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Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl, Revisited

July 17, 2025·37 min·3 clips

Majd Abdelgani, once a 19-year-old Saudi girl resisting arranged marriage, now holds a doctorate from Oxford and reflects on her transformation.

Majd begins with a recorder. At nineteen, in Riyadh, she keeps an audio diary about dreams, pressure, and the ordinary limits around her life. She wants science badly. The host follows that wish alongside her resistance to an arranged marriage and the rules around teenage girls in Saudi Arabia. Then she leaves for university on the coast near Jeddah. She is supposed to travel alone. Before the flight, her father calls and tells her not to sit next to a man. It is a small instruction, but it carries a whole world with it. She packs flip-flops anyway. The trip is only for two months, yet her excitement makes it feel much bigger. Then she turns twenty. In the genetics lab, she puts on gloves and talks with wonder about seeing what is happening inside her body under a microscope. The work feels personal. Beside Philip, a PhD in the lab, she records experiments comparing ways to isolate DNA, RNA, and proteins. The campus runs by different rules. Men and women work in the same space, though Majd keeps the boundaries she believes in. She does not shake hands. Her family has accepted that science is her field, and that acceptance gives her a fragile kind of room. The lab brings joy and purpose. On a video call with her parents, the diary stays close to family ritual: greetings, questions, and the careful sound of staying connected. Later, distance has its own cost. She wants to return to someone she loves, carrying hair clips, jewelry, and dresses, hoping there is still room for forgiveness.

As heard by us

A return visit that turns a private diary into a study of change.

Radio Diaries returns to Majd Abdelgani nine years after her teenage diary in Riyadh, and the later chapter is the stronger one. The episode follows her from early dreams of becoming a scientist and her resistance to arranged marriage to her work in a genetics lab at King…

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Why you'd press play

For a quiet listen built from a young Saudi woman's audio diary.

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