I'm in the middle of this one, but it reads easily, like it was taken from a diary. The author, Carmen Bin Ladin, is the divorced sister-in-law of Osama Bin Ladin. Need I say more?
Well . . . . she is a good writer, and compelling with a first person point-of-view of Saudi society. She grew up in Switzerland, her estranged father's native land, and her mother was Iranian, and this seems to have partly disposed her to ignore some of the oppressive elements she first encountered when dating Osama's half-brother. I haven't reached the point in the book where she describes Osama, but her descriptions of Saudi society are swealtering to the soul.
Her husband's childhood is telling: sent away to bording school at 6 years of age, and one of so many children that maternal bonding was probably strained, or rare. She remembers him with real affection, and so her remarks about his deep underlying insecurities are both convincing and endearing.
It is disturbing to see, in these descriptions of Arab society, women portrayed as a man's worst fears. I'm generalizing from Saudi culture, but other readings, such as Fatema Mernissi's "Islam and Democracy: The Fear of Freedom" suggest this to be true, in varying degrees perhaps. But as I reflect on this fear, it isn't really a man's fear, but what we'd describe in the west as a basic fear of intimacy, a fear of being known - a violent repulsion of the existential encounter, with an entire society built to minimize this exposure, perhaps symbolized by the veil. But this fear of intimacy extends, seemingly, to every aspect of human encounter, with men and women almost a symbol of the emptiness, or degradation of emotional intelligence, where the individuation we value in the West, even when it's miniminal, is more dangerous to Arab society than any of its secondary, external expressions.
I can see, further, how various traditions of Tantra arose around the world as crucial elements of the formative psychology of spiritual practice. This isn't a topic of the book, but the devastating polarity between men and women in Saudi society accentuates how resisting the interior transformation of sexual yearning into spiritual devotion creates these crushing misogynist behaviors. One can easily imagine the genuis and threat that Sufism must pose to even moderate Islam. In fact, what is hard to overcome is the notion that a society, whose culture is so terrified of individuation, would be almost incapable of moderating its religious dogma.
By the way, the Arabic term for woman, "hormah," derives from "haram," which means sin. Yikes . . . . . .
So, w.c., it would seem that part of militant Islam's disdain of the West could also be a rejection of the liberation that Western women enjoy. . . no?
