knock me down with a feather! re: S.A./veils

http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/09/24/saudi-arabia%E2%80%99s-new-university-to-let-women-unveil-and-study-with-men/


Saudi Arabia’s new university to let women unveil and study with men

The King Abdullah Science and Technology University opened Wednesday is meant to break ground on Saudi Arabia’s scientific learning and gender norms.


For the first time in Saudi Arabia’s history, men attending a university north of Jeddah will have special classmates – women.

The conservative country unveiled on Wednesday its first ever fully coed university, the King Abdullah Science and Technology University (KAUST). In the past, women in the notoriously gender restrictive kingdom were only allowed to take classes separately from men.

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The university’s lavish inauguration on Wednesday met with glowing praise, according to this description from Arabnews.com:

Breathtaking, spectacular and just amazing. That is how Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony of the multibillion-dollar King Abdullah University of Science and Technology was described by a large section of the nearly 3,000 guests that included prominent Saudis, foreign leaders, Nobel laureates, researchers, scientists and journalists.

Women guests in the audience carried along by the heady atmosphere of excitement and expectation spontaneously broke into traditional ululation, a sign of joy and good will.
There’s a lot for women to be happy about, as Al Jazeera reports:

he new university will not require women to wear veils or cover their faces, and they will be able to mix freely with men.

They will also be allowed to drive, a taboo in a country where women must literally take a back seat to their male drivers.
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absolutely wonderful news! wishing them well. hugs and kisses for the King

I applaud SA for doing this. It's a baby step.

Sorry I don't have a link -- whatever I've read on this was a while ago. But the general impression I have is that there are enormous social pressures within Saudi Arabia, that well-educated middle class youths are one of the areas of greatest stress, and that the decades-old policy of catering to their own religious right to keep a lid on things is no longer working.

Basically, if the Saudi monarchy is to have any prayer of survival, it needs new allies -- and presenting itself as the sponsor of a modernizing trend in a way that could win the loyalty of a generation probably looks like its best bet.

She has dual US/ Saudi citizenship and was in the US to get her MPH. She told me that one of the first tasks she was asked to perform, as a medical student, was a testicular exam on a male patient. "Don't believe everything you hear in the U.S. about us," she said. "Of course I take care of male patients. I'm a doctor."