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.