By Mona Eltahawy
The Jerusalem Report
Jan. 4, 2010

It was the end of a three-hour class I’d given on women and Islamist movements. Why do women join such movements, which often bar them from positions of power? Why would a woman who belonged to one such movement tell a researcher “We don’t want equality. We want justice”? Why would the majority of women who belonged to another movement resist demands by fellow sisters that they gain decision-making positions?

And most disturbingly, why would women offer to blow themselves up for violent Islamist movements, whose misogyny outdoes the nonviolent groups’? Is it any different when a woman blows herself than when a man does? Why do women suicide bombers shock people more? Isn’t it clichéd to think that all women are nurturing and less violent than men?

I was spilling my guts out, I knew. Those were issues that mattered to me not just academically or for my columnist’s eye but personally too as a Muslim woman and a feminist. But then, every class was a philosophical roller-coaster that left my students and me alternately elated and drained from the intensity of our discussions.

As I packed up my papers and unclenched my spine at the end of class, one of the Asian students shared an anecdote that made me want to hug her. She told me that during her years as a television producer in her country, her co-workers decided to go on strike and would shave their hair as part of their labor dispute.

“I thought about it and realized that the men had no idea what hair meant for women. In a month, the men would look the same but it was very different for women,” she said. “I refused to shave my hair. I was the only woman who refused and I came under a lot of pressure but I refused.”

Clearly, I was learning as much as I was teaching.

The campus: the U.N.-mandated University for Peace. The class: “Women and New Media in the Middle East,” which I was teaching to graduate students from 14 different countries.

The country: Costa Rica, which became the first country to abolish its armed forces in 1948. (Imagine! We all know what was happening in the Middle East in 1948!)

The lessons walked home with us. The students would tell me of hours of arguments and debates they’d have – face to face and (apropos our class on how New Media gave women in the Middle East unprecedented avenues for expression) via Facebook.

Spending a year studying alongside students from more than 70 countries brings the world to you; yes, it’s exhilarating, but it also reminds you of how frustrating and unknown that world can be. When you encounter for the first time ideas and ideologies that your home country had sheltered you from or when you’re sitting just across the room from someone whose values you’ve never contended with before – either because you’re conservative and your classmate across the room explains what it’s like to be bisexual or because you’re liberal and the classmate across the room thinks homosexuality is unnatural – nothing short of alchemy is at work: nothing will be the same again.

I traveled as a child with my family. We left Egypt when I was 7 and I didn’t return till I was 21. Of my 42 years, I’ve spent just 17 in Egypt. But I didn’t travel by myself until I was 27 years old. My solo journeys before that were intellectual and were conducted not in a class of 14 nationalities but between the covers of books. Books brought me the exhilaration and terror of new ideas that helped me deconstruct and reconstruct Mona.

The youngest of my students was 22 and the oldest 33. Their deconstruction and reconstruction was happening before my eyes.

My education at UPEACE continued at “home” too, in the hotel where other visiting professors and I lived during the course. Imagine the privilege of having dinner with one of the world’s leading researchers and educators in nonviolent struggles. As a young student, Mary E. King worked alongside the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (no relation) in the U.S. civil rights movement and here she was, the author whose many books include “Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement,” giving me goosebumps by telling me it was my duty to write a book.

And right over there at the next table, another dinner companion/teacher: Jan Pronk, who spent almost 40 years as a Dutch politician and diplomat, including four terms as a minister in Dutch governments. He served for two years as Head of Mission for the United Nations Mission in Sudan before Sudanese President Omar Bashir effectively pinned a badge of honor on his chest by asking him to leave Sudan after Pronk criticized a deal between Khartoum and a Darfurian rebel group. The students got decades worth of experience from professors like King and Pronk and I got them both for dinner.

But I was in trouble. Students under renovation and legendary professors notwithstanding, Costa Rica – hands down the most beautiful country I’ve ever been to – was messing with my head. With every look at the stunning Central Valley vista laid before us at the campus, I knew I’d lose my mojo (read: anger), if I stayed here too long. It was impossible to be angry at anything.

So for the sake of my writing, I had to leave and, so, as soon as I finished teaching my course, I left.