JEDDAH, 20 February — Understanding the word “diversity” is simple in theory, but in practical terms, it conjures up strange — if not always complex — meanings.

Our world has forced upon us specific characteristics to suit our universal goals. It is this particular issue that has concerned visiting Professor Elizabeth Warnock Fernea of the University of Texas, in Austin.

In her speech at Effat College recently, Fernea spoke of the images and stereotypes of Muslim women in Western minds. “The night before I came to Saudi Arabia,” said Fernea, “the person sitting next to me in the airplane asked ‘why are you here?’ and I explained I was visiting Effat Collage, to that he replied, ‘but you don’t have children do you?’” When Fernea explained that she was indeed a mother of three and a grandmother of seven, he finally said, “Maybe there are some American women who have grandchildren.” This way, the man showed that he had not expected this of the “other”.

This example is one of two kinds pertaining to the stereotypes defined by Fernea. It is the misunderstandings associated with the “other”.

Other stereotypes are more complex and psychologists brand the second kind “deep stereotypes.” They are based “not on reason,” said Fernea, but on “emotion and are much harder to get rid of.” Like many others, Fernea admitted to having had some reservations of her own regarding women of the Middle East. For the first time in 1956, Fernea set out on a trip with her husband.

“That experience literally changed my life,” Fernea said. Thus she began to rethink the ideas her mother had instilled in her about women in the Middle East and spent the last 40 years filming, writing, and teaching in order to “combat those stereotypes.”

So how do we explain the existence of stereotypes? One is the idea that the Western world separates state from religion, and hence the pretense that religion itself does not exist altogether.

Second is “biology versus civilization,” meaning that most societies believe in the inherent roles of males and females on the one hand, and the effort by Western feminists to break that down into socializing men and women in different ways — depending on the circumstances of our times. Children, for example, are a sign of “status, maturity, respectability and love,” in one part of the world, while in some other parts, it is not as important.

She also says that the more Muslim women can explain the true meaning of culture, the more likely people will get the right message across. Asian men who abuse their wives, for example, go to court and tell the jury that it is in their “culture” to abuse their wives.

Lawyers later concluded that Asians had to rid themselves of their cultural traditions. In this sense, culture was misrepresented.

As a poet once said: “No man is an island, nor is a woman, we must work together,” and as one commentator later noted, it is up to us to deal with ignorant people on both sides of the world. We should begin by self-criticism.

Fernea, a writer, filmmaker, teacher and translator, is one of the founders of women’s study programs at the University of Texas in Austin. She spent much of her time in the Middle East region where she visited and lived for more than 11 years in countries like Iraq, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait.

Fernea received an honorary degree from the New York State University for her contribution to the cultural understanding of the Middle East in the West. She has also edited and written more than 12 books, some of which are “Women and Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change, a Street in Marrakech,” “The Arab World: Forty Years of Change,” and her newest book “In Search of Islamic Feminism” which the New York Times called “new and noteworthy.”