At Saudi campus, expanded freedoms
King wants school to foster tolerance
THUWAL, Saudi Arabia - On this gleaming high-tech campus edged by the Red Sea, May Qurashi crossed a barrier the other day. She played a game on PlayStation with some male fellow students. Her best friend, Sarah al-Aqeel, is also reaching for the forbidden. She’s getting her driver’s license.
Under Saudi Arabia’s strict constraints, Saudi women like Qurashi and Aqeel may neither mingle with men nor drive. But at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened last month on this sprawling site 50 miles north of Jiddah, men and women take classes together. Women are not required to wear traditional black head-to-toe abayas or veil their faces - and they can get behind a steering wheel.
“I don’t think religion should have anything to do with higher education,’’ said Qurashi, a 23-year-old biological engineering graduate student.
The research university is the latest, and so far most significant, endeavor by a Persian Gulf nation to diversify its economy and help wean the region from its dependence on oil wealth. Saudi officials describe the multibillion-dollar postgraduate institution as the spear in the kingdom’s efforts to transform itself into a global scientific center rivaling those in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
But the kingdom’s powerful religious establishment is increasingly voicing criticism of the university. On websites, clerics have blasted the school’s coeducational policy as a violation of sharia, or Islamic, law. Recently, a member of the influential Supreme Committee of Islamic Scholars, a government-sanctioned body, called for an inquiry into the curriculum and its compatibility with sharia law, local newspapers reported.
“Mixing is a great sin and a great evil,’’ Saad bin Nasser al-Shithri was quoted as saying in the al-Watan newspaper. “When men mix with women, their hearts burn, and they will be diverted from their main goal,’’ which he said is education.
In an unprecedented action, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz issued a royal decree recently removing Shithri from his post, according to the official Saudi Press Agency and Western diplomats.
Many Saudis and Western analysts view the university as a test of the king’s ability to challenge hard-line Islamic clerics and expand freedoms, including rights for women, in the Middle East’s most religiously austere country.
In a speech last month, the king, 85, said he hoped the university would become “a beacon of tolerance.’’
