Another Kind of Warrior

摘要

It Was Late Sunday And the kids were asleep," remembers Rania al-Baz, one of Saudi Arabia's few women television presenters. She and her husband were arguing, as they often did. "The next thing I knew he was strangling me," al-Baz told NEWSWEEK. "Then he threw me against the wall and banged my head down on the floor. He told me to say the Sha-hadah [the Muslim prayer of last rites] because I was going to die. I said it and fainted. The next thing I remember, I was in the hospital." For many battered wives, and not only in Saudi Arabia, the story might have ended there. But because al-Baz, 29, is i a celebrity in a country where many women aren't allowed to show their faces in public, and because she was barely recognizable with her features fractured in 13 places, somebody took her picture. More surprising still, the Saudi press published the gruesome image. Then, in the full glare of international publicity, al-Baz spoke out for her rights as a woman and a mother.