“We were not willing to be the tool of a foreign government,” remembers Sheikh Hassan today. “There were a number of people in authority in Iran who wanted to recruit us againstthe Saudi government. They came to us—they made quite a few approaches to us. But we told them that we wished to remain independent.” His aide Jaffar Shayeb did the political talking on the sheikh’s behalf. “We listened to what they said,” says Shayeb of the Iranians. “But we were never willing tobe part of their games.”

“The people who run the circus kidnapped us from our parents. Since we got here, we have all been working in the circus. We can’t see any of our mummies or kiss them OR cuddle up to them. said Adrian.His tears flowing in his big blue eyes that were the colour of the sky. We didn’t want to listen to our parents when they told us: ‘Never, Ever!” talk to strangers. We all disobeyed and spoke to strangers, and then the strangers stole us away from our parents.”

“Our reputations weren't who we really were, they were who people told us we were. Some of us fell into that trap, while others fought their entire lives to break free of them.”

“Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the WillThat wills the natural world, but wills us dead.”

“Rights are either God-given as part of the divine plan, or they are granted by government as part of the political plan. If we accept the premise that human rights are granted by government, then we must be willing to accept the corollary that they can be denied by government.”

“There was a time we laughed at the old guys up on the hill. The ones who graduated a couple of years before us, and who would hang around the school and the ballpark still, and would sit on the hoods of their cars and tell us how when they were seniors they did it better, faster, and further. We laughed, because we were still doing it, and all they could do was talk. If our goals were not met, there was next year, but it never occurred to us that one day there would not be a next year, and that the guys sitting on the hoods of their cars at the top of the hill, wishing they could have one more year, willing to settle for one last game, could one day be us.”