A Wife’s Lonely Fight for Her Husband

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A review of Ensaf Haidar’s excellent new book about her life with Raif Badawi

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How does a young mother tell her children that their father—her husband—is in prison for writing what he thinks in a fundamentalist country that oppresses freedom of thought and freedom of expression? How does she tell her children that their father was taken from them because their country punishes thinkers and writers? How does she tell them he was taken from them?

There is no instruction manual for that situation. The moment in which a young mother must live through exactly this moment is only a brief scene in Ensaf Haidar’s newly published memoir of life with and apart from her husband, the writer Raif Badawi, but it is painful to read, because Ensaf (and her co-writer Andrea C. Hoffmann and their skilled translator Shaun Whiteside) bring the reader into the room with her and the children and invite us to feel their terror and confusion.
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Today in History: June 17

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Now that Raif and I were forcibly separated from one another, we were behaving as we had done at the start of our relationship: we constantly wrote each other messages. We sent chats or spoke on the phone … When I woke up, I was usually greeted by one of his little hearts sent to my phone during the night.
 
This morning, however, I didn’t find a single heart, and no missed calls. […] I had an extremely bad feeling, and called his number. […] I don’t know how often I tried that morning. Twenty times? Fifty times?
 
At about the fifty-second attempt someone suddenly answered. I was almost speechless with surprise when I heard a deep man’s voice at the other end. But it wasn’t Raif’s voice. “Who the hell is this?” it asked angrily. “You’re getting on our nerves!”
 
I gave a terrible start. “Where is my husband?” I asked shrilly.
 
“He’s in jail.”—Raif Badawi, The Voice of Freedom: My Husband, Our Story, Ensaf Haidar, Andrea Claudia Hoffmann

Four years ago today, writer Raif Badawi was arrested for violating article 6 of the Saudi Anti-Cybercrime Law. He has been incarcerated since that day. In the subsequent four years he was convicted of “insulting” Islam in his writings, sentenced to 600 lashes and seven years imprisonment, and even had his sentence re-considered but made harsher: 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes.
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An Open-and-Shut Case of Something or Other

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Although I have been told that I have “loud” facial expressions, my pleading eyebrows were easy to ignore this morning. I guess my eyebrows were not loud enough.

My eyebrows were requesting conversational assistance … no, they were pleading for a rescue, stet.

One of the great parts of a life in recovery is the fact that I have a network of people with whom I can share some of my day-to-day difficulties. My friends in recovery remind me that there is really only one thing I need to understand: I am my only problem in my life. Anything that I feel is a problem is almost one hundred percent of the time a repercussion from me reacting to a person or situation as if it was the problem. My reaction is the problem, not the person or situation.
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