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woman of about forty-five
years of age. She once asked my parents’ permission to expand my
sisters’ education to include science, history, and math. Father
responded with a firm no and the recital of the Prophet’s words,
and his words alone continued to ring throughout our villa.
    As the years passed, Father saw that many of
the royal families were allowing their daughters the benefit of an
education. With the coming of the great oil wealth, which relieved
nearly all Saudi women, other than the bedouin tribes people and
rural villagers, from any type of work, inactivity and boredom
became a national problem. Members of the Royal Family are much
wealthier than most Saudis, yet the oil wealth brought servants
from the Far East and other poor regions into every home.
    All children need to be stimulated, but my
sisters and I had little or nothing to do other than to play in our
rooms or lounge in the women’s gardens. There was nowhere to go and
little to do, for when I was a child, there was not even a zoo or a
park in the city.
    Mother, weary of five energetic daughters,
thought that school would relieve her while expanding our minds.
Finally, Mother, with the assistance of Auntie Iffat, wore Father
down to weak acceptance. And so it came to be that the five
youngest daughters of our family, including Sara and myself,
enjoyed the new age of reluctant acceptance of education for
females.
    Our first classroom was in the home of a
royal relative. Seven families of the Al Sa’ud clan employed a
young woman from Abu Dhabi, a neighboring Arab city in the
Emirates. Our small group of pupils, sixteen in all, was known in
those days as a Kutab, a group method then popular for teaching
girls. We gathered daily in the home of our royal cousin from nine
o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, Saturday
through Thursday.
    It was there that my favorite sister, Sara,
first displayed her brilliance. She was much quicker than girls
twice her age. The teacher even asked Sara if she was a primary
graduate, and shook her head in wonder when she learned that Sara
was not. Our instructor had been fortunate to have a
modern-thinking father who had sent her to England for an
education. Because of her deformity, a club-foot, she had found no
one who would marry her, so she chose a path of freedom and
independence for herself. She smiled as she told us that her
deformed foot was a gift from God to ensure that her mind did not
become deformed too. Even though she lived in the home of our royal
cousin (it was and still is unthinkable for a single woman to live
alone in Saudi Arabia), she earned a salary and made her decisions
about life without outside influence.
    I liked her simply because she was kind and
patient when I forgot to do my lessons. Unlike Sara, I was not the
scholarly type, and I was happy the teacher expressed little
disappointment at my shortcomings. I was much more interested in
drawing than in math, and in singing than in performing my prayers.
Sara sometimes pinched me when I misbehaved, but after I howled in
distress and disrupted the whole class, she left me to my
mischievous ways. Certainly, the instructor truly lived up to the
name given her twenty-seven years before—Sakeena, which means
“tranquility” in Arabic.
    Miss Sakeena told Mother that Sara was the
brightest student she had ever taught. After I jumped up and down
and yelled, “What about me?” she thought for a long moment before
answering. With a smile, she said, “And Sultana is certain to be
famous.” That evening at dinner, Mother proudly passed on the
remark about Sara to Father. Father, who was visibly pleased,
smiled at Sara. Mother beamed with pleasure, but then Father
cruelly asked how any daughter born of her belly could acquire
learning. Nor did he credit Mother with any contribution to the
brilliance of Ali, who was at the top of his class at a modern
secondary school in the city. Presumably, the intellectual
achievements of