Girls of Riyadh

One reader—she didn’t give her name—tells me she doesn’t know how I can be so naïve as to exalt love. And how can I be so proud of my clueless friends who go on pursuing this hopeless quest and probably will do so for the rest of their lives? There is nothing better, she proclaims, than a respectable fiancé who, as they say, “walks in through the front door.” The two families already know each other, there are solid ties and since it’s all done through family channels the bride is certified as a good girl and everyone agrees on everything. There is no room for nonsense or deception as there is with this “love match” thing. This method is beneficial to the girl, since it guarantees that the guy won’t have any suspicions as to her past, which might well happen if they had had any sort of relationship before marriage. How could any rational girl kick away an opportunity like that and run after something not guaranteed?

Your opinion, my friend, is one I respect. But if we lose faith in love, everything in this world will lose its pleasure. Songs will lose their sweetness, flowers their fragrance, and life its joy and fun. When love has been in your life you see that the only true, real pleasure of life is love. Every other thrill arises from that basic source of pleasure. The most meaningful songs are those your lover hums in your presence, the prettiest blossoms are the ones he offers and the only praise that counts is your beloved’s. In a word or two, life only goes Technicolor in the very moment love’s fingers caress it!

O God, we—the Girls of Riyadh—have been forbidden many things. Do not take the blessing of love away from us, too!

After a three-week engagement and after waiting four months after the contract-signing ceremony, Lamees’s wedding day arrived.* It was the first wedding to be planned by Sadeem, Gamrah and Um Nuwayyir, in collaboration with Michelle, who had come from Dubai especially to attend her friend’s wedding on the fifth of the month of Shawwal, the month after Ramadan, when the marriage business booms.

Preparations were in full swing all through Ramadan. The biggest share of the burden fell on Um Nuwayyir and Gamrah, since they were the only ones in Riyadh, where the wedding would take place. Sadeem took on some light duties such as ordering the chocolates from France, while Michelle was responsible for using her connections to record a CD of songs written by some of the famous singers she knew personally. A custom-made CD for Lamees and Nizar to play during the party, and then copies could be handed out afterward to the guests as a keepsake.

Gamrah would begin working every night after she performed the evening Ramadan prayers at the huge mosque downtown. Shopping malls rarely open in the daytime during Ramadan, but they make up for it at night, opening until three or four in the morning throughout the holy month.

She always brought Saleh with her to the mosque when she went to pray—she wanted to be sure to inculcate in her little boy, who was now three years old, a sense of religious devotion early on. Saleh was happy to come, and would throw on his miniature black woman’s abaya, which Gamrah had cut and hemmed to his size after he demanded that she buy him one exactly like hers. He wouldn’t be put off about the abaya, and so she had relented, shrugging off Um Nuwayyir’s repeated warnings about giving in to his desires. Gamrah would remind Um Nuwayyir that Saleh was growing up in different circumstances than those in which her Nuri had been raised. Her little Salluhi was growing up among all his uncles, and so there was no cause to fear that he would lack adequate male role models just because his father wasn’t around. Anyway, he looked so cute, gathering the folds and ends of the voluminous black abaya around his little-boy clothes, his head covered all the while in a traditional shimagh.

During the prayers, Saleh would stand next to her imitating every one of her moves, from the very beginning with saying “Allah Akbar”* to reciting to bending down and prostrating himself on the carpet-covered floor. When he got bored with imitating her, he would twist his head and contort his upper body toward her as she bent and knelt, trying to peer into her eyes and those of the rest of the grown-ups lined up for prayer, seeing if he could make them laugh. Kneeling in front of them, he would lean so far forward that he would topple over on his face, and then he would roll over onto his back, still grinning his wide grin and waiting for someone to smile back, any one of those gloomy-looking women in the row who tried to avoid meeting his gaze and keep their concentration on the prayer. Losing hope, he would take the opportunity of their kneeling and bending to the ground in prayer to give every one of those frowning women a little pat on her rear end, before going back to stretch out on his back in front of them, laughing and totally proud of his achievement!