Mixed gender locations in Saudi Arabia: Once again a headline maker

ONCE AGAIN the ever controversial issue of mixed-gender locations in Saudi Arabia makes headlines as the dean of the nursing college for women at Princess Noura University allegedly submitted her resignation a couple of weeks ago due to her objection on male teachers giving face to face lectures to the college’s female students.
This headline all over local newspapers made rich content for a hashtag in Twitter, created especially in reaction to the news. The public started what looked like a virtual war between supporters and those against her act using the hashtag as its fertile ground. The dean supported her claims saying that gender mixing is against the all-female university policy as well as the Islamic Shariah laws.
Interesting enough the dean’s resignation came even before students were scheduled to return to college after the summer vacation making the denial of the university’s administration a solid argument. Supporters who embraced her point of view and stood up for her apparently share the same strict Islamic views, assuming that was the actual reason behind her quitting her job. Such Islamic views remain controversial since there is evidence that in the early days of Islam, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) performed prayers in mosques with men lined up behind him followed by women with no barriers or walls to separate them.
Additionally, Muslim women used to go to war alongside with the Prophet (pbuh) and his army of male followers to fetch water for the soldiers, clean the battle field from those who fell wounded and provide medical care to them — which all forced direct contact and mixing between genders. The Prophet, at times even gave lectures to an all-female audience after prayers in mosques. Some would argue that this happened back then, because Allah had given the Prophet privileges that no other human has the right to.
In more recent times, newspapers and electronic news sites published reports with images documenting the visits of well-known Saudi sheikhs and religious scholars, who are also sources for fatwas.
They travel all over the world to give Islamic lectures to either mixed-gender or all-female attendees. The inconsistency and paradox between the given fatwas and the actions of those fatwa-givers is undeniably the root cause of the squabble that occurs among the Saudi people every time an issue of that sort arises, including this incident at Prince Noura University.
Coming back to the subject matter, I cannot help but find it a little confusing that the dean of a nursing college had studied nursing herself, while she was aware that she would most likely end up working in a mixed-gender hospital environment.
If according to her moral code she was lucky enough not to end up in such a workplace, there still remains the fact that she was for years the dean in a college whose students graduate to work mainly in a mixed-gender environment that is a hospital. I personally find such actions to have one label — double standards.