Letter Concerning Interruption of Study of Four Medical Students at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia

[CAF logo. Image from MESA website] [CAF logo. Image from MESA website]

Letter Concerning Interruption of Study of Four Medical Students at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was written by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).]

Dr. Abdullah Mohammed Al-Rubaish
President, King Faisal University
via email aalrubaish@kfu.edu.sa; president@ud.edu.sa

Dr. Waleed Albu-Ali
Dean, College of Medicine, King Faisal University
via email wbuali@kfu.ed.sa

Dr. Majid bin Ali Al-Naimi
Minister of Higher Education, Bahrain
via facsimile +973 1768 0161

Prince Faisal Bin Abdullah Bin Muhammad Al-Saud
Minister of Higher Education, Saudi Arabia
via email media@mohe.gov.sa; dmea@mohe.gov.sa

Dear Sirs,

I write to you on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association and its Committee on Academic Freedom to express our deep concern over the sustained interruption of study for four medical students at King Faisal University in Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching of the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

A travel ban was imposed on Zainab Maklooq, Aalaa Sayed, and Zahra Zabar, effectively preventing them from going to school. All were on full scholarships based on exemplary performance in high school. We understand that they were arrested by Saudi Arabian authorities and extradited to Bahrain, where they were accused of inciting hatred towards the Bahraini regime and criticizing government symbols and detained for about three weeks.

Although they were acquitted in June due to lack of evidence, they have not been allowed to resume their studies. Two of the students were in their final semester of a six year program of study. The other was in her fifth year of study. King Faisal University will neither confirm nor deny their expulsion, but they are no longer allowed into Saudi Arabia. They have contacted authorities in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to no avail. Further, they are unable to obtain university transcripts. With no access to these documents, they are effectively barred from resuming their education anywhere else. Other universities have informed the students that they would be required to repeat at least three years of study if they were to enroll.

Zahra was recognized as the best student in the northern governorate of Bahrain, won a physics competition, won best project for an Autism in Health Education competition, and represented Bahrain in the Arabic World Speech competition. Zainab has volunteered her skills and energy in a health care center. Aalaa’s grade point average is 4.09 out of 5. She was previously nominated for participation in the Crown Prince Outstanding Leadership and Development Foundation. All three have worked very hard to pursue their goal of becoming physicians.

We are also concerned about a fourth medical student at King Faisal University, Mahmood Habib. Also in his final year of study, he was prohibited from taking his final exam by the university administration without explanation. He learned later during a university investigation that he had been accused of “inciting hatred towards the Bahraini regime.” He was not given the opportunity to prove otherwise. He has been informed that he is permanently expelled from the university though he was never charged with any offense.

We ask that you allow these four students to complete their university medical education and receive their medical degrees, that you protect their scholarships, lift the travel ban and ensure that they are not hindered in any way as a result of these events in their quest for professional employment.

Education is integral to national development. Both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have expressed their commitment to nurture young citizens who are capable of nation building and contributing to the community. King Abdullah has repeatedly said that giving young people a better education is at the heart of his plan to build a modern state. He stated, “Undoubtedly, scientific centers that embrace all peoples are the first line of defense against extremists.” The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Higher Education “seeks to fulfill the potential of the greatest resource – people.”

Bahrain’s commitment to education is explicit in its Constitution, which affirms that “The State guarantees the inviolability of places of learning.” King Hamad recently confirmed this stance when he called education “the cornerstone of national development.”

These four students have all proven their professional credentials and are future leaders in a critical field of national development. We urge you to ensure their access to academic programs and to support them so that they may fulfill their academic and societal potentials.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Fred M. Donner
MESA President
Professor of Near Eastern History, University of Chicago

cc:

H.E. Sheikh Humoud Bin Abdullah Bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Bahraini Ambassador to Saudi Arabia
H.E. Ambassador Houda Ezra Nonoo, Bahraini Ambassador to US
Dr. Abdulmohsen Fahad Almarek, Ambassador Saudi Arabian Ambassador to Bahrain
H.E. Adel A. Al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the US
Prince Mohammed bin Fahd, Governor of the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412