It is a tale that every child in this country knows: Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) told his followers to seek knowledge anywhere in the world even if they had to go to China, which was the farthest place imaginable at that time. The message was clear: Knowledge was to be sought even if one had to travel to the end of the world to obtain it. These days, we travel for education, we meet different people and live in different cultures, and that also is part of our religion, as it says in the Qur’an that God created different tribes and nations so that we could seek to know each other.
To know the “other” is essential and to respect that “other” is also essential, but the knowing and respecting seems to be all in an ideal world that we do not live in and, sadly, no matter what we say we tend to forget those wise teachings.
Newspapers this week carried the story that, while doing the rounds at an international educational fair in Jeddah last week, the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice noticed that there were women working at the Canadian booth. The Commission then decided to close down the section and eject the three women who had traveled to Jeddah from Canada, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to staff the booth.
To go back one step and look at the situation, here is what happened: The Canadian section was promoting educational institutions at which Saudi students are invited to study, but in Saudi Arabia that is beside the point. What matters is that we make sure that women do not work alongside men; the mere fact that the booths had women working in them was so objectionable that those booths had to be closed. It does not make a difference if the event were mixed, and that there were women attending it.
I have to ask: What difference does it make if women stand either inside the booths answering questions or outside the booths asking questions? And I ask here, for the sake of argument, what will happen to future students if they see women working there? Isn’t the whole idea of the fair to promote education abroad? And for those who perhaps do not know what life abroad entails, don’t we have to shock them with the fact that in other countries women work in public, mixing with men!
According to the report in Arab News, prior to the fair the Canadian Embassy specifically inquired whether women would be permitted at the exhibition and were told by the organizers — Al-Harithy Company for Exhibitions — that they would. A month ago — after the embassy had made the bookings and paid the participation fees — the exhibitors informed them that women would not be allowed to participate. But as it happens, the exhibition center was apparently not authorized to give such permission and the whole nasty business was blamed on the center in the end. A scapegoat was obviously needed to put an end to the confusion and negative effect this whole business caused.
The Canadian Embassy released an angry press statement which said its booth at the exhibition was in full compliance with both Saudi laws and the rules outlined by the Al-Harithy Co. The statement said the booth should not have been closed and that such unprofessional behavior would only undermine the chances of Canadian participation in future events in the Kingdom. Obviously, undermining the chances of Canadian participation in future events had never occurred to those who booted the women out. That leaves us with a question: In all our efforts to force a hypocritical sense of propriety upon everything, did anyone stop to think that the booth of Effat College, which is a women’s college, was also emptied of women and that a man was brought in to explain the work of an institution which men are not allowed to enter? How ironic!
