I struggled to decide what I wanted to study at university and which university I should attend. My first-choice subject, engineering, was not available to women. And female secondary school graduates received no guidance with our decisions. If you did not want to study medicine or nursing, the only other choice for girls was to become a teacher. Thus the cycle continued: you are taught by women, and then you teach women, and the women you taught will go on to teach the next generation. This was to prevent the mixing of women and men in the workplace, which was both a religious and a social taboo. But what it has led to is too many applicants for these professions and a glut of educated women who cannot find employment outside of these three fields. In 2012, the Ministry of Labor revealed that eighty-five percent of those seeking jobs were women, despite the fact that more women obtain university degrees and certificates of higher education than men.
Without a scholarship to study abroad, I had three choices for university. My first option was to enroll in Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca, ten minutes away from where I lived. It didn’t provide many opportunities or a particularly qualified teaching staff, but it was known for a Salafi-inspired radicalism that would have suited me very well at that period of my life. Another choice was to study at one of the colleges of education, institutions designed to prepare women for the teaching profession. Regardless of one’s major, one’s course of study was dominated by religious and education-related material.
My third option was to study at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, an hour’s drive away. It was unthinkable that I would live on or near campus; I would have to commute. King Abdulaziz University provided many more opportunities than Umm Al-Qura, but my still-radical self had serious concerns. The school was located in a liberal, progressive city. Despite its proximity to Mecca and the fact that it served as the arrival point for the majority of Muslim pilgrims, Jeddah was considered the most “open” city in Saudi Arabia. The university had a bad reputation among Meccans because it allowed girls to uncover their faces. It even allowed girls at the College of Medicine to participate in mixed education. My sister had enrolled at the university before me, and when she decided to study at the College of Medicine, she faced strong objections from my father and some of my male cousins over the mixing of the sexes. My cousins categorically told my father not to allow her to attend a “mixed” school. My father, remembering Muna’s flirtations with the Arab boy, listened. This ideological combat soon turned physical; she was severely beaten by my father and imprisoned in the apartment.
Somehow Mama managed to smuggle Muna out of our building and get her to the school to take the acceptance test; I remember Muna leaving that day with a bandage over one of her eyes. She passed the test, earning top marks. Still, my sister needed my father’s consent before she was able to enter the school. To this day, I don’t know how Mama persuaded my father to sign the permission papers. (Females in Saudi Arabia still cannot enroll anywhere without having permission from their assigned male guardian.) But she did.
I submitted my registration papers at the University of Umm Al-Qura, but they were so dismissive and disparaging, shouting insults and herding the female students from place to place like hapless sheep, that I decided to enroll in the College of Education instead. It wasn’t possible to major in physics there, so I chose the English department, although I wasn’t very happy with my decision. For her part, Mama was very disappointed that I had chosen the College of Education: “I want you to be a doctor, like your sister,” she said.
“But Mama,” I replied, “the Faculty of Medicine is mixed—and anyway, I hate the sight of blood. I can’t imagine myself ever being a doctor. What I really want is to study physics.” Mama cried. “Twelve years of top grades, and all that effort wasted for you to go to the College of Education?” she asked.
The combination of Mama’s tears and my own lack of conviction about the English department made it impossible to remain stubborn. The only choice left was King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah. My concern now was how to approach my father. How would I tell him I’d changed my mind again? To my surprise, he agreed without protest. Unlike with my sister, none of our relatives told him not to let me go. I withdrew my registration from the College of Education and headed for Jeddah with my father.
By then the period to register for any university was over and the doors were closed. My sister helped me to be placed on the “wait list.” Eager to make sure that I could get off the list if a spot opened up, my sister and I spoke on a daily basis with the dean of admissions and registration. After a week of asking at the office and a week of going up to the university gates, only to be denied entry, I began to lose hope. Would a whole year of my life be wasted?
Then, unexpectedly, the dean invited me to an interview. I thought that she would use the interview to decide if I merited one of the vacant spots. To my surprise, when I got there I discovered that she wanted to tell me in person that I had been accepted. “We’d be honored for a student with an academic record like yours to join our university,” she said.
Though her words certainly made me happy, I had no idea what an impact that they would ultimately have. Those words opened the door to a new stage in my life, a door that would lead to a way out of the narrow confines of the first eighteen years of my existence. Despite all the differences and problems between my sister and me, I discovered that there was one thing that united us: the importance we placed on education and on excelling in our studies, no matter how hard we had to struggle to do so.