A Day in the Life of a Substitute Teacher # 4

This was originally published on Qassia on February 20, 2008.

I lucked out this week because I am substituting for a particular teacher for four days straight, which means that I have the same students Tuesday - Friday. The best part of it is that these students, although almost all sophomores, are the best-behaved and probably the most intelligent students I have encountered all year long.
Their regular teacher left extremely detailed lesson plans for them to follow. And since the students are so intelligent, the plans were both very simple for me as a substitute and demanding for the students.
Today, they were to start by passing in a composition they had been assigned to do about the place of women in Muslim society. I read over about a dozen of the themes. The issues the students attacked and disapproved of included arranged marriages, honor killings, genital mutilation, the wearing of variations of the veil, and the low status of a woman vis-a-vis her husband. Several students said that there is nothing in the Koran that requires a woman to wear a veil, and that most of the things they objected to were in fact distortions of the Muslim religion.
All this sounded extremely negative, and I didn't encounter anything anyone had written that sounded positive, so I asked the entire class at one point whether or not we were so culture bound that we were not unnecessarily seeing the Muslim religion as less positive than it really is. (My own feelings are that we are not so culture bound that we cannot appreciate these aspects of the Muslim religion, but I really wanted to toss out the question and see what anyone said.)
Then I posed to them the question of whether or not, since we have our own values and were discussing a culture or cultures different than ours, we could find a way to judge cultures in a way that might be fair. What criteria might we use that would be less culture bound ?
A few people mentioned happiness. I pounced on that one and mentioned that one possible way might be to follow Jeremy Bentham's system of hedonistic caluclus in which he suggested that an action that made the greatest number of people happy would be morally better than one that made fewer people happy. (I hope I have this right, but I pulled this out of thin air from having studied philosophy a lonmg, long time ago.) Maybe this was also a method for judging the quality of a culture.
One of the students with an even more subtle mind than the others had mentioned in her composition that the media in the United States often distorts what occurs in Muslim countries.
I was able to have prolonged conversations with several really notable students. The main one was a fellow named B who sat in front not far from my desk. It turns out that he had been going to another school elsewhere and had been kicked out of the school because, according to him, he had had an intellectual argument with a teacher. As he explained this, he got into the argument because the teacher used terms that he was not willing to define. I guess B. pushed a little too hard. He may well have been brighter than the teacher. On the other hand, his description of events may not be accurate.
B and I had a discussion about the United Nations report that was issued a year or two ago in which a panel of Muslims under the auspices of the United Nations issued a white paper intended for the Muslim world on the necessity for Muslims to modernize and change certain practices if they are to catch up with the West's development.
A very traditional (we might say "conservative" or Right-wing") physician in Egypt with whom I had a long e-mail acquaintance with a year or so ago told me that he had a copy of the U.N. report "on his desk," but when I tried to discuss iot with him he was never willing. One of the main points in that report, as put forth by Muslim scholars, was that by disenfranchising half the population (women) these cultures seriously diminish their intellectual power. They waste half their intellectual resources. If I recall one of the comments in the report correctly, these scholars stated that the country of Greece annually produces more new books than all of the Muslim world.
Anyway, B and I discussed all this.
Another "devil's advocate" question that I raised, beyond asking out loud if we were all just too culture bound to appreciate the Muslim religion, was that there are a number of Muslim women here in the West who are advocates of the Muslim religion and apologfists for women's place in it. Are we missing something, I asked, if there are Muslim women with this attitude ?
Even though I personally feel that the place of Muslim women in their societies is really an unpleasant and difficult one, ill-suited to human nature, I was at least trying to be fair and question what the students seemed all to have decided.
The general impression I got was that the students thought women who apologized for the place the Muslim religion allows women are the equivalent of Uncle Toms.
It was an interesting day. I went home feeling good about it.