3	A University Devoted to Advancing the Status and Professional Opportunities of Women
		Similarly, the work we project for AKU on economic growth [Section VII c.5 below] will address economic questions affecting women's opportunities and well-being very basically. In particular, it may contribute to advancing or preserving women's employment opportunities on a much broader front than would otherwise be possible for the University. We think, for example, of problems such as Egypt has encountered in cutting back from the bloated state employment of Nasser's time. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a vigorous growth of educational and employment opportunities for women but subsequently, in the chronic dearth of employment that Egypt has suffered since the 1970s, women have been affected disproportionately. In 1986 the unemployment rate is said to have been 10% for men but 40.7% for women; and it is perhaps of particular interest to us that of the women seeking to join the labour force, 40% were university graduates. [Mervat F. Hatem, "The Paradoxes of State Feminism in Egypt, p.232 in eds. Barbara J. Nelson and Najma Chowdhury, Women and Politics World-wide, Yale, 1994.] The problems of equitable access to employment for women are -obviously especially hard to resolve where economic growth is slow and employment chronically limited. Anything AKU's research and instruction on economic growth may do to raise the rate of growth may contribute more than proportionately to increasing the opportunities for women. It may also help protect the legitimacy of women's aspiration to have careers of their own. In Egypt, the bitter competition for jobs has apparently brought a critical reaction against the view that women should normally aspire to occupational careers, and this reaction has probably contributed to the rising popularity of Islamist views that the proper place of women is in the home.
		The ways in which future new components of AKU will contribute in the common commitment of the University to the advancement of women will differ appreciably, as we have begun to illustrate. We have thus far mostly been concerned with professional education and research. As we now turn to liberal education and the study of Islamic civilisations as future developments in AKU, we encounter somewhat different needs and possibilities. In Section VI of this report we have foreshadowed recommendations on general or liberal education in AKU that are more fully developed later in this Section VII. We are recommending that AKU broaden the education of its own students to equip them more satisfactorily to adjust to the complex demands of modern life and to assume the positions of leadership we hope AKU graduates, both men and women, will assume. And in the aspiration to wider influence that we urge on AKU, we stress that it should provide models and materials that will attract attention and use far beyond AKU itself.
		It should be axiomatic that the situation and the outlook of women must be an important part of general or liberal education in the modern world, for the need and the mutual benefit of both the sexes. If the principle is axiomatic, its concrete curricular application is, however, subject to many options and has aroused controversy in many places. The Commission has had recommendations from the faculty in Karachi for the establishment of women's studies in AKU. We agree warmly with this recommendation in principle and we are aware that accepting it requires steps beyond the traditional content of liberal education. It is, of course, our hope and expectation that the liberal education that develops in AKU, first perhaps in broadening the education in the Faculty of Health Sciences, and ultimately issuing in a Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will be original in many respects. In dealing with the history and the structure of the modern world, for example, we think it should go beyond narratives of kings and statesmen, constitutions, generals and wars, to give some understanding of the peoples of the world, their passions and diversity. Among these understandings must certainly be that of women's outlooks. It would seem important, for example, for students not simply to know how South Asia (including Sri Lanka) has come to have so many women as heads of government, but what women think about this fact; and moreover, what they think about the reserved parliamentary seats for women and the dearth of elected members. (The chapter on Bangladesh by Najma Chowdhury in the volume cited above that S he edited, is quite illuminating on these particular matters.)
		The fact that AKU is a Muslim university has basic implications for the character of the liberal education that may develop within it. We conceive the Institute of Islamic Civilisations that we are recommending, as having important educational and research functions that we trust will infuse AKU's own programmes. This Institute must obviously be concerned with research and scholarship on the status and position of women both in the Islamic heritage and in present-day conditions in the Muslim countries. We hardly need emphasise the delicacy and controversiality of such matters at the present time. But we do think it important that AKU enable the status and situation of women both in Muslim countries and elsewhere to be studied and appreciated in more rounded and less sensational terms than they frequently appear in the news media or in the pronouncements of extremists. We do not suppose that AKU will soon or easily venture into such brave interpretations of Islamic traditions as a participant in the discussions of this Commission, the Moroccan professor and writer, Fatima Mernissi, has in her book The Veil and the Male Elite . But we are confident that there is a large scope for research and writing on women that will bring valuable contributions from AKU for the benefit of Muslims and the world at large.
		Developing studies related to women in AKU clearly should be a diffuse enterprise for which many people will have to share responsibilities. We are of course aware that women's studies have in recent decades expanded enormously, winning special sections in university press catalogues and special issues of learned publications [cf., e.g., the issue devoted to women's studies of the Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 1994]. They have in some universities won departmental or other organisational status. At this stage of AKU's development we do not think women's studies should be given a special programme or organisational status; such a move might be compartmentalising and damage the pervasive concern with women's needs and advancement that we think AKU should have. On the other hand, we do think it important that there be a definite locus of responsibility for stimulating and monitoring progress toward this purpose of the University. There is a strong concern among many of the present faculty in Karachi to move toward strengthened attention to women's needs and into women's studies within the University as it now exists. We think it desirable that there be a prompt response to this concern with assignment of responsibility and the allocation of modest means for planning and exploration. It has been suggested in our discussions that an officer on the staff of the chief academic officer have special and continuing responsibility for these matters, and furthermore, that this officer be supported by a committee or planning group. We believe these to be sound suggestions and that the need for such planning and oversight will grow and evolve as the University spreads into new fields and components. We do not think we can wisely prescribe the specific organisational arrangements that will be needed in the near or longer run future, but urge that the senior administration and the Board of Trustees give early and continuing attention to them.

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