Yusuf Estes Talk

I've recently become painfully aware of how much my Western assumptions about culture and gender so significantly conflict with some of the ways gender and culture play out here in Doha. On Tuesday night, I went to a talk given by Yusuf Estes, a former American Minister turned Muslim convert. He spent a lot of time discussing the meaning of Allah and Islam and Muslim and other words which in itself was quite helpful. In trying to create a division between Islam and Christianity, he completely misinterpret an extremely important passage from the New Testament that talks about eternal and everlasting life, saying that in this section Jesus himself, a man who died a mortal died, was claiming that following him would be the road to eternal life, but in the most physical sense of the term, which I've never in my entire life heard any Christian interpret that way. There were some other questionable things about his portrayal of Christianity, interesting coming from a formerly evangelical preacher, but I won't get into that. While wikipedia isn't the most sound of sources, you can look him up and find more websites on his life and mission here.

The purpose of this post is not the talk itself, but rather my own emotional and physical reaction to the social environment of the talk. It is the custom of the student group MyEC, Muslim Youth in Education City, to segregate their events. Men sit in the front, women sit in the back. They do this for a couple of reasons: 1) In situations where Muslims are focusing on God and their faith, the presense of the opposite sex is not only distracting but inappropriate and 2) if women were to sit in the front, the men could still be distracted by the women b/c the men could see them. This I understand from a cultural perspective. However because of this social situation, I was put in a very uncomfortable position. When I first walked in the women were just sitting in the back of the men's section, and so I sat at the front of the women's section only a few rows back from the men. More men started to file in and at some point there was a mass exodus from the men's section by the women to their own section which was separated by tables, completely unbeknown to me.

At one point, a man sat down right in front of me and I finally realized that I was alone in the men's section. Several thoughts ran through my head. Should I get up out of respect for Muslim culture? What message would it send to the Muslim students if I refused to move? Would it mean that I was disrespectful and irreverent to their customs? Would that then create distance between me and the students that I was to interact with on a day to day basis? Or should I move? What message would THAT send to the students? Would it show them respect and therefore make them more likely to approach me in the future about sensitive subjects? Or would it show that being subjugated to cultural norms was an okay thing? Would it reinforce in the students' minds that not questioning the status quo and just passively accepting the state that the world is in is good? I sat there in my seat, frozen by my conflicting values and desires to respect but also to push students to question. That's what being an educator is really all about, isn't it? To get students to question why things are done the way that they're done, right? The pressure to act, including not because making a conscious decision not to move was in fact more of an action that you could believe, built inside of and I slowly slipped out of my seat and quietly reserved myself to the back.

In retrospect, I think it was a good thing that I moved. Events of a spiritual nature are not a place to make a cultural statement. It gets tricky, however, in the involvement of religion, which is innately and innevitably a cultural issue, so why wouldn't a cultural statement be appropriate? I think it had more to do with respect in the end for me. I don't have enough clout and rapport around here yet to make those kind of statements. One woman did, and that's the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs, Gloria Khoury. She's also Arab, and she's been here for much longer than I have, and thus much more justified in making the statement that I was unfortunately too chicken to make. She's the better woman in the end. But I did end up getting to share my experience and emotional whirlwind with a few students, which I think actually had the same effect on a few students as I had originally intended. Whereas they would have thought nothing of the event, I got to share with them my perspective on it and at least bring up the idea of questioning the way things are. Maybe it didn't make a difference to them, but I guess that's the kind of risk you take every day in the student affairs. You have to believe that what you do makes a difference in at least ONE person's life, and that's all that matters.