Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia

Princess presents the true story of a woman identified only as Sultana, a member of Saudi Arabia's ruling Al Sa'ud royal family. Sultana asked American author Jean Sasson to tell her story. The book traces Sultana's life from childhood through the early 1990s, chronicling her struggles against the rigid patriarchal system governing Saudi women.

Sultana was a direct descendant of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, who in 1902 recaptured the kingdom from the rival Rasheed clan after years of exile and married more than 300 women to secure tribal loyalty. Born into this dynasty, Sultana grew up in a family of 10 daughters and one son, Ali. Her earliest vivid memory was being slapped by her mother at age four for praying to Ali instead of toward Makkah, Islam's holiest city, sparking her first awareness that her brother was treated as superior. Her father was merciless toward his daughters, lavishing resources on Ali while dismissing the girls as burdens. Sultana's mother, married at age 12, was powerless to challenge her husband.

From an early age, Sultana became the family troublemaker. When she refused to surrender an apple to Ali at age seven, her father punished her by giving Ali control of her food portions, leaving her hungry each night. Ali was consistently cruel: he taunted a child with a disability, tortured kittens, and threw the sisters' beloved puppy from a moving car. Sultana's defiance hardened while her sisters resigned themselves to obedience.

Sultana's mother, supported by King Faisal's wife Iffat al Thunayan, a pioneering advocate for female education, eventually persuaded the father to allow his younger daughters to attend school. Sultana's favorite sister, Sara, three years her senior, proved brilliantly gifted, but brilliance offered no protection. On Sara's 16th birthday, their father announced she would marry a 62-year-old man chosen solely for business advantage. Sara protested fiercely. Their father had the telephones disconnected, confined Sara to her room, and moved up the wedding. On the day itself, a doctor injected Sara with tranquilizers to prevent her from causing a scene.

Five weeks later, Sara attempted suicide by placing her head in a gas oven. At the clinic, Sultana's mother discovered Sara's husband had subjected her to sadistic sexual brutality. For the first time, their mother defied her husband, threatening to take the story to the king unless Sara was freed. The husband reluctantly divorced Sara. The experience transformed Sultana, who resolved to fight for women's rights.

Before a family trip to Egypt and Italy for Sara's recovery, Sultana discovered Ali's hidden pornographic magazines and alcohol and planted them in the neighborhood mosque. The mutawas, or religious police, arrived with evidence bearing Ali's name, and Ali was sentenced to mandatory daily prayers for 12 months. In Cairo, Sultana and Sara stumbled upon Ali and his friend Hadi raping an eight-year-old girl whose mother had sold her. Ali told a horrified Sultana that their father did the same when visiting Cairo.

Returning at 14, Sultana learned her mother, Fadeela, was dying of an inoperable spinal tumor. Fadeela died surrounded by her 10 daughters and was buried in the desert without a headstone. Within months, their father married Randa, a 15-year-old former playmate of Sultana's. Sultana initially felt fury but then took pity on the terrified young bride and befriended her.

Sultana formed a women's club called "Lively Lips" with Randa and two friends, Nadia and Wafa, vowing to oppose forced marriages. Nadia and Wafa secretly approached foreign men for sexual encounters and were arrested by a morality committee. After imprisonment, Wafa was married off to a 53-year-old religious man, and Nadia's father sentenced her to death by drowning in the family swimming pool. Sultana's father discovered the club's papers, divorced Randa, and warned Sultana that had she participated, he would have seen her "lowered into your grave" (119).

Through her Filipino maid Marci, Sultana learned of the widespread exploitation of foreign domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, including Marci's friend Madeline, who was repeatedly raped by her Saudi employer and held prisoner for two years.

At 16, Sultana was engaged to Kareem, a 28-year-old royal cousin educated as a lawyer in London. In a rare breach of custom, she was allowed to meet him before the wedding. Her eldest sister, Nura, revealed that she and three older sisters had been forcibly circumcised at puberty, a trauma that left permanent damage. The six youngest daughters were spared after a Western physician convinced their father to abandon the practice. Kareem's concern about this issue signaled to Sultana that he wanted a genuine partner.

Their wedding was grand, and Kareem proposed an unconventional honeymoon: a courtship after marriage, with physical intimacy only when Sultana was ready. They traveled to Cairo, Paris, New York, and Hawaii over 10 weeks. Upon returning to Riyadh, they moved into the palace of Kareem's parents, where his mother, Noorah, became a hostile rival. When a household confrontation escalated, Kareem slapped Sultana. She retaliated by smashing artwork, including a Monet painting, and Kareem punched her unconscious. Soon after, Kareem's younger brother Muneer was caught smuggling alcohol, drawing the wrath of the religious police. Sultana seized the moment, threatening to leave and use her father's influence to ensure Muneer's punishment. Noorah, terrified of losing both sons, begged Sultana to stay and made peace.

Sultana discovered she was pregnant but planned an abortion rather than remain in a troubled marriage. Kareem burst into the physician's office at the last moment, alerted by household gossip, and they reconciled. Sultana gave birth to a son, Abdullah, vowing to raise him to respect women. While in the hospital, she learned of Amal, another patient being held in the same maternity ward—a teenage girl shackled and guarded—who had been gang-raped by her brother's friends yet blamed for the assault. Amal's father insisted on death by stoning after Amal delivered her baby.

In March 1975, King Faisal was assassinated by his own nephew, devastating the women who considered him their sole champion. Sara found happiness by marrying Kareem's brother Asad. Sultana later learned of the fate of Sameera, a childhood friend who had fallen in love with an American student while studying in London. After Sameera's parents died in a car accident, her fundamentalist uncle seized guardianship and lured her back to Saudi Arabia with false promises of leniency. He forced her into marriage, but Sameera fought her husband violently and taunted him about her American lover. The humiliated husband demanded punishment, and the uncle sentenced Sameera to permanent solitary confinement in "the woman's room" (238), a windowless, soundproofed cell. She was 22.

Years later, after Sultana underwent breast cancer treatment and sterilization, Kareem announced his plan to take a second wife. Sultana attacked him, then executed a calculated escape: she forged travel documents, emptied the family safe, flew to Dubai to collect her three children from a British summer camp, and disappeared across Europe, eventually settling outside Paris under a false name. After five months, she negotiated her return. Kareem signed a binding agreement: no second wife, or Sultana would receive a divorce, custody of the children, and half his fortune. She returned to Riyadh, though their love had been substantially damaged.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the arrival of American female soldiers shocked Saudi Arabia. Forty-seven Saudi women staged a protest by driving cars through Riyadh's streets, but the backlash was swift: They lost their jobs, had passports confiscated, and were denounced as prostitutes from mosque pulpits. The war ended quickly, and Western attention to Saudi women's plight faded.

In the epilogue, Sultana stands on her balcony at dusk, watching Kareem and Abdullah walk hand in hand to the mosque, shut out just as she was shut out from her own father and Ali as a child. Nearly 30 years have passed, yet nothing has changed.