Editorial
The article is based on a paper presented at the 2014 Cutting Edges Conference at Canterbury Christ Church University on July 1st, 2014.
Teaching Bedu Kids: The Persistence of “Othering” in the Face of Evidence
Neil McBeath, Oman
Neil McBeath served as a uniformed education officer in the Royal Air Force of Oman from 1981 to 2005. During that time, he took two Masters degrees and was awarded the Omani Distinguished Service Medal. Refusing to renew contract, he taught at the Technical Service Institute in Saudi Arabia for two years. He has now returned to Oman and is teaching at the Sultan Qaboos University. E-mail: neilmcbeath@yahoo.com
Menu
Preamble
Introduction
Condescension
Ignorance
Stereotyping
Personal experience
References
The title of this presentation is taken from an ill-advised remark made by a candidate for a teaching position at the Language Centre of the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. Given that her qualifications for the position only just reached the minimum that were was required for consideration as a candidate, and that her experience in the Arab Gulf was equally thin, she was asked whether she felt she was ready to face the demands of teaching at SQU. Her reply was revealing. “Well,” she said, rather defensively. “How difficult can it be? You’re only teaching bedu kids.”
She was not offered a teaching position at the Language Centre.
I should now like to raise three issues, condescension, ignorance and stereotyping. I should also like to make a personal statement. For most of my life I have lived and worked in the Sultanate of Oman. From 1981 to 2005 I served as an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force of Oman, and since 2007 I have taught at the Sultan Qaboos University. I regard Oman as my home, and I hope to stay on there after I retire. It is a country that I love, it is home to people I love, and I find it personally offensive when either the land or the people are treated with a lack of respect. For that reason, I have no respect for expatriates who apparently lack the ability to conduct elementary background research, and familiarize themselves with the culture and heritage of a place where they have voluntarily chosen to work.
That returns me to the concept of “bedu kids”, which is a gratuitously condescending description. It is unthinkable that any teacher would dismiss “black kids”, “Jewish kids” or “gipsy kids” in the same way, particularly during a high stakes interview. Racial bias is still a blot on the teaching profession, and it still finds voice in some teachers’ staffrooms and on certain teaching websites, (McBeath 2009). Even so, blatant racial prejudice has now been taught to hold its tongue in public – unless, as Holliday (1974) indicated, Arabs are involved. As anecdotal evidence, I offer firstly the Canadian teacher who was doing a final, pre-retirement contract in Oman and who amused herself by referring to the Sultanate as “the sand box”. This was ironic, as her previous job had been in Australia.
Secondly, “bedu kids” carries with it a level of ignorance about the development of the Arab Gulf that is even more alarming. The speaker is not alone in this. In May 2014 Dave’s ESL Café carried a naïve enquiry about whether there was a pharmacy in the southern Omani town of Jaalan Beni bu Ali. Such a lack of awareness remains reprehensible, but it could be overlooked if it were limited to a single case – like the Canadian teacher. Unfortunately it is not. The original question drew the following response from a poster called “smokesignals”
“Jalan is in the sticks – a small wind-swept desert town with very little in the way of amenities. A few years ago I taught a number of college students, who came from Jalan. They were all quite rough and ready bedouin, all low level, generally not very academic, and obsessed with camels.” (smokesignals, May 31, 2014).
The history of Ja’alan will be covered later in this paper, but “smokesignals’” description is rather unfair. In May 2014 I crossed the frontier from Oman into the UAE, and went through the town of Madam, which is genuinely small and wind-swept – imagine a single main road with single storey buildings on both sides – but Ja’alan had far more to offer than that even 20 years ago. Secondly, I too have taught students from Ja’alan. I taught about half a dozen in the Autumn 2013 Semester. I found their energy level rather trying, but they were genuinely delighted to have arrived in the Foundation Programme at the Sultan Qaboos University, and it would have been hard to fault them on effort.
Writing from Abu Dhabi, the Emirati scholar Jamal al Suwaid recently published a book whose title, From Tribe to Facebook (Al Suwaid 2013), neatly encapsulates the change that has occurred across the Arab Gulf in the last 40 years. Abu Dhabi’s immediate neighbour, Dubai, now hosts the busiest airport in the world, and such is the volume of traffic that a second, relief airport, Maktoum International, has just opened. The problem is that many people, including those who ought to know better, continue to view the Arab Gulf through the lens of heritage, rather than accepting its evolving culture (McBeath 2013).
I spoke about this at last year’s Canterbury Christ Church University’s Cutting Edges Conference, (McBeath 2013) but since then further evidence has come to light. Aviv (2013) in an article concerning the establishment of the Abu Dhabi campus of New York University, quotes an academic who was horrified to hear “professors refer to the ‘sultan’ of Abu Dhabi (a non-existent position), and that they seemed to believe that all women visiting the country would be oppressed.” (Aviv 2013; 68). What is particularly depressing here is that the comments were not made by uninformed viewers of Fox News, or readers of the tabloid press. These people are teaching faculty from a tertiary institution that prides itself on being a liberal arts college.
Another example of the same phenomenon would be a video that I once saw in Oman. Created by an entirely well-intentioned expatriate, it repeated “Welcome to Oman” like a mantra, and offered a series of quite stunning photographs of the Fort at Nizwa, the Royal Opera House Muscat, sunsets over the desert, seascapes, picturesque Omani villages, camels, dolphins and other assorted wildlife. The video managed, therefore, to be simultaneously exceptionally attractive and totally useless, because newly arrived teachers actually need to know how to open a bank account, how to get mobile phone and internet access, where to buy food, and how to get in to work. They do not need a tourist video of the type shown by Gulf Air immediately prior to landing.
The video also offers what could be described as an orientalist stereotype. I shall refer to orientalism later on, but stereotyping, all stereotyping, is inherently dangerous. In the British school context “Some of our teachers, faced with a tall, well-built black teenager see the stereotype of hoodie, baseball cap, loud mouth and bad attitude. Of course it might turn out that the youth is a stalwart of his local Sunday School – many are, religion is still mainstream in the Black community – but why take chances? It is in this light that we have to consider the disproportionate number of exclusions of students of Caribbean heritage” (Mitchell 2007; 102).
It is in the light of this warning, moreover, but with the orientalist slant, that I would like to examine the stereotypes peddled by Wynne-Jones (2010). David Wynne-Jones worked for the Royal Air Force of Oman as a civilian teacher in the early 1980s, and he was on the staff of English Language School (South) at RAFO Salalah when I was the 2iC, from 1985 to 1987. It would be fair to say that, at that time, Mr. Wynne-Jones was not popular. He was famous for his unreconstructed colonial attitude and an economy with the truth. By the time that he left Oman, I had already been posted to the Force Ordnance Service, so I played no part in the decision to terminate his contract, but I understood the rationale and would have supported the decision had I been asked for my opinion.
In January 2010, however, he wrote an account of an expedition that he undertook when he was working for the British Council in Salalah in 1989. This piece was published in the Parish Magazine of a place called Croxley Green in Hertfordshire, and it was drawn to my attention by another former colleague, who had found it online.
The article explained how the author had drawn a weapon from the armoury of the Royal Army of Oman, and had then ridden a camel out to the edge of The Empty Quarter, to spend a night under the stars at a Bedouin encampment. There was a description of Salalah, “a beautiful Arab port” on the border with Yemen, complete with a slave market and the Sultan’s hilltop palace. At the Bedouin camp, near which oryx, camels and gazelles could be seen peacefully grazing, the author had been offered a sheep’s eye as a delicacy, and he had manfully swallowed this tit-bit.
The entire piece was in the best traditions of the orientalist paradigm “All the cultural values which we pride ourselves upon – progress, rationality, democracy and so forth – are negated or inverted and the resulting anti-West is poured into a stereotyped, if at times rather romantic, vision of the Middle and Far East” (Milligan 1997; 33). To a certain extent it also owed a debt to Thesiger (1959), but the most important point was that it was a tissue of lies from start to finish.
Mr. Wynne-Jones’ teaching contract was terminated by the Royal Air Force of Oman in 1988. If, at that time, the British Council had an office in Salalah, he certainly never worked there. Salalah itself is not on the border with Yemen because the frontier lies nearly 100km to the west. The port area of Salalah is anything but beautiful. Built in the 1980s to handle container traffic, it is a major transshipment centre and welcomes the occasional large cruise ship, but it is starkly modern and entirely functional. His Majesty’s palace has a beach-front location and is almost at sea-level (Mackintosh-Smith 2001). Slavery was formally abolished in Oman in 1970, although it is generally believed that the act of abolition simply enshrined in law what had long since been the de facto position, and to the best of my knowledge, Salalah never ever had a slave market.
It is, of course, impossible to determine why Wynne-Jones decided to publish his fantasies. He may simply have decided to claim his twenty-five seconds of fame and assumed that no one would ever challenge his account. In that case, he was wrong, because I wrote to his Parish Magazine with a list of corrections, and as a result the piece was removed from its website. Wynne-Jones, however, appears to have been unabashed. While researching this paper, I did a Google search and was rather alarmed to discover that he has somehow managed to get himself elected to the Parish Council as an Independent member.
The good news about this, of course, is that the readership of a parish magazine is, by definition, extremely limited, and such magazines could never be regarded as authoritative scholarly journals. Even so, it remains alarming that such trash can be published anywhere, and it is an indictment of other people in Croxley Green that they were prepared to publish it without checking its veracity. Clearly, there remains a market for such orientalist stereotyping, and at its worst, this leads to the attitude remarked by Said (2000) that “the notion of an Arab people with traditions, cultures and indentities of their own is simply inadmissible” (Said 2000; 50).
The use of such stereotypes at professional conferences, moreover, is even more serious, and this leads me to the case of Michelle McGrath, who presented a paper entitled “Understanding Paralinguistic Features of Bedouin Students” (McGrath 2014) at the 2014 TESOL Arabia Conference. “Bedouin” is a misleading term if it is applied to the entire population of the Sharquiyyah Province, and supported with evidence from Thesiger (1994).
At the time of the TESOL Arabia Conference, McGrath was teaching at the University of Buraimi, but she had previously worked at Ibra College of Technology, where she had persuaded herself that she was teaching “real Beduoin” (sic) (McGrath 2013; 8). I would suggest that, in this, she is mistaken. . Morimoto (2014; 186), glosses Bedouin as meaning “Nomadic Arabic tribes that make the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula their home. They occupy themselves herding, buying and selling camels and sheep, transporting goods, and doing other work”. Thesiger (1959) avoids the term, using “bedu” instead.
The salient point is, of course, that in both instances these writers are referring to people who are nomadic. The same cannot be said for the students who attend Ibra College of Technology, although in the course of her paper, McGrath showed no awareness of the history of the place where she had been working. Referring to “the three Jaalans” – there are, in fact, only two, and asserting that she was probably the first white person that her students had seen is an almost classic example of “othering”.
A glance at a map of the Sharquiyyah province will reveal that the towns of Jaalan Beni Bu Ali; Jaalan Beni Bu Hassan; Al Kamil wa Al Wafi; Bidaya; Al Qabil; Ibra; Samad Ash Shan; Mudhaibi and Sinaw form an arc round the eastern and northern edges of the Wahiba Sands. They are all long-established settlements; small market towns that served the agricultural communities of distinct tribal alliances, each with their own hierarchies and local enmities. The watchtowers that surround Ibra may be coeval with the great fort at Nizwa, which was built in 1680, but within living memory they were used to alert the Beni Harith about the possibility of raids from Al Yahmadi (Mujahid 2014), where their traditional enemies, the Al Maskari tribe, resided. It was also from Ibra that, in the mid-1950s, the Beni Harith dispatched a large force of cavalry to rendezvous at Firq with the forces of His Highness Said bin Taimour (Morris 1957). This led to the capture of Nizwa and the end of the Jebel Akhdar War.
The maritime outlets for the Sharquiyyah province are Sur, and formerly, Qalhat. Both were visited by Ibn Battuta in the 14th century, (Mackintosh-Smith 2001; 2008) and the city of Qalhat was visited by Marco Polo in the 13th century. Both Qalhat and Sur were sacked by the Portugese Alfonso de Albuquerque at the start of the 16th century, and no sooner had it been rebuilt, than Qalhat was destroyed again, this time by an earthquake. Since then, the site has declined in importance. The harbour silted up, and it is now no more than a small village.
Sur, by contrast, has flourished. It was the disembarkation point in 1821 when Jalaan Beni Bu Ali became the target of a punitive expedition mounted by the British East India Company, at the request of Sultan Said bin Sultan II (1806-1856). For the rest of the Sharquiyyah, in 1987 archaeological excavations at Samad Ash Shan discovered tombs and grave goods, including a buried camel, that date back to the Late Iron Age (Yule and Weisbgerber 1990). On June 10th,2014, the Omani press reported “Major Archeological Findings” near Sinaw, including hundreds of tombs that date back to the first and third centuries BC. (Oman Daily Observer). Further north, Alrahbi’s (2013) autobiographical memoir from Saroor is sub-titled “Memories of Village Life”. The word “bedouin” is never mentioned.
Certainly, when Thesiger and his companions entered Oman in the early 1950s there were still bedouin in the Wahiba Sands, and some still live there today. Their numbers, however, are small – a Wikipedia article suggests there are only 28,000 in the Sultanate as a whole – and many former bedouin have settled in towns and adapted to urban life. The two best examples of this are, in all probability, Thesiger’s own companions – Salim Bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha, both of whom now live in large villas in the UAE. McGrath’s 1994 citation of Thesiger refers to the edition of Arabian Sands that was produced by Motivate Publishing in the UAE. She seems unaware that the original book came out in 1959, and that it referred to events a decade earlier.
Dates, however, are important, and particularly so in a society that is continuing to evolve. My own first visit to Ibra occurred in February 1981, when I took the public bus service from Ruwi to Sur, stopping in Ibra for lunch at a very basic restaurant, but even in those days my presence caused no comment, leading me to suggest that McGrath is by no means the first white person that her students have seen.
In 1982, moreover, I revisited Ibra, this time as the accompanying officer with a platoon of boys from the Sultan’s Armed Forces School at RAFO Ghallah. What was interesting about this platoon was that it contained several boys from different villages within the Sharquiyyah – Al Kamil wa al Wafi, Ibra, Al Yahmadi, Wadi Qafifa, Sanaw – and a tribal mixture that would have been impossible only 12 years before. The accession of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos in 1970 had already altered the paradigm by allowing the return of Omanis who had been self exiled in East Africa and the other Arab Gulf countries and for whom the concept of being Omani trumped the more local loyalties of tribe.
What is even more important, however, is that the boys from that first platoon are, in many cases, now very senior officers in the Sultan’s Armed Forces. Even the two youngest are both Lieutenant-Colonels, and one of those has a son who is currently completing his medical studies at SQU. One of the older boys, moreover, was already married with a baby son in 1982. That baby completed his studies in New Zealand and is now serving in the Royal Oman police. So much for “bedu kids”.
Omani students.
Kershaw (1997;166) points out that in Papua-New Guinea “by the time he reaches adulthood, a Papua new Guinean male traditionally will have learned to build a house capable of withstanding some of the most rugged climatic conditions in the world; he will make and maintain deadly weaponry; he can construct traps for birds, bandicoot and boars, and, depending on his location, he may also build suspension bridges and ocean going sailing vessels. He may well choose to make musical instruments and carvings; he will surely know how to create impressive costumes for sing-sings. And all of this without opening a single book.” Young Omani men frequently display a similar wealth of traditional, or non-academic, learning.
In 1983, 1984 and 1985 I was the accompanying officer for three cohorts of students from the Sultan’s Armed Forces School at RAFO Ghallah on adventure training courses in Scotland. The students were at that time in their penultimate year at school, and so they would have been about seventeen years old, though some were certainly older and others may have been uncertain of exactly how old they were. At the end of each course, and in complete defiance of Scots law, the boys were given a live sheep in the morning, and by the evening they had transformed it into a mutton and rice dinner for some forty people. The only time they ever balked at anything was on the first expedition, when they were given rabbits that had been shot. These they refused to eat on the grounds that the meat was not halal. Live rabbits, on the other hand, would have been a different matter.
With the passage of the last thirty years, society in Oman may have changed to such an extent that some of my present University students may have lost some of these earlier skills. My students from Ja’alan, however, would be perfectly capable of ritually sacrificing a goat, and then transforming the carcass into food. Within the Sultan’s Armed Forces, young soldiers are still expected to be able to prepare edible food for both themselves and others, and this is often done on a competitive basis. In other words, a detachment may basically have a cook-off competition to decide which man does the best job, and in the field he may then find himself tasked with providing food for his mates while they get on with the job of soldiering.
Omani boys are taught to be men by following their fathers. From the age of approximately eight, they are allowed to sit with their fathers and older men, and listen to adult conversations. They are taken to important events by their fathers or older brothers, and are shown how to conduct themselves in public. They take part in religious celebrations, which usually involve both praying publicly in mosques and sacrificing a sheep, goat or cow, which is then cooked and the meat eaten by the family and shared with others.
Omani girls live in a parallel world where they accompany their mothers to social functions, and within the domestic sphere they learn to cook, clean and tend children as part of living in extended families. The major difference between boys and girls is that girls have far less freedom of movement, particularly after puberty, and so they devote more time to their studies. This pays off. In school examinations, the girls outperform their brothers by some 10% and at the Sultan Qaboos University, entry requirements for young women are correspondingly higher. If they were not, SQU would be an all female university!
There is also the point that, at school, girls have the advantage of positive role models. 90% of the teachers in Oman’s girls’ schools are themselves Omani. In the boys’ schools that figure drops to 40%, because Omani men still have a wider range of career options. (Al Abri 2010). This is very unfortunate, but unless the Ministry of Education is prepared to restrict the recruitment expatriate teachers, the situation is unlikely to change. At the same time, however, there is mounting criticism of the school system’s failure to prepare its pupils for both higher education and the world of work (Hakli 2002). School education, it is alleged, still places too much emphasis on rote learning and not enough attention is paid to either the development of problem-solving skills or the use of new technology.
These last points, however, are common criticisms of secondary education across the globe. They are in no way specific to Arab higher education or to Arab Gulf higher education. Price (2013) indicates that university level students in the United Kingdom may be adept at using social media sites, and still lack the ability to use the internet for research purposes. What those same UK students also lack, of course, is my Omani students’ ability to retain information if they believe that it is important – sometimes the ability to learn by rote can be harnessed for good.
Those same Omanis will also know how to drive a car, operate a computer, and keep in touch with their very extended families using mobile phones and, again, social network sites. They therefore combine their traditional skills with the skills required for life in the 21st century. They have demonstrated what Raban (1979; 154) refers to as the “power of accommodation”. This enables them to select what they need from other societies and cultures, while rejecting those elements that might fundamentally change their culture. And that, I would suggest, is a far healthier approach than the casual stereotyping that leads ignorant “jet-in, jet-out” self-appointed “experts” to use unthinking designations like “bedu kids”.
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Seminar for Arabian Studies 20. 141-144.
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