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By Basrawi Fadia
Fadia, a Saudi Arab, grew up within the strictly circumscribed and tailored ‘desert Disneyland’ of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). This slice of recent, suburban, center the United States used to be positioned in Dhahran, Aramco’s administrative headquarters in Saudi Arabia, a theocratic Muslim country run in line with strict Wahabbi Shari’a law.Eventually, after simply short vacations overseas traveling family members in colourful Arab towns like Medina, Damascus and Alexandria, Fadia moved to Beirut, the glitzy ‘Paris of the center East’, to wait highschool. In Beirut she fell in love with a passionate and idealistic Lebanese journalist with whom she eloped opposed to her mom and dad’ needs, in this case getting stuck up in Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil warfare whereas elevating a family members of 5 children.Providing a desirable account of a Saudi woman’s painful trip from na?ve Aramcon woman to lifestyles as a resident of a war-torn capital urban, this publication offers new perception into very diversified center jap worlds approximately which so little is understood via these residing outdoors the quarter.
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Additional info for Brownies and Kalashnikovs: A Saudi Woman's Memoir of American Arabia and Wartime Beirut
Example text
The suq was lined with tiny shops traditionally handed down from father to son. Salesmen stood at the door to their shops and called out to potential 37 ✬ BROWNIES AND KALASHNIKOVS ✭ customers to buy their wares of iridescent damask silks, handmade mosaic boxes, embroidered tablecloths, towels, spices, 21 karat gold jewelry, satin bed sheets and risqué underwear for brides to be. Branching off from the main covered suq was a maze of sinewy crowded paths lined with intricately designed Ottoman and Mamluk era homes, their occupants hidden from the public eye behind thick wooden doors with heavy brass knockers in the shape of gargoyles and colored glass windows with tightly latticed wooden shutters.
Shafiq and complained to the administration, Dhahran Senior Staff School treated us much as the company dealt with its Arab employees … as mirages … there, but not really there. We did not study the geography or history of Arabia nor the beauty of the Arabic word, nor the history behind the Muslim civilization. I had no idea who the Ummayyads, Abbasids or Fatimids were or what Salaheddine el-Ayyubi or Harun al Rashid did or where. I barely knew the facts surrounding our prophet. But I did learn that “in fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” what went on during the Boston Tea Party, the contents of the Declaration of Independence, how to build a log cabin and furnish it, the hardships of the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, the location and history of all fifty states in America, and the names and life histories of each and every one of the Presidents of the United States of America.
She took the easy way by choosing to do what every Syrian does when they leave Syria … remain Syrian to the core: unbending, unchanging, and unyielding. My mother, Muzzayyan Kotob, was a Damascene beauty with amber eyes, a rosy complexion, glossy black hair and skin so soft and translucent that the slightest pressure left glaring marks. The eldest and prettiest of her sisters, she loved the feminine accoutrements of clothes, perfume, and make-up so much, it bordered 26 ✬ B R AV E N E W W O R L D : G R O W I N G U P ‘ A R A M C O N ’ ✭ on narcissism.