Zayed University in Dubai

We spent a few hours at Zayed University chatting with a professor, getting a tour from some students, and sacking the library. We were first greeted by an official who said nice things to us, got photographed with us, and then left. We chatted rather intensively next with a professor from the Department of Islamic Studies. He made quite a point of telling us that they took more a social science perspective on the modern realizations of Islam rather than a doctrinal approach. He told us that there were 2,400 students there, but that the campus could handle 5,000. The principal issue is that t is a public university. This means that Emirati nationals can attend for free, and they get their books for free. The university does not have dorms, so everybody has to live at home. It is also gender segregated. At the moment, all the students are female, but they will begin to admit males. However, this does not mean that men and women will be chatting with each other. Women take classes from 8:00-3:00 and men will arrive to take classes from 8:30 to 10:30pm. The buildings are beautiful, spacious, and well appointed. However, 15 feet outside the walls of the university, the desert laps in dry waves of sand up against those walls and be-palmed fountained courts.

All the young ladies wear abaya and shayla and some even use niqab. That was very interesting. In our group, we talked about how it was not a problem to chat with women wearing the head covering, but as soon as they covered their mouths and left nothing but eyes to talk to, then it felt uncomfortable. Studies show that when Westerners view a face, the saccadic rhythms of the eye follow a clear triangular pattern from eyes to mouth. I wonder what the saccadic rhythm is for a face that only offers the eyes for viewing?

The tour wound through spacious airy corridors and the young students who were giving the tour were quite forthcoming on some topics and not on others. At one point in the tour, we passed a square of tables that had a huge load of used books in English. These books included such classics as Goldfinger, Hell Blazer, and one called Space Prophet. I turned to our guide who was wearing the niqab and asked, “Why are these books here? “, “Oh,” she said, “A charity group donated them.” “Don’t you think some of the topics are not proper?” I asked, trying to understand the elusive concept of modesty, and she replied, “Oh, well. It doesn’t really matter because they are in English.” Very interesting! We then went to the University Bookstore (where students come to get their free books!), and for their most recent English lit class, they were reading, the Epic of Gilgamesh, some Euripides, Homer’s Odyssey, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Scarlet Letter, all in English. When I considered Mrs. Dalloway from the point of view of a conservative Muslim woman, it put a whole new spin on it. There was also a piece of art on the wall, which I was unable to photograph for you, gentle reader, which was a drawing of the last supper except that all the individuals in the da Vinci original positions were faceless women in abayas and shaylas. Whole new spin. I reeled down the hall after the group trying to get my cognitive dissonance under control.