On this date in 1977, a 19-year-old royal adulteress and her paramour were executed in a Jeddah parking lot by the order of the girl’s powerful grandfather.
Princess Misha’al‘s fate has been obscured by secrecy and the Rashomon-like interpretations imposed upon it by observers.
In its outline (and the first stock interpretation we’re imposing) it’s that timeless human tragedy, the love story, in which headstrong royal daughter and suffocating traditional family square off over the seditious power of the feminine libido.
The princess, in a youthful arranged marriage by most accounts, took up with a Saudi boy while both were studying abroad in cosmopolitan Beirut, and dangerously attempted to maintain the affair back in the royal kingdom to the point of a quixotic (and obviously foiled) escape attempt. Whether under color of a judicial proceeding — the story says Misha’al refused to walk away by simply renouncing her lover and defiantly brought down the death sentence by confessing adultery — or simply on his own authority, the girl’s staunchly conservative* grandfather exercised his right as tribal patriarch to inflict an honor killing for the disgrace they had brought on the family.
The execution in Jeddah — she by gunshot,** he by a very clumsy beheading — that is supposed to have occurred on this date was public, but quiet; news of it got abroad only slowly and incompletely. Small wonder that, once it did, the blended motifs of Romeo and Juliet, harem titillation and oil politics made dynamite material for high-, middle- or lowbrow exploitation.
In 1980, the affair became the subject of one of the most notorious television programs ever aired, the docudrama Death of a Princess. This film’s airing in Britain in 1980 led Riyadh to expel the British ambassador, and cost £200 million of lost revenue for the UK from canceled orders and product boycotts by the Saudis.†
It was aired on in the United States on PBS in 1980 to similar controversy, as oil companies rushed to distance themselves from it.
Rebroadcast in 2005, Death of a Princess is available online for your judgment (as is this partial script): is this a muckraking expose of a shameful crime? orientalist heavy petting? “a sensitive and thoughtful exploration of the Arab dilemma,” as per its own advance publicity? and what did the official apologies (and in only a few countries, censorship) say about the political weight of the petroleum industry?
These, meanwhile, are the western reactions, already removed from events by a further layer of mediation, a forest of axes seeking grinding. If the writer who composed this piece is to be believed, the executed girl has posthumously achieved a sort of universal symbolic gravity in the Arab world, standing for the plight of any hopeless cause of justice dashed against authoritarian power.
* For the House of Saud, it must be recalled, the personal was political in the problematic confrontation between tradition and modernity athwart the desert kingdom’s sea of oil.
** “Princess Misha’al” was executed fully veiled, which permits the rumor that the slain woman was actually a surrogate and the onetime royal favorite lives on incognito somewhere.
† According to the July 4, 1980 London Times.
Part of the Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique.
Editor’s note: References to “Princess Misha” corrected; thanks to hannah for the clarification.
On this day..
- 1942: Wenceslao Vinzons
- 1958: Nuri al-Said
- 1857: Danforth Hartson, again
- 1738: Baruch Leibov and Alexander Voznitsyn, Jew and convert
- 1381: John Ball, radical priest
- 1936: Charlotte Bryant
- 756: Yang Guifei, favored concubine
- 1883: Leoncio Prado, for defending his homeland
- 1927: Three persistent escapees
- 1907: Qiu Jin, Chinese feminist and revolutionary
- 1953: John Christie, a little late in the day
- Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique
- 1685: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth
Calling PBS “leftist” is a nice insult but not even close to true.
Most of the tired “experts” on the various PBS shows are government and corporate officials who are very much part of the status quo. Very few women get to grace the Snooze Hour and similar shows. Even fewer who suggest that endless war is bad.
Mobil Oil, various military contractors, super money bags and others are big funders of PBS. Last time I checked, weapons manufacturers and big banks didn’t exactly fit the definition of “leftist.”
PBS bowed to pressure and would not air the film. Mobil Oil is a major sponsor of PBS. Yes leftists are Big Oil Whores too
The show did air on PBS. Frontline’s website has the entire transcript.
YOU DONT CHOOSE YOUR BIRTH FAMILY, NOR THEY DO.. AND FALLING IN LOVE WHILE YOUR IN ROYAL IS LIKE PLAYING WITH FIRE.. ITS SAD TO THE PRINCESS
How sad..she got executed for falling in love. And on top of it she was only 19, that’s so young.. It pains me to know people are forced to marry because of their family or royalty, I’d never be able to do it. I’m so thankful I can love who I want.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace..”
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Brief head’s up: her name is Misha’al, not Misha. The ‘al at the end is part of her name.
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