Our country is currently undergoing an encouraging educational boom. Instead of building more private and public colleges, universities and institutions for young men and women, there’s a trend to send students abroad to study in different Western, Eastern and Arab countries. We hope that these students will come home with valuable and useful degrees and qualifications that will help in the advancement of the country and boosting its economy. They should be prepared academically and psychologically in advance to live through this beneficial yet difficult experience.
What matters in the experience isn’t just only academic success, but also maturity and personal development by which the young man or woman lives an independent lifestyle and thinks seriously about handling residence issues, finances, friendships and how to survive. However, one shouldn’t deprive himself or herself of the joy of getting to know the good in other cultures instead of what is destructive physically or emotionally.
Some of these young students who travel abroad to study need guidance. They occupy themselves with trivial issues that negatively influence their academic performance and then they return home with financial and psychological losses.
We can focus on two groups of students who have yet to learn what is the healthy and most appropriate way to adapt to different non-Islamic non-Arab cultures. The first one is the extremely conservative type that doesn’t necessarily implement the true aspects of religion. Islam is supposed to help humans choose a lifestyle that is flexible and suitable to his surrounding.
This group of students doesn’t have the balanced religious awareness and they base their actions on what others say without having their own solid references. They categorize others as atheists and disbelievers according to their own judgments and religious beliefs. They see that any woman who doesn’t wear a veil is a wrongdoer. And any man who doesn’t have a beard and doesn’t agree to the criticism of any religious figure is a sinner. They think this is a nasty violation of religion’s solid rules. This confusion of religious beliefs can’t be solved easily. A person with such negative mentality isolates himself when living in a Western country. He undergoes a cultural shock because of his new environment and the shock is enough to make any individual experience depression. Add to that the difficulties of studying and feeling homesickness that push the person to the one thing he’s familiar with: religion. And because he doesn’t have enough time to read extensively about religion and learn how to be religiously balanced, he follows what he hears of different opinions and neglects Islam’s leniency and the fact that it’s suitable for every time and place.
To understand this type of extremists who lack sufficient religious knowledge, I recall the story of a group of young students studying abroad. They tried to escape from a snowstorm while driving in one of America’s big cities so they sought shelter inside a building. After the snowstorm was over, they realized that they were inside a church and they became afraid that they had committed a sin. They wrote at once to a sheikh asking his opinion.
Those students didn’t know that Islam grants Christians their rights in Christianity and does not prohibit Muslims from entering Churches. In fact, Umar ibn Al-Khattab, the second Caliph in Islam, entered the Qyama Church and the only thing that prevented him from praying in the church was his fear that Muslims might stop praying in mosques and pray in temples and churches instead. Islam is a religion of leniency and forgiveness. Where do extremists stand on these issues?
The other group of students is one that suffers a loss of identity. They forget about their way of eating, drinking or dressing in order to learn what others do. One reader wrote to me saying that he feels deep pain and sorrow when he sees these new enthusiastic students living without morals or principles. They indulge themselves by adopting negative habits such as drinking alcohol, using drugs or committing adultery. This problem doesn’t occur among young men only but among women as well. They live through confusion and turbulence, wasting their energy on destructive things that nullify the very reason they traveled for.
In my opinion, those two groups don’t know how to make the best of their stay abroad. Some will come back without any knowledge about foreign cultures and some will come back after failing to earn a degree in addition to other financial, psychological and emotional damages. I believe that it’s a beautiful thing for people to experience different cultures, but it’s more beautiful to know that one is successful academically and socially in order to enjoy life in a healthy balanced manner without losing one’s identity or one’s religion.
— Dr. Maha Al-Hujailan is a medical researcher at King Khaled University Hospital in [email protected]
