The first thing that stuck out to me while watching the documentary was the fact that the woman in the beginning from Great Britain, Dagmar, had to wear an abaya in order not to get stared at when she walked down the streets in Oman. Despite the fact that Dagmar said she did not mind wearing the abaya, that fact alone drove home the point of how different Oman’s culture is to the Western culture I grew up in. I was also shocked when she told the interviewers that even after she wore the abaya out in public, people could still tell that she was not an Omani woman because she walked too quickly and with an upright posture. I was encouraged to hear it was no longer that strict, however, and the fact that in Oman today women have complete control over their own money and keep their own names even after they are married shows how much progress has been made. Hearing these last two facts in particular really made me change my perspective on Middle Eastern cultures today.
The entire documentary was very eye-opening for me as I had never really learned about the country of Oman before and had no idea what its culture was like. Oman is a sultanate, which I did not know before watching the film, and at the time this documentary was made the country was ruled by Sultan Qaboos, who took the throne by overthrowing his father. The documentary did then go on to say that the Sultan was on the side of women, allowing them to reenter the schools to the point where more than half of the new students entering Omani schools now are girls. Overall, I was surprised at the overwhelming progress which appears to have been made in such a short amount of time in Oman and it made me very hopeful for the future, especially hearing all of the women’s success stories.