Product Description
Nothing prepared me, a middle-aged American housewife, for life or for my culturally shocking, mind-broadening experiences in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I was fifty-one when, in 1984, I accompanied my husband to Saudi Arabia. Islam dictated the rules under which I lived. Forbidden to work or drive a car, I couldn’t leave the confines of the housing compound alone and only when wearing a full-length dress with a high neck and long sleeves. Kindi, a walled compound at the north end of the port city of Jeddah, housed an average of forty families from all corners of the world in American mobile homes. We were truly an international community, but from the daily prayer calls which regulated our lives to the stern admonishment from the Committee for the Promulgation of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice, we all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, lived In the Shadow of the Mosque.