Dion Peoples Summary of: ‘Stolen Loves’ by Malika Oufkir
REL408: Buddhism & Women
02 Feb 2003


I am under the task to summarize a struggle that few people can imagine happening. Since this class is an academic class: BUDDHISM & WOMEN, the scope of effort should be focused within this shadow. Above I have attached twenty-seven quotes from the book. This summary is inspired from those quotes within the book.

We start with a child taken in to the King’s inner circle – as a playmate to his daughter. Malika’s father is a General and close friend to the King. Later the General would stage a coup and is assassinated. The remaining members of the family were forced into various facilities of imprisonment. Some conditions were pleasant enough, others were horrible. Then she escapes and is eventually freed.

There are several themes presented in this book but I have limited them to greed, hate and delusion – throughout her life. Her invocations of both seem to imply that she is a woman who has concerns for her material, physical and spiritual self, and throughout her life they seemed to provide her with the means to life a happy life, or as content as possible considering her conditions. Balancing life between analyzing reality and her imagination seems to be evidence of her reflective capacity&even during the prison hunger strikes. Taking her royal life for granted and knowing what was in store for her in the future is a nice reflection, however Q#16 (quote #16) demonstrates contrast to Q# 2 that she really has no idea what would become of her but stereotypically presents us with what the Moroccan Princess life must be like. She turned to the radio as an outlet into society, an area she ignored if her princess lifestyle continued.

Her greed was the longing to retain the royal easy life; she hated her captor, and was delusional in thinking many times in her various comments. She does her best to work out her issues. She hated Allah and her King (Q#7, 17, 21, 22).

Pain gave her new life indeed, as Q#3 illustrates. Growth is not possible unless one goes through a certain amount of pain or suffering. Her life in prison also gave her new perceptions of reality that she was sparred from living and being protected in the palaces. Q#1-2 speak eloquently enough for my point. She was so secure in the seemingly permanence of her lavish lifestyle that it blinded and deluded her away from reality. Displayed in Q#10 is a disgusting display of arrogance and delusion for her clinging onto the “self” of her past – her fast lifestyle -demonstrative of an ideal that her beautiful body would should be servicing men’s pleasures during her youthful years. Yet, I feel like we are supposed to feel sorry for her, confirming that a beautiful body should not be wasting away in prison. Her resignation to her view of physical self comes about during Q#19. People sometimes do not get what they want: wishes and desires are seldom fulfilled. Even in Q#26, her former self reappears and is intent on prostituting freedom, instead of just living. For support refer to Q#24: her pointing out the uselessness of consumerism, yet she is wishing to welcome it back. What did she learn during isolation, besides survival?

She at some point loses faith in Islam and converts to Catholicism, based on the prayers taught from her mother. She is fighting a theological battle: Going from Allah (the male) to Mary (the woman): Having faith in existence then towards the non-existence of all that she thinks she knows. She is surrounded by mostly women and draws her inspirational strength from women, so she created an extra-mother figure, that of the Virgin Mary to satisfy her absence of a figure to hope saves her. She becomes ungrateful to Allah. She loses inspiration in the male, and seeks shelter in the more familiar female. At some point, she thinks she is even a feminist, but that was conditional thinking on her part.

We are redeemed when as Q#27 represents: she attempts to release her hatred. That is a major act in her steps toward liberation. As she says, she still has a long ways to go. Her years of contemplation should and will provide her with a solid base to start from as she attempts to regain and attain her desires allowable in freedom.

Quotes to the Summary of “Stolen Lives” by Malika Oufkir, (Hyperion: New York, NY) 1999.

  1. “I had a choice, the world was my oyster. I took everything for granted, money, luxury, power, royalty and subservience.” (pg 75)


  1. “With hindsight, I look back at the girl I was with amusement, and also with certain fondness. I wasn’t too stupid but I was very spoiled&my future was already mapped out: marriage to a wealthy husband at twenty, a life of luxury and boredom, of sleeping around, infidelities, frustration and dissatisfaction drowned in alcohol or drugs. It was a fate identical to that of so many other unhappy Moroccan society girls I know. At least my ordeal has spared me that miserable fate.” (pg. 79)


  1. “Pain gave me new life&my suffering made me grow&for the better&” (pg.79)


  1. Upon the death of her father: “I demanded to be left alone, then I sat down to contemplate him.” (pg. 93)


  1. “I was living a fairy tale in reverse. I had been brought up as a princess and now I had turned into Cinderella.” (pg. 106)


  1. “I probably coped better with our twenty year ordeal than my brothers and sisters, for I already knew, on entering prison, what loneliness and abandonment meant. But I also discovered the heartbreaking pain of knowing one’s enemy and being close to him.” (pg. 114)


  1. “I hated him for his hatred, I hated him for my ruined life, for my mother’s misery and the mutilated childhood of my brothers and sisters&” (pg. 115)


  1. “&Mother had to read us the Qu’ran until dawn to chase away the specters.” (pg. 119)


  1. “Each of us had our own stories to tell the others&but over the years, our different stories became entangled, changed and distorted. My brothers and sisters appropriated mine. That is how we protected ourselves against the emptiness that threatened us.” (pg. 121)


  1. “I admired my firm, sculptured body and youthful face, telling myself that this ripeness would be lost forever. No man would love me and enjoy the bloom of my twenties.” (pg. 130)


  1. “The guards, all mouhazzin now, were forbidden to speak to us kindly, or to show any interest in us. On the contrary, they were to humiliate us in every little way possible. I lived with a permanent fear in the pit of my stomach: fear of being killed, beaten or raped, fear of constant humiliation. And I was ashamed of being afraid.” (pg. 143)


  1. “We put up a struggle.” (pg 144)


  1. “And I was wasting away. I learned to die inwardly.” (pg 147)


  1. “Day and night we dreamed of eating and we felt ashamed to have sunk so low.” (pg. 153)


  1. “We were protected by a mysterious god whose main design was to keep us alive, although he didn’t spare us the most horrific ordeals.” (pg 159)


  1. “The radio made me aware of feminism and sexual liberation. Had I been free&I would have been an activist like them.” (pg. 167)


  1. “I railed against God...I turned to God only to rebuke him and confess that I questioned his existence&waiting for a sign&but nothing happened. The night was black&like our life&like our thoughts&but I was also at the mercy of my demons, my ghosts.” (pg. 168)


  1. “The Darkness enabled me to converse with death, to venture dangerously close to it, until I seemed to fuse with it. It was an extreme sensation and AI have never experienced anything like it.” (pg. 170)


  1. “At the age of thirty-three I became resigned. I would never experience a great love; I would never have my own family&I tried to remain in control of my body, to suppress everything to do with human appetite, desire, hunger, cold, thirst. To suppress my impulses and my desires.” (pg. 171)


  1. “Towards the end&we were no longer even capable of feelings. We were tired and enraged, aggressive and cruel& We no longer believed in anything.” (pg 173)


  1. “We were convinced that the Virgin was protecting us&We had rejected Islam, which had brought us nothing good, and opted for Catholicism instead. Mother&herself had remained a good Muslim.” (pg 188)


  1. “Supported by Raouf, I launched into a Moroccan-style screaming fit, invoking Allah and the Profits.” (pg. 198)


  1. “The street felt strange to me, and it took me a few minutes to realize why. I was no longer accustomed to noise. The shouts, the voices, the hooting, the oriental songs, the tires screeching on the road&all those sounds grated on my ears. Raouf and the others were in a similar state. The light hurt our eyes, and our heads throbbed.” (201)


  1. “We had forgotten consumer society. How could people clutter their lives with so many useless things?” (242)


  1. “To escape, all we needed was fifteen years in prison, fifteen years of inhuman suffering, fifteen years of starvation, cold, fear and deprivation. And as for intelligence, you gave us all those years to nurture and develop it.” (pg. 251)


  1. “I was anxious to please, charm and seduce freedom.” (pg. 277)


  1. “In prison, hatred helped me survive...Now I swing between the deepest resentment and the sincere wish to feel no more hatred. Hatred eats you up, hatred paralyses you and stops you living. Hatred will never enable me to make up for the lost years&But I’ve still got some way to go.” (pg. 288)