Breaking Down Bias in the Midwest

When Amany Massoud El Hedeny wraps up her six weeks at Winona State University, in southeastern Minnesota, this month, she will have given more than three dozen lectures.

“I try to clarify a lot of things,” says the political-science professor from Egypt. “It’s time for Americans just to break those stereotypes about Muslims. It’s time to break those stereotypes about each other.”

Breaking stereotypes is also the goal of the program that brought Ms. El Hedeny here. Last year the Fulbright administration established a program called Direct Access to the Muslim World to expose small colleges with few or no Islamic-studies courses to Muslim perspectives. Both American colleges and foreign professors apply to the program, and grant winners from the two categories are matched based on similar interests and goals. Host institutions are typically not those where professors go to teach and conduct research on the Fulbright Program’s yearlong foreign scholar grants.

This fall Ms. El Hedeny, a professor at Cairo University whose research focuses on gender, social networks, and migration in Cairo’s squatter settlements, is teaching two courses at Winona State, “Women in Islam” and “Women and Poverty in the Third World.” She also gives multiple lectures each day on and off the campus — in other professors’ classes and in student centers, as well as in local high schools and churches.

Curious Students

“Students from the upper Midwest generally are quite insular in how they view global issues, and having Dr. El Hedeny here makes them confront their interconnectedness in human terms,” wrote Linda d’Amico, director of study abroad at Winona State, in an e-mail message.

A common Egyptian perception, says Ms. El Hedeny in an interview, is that Americans “are not caring a lot about the world. They are just caring about America.” But she has discovered that her students do care about international issues. They are sometimes reluctant to ask what they consider sensitive questions. “I feel in their eyes that they want to ask. When I insist to let them talk, they start to respond,” she says.

The students ask why Muslim women wear a veil, and why some Muslim men are permitted to have multiple wives. They ask “is it really that jihad gave a permission for Muslims ... to kill a lot of people?” she says. “They have a lot of interesting questions in their minds,” says the professor, adding with a laugh, “I like the stubborn students.”

Ms. El Hedeny tells her students that she came to the United States, accompanied by her six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son, without asking her husband’s permission. “I am not an exceptional case. You can find a lot of Muslims like that,” she explains.

Ms. El Hedeny and her children live in a house provided by the university, about a 10-minute walk from campus. Her daughter is in school and her son in day care, and Ms. El Hedeny gets $36 per day to feed her family. When she is not lecturing, she likes to take her children to a nearby lake, she says, to “enjoy the sun before it snows.”

Most of the time, however, she is lecturing — on conflict in the Middle East, development issues in the Muslim world, or the role of women in Egyptian society. “After each lecture,” she says, “I’m sure the students start to break the stereotypes.”

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