity to social issues, and awareness of women’s rights. They marked the difference between the writers as individuals and their characters and highlighted al-Juhani’s insistence that what she presents in her fiction is simply the characters’ ideas, their vision of the human condition, which may not be her own views. Maisah al-Sobaihi, acting live so many roles, drew a very clear line between the writer and the world she creates. In addition, Shata’s portrayal of emotionally and sexually starved middle-aged women shocked at first the romantic sensibilities of my students, but these women do exist and are, therefore, legitimate literary subjects.
What other highlights? I asked the students in an effort to have them sum up the conclusion of their thinking about the whole experience. Their responses have helped me conclude this article. Zainab Hifni’s unqualified admiration for today’s youth left fond memories: “I am one hundred percent on the side of the youth,” Hifni said, having assured the young women that the new communication technologies and other sources of knowledge available nowadays have created a more informed, more knowledgeable generation. Amal Shata may not share Hifni’s optimism in this matter, but her sentiments equally appealed to some students: “The new generation is living a time harder than ours. Our life was clearly figured out for us, and we didn’t have the options girls nowadays have.” She explained that although she spent her formative years in Cairo during the 1960s (a much freer world than Makkah or Jeddah), the world then didn’t have the Internet or satellite TV, and the government supervised media sources. “The clash, therefore, was minimal between the youth and the authorities. There were limits. People nowadays do not believe that talking with boys and walking without hijab are haram. We did then and had no problem with it. We didn’t have the conflict young girls have nowadays.” Maisah al-Sobaihi sang and danced in a scene celebrating
The idea of inviting the writers to speak only to my students in ENGL 493, Senior Seminar, soon developed into the idea of having the writers speak to a much larger audience of faculty and students. Two lectures, conducted formally in two different campus auditoriums, were followed immediately by the exclusive interviews carried out by my class with the writers Zainab Hifni and Amal Shata. In Maisah al-Sobaihi’s case, I took advantage of the fact that she was already coming to Effat University to perform her play
Ages are approximate here. Out of courtesy, the students refrained from asking the writers about their age, and the few published records that give a birthdate do not quite correspond.
In her work
The writer asked if it were going to be a mixed audience, and if so, would we consider one hundred women and four men (sitting in the back) as a mixed audience? But the presence of even one man is a cause for wearing hijab and/or
This subject has been widely dealt with in Saudi fiction and nonfiction. Badriah Albeshr, for instance, refers to it in her novel
Albeshr wrote about her society before and after oil wealth. See, for example, her recent work
Formal education did not start in Saudi Arabia until the 1960s. For more information, see
This theme is most obvious in Albeshr’s novel
For a well-documented work on al-Sahwa and its activities, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, see Madhawi Al-Rashid’s
The Saudi writer Nabila Mahjub told me during a gathering (14 September 2014) at the Cultural and Literary Club in Jeddah that she had stopped writing fiction because she felt uneasy about having her sons and brothers read about her “deeply felt” scenes, which would be shocking to their sensibilities. “Not being able to write freely and expand kills creativity,” she said.
These writers include Samar al-Mugrin, Warda Abdulmalik, and Saba al-Hirz.
Denoting “visiting” rather than living arrangements, the word
So far, autobiography is not a common genre in Saudi literature. Writers fear social retribution and, therefore, writing fiction is a safer mode of expressing personal ideas.
Many religious women insist on wearing the traditional
This is a reference to fish vendors who capitalize on people’s fear of consuming the flesh of animals not killed according the Islamic way (hence the word “halal” or lawful).
Government school education is a recurring theme in the works of Saudi women, whose heroines often suffer from campaigns targeting secular reading in school. Girls’ education was religiously oriented and geared towards the formation of the “ideal” Muslim girl. For a feminist Saudi work on girls’ education, see
Albeshr here is referring to the annals of the Hilalians, Bedouin tribes from Najd and Hijaz known for their adventures but also bad reputation before and after their emigration to Maghreb in the tenth century.
The author has no competing interests to declare.