A Saudi woman struggles for her husband, a political prisoner
By Jay Nordlinger — March 8, 2016
Ensaf Haidar, the wife of jailed Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi, poses with a portrait of her husband as she receives the 2015 Sakharov Prize on his behalf during a ceremony at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, December 16, 2015.
REUTERS/VINCENT KESSLER
Editor’s Note: In our February 29 issue, we had a piece by Jay Nordlinger: “The House of Saud and the House of Badawi: A wife’s struggle for her husband.” Today, Mr. Nordlinger expands that piece in his Impromptus column.
Ensaf Haidar is playing a familiar role, and it is a very difficult role: wife of a political prisoner, who finds herself in exile, spending her time campaigning for her husband. Trying to keep him alive, trying to win his release.
Avital Sharansky did this for nine years. I remember watching her on television, on shows like Nightline. She was touching, impressive (pretty, which helped). She was the wife of Anatoly Shcharansky, who was in the Soviet Gulag. Later, in Israel, he became Natan Sharansky.
More recently, Geng He has played the role. She is the wife of Gao Zhisheng, the heroic Chinese human-rights lawyer.
I could name many more wives. They rise to the occasion. They say they can do no other. But still: They rise to the occasion.
What would you and I do, in a similar situation? As well as they, we can hope.
Ensaf Haidar lives in Quebec — Sherbrooke, specifically — where the winters are very different from those of her native Saudi Arabia. In January, I asked her some questions. One was about the weather. What did she think of the winter?
A Quebec winter is harsh, she said, but “the Canadian people are so warm and welcoming that I can barely feel the cold.”
She considers herself very lucky to be in Canada.
Ensaf is the wife of Raif Badawi, one of the most famous political prisoners in the world. He is a Saudi liberal, 32 years old. He advocates the most basic human rights — freedom of expression, freedom of conscience. He was imprisoned in 2012.
It was in 2000 that he and Ensaf met. They met “by accident,” as Ensaf says. He was a friend of her brother, and occasionally her brother lent her his phone. One day, she wound up talking to Raif. They liked each other. They had a lot in common. They thought alike. They “clicked,” in short.
The two could not meet face to face, of course — this being Saudi Arabia. But they talked on the phone every day. For two years.
Creatively, they arranged to catch glimpses of each other. Theirs was a Romeo and Juliet-style romance, complete with balcony scene. How could that be? Well, Ensaf would stand on her parents’ balcony, and Raif would loft letters to her.
They never met — truly and properly — until the day he arrived at her home to ask her hand in marriage. Her family flatly refused. But Raif wore them down, with his friendliness, persistence, and charm.
He and Ensaf married in 2002. They honeymooned in Syria, which was a haven of liberalism, compared with their own society.
For several years, they enjoyed what Ensaf describes as a normal life. Raif was an entrepreneur, the owner of an English-language school and an information-technology school. The couple had three children, two girls and a boy.
In 2008, Raif did something fateful: He started a website,
Free Saudi Liberals. He wanted a space in which he and his fellow citizens could discuss fundamental issues of concern to them.
What kind of society did they want to have? What kind of society did they have a right to have? What was the place of religion in the state? Should there be any separation of religion and state at all? What about women? Should they be followed around by police, when they are unaccompanied? Should they be forbidden to celebrate national holidays, along with men?
And so on.
Let me note that Raif’s older sister, Samar, is a human-rights advocate as well. She is a story unto herself. She too has been in prison. She has been charged with disobeying her father. And she has driven — that is, she is one of the Saudi women who have had the audacity to drive a car.
As I said, she is a story unto herself, but I will continue with Raif (and Ensaf).
Free Saudi Liberals caught the attention of free-thinking people. They flocked to it as to an oasis in the desert. In equal measure, it caught the attention of the authorities — who froze Raif’s bank accounts and forbade him to travel.
Ensaf’s family was alarmed (understandably). They took legal steps to force her to divorce Raif. She would have none of it.
Being the troublemaker’s wife, Ensaf received death threats. Eventually, she and Raif decided that it was best for her and the children to go abroad. He would join them, they thought, in a couple of months.
First, Ensaf and the children went to Egypt, and then Lebanon. They received their ultimate asylum in Canada.
In 2012, Raif was arrested. Among the charges were “insulting Islam through electronic channels” and “going beyond the realm of obedience.” When all was said and done, the sentence was ten years, plus a thousand lashes. The lashes were to be administered 50 at a time, every Friday, for 20 weeks.
The first flogging occurred on January 9, 2015. Raif was led to the square outside the Juffali Mosque in Jeddah. Handcuffed and ankle-shackled, he was hit 50 times, as a crowd of hundreds cheered.
“Allahu akbar!” they shouted. (“God is great!”)
Later, Ensaf saw this event on a leaked cellphone video. “Every lash killed me,” she said.
The 50 lashes the next Friday did not occur. The authorities said that the prisoner’s wounds from the first lashes had not healed sufficiently. Ensaf believes that a second lashing would have killed him: Raif is slight of build, and, while in prison, has developed diabetes.
That second lashing? It has been postponed Friday after Friday after Friday. To this day, it has not occurred.
One reason, almost certainly, is that the first lashing provoked an international outcry. The lashing took place two days after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris. “Je suis Charlie” was a universal slogan. People also picked up “Je suis Raif.”
Raif’s lawyer was Waleed Abulkhair, another human-rights advocate, who was also his brother-in-law — Samar’s husband. He is another story unto himself. Waleed founded a group to monitor human rights. He also founded a salon: called “Samood,” meaning “resistance” or “steadfastness.” As at
Free Saudi Liberals, people could talk about the fundamental issues.
To read a column by Waleed in the
Washington Post, go
here. To read another, go
here.
In 2014, he himself was arrested: charged with “breaking allegiance with the ruler,” among other offenses. They sentenced him to 15 years in prison. To be followed by a 15-year travel ban.
So, they are trying to sideline him for life, it seems.
As you can see, this is a family drama, as well as a personal one, and a political one, and an international one. To add to the drama, Samar and Waleed have recently divorced, though Samar continues to campaign for him.
Raif Badawi is a cause célèbre. There have been protests around the world in his behalf, often outside Saudi embassies. Governments have raised his case with the House of Saud. In the time-honored fashion of dictatorships, the house has complained about “attempts to interfere in our internal affairs.”
The Saudis’ marquee prisoner, Badawi, has received many awards (in absentia, of course). Last year, he was given the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, which comes from the European Parliament. His wife, Ensaf, went to pick it up. Here is some of what she said:
“Raif Badawi was brave enough to raise his voice and say no to their barbarity. That is why they flogged him.”
“Free and enlightened ideas are considered blasphemous in the ideology adopted by Arab societies, in which every free thought is decadence and a diversion from the true path.”
“Raif is not a criminal. He is a writer and a free-thinker — that is all. Raif Badawi’s crime is being a free voice in a country that does not accept anything other than a single opinion and a single thought. He is just a thinker who refused to be part of the herd following clerics living outside of time and governing by unjust and tyrannical laws.”
Ensaf told me that Raif’s winning the Sakharov Prize helped his cause a lot, in Europe — not so much in the U.S., but in Europe, yes. It “helped psychologically,” Ensaf said.
The Saudi government destroyed Raif’s writings — his blogposts — but not all of them: His allies were able to retrieve some of them. They have been put into a book called “
1,000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think.”
One of the entries is called “No to Building a Mosque in New York City.” The (London)
Telegraph published it:
On September 11 we remember the painful day of a terrorist attack that resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. Coinciding with that painful memory, many Muslims in New York are calling for an Islamic centre, including a mosque and a social lounge, to be built in the same area where the World Trade Centre stood.
What pains me most is the boldness of New York’s Muslims, who did not think about the thousands of people who died on that dark day and their families. This brashness has reached the limits of insolence. What bothers me even more is this chauvinist Islamist arrogance they display; they disregard the innocent blood spilled because of the plans of barbaric and brutal masterminds under the slogan of ‘Allahu akbar’.
The question I must ask, as a global citizen first and a citizen of the country that originated those terrorists, is very simple: Why the arrogance? What kind of racist discrimination against innocent human blood allows us to demand such a thing?
Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the ordinary American: how open-minded are we going to be if a Christian or a Jewish person attacks us in our very home? Will we build a church or a synagogue for them in the same location as the attack?
I highly doubt that.
(Of course, the Saudi government does not permit the building of churches or synagogues regardless.)
Ensaf Haidar, too, is about to publish a book — another component of her campaign for her husband. Called “
The Voice of Freedom,” the book tells Raif’s story, and hers, and theirs.
I ask what her days are like. “Hard,” she says. “There are no words to describe how difficult it is to wait, just to wait without knowing what will happen.” Her biggest fear is that Raif will be tried for apostasy — the penalty for which is death, usually by beheading.
She does her best to remain calm, if only for the sake of her three children. They are growing up in Quebec — and the boy, exhibiting the assimilation of the very young, has become a rabid hockey fan. He plays the sport with his friends, and they root like mad for the Montreal Canadiens.
For a long time, Ensaf had weekly phone calls with her husband — terribly brief, but regular. She has not been able to speak with him since December 11. She believes that his condition is very poor. He needed medical care, and asked for it. When he was denied it, he went on hunger strike, to get it. Instead of giving him medical care, they moved him into solitary confinement.
As if the couple didn’t have enough trouble, both their families have disowned them. Their parents don’t want the three children to grow up abroad. They are worried they won’t become good Muslims. Raif’s father has appeared on Saudi television, to denounce his son. This must buy him some space in Saudi society. Shame falls on everyone associated with a dissenter. (So should glory.)
About the Saudi government, Ensaf does not want to say anything right now. Any word, apparently, might be harmful. She does want to talk about her adoptive country, for which she’s so grateful: “Canada has made me feel that I matter as a human being.”
Her main hope is that “free societies will pressure the Saudi government to release Raif.” The United States would be especially helpful here.
Let me say that Saudi Arabia is our ally, and necessarily so. But we citizens should not close our eyes to the fact that, really, this is a ghastly dictatorship, imprisoning and torturing some of the very best of that country.
For years, many of us have hoped for the appearance of Sharanskys, Sakharovs, and Solzhenitsyns on the Arab scene. They exist, obviously. They may not be world-class scientists or writers, but they certainly exist, and they are very brave.
Ensaf Haidar is brave too. She says that it is “normal” to defend one’s husband. But some people can’t rise even to normality. Raif and Ensaf are an extraordinary love story, kindred spirits — two people who found each other in a desert, in more than one sense. Ensaf thinks they are destined for each other.
I will close with a humble fact. I think it says a lot.
If Ensaf filed her taxes as a single parent, it would be to her advantage. But she refuses. She insists on filing as married. Because she is.
