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family. She was particularly incensed at Crown Prince Faisal and blamed him for her husband’s dilemma. She told us that the brothers of her husband had conspired to take the throne that had been given by their father to the one of his choice, Sa’ud. She cried out that the religious council, the Ulema, had arrived at the palace that very morning and had informed her husband that he must step aside as king.
    I was entranced by the scene before me, for rarely do we view confrontation in our society. It is our nature to speak softly and agree with those before us and then to handle difficulties in a secret manner. When our auntie, who was a very beautiful woman with long black curls, began to tear out her hair and rip her expensive pearls from her neck, I knew this was a serious matter. Finally my mother had calmed her enough to lead her to the sitting room for a cup of soothing tea. My sisters gathered around the closed door and tried to hear their whispering. I kicked around the large clumps of hair with my toe and stooped to gather the large smooth pearls. I found myself with fistfuls of pearls and placed them in an empty vase in the hallway for safekeeping.
    Mother guided our weeping auntie to her waiting black Mercedes. We all watched as the driver sped away with his inconsolable passenger. We never saw our auntie again, for she accompanied Uncle Sa’ud and his entourage into exile. But our mother did advise us against feeling harsh toward our uncle Faisal. She said that our auntie had uttered such words because she was in love with a kind and generous man, but such a man does not necessarily make the best ruler. She told us that Uncle Faisal was leading our country into a stable and prosperous era, and by doing so, he earned the wrath of those less capable. Although by Western standards my mother was uneducated, she was truly wise.
     

Chapter Two: Family
     
    My mother, encouraged by King Faisal’s wife Iffat, managed to educate her daughters, despite my father’s resistance. For many years, my father refused even to consider the possibility. My five older sisters received no schooling other than to memorize the Koran from a private tutor who came to our home. For two hours, six afternoons a week, they would repeat words after the Egyptian teacher, Fatima, a stern 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