Having spent 34 years of her life as an educationist in the Kingdom, Dr. Chaman Rahim, a Bangladeshi national living in Jeddah, says her experience here has been more than rewarding. She has witnessed the gradual development of the education sector, especially with regards to girls' education. “Education for girls was officially proclaimed by King Saud in 1959 on Saudi radio. Later, King Faisal and his wife, Queen Effat, made great contributions to girls' education,” said Rahim. “However,” she continued, “the process was slow at first and progressed gradually. Girls always seize any opportunity to study, and today women are at the forefront in almost all fields of work. This is indeed a great achievement.” Rahim completed her post-graduate program at Dhaka University. She was then awarded a merit scholarship by the French government. She obtained a second master's degree, and later, a doctorate from France. She started her career in the teaching profession in 1975 at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah and is currently working as an assistant professor at Dar Al-Hekma College. “Though I came here in 1975, my family's association with the Kingdom started long before that. My father served as a British diplomat in Jeddah in 1946. Back then, a friend suggested that I visit KAU. I did and I was offered a part-time teaching job. I was told I would be hired as a fulltime lecturer to teach Social Science when I finished my doctorate. Thus started my new journey in a new country,” she said. Rahim was then offered a job by the UN, which she refused because, “I was so involved in this country that I deferred that opportunity to a later time. A colleague of mine recently commented that this place is addictive. How right she is!” She said she joined the teaching force in Saudi Arabia at a time when female teachers were a rarity. “When I joined the University, it had only three buildings, and now when I left, it has 22 buildings!” she proudly said. Girls had not yet forayed into sports then and Rahim, who won several sports-related accolades at her university, saw it as an opportunity to make a start in this direction. “When I started working at KAU, there were no sports for girls. With the permission of the Dean, I encouraged the girls to play and trained them to keep fit. I have always enjoyed and played sports. I was overjoyed when the then Vice Dean of Student Affairs, Dr. Bilquis Nasser, declared that an indoor stadium in the girls' premises would be constructed, and that SR50,000 had been allocated to buy equipment. That was big money in those days,” she said. Rahim has written two books: One, A Glossary of Muslim Names in 1986, and two, Geography of Saudi Arabia in the nineties, which she said is the first such work on Saudi Arabian geography in English. Recently, she was awarded a fellowship in UNESCO's International Institute of Education and Planning (IIEP), in which the topic of her research was ‘Female Education in Saudi Arabia'. “Don't believe it when people tell you women here are unhappy and restricted. I spent more than half my life with them, and I can assure you that Saudi women are just like any other women, with similar aspirations and dreams,” said Rahim.
