Al-Jazirah

MANY decisions in our country take long to issue to the point that I can safely say the time they take can be described not only too long but immensely exaggerated.

The decision to introduce sports in the girl schools needed a long time and heated discussions in the newspapers and the social media before it was issued.

A number of opponents took to the floor to voice their opposition to sports for girls. They did not hesitate to call its propagators bad names.

When the decision to introduce sports in girl schools was issued, the opponents suddenly disappeared in thin air. They kept quiet as if they have no voices now.

Why does the dialogue and discussions in our country extend for years to issue a social decision like the girl’s sport, which the world had adopted for decades or even centuries?

Who is responsible for making us succumb to the forces of darkness and who is ready to severely badmouth anyone who dares to oppose them?

The experiment of mixing boys and girls in the first grades of the primary schools up to the third year was applied and practiced in some private schools. Nothing of the fears, problems and difficulties that the forces of darkness imagined had happened. If the experiment had not succeeded, the parents would have stopped sending their children to these schools.

We should, therefore, not mortgage our lives and the future of our coming generations to some few people who oppose the idea and fabricate false stories and sheer lies to frighten children from going to schools where the boys and girls in the first grades study together.

They mobilized their followers to support them in the social media so as to terrorize anyone who was inclined to support the idea of co-education and put them in ready-made black lists.

These people should not scare us from accepting good ideas that will contribute to the making of our future. We should not allow them to spread fears against the mixing of young boys and girls in the first grade of the primary school.

These are merely children who should be enabled to live their childhood naturally by their innate instincts and simplicity.

The boys should learn from their early years how to deal with females with all respects, consideration and sublimity. They should learn from their young years how to deal with women as complete human beings who are capable of making dialogues and integration.

They should also be enabled to be educated by women teachers who are themselves mothers and good educators. These women teachers are usually passionate and merciful.

The women teachers are very well equipped to deal with the children at this early age. They know how to handle and bring them up.

The issue, then, does not need the voting of the society on it or consulting and taking the opinions of people who have no proper knowledge of psychology or sociology.

If the issue was to be studied before it was decided on, then it should have been given to a certain committee specializing in sociology and psychiatry not in religion.

The controversial issues do not need fatwa (religious ruling) because the fatwa is always changing and may hinder us from building a healthy society. It will also delay our progress for long years.

The fatwa may change with time. We will come to know when it is too late that this fatwa has delayed our development as it was the case with many other controversial issues. which had completely stopped the growth of the society especially during the 1980s.

I am confident that we will not go back in the field of women education to the era before 1979 as the Crown Prince had said last April.

We are now on the brink of a new future being built by young men and women. The important element, which will bring change and achieve the aspirations of the society, is no doubt education.