Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [68]
But they are stuck, and so are the men. Over coffee one afternoon, an economist told me wistful stories of studying alongside his wife in the United States. His wife drove herself around; she was an independent, outspoken woman. Coming home to Riyadh had depressed both of them.
“Here, I got another dependent: my wife,” he grumbled. He chauffered and chaperoned her as if she were a child. “When they see a woman walking alone here, it’s like a wolf watching a sheep. ‘Let me take what’s unattended.’”
Both he and his wife believed, desperately, that social and political reform needed to materialize. Foreign academics were too easy on Saudi Arabia, he argued, urging only minor changes instead of all-out democracy because they secretly regarded Saudis as “savages” unsuited for a surfeit of freedom.
“I call them propaganda papers,” he said. “They come up with all these lame excuses.”
The couple had already lost hope; their minds were on the next generation. All they could do, they thought, was speak frankly.
“For ourselves, the train has left the station. We are trapped,” the economist said. “I think about my kids. At least when I look at myself in the mirror I’ll say: ‘At least I said this. At least I wrote this.’”
The story was on the front page: A nine-year-old girl had been stabbed to death by her father and stepmother. It happened in Mecca—Islam’s most sacred city, home to the holiest of holy shrines.
I sipped Nescafé. I chewed on a sweet roll. I was in the oil-rich eastern provinces, in a stuffy hotel breakfast lounge with big glass windows and the flat sprawl of desert below. My eyes flickered down through the article. I swallowed, and the bread stuck in my throat.
The mother and the father divorced a long time ago after she suffered physical abuse at his hands. She kept custody of the girl under Islamic law until the girl turned seven … The father won custody last year …
When the mother did get an opportunity to see or speak to her daughter, she noticed signs of abuse. When she reported this abuse to authorities, she was ignored …
After stabbing his daughter and realizing that she might have died, he and his wife washed her blood with Clorox and took her to the hospital where he told the emergency personnel that he doesn’t [sic] know what is wrong with her. When they examined her, they found she was already dead and that she had suffered multiple fractures and stabs …
A few days before the incident, the biological mother had sent a letter to the Mecca municipality begging the governor to intervene before the father killed the girl …
The rights of the parents are granted priority over the rights of the child. The father, who is more often the perpetrator of domestic abuse, is also favored under the current system in accordance with social norms …
Police do not have the authority to enter homes and bring abused children under public protection … according to law, wives cannot report domestic abuse by husbands to the police …
According to Islamic law, a father who kills his child is not eligible for the death penalty …
The father is likely to serve a jail sentence of a number of years if he’s found guilty. The mother may receive monetary compensation for the death of her daughter.
I looked up from the page. All around me sat men—men from America and men from Great Britain and men from France, men eating their breakfasts and preparing for business meetings. Men who’d already begun their meetings, hunched with jovial, berobed Saudi men over platters of scrambled eggs. Men meeting for oil in this land of invisible women.
Pundits like to talk about Saudi reform. About how maybe women will be allowed to vote, or to drive. But after years in the Middle East, the word reform signified, to me, the tangled, unholy alliance between America and the Arab dictators who grant and revoke press laws, women’s rights, and political party laws on a whim. The flaw in the notion of Arab reform