Saudi Princess Chained to Train Tracks for Being Unable to Have Children

Saudi Princess Chained to Train Tracks for Being Unable to Have Children

I was a Saudi princess locked in a dungeon and chained to a railway track because my body could not give my husband a son.

Then Jesus walked into that darkness and carried me out alive.

I should not be here right now.

I should be dead or broken or still chained to that cold iron rail in the desert.

But I am sitting in a quiet apartment in Houston, Texas, recording this testimony because something happened to me that I cannot explain any other way except to say that God showed up.

Stay with me until the end of this story because what happened in that tunnel is going to change the way you think about miracles.

My name is Nadia al-Rashid and I am from Riyad, Saudi Arabia.

I was not born into poverty.

I was not born into suffering.

I was born into gold.

My father was a senior prince within the house of Saud, a man whose name opened every door in the kingdom and whose phone calls were answered by ministers and generals within seconds.

We lived in a compound in the northern district of Riyad that was so large it had its own roads running through it.

There were fountains in the courtyards and marble floors that reflected the lightlike mirrors.

There were servants who had worked for our family for generations.

There were cars lined up outside every morning waiting to take my father wherever he needed to go.

We had everything that money and power could provide.

And I grew up believing that this abundance was evidence of God’s favor.

I believed we were blessed because we were faithful.

I believed Allah had rewarded our family with wealth because we submitted to his will completely.

That my mother was a quiet and graceful woman who had grown up in a religious family in Jeda.

She wore her abaya and nikab with dignity and she prayed all five prayers without fail every single day.

She read Quran after fajar every morning sitting in the pale light of dawn with the holy book open across her lap.

She never raised her voice.

She never complained.

She accepted the boundaries of her life without resistance.

And she passed those values down to me as a mother passes a precious heirloom from her own hands into the hands of her daughter.

I was the third of seven children.

I had two older brothers who were being prepared to carry the family name forward into positions of power and influence.

I had four younger siblings who filled our home with noise and laughter.

And I existed in the middle of all of it or a princess in every sense of the word, sheltered and educated and protected and controlled in equal measure.

My education was excellent by any standard.

My father believed that a well-educated daughter reflected well on the family.

So I attended the finest private girls school in Riyad.

I studied Arabic literature and Islamic Jewish prudence and mathematics and the sciences.

I learned English from a private tutor who came to our home three afternoons a week.

I was a serious student who loved reading.

I spent hours in my father’s private library running my fingers along the spines of books he had collected from all over the world.

I read history and philosophy and poetry.

My mind was hungry for everything it could absorb.

But the education I received, no matter how excellent, always operated within a specific boundary.

On there were things I was taught and things I was never allowed to question.

The Islamic Republic of our faith was not a subject of debate in our household.

It was the foundation of everything.

Allah was sovereign.

The prophet peace be upon him was the final messenger.

The Quran was the perfect and uncorrupted word of God.

The role of a woman was to submit first to her father and then to her husband.

These were not opinions.

These were facts as certain and unchangeable as the desert horizon.

I absorbed these truths without resistance because they were all I had ever known.

I prayed with sincerity.

I fasted during Ramadan with devotion.

I wore my hijab with pride.

I believed fully and completely in the Islam I had been raised inside.

It was not a performance.

It was the air I breathed.

It was the water I drank.

It was the ground beneath my feet.

The first crack in my perfect world appeared when I was in my early 20s.

My father sat me down in his private study one evening and told me very calmly that he had accepted a marriage proposal on my behalf.

The man’s name was Prince Fad bin Mansour.

He was 15 years older than me.

He was from a prominent family with close ties to the royal court.

He had been married once before briefly and that marriage had ended in divorce.

My father told me this was an excellent match.

He told me that Fad was wealthy and respected and that I would want for nothing as his wife.

He told me the wedding would take place within 3 months.

I sat across from my father in that quiet study and I nodded and I said I was honored by his choice because that was what you said.

That was what a good daughter said in a moment like this.

You did not ask if you could meet the man first.

You did not ask if you had a choice.

You did not ask if love was supposed to come before the contract.

You smiled and you nodded and you trusted your father’s judgment because questioning it was not an option that existed within the world.

you had been raised in.

I met Fahad for the first time at our engagement ceremony.

He was tall and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed beard going gray at the edges.

His eyes were dark and assessing.

He looked at me the way someone looks at a purchase they are satisfied with.

He was polite and formal during the brief time we were allowed to speak with family members present.

He told me he had heard I was intelligent and well read.

He said he appreciated a wife with a sharp mind.

He said he hoped I would settle comfortably into his household.

The wedding took place in October.

It was a lavish event that filled an entire ballroom in one of Riyad’s most prestigious hotels.

Hundreds of guests attended.

The women’s celebration on one side of the divided hall was an ocean of jewels and designer clothing and expensive perfume.

The food was endless and extraordinary.

The decorations had been planned for months.

Everyone told me I looked beautiful.

Everyone told me how lucky I was.

I stood in the middle of all that celebration wearing a gown that had been made for me in Paris.

And I tried to feel the joy that everyone around me seemed to feel on my behalf.

But underneath the silk and the diamonds, I felt something I could not name.

Something that sat quietly in the center of my chest.

and would not move.

Something that felt very much like fear dressed up as composure.

Fad’s primary home was a large villa in a private residential district of Riyad.

He had a household staff of 12.

He had a separate wing of the house that served as his private office and meeting space where I was not permitted to enter without invitation.

He had routines and rules that were already in place long before I arrived and I was expected to slot myself into those routines without disrupting anything.

The early months of our marriage were not cruel.

Fad was not a violent man in the beginning.

He was distant and formal and controlled, but he was not cruel.

He expected his home to run perfectly.

He expected meals at specific times and in specific ways.

He expected silence when he was working and conversation on his terms when he was not.

Taught he expected me to be available when he wanted my company and invisible when he did not.

I adapted as quickly as I could because adaptation was the skill I had been trained for my entire life.

There was one expectation above all others that sat at the center of our marriage like a stone.

Fahad wanted children.

More specifically, he wanted sons.

He had gone into this marriage with a single primary purpose.

And he made that purpose clear to me within the first weeks of our life together.

He wanted heirs.

He wanted boys who would carry his name and inherit his wealth and extend the legacy of his family into the next generation.

This was not a desire.

It was a requirement.

I wanted children too.

I genuinely did.

I had always imagined myself as a mother.

Yay, I had spent years watching my own mother raise her seven children with grace and love.

And I had imagined doing the same thing.

I wanted a baby I could hold and nurse and sing to.

I wanted the warmth and fullness that a child brings into a home.

So in the beginning, the pressure to conceive felt like a shared desire rather than a demand.

But the months passed and nothing happened.

We consulted doctors quietly and discreetly because in our world medical difficulties were private matters that did not leave the family.

The tests were conducted with careful confidentiality and the results when they came back were delivered to Fahad first because that was how things worked.

He came to me one evening and stood in the doorway of our bedroom with an expression on his face that I had not seen before.

at something cold and assessing had replaced his usual controlled manner.

He told me the doctors had found a problem with my fertility.

He told me the issue was significant.

He told me the likelihood of natural conception was very low.

He did not hold me.

He did not offer comfort.

He stood in that doorway and looked at me with an expression that contained something very close to contempt.

And then he turned and walked back to his office and closed the door behind him.

That was the night my golden cage became a prison.

The change in Fad’s behavior was gradual at first and then suddenly total.

The distance between us grew into a wall.

He stopped eating dinner with me most evenings.

He stopped asking about my days or sharing anything about his own.

He spent more time away from the villa conducting business or visiting his family.

So, and when he was home, he looked through me as if I had become transparent.

I had failed at the one task that mattered most in his world, and he could no longer see the point of me.

I threw myself into prayer.

I prayed with an intensity I had never reached before.

I woke before Fajar every morning and prostrated myself on my prayer mat in the darkness of our bedroom.

While Fahad slept, I begged Allah to open my womb.

I recited every dua I knew for fertility.

I fasted additional days beyond Ramadan as acts of supplication.

I visited a respected shake who gave me Quranic verses to recite over water that I drank every morning.

I gave charity in amounts that stretched my personal allowance to its limit, believing that generosity would open the gates of heaven’s mercy towards me.

Nothing changed.

Fad began receiving pressure from his own family.

His mother, a formidable woman who ruled her household like a sovereign, came to visit and sat across from me in our formal sitting room with the particular polite cruelty that certain women have perfected over decades.

She drank her tea and asked about my health and spoke in veiled references about the importance of family continuation and the disappointment of baronness.

She told me there were doctors in London who specialized in these situations.

She told me that some women simply were not built for childbearing and that in such cases a husband had legitimate rights to consider his options.

She said all of this with a smile on her face and a strand of prayer beads moving through her fingers.

I understood exactly what she meant.

The word she was too refined to say out loud was divorce.

Or worse, she was reminding Fad that Islamic law permitted a husband to take a second wife.

Either outcome would be a devastation.

Either outcome would be a public humiliation that my family would carry as a stain for years.

I went home to my parents for a visit that week and sat with my mother in her sitting room.

I told her some of what was happening, not all of it, because there were things you simply did not say out loud, even to your mother.

I told her Fad was unhappy.

I told her the medical situation was difficult.

My mother listened and then she took my hand and told me to be patient.

She told me to trust in Allah’s wisdom.

She told me that sometimes Allah delays blessings to test the faithfulness of his servants.

She told me to submit more fully, to pray more consistently, to serve my husband better to and trust that Allah would reward my obedience.

I went back to Fahad’s villa and I did exactly what my mother told me.

I submitted more.

I prayed more.

I served more.

I made myself smaller and quieter and more invisible in the hope that my obedience would somehow change the biology that had failed me.

It did not change anything.

But I kept believing it would because I had no other framework to believe inside of.

The second year of our marriage was darker than the first.

Fad had stopped pretending that our marriage was functioning.

He had taken a second wife, a younger woman from a family in Medina.

The announcement was made to me directly without ceremony on a Tuesday morning over breakfast.

He told me as if he were reporting a business decision.

He said it did not affect my status or my living arrangements.

Uh he said I would remain in the villa.

He said it was his right under Islamic law and then he finished his coffee and left for his office.

I sat alone at that breakfast table for a very long time.

The second wife moved into a separate house nearby.

Fahad divided his time between the two households on a schedule that became known to everyone around us.

The servants knew.

My in-laws knew eventually because these things always spread no matter how much you try to contain them.

My own family knew.

My father called me and spoke in careful measured tones about dignity and patience.

My brother said nothing directly to me, but I could feel their discomfort whenever I was in the same room with them.

I had become the woman who could not fulfill her purpose in the world I moved through.

That was a specific kind of shame that had no remedy.

I was 26 years old and I was already beginning to understand what it felt like to be erased.

The crisis came in the third year of my marriage in the spring of the year when the desert heat arrived earlier than usual and settled over Riyad like a lid pressed down on a pot.

Fahad’s family had property in the desert regions outside the city.

Not the polished desert of tourist photographs, but the harsh and empty stretches of sand and rock that extend for hundreds of miles in every direction without mercy.

His family had been connected to this land for generations.

There were old structures on parts of this property, remnants from earlier decades, including the ruined framework of Tenor Narrow Gauge Railway that had once been used to transport materials across the estate during a construction project years ago.

But the track had long been
abandoned.

It stretched for perhaps 3 mi across the flat desert floor and then stopped at nothing, going nowhere, serving no purpose except to rest slowly under the sun.

Fahad had stopped speaking to me in any meaningful way.

By this point, our interactions were transactional.

He would communicate instructions through the household staff.

He would appear at meals when he chose to and disappear when he chose to.

I was managed rather than spoken to.

I existed in his house as a legal fact rather than a living wife.

Then one evening in April, Fahad came to me in the formal sitting room.

He was not alone.

Two of his male cousins and his older brother were with him.

They sat across from me with expressions that told me something deliberate had been arranged.

Fad spoke without preamble.

Uh he said his family had made a decision.

He said my failure to produce children had become an embarrassment that extended beyond our marriage into his family’s public standing.

He said there were members of his family who believed that my baroness was a sign of spiritual corruption that something in me was blocking Allah’s blessing and that the appropriate response was ritual correction.

I did not fully understand what he meant until the following morning when two of the household staff members I had never seen before arrived at the villa with a vehicle and instructions to take me to the desert property.

I was not given a choice about going.

The property was 2 hours from the city.

The drive took us through suburbs that gradually gave way to empty landscape until there was nothing in any direction except sand and rock and the white sky of a desert morning.

We arrived at a low concrete structure that had once been a storage facility for the railway project.

Inside it was empty except for some old equipment and a rusted metal chair.

The air smelled like oil and heat and abandonment.

They walked me to the railway track and they chained my wrists to an iron rail.

I’m going to say that again because I know how it sounds and I need you to understand that I am not using metaphor or exaggeration.

They took a length of chain and they locked it around my wrists and they attached it to the railway track that had not seen a working train in decades.

They left me water.

They left me in the shade of the concrete structure that partially covered that section of track.

And they told me I was going to remain there until I had repented of whatever spiritual failure was preventing my womb from opening.

Fahad did not come.

He sent his older brother to deliver this information with the matterof fact delivery of someone communicating a religious procedure rather than a punishment.

The brother told me that certain religious consultants within the family had advised this course of action.

He said there were precedents in certain traditions for this type of spiritual isolation.

He said if I prayed sincerely and repented deeply, Allah would open my womb and I would be released.

He said my comfort and food would be provided.

He said this was for my own benefit.

Then they drove away and left me alone in the desert.

I want to describe what being chained to a railway track in the Saudi desert feels like because I think people who have not experienced true powerlessness cannot imagine it.

It is not primarily physical, though the physical reality is brutal enough.

The chain was short enough that I could not stand fully upright.

The iron was hot from the sun during the day and cold and damp at night.

My wrists achd constantly.

The desert is not silent.

It makes sounds that your mind begins to fill with meaning when you have been alone long enough.

Wind across rock, the settling of sand, things you cannot identify moving somewhere beyond your field of vision.

But worse than all the physical discomfort was the specific torture of what was happening inside my head because I believed what they had told me.

Not completely, not without doubt, but enough.

But I had been raised my entire life inside a religious framework that taught me that suffering was the consequence of insufficient faith.

I had been taught that when things went wrong, you searched inside yourself for the failure that had caused them.

I had been praying for years without my womb opening.

What if there was something wrong with me that went beyond biology? What if the religious consultants were right? What if Allah was withholding his blessing because of some fault in my soul that I had failed to see? So I prayed in chains on my knees on the desert floor.

I prayed with everything I had.

I recited every Quranic verse I had memorized since childhood.

I confessed every sin I could remember.

I begged and pleaded and bargained and surrendered.

Odai prayed until my voice was gone and my knees were bruised and my arms achd from the weight of the chain holding them to the rail.

Nothing came back.

The desert stayed silent.

The sky stayed white.

The chain stayed locked around my wrists.

By the second day, something was shifting inside me.

The fervor of my prayer was being replaced by something quieter and more dangerous.

Questions.

Questions I had never allowed myself to form were rising in the silence of that desert place and demanding answers that my training had no language to provide.

If Allah could hear me, why was there nothing? Not a feeling, not a sense of presence, not a whisper of peace, just silence and heat and the sound of my own ragged breathing.

I had spent my entire life praying to a God I had been told was near.

But in this place where I needed that nearness more than I had ever needed anything, there was nothing.

The silence did not feel like a test.

It felt like absence.

On the second night, I stopped reciting formal prayers.

I did something I had never done in my life.

I simply spoke out loud into the darkness of the desert.

Not in Arabic, not in the formalized language of religious petition, just in my own voice, in my own words, in the plain broken speech of a woman who had nothing left.

I said that I did not know if anyone was listening.

I said I was afraid.

I said I did not understand what I had done to deserve this.

I said, “If there was a God who actually heard human beings, I needed him to show up right now because I was running out of strength.

” And then I stopped talking and lay down on that iron track with the chain pulling my wrists above my head.

And I stared up at the desert sky blazing with more stars than I had ever seen from inside the city.

And I waited.

I do not know when I fell asleep.

I do not know if what happened next was a dream or something else, but what I experienced in the darkness of that desert night is the reason I am sitting in Houston today recording this testimony.

There was light, not the harsh white light of the desert sun or the thin silver light of the stars, a different kind of light entirely, warm and golden, and so completely without threat that my first response was not fear, but an almost unbearable relief.

The kind of relief you feel when you have been cold for a very long time and someone wrapped something warm around you.

stand in the center of that light was a figure I could not look at directly but whose presence I could feel the way you feel a fire’s warmth without being able to see the flame from where you stand I heard my name not Nadia the name I had been given by my parents something deeper the way you would name something you had made yourself and loved completely before it had done a single thing to earn that love I heard one sentence In that moment, I understood it completely, even though I cannot explain the language it came in.

I knew in my
bones what it meant.

It said, “I made you, and I am not finished with you.

” I woke up gasping.

The sky was turning from black to dark purple at the horizon.

The chain was still on my wrists.

The desert was still around me.

But something in me had changed so completely and so suddenly that I barely recognized the woman who had fallen asleep on that track the night before.

I had spent my entire life being told that Jesus was a prophet only, a respected figure, but not divine, not the son of God, not a savior.

I had been taught that Christians had corrupted his story and that those who worshiped him were committing the worst possible sin against God.

I had internalized this so thoroughly that I would have told you with complete confidence that Jesus had nothing to do with my life or my prayers or my God.

But in the silence of the desert, with no one watching and no doctrine to protect and no career to defend, I knew who had just spoken to me.

I do not know how I knew.

I simply knew the way you know when you wake from a long sleep that it is morning.

And it was not information I received.

It was recognition.

I began to weep.

Not the desperate weeping of a woman in pain, though I had done plenty of that over the previous two days.

This was something different.

This was the kind of crying that comes from a place so deep inside yourself that you did not even know it existed until something opened it.

I wept for everything I had believed and everything I had built my identity inside and everything I was going to have to let go of.

I wept because I was terrified and because I was free at the same time and I did not yet have the language to hold both of those things together.

Three hours later, a vehicle arrived at the property.

It was one of Fahad’s staff members bringing food and water.

He saw me on the ground, still chained, and something in my face stopped him in the doorway of the structure.

He asked if I was all right.

I told him I needed to speak with Fad.

I told him I had something urgent to communicate.

Something in my voice must have carried the weight of what had happened because he made a phone call right there standing in the desert sun.

And within 4 hours, a car arrived and I was unloaded from that track and driven back to Riyad.

I was released from the chain after 3 days and two nights in the desert.

The official reason given within the family was that I had completed my repentance.

Fahad received me back into the villa with the cool disinterest of a managing a legal complication.

He did not ask what had happened to me out there.

He did not ask how I was feeling.

He asked if I was ready to resume my household responsibilities.

I said yes because I had learned to say yes while meaning something completely different.

And I was already making a plan.

The woman who returned from the desert was not the same woman who had been chained to that railway track.

But I was careful not to let anyone see the difference because I understood immediately that my survival depended on the concealment of what had happened to me in those two nights under the desert sky.

I had encountered Jesus.

I knew this with the certainty of someone who has touched something real.

But I was a Saudi princess living in the household of a senior royal.

I was a Muslim woman in a country where apostasy was not merely a social catastrophe but a legal one.

I was completely surrounded by family and staff and a husband who already resented me.

I had no friends outside the family network or no independent income, no passport I could access without FAD’s knowledge and no one in my immediate world to whom I could say what I now knew.

So I said nothing.

I went back to my household duties and my prayer schedule and my carefully managed invisibility.

But in the privacy of my own heart, in the silence of my prayer mat before dawn, I was no longer speaking to Allah.

I was speaking to Jesus.

And the conversation felt completely different from anything I had experienced in 26 years of Islamic devotion.

It felt like talking to someone who was actually there.

I began searching very carefully and very quietly for information.

Our villa had reliable internet access that Fahad rarely monitored.

He considered me too obedient and too broken to be doing anything suspicious on my phone.

I used this assumption as a doorway or late at night while he was at his other wife’s house.

I would sit in the darkness of my bedroom and search in English, not in Arabic, because Arabic searches left a different kind of trail.

I found testimonies, women and men across the Middle East describing experiences of Jesus appearing to them in dreams.

Iranians, Turks, Egyptians, Saudis, all describing that same quality of light and that same particular warmth that I had felt in the desert.

I read their words with my hands shaking and my heart hammering and tears running down my face onto my phone screen because here were people who had felt exactly what I had felt.

And they were not insane and they were not lonely and they were not making it up.

I found the Bible online in a translation I could read.

I began with the Gospels because I wanted to know who this person was that had spoken to me in the desert.

I read about Jesus healing the sick and welcoming the outcasts and placing his hands on people who the religious establishment considered unclean and damaged and without value.

I read about a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years, who had spent all her money on doctors who could not help her, who pressed through a crowd just to touch the edge of his robe and was immediately healed and immediately seen.

I read Jesus saying, “Your faith has healed you.

Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

” I read that verse five times in a row, sitting in my dark bedroom in Riyad, and I could not stop shaking.

I found a Christian woman through a private online community that operated with extreme discretion in the Gulf region.

I will not describe how I found her or how we communicated because there are people still inside that network whose safety depends on their anonymity.

I will only say that she became my lifeline in the months that followed.

She answered my questions without pressure and without agenda.

She prayed with me through the phone in her simple American English.

She sent me Bible verses and explained their context.

She told me her own story and how she had come to faith and what it had cost her.

She never once told me I had to do anything.

She simply told me the truth and let the truth do what truth does.

It was during one of our late night conversations that she asked me a question I had been avoiding for months.

She asked me if I had any way out.

Not theologically, practically.

Was there any path that existed in my actual physical life that could lead me to a place of safety where I could live openly in the faith I had already claimed in private? I thought about that question for a long time before I
answered.

And the answer I gave her was one I had never let myself say out loud before.

I said I did not know, but I knew I had to try to find one.

My window of opportunity came in the form of a medical trip.

In the year following my time in the desert, I had been continuing to receive fertility treatments at Fad’s insistence.

He had not given up entirely on the possibility of children from our marriage, and this meant periodic appointments with a specialist at a private hospital in Riyad.

In the fall of that year, the specialist referred me to a clinic in London that he said had more advanced treatment options.

Fad agreed to the trip because it served his purpose.

He wanted an heir, and if London could produce one, London was acceptable.

I was sent with a female companion, one of the household staff, a woman in her 50s who had been with Fahad’s family for many years.

She was kind and quiet, and she trusted me completely because I had given her no reason not to.

We flew to London on a direct flight from King Khaled International Airport.

We checked into a hotel in Mayfair that Fahad’s office had arranged.

We had appointments scheduled over several days at a clinic in Harley Street.

I attended the first two appointments faithfully.

I had blood drawn.

I met with consultants.

I asked appropriate questions.

I behaved in every observable way like a woman who was fully committed to solving her medical problem and returning home to her husband.

But on the morning of the third appointment, I woke early and sent a message to the Christian woman I had been speaking to for months.

I told her I was in London.

I gave her the name of the hotel.

I told her I needed help.

What happened in the 12 hours that followed was arranged by people who knew how to do these things, people who had helped others in similar situations before me.

I will not describe the operational details because as I said there are people who could be harmed by that information.

What I will say is that I walked out of that hotel in Mayfair at 7:00 in the morning with one bag and a phone and the clothes I was wearing and I did not look back.

My companion called the hotel room from downstairs at 9:00 in the morning when I failed to appear for breakfast.

By the time she reached my room, I was already in a car being driven north of the city.

By the time Fahad’s people were contacted from Riyad, I was in a safe house being processed by an organization that specialized in exactly this kind of situation.

I applied for asylum in the United Kingdom within 48 hours of my disappearance.

The process was long and grinding and at certain moments it felt like it would break me.

But I had a team of people helping me navigate it.

I had legal representatives who understood both the asylum process and the particular vulnerabilities of women from Gulf royal families.

I had the testimony of my own body which still bore marks on my wrists from the chain in the desert.

I want to say something about that asylum process because I think people who have never experienced it imagine it as a straightforward humanitarian procedure.

It is not.

You sit in rooms and tell your story to strangers who look at you with practiced neutrality and write notes on forms and ask the same questions again in different order to test your consistency.

You produce documents.

You wait.

You wait in rooms.

You wait in temporary housing.

You wait for letters.

You wait for phone calls.

You tell your story again to a different person with a different form.

You learn to tell the worst things that happened to you in the flat matterof fact language of an official statement because emotion reads as instability.

And instability is dangerous in a process where everything depends on being believed.

I was believed.

After 7 months, I was granted asylum in the United Kingdom.

I was baptized in a small church in the English countryside on a Sunday morning in April.

Though the pastor poured water over my head went in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit and I stood up from that water a different person than the one who had gone down into it.

The congregation, about 30 people, most of whom I had never met before, sang a song I did not know the words to yet, but whose melody reached something in my chest that I had been keeping sealed for years.

I stood there in a borrowed dress in a small English church, far from everything I had ever known, and I was more free than I had ever been in a palace.

I want to tell you about the healing because the healing is the part of this story that I know people will find hardest to believe did and I am going to tell it exactly as it happened because I have told it to doctors and I have told it to my pastor and I have told it to the Christian woman who helped me escape and none of them has any explanation that satisfies them more than the one I am offering here.

6 months after my baptism, I visited a doctor in London for a routine checkup.

The doctor who examined me was a fertility specialist who had reviewed my previous medical records which I had obtained as part of my asylum documentation.

She had seen all the original results from the Saudi clinic.

She knew what the tests had shown.

She knew what the consultants in Riyad had told Fahad about the likelihood of natural conception.

She had read all of it after her examination.

She sat across from me and looked at me in a way that told me something unexpected had happened before she said a single word.

She told me the results were inconsistent with my previous records.

She told me the condition that had been documented in Riyad could not be confirmed by her examination.

She told me she wanted to run additional tests because what she was seeing did not match what had been reported before.

The additional tests confirmed what the examination suggested.

The medical condition that had defined my marriage and destroyed my life inside that household could not be found.

I sat in that consultation room in London while the doctor told me this.

And I heard her words from a very great distance because my mind had gone somewhere else entirely.

It had gone back to the desert.

It it had gone back to that track and that chain and that darkness and that voice that had said with a certainty more solid than iron, I made you.

And I am not finished with you.

I asked the doctor if there was any medical explanation for the change in my results.

She said there were several possibilities she could investigate.

She said medical records from international clinics were sometimes incomplete or imprecise.

She said conditions of this nature could occasionally resolve on their own given sufficient time and reduction of stress.

She offered me every rational explanation available to a careful medical professional who did not want to claim something she could not prove.

I thanked her and I went home to my small flat in the city and I sat on my kitchen floor and I talked to Jesus for a very long time.

And everything he said back to me came in the form of a piece so complete that it had a physical weight like something being placed around your shoulders that you had been carrying on your back for so long you had forgotten what it felt like to set it down.

I am not going to
tell you that everything became easy after that.

It did not.

The grief of what I had lost was enormous and it did not disappear because I had found something better to replace it.

I grieved my family whom I could not contact.

I grieved my mother who did not know where I was.

I grieved the life in Riyad that had been built around me like a beautiful trap.

I grieved the version of my faith that I had given my whole heart to and that had ultimately led me to a railway track in the desert.

Grief and healing are not opposites.

You can experience them simultaneously and the coexistence of those two things does not mean something has gone wrong.

It means you are human and you are alive and you are paying attention.

I moved to the United States 14 months after my asylum was granted in the United Kingdom.

I had connections through the Christian organization that had helped me escape, who had helped other women rebuild their lives in America.

Houston was suggested because of its large and diverse population.

Because it was easy to become anonymous there in the best possible way and because there was a church community there that had experience walking alongside women in transitions like mine.

I live in Houston now.

I work.

Why? I have a small apartment that I chose myself and furnished myself with my own money that I earned at a job that I applied for with my own name.

These ordinary facts feel like extraordinary gifts to me every single day.

The ability to open my own front door.

The ability to decide what to eat for breakfast.

The ability to sit in a church on Sunday morning next to people who know my real name and my real story and love me without condition.

These are not small things.

These are everything.

My father does not know where I am.

My brothers have made public statements through intermediaries that I will not repeat here.

Fad has divorced me through legal mechanisms in Saudi Arabia.

None of this surprises me and none of it defines me because I have learned something in the past 2 years that my entire previous life did not teach me.

I have learned that my identity does not come from my family’s approval or my husband’s satisfaction or the regime’s recognition or the performance of a faith I was handed rather than chosen.

My identity comes from the voice that spoke to me in the desert.

The voice that called me by a name deeper than any name I had been given.

The voice that told me it was not finished with me and then proceeded to prove that in ways that a doctor in London cannot fully explain and that no coincidence in the history of my life adequately accounts for.

I want to speak directly to the women who are watching this from places where what I am saying could get them into serious trouble.

I know you are there.

I know some of you are watching on devices that are not your own.

Yeah, I know some of you have questions that you are afraid to type into any search bar because search bars leave records and records have consequences in the households where you live.

I was you.

I was completely inside the world you are inside.

I believed everything you were taught to believe.

I performed everything you were taught to perform.

And something found me anyway.

Something reached into the most locked and guarded place inside my life and called my name and refused to let me go.

You do not have to understand it before it happens.

You do not have to have your theology sorted out.

You do not have to have a plan or a network or a way out.

You only have to do the thing I did on the floor of that desert in the darkness between one kind of life and another.

You only have to speak plainly into the air and say that you do not know if anyone is listening, but you need them to show up.

He showed up for me in a desert in Saudi Arabia, chained to a railway track with no one watching except the stars.

He can show up wherever you are.

The women who tied me to that track believed they were delivering me to Allah’s correction.

What they actually did was deliver me to the moment that changed everything.

What they meant as a punishment became the address where Jesus met me.

I do not hold bitterness toward them for this because the thing they intended for my destruction became the precise location of my rescue.

I am not the woman they tried to erase.

I am not the barren princess whose value was measured in children she could not produce.

I am not the empty room in a man’s house that failed to fill with heirs.

I am loved by a God who pursued me across two continents and through a chain and into a desert and all the way to a church in the English countryside and all the way to a small apartment in Houston, Texas where I am sitting right now whole and free and deeply completely alive.

If this story has reached you, it was not an accident.

Nothing in my story was an accident.

Not the desert, not the chain, not the voice, not this moment.

Leave a comment below that says she is free.

And let those three words be the beginning of the conversation you have been afraid to start.

My name is Nadia al-Rashid.

I was chained to a railway track in a Saudi desert for being unable to give my husband a son.

And Jesus walked into that darkness and did not leave without