As three of Pinnacle's pastors and 35 congregation members and friends prepare to journey to the Holy Land in late October, I’ve been thinking about the last time I was in Israel, twenty-three years ago. I went not as a tourist but as a teacher. I had just gotten through my doctoral “comprehensive” exams at Princeton Seminary, and I wanted to do something completely different. I thought about the enriching time I had spent teaching English for the summer in Western China back in 1987, under the auspices of Grand Canyon University, where I was then a student. The dean of students who had coordinated that trip, Treva Gibson, was still working at GCU in 2000. So, I contacted her and asked, “Do you have any international placements for teaching English this summer? Any chance of going back to China?” She responded, “I don’t have anything in China, but I do have something in Jerusalem. Interested?” Well, yes, I was interested! After seven years of theological studies at that point, a trip to the Holy Land seemed like a dream come true.
Well, I took the opportunity and ended up not in Jerusalem, but in a small Israeli-Arab town, called Baqa al-Gharbiyye, teaching at a small community college, with only six students who’d signed up for my class: Suhair, Rania, Abeer, Jamilla, Heba, & Nour. You may not recognize these names enough to tell, but they are all female. The fact that there were only girls worked out well for our classroom. If male students had been present, the girls would have had to sit in the back of the classroom behind a barrier. They would have had far less opportunity to interact in the class and to vocalize their opinions.
Because there were no male classmates, these women took the chance to say what they thought. Rania (21) said, “I have had seven to eight proposals of marriage since I was fourteen. My father has always said that his daughter would not marry until she had her education and knew how to drive!” All the girls said the same. Their fathers supported them in getting an education. “Don’t think of us as oppressed as women,” Suhair asserted. “We choose to wear these hijabs (coverings). Our sisters do not wear these. They go to state universities and lead secular lives. We choose this way of life.”
When I talked to them about their dreams, however, they were less positive. Heba said, “I want to be an astrophysicist!” All the other girls hissed and chided her, “Don’t reach beyond your station. You know such a thing is not possible for us.” These students all affirmed that their position as women in the Islamic world in some ways was limited, but they said, “In the Qur’an we as women have rights. It is our society that limits us. We have the right to own property and to be treated equally within the household. Yes, the Qur’an allows for a man to marry up to five women, if he will treat them all the same. And what man is in any way capable of this?” Through these conversations, I learned a lot about Islamic feminism! These young women each brought a copy of the Qur’an to class, and if at any point they disagreed with something I said, they would flip through the pages of their holy book and say, “Professor, with all respect, the Qur’an says, ….” And I would be put in my place.
I wonder about these young women and what has become of them. They would all be in their mid-forties by now, most likely married, and raising teenagers. Perhaps some of them have been able to emigrate to other countries, where there are greater opportunities. Perhaps Heba has become an astrophysicist after all! Who knows.
I love how education can bring people together, create opportunity, and feed the soul. My soul was definitely fed back in the summer of 2000. I learned a lot even as I sought to teach.
