A lot of people have all kinds of misleading and misconstrued notions in their heads when they think of life inside the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia has long fascinated outsiders, from western feminists who ponder the fate of women inside this male-dominated nation to foreign oil prospectors, adventurers and rogues of all sorts. The Kingdom attracts its share of oddballs, besides the millions of Muslims visiting annually for the sacred Haj. I've seen a great many of them, but I have never seen the like of Solomon Haverhill.
It's often been said that much of Muslim society is two-faced, and nothing could be truer than Saudi Arabia. Here, in the heartland of Islam, tourists from places like Belize, Spain, Turkey and Kuwait enjoy the charms of 'pleasure girls' recruited from exotic places such as Ethiopia and Kenya, as well as among the throngs of impoverished Saudi girls whose families abandon them because they don't need extra mouths to feed. I was such a gal, until fate sent me a man who changed my life. My name is Maya, short for Mayameen. I was born in the town of Dhurma, about forty six kilometers from the bright lights and gleaming spires of metropolitan Riyadh, the fabled Saudi Capital.
Whenever I tell people that prostitution runs rampant in Saudi Arabia, they shake their heads and say that I must be lying, that such a thing would never be permitted in the heartland of Islam. And they're absolutely wrong. You see, the world's oldest profession tends to flourish in places where sexually is repressed. Don't believe me? Take weed for example. In many western countries, it's a problem because many people smoke it, become addicts and get involved in crimes both petty and serious. If it weren't illegal and forbidden, it wouldn't lure so many otherwise decent people, would it?
The same goes for prostitution in Saudi Arabia. In a land where men and women spend a LOT of time apart due to socio-religious restrictions and age-old traditions, sexually frustrated men with a lot of time and money on their hands need an outlet. Since most Saudi men would rather experience the touch of a lovely woman rather than to fuck other men, that's where girls like myself come in. Create a demand for something and the supply will soon follow. Visitors entering the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be told that drinking, sex outside the marriage bed and other such vices are haram and punishable by whipping and imprisonment. The Saudi vice police is the biggest joke in the world. Half of my clients are sexually frustrated Saudi policemen. The other half are preachers, clerics and government agents. Those I call the morality enforcers. They look the other way while girls like myself do our thing because they get to reap certain benefits, you see? It's no different than anywhere else, really. Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours and all that jazz.
Of course, ladies like myself have to be careful because the same man who smiles happily at the 'pleasure provider' whose pussy he just rammed will go home, pray, and then decide the next day that he repents from his sinful urges and try to tip off the few 'legit' members of the Saudi vice police about our brothels. It's a roll of the dice at the end of the day, I guess that's why I trust no one. I've been in this game for a long time. In many ways I could almost say that it's all that I've ever known.
In every society, there are the haves and the have-nots. My parents, Amir and Hafizah Abdul-Rahman were definitely part of the latter category. In Saudi Arabia, the gap between rich and poor is so wide it's not even funny. You have the rich, which includes the countless princes and princesses of the Saudi royal family, and those directly under them, the governors, the wealthy merchants and the powerful clerics. And then you have people like my parents and myself.
We are the real citizens of Saudi society. Those you seldom hear about. Westerners know about the wealthy Saudi princesses seen shopping at high-end stores in places like Milan, Paris, Vienna and London. They don't know about the Saudi poor, which form ninety eight percent of the country's population. We who live lives of such heartbreaking poverty and misery that the late great Norman Rockwell would have a field day photographing and painting us if he knew about it. My father wasn't a wealthy sheikh, I did not grow up in a villa, and quite often my siblings and I went hungry. Not because my father was cruel or mean but because he was heartbreakingly poor.
Still, that did not excuse what the family did to me, though. My older brother Ali, the sole male heir of the family, left our household when he was eighteen and I haven't seen him since. As for my sister Halima and I, our fates were sealed the day our father failed to arrange a marriage for us. You see, he intended for me to marry one of his friends, an old farmhand named Hussein, but Hussein died three days before our wedding was supposed to take place. Since bride price money had already exchanged hands, I was considered the property of my prospective husband's family, and in his absence, his sixty-year-old brother Hassan took over. It was Hassan who sold me as a sex slave to the brothels.
For ten years I led the life of an escort, courtesan, prostitute, lady of the night, pleasure woman or whatever you want to call ladies like myself. I have brought pleasure to countless men, from the wealthy white businessmen who come to Saudi Arabia from Europe and North America to Turks, Kuwaitis, Indonesians and so on. I never discriminated against paying customers. To me, they were all the same. Men want their pleasure taken quickly, and we women are but a conduit to that pleasure. What man seeks is his own pleasure, and the woman is only the means to that end. That's what I believed, until I met Solomon Haverhill.
We get a fair amount of American soldiers, mostly affiliated with the United States Military Training Mission or U.S.M.T.M. I'd had a few American soldiers as clients, usually accompanied by their Saudi male friends. I had never seen a black American soldier until I met Solomon Haverhill. Understand that, as a Saudi woman, even one of my station, I was taught that blacks were inferior. The only black people who stay in Saudi Arabia year-round tend to be the descendants of migrant workers from places like Ethiopia, Senegal and Nigeria. Black Muslim visitors performing Haj from nearby African countries usually couldn't wait to leave the Kingdom. I was used to seeing submissive blacks, the types brow-beaten by centuries of mistreatment at the hands of Arabs. Nothing prepared me for the African-American warrior who came to my chambers that evening...
Solomon Haverhill, six feet three inches tall, broad-shouldered and seemingly made out of solid muscle from head to toe. Dark-skinned, clean-shaven and absolutely masculine. About as different as can be from the slender men of Ethiopia and Kenya whom I was used to. In slightly accented Arabic, he wished me a good evening. I stared at him, eyes wide with shock. Understand that up until that point, I'd never been with a black man before. I was hesitant, but he put me at ease. Nothing will happen that you don't want to happen milady, Solomon said, addressing me as one would a highborn woman of the upper crust. In spite of my misgivings, I was touched. Men are seldom polite when dealing with ladies like myself. Hello brother may Allah bless your path, I replied.
