Who taught us and who taught our teachers? This is an important question in attempting to discover what blocks our minds and what clouds our faculties of thinking and understanding. To answer this question we have to go back in history to the founding of primary schools in the Kingdom 50 years ago and understand how knowledge was imparted in those days. We also have to find out how we understood ideas in those days.
Is it not odd that we have become a kind of Islamic or cultural type different from all other Muslims — particularly from our own brothers in neighboring countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and, lately, Qatar? We’re even different from people in Oman where women appear most honorably. The Omani woman keeps her face uncovered but is never lax in her hijab (veil). She behaves in a respectable manner without anyone with a cane standing behind her preventing her from looking right or left and prodding her to keep her face covered. On the contrary, our practice in the Kingdom suggests that women never go out of their homes except to indulge in immorality.
There are people among us who look at books with suspicion thinking they have a unique power to profoundly influence readers. Man is viewed merely as a vehicle that is driven around. Meanwhile, our friends and relatives in nearby regions have allowed their women to occupy top positions in government. Women occupy four ministerial posts in the UAE; they also hold key jobs in other close-by countries.
Books impress us with their varied contents and the mingling of ideas and cultures. Those who taught our teachers never came across books that contained varied ideas. Even their understanding of religion was confined to a narrow circle.
I remember one of our Fiqh (jurisprudence) teachers who used to teach us a book called Zad Al-Mustaqni (Provisions for the One Who Seeks Conviction) at the intermediate school level. None of us could understand the book’s title or content. We repeatedly asked the teacher to explain the vague ideas contained therein. But he could not provide us with a convincing answer and finally told us to “learn as I did, and you will pass the exam.”
This outlines the limited understanding of those who taught us in those days. Just imagine the outlook of teachers before people learned about electricity, water taps and cooking gas; when the goat was the equivalent to the modern Al-Marai or Al-Safi (local dairy companies) and when asphalt and cement were unheard of. Imagine the isolation that people lived in the desert in those days, when rocks and sand alone were the hard realities to interact with.
However, the people in the Gulf have made a lot of progress because their teachers and the teachers of their teachers were never isolated from cultural and scientific developments in other parts of the world.
