When I first came to this country, I couldn't understand the people because of my lack of English. These days I can't understand the people because of their lack of English, which includes my friendly GP who is a Pakistani who grew up in Jeddah where his father worked as a banker.
To keep his mind off my blood pressure and cholesterol level, I gave him my spare copy of Robert Lacey's "The Kingdom" which I had last read while holed up for two weeks in a five-star hotel in Bahrain as I waited for my entry visa to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to come through.
I never quite read all of its 668 pages because rather than being able to take it with me on the long flight across that sandy emptiness to Jeddah, I had to leave it behind as the book was banned in Saudi Arabia, but I do remember reading in it about the "Death of a Princess", a docudrama that had stirred up an international hornets' nest only two years earlier.
To keep up with my GP and to remind myself of what I had read forty-odd years ago, I re-read my beautiful hardcover copy of "The Kingdom" and also watched the docudrama which is freely available on YouTube:
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Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Read the docudrama transcript here
(Part 13 not found)
Here's the gist of it: One noon-time towards the end of July 1977, Princess Misha'il, granddaughter of Prince Muhammad ibn Abdul Aiziz, was led out into a car park beside the Queen's Building in Jeddah and forced to kneel down in front of a pile of sand. She was then shot dead. Standing near by was her young lover, Khalid Muhalhal, nephew of General Ali al Shaer, special Sa'udi envoy to Lebanon, and, when the young man had seen the princess die, he also was executed - by beheading.
Nearly three years later, in the spring of 1980, a film dramatization of these executions and of one journalist's attempts to investigate them was broadcast by ATV in Britain, and this broadcast caused King Khalid such offence that he instructed Great Britain to withdraw her ambassador from the Kingdom. There was even wild talk at one stage in April 1980, of not only the ambassador but all 30,000 Britons working in Saudi Arabia being put on planes back to London.
Such were the bare essentials of the painful international melodrama that flourished for a season around "Death of a Princess". The outline of the princess's story was straightforward. Married off at an early age to an elder relative who took little interest in her, Princess Misha'il, the daughter of one of old Prince Muhammad's less distinguished sons, turned for consolation to young Khalid Muhalhal and enjoyed with him a romance whose flamboyance scandalized the rest of the family. The couple tried to elope. To effect her elopement, the princess staged a drowning, leaving her clothes in a pile on the shore of the Red Sea. Then she tried to escape with her lover from Jeddah airport, disguising herself as a man. They were caught, and both suffered the death penalty prescribed for adultery in Saudi Arabia's code of Islamic law.
There's a rumour that Princess Misha'il had a stand-in - or should that be a 'kneel-in'? - and that she's slowly growing old in a windowless room of the royal palace in Riyadh like some latter-day female version of the "Man in the Iron Mask". Will we ever find out? "Inshallah." If God wills it.
