A Classroom in Oman

Article by: Baxter Jackson, January 2008

The gleaming white buildings of Ibri's provincial college shimmer under a scorching Arabian sun as teenage girls, dressed head-to-toe in black polyester, scuttle through an austere courtyard. They look more like freed shadows than college freshmen. These are some of my future students and I follow them to my first English class here in the Sultanate of Oman.

I watch them as they sweep down a long white corridor in their elegant black abeyyas (thin gowns), stealing furtive glances at me and giggling, perhaps wondering if I'm their teacher. No exotic perfume drifts with them, just the antiseptic scent of hand-sanitiser.

While no signs specifically mark this area as a 'girl' or 'boy' passage (as they do in the admin building), I notice that men are conspicuously absent. Then, as I'm halfway through an outlying corridor with the ladies, I spot some altar-boyish figures in an interior hallway: Omani guys.

I sneak a peek at them in their starched-white dishdashas (wrist-to-ankle shirt-dresses) and embroidered caps as they wait patiently for me near their classroom entrance - the girls have their own. This will be the first time these young men and women have been in the same room since hitting puberty.

I catch up to the ladies in the hall and watch them walk in, sit down and prepare for class. With no boys around, the Omani girls fiddle and rewrap their hejabs (veils) just as Western girls fuss over their hair and make-up. After stealing a glimpse, I round the bend and take the 'male' door into class, eager to see if what I have been told is true.

My entrance is the boy's cue. As I unload my bag, they file in and respectfully shake my hand. They sit at the front of the classroom and as far away from the girls as possible. The starchy scent of their dishdashas travels with them. Looking up from my stack of course outlines to address the entire class for the first time, I see it just as I was told it would be: boys in white on the right, girls in black on the left.

Even though the students don't look at each other, talk to each other or directly acknowledge each other's presence in class, I find out later that their diffidence towards the opposite sex is not grounded in repugnance (there's a population explosion going on, after all) nor in a sense of hierarchy (women and men share work separately in all sections of society) but in a collective reluctance to avoid bringing criticism to the one thing that matters most in Omani society - family.

So the outward symbols that I initially perceived as oppressive - the women in black, the men in white, the signs for men here and women there - were nothing more than signposts for separate but equal realities.

Photos by Kristina Kunz