The Foreign Service Journal, April 2011

A P R I L 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 31 F O C U S Haifa Jamal al-Lail: Promoting Education for Girls D r. Haifa Jamal al-Lail is at the forefront of a social revolution in Saudi Arabia. She is dean of Effat University, the kingdom’s first private women’s college founded in 1997. (The university is named after Queen Effat who championed girls’ educa- tion in the kingdom. Her husband, King Faisal, overcame pressure from conservative clerics and opened the first girls’ schools in the kingdom in the 1960s.) Today, Effat is small, with only about one thousand undergraduates, but its ambitions are large. “If we can produce students here with big ideas, then they will have a big impact on our country,” Dr. Haifa insists. Early on, Effat offered a traditional cur- riculum, training girls as teachers and nurses, but it soon added business and technical majors. Notably, all instruction is con- ducted in English, even Islamic studies. Dr. Haifa, choosing her words carefully given the country’s deep religiosity and powerful clerics, explains that the girls must be able to discuss their religion in English — and they also must be prepared for the global job market. Effat has also done away with restrictions that physically separated male teachers from female students. When the college first opened, men used videocameras to teach classes, but now they teach face-to-face. Again, the justification is that the girls must be prepared for a gender-integrated workplace. Among Effat’s other innovations is the screening of foreign films without censorship. Religious conservatives in Saudi Ara- bia believe that movies are a corrupting influence, and consequently there are no public movie theaters in the kingdom. Behind its high walls, with the relative freedom of action enjoyed by its private status, Effat is teaching critical-thinking skills and using the latest pedagogy to encourage more open discussion and debate. The results speak for themselves: Effat confers one of the few Saudi degrees recognized internationally. — Isobel Coleman Two Women Making a Difference Nilofar Sakhi: Reaching Out to Mullahs N ilofar Sakhi stands in front of a gathering of mullahs and tribal leaders, the only woman among 50 men. They have gathered to debate a recent newsletter cir- culated to thousands of village leaders around this province of Northwest Afghanistan by her organization, the Women’s Ac- tivities and Social Services Association. The newsletter has sparked quite a controversy by publishing the views of several Islamic scholars who challenge conservative interpretations of sensitive passages in the Quran. The subject of these con- troversial passages? Women. Nilofar introduces the discus- sion, and then slips to the back as the mullahs hash out their views. “We at WASSA don’t give our own views on the Quran. We bring in religious scholars and sharia experts for that,” she tells me. Born in Herat, Nilofar grew up as a refugee in Pakistan. Her father believed in education for all eight of his children, and Nilofar, the smartest of the lot, went on to earn a degree in biochemistry. After the toppling of the Taliban, she re- turned to Afghanistan and founded WASSA. She quickly re- alized that to have a real impact, she would have to engage conservative attitudes. “You cannot ever be against religion in Afghanistan,” she says. “You must work through it.” WASSA was soon reaching out to the mullahs, promot- ing a Quran-based dialogue that worked to disentangle reli- gion from oppressive cultural practices. When WASSA first started getting involved in sharia debates, threatening letters were slipped under her door at night. But Nilofar also heard from tribal elders and mullahs across the region praising her work and asking for WASSA’s assistance to get literacy classes and other workshops going for women in their vil- lages. “Eighty percent of Afghans live in villages,” Nilofar ex- plains. “We must engage them because if we don’t, we’ll be like tiny pockets of reason surrounded by fundamentalist thinking.” At the local level, WASSA has scored some successes. In one village, it persuaded a young mullah to provide a room in his mosque for literacy classes. The mullah’s sister, the only educated woman in the village, taught classes for girls with WASSA’s support. After seeing the positive impact of the classes and his people’s tremendous demand for educa- tion, the mullah’s reluctance faded away and he became a teacher himself. When WASSA wound down its financial support for the program, the mullah and his sister kept the classes going, making a small business out of it. They collect about 50 afghanis (about 50 cents) per month per student, which more than covers their costs. “It is challenging, but not impossible to work with mullahs,” concludes Nilofar. “Afghans want change, but you always have to be sensitive to religious is- sues.” She draws her inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi’s admonition: think globally, act locally. — Isobel Coleman