2008, Sourcebooks, Inc., Naperville, IL, 454 pages

We Americans tend to think of Saudi Arabia as either a picturesque desert playing host to Peter O’Toole, or as the incredibly boring and stifling patriarchy of legend where nothing of interest other then judicial beheadings occurs.

Throughout In The Land of Invisible Women, Ahmed Qanta dispels these opposing fantasies by sketching a woman’s-eye view of a nail-biting dysfunctional society where women walk in fear of a lock of hair escaping their shroud of living mummification, to high powered men in a panic over whether or not the couple they are dining with has an up-to-date marriage license. Behind all of this fear and paranoia are the Mutawaeen, or Men in Brown, the radical clerics that trace their fanatical brand of living death back to the 17th Century.

Although we think of extreme orthodoxy and stifling tradition as ancient, this is as untrue of Islam as it is of Christianity. For, as Qanta points out, just as modernity was gaining hold in 17th Century England, and spawning the reactionary puritan cults, so was an Islamic clergy man founding his own Islamic version of Puritanism.

Doctor Ahmed takes the reader on an intimate journey through a land where being a woman is a crime, her very clothing is her parole officer, and the ever looming religious police are merely a breath away.

My favorite chapters of this elegantly written—and not in the least feminist—book are:

4, Abbayah Shopping

5, Invisible and Safe

6, Saudi Women Who Dance Alone

14, The Million Man Wheel

15, Committing Haram

21, Mutawaeen: The Men In Brown

27, Show Me Your Marriage License!

34, The Hot Mamma

Doctor Ahhmed permits the reader to get to know some of the villains of this bizarre reactionary kingdom, as well as many of the dedicated and deeply contemplative people she worked and lived alongside at the National Guard Hospital, that was directly supported by the Crown Prince. Perhaps her most telling recollection was her mystical experience surrounding her hajj to Mecca, including a surreal crowd scene where people threw stones at a pock marked pillar in a wild religious frenzy at the Jamaraat pillars.

In The Land of Invisible Women is a singular memoir, written by a woman telling her story, not marching for some cause, but telling us about a world she came to know.