Youth and Education in the Middle East by Cantini Daniele

Author:Cantini, Daniele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Islamic studies, Nationalism, Philosophy & theory of education, Higher & further education, Social & cultural anthropology, Development studies, Jordan
ISBN: 9780857729378
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Self-presentation and judgement-making

Perhaps implicit in the discussion so far, one of the driving forces that sustain the complex structure that I have tried to account for is the necessity of keeping one's reputation, in facing others, both on campus and at home, and in presenting oneself in public. Reputation has a double cogency, among one's peers in the context of the campus, and among one's family and in the general social context outside it. Some studies have shown that co-educational institutions are not so widespread at the school level in Jordan (Adely 2009c, Jansen 2006, Kaya 2010), and there is quite a serious debate about women attending such institutions and still preserving their propriety. Adely discusses how such debates are conducted at one secondary school outside Amman, and finds that although the official textbook of religious education states that Islam permits attendance at co-educational settings, it emphasises the need for seriousness of purpose as well as modest dress and demeanour. Moreover, in the recent past in Jordan,

many families would not allow their daughters to take a public bus to a nearby town for class, let alone to live in a dormitory at a more distant university. According to conventional wisdom at that time, women should stay near home, they should avoid mixed-sex environments, and they should not sleep away from the protection of their male relatives. (Kaya 2010: 527)

Despite having been somewhat weakened in recent years, such spatial dictates still carry some weight. They intimately bind concern for women's safety with issues of reputation (Ghannam 2002, 2011), and they somewhat transcend class boundaries. Walida offers an excellent example, for her limited mobility was already part of a deal in which she had obtained something that would be unthinkable a generation before. Her case might lead one to think that this condition applies only to students from the lower strata of society, but in my fieldwork I also encountered many cases among more privileged students in which negotiations over propriety and modesty were the norm. Surur, for instance, enjoyed a great deal of mobility during daytime, but she was almost never allowed out after dusk. Tania, a student of business administration coming from a well-off family and whose mother is British, kept making fun of Wahija's decision to don the veil, and considered herself to be quite different from the average students on campus (Wahija kept making fun of her snobbishness in return). Yet she, like Surur, was not allowed out in the evening, while Wahija, despite her more humble class and her veil, went out with regularity; when I went out with them and their friends off the campus, Tania invariably left at 8pm, while the others could stay until later.18 Interestingly, neither Surur nor Tania described this in terms of an outright imposition, but pointed to exceptions, usually family occasions, and dismissed evenings out as being cheap and inappropriate. Both cases, however, indicate that considerations of gender propriety are not affected by class, and are among the main preoccupations of students in their everyday lives on campus.

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