Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Women of the Middle east podcast. Women of the Middle east.
This podcast relates the realities of Arab women and their rich and diverse experiences. It aims to present the multiplicity of their voices and wishes to break overdue cultural stereotypes about women of the Middle East. My name is Amal U. Malki. I'm a feminist scholar and educator. This is Women of the Middle east podcast. Hello and welcome to Women of the Middle East Podcast. I'm still and I invite you to a non curated conversation with a fellow Arab academic. Two Arab women just having a conversation. Deal Abid, Academic researcher from Jordan and there are many areas of commonalities between us. So we both graduated from soas indeed. Was it around the same time? I got my PhD in 2003. How about you?
[00:01:00] Speaker B: I got my Master's in the year 2000 and then I worked for 10 years where I explored the markets, I learned about where exactly I really need to specialize more. I did further research and then I went back for my Ph.D. 2010. 2011 the moment I arrived at Sowers, I was invited to teach because my book on the Palestinian refugees of Egypt was out in 2009.
So my supervisor invited me just directly to start teaching. I told her I am here to think and to ponder. She said, we need you to be with us because we're teaching your book. I spent four years and during these four years I was fully teaching and I graduated 2014.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: If time goes back, I would do exactly the same as you did because I was disadvantaged. I was only 22. Again, no experience, no job experience whatsoever, not even internships. But again, I think because of the context I was living in, I knew that if I go back with a master's to Qatar, the only job that was available to women back then was teachers at schools. And I didn't want to do that. Although I ended up teaching in the university.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: It's a different level.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Exactly. I think I lacked maturity, I lacked world experience.
I spent lots of time, especially because of my topic in the African section at SOAS library, because my thesis was on post colonial novels covering Tayuf Salih and Chani Oshibi. And I think now that we're talking, maybe this is why I'm still hesitant towards publishing my PhD thesis, because I always feel that I could have done better.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: That's very interesting. I think you're hitting on two very important nails. One, when do we go for further education and why? Why do we go for further education and what is the kind of education that we really need to Pursue this is a very important topic really to think about.
And in my work, definitely I question it. Today as an academic, I'm afraid to say most of my students, the moment they finish their masters, they come to me saying we're going for PhD. Women and men, women and men. And I put them off.
My job is to put them off, say hold it, look at the market, explore the market, give it at least between three to five years and understand the market.
Why are we in a rush in our Arab world? The moment we finished Tawjihi, the high school exam, we rushed to go for BA and you go to the West. When I was in London, I used to teach the first two years. I used to teach undergrads, I used to teach forced migration because this is the field of my specialty. I did political economy of development as my main discipline and my sub discipline is forced migration. To my surprise, I'm in London as a PhD scholar. I see that my students, they are young ones like you're talking about 20 years old, they're age able to debate with me, to engage with me, of experiences they have gone through. When I'm talking about refugee camps because they finished their high school exams, they did three months of internship in Somaliland, in Sudan, in name it, Darfur, whatever. So they gave themselves the opportunity to understand what's out there in the real world away from our very global north setting, which is very nice. We really need to think about this. How do we approach education and why do I approach education?
Am I going to university only because I need to finish with a ba?
Most of the researchers today who are working with me, they have studied engineering, architects, medicine, and they have opted the moment they finished their degree to come and work with me as researchers because they felt that they relate more to the community and, and they want to do field research.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: So they convert from STEM to social sciences.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Oh, wow, okay.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: By the way, majority of those who are working with me as researchers are with very engineering architectural backgrounds. Does that tell us something? What's amazing about them is that the education has given them the mindset.
It's like pmp, the management program.
So they know very well when I say let's go to the field, they know very well, what do we need to do. So there is this mindset which I very much value. You don't see it in those who studied humanities. So I value this thing in the kind of research that we're doing. But I feel sad that these people have spent at least five years studying something that was just Chosen either because of my grade. I believe this is the system that we have everywhere in our Arab world. It's my grade, my average that permits me to go into engineering and doesn't permit me to go into low, for example. So because I had a good high average, I opted to be for an engineering engineer. And then I realized the moment I graduated, this would take me nowhere. I have quite few colleagues who've done mechatronics.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: I'm not sure what that is.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: A particular language, thank you very much.
Very particular words. It is. How do you prepare an airplane to take off in the sky? I'm afraid I can't elaborate further because this is not my language. So with this, they do realize that this is something that doesn't fit their lives as women. Would I really be able to go to the airport every day, even if I am married and pregnant, and stand under the airplane fixing up things? So the moment they were done, they just shifted into something else. So here you stop and you say again, why do you really need to go for education?
And what do we need to equip ourselves with when we go for further education?
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Okay, let's narrow it down for my sake and for the podcast's sake. Women in specific. Why do you think women get into academia and higher education? When I graduated with a PhD, I was the youngest Qatari PhD holder, believe it or not, that was 2003. And I remember the records showed that we were less than 100 people in Qatar with PhDs. But comparing 2003 to now, 20, 25.
And of course, we can see the growth. And we can see why in terms of growth of institutions, not all women can travel abroad. Now we've got the universities in Qatar who offer PhDs, but there are more to that, right? Why would you think is the increase in women's desire to finish their master's and PhD? Is it a matter of prestige or is there more to it?
[00:07:36] Speaker B: First of all, people are varied, and we need to bear in mind this variety of human beings. We don't want to generalize. One element is status.
I want to grow in a level where I have the status that permits me to be a decision maker.
Okay, so that gives me position in the university.
That could enable me to have a position in the public sector, the wider level. In the public sector, you can maybe become minister at one point if you have certain conditionalities.
It's not necessarily education. It gives you the. Opens the path for you to become a minister. But this is one line. Other line could be really passion and here we come to a very critical word passion about education. People sometimes are really passionate about a certain topic and furthering the education permits you to dig further into your topic and that gets you more into your research, into delving more into the topic that you're passionate about, and in producing knowledge. Remember, the word production of knowledge is a keyword. And to what extent do we think about it when we are working on our PhDs? This is something extremely important.
It's not the point.
This is one of the issues I encounter often when I go to the libraries in our Jordan universities. I feel that knowledge is being repeated.
Are we really producing knowledge or are we digesting what has been presented by others?
Or a third word? Are we engaging with a wider debate of knowledge? And I always remind my students, we do research, we do essays, because I need to talk to the world. Someone has written about this topic and I need to engage with his approach, with his argument. So to what extent our students who are passionate about furthering their education are aware of this point and to what extent professors who are teaching them are guiding them through this point. This is something in my view, really something also to think about passion.
Another reason, a third reason could be I become more alluding for marriage. By the way, I go for masters because this means that I will be more in the market of the expensive girls.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: It depends on the society, otherwise you're over, you're overeducated, qualified for not only jobs, but also.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: But also the husband.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: That's a good point. But depending on the class that ironically enough, the upper we go in the class, the more there's this tendency is that I'm done with my BA and moving to my master's, then to my PhD. Let's think about it. Why do we need to do it? Because this happens in my social class.
Now for the middle, lower class, the idea of having a BA is now becoming. The other day there was a report in one of the newspapers saying that it's indispensable, you really need to have a BA because men today are looking for women to work together with and to share the expenses of the livelihood, of the marital livelihood.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: I would line up these three reasons that push a woman to go for furthering her education.
I would suggest another fourth reason, which is quite harsh to say I finished my education, my Master's and I did not yet find the husband. So let me continue doing something else until I secure. Because one of the issues in all the reports that we read, there's always this obsession in the mindset of the woman is that I really need to secure my marital life, my marital status. And this is in my view it's a bit dangerous. So the woman is often thinking her well being, her progress is very much dependent on the other, but she's programmed.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: To think this way. Indeed, women in our societies are programmed to think there are gender roles, even if you try to break it by developing more power within the academia, higher education, because yes, you leverage that power. You have a PhD now, supposedly you have more power to pick the man you want to pick, create the circumstances that you want to live in. But in reality we are all indoctrinated that we have a role and that role is to become a wife, a mother, otherwise the society wouldn't embrace us.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: It is in the society, but this is why we get education.
Don't we move on with. I cannot really continue thinking like the way my grandma used to think. Don't we move on in life?
This is in my view is dangerous because my Grandma in the 30s used to think this way, because it used to be a very concise little traditional setting in which you would need to secure the well being of your daughter through marriage. And we move on a bit, we're opening up a bit and are permitting more and more these women to get their education. I'm talking here about the 50s onwards. In fact, my mom left to the US in the year 1956.
And I'm talking here about really beginning. I'm sure that there are lots of women at that time who not necessarily used to go to the USA like my mom did, but maybe went to Ramallah, like where used to be the Teachers Institute. By the way, this applies also to Lebanon. There was also another Darat Muhallimi. So often they talk about these important institutes that used to educate women how to become teachers. And this is one of the reasons that let lots of these teachers leave to Kuwait. Do you remember often Kuwaitis praise that our education was very much in gratitude to these teachers who came from Palestine.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: And I second that even education in Qatar. The early teachers in Qatar were from Palestine and that's when education was solid.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: They were trained to be teachers. It's not like today I studied English literature and I'm now ready to go and teach in a class.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: Or you're a mother and a wife, but you cannot be both. How can women consolidate between family life and work?
And I've been in conversations and interviews with other male deans who were never asked the question that was asked to me, how do you manage to do both? How do you manage to be a wife and a mother of two while you're running a college? I really get mad. So modernity has made us also believe that we can't have both. What do you think?
[00:14:35] Speaker B: I like what you're saying.
Is it really modernity?
Because let's think about the peasant woman.
Let's think about the Bedouin woman. By the way, the Bedouin woman wakes up at 4 o' clock in the morning in order to take the herds and sometimes she would leave them, come back to her tent, and then at 5 o' clock in the evening she would go back to bring them back to the farm.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: But you know why? Because this is basically the traditional working woman. Exactly. There was no dichotomy between private and public.
It's a very modern concept dividing private and public.
Right.
You're absolutely right.
[00:15:17] Speaker B: Modern and traditional work has always been there, I believe. What's new? Coming back to the word modernity, it's the fact that women want to take the decision making that is often as per traditional norms given to the man. So work has always been there within different shapes, in the desert, in the farm, in the school and wherever. The new thing about it is I don't want only to work, but I want to go up the ladder the way the man is going up the ladder. And the moment I'm not going up the ladder, I would feel that there's something wrong. I believe this is one of the new things that we're talking about, and this is what the modernity has brought to us or has reminded us, is that we do have that power. So keep going.
And we started talking about competition with men. But that's very true, is that today I feel offended when I see that there's a man sitting there talking about an issue that I'm specialized in and he's in a position and I'm not in that position. I do feel frustrated and this is.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: Why I call for quotas.
Women need to be active and decision making.
But also this won't happen within our societies unless we have strict quotas. And my quota is 50. 50, really?
Because men are assuming jobs that they're not fit to assume. So definitely it is by merit, 100%, but it applies on both.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: I fear I may not agree with you on the word quota because the quota could at one point oblige me to bring also an incompetent woman to take also the place. Only because I need to fit in the six seats for women.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: And it happened and it happened and.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: It happens, and it will happen. We have lived it in Jordan. I have lots of examples that I.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Can also that are in positions that they're.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: So I would then I would very much lobby and advocate for the opportunity equally to whoever is specialized and does deserve to be in that place. So the merit calling for that. But in my view, in a world that is very entangled with too many layers, from nepotism to social capitalist relation to cloney capitalism, I feel that the word merit is very much shy.
It's going under the table. And that's why more and more people who are competent are unable to fit in our world and they are better off to be elsewhere.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: Going back to academia, do you think this is why we both chose academia? Is it our safe haven? People say ivory tower, but I don't agree. But there is a sense of prestige, of course, to academia. What do you think academia gave you and took from you? Was academia just to a female faculty, a female professor like you? Or was also the gender power play, power dynamics determinant of what you can get and where you can reach?
[00:18:27] Speaker B: I'll start with the fact that I chose a theme that's very sensitive. Okay, I chose a theme that's forced migration. The macro level is development, but I pinned it down to forced migration. I remember when I finished my master's, that was in the year 2000, I came back to Jordan and I went to one of the professors at Jordan University, and I told him, let us create a unit for forced migration. This is a language that's needed. And I remember him so well, looking at me, he said, you are interested in refugees. That never means that we are all interested in refugees. And funny enough, when we had the mass influx of Syrian refugees in Jordan, suddenly most of the universities started searching for funds in order for them to do research on refugees and started creating refugee centers and whatever. So, number one, I chose a theme that's quite sensitive. Number two, I chose it and I wanted to pursue my education because I wanted to continue talking to people about a theme that is very rarely addressed and that we live every day. Wherever you go in the world, you would meet someone who's a refugee who was pushed away from his home country, forced to move out of his home country. And this person is unable to go back. And often there is this mess in his brain. Am I a refugee or not? How do I define myself when I have money? The other day I was doing a review for an article talking about affluent Syrians.
Do we consider them as Refugees, or we don't consider our expats migrant workers when they are living anywhere in the world. But as long as I'm unable to go back home, that means I'm a refugee. And refugee cannot be ever connotated with the fact that I live in a refugee camp. And it is the image of deprivation. I chose a topic that really needs me to reach out to a big number of people to teach them. There are too many layers for us to understand refugee dom and for us to understand what are the rights that we really need to give for these human beings who do not have a protection. They cannot go back home. They cannot avail themselves to their embassies. There are lots of needs that we need to address when we're talking about a refugee. So this is a passion. And I started. In fact, I started doing research on refugees many years before going for my PhD. So I was an affiliate researcher with the Institut Francaise de Procharliens, it's a French institute based here in amman for almost seven years. As a researcher before I went for my PhD, knowing exactly what do I want to study for my PhD, I continue to have this passion for a topic that I believed being within academia, within the Arab world is needed because very few have done what I have studied, and very few address forced migration with a specialized lens. I'm not a political scientist, I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not a geographer. Remember, these words do address forced migration, but I am specialized in forced migration as a discipline. So I felt that this is something that I want to do in my area. And lucky enough, when I finished my master's a year after I approached this professor, I was attending a course at American University in Cairo on something related to international refugee law. And I was approached by the guru, the lady who created the discipline of forced migration. And she came to me and she said, listen, you're very much raising the issue of Palestinian refugees. Would you want to come and teach with us? And it was just a year after I finished my master's, and I said, I only have masters. She said, come and teach with us. We need to hear your voice. So here we come to the fact that I am important because of the knowledge that I have. It's not because of the degree that I have. And she said, come and teach with us. And she permitted me to design a course on Palestinian refugee issues while questioning me, what do I know about Palestinians in Egypt? So that enabled me to search the ground as I was in Egypt and to learn more about the reality of Palestinians who are rarely mentioned in the literature, those living in Egypt, as not protected and not assisted by any UN body.
And at the same time, I am teaching and I am helping students who are interested in my course to learn more about Palestinian refugees that was pushing me to look for documentaries, for movies.
And even at one point, I told all my students, American University of Cairo, we are going to the field.
So I obliged everyone, Egyptians, Americans, some Palestinians, to book a day where we went to one of these very Sha', Biyya, popular areas within Cairo, in order for us to hold interviews with Palestinians in the poor part of Cairo that I don't believe it exists anymore. I'm talking here about the year 2001, 2003.
But that was also a motivation. I tried teaching, I was in the classroom, I talked to students, I supervised students writing their essays. I was really moving with my passion and being channeled in that direction. That's called academia because of these opportunities that came my way.
And at one point, when I finished and published my book, went back to Jordan and continued with questioning, putting out more questions, more issues for us to learn more about.
These are really the reasons that very much made me keep going into the track of academia.
What did it give me? It gave me knowledge.
This is the first big word I would say. The day I submitted my PhD thesis, I felt that I am holding the world.
I can read between the lines. I know everything.
It gives you that power of knowledge, power of analysis, power of relating to theory, the way you are able to relate the theory with the reality, with your questions, and you're able to pass this knowledge on to someone else. And this is power. What did it take from me? I don't feel. I'll be very honest with you, I don't feel coming back, how do I balance my life?
I don't feel it has taken things from me that makes me regret the fact that I went for my PhD.
Maybe because I went for my PhD at the age of 34. So I have learned lots about the world. I have seen the world. I've seen the market.
I've talked to people, I created my networks. I built enough of knowledge I can say preliminary knowledge, capital, social capital that enabled me at the age of 34, when I'm spending all my days in the library, I don't feel I am missing out on anything. I don't feel it has taken anything from me. Honestly.
What about you?
[00:25:52] Speaker A: I got into academia without knowing why, to say the truth, was it because I thought it was my safety blanket? Maybe because I wanted to do something that others didn't do. Not that there were no Qatari professors. Of course there were. And they played a huge role in my education as well.
But it happened that I was lucky enough that I graduated with a PhD and came back when Qatar foundation started.
When I applied, it was when Carnegie Mellon opened in Qatar. And when I applied to them, they were astonished with me on paper, but they were very clear that they cannot hire me because I'm Qatari.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Oh, my God. So we don't. We're in Qatar, but we cannot recruit locals.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: At the same time, they gave me an option of going to Pittsburgh to teach there. And if I get certified in Pittsburgh as professor type, I would be hired from Pittsburgh. I went to Pittsburgh as a postdoc. I taught there, and I taught master's student, and I had the best mentor ever. I got certified by them. I came back as a visiting assistant professor in 2005, and I remember my father was not happy at all. And he said, what does this mean? You come from the States as a visiting professor to your own country.
But that brought pride to my father that I've done something that no one has done before. So I was the first Qatari faculty in Education City. So that I have to say, yes, there is that prestige that comes with pioneering being the first. But also within our context, it's a very small country. Right. And again, I told you there were like 100 of us with PhDs. Exactly.
So that was a privilege that I took on as a responsibility afterwards.
It gave me a lot. And maybe this takes me back to when we began and I told you maybe I needed some maturity before going into PhD. I remember even my supervisor, who now thinks that I'm his star student, Alhamdulillah, and he proved him wrong, because back then, he didn't take me seriously. Is it because of my age? Is it because I'm a woman? Is it because I'm a woman from the Gulf? There were multiple factors, really. And this is why I got really interested in gender representation and identity politics. I was lucky because I matured through teaching.
I taught university students who were 10 years younger. We spoke about identity politics and issues, dichotomies between tradition and modernity. Postcolonialism was back then, a term that, especially within the American university context, it's like, do you even teach postcolonial novels? What's the relevance of it?
[00:28:46] Speaker B: Here you go. You're talking about something extremely important. I've studied political economy, and of course, we had to study colonialism and we had to study the whole story of colonialism to post colonialism, imperialism, globalization. I'm back to all this literature today, ever since Gaza started. I am back to all the readings on colonialism and I'm not moving on.
I stopped at colonialism. Can you imagine? I was invited on TV channel. And the lady who was interviewing me with, with all in my view ignorance asked me, how do you comment about the transfer of Palestinians from their homes?
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Transfer.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: And I said transfer. Transfer is a very. Thanks to the books that I'm back to reading.
Transfer is a very colonial jargon that very much reflects the fact that you're not human.
Remember, colonialism dehumanizes those people who are colonized. And look at all the words that are said by the Zionists against Palestinians and the beginning of the war. They did mention the word human animals. So transfer very much reflects the very dehumanizing term about Palestinians. They could have used the word dispossess, but the word dispossess very much emphasizes the roots that you have in the place.
And they don't want to say that because their lie, the big lie, the big narrative that they are showing the world is saying that this is our route and it's not their route. I had to stop her, say, excuse me, let's start with a transfer, which is a not acceptable term for you to use.
Here comes the importance of us reading these novels. Here comes the importance of learning about what happened in Africa, okay. And what happened in our big world, not necessarily in America. How America got created. What are the residuals of America, Australia, New Zealand. There is this knowledge gap. It's about time for us to go for these interdisciplinarity and stop thinking on one channel path where we're only thinking about law as law. We need to learn from the Germans. Germany was under war and it was horribly attacked because of the Second World War. Today, do you know the percentage of those students in Germany who go for academic education?
It does not exceed 17%. 17. 17.
So the graduates from schools, only 17% go for universities.
[00:31:29] Speaker A: Where do the rest go?
[00:31:31] Speaker B: To medical education.
The world needs technical education, vocational education, skilled people, those in Britain. Since we all seek academic education, Britain don't exceed 25% of the graduates each year from British schools. Only 25.
[00:31:53] Speaker A: I'm confused because we are at a point where we talk about artificial intelligence and how we are training our graduates for jobs that don't exist.
And I know lots of countries have actually stopped their vocational training.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Let's look at the percentage of women. Since we're talking women who graduate from universities and are able to find jobs, we're in Jordan. This is considered to be one of the lowest countries when it comes to women labor participation.
Although at the higher education at universities, women are considered to be of a higher percentage in attending university and graduating.
[00:32:37] Speaker A: So the numbers don't translate into the mismatch.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: There's a clear mismatch, but that's telling us something.
Again, I need more than someone who's able to go and get a BA in engineering.
If I'm not mistaken, there was a decision in Jordan.
You don't know what will happen in few years time as AI is taking over more and more.
So we really need to start widening a bit our understanding of number one, education.
And why do we need to go for education? What is the kind of passion that we have and where does it lead us?
Where do we want to go for as men and women, as young people or as old people? Like, where do you want this to take us? We don't want speaking of colonialism, we don't want to keep digesting what was given to us by the global North. And it's worth today to call for a voice, a loud voice from our global south with our needs.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: It seems that you are advocating for education with a purpose. And if that's the case, then I'm with you. And on this note, shall we end and go to dinner?
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Go for dinner.
Thank you very much.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
This is Women of the Middle east podcast. Thank you for listening and watching To Stay up to Date with Women of the Middle east podcast. You can subscribe and don't forget to rate us. If you would like to contact me directly, you can do so on Instagram or via email.
