Nine Parts of Desire (23 page)
The pupils had the well-tended look of the very rich. They were tall, with lustrous hair swept back in thick braids. The headmistress, a svelte, silk-clad thirty-eight-year-old, had the unlined skin of a teenager and the taut body of an aerobics addict. “The gym is the most important room in my house,” she said. Twenty years earlier, her older sister had wanted to study dentistry, impossible then for women in Saudi Arabia. Basilah’s father had moved the whole family to Syria so her sister could study at Damascus University. She came home as the first Saudi dentist and opened a clinic to treat both men and women. But she soon found that some Saudi men used to strict segregation couldn’t cope with having a strange woman touch them, even with a dentist’s drill. Tired of propositions and misunderstandings, she separated her clinic into men’s and women’s sections and hired male dentists to treat the men.
Basilah, too, preferred professional segregation. Dar al Fikr had a neighboring school for boys and a male board of directors. When Basilah had to have a meeting with the board, or with her boys’ school counterpart, she used closed-circuit TV. “I might need a colleague’s support, but I don’t need to be sitting in a room with him,” she said. “If the men could come in here and be with us, they would end up dominating and telling us how to run things. I prefer to run my own show.”
Basilah also used closed-circuit TV at the university, where she was studying for her MBA. Women were first admitted to university in Saudi Arabia in 1962, and all women’s colleges remain strictly
segregated. Lecture rooms come equipped with closed-circuit TVs and telephones, so women students can listen to a male professor and question him by phone, without having to contaminate themselves by being seen by him. When the first dozen women graduated from university in 1973, they were devastated to find that their names hadn’t been printed on the commencement program. The old tradition, that it dishonors women to mention them, was depriving them of recognition they believed they’d earned. The women and their families protested, so a separate program was printed and a segregated graduation ceremony was held for the students’ female relatives. Two thousand women attended. Their celebratory ululations raised the roof.
But while the opening of women’s universities widened access to higher learning for women, it also made the educational experience much shallower. Before 1962, many progressive Saudi families had sent their daughters abroad for education. They had returned to the kingdom not only with a degree but with experience of the outside world, whether in the West or in more progressive Arab countries such as Egypt, Lebanon or Syria, where they’d breathed the air of desegregation and even caught a breath of secular culture. Now a whole generation of Saudi women have completed their education entirely within the country. While thousands of Saudi men benefit from higher education abroad at government expense, women haven’t been granted such scholarships since 1980. The government’s position is that women’s educational opportunities have improved within the kingdom to the point where a woman’s needs can all be met within its borders. The definition of her educational needs, as set out in a Ministry of Higher Education policy paper, are “to bring her up in a sound Islamic way so that she can fulfill her role in life as a successful housewife, ideal wife and good mother, and to prepare her for other activities that suit her nature such as teaching, nursing and medicine.”
The result is a cadre of older Saudi women professors who are vastly more liberal than the younger women students they now are teaching. When some of these women professors took part in the driving demonstration, it was their women students who turned on them first. One student barged into one professor’s office and started
pulling at the professor’s hair and abusing her for demonstrating. Young women objecting to the drivers led an angry protest from the campus mosque. Among the calls of the zealots following the demonstration was for the women’s university to be permanently closed.
Lack of opportunity for education abroad means that Saudi women are trapped in the confines of an education system that still lags men’s. Subjects such as geology and petroleum engineering—tickets to influential jobs in Saudi Arabia’s oil economy—remain closed to women. Three of Saudi Arabia’s seven universities—Imam Mohamed bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, the University of Petroleum and Minerals and the Islamic University in Medina—don’t accept women. Few women’s colleges have their own libraries, and libraries shared with men’s schools are either entirely off limits to women or open to them only one day per week. Most of the time women can’t browse for books but have to specify the titles they want and have them brought out to them.
But women and men sit the same degree examinations. Professors quietly acknowledge the women’s scores routinely outstrip the men’s. “It’s no surprise,” said one woman professor. “Look at their lives. The boys have their cars, they can spend the evenings cruising the streets with their friends, sitting in cafés, buying black-market alcohol and drinking all night. What do the girls have? Four walls and their books. For them, education is everything.”
When Saudi women did go abroad to be educated in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the places they often selected was the American University of Beirut. In 1866 a Vermont missionary named Daniel Bliss laid the foundation stone for the men’s college that was to become AUB, declaring that the school was for “all conditions and classes of men without regard to color, nationality, race or religion. A man white, black, or yellow, Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution… and go out believing in one God, in many gods, or in no God.”
The AUB opened a Women’s School of Nursing at the university as early as 1905 and accepted its first woman student to the general campus in 1921. She arrived fully veiled and accompanied by her
husband. By the mid-sixties, the last all-male bastion, engineering, had fallen to coeducation.
For a while, the transplant of American liberalism seemed to work. Leila Sharaf, a Lebanese Druse, witnessed the birth of dozens of political and philosophical movements on the campus in the 1950s, and fostered the rise of Arab nationalism. “There were so many clubs,” she says. “The Arab Cultural Club, the Loss of Palestine Club, the Baathists.” Women sat with men in the coffee shops fringing the campus, arguing passionately into the night. Leila Sharaf met her future husband, a Jordanian Muslim, at one of the clubs and returned with him to Jordan, where she eventually became minister of information in the Jordanian government and a close adviser to Queen Noor.
But by the middle of the 1960s the return to Islamic fundamentalism began to emerge as an ideology in competition with Arab nationalism. The university’s liberalism, and its American name, began to make it a target of extremists.
The heart of the liberal program at AUB has always been a cultural studies course that takes students from the Epic of Gilgamesh through Homer and Virgil to Locke, Descartes and Hobbes. In 1966 the imams of some Beirut mosques got hold of a required text from the course that quoted the medieval Christian theologian, Thomas Aquinas, saying that the Islamic faith’s swift expansion didn’t indicate the religion’s inherent truth. Police burst onto the campus to arrest the heretical author. “I told them Mr. Aquinas wasn’t available at the moment,” recalls Tarif Khalidi, a medieval historian who helped develop the cultural studies program. He found himself hauled off to be interrogated instead. It was one of his students, Hanan Ashrawi, who raised the alarm and brought the president of the university and the Lebanese interior minister to have him set free.
By the 1980s the attacks were no laughing matter. One day in 1984 a crowd of Hezbollah activists poured into the campus and planted a green Islamic flag atop one of the buildings. Sheik Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, gave a speech about the prophet’s daughter Fatima and her importance as a role model for Muslim women. “It wasn’t that he said anything particularly controversial, but you can speak about the weather, and everyone knows what is
meant,” says Wolfgang Kohler, a German scholar who happened to be on campus that day. To him, the message was that Hezbollah’s power extended even within the gates of the most important American institution in Lebanon.
That message was conveyed brutally in January 1984, when the university president, Malcolm Kerr, was murdered near his office by gunmen with silenced pistols. AUB faculty and staff also became kidnap victims. In 1985, in the wake of the Kerr murder, the cultural studies program came under fire again. This time the issue was the teaching of sacred texts—one of the gospels, an epistle of St. Paul, parts of the Koran—that was led by a Christian member of the faculty. “With the growth in the number offundies in the arts faculty, more and more students found it objectionable to be taught the Koran by a Christian,” Tarif Khalidi recalls. “So we decided to throw out the sacred texts, much to my regret. How can you understand, say, St. Augustine, if you haven’t read any Old and New Testament?”
Mostly, the university resisted sectarian pressures. Men and women continued to mix freely on the tree-shaded, seaside campus, and more women still wear blue jeans than veils. And that is a thorn in the side of extremists. In 1991 a powerful bomb tore the heart out of the campus, leaving a pile of rubble beneath the gate inscribed with the university’s motto: “That they may have life and have it more abundantly.”
Tarif Khalidi has no doubts about where he and his colleagues stand with fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim. “I have reason to believe they hate our guts. I know myself I set out consciously to sow doubt in their minds.” One area in which he likes to sow doubt is the role of women. His mother was one of the first Arab women to appear in public without the veil. “She was always reading the Koran and shaking her head,” he recalls. “The line about ‘men are in charge of women’ used to make her really angry.”
To go from the liberal, tolerant campus of the AUB to the gates of the Islamic University of Gaza feels like traveling backward in
time. In fact, it is the Gaza campus that offers the more accurate vision of the future as Islamic groups gain increasing influence.
The campus of the Gaza university is split down the middle, with one section for men and one for women. When I visited the women’s campus in the spring term of 1993, I wore a scarf and a loose-fitting, long-sleeved ankle-length dress, since I knew the institution strictly enforced hijab. But my arrival at the women’s gate caused a flurry anyway. “We have to find you a
jalabiya,”
explained Asya Abdul Hadi, a recent graduate, pointing to her own neck-to-toe button-through coat. “Even on the women’s campus, we have men professors.”
Eventually, someone found a baggy blue serge garment that belonged to a student at least five inches taller than I. Grabbing a fistful of fabric so I could walk, I tottered after Asya into the high-walled campus and past a jumble of low, asbestos-roofed huts.
What Berkeley was to the antiwar movement of the sixties, the Islamic University of Gaza is to the holy-war crowd of the nineties. Most of the campus supports Hamas, the Islamic group that calls for a war to the death against Israel. The university’s militance was so menacing to the Israelis that the army declared the campus a closed military zone from 1987 to 1991 and hauled most of the faculty and a large swatch of the student body to prison.
We wandered to the students’ common room, where a few women sat sipping Cokes and chatting. All of them wore jalabiyas in dull shades of brown, olive or navy. Asya introduced me to some of her friends who worked in the university administration. I asked if I could meet some of the women professors as well. “We don’t actually have many women professors,” said Majida Anan, a thirty-year-old administrator. “The priority here is for men to teach, because the man is the one who needs a career. The woman will be married and her husband will take care of her. And besides, if the university hires a woman, she can only teach here, on the women’s campus, whereas a man can teach both here and across the street with the men. When we achieve our Islamic state there won’t be any mixing at all.”
Khomeini’s daughter Zahra taught philosophy to mixed classes at Tehran University. I asked Majida her opinion of that. “There are
no opinions in Islam,” she responded brusquely. “Islam says that men and women can mix if it is absolutely necessary. If there is no necessity, then they mustn’t do it.”
I’d hoped to find something different at Gaza University—perhaps the emergence of an Islamic feminism. Palestinians had always been among the most progressive on women’s issues, and I thought the fusion of that spirit with militant Islam might produce something interesting.
But in Gaza the militants had latched onto a brand of Islamic radicalism that threatened to do worse than set the clock back for Palestinian women. What Majida was proposing had never been part of Palestinian culture. Instead, her ideas were imports: they had “Made in Saudi Arabia” stamped all over them.
Hamas devotes two articles of its thirty-six-article charter to the role of Muslim women. Women, it says, “manufacture men and play a great role in guiding and educating the [new] generation. The enemies have understood that role, and therefore they realize if they can guide and educate [the women] in a way that would distance them from Islam, they would have won that war. Therefore you can see them making consistent efforts by way of publicity and movies, cur-riculi [sic] of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Free Masons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like…. Therefore, we must pay attention to the schools and curriculi upon which Muslim girls are educated, so as to make them righteous mothers, who are conscious of their duties in the war of liberation. They must be fully capable of being aware and of grasping the ways to manage their households. Economy and avoiding waste in household expenditures are prerequisites to our ability to pursue our cause….”