Educating Muslim Women

Educate a man, you educate a person. Educate a woman and you educate a family. Educate a family and you educate the ummah.

Last year on Eid al Adha I visited my Pakistani cousin. He has three children from a Yemeni mother; two boys and a girl. I like the girl very much; she is intelligent and hard working so together that makes a charming combination. It was on Eid that I found out that my niece was being made to study Urdu as a second language by her parents while her brothers were studying French and Spanish. She wanted to study Spanish because she is already fluent in Urdu. My cousin’s excuse is that she is a girl and doesn’t need to study European languages. The boys, future patriarchs of the family, need as many languages as they can master to better interact with the world. My cousin’s family has now moved to Saudi Arabia and I hear that the girl is being home-schooled while the boys go to an American school. She is being home-schooled for A Levels in a Muslim country by her mother who has never been to college and cannot speak English.

The graph below clearly shows the relationship between male and female illiteracy rates in Arab countries. There is not a single Arab country where the female illiteracy rate is lower than the male illiteracy rate. Qatar is an exceptional country because female and male illiteracy rates are equal.

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According to the Adult Literacy Rates and Illiterate Population by Country and by Gender report (of September 2006) by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Egypt’s adult literacy rate for males is 83% whereas that of females is 59.4%. The male adult literacy rate for Morocco is 65.7% and that of females is only 39.6%. Pakistan, another Muslim country’s literacy rate is 63% for males and a mirror image of 36% for females. Compare these percentages with that of Israel where male literacy rate is 98.5% and that of females is 95.9%! According to an unpublished report on senior schools by a lecturer at University of Reading, more and more Pakistani parents are keeping their children from seeking higher education or their children themselves are simply not interested in education. The result is that half of Pakistani households in the UK have incomes that are 50% below the national average income (Source) and nearly all Pakistanis aged 60 and over are living on Income Support (Source).

Where are we heading with these figures? Last year, a friend sent me a forwarded email with a plainly written essay on why Muslim youth must be educated urgently. The essay basically compared today’s most influential Jews with Muslims. Results were dismal in terms of how many Muslims were famous compared to what Jews have done for societal advancement and scholarly achievements. The essay referred to famous Jews like, Jonas Salk, Henry Kissinger, Wilhelm Steinitz, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim, Boris Pasternak, Harry Houdini, Steven Spielberg, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster among the 100 most influential Jews. Of course, one may argue that Muslims are equally intelligent and have been influential, look up history. But, let’s face the stabbing truth – most great and influential Muslim scholars are dead. Gone are the Muslims who fashioned the Islamic Golden Age. I personally find it very sad, more so because in Michael Hart’s book “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in Historyâ€?, the number one position is held by Prophet Muhammed (pbuh). Time’s TIME 100: The People Who Shape Our World, has only 10 ‘Muslim sounding’ names out of 100 and one of them is that of Wafa Sultan! This means that less than 10% of the 100 most influential people in the world are Muslims. Today we urgently need people like Ibn Sina, Al Khawarzimi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Al Haytham, Ibn Arabi, and Ibn Rushd because today the number of original research papers published by scientists in Muslim countries is 0.1% of the number published by scientists in Europe and the USA. (Source)

And we need ‘banaat’ (girls) along with the ‘ibns’ (boys/sons) because when you educate a man, you educate a person. Educate a woman and you educate a family. Educate a family and you educate a village. Educate a village, and you educate a country.

A study done with Bangladeshi women showed that “girls’ career preferences in Bangladesh were the most limited in the survey: rural girls opted for ‘doctor’ or ‘teacher’ almost without exception and 88 per cent of the urban girls said they wanted to be doctors. The lack of range in career preferences would appear to be linked to the lack of role models for the girls: only a tiny percentage of their mothers were working outside the home.â€? (Source). Girls in developing countries don’t have appropriate role models and their parents make traditional career choices for them – doctor or teacher. We need Muslim female nurses, scientists, astronomers, composers, painters, writers, business entrepreneurs, and statisticians amongst other myriad professions. Fewer girls than boys are enrolled in high school science curricula because of a bias in the existing education system and family attitudes that encourage girls to study the arts and humanities. (Source) Another study shows that 75% of Muslim women in India are illiterate (Source).

According to a hadith Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) said, “utlub al ‘ilm waslaw fi al-Sinâ€? (Seek knowledge, even unto China). The hadith instructs both men and women to seek knowledge. 750 verses of the Quran urge believers (men and women) to study nature, to reflect, and to make the best use of reason in their search for the ultimate truth (Source). Educating women achieves equality between the genders since it is the duty of both genders to seek education/knowledge and helps to eradicate disease and poverty in the developing world. In 1837, when Queen Victoria came to power, no institution of higher education in Britain was open to women. But before the beginning of the next century women had even entered institutions like Oxford and Cambridge. Many new universities were founded during Victoria’s reign and the result was that the sun never set on the British Empire.

What I am proposing here is to empower Muslim women. I’m not a Western feminist. I’m not proposing that Muslim women bare themselves and burn their hijabs. I’m proposing that we change statistics. Change statistics which show that half the women in the Arab world are illiterate and in all but four Arab countries less than 80 per cent of girls go to secondary school.

As-Salaamu ‘alaikum,

A study done with Bangladeshi women showed that “girls’ career preferences in Bangladesh were the most limited in the survey: rural girls opted for ‘doctor’ or ‘teacher’ almost without exception and 88 per cent of the urban girls said they wanted to be doctors. The lack of range in career preferences would appear to be linked to the lack of role models for the girls: only a tiny percentage of their mothers were working outside the home.� (Source). Girls in developing countries don’t have appropriate role models and their parents make traditional career choices for them – doctor or teacher.

In my observation, medicine is a very common career choice in the Indo-Pak Muslim diaspora for men as well as women; it’s a direction favoured by Muslim parents.  I know of one family in which two of the three adult sons are in the IT industry and one a doctor, but one of the others actually wanted to be a doctor but could not get into medical school because his A-level results weren’t quite high enough.  I’ve also heard (from one of those three) of British Pakistanis travelling to Prague to train as doctors because of difficulties securing places at UK medical schools.  The doctor son explained that the career is “recession-proof” - people always need doctors even when they don’t need computer programmers; they are the least likely to be made redundant in a mild recession as we have a National Health Service here in the UK.

The literacy gaps are shocking, particularly the one for Tunisia which prides itself on its achievements for women under the vile Bourguiba / Ben Ali dictatorship.  I had never realised that illiteracy rates were so high even in the rich Gulf states.

Salaam Yusuf,

You are absolutely right. There are literally more doctors than patients in Pakistan! And they are paid poorly and most are jobless.

I teach university students in a Gulf country and mine are first generation university goers. Fifty years from now statistics will be different. Teaching them and how they perceive education is a whole other story…

Education is seen by many people as investment in terms of time, money and resources. Consequently women are less educated in these countries because do not think that that is a worth while investment. What people do not realize that investing in the education of women does amount to investing in the education of her family. May be we are just short sighted.

Well said, Saqi! I totally agree.

Beautifully written Suroor!

When I lived in KSA in the 90s, I had the good fortune to have work that brought me into contact with a lot of university aged young women, and almost without exception they were not only very bright, but were extremely motivated and hungry to learn.  Thus it was all the more heartbreaking to listen to their tales of woe…the dashed hopes, the rage toward the inane (as they saw it) limitations which were placed upon them, and their despair at the double standards which were applied to them vs their very often lazy and spoiled brothers. 

I will also say that the most exceptional women I met were 2nd generation: their mothers had had access to a university education (albeit without much in the way of employement opportunities) but their daughters were not so willing to settle for crumbs….

Salamaat,
Awesome post. The whole other dimension to this, are the stereotypes that follow “educated” women/girls. Some parents actually think education gets in the way of marriage. As much as I thought this was an insane rationale, I recently discussed this topic with a brother who specifically preferred an “uneducated” wife,since they were less of drama to deal with.

The sheer madness of it all.

Madness indeed.

Funnily enough, in the UK-Asian marriage market, i and other educated sisters are experiencing the opposite problem to that described in the article.

Fewer practising brothers are bothering with a university education these days compared to sisters, so it is becoming very difficult to find someone compatible!

Asian men are attending university, but many are not practising Muslims, and that is my priority above their having a degree - but it would be nice to have both, inshallah!

Sunrunner – Something in your comment struck me – “and almost without exception they were not only very bright, but were extremely motivated and hungry to learn.â€? I don’t find students in the Gulf bright either. What could be the reason? They want to learn, yes, but they are not smart which has nothing to do with education. I have seen very bright small children selling bobby pins on footpaths in Pakistan. There was one I can never forget – so articulate and well mannered and hungry for learning. I really want to find out why my students are not smart.

Maliha, you are right. Many men and their families want “young and uneducated� brides whom they can “mould�. I have an Indian dentist friend who was looking for a girl for her brother who had been to high school and not more!

iMuslim, Asian men in the UK who are university educated lose Faith because they have to assimilate in the student culture where everyone dates and drinks. Those who are practicing either pay more attention to education of deen over ‘worldly’ education or they don’t see themselves fitting in a university environment. This is a huge problem in the UK.

In the Gulf countries many women go to university only to get married because it is trendy to have educated brides who can speak English! They must never drop out because that would mean eternal accusations from in-laws.

As-Salaamu ‘alaikum,

Surely brothers who need a university education but want to maintain their deen will find a university with a substantial Muslim student body?  Where I was (Aberystwyth) there was no functioning Islamic society (although there was a stall at the freshers’ fair with some mostly foreign men handing out some of the standard leaflets), and I decided to leave Aberystwyth at the end of my degree since I had already decided to accept Islam and realised that Aberystwyth could not answer the needs of a Muslim.  However, that’s not the case in most London universities.  The problem there is often Islamic society politics and the fact that a lot of them are under sectarian control.

As for men not liking educated sisters, I used to have the same attitude because I fear what sort of ideas might have been put into her head at uni.  Universities are often very “politically correct” environments, particularly student unions which are often under the sway of radical feminists and Marxists (this was the case at Aber as well).  My main concern is that the sister would be willing to home-educate the children if necessary, because I don’t want my children repeating my miserable school experience (to be honest, I have little respect for western schooling for a number of reasons), and if the sister is very career-oriented, the likelihood is that she won’t be willing to do this.

Salaam alekum Yusuf,

I’m really curious to know why you didn’t want an educated wife? I mean there are many women who have been to uni and are looking for educated men to marry who are practising muslims but they can’t seem to find any.

Maybe your opinion will offer an insight into what educated and good Muslim men want from a wife.

Your sister in Islam

Suroor

Jazakallah Yusuf for your interesting comment:

”My main concern is that the sister would be willing to home-educate the children if necessary, because I don’t want my children repeating my miserable school experience (to be honest, I have little respect for western schooling for a number of reasons), and if the sister is very career-oriented, the likelihood is that she won’t be willing to do this.”

I can see your point, but not all educated sisters put careers before their family. In the end you only have to ask the “applicant” what her plans are for the future, and you will quickly find out what you need to know.

Plus how do you expect your wife to home school your children if she lacks a decent education herself?

Wa’salam

Educate a man, you educate a person. Educate a woman and you educate a family. Educate a family and you educate the ummah.

True that!

You said:

“I don’t find students in the Gulf bright either. What could be the reason? They want to learn, yes, but they are not smart which has nothing to do with education. I have seen very bright small children selling bobby pins on footpaths in Pakistan.”

I can really relate to that. Yes, as a uni prof in the Gulf for 8 years now I have come across a few VERY bright students from local families, but the vast majority is not what—certainly not in comparison to the non-Khaleej students we have. I think the difference comes from the way they are raised and what has been passed along for generations.

First, you have the fact that the male-dominated interpretation and implementation of Islam in the Middle East has repressed critical thinking. “Do what we tell you and don’t ask any questions” is pretty much the rule of raisin successive generations of Arab children.

Secondly, you have an over-indulged populace in this generation of Khaleeji. They haven’t had to learn problem solving in their lives because there are very few problems that actually fall into their laps. They are horrendously over-protected and generally have led an insular social life, not to mention denied the opportunity to take on part-time work because it would make the family look bad (is., poor).

Thirdly, this generation has been largely raised by maids and nannies who themselves are uneducated. What has always shocked and disturbed me is the fact that this is the case even when the mother does not work outside or even INSIDE of the home. The lack of genuine struggle and hard work to reach goals is really shocking when you come from outside and immerse yourself in the culture for any period of time.

Now that said, I am not saying that Gulf Arab parents are intentionally doing any of this; but simply that what is viewed as good and loving parenting is generally construed as giving your child everything that the people around you give theirs, isolating them from worry about life’s hardship and making sure that they have maids and nannies to attend to their every need. As a result, there are few opportunities to truly learn responsibility and ponder upon one’s role in the larger scheme of things. I have seen this and its ugly consequences in my own STBEH’s children. One of the Doha Debates staged last year was about whether oil had been a blessing or a curse for the Gulf countries. I would say emphatically both and maybe more of a curse when you consider the effect it has had on work ethic.

Fortunately, some parents of today’s uni students are educated and have considered these issues. They are the ones largely who are responsible for bring educational opportunities to this generation. Sure a lot of people are still seeking education for the wrong reasons: as something to do while waiting to get married; as an opportunity to hang out with their friends without parental or family supervision; or to gain prestige and make one more marketable for marriage. However, they ARE being educated—to think critically; to engage with people outside of their gender, tribe, nationality, ethnicity and religion; to consider their own role in the future development of their nation and the wider world. Sure progress is slow but I have faith that insha’Allah change is afoot.

Salaam Alaikum,
PM

Oh PM, You hit the nail on the head. Do I have stories about that?! I once debated with an atheist on a blog who kept saying that Arabs have very low IQs. I believe that to score high on an IQ test, one needs cultural knowledge; one needs to socialise; one has to have experience with problem solving. Therefore what you have explained definitely explains low IQ. But, I also feel that it’s not only about low IQ. There is something missing… even in those who spend a considerable time studying in the West unless they have “foreign parentage.� When they return it seems like nothing is gained … or even lost!

There was once this Khaleeji candidate I was supposed to give an oral test to and when he began to speak I forgot to record his interview! He was so smart and articulate. He had a strong American accent and was spot on everything. His general knowledge was updated and very polished. When he was leaving he mentioned btw that his father was originally from Lebanon and his mother was and American Fulbright scholar!

I’m not ridiculing Khaleeji people. As an educator, I’m only curious what others are curious about too because I want to help.

Having brought up by parents who believe education is a right to every CHILD,I have that in me to pass it to my girls. I know many pple who believe education is only for boys. My grandfather for instance (maternal), didn’t want to educate his first 3 girls thinking that it will bring “shame” to his family. The way of thinking was that girls who were educated would start demanding things that were not the norm. I could feel the thirst my mother had/has for education. She pushed us to excel in everything mashallah. She would always tell us how lucky we were to get an education. She said she would visit her friend who had a tutor at home and would sit behind a door just to listen to them when they were taught. Inshallah, all the parents out there, especially the mothers would hopefully show their girls that education is their right.