In the Christian Science Monitor: “The conservative Christian college where Muslims feel welcome: Being a tiny minority in a community can amplify differences. But at BYU, a common history of being the ‘other’ leads to a learning atmosphere of empathy.”
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I share with you some further passages that caught my attention in John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007):
a full third of professional and technical workers in Egypt are women, on par with Turkey and South Korea (102)
The valedictorians of Cairo’s elite medical school are famously known to almost always be female.
These cases are hardly unique. Nationally representative self-reported data show percentages of women in Iran (52%), Egypt (34%), Saudi Arabia (32%), and Lebanon (37%) with postsecondary educations. In the United Arab Emirates and Iran, women make up the majority of university students. However, in Muslim countries — as well as in non-Muslim countries — Gallup finds a wide range of female education with percentages of women pursuing postsecondary educations dipping as low as 8% and 13% in Morocco and Pakistan, respectively, which is comparable with 4% in Brazil, or 11% in the Czech Republic. (103)
According to the UNESCO 2005 Gender and Development report, the ratio of women to men enrolled in secondary education in 2001-2002 was 100% or higher in Jordan, Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. This compares with only 77% in Turkey, a staunchly secular nation [at the time of writing] often assumed in the West to be ahead of its neighbors in the arena of gender development, or 74% in India. The gender gap in these nations is higher than in Saudi Arabia, which boasts an 89% ratio of women to men enrolled in secondary education, according to the U.N. report.
Despite these hopeful statistics, women’s basic education is still lagging in some countries. For example, in Yemen, women’s literacy is only 28% versus 70% among men; in Pakistan, it is 28% versus 53% for men. These sad findings, however, are not unique to Islamic nations nor do they represent the entire Muslim world; women’s literacy rates in Iran and Saudi Arabia are 70% and as high as 85% in Jordan and Malaysia. (104-105)
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Note to self: I would really like to see this film, both for itself and because local Yuba City Latter-day Saints apparently figure positively in the story it tells:
I’m quite gratified at the fact that Latter-day Saints may be gaining a reputation for being exceptionally kind and religiously tolerant. That’s by far not the worst thing that I can imagine.
And Yuba City is going to get a temple.
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