Lakhasly

Circles of Knowledge
Religious Learning, Pious Pasts, and Alternative Sociality
AISHA, A STUDENT AT A TEACHER’S TRAINING COLLEGE, first mentioned the summer classes a week before they began. I had gone to visit her sister and her sister’s husband one day for lunch, and Aisha, who was visiting them that day as well, said that she and her friends were starting summer classes for high-school girls. They had not done this before in Bahla but decided that it would be a good time to study and teach Qur’an, hadith, and Ibadi history. She and another woman, Mawza, would run the class for their neighborhood, and two pairs of other college women would hold classes in two other neighborhood meeting-rooms. I asked if she would mind if I attended and recorded her classes and she said she would ask her friend but thought it would be fine.
In the previous chapter, I analyzed everyday visiting in Bahla and noted that to be a good person meant being social. Indeed, not being social could be a symptom of “possession.” I described that despite such expectations, sociality was not ahistorical, but tied to shifting economic conditions as well as to changing ideas about religiosity. Not only were the primary aspects of visiting (time, coffee, and dates) newly available, but younger people saw sociality as an impediment to proper religiosity. In this chapter, I explore the ways that several groups of young women harkened to an idealized Ibadi scholarly tradition to structure new forms of sociality—organized around religious study—in opposition to the visiting practices of their mothers, grandmothers, and sisters, and in so doing helped shape new notions of religiosity. Although the number of young women and girls who, during my fieldwork, actively participated in these study groups was small (about seventy-five students altogether) the standard created by these gatherings and the local discourse around them affected peo-82 ple far beyond the small groups directly involved. Rather than socializing with and belonging to neighborly groups, Aisha, Mawza, their fellow teachers, and their students were constructing a moral universe in which one would belong primarily and explicitly—and at times in divisive ways—to a religious community of students, scholars, and what they understood to be a pious public.
This chapter focuses on two intersecting processes in the activities of the study groups. First, this chapter illustrates how young teachers in Bahla defined, invoked, and drew from different forms of education, thereby producing a new religiosity. By invoking local practices and well-known histories of study circles among Ibadis as well as by critiquing the new state schools, the teachers and students were expressing their deference to and admiration for “traditional” religious authority and knowledge. Arguing that the new state schools purposely worked to produce secular citizens, the young women insisted that religious knowledge must be pursued independently—and in the forms of “traditional” education—lest they forget or not learn what it means to be good Muslims and good Muslim women.
The desire to pursue traditional education, however, was complicated by the fact that these women simultaneously admired and saw as unauthoritative older generations of Bahlawis. Similarly, although critical of state-school education, the structure of the study group and the pedagogic methods of the group drew heavily from the religious studies classes at the new state schools, and from the new education system in general. Indeed, the teachers derived and established their authority from pedagogic methods borrowed from the state schools: lectures, direct question-and-answer techniques, and high-involvement repetition strategies being three of these methods. Their experience of attending the state schools, therefore, conferred on the
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young teachers authority to hold such study groups and to demand respect for their religious knowledge in the first place.
Perhaps most significantly, these women believed that they needed religious classes to learn about Islam and Ibadism, suggesting a distinctive and shifting understanding of the process of cultivation of good personhood. While there is a long history in Ibadism and Islam in general that emphasizes the cultivation of good personhood and proper community through study, this emphasis on the necessity of formal classes is distinctively recent, and not simply the continuation of age-old Ibadi traditions.
Indeed, the various schools and branches of Islam have historically emphasized different paths to proper piety, depending on particular notions of the origins of human goodness and the role of human reason in achieving piety. Many Bahlawis maintain that individuals are discreet, autonomous beings, born good (fira) and quite responsible for their actions and beliefs. Contemporary (as well as classic) Ibadi doctrine, while emphasizing that God is the creator of all human acts, is thus not absolutely predestinarian. Many Ibadis emphasize the individual capacity to reason (‘aql) as paramount to the human achievement of goodness and proper Islam. The emphasis on individual reason means that while learning from others and texts and performing the acts of religious obligations (‘ibdt) are critical for becoming and being a proper Muslim, individual and God-given capacity to choose and to reason, it is argued, confers on the individual the ability to distinguish good from bad. It also enables the individual to deduce from the Qur’an and hadith correct
interpretations of such obligations when there are textual discrepancies.1 This approach, it should be noted, is distinct from other theological and legal interpretations that suggest that humans learn deductive reasoning and must rely on literal readings of God’s words and hadith, rather than on a possibly flawed human and
individual ability to reason, in order to fulfill God’s aims and expectations.2 The difference between what are called rationalism and traditionalism is a classic distinction in Islamic theology and the subject of countless texts of Islamic scholarship. This distinction was evident in Bahla as many people insisted that humans, both men and women, are reasoning beings. Suffice it to say that to the extent that individuals are understood to require literal readings of the Qur’an in particular, they are considered inherently less capable of relying on
their individual (and according to the rationalists, God-given) abilities to reason.3
At the same time, what constitutes a pious person in the Bahlawi and Ibadi context is hardly a fully autonomous individual who becomes fully pious simply out of his or her own conscious volition (or even reason). According to many Bahlawis, humans also inherit—through blood—qualities from their parents, they are potentially controlled and inhabited by spirits, and, most important here perhaps, their piety is not fully self-produced, willed, or reasoned. Learned and textually based theology or ritual is necessary for the
fulfillment of becoming a good person.4 However, whether this learned piety can evolve from everyday interactions or must emanate from classes and individual study marked the difference between younger and older generations.
The second process this chapter examines is the ways women and girls in these Bahla study groups were struggling with how to speak of themselves, as good humans as well as gendered and sexual beings. Although the women felt entitled to demand space outside their homes for their classes and were, in fact, encouraged to study by national and “religious” discourse that valued knowledge, much of the talk within the study groups revolved around limiting their own and other women’s movements. An examination of these tensions among the sense of entitlement, the duty to become knowledgeable, and the desire to limit movement and control bodily and moral comportment revealed that the path to proper womanhood for younger generations who advocated more visibly devout conduct was hardly without its internal conflicts.
The young women’s activities and their expectations for their own and other women’s behavior also revealed the nonliberal nature of their actions. The authority vested in these young women from their education and their deference to the continuation of a religious tradition did not translate into what liberal feminists might recognize or expect as liberatory discourse or practice. As Saba Mahmood (2005) has argued, “agency” in liberal and radical feminist analysis and politics has often been incorrectly conflated with “resistance.”
These women did not encourage “public piety” in the form of large gatherings in public spaces (Deeb 2006) or in the form of attending classes in mosques (Mahmood 2005). In fact, these women actively
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discouraged such publicness, even while they demanded a “publicly” acceptable space to study. Rather, the publicness of these women’s piety centered on their interest in being “visibly” pious through a set of limited symbols: primarily, through their clothing. Although clothing could always be said to be symbolic of certain forms of piety (or any social, economic, or political subjectivity), older women in Bahla did not view their clothing choices as obviously projecting signs of piety in the same ways that younger women did. In other words, while older women wore what “women” wore (colors as opposed to white, something covering their hair as opposed to bareheaded), younger women wore what they consciously understood as conveying a woman’s piety. In comparison to this form of pious visibility in town, the younger women who organized these study groups were much less comfortable with the movement, activities, and conversations of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ visiting, as well as being conflicted about their own missions of studying outside of their homes.
These missions, however, were continually fraught. On the one hand, these young women were clearly creating an alternative sociality, a sociality that was structured around religious knowledge and what they understood to be traditional learning. On the other hand, this alternative sociality also encouraged solitary or household-bound life, a life in which going out even to study might be suspicious. This encouragement of nonsocial activity appeared primarily in comments and hesitations about “going out” and movement as well as through comments about “useless talk.” This is not to say that the students were explicitly guided to study on their own before coming to class; they were not. However, they were encouraged to pursue individual study in general and in private at home, just as supposedly used to happen in the times of the more appropriate past.
Ultimately, by bringing different styles of or approaches to religious knowledge and religious education together, the young women were attempting to create for themselves a space where they could practice their emerging religiosity, in dialogue with their male colleagues and as opposed to their mothers and grandmothers.
Modern Mass Education
It is no surprise that education had become the focus of debates about the socialization of proper religiosity, proper womanhood, and about the changes in Oman since 1970. Official Omani publications and foreign commentators have continued to herald the dramatic increase in “modern” (non-Qur’anic) schools since the
1970 coup d’état as one of the most important developments since the coup.5 Histories and newspaper
articles about Oman rarely leave out proud statistics about or references to the increase in schools since 1970.
6 On a local level too, men and women often mentioned the construction of schools as one of the primary changes in Oman since the coup. While many young people acknowledged the importance of this change, they also questioned the implications of this kind of schooling. They were proud of their training and abilities. At the same time, however, they were also confronted with tensions surrounding their status in the social hierarchy as well as how to maintain the values of what they saw as traditional knowledge and practice. Learning, although critical to becoming a good Muslim, had not naturally evolved into classes, even though the young women of the study group understood their activity as an extension of traditional Ibadi practices.
Anthropological research on education in the Middle East has tended to focus on the specifics of traditional teaching and learning in Qur’anic schools and more advanced seminaries (D. Eickelman 1978, 1985; Fischer 1980; Houtsonen 1994; Wagner 1982; Wagner and Lotfi 1980) or, inspired by Foucault (1977), on “methods of ordering” in schools in British and Ottoman colonial contexts (Mitchell 1988; Messick 1993). For the most part, scholars have focused on one system or the other. A few, however, have also noted how in particular contexts, these schooling systems have changed and, sometimes, how they influence or inflect each other. Brinkley Messick, for example, notes the internal transformations of traditional schooling in Yemen (Messick 1993: 102). Jennifer Spratt and Daniel Wagner (1986) discussed the transformations of the Qur’anic schools in Morocco with the introduction of modern education at the beginning of this century and with the formation of the national education system after 1968. Gregory Starrett (1998), in particular, explored the ways that the modern state schooling system in Egypt has appropriated and transformed religious learning.
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Focusing on policies and philosophies of Islamist movements, Anne Sofie Roald (1994) outlined the different ways Islamist intellectuals in Jordan and Malaysia have discussed education. While these intellectuals have insisted that Islamic learning and teaching is comprised of both everyday experiences and particular schooling practices, their policies center on formal schooling, where most demand the “integration” of different schooling styles such that all fields of a “modern” school would be “approached from an Islamic point of view” (Roald 1994: 59, 94–95). Although Aisha and her colleagues also considered it essential that modern schools conform to “Islamic points of view,” they were, unlike the groups and people that Roald described, much less opposed to what they saw as traditional schooling. While the educational philosophies of the movements that Roald examines argue for modern schooling, which would teach and be based on religious principles, in Bahla, the young women were much more inclined to praise what they considered to be traditional education.
In fact, the young women I knew in Bahla expressed respect for the older generation, at least older men, when it came to religious knowledge. Unlike in countries where independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s were tied to nationalist languages and ideologies, in this part of Oman, the older generation was generally seen as religiously righteous, supportive of a theocratic state and remembered to have fought the British-supported Sultan in the Jebel Akhdar war in the 1950s. This admiration, however, was complicated by and intertwined with gender dynamics. While many older men were respected for their devoutness, many older women were more often castigated for their “ignorance.” Nevertheless and despite this respect for older men, younger men and women, with their access to mass state schooling, had not only gained access to the cultural capital that distinguished them from the older generation, but were also asking different kinds of questions about themselves and their religiosities.
Education not only provides a source of authority and cultural capital, it helps, as Messick (1993), Mitchell (1988) and many others have illustrated, produce notions of personhood. Dale Eickelman (1992), in particular, reflected on the implications of the introduction of modern mass education for religion in the Middle East and suggested that this change is related to the emergence of new forms of religiosity and shifts in communal identity: a shift from experiencing religion in local symbols to identifying with particular, shared statements about belief and practice. Drawing from Eickelman, other anthropologists have analyzed how the new institutions of schooling transferred religious socialization from private to public worlds resulting in the formation of public religious discourse, public pronouncements of individual and collective religiosity (Fahy 1998; Starrett 1998).
On the one hand, such processes were clearly at play in Bahla. On the other hand, I found another simultaneous shift, at tension with such emphases on public discourse and public religiosity. While public religious discourse and appropriate religiousness were becoming the legitimate forms of life in public, what qualified as religion was shifting such that other forms of what might be considered public life—of sociality, for example—were becoming excluded from the domain of the religious. At the same time, while religious learning came to seem the most legitimate form for women of participating in appropriate public life, private and reflective study was also being encouraged, especially for women.
Speaking to the construction of gendered subjectivities in religious education, Azam Torab (1996) and Mahmood (2005) focused on the question of the relationship between agency, feminism, and religious
knowledge, illustrating specifically that agency and resistance to patriarchy are not coterminous.7 My concern here is specifically how young women’s understandings and expressions of what it meant to be Muslim women were related to their mass education, from how they responded to the state schools and their ways of seeing their responsibilities for upholding the integrity of a good home to the necessity of studying and the ways they spoke of their bodies and sexualities. Their responsibilities, their bodies, and their sexualities all became objects of scrutiny in the state schools and in the study group, a place where they critiqued the new schools. At the same time, in the discussion around and in the study group, it became evident that these young women were struggling with a tension between the desire to be respected as politically active public intellectual figures and their responsibilities as “good women,” bound to spatial and bodily restrictions. The tensions that these young women faced were in part related to a growing sense that
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they needed to participate in religion, confirming the idea that religion is a distinct category in life and one that requires participation, and to an equally growing sense that they needed to determine what constitutes gendered participation and what constitutes religion.
Following in the Footsteps, Sort Of
It was no coincidence that Aisha organized a class. When I was in Bahla, she was training to be a teacher at the Teacher Training College in Rustaq, a town on the Eastern side of the Jebel Akhdar mountains, and was home for the summer holidays. I met Aisha through her older sister Zuwayna, who was married to Hilal, an English teacher in Bahla as well as the co-owner of a store that sold agricultural equipment and material like seeds and fertilizer. Aisha and Zuwayna’s father, Gamal, was the shaykh of their neighborhood and an Islamic studies teacher in one of the Bahla boys’ schools. He was the only teacher in Bahla who had been a teacher before the introduction of mass schooling in the 1970s and continued to work in the new system. He
had also been a teacher at the now-closed state-run alternative religious elementary school in Bahla.8 Teaching ran in Aisha’s family: from her father to her older sister’s husband and to herself. While Aisha was following in the steps of her father, she was also challenged with the prospect of negotiating a role for herself in the changing and gendered world of authoritative religious knowledge.
Although many people in Bahla saw teaching as a good job, several young men I spoke to complained about how it was no longer a desirable profession for them: there was neither enough money nor prestige in teaching. Like Hilal, many others had a second profession, usually in some kind of business endeavor. Male teachers at the new state schools did not have the same respect that Qur’anic teachers and scholars once had. Young women, however, generally saw teaching as one of the most desirable professions, since they could gain money independently in a job where they did not have to worry about mixing with men. While scholarship and the pursuit of knowledge in general had not lost prestige in Bahla for men or for women, for men, teaching in the state school was simply another job that paid less than one might gain in business. For women, on the other hand, teaching provided a source of income in a respectable profession. Their schooling could be put to good use. The main drawback for many young women was that they might not work in their hometowns. If they came from a town with enough teachers, it was most likely that they were sent to another town.
Aisha was well on her way to entering the job market, though it was unclear where she would be teaching. The family tradition of scholarship and teaching was being taken up less by the other men in the family, and more by the young women. Taking up this role meant, for Aisha, demanding the same respect that had been accorded to her father and her brother-in-law; it meant being entitled to the same respect and to the same access to places to study: meeting rooms, schools, libraries, and bookstores.
The State Schools
Despite Aisha’s criticisms of the state schools, she was a product of them, using the same pedagogic methods in her lectures as what was practiced in the state schools. The first modern state school for girls in Bahla, the Aisha Riyamia school, opened in upper Bahla in the early 1980s. At first, girls were divided by approximate age into several classes and taught the basics of writing, reading, and arithmetic. There had been some opposition to the opening of the schools, I was told, but soon, everyone was sending their girls. Some of the girls had already attended Qur’anic schools and had writing and reading skills, but most did not.
When I was in Bahla, there were four girls’ schools in town, all outside the walls, either in Ma‘amra or in Jum.9 The twelve-year school system in the late 1990s was divided into three divisions: six years for primary
(’ibtid’), three for elementary (i‘dd), and three for secondary (thanaw). At the time of my fieldwork, the
Ministry of Education was reforming the school system and, in particular, parts of the curriculum.10 Most of the new textbooks for English, science, and mathematics were complete and the schools had begun to introduce some of them. It was unclear when (or whether) there would be reforms in history, social studies, and Islamic studies. Although the reforms seemed to be extensive and the structure of three levels was changing, the style of teaching and the division of the subjects were expected to remain the same for some
time.11
At the time of my fieldwork, students from grades one to three kept the same teachers throughout the day
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and the teachers would divide the day into subjects (mathematics, history, religion, science) according to a national academic schedule. After the third grade, teachers would teach particular subjects, moving from one classroom to the next. The organization of the classroom was similar to many classrooms in the United States and Europe: rows of individual desks with each student at an assigned seat. Teachers had plans of the classrooms and used them to check attendance and to call on the students. Several teachers explained that since they had many students, they were not able to remember all the students’ names. The teachers used the students’ first names, sometimes adding the father’s or tribal name to make clear which student was being called. For the most part, the students call their teachers mu‘allim or mu‘allima and their first names.
In the last two years of secondary (or high) school, the students were divided into those who wished to study humanities and those who wished to specialize in the sciences, the better students going to the science division, or at least, that was the assumption of the teachers and school principals. Students also assumed that the better students went to the sciences, although many did say that it was harder to do well in the humanities. While some of the textbooks were different for the two sections, the Islamic studies textbooks were the same.
Islamic studies was mandatory for all students from first primary through third secondary, or in other words, from first to twelfth grades. The twelfthgrade religious studies textbook was divided into two parts: one for the first semester and one for the second. The first semester textbook was itself divided into sections on the Qur’an, hadith, doctrine (‘aqdah), jurisprudence (fiqh), prophetic biography (sra), and economic system; the second semester into those plus the social system. The few references to Ibadi history in the textbooks was indicative of concerns about Sunni-Ibadi relations in Oman. While some Sunnis complained that the textbooks assumed that Oman was necessarily Ibadi, many Ibadis said that the textbooks were very vague and only emphasized a “generic” Islam. For the women’s study groups in Bahla to focus one section of their studies on Ibadi history indicated their awareness and desire for specific attention to their distinctive religious ideologies, practices, and histories—features, according to them, that were insufficiently attended to in the religious studies classes.
As for the method of instruction, I observed (from my numerous visits to the various state schools) that emphasis was on lecturing and, from the first grade, students’ (both boys and girls) abilities to engage in direct question-and-answer: students were expected to answer teachers’ questions as directly and quickly as possible. Teachers asked questions and students raised their hands, hoping to be called on to answer. When the teacher called on a student, the student would stand up and attempt to “shoot back” the correct response. In the more advanced classes, the students remained seated, although they too were expected to respond directly and quickly. Students were discouraged from pausing and were sometimes verbally reprimanded if they paused or filled in pauses in their answers with “umm’s.”
In the classes I observed, sometimes students who were called on were unable to answer the question or recite the memorized phrase: it was as though these students were pretending that they knew the answers by raising their hands, but were expecting that they would not be called on to respond. This way the teacher might assume that they knew the answer. As the classes averaged between thirty and thirty-five students, some students could count on slipping through unnoticed. If a student did not know the answer, the teacher would ask if someone else wanted to try and again, the students raised their hands. This would continue until someone answered correctly.
The emphasis on direct question-and-answer demands what linguists call a perfect “adjacency pair” (Levinson 1983; Schegloff and Sacks 1973), whereby a particular question requires and expects a particular response. In this case, it was important that the response was both composed of a certain sequence of words and, further, that it not have any interludes or “holds.” While in everyday interactions strict adjacency is, as Stephen Levinson points out, too strong a requirement for the coherence of a conversation, in this school context the concept of the adjacency pair is quite appropriate (1983: 303). Since there was a limited number of acceptable responses, some of which were dismissed because they were prefaced with a delay, such as with an “uhhh,” the students were being trained to answer as succinctly and directly as possible.
In addition to direct question-and-answers, schoolteachers in Oman (in the state schools as well as in the summer classes) employed another method, encouraging students to engage in a topic; a method similar to Deborah Tannen’s “high involvement repetition strategies” (Tannen 1989). Teachers would begin an utterance, then slow down and raise their voices slightly before the end of the utterance. Slowing down and
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raising their voices would key the students into finishing the phrase. Some or all of the students would shout out the last words of the sentence in unison. This method was particularly effective after the students had heard the phrase or topic already. The students would have heard the phrase already either because they had read the chapter with the teacher in class before or because they had completed their homework. Homework usually consisted of copying out verses from the Qur’an or hadith reproduced in their textbooks and then answering a series of questions at the end of the section. Sometimes the teachers simply made a statement and then immediately repeated it, slowing down near the end so that the students could finish it. The students were expected to complete the sentence they just heard. These two methods of engaging the students in the class material—direct question-and-answer adjacency pairs and high involvement repetition strategies—were distinct from the modalities of teaching in the Qur’anic schools and more advanced study-circles in Bahla.
In many ways, Aisha’s study group was unlike the classrooms of the school year. The students were less formal with the teachers, there were no grades, they all sat together in a semicircle on the floor, and they only focused on religious education. At the same time, however, there were clear similarities both in terms of the style of instruction and the content of the lessons. The classes were divided into Qur’an, hadith, and Ibadi history as distinct categories of religious knowledge. Although the style of the classes both invoked the traditional approach of the study group and, in some ways, replicated the assumptions of the state schools, Aisha and her colleagues did make a claim as to where their allegiances stood and what their goals were for organizing these classes. It was clear that their goals were to rescue religious education and to make the students recognize that they could or should study Islam outside the confines of the new schools, and yet also outside their homes.
A Question of Place
Aisha held her classes in her neighborhood sabla or meeting room. Her neighborhood, like most in Bahla, was walled with close, mud houses, narrow alleys, and neighborhood gates (although by the late 1990s these gates were always open). This sabla was a cement room next to the new town library, in the courtyard just outside the entrance of one of the neighborhood gates. The courtyard stood at the edge of the neighborhood: it was not quite part of the old neighborhood and yet it was clearly attached. The courtyard, housing the new library and the meeting room, hinted at a separation between a space of more official gatherings and the daily gatherings of men and women in their neighborly groups: the new library and the meeting room were two neighborhood institutions distinct from other daily activities.
The new library and sabla were also separate from the mosque. Some of the mosques in Bahla used to have small libraries and schools either in or next to them. Until the early 1980s, most of Bahla’s Qur’anic
schools were set in rooms attached to mosques or held within mosques.12 At the beginning of the 1980s, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and Religious Endowments began building Qur’anic schools in separate buildings on religious endowment property, corresponding to an approach to education as an activity distinct from
prayer and parallel to “secular” schools outside of the town walls.13
Sablas were usually reserved for men’s gatherings such as mournings and speeches. The government also used these rooms for distributing monthly payments to widows, the disabled, and the poor. Aisha told me that she did not want to hold the gatherings in someone’s house and, she said, as long as no one died, the girls could use the neighborhood meeting room. She had tried to get permission to hold the classes at one of the schools, but this request had been denied. A male official from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs and several other town citizens held summer classes for elementary and high school boys in one of the schools, but for some reason the men organizing those classes had been granted permission. When I asked why she could not get permission and the men could, she responded with a shrug of her shoulders. Aisha’s presumption of holding classes in the schools, although in line with a general emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge in Oman, seemed to have raised an institutional question of who would be willing to take “responsibility,” supposedly, for the “safety” and, more likely, the content of the girls’ and women’s discussions. Having young women leave the town walls regularly for two hours made too many people nervous. It was probably better, I suggested to Aisha, trying to lessen the blow, since it would be harder for the girls to reach the schools. At least this way, the girls could walk to the class.
Aisha’s determination to hold the classes in a formal setting, ideally in the school building and by
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necessity in the sablas, and her refusal to host them in someone’s house is an indication of her self-conscious intention to break with the social roles and places usually reserved for unmarried, local young women and girls. Aisha and her colleagues also assumed that if they held their classes in their homes, people, including the girls themselves, would not take their intellectual goals seriously, not to mention that they might be interrupted by young siblings, parents, grandparents, or neighbors. The conceptualization of a separate space for their intellectual endeavors suggested an idea of institutional education as necessary to learning. As part of a complex next to the library, the meeting room seemed a good place to hold the classes.
A struggle for space was not limited to the case of the class. Before the summer classes, the library next to the sabla opened for the town. Besides private collections and the school libraries, it was the only library in town. It was more convenient than the school libraries, however, because it was set within the walls and open to everyone. The library was a tiny room covered in bookshelves and filled with the usual list of Ministry of National Heritage published Omani history books, collections of hadith, law manuals, biographies of the Prophet and his companions, dictionaries, literature and poetry, children’s books, school textbooks, and some magazines, as well as cassettes and video tapes of sermons. There were also folders with legal opinions ( fatawa) of Shaykh Ahmed al-Khalili, the leading religious scholar (nationally sanctioned through his position as Grand Mufti), and research projects by local students on Bahlawi scholars and Omani history. In the middle of the room was a plastic table and chairs where the visitors to the library could write and read as they did at school. The library was open for women three hours a week on Friday mornings, which, Aisha said, was not enough time for all the women and girls who wanted to use it. Sometimes the tiny library got so full on Friday mornings that everyone had to stand, holding books up in front of them. Aisha explained that she had written a letter to the organizers of the library asking that they provide a second time for women, but this request was also denied. This time, it seemed that her demand that more time be set aside for women to use the library was less a question of who would take responsibility for the girls, and more a problem that Aisha
was transgressing boundaries expected of young women.14
The Meetings
Aisha held her classes three times a week: Saturdays for Qur’an, Mondays for hadith, and Wednesdays for Ibadi history, from 8:00 to 10:00 or 10:30 in the morning. Each Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday for two months, the group of approximately twenty-five girls met in front of the metal sabla door. Each morning, we shook hands and waited for Aisha’s younger sister to arrive with the key. I knew two of the girls from lower Bahla, where I lived, and recognized most of the others from the library: Aisha told me they were from her neighborhood.
About fifteen of the girls wore black abayas over their dresses and black scarves covering their hair.15 The other ten girls wore colorfully patterned dresses and scarves. Five of the fifteen in black abayas also wore black socks, but no one’s face was covered. Aisha and her sister both wore the black abayas, headscarves, and socks. The different styles of covering not only marked modesty, but the way in which the sabla was perceived, its place in town, and the girls’ activities there. Some of the girls wore abayas any time they left their houses, others when they went to school or beyond the boundaries of their neighborhoods, and yet others wore abayas when going to particular places, such as the meeting room, for a talk or class. How the women related to the spaces they were passing and going to partially dictated their dress codes.
Abayas come in many different styles, from the more fashionable to the more simple. All the young women and girls who wore abayas to the class wore the plain style, without sequins or sharp angles. To school, young women also wore overcoats in either black or muted tones, signaling a kind of professionalization that older women did not exhibit through their style of dress. None of the girls wore these overcoats to the summer class, indicating that this was not really school. The socks were particularly important for identifying the degree of covering that a woman might consider religiously recommended. Only young women wore socks, however, indicating their different approach and interpretations of Islam as well as their unwillingness to engage in agricultural work. Although some of the girls wore colorfully patterned dresses and headscarves, none wore the shorter knee-length dresses and colorful pants that are seen as the traditional dress of interior Oman. These were clothes that their grandmothers might wear.
The changes in approach to dress and dress codes could be read as part of a shift in religious discourse
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more generally, as I mentioned earlier: whereas older women, as women, necessarily wore headscarves,
younger women instead wore particular emblems to index their religiosity.16 As religion took on a particular place in everyday life, headscarves became indexical of religiosity. In addition to the differences in approach to religion, there was also a mix of former-servant and free families, as well as girls from different economic backgrounds.
When Aisha’s sister would arrive with the key, she would open the metal door and we would enter, following Aisha and her colleague, Mawza, to the one corner of the room where there were plastic mats. The sabla was a large room with wall-to-wall carpet, divided in half by a low wall against which people could sit
and still be within the same room together.17 There were two air conditioners and several ceiling fans. Sometimes Aisha would bring a tape recorder for us to listen to a Qur’anic recitation or a lecture from a famous scholar. Once in the room, she would put down the tape recorder, close the windows, and turn on the fans and air conditioners. The girls would sit in a semicircle with their backs to the long wall of the rectangular room and the low dividing wall. Aisha and Mawza would sit at one end of the semicircle, along the wall at the end of the room, and I would usually sit at the other side, farthest away from the two teachers. Occasionally, I would move to sit closer to Aisha and Mawza, since my own tape recorder would not always pick up their voices above the hum and whirr of the air conditioners and fans. Even though the teachers did not assign a seating arrangement, the girls tended to sit in the same place every class, usually next to the girls with whom they had arrived.
At the library the Friday before the classes began, I saw Aisha ask some of the girls whether they were going to attend the class. Her questioning had an air of pressure and it is possible that some of the girls sensed the moral burden of attending the class. In addition to expanding their religious knowledge, Aisha said, through summer study, the girls could improve their grades at school. In either case, because of an ethic of furthering their religious knowledge for its own sake or because they wanted to improve their grades at school, the girls would not be wasting their summer vacation if they attended. While Aisha put some pressure on the girls, I doubt that parents pressured their daughters to attend. I knew that the girls from lower Bahla were responsible for watching their younger siblings and I suspect this was the case with most of the other students. Parents tended to discourage their daughters from being away from home in the mornings when they did not have to be at school, especially since that was the time their mothers visited neighbors. The combination of self-motivation and peer pressure was evident in the girls’ behavior in and attitude towards the class. Although by the end of the two hours, the girls would fidget and chat, they were, for the most part, very attentive and serious.
Instead of devoting the entire two hours to one of the three topics (Qur’an, hadith, or Ibadi history) as they had planned, Aisha and Mawza usually spent the first hour on one of these and the second hour listening to taped lectures, watching videos, playing quiz games, or simply giving lectures. Sometimes, however, they would discuss two of the main themes in one class and then spend the next class on a video or lecture. There was not much general discussion, although occasionally Aisha and Mawza would open the class to asking questions about a particular issue from one of their discussions, lectures, or videos.
On the one hand, these were most certainly “classes” where students learned from teachers who controlled the stream of discussion, who lectured, and who would sit at one end of the semicircle, against the wall at the end of the room. The students were not expected to study on their own, arriving with questions, or to come together to read and raise questions. These summer classes were very similar to the state-run classes during the school year. Like in the religious-studies classes in the schools, the topics of discussion were divided among these three particular themes; and the style of teaching—the lectures, established questions and answers, and memorized responses to well-known debates—marked the teachers and students as participating in the pedagogic style of the new schools.
On the other hand, Aisha, her colleagues, and the students were also aware that they were in some ways pursuing a “traditional” education. The similarity between their basic practice of sitting in a semicircle, as opposed to the straight lines of the classrooms, and the oft-invoked national representations of traditional scholarship was not lost on the girls. The fact that they were discussing religious issues, no matter the style of teaching or the particular issues raised in class, also connected these summer study-groups to a particular past, when education necessarily meant religious education. As these young women and girls negotiated their