Mike's Saudi (7) Meeting Mansour and His Father

There are times in life when you meet people who you naturally trust and almost immediately become friends, so it was when Mansour and I started to work together. He was what might be described as a middle class Saudi with western leanings but a strong reliance on his faith. So he tended to understand me and my sense of humour and I had by this time been in Saudi long enough to more or less understand him. Within a few hours of our meeting I had taken him home and introduced him to Syb, we had a cup of tea made the Arabic way which impressed him, then, much to our surprise, he suggested we go to his home to meet his wife. This should be seen in the context of the time and of Islam, wives did not meet other males outside the family.

We were naturally flattered. When we arrived at his home both of us were ushered in to the family lounge and introduced to Fateeha his wife and the children. Syb and Fateeha immediately took to each other and learnt to converse with each other in a half English and half Arabic over the coming weeks. Because we all seemed to integrate so well from that moment on we became members of his family and whenever we visited we all used the family lounge, the only exception was when non-family men or women visited, then we used to split into the two lounges. Mansours extended family was very large and we were introduced round “This is my brother from another mother” was not unusually his father had had many wives but no more than four at a time as was required by Islam. We met him later at a wedding when he was over 90 and was considering another wife, Syb met the lucky lady(?) who was 40 at the same event and she was adamant she was not marrying such an old man. I believe she won out.

Mansour was an influential person his father having been with King Saud when he united the country, before that he fought with the French and it was rumoured that he could hit a egg with his rifle from the back of a galloping camel. If you have seen a galloping camel you will know what feat of shooting that is, if it’s true. The wedding was the only time we met the old man, unfortunately we spoke no Arabic at the time and felt much embarrassed as he reeled off the languages he could speak; it seemed in the end that English was one of the few he was unable to speak. But even though we couldn’t communicate directly, there were plenty of people who could translate for us. I really admired him he had such a great presence. Oddly enough Mansour and I never seemed to speak about him again and I have no idea how he fared.

I seem to have strayed a little from where I started but I will return to Mansour and Fateeha in later blogs. I know that some of the background against which I write seem strange to those who have not lived in an Islamic society. Syb’s book ‘Inshallah’ does give a fair picture of a Muslim family life in the way we experienced it in 1978.(amazon.com/dp/B007OIX3XM)