University challenges conservative ideals

Thuwal, Saudi Arabia: Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Makkah sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.

Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10 billion (about Dh36 billion) university ordered up by the king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of the country.

When finished next year, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coeducation classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other features loathed as dangerous liberalism by fundamentalists.

The campus outside an ancient fishing village is recognition that the country needs the likes of the University of Southern California, Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survive globalisation.

Opening up

An architect's rendering shows a campus of canals and pools along glass libraries and laboratories. Students and professors will live in villas and apartments looking out on date palms.

"Saudis are beginning to realise they are not the centre of the universe," said Tariq Maeena, a writer and aviation expert.

"[King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz] hopes that a young Saudi will be in a class with an American professor. The king is jabbing the conservatives from all sides. He's not doing it with a massive decree, but incrementally, and all the radicals can do is roll their eyes and say, 'Uh-oh, we're losing more power'."

Amira Kashgary, a literature professor at a women's college, said: "We are part of the global world now. Whether we like it or not, and regardless of our political and religious systems, there are changes seeping through our lives. The radicals ran a wicked internet campaign against the university. They said it is another sign liberals are invading us."

King Abdullah is building the university, along with six multibillion-dollar Economic Cities, to provide jobs and open the country to global markets. Conservatives fear that these international voices, from South Asian construction workers to Western scientists, will change the religious fabric.

"Men and women learning together should remain forbidden," said Mohammad Ben Yehia Nogeemy, a member of the Saudi Juristic Academy, a religious organisation that issues fatwas.

The university, known as KAUST, is promising academic freedom, the mixing of cultures and religions, and subjects as varied as nanotechnology and crop development. The country's morality police will not patrol the campus, depicted on the university's interactive web site with unveiled women.

Sami M. Angawi, an architect, drove through the streets wondering whether the university would melt into the community or become another gated pocket of Western ideals.

"To just implant a foreign university here will not work," he said. "What do we do with it? Put fences around it? We don't allow it to interact with the rest of Saudi society?

"Do we just want science without culture? Does science grow without culture? You have to have a unity. Without interaction you create polarisation, and with that the extreme will grow more extreme."

We are part of the global world now. Whether we like it or not, and regardless of our political and religious systems, there are changes seeping through our lives."