Final KSA Thought

My trip to Saudi Arabia is over, and has been for a couple of days, but I wanted to share one last experience: our visit to Dar al-Hekma College in Jeddah, which was undoubtedly my favorite visit of the trip.

Dar al-Hekma is a women’s college. It was founded in 1999, and its graduates are as competitive as any that the Kingdom produces. When we arrived, we sat in on part of a lecture on frameworks for environmental regulation. The women were engaged, asked great questions, and, most importantly and perhaps surprisingly (reminder: this is Saudi Arabia), confident. We then took a tour of the building, and it was striking how much the school emphasized art, and how creative and expressive a lot of it was. There was a birth control poster on the wall.

When we stopped in the library, someone asked what was the most checked-out book. Dr. Salah Abdeah (sp?), the school’s vice dean of institutional advancement, our tour guide, and a woman whose subversive pride and dedication to the school and its students was heart-lifting, laughed and said “I don’t know – it would be the most controversial one.”

Dar al-Hekma was a breath of fresh air in a country that, as I’ve said, I found beautiful, welcoming, and disturbing all at the same time. That Dar al-Hekma and its women could shine brightly in a place so literally dark for so many of its burka-clad citizens was a deeply moving thing to see. I was and am in awe of them, and wanted to make sure to relay that to Pickle Nation before closing the pickle-book on KSA.