Aletta Blogt

Damascus, Syria. A woman is driving a car through the busy traffic of the city. Besides her sunglasses she is wearing a headscarf. Her driving seems confident. She is on her way to the Qur'an school she founded. It is a Qur'an school for girls. Her name is Houda al-Habash.

This is one of the opening scene of The Light in her Eyes a documentary that was first screened at last weeks’ International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. The documentary gives insight into Houda al-Habash and her Qur'an school, it shows how children, teenagers and women learn together in the Mosque. It tells about Houda’s life and it shows the anxieties, dreams and hopes of young Muslim women.

Education = emancipation?
Al-Habash founded her Qur'an school based on the vision to make religious and secular education available for women. In fact, the numbers of women that come to her school and learn the Qur'an by heart highly increased in the last twenty years. For al-Habash this is a clear sign of a women’s emancipation. She beliefs that for a long time Muslims took away many rights from women, even the right to learn. Her school makes it possible again for women to learn, to establish a position within the Mosque and within society. In one of her preaches she answers the question ‘Does religious law allow a woman to be president?’ with a strong and clear ‘Yes!’

Learning by heart
Still, I had troubles to recognize the emancipatory value of al-Habash’s teachings. Clearly, education is a major factor for a woman to emancipate herself. But, in the film we see little girls learning the Qur'an by heart and being trained to articulate every syllable in the correct way. A good student is measured according to the amount of pages she knows perfectly by heart. But where is the understanding of what these girls learn? And where are the discussions of the content of the Qur'an? Those scenes I did not see.

Conservative Values
Also, al-Habash sticks to conservative values. She says the first thing she is going to be judged upon is whether she was a good wife and a good husband. The film shows girls speaking about their dreams of going to university and becoming a doctor. Of course, only if their future husband allows and if they can still be a good wife and mother at the same time.

Ambiguity
As maybe recognizable my feelings towards the documentary are very ambiguous. And this is what made The Light in her Eyes a very intense experience for me. The filmmakers leave it open for the audience to form their own opinion. Emancipatory and conservative values are shown side by side. Al-Habash encourages young women to attend university while in the next scene she tells a girl off because her swimming suit is too short. Exactly, this ambiguity was what made the documentary worthwhile for me and that is also why I can only suggest for everyone to see it as well!

Michelle Pfeifer is currently doing a research internship at Aletta. She studies Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University College Amsterdam.