6. What do students learn from this oral history?
Most American students dealing with the Middle East have stereotypes. When I prepare them to read this, I try to get them to look for what might surprise them. And I try to get them to look at issues of reading it from the outside going in. What kind of ideas did they have about a young Muslim woman in the 1930s in a country like Palestine? How does this interview deconstruct these preconceptions? What kind of personality can they sense here?
I tell them to pay attention to language. This is a little difficult because theyre reading it in translation. I ask them to look at how it is that the person responded to questions and the way that people shape their own narratives in an interviewthe fact that they emphasize certain things, or that they stray off into another topic. And I ask them to think about what that means and how to interpret that. I prepare them for the fact that this is very different from reading, for example, a diplomatic document. It gives you a sense of everyday people. Students respond much better to these kind of sources. Theyre fascinated. They remember more about them. The things that they notice are very different often than what I notice.
Theres another section that strikes them. Its about wearing the head scarf called hijab in Arabic. I asked What did you used to do as young girls?
We used to go to the cinema at the holidays. My father did not mind us going but my mother was against it and did not like us to go. But we did anyway. There were beautiful old movies. I remember seeing Gone With The Wind three or four times. Sometimes my mother and father used to go with us and my father used to explain the movie to us. My father was more like the foreigners. They used to blame my father for letting us do as we wished. This is a favor my sisters and I will never forget from our father for as long as we live. He was honest to us. He loved us and respected us and treated us like real women. And those days, people still wore the hijab [the Islamic head scarf]. People used to look differently at me when I rode the bus to the Training College. I used to be wearing nice clothes. Men used to look at me differently because I was not wearing the hijab. Once I was riding the bus and an old woman wearing the hijab recognized me. She said to me, Saida, why are you not wearing the hijab? Do you think when you get married that your husband will allow you to go out without the hijab? I answered her in front of all the men on the bus. If Shaykh Hussam gave me the permission to go out without the hijab then there is no one in the world that can force me to wear it.
What strikes the students is how a Muslim man, her father, was more liberal than her own mother, a woman. And how an old woman on the bus was the one who criticized her. It makes them rethink their stereotypes about Muslim men as opposed to just Muslim women. It gives you a sense of gender, not just women. They recognize that, in fact, Muslim men were not oppressing women, which is how they tend to think about men in Islam.
Once I get them to recognize how this interview destroys their stereotypes, they have to understand this interview with an overall historical context. There were Muslim men who supported female education, and there were Muslim women who were educated and had opportunities. And yet they have to situate this individual within the broader historical context. This was an exceptional woman.
Students have this tendency to take a source and then generalize everything from it. So once they get into it from the inside out, then they have to go from the outside in and recognize it as a unique source. Whats very difficult is to understand these subtleties, to not overly generalize either from the perspective of stereotyping all Muslim people in the Arab world or from exceptionalizing or having this distorted version of what people are like. This shows them the complexities of this world.