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Biography & Autobiography. Multi-Cultural. Religion & Spirituality. Nonfiction. HTML:"In this stunningly written book, a Western trained Muslim doctor brings alive what it means for a woman to live in the Saudi Kingdom. I've rarely experienced so vividly the shunning and shaming, racism and anti-Semitism, but the surprise is how Dr. Ahmed also finds tenderness at the tattered edges of extremism, and a life-changing pilgrimage back to her Muslim faith." - Gail Sheehy The decisions that change your life are often the most impulsive ones. Unexpectedly denied a visa to remain in the United States, Qanta Ahmed, a young British Muslim doctor, becomes an outcast in motion. On a whim, she accepts an exciting position in Saudi Arabia. This is not just a new job; this is a chance at adventure in an exotic land she thinks she understands, a place she hopes she will belong. What she discovers is vastly different. The Kingdom is a world apart, a land of unparralled contrast. She finds rejection and scorn in the places she believed would most embrace her, but also humor, honesty, loyalty and love. And for Qanta, more than anything, it is a land of opportunity. A place where she discovers what it takes for one woman to recreate herself in the land of invisible women.… (more)
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Ahmed
Ahmed wasn't particularly dedicated to her faith prior to her stay in Saudi Arabia. While there, however, she embraced Islam in a new way and in her memoir she shares her religion with the reader, which was very enlightening to me. It didn't feel preachy, just informative. All religion is nuanced and varied upon closer inspection and Islam is no different. The form embraced by Ahmed felt liberal and progressive, and according to her, that is the true Islam.
My only complaint about this book is that it could have used a little more editing. There are several grammatical errors and inconsistencies. Ahmed dedicates nearly 100 pages to a description of her participation in Hajj, an important rite of passage in Islam, when it could have been covered in half that. While frustrating at times, this did not keep me from thoroughly enjoying the book.
I've never looked at Iran in the same way since reading Elaine Sciolino's Persian Mirrors, and I now feel the same about Saudi Arabia. After reading Qanta Ahmed's intimate observations of daily life in the Saudi kingdom, and her descriptions of the people she came to know while living there, I feel as if I've looked inside a book that I previously judged only by its cover.
Her compelling story is told in vivid detail, almost distracting in its descriptive intensity, but very illuminating as she describes her experiences through the curious, clinical eyes of a doctor. Her friends, associates and patients seem very real and multifaceted, as do her experiences within and outside the medical compound's walls.
I would recommend this book to anyone who seeks further understanding of this incredible cultural chasm, seen through the eyes of an intelligent, articulate professional woman. My biggest surprise was that I found her experiences so shocking, despite having read many books that lay bare this same treatment of women. My indignation as a woman and a human smolders even more after reading this memoir.
I also found that she was oddly schizophrenic in her response to veiling: when around westerners, she adopted a superior tone and emphasised the idea of the sense of liberation veiling gave her; when around Saudis, she often adopted a superior tone, asserting her right not to. There are moments where she labours the point of liberation from male attention. When she described how Saudi men attempted to pick up girls, much as she attributed her fear and intimidation to the male attention, I couldn't help but ask myself whether this stemmed from the attention itself or the context of the climate of fear created by the religious police, which she had already demonstrated she was affected by.
Nonetheless, this book is a fascinating window onto what it, for me, an alien world. It was an interesting portrait of two vastly different forms of Islam (from multi- and single faith environments). I found it particularly telling that, at the outset, the non-Muslim expats who had been in the Kingdom longer, often appeared more at home than the Muslim narrator. The opening account of a dying woman and the extreme lengths her family went to to make sure that she remained veiled raised the interesting question of whether her rights were being supresses or her dignity upheld - as she was unable to bear witness to this herself, we shall never know.
It is evident that there are multiple levels of segregation in the Kingdom: by sex, by nationality and by class with the dichotomy of the uber-rich and the slave class that serves them. Many of the most interesting moments for me were the tales of the ER as these gave insight into the nature of Saudi citizens at their worst moments; these stories were more 'alive' than some of Ahmed's other descriptions. The re-telling of her pilgrimage to Mecca, her Hajj, was absolutely fascinating - a real view of a world I know very little about.
In the end, I found Ahmed to be a person who seemed to be conflicted in her sense of national identity. It is telling that in the chapters describing post-9/11 Saudi Arabia, Ahmed finds it quite easy to take an uncritical view of America's role in precipitating the event. Despite being English born, she repeatedly allies herself with America, constantly belabouring the point that she owed America a great deal for her medical training (conveniently failing to give any credit to the British university that gave her her original medical degree). Ultimately, the author's obvious and overriding pro-American voice led me to treat her description of post-9/11 Saudi with a degree of scepticism as, with regards to America, I never got the sense that her writing was particularly balanced. The degree to which she allied herself with America is typified by a description of a conversation with a Saudi male who sympathised with the US later in the book, where she describes him as being 'on our side' - it is rare that an English person would ever use the word 'our' to encompass the US and the UK as an entity.
I was, in the end, reminded of the fact that change never comes fast. There is process and there is evolution behind every perceived momentary revolution of culture. The book ends on a hopeful note that leaves the reader feeling that there may be a chance for Saudi Arabia; that, in time, it could become a more open and independent place for all Saudis, women included, and that this could happen without the submersion of its rich Islamic heritage under the yoke of a western, or more specifically an American, monoculture and value structure. How accurate this is, I'm not sure. Ahmed's voice is not one that I feel I fully trust and sometimes there is a sense that, once free from the control exerted by the Kingdom, able to return as an obviously-rich western woman, there is a tint of rose in the glasses she wears to look back at it. Certainly from personal accounts I've had from people who have spent much longer in the Kingdom than Ahmed's short stay, the view is not so positive.
For the story and insight it gives to aspects of Saudi life, I would certainly recommend this book. It's a four-star for content. Unfortunately, it's a two-star for writing ability; although it's not often so bad that it prevents you from absorbing the facts, certainly at the beginning you have to cling to the fact that from a chapter or so in the subject matter becomes fascinating and overrides the fact that the writing is so poor at the outset that you'll be tempted to discard it. Hang in there! It will be an illuminating experience. I decided to split the difference and settled on a three-star compromise.
I read this as an e-book which was a new experience for me. The book has a very accessible style which helped, because I've actually found reading it on the computer more difficult than I would have thought and I think I might not have made it to the end had I not enjoyed the book so much. If I'd had this in book form and been able to hold it in my hand, I would have finished it in a couple of days, but having to read it on the laptop felt a bit of a chore. Testament to the book that I did finish it.
It's much scarier when the dystopia is real - as Qanta Ahmed's story of her year living as a doctor in Saudi Arabia makes clear. Saudi Arabia expects all women to wear head-to-toe veils in public at all times and never appear in public without a male chaperone - it makes no exceptions for citizens of other countries, even solo travelers - like Ahmed - invited to practice medicine there at a hospital endowed by the royal family.
When I downloaded this book to my Kindle as part of the Early Reviewers giveaway, I wasn't expecting the book to be written from such a strong Western perspective - I thought that surely someone who opted to go to Saudi Arabia would have known what to expect, and would have fit in there in a way that a red-headed American like me couldn't possibly relate to.
But the culture clash for Ahmed was just as visceral as it would have been for a non-Muslim - from the moment she first donned her veil, she perceived it as an eraser trying to wipe out her identity. Though inside the hospital she is allowed her to speak to her male and female colleagues and remove the veil from her face, outside on the streets she was a virtual prisoner of the fanatical, nearly hysterical moral police. As an unmarried woman with no male relatives in the Kingdom, she risked jail every time she attended a going-away party off the hospital grounds.
As her year progressed, though, she got to know her male and female colleagues and saw that underneath the veils, behind the high walls of their private homes, they were bright, passionate, political, and most amazingly, comfortable. The rigid rules about public conduct had not sunk beneath the surface. The runaway oppression of women in public doesn't extend to family life, where Ahmed found most women were happy in their marriages, had a voice and control over their personal spaces, made friends and found ways to work, even though outside they were unable to drive, hounded by testosteronal Saudi men who have no outlet for their aggression, unable to speak in public, and forbidden from shopping in most stores.
Ahmed never gets used to the public spaces in Saudi Arabia, but develops a deep appreciation of her Muslim faith and the Saudi people she meets, especially during her pilgrimage to Mecca. As a reader, I also understood by the end that Saudi Arabia is not a monolithic gulag, but it remains - for Ahmed as well as me - just as inscrutable and impenetrable at the end as it was in the first chapter.
The book gives a remarkable portrait of a relatively naive woman--naive in the sense that she did practically no homework on the country before moving there--encountering the limits that state-sponsored, fanatical religious observance put on her life. As a Muslim, she assumed she would fit in to a Muslim country, but instead found it to be a very foreign world, indeed.
As fascinating as I found her tale, the book has drawbacks that better editing could have prevented. She does not tell us enough at the beginning of the book who she is, nor provide a time frame for her reminisces. I knew she was a doctor, and that her American visa was not renewed when she expected it to be, but only in later chapters could I piece together that she was a Pakistani British citizen. She has the same problem presenting the time frame; it is the late nineties, pre-9/11, a salient fact that is not explained early enough in her narrative.
She presents her story informally in a series of portraits of the women and men she meets, both Saudi and ex-pats, who are coping with the unusual restrictions of life in Riyadh. Most movingly, she describes also her deepening understanding of her own religious heritage, especially during her impulsively-taken Hajj pilgrimage.
Near the end of the book she tells of her struggles as a Westernized woman, a former resident of New York City, during the 9/11 attacks. As with so many other experiences of her experiences in the Kingdom [of Saudi Arabia], much of what she thought she knew about the Saudis and her co-religionists from other nations fell away.
I would recommend the book, even with its flaws, as a compelling portrait of a world few foreigners can ever penetrate.
What I was Given:
A smattering of sexism, punctuated by admiration for the warm brotherhood of Saudi men. A world of women, some more comfortable in their restrictions than others –conducting their lives as best they know how. One scene, a vehicle pursuit of a car of women by a car of men – sings out. But harassment by men is unfortunately not unique to this culture. Otherwise the world of women mostly revolves around culturally sniping each other for faux paus in the name of religious piety. A handful of worthwhile cross-cultural observations involving globalization.
What more I could want:
Chapter divisions that made more sense thematically. As well as more cumulative build in chapter progressions. A central point. A more compelling narrative tone. More voiced internal contemplation of the world she was observing as opposed to the almost “just the facts” descriptions. An ending that felt less pat, less clean and dismissive – more contemplative.
I am a better person having read this book.
Most of the writing is quite good, informative and insightful; there are a couple of chapters that could safely be re-written, but overall it’s very interesting, and I never lost the zeal to read it.
I liked the format, and didn’t mind reading it off my computer screen at all.
I had difficulty deciding on the rating for this book, because although I enjoyed it very much (and highly recommend it), I feel that the author's failure to grasp what I see as obvious explanations for cultural "mysteries" is a big flaw in a book that attempts to do exactly that. However, after reflection, I believe that my own, personal (lack of) faith is not a fair basis on which to judge the book...so 4 stars it is!
Ahmed's portrayal of Saudi Arabia is sensitively drawn. She seeks out many people's opinions in exploring Saudi Arabia's culture and character, but never pretends to give anything other than a personal account. While it may seem a bit self-involved to give her emotional reaction to everything, I think that gives the reader the context she/he needs to interpret the information fairly. I think the book is slow in spots, but mostly the material is absolutely fascinating! My biggest quibble is how long ago the author's experiences happened. Saudi Arabia has changed much since then, and I would have like to see more about that at the end of the book than is presented.
Ok, well maybe not my biggest quibble, but this is my personal, philosophical rant, so if you're just reading this to see if the book is recommended and why, stop here. Ahmed is repeatedly puzzled by apparent contradictions and contrasts in Saudi Arabia, particularly between what she sees as a her loving, live-affirming, egalitarian, feminist Islamic religion and the hateful, death-celebrating, elitist, misogynistic behaviors she observes even among Saudi Arabia's devout, intellectual, progressive, elite. She seems diappointed on how a kingdom ruled by the law of the religion she embraces could still have people who behave and think so contrary to it, and she seems determined to blame it on a minority of relgious extremists in Saudi Arabia. The fact is, people are good or bad irrespective of their faiths. The "good Muslims" in her book are good because they are good humanists. They may give their faith credit, but then should their faith take the blame for all the "bad Muslims"? They would be bad without their faith as well - their faith merely gives them an excuse for their behavior. People are people, in a religious kingdom or not, and it seems naive to me to expect them to be less or more no matter to whom they pray or in what nations boundaries they reside.
Though I don't usually enjoy reading medical accounts, the portions of the book that take place in the hospital are handled with grace and delicacy. Not once is a patient's story told just for the sake of telling it, but rather it always fits in with a lesson that Quanta wants to impart.
Overall, absolutely worth reading!
Doctor Ahmend left Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the bombings of 9/11, she could not reconcile herself with the reactions of some of her colleagues. She now teaches at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charelston.
Part of this aimlessness shows up in the narrative - there's no real sense of time in the book, as it jumps around and has no reference points. This is mostly fine - the book is as much about Saudi Arabia and its people as it is about Ahmed's experiences there - but can be slightly confusing in terms of the characters there. And the section on her pilgrimage to Mecca seems to end somewhat abruptly.
But the strength of the book comes in seeing how the slice of Saudi Arabian life Ahmed moved in worked at the turn of the century - it's fairly fascinating, and her tendency to indulge heavily in description works to the good more often than it does in terms of flowery overreach. (The latter is most frequent in clothing description and so on). What's fascinating is not just the way the people deal with the government, but how the strict sex separation and everything else has affected the way people grow up and interact.
Ahmed's not the best writer, but her prose usually isn't enough to detract from the frequently fascinating stories in "In The Land of Invisible Women"; while the book doesn't say much about politics, it says a lot about the people, and that's probably more important in learning about the no longer so distant Saudi Arabia.
It was very interesting to see how they treated non-Saudi Muslims there. She showed how hard
I was very shocked to see how her fellow medical workers acted after 9/11 happened. I can't imagine being in a country when something like that happens and people being happy about it.
I would recommend this book by anyone who wants to see how the life of women is in the country without all the anti-Muslim rhetoric.
My only qualms with the book were as
1) cast of characters - exceptionally large and very often new characters would simply appear out of thin air and be treated as though the readers had known them their entire lives - only for them to never be seen again.
2) citations and notations - it was very difficult to tell what was a footnote and what was a an end note (though I blame the editor on that one), and there weren't nearly enough of them. As a history major with minors in Middle Eastern studies and the Arabic language, I knew a great deal of the information before hand, but even then I found myself "googling" a lot of terms. I tremble to think how a lay-person would have handled this book
3) Whatever happened to the professor she met at Mecca? Did she ever take her up on her offer of visiting?
4) Her occasional contradictions of herself - in one chapter she talks about how the men have unlimited freedom akin to their western male counterparts that often leads to reckless behavior, then barely a page later she says that in the Kingdom men were just as restricted in their thoughts and actions as the women due to the mutawaaen and others.
Other than that I'm absolutely in love with the remarkable job this book did of opening up Saudi Arabia to me. I've always been desperate to visit (especially after dating a Saudi national). Her book just reinforces that desire.
Until the day Saudi Arabia opens it's doors to single, christian women without male chaperons, I will have to rely on Qanta's memoir to envision myself there.
Unfortunately, about halfway through this novel I started to find some of the descriptions pretty tedious. It was all more of the same and I was getting bored. I also didn't like the last chapter, where she went back to Saudi Arabia after leaving for several years. Her descriptions of the changes from the time she left to the time she returned were cursory and abrupt. Frankly, I found the ending chapter to be a little disappointing because throughout the rest of the book she was telling us how bad things are in Saudi Arabia and then suddenly she tacked on "P.S. things aren't so bad now." I would have preferred if she had started out the book by saying "Things aren't so bad now, but this how they used to be a few years ago." That would've at least put me in the right frame of mind.
The prose in this work surprised me. I found it quite flowery for what I would have expected from a clinician, but at the same time, it evoked the gorgeous and sensuous visuals that I remember from visits to European lands where Moorish influence is apparent. That said, the prose sometimes become overbearing, and I found myself saying 'enough already'
I got this in an electronic download. I can't wait til it comes out in hardback--I found the electronic format a bit limiting. I'm sure if it had been on a playaway or a kindle, or some other portable device it would have been ok. I didn't have any trouble reading it (although I could have done with a much lighter watermark thru each page), but I found myself feeling chained to the computer since that was the only place it could be read. If I hadn't had the luxury of a laptop, I would probably not have finished it.
The story drags in the middle, and I found myself saying 'get on with it" several times. It could have done with some judicious editing. Overall however, it was an enlightening, entertaining, and worth the effort.