Love, Saudi Style

As part of my course in Discursive Approaches to Intercultural Communication, I am required to engage in a service learning project. For those of my readers who aren't currently enrolled in an academic institution, a service learning project is a project in which you go out and perform some type of community service or engagement and report your findings to your instructor, your classmates, or both. My service learning project is to run biweekly conversation hours as part of Penn's English Language Program (ELP). The ELP brings students from all over the world (though mainly not from Europe, which tends to send its English Language Learners to Britain) to the United States to learn English in eight-to-sixteen week courses. Students in this program often complain that they don't get enough opportunity to meet and interact with native students. To remedy this situation, the program has created a system of partnered exchanges with native English speakers who want to learn one or another of the ELP students' languages. Some students cannot find a partner, however, because they speak a langauge that isn't in high demand (I gather not many Penn students are jumping to learn Turkish) or because there are just too many of their nationality in the program (currently, I'm told, the situation with ever-popular Mandarin). And so I and a classmate come to fill in this gap by running conversation hours with a native speaker for those students unable to find a conversation partner.

Last Thursday, I had a somewhat inauspicious beginning to my conversation hours. The time for the hours turned out to be inconvenient, and I ended up hosting them later in the day than I had originally planned. Despite this concession, only three students, all from Turkey, turned up. Today worked out a bit better: about eight students came, and we went off in search of a good conversation spot. This search proved more difficult than I had expected; two or three of my students didn't want to go into Starbucks "because it supports the war against Palestine" (a charge I had never heard before). We eventually ended up at the main Penn library and were able to find one of the rooms there reserved for large study groups.

My first conversation hour having been a fairly basic, getting-to-know-you hour, I decided we should have a more concrete topic today. So I brought up the recent arrest of Roman Polanski (more on my feelings about this later). Most of my students had not heard of Roman Polanski, so I got to flesh out the sordid tale of his acto f rape, conviction, flight, and now arrest in Switzerland, in the process defining such crucial words as convict and trial. As there has been some brouhaha in Europe about Polanski's arrest on a thirty-year-old crime, I mentioned this fact, as well as his victim's decision to forgive him. I then turned the discussion over to them, asking what they made of the case.

My students today hailed from two countries: Turkey and Saudi Arabia. While there was no disagreement between the natives of these two countries about what should be done with Mr. Polanski--they all agreed he should return to the United States and face punishment for his crime--they had some remarkably different questions about the circumstances of what happened. The Saudi students were particularly interested in whether the girl had consented to the act. I explained that in the American legal system, a 13-year-old girl is not capable of giving consent to sex, and any sex act between an adult man and a 13-year-old girl is considered a crime, however willing the girl.

Shar'iah (Islamic religious) law, I soon discovered, has quite a different point of view. Under Shar'iah law, at least as it is interpreted and practiced in Saudi Arabia, a girl this age can be considered an adult for the charge of fornication, though she would not likely receive as severe a punishment at this tender age as an older woman committing the same offense. Usually, however, fornication goes unpunished, because the Shar'iah requiresr four witnesses to the act to convict; as one of my students put it, the main thing is for people "not to do it in the street". Without four witnesses, fornication is considered a sin, but the matter is left to God's justice, not society's.

In Turkey's more secular society, however, matters stand closer to where they do in the States. Turkey considers people to be adults at the age of eighteen. Fornication is not a crime punishable under Turkish law, though it is widely frowned upon and regarded as a serious sin.

My students asked me what Americans thought about these kinds of things. This was a bit of an awkward moment (even more awkward than having to explain the difference between adultery and fornication a moment before). It's hard to know at such times whether to tell the unvarnished truth, and risk giving your students a highly negative view of the country, or to fudge a bit, and have them come away with an incorrect though more positive view. In the end, I half-fudged; I told them that various Christian groups had differing views about the sinfulness of fornication, but that the law did not generally attempt to punish it.