Saudi Princess Chained to Train Tracks for Being Unable to Have Children
My name is Nadia al-Rashid and I am from Riyad, Saudi Arabia. I was not born into poverty.
I was not born into suffering. I was born into gold. My father was a senior prince within the house of Saud, a man whose name opened every door in the kingdom and whose phone calls were answered by ministers and generals within seconds.
We lived in a compound in the northern district of Riyad that was so large it had its own roads running through it.
There were fountains in the courtyards and marble floors that reflected the lightlike mirrors. There were servants who had worked for our family for generations.
There were cars lined up outside every morning waiting to take my father wherever he needed to go.
We had everything that money and power could provide. And I grew up believing that this abundance was evidence of God’s favor.
I believed we were blessed because we were faithful. I believed Allah had rewarded our family with wealth because we submitted to his will completely.
That my mother was a quiet and graceful woman who had grown up in a religious family in Jeda.
She wore her abaya and nikab with dignity and she prayed all five prayers without fail every single day.
She read Quran after fajar every morning sitting in the pale light of dawn with the holy book open across her lap.
She never raised her voice. She never complained. She accepted the boundaries of her life without resistance.
And she passed those values down to me as a mother passes a precious heirloom from her own hands into the hands of her daughter.
I was the third of seven children. I had two older brothers who were being prepared to carry the family name forward into positions of power and influence.
I had four younger siblings who filled our home with noise and laughter. And I existed in the middle of all of it or a princess in every sense of the word, sheltered and educated and protected and controlled in equal measure.
My education was excellent by any standard. My father believed that a well-educated daughter reflected well on the family.
So I attended the finest private girls school in Riyad. I studied Arabic literature and Islamic Jewish prudence and mathematics and the sciences.
I learned English from a private tutor who came to our home three afternoons a week.
I was a serious student who loved reading. I spent hours in my father’s private library running my fingers along the spines of books he had collected from all over the world.
I read history and philosophy and poetry. My mind was hungry for everything it could absorb.
But the education I received, no matter how excellent, always operated within a specific boundary.
On there were things I was taught and things I was never allowed to question.
The Islamic Republic of our faith was not a subject of debate in our household.
It was the foundation of everything. Allah was sovereign. The prophet peace be upon him was the final messenger.
The Quran was the perfect and uncorrupted word of God. The role of a woman was to submit first to her father and then to her husband.
These were not opinions. These were facts as certain and unchangeable as the desert horizon.
I absorbed these truths without resistance because they were all I had ever known. I prayed with sincerity.
I fasted during Ramadan with devotion. I wore my hijab with pride. I believed fully and completely in the Islam I had been raised inside.
It was not a performance. It was the air I breathed. It was the water I drank.
It was the ground beneath my feet. The first crack in my perfect world appeared when I was in my early 20s.
My father sat me down in his private study one evening and told me very calmly that he had accepted a marriage proposal on my behalf.
The man’s name was Prince Fad bin Mansour. He was 15 years older than me.
He was from a prominent family with close ties to the royal court. He had been married once before briefly and that marriage had ended in divorce.
My father told me this was an excellent match. He told me that Fad was wealthy and respected and that I would want for nothing as his wife.
He told me the wedding would take place within 3 months. I sat across from my father in that quiet study and I nodded and I said I was honored by his choice because that was what you said.
That was what a good daughter said in a moment like this. You did not ask if you could meet the man first.
You did not ask if you had a choice. You did not ask if love was supposed to come before the contract.
You smiled and you nodded and you trusted your father’s judgment because questioning it was not an option that existed within the world.
You had been raised in. I met Fahad for the first time at our engagement ceremony.
He was tall and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed beard going gray at the edges.
His eyes were dark and assessing. He looked at me the way someone looks at a purchase they are satisfied with.
He was polite and formal during the brief time we were allowed to speak with family members present.
He told me he had heard I was intelligent and well read. He said he appreciated a wife with a sharp mind.
He said he hoped I would settle comfortably into his household. The wedding took place in October.
It was a lavish event that filled an entire ballroom in one of Riyad’s most prestigious hotels.
Hundreds of guests attended. The women’s celebration on one side of the divided hall was an ocean of jewels and designer clothing and expensive perfume.
The food was endless and extraordinary. The decorations had been planned for months. Everyone told me I looked beautiful.
Everyone told me how lucky I was. I stood in the middle of all that celebration wearing a gown that had been made for me in Paris.
And I tried to feel the joy that everyone around me seemed to feel on my behalf.
But underneath the silk and the diamonds, I felt something I could not name. Something that sat quietly in the center of my chest.
And would not move. Something that felt very much like fear dressed up as composure.
Fad’s primary home was a large villa in a private residential district of Riyad. He had a household staff of 12.
He had a separate wing of the house that served as his private office and meeting space where I was not permitted to enter without invitation.
He had routines and rules that were already in place long before I arrived and I was expected to slot myself into those routines without disrupting anything.
The early months of our marriage were not cruel. Fad was not a violent man in the beginning.
He was distant and formal and controlled, but he was not cruel. He expected his home to run perfectly.
He expected meals at specific times and in specific ways. He expected silence when he was working and conversation on his terms when he was not.
Taught he expected me to be available when he wanted my company and invisible when he did not.
I adapted as quickly as I could because adaptation was the skill I had been trained for my entire life.
There was one expectation above all others that sat at the center of our marriage like a stone.
Fahad wanted children. More specifically, he wanted sons. He had gone into this marriage with a single primary purpose.
And he made that purpose clear to me within the first weeks of our life together.
He wanted heirs. He wanted boys who would carry his name and inherit his wealth and extend the legacy of his family into the next generation.
This was not a desire. It was a requirement. I wanted children too. I genuinely did.
I had always imagined myself as a mother. Yay, I had spent years watching my own mother raise her seven children with grace and love.
And I had imagined doing the same thing. I wanted a baby I could hold and nurse and sing to.
I wanted the warmth and fullness that a child brings into a home. So in the beginning, the pressure to conceive felt like a shared desire rather than a demand.
But the months passed and nothing happened. We consulted doctors quietly and discreetly because in our world medical difficulties were private matters that did not leave the family.
The tests were conducted with careful confidentiality and the results when they came back were delivered to Fahad first because that was how things worked.
He came to me one evening and stood in the doorway of our bedroom with an expression on his face that I had not seen before.
At something cold and assessing had replaced his usual controlled manner. He told me the doctors had found a problem with my fertility.
He told me the issue was significant. He told me the likelihood of natural conception was very low.
He did not hold me. He did not offer comfort. He stood in that doorway and looked at me with an expression that contained something very close to contempt.
And then he turned and walked back to his office and closed the door behind him.
That was the night my golden cage became a prison. The change in Fad’s behavior was gradual at first and then suddenly total.
The distance between us grew into a wall. He stopped eating dinner with me most evenings.
He stopped asking about my days or sharing anything about his own. He spent more time away from the villa conducting business or visiting his family.
So, and when he was home, he looked through me as if I had become transparent.
I had failed at the one task that mattered most in his world, and he could no longer see the point of me.
I threw myself into prayer. I prayed with an intensity I had never reached before.
I woke before Fajar every morning and prostrated myself on my prayer mat in the darkness of our bedroom.
While Fahad slept, I begged Allah to open my womb. I recited every dua I knew for fertility.
I fasted additional days beyond Ramadan as acts of supplication. I visited a respected shake who gave me Quranic verses to recite over water that I drank every morning.
I gave charity in amounts that stretched my personal allowance to its limit, believing that generosity would open the gates of heaven’s mercy towards me.
Nothing changed. Fad began receiving pressure from his own family. His mother, a formidable woman who ruled her household like a sovereign, came to visit and sat across from me in our formal sitting room with the particular polite cruelty that certain women have perfected over decades.
She drank her tea and asked about my health and spoke in veiled references about the importance of family continuation and the disappointment of baronness.
She told me there were doctors in London who specialized in these situations. She told me that some women simply were not built for childbearing and that in such cases a husband had legitimate rights to consider his options.
She said all of this with a smile on her face and a strand of prayer beads moving through her fingers.
I understood exactly what she meant. The word she was too refined to say out loud was divorce.
Or worse, she was reminding Fad that Islamic law permitted a husband to take a second wife.
Either outcome would be a devastation. Either outcome would be a public humiliation that my family would carry as a stain for years.
I went home to my parents for a visit that week and sat with my mother in her sitting room.
I told her some of what was happening, not all of it, because there were things you simply did not say out loud, even to your mother.
I told her Fad was unhappy. I told her the medical situation was difficult. My mother listened and then she took my hand and told me to be patient.
She told me to trust in Allah’s wisdom. She told me that sometimes Allah delays blessings to test the faithfulness of his servants.
She told me to submit more fully, to pray more consistently, to serve my husband better to and trust that Allah would reward my obedience.
I went back to Fahad’s villa and I did exactly what my mother told me.
I submitted more. I prayed more. I served more. I made myself smaller and quieter and more invisible in the hope that my obedience would somehow change the biology that had failed me.
It did not change anything. But I kept believing it would because I had no other framework to believe inside of.
The second year of our marriage was darker than the first. Fad had stopped pretending that our marriage was functioning.
He had taken a second wife, a younger woman from a family in Medina. The announcement was made to me directly without ceremony on a Tuesday morning over breakfast.
He told me as if he were reporting a business decision. He said it did not affect my status or my living arrangements.
Uh he said I would remain in the villa. He said it was his right under Islamic law and then he finished his coffee and left for his office.
I sat alone at that breakfast table for a very long time. The second wife moved into a separate house nearby.
Fahad divided his time between the two households on a schedule that became known to everyone around us.
The servants knew. My in-laws knew eventually because these things always spread no matter how much you try to contain them.
My own family knew. My father called me and spoke in careful measured tones about dignity and patience.
My brother said nothing directly to me, but I could feel their discomfort whenever I was in the same room with them.
I had become the woman who could not fulfill her purpose in the world I moved through.
That was a specific kind of shame that had no remedy. I was 26 years old and I was already beginning to understand what it felt like to be erased.
The crisis came in the third year of my marriage in the spring of the year when the desert heat arrived earlier than usual and settled over Riyad like a lid pressed down on a pot.
Fahad’s family had property in the desert regions outside the city. Not the polished desert of tourist photographs, but the harsh and empty stretches of sand and rock that extend for hundreds of miles in every direction without mercy.
His family had been connected to this land for generations.
There were old structures on parts of this property, remnants from earlier decades, including the ruined framework of Tenor Narrow Gauge Railway that had once been used to transport materials across the estate during a construction project years ago.
But the track had long been abandoned.