EQUAL BUT SEPARATE (vignette excerpt from the Abu Dhabi chapter)
The historically all-female university where my husband taught expanded to a co-ed facility and moved to a new campus before we arrived. Like a butterfly, the building was designed as two large wings, each with dozens of classrooms and offices. A female side and a male side.
The campus was situated on a large piece of desert property, but the external grounds were rarely used. Everything, including all of the parking, was covered for protection from the sun. Each side of the facility featured a long mall. There faculty, staff, and students could gather, enjoy a coffee, or do a bit of shopping at one of a few small stores: a stationery boutique, health-food store, flower shop. The mall ceiling was three commercial stories high. To view the women’s side from a second- or third-floor landing at lunchtime was to be transported to Hogwarts Great Hall, overlooking hundreds of young people in long black robes.
The two wings of the campus were connected by a thorax with two dining halls and a library in the middle. As there was only one library, it had to be shared, but never concurrently. Women could use the research and study facility on three days of the week, and men on two days. Even the parking lots were segregated: one for male students, one for female.
On day one of the fall semester, a first-year professor from England, new to the country, greeted his students on the men’s campus. After handing out the syllabus to a roomful of white-kandura-clad students, he noted that they needed textbooks. The stack was too heavy to carry, so he had not brought them with him.
“We could help you carry them,” one of the young males suggested.
“Yeah?”
“Sure.”
“Well… OK.”
So off they went, two dozen male students following their teacher out of the classroom, down the hall, through the men’s cafeteria, past the uniformed guard, beyond the library, through the women’s cafeteria, and into the textbook storeroom. On the women’s campus.
The professor handed out the texts, and everyone filed back toward the classroom. It is not known whether any students in white kanduras caught sight of any students in black abayas, but administrators found out about the little excursion, and the teacher was reprimanded for leading it.
***
Male and female students were forbidden from crossing into one another’s campus territory, but faculty members could come and go as they pleased. Men or women could be instructors for either women or men. It was almost as though professors had no gender.
This “otherly” status was not completely blind to gender. Men and women were never to touch. A male professor was careful to never get too close to his students, never lean too close over a computer they were working at, and never touch a book held in a woman’s hand. When a female student made an appointment to come to a male professor’s office, he would have an extra chair available because she might be more comfortable bringing a friend with her.
The point was repeatedly emphasized in the fall-semester faculty orientation (a weeklong event). Never touch a woman.
“What if she’s stumbling? What if she’s falling down the stairs?”
“Let her fall. You may not touch her.”
A professor from Jordan corroborated the principle. When a female student of his in Amman had an epileptic seizure, her classmates would not allow him to provide first aid. “Don’t touch her,” they warned. “You’ll make trouble for her.”
In any foreign country and culture, we try to respect local laws and customs. Their land, their rules. This directive, however, John found intolerable. “If that ever happens, I may get thrown out of the country, but I’m not going to stand by and let someone get hurt,” he said. Fortunately, he was never put to that particular test.
***
“Lemonade stand” is a class assignment that introduces accounting concepts through a simplified but realistic business scenario. The exercise requires students to figure out the steps required to make and sell lemonade. The curriculum had offered them no accounting background. Still, the students in a computer course on enterprise systems had to figure out the cost of goods, set an appropriate sales price, and produce a balance sheet.
When John introduced the project, twenty-five students looked puzzled.
Make and sell lemonade?
“You know how to use a recipe, right?”
Blank looks. They knew what a recipe was, but they had never used one. Every household had a cook, hired from a foreign country, perhaps the Philippines or Indonesia. They never made lemonade. And selling anything at a makeshift stand in front of their homes would be unimaginable. Still, a cultural gap did not seem to be the problem.
Given a recipe for 50 liters of lemonade, they could not figure out the cost of ingredients required to produce one glassful and how to price it to make a profit.
Homework assignments like this one were sometimes done and sometimes not. When John would remind his students of the deadline for an important “deliverable” component of a semester-long project, they would agree to do it, Insha’Allah.
Insha’Allah is a formidable word in the Arabic language and Muslim culture. It means, “If God so wills.” The phrase is doubly meaningful to me, and I adopted it readily. First, as a journalist, I was trained not to write, for example, that a school board was going to take a certain action; rather, the board members had announced that they planned to do so. Second, as a God-fearing person, I appreciated the reminder that my best-laid plans may not come to fruition.
When John and I say Insha’Allah, it means, “Good Lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise.” When Emirati students said it, it meant, “That’s probably not going to get done on time.”
***
While not all of the students were academically brilliant, they were pleasant to teach, because they were polite and respectful in the classroom. They seemed interested in the subject matter and a little curious about their foreign professors as well.
When Dr. John mentioned that his wife would be coming from the United States soon, his female students seemed eager to meet me. I showed up one day when two of my husband’s students were passing by his office. They stepped inside, and one of them immediately called a third friend. Her speech was quick and breathless when she exclaimed into her phone, “Come here. Come right now. Mrs. John is here!”
Though they were all eighteen or older, it was hard not to refer to these young women as girls. They liked to bring flowers and frequently offered little gifts with childlike enthusiasm. This is why a ceramic plaque in our hallway bears the inscription, “Children are born with wings. Teachers help them to fly.” They shared an appealing sense of freshness and energy. Such was their joie de vivre.
On a stormy February day, students were so excited they couldn’t sit still in a classroom. It was raining. This might only happen twenty days a year in the UAE, so when it does it’s an occasion. The young women ran down the halls and burst outdoors, laughing and squealing, and tilting their heads toward the sky to let the pouring rain splash on their hands and faces. Two of them commandeered a three-wheeled mini loader used by the gardeners; one stood on the back while the other steered the wagon through puddles.
There was a certain naïveté which was enviable if slightly concerning. The students expressed great trust in a government that took good care of them. Our young friend Huda expressed little concern when an American woman was stabbed to death in a shopping mall restroom at the high-end Boutik Mall on Reem Island. The news report emphasized the female perpetrator’s Yemeni origins, a common scapegoat. There was no public follow-up. We asked Huda what she thought of the ordeal.
“I assume the police took care of the matter,” she said simply.
Male college students didn’t necessarily have any tighter grip on the realities of the country’s transitional status.
“What do you want to do after you graduate?” John typically asked all of his students.
“I want to work in an office,” one young man replied, pleased with himself for having a ready response.
“Okay… Doing what?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just work in an office.”
“Well, if you’re going to sit at a desk all day, it might be more pleasant to being doing something you like.”
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