Brief Bio:
Nehal is a chemical engineer with a biomedical research focus on how cells under stress interact with surfaces. Her faith in Islam influences her work in science, and science in turn has reinforced her belief in the ultimate power of God.
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My parents both migrated from Palestine to Jordan, my father in the ‘40s and my mother in the ‘60s. I grew up in Jordan with four sisters and one brother, our ages spread over 15 years. We were a middleclass family. Both my parents were teachers and there was not much luxury. Like many other families, we were trying to survive from month to month on my parents’ salaries, so our childhood really was stuff we did all together as a family. We were raised in a close circle, relying and trusting and playing with each other. Both my parents, I would say, were encouraging, open minded, and wanted us to be the best. They wanted us to have a better future than they did. School was important, to do the best and be committed. At the same time, we got to do all the things that kids do, playing, visiting with neighbors but not so much with going out on trips which would involve a lot of expense. We played games like soccer, cards, puzzles, and tennis.
As the eldest and with working parents, they would show me what to do and I would do it for my siblings next. They would show me how to shop or to take one of my younger siblings somewhere and then I could do it. I became independent at a young age.
My mom was a math teacher and my dad taught Arabic. In Jordan, education was important; the literacy rate in 2015 was stated as 98%. From a demographic point of view, I would say 60-70% of people in Jordan were Palestinian; we lost our land, migrated and were told, “Your future depends on being educated and educating your kids. That’s what we can invest in, there is nothing else to invest in.”
As we see everywhere in the world, my parents as teachers were underpaid though their job was important. We struggled to manage house finances. All the kids were smart and were expected to go to University, but universities were costly compared to their salaries. Pushing us towards science was because science related jobs paid better. If you were a pharmacist, engineer, doctor, or science teacher in chemistry, physics or math, you earned more money versus a history, geography or Arabic teacher or even a business major. Science was security.
Entering university was based on a competitive national exam. Everyone was ranked from top to bottom. Each will fill a form ranking the disciplines they preferred to study. Based on the needs of the country and the rigor of the subject or major, we were notified of our percentile ranking and what studies we had qualified for at a public University. Medicine was the most rigorous followed by dentistry, pharmacy and then engineering. Amongst engineering disciplines, civil was considered the easiest but in Jordan, it usually required the highest marks because of the high need and employment opportunities for civil engineers. Other engineering disciplines were next and then came science teaching, either in computers, physics, chemistry or math, and then nursing, veterinary medicine, business and economics. If you scored high on the national exam, you could go into any discipline you wanted. But it wouldn’t make sense to score as high as 95% on your exam and choose not to go into medicine, engineering or some other science field, and to instead go and study liberal arts, it would have been considered a waste of sorts.
I really loved math since I was a kid, it was my favorite subject. I also enjoyed chemistry and English. At the University, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, STEM fields were taught in English.
It was a collection of things but mostly I am grateful to my parents and how they brought us up that I became an engineer. If I had chosen to study science to become a teacher, there would have been no tuition and no cost to them. University would have been free. In Jordan, students just studied, there was no part time work. My father respected my choice and said, “You earned your spot in engineering and I’m not going to prevent you from studying that.” All considered, my siblings did well; among the six of us, we have five engineers and a mathematician. We all graduated from the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST).
Being female was never something of concern in my family. Jordan has a male-dominated society but in my own family, we were treated as equal. Funnily, the girls were the engineers and the boy became the mathematician; my brother’s grades were as good as ours but the competition was tough the year he applied and his grades didn’t get him into engineering. One of my uncles said to my father, “You educated the girls as engineers and you let your boy study to be a science teacher. You have to send your son to Russia or somewhere to study engineering.” But Dad said, “That’s the spot he got, he has to study in the program he got.” Other uncles said, “Your daughter should do chemistry teaching since University is free for that, and she will get married and will go to live with her husband. Why care about providing her with engineering?” and here again, my Dad replied, “She earned her spot.”
When I would bring my classmates home to study, Dad would allow us to talk and sometimes, in front of his friends, he would invite me to come and recite poems. He had taught me to say them with the right pronunciation and they were all based on the theme of “Palestine is our land. Palestine is where we will go back to in the future.” He would teach me how to say them with the ups and downs in my voice when you’re angry and when you’re happy and by also moving my hands to go with the recitation of the poem.
I remember the poems so well. Mahmoud Darweesh was one of my father’s favorite poets, he has since passed away. There were also other ones but this particular one called “Identity Card” was his favorite and of course, the English translation is not as good as hearing it in Arabic.
Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?
Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks.
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?
Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew.
My father descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman’s hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!
Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks.
So will the State take them
As it has been said?
Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware
Beware
Of my hunger
And my anger!
Both of my parents were moderately religious, we are Muslims. My Mum didn’t wear the hijab until her mid-40s and even then, she would wear it sometimes, sometimes not; it was not till her 50s that she became strict about wearing it all the time. They prayed 5 times a day, fasted during Ramadan, and encouraged us at a young age to also fast. They left it to us to wear the hijab or not. With the five girls, two of us put on the hijab early probably because we were living in Oman at the time and were influenced by the society there. All our classmates put on the hijab and it was more about culture rather than religion at that point. We didn’t want to feel, or be seen, as different.
My other sisters put on the hijab in their 20s and one still doesn’t wear it. We believe in following what we think is right, it was not something our parents forced us to do. They encouraged us to participate in things like the Eid, the celebration at the end of the Ramadan fast and other celebrations but we also respected the privacy of others.
We spent some time in Oman because there was a teacher exchange program in the Gulf which paid better than in Jordan. My parents could teach in Oman for 5 years as part of the agreement between the two governments. These were very competitive awards since everyone, that is teachers, wanted to have the opportunity to do work in Oman or in Persian Gulf countries. We lived there for five years when I was in 7th to 11th grades.
These were the best years of my childhood and all my siblings would say the same. It was our first exposure to a different society with a diversity of people. At the time, Jordan was mostly populated with Jordanians but now, there are Syrians, Iraqis and others. Oman had people from several countries; there were Indian migrants doing tough jobs, and teachers from all around the world coming from Egypt, Sudan, Sri Lanka and other countries. People were nice. The country was very beautiful. Every summer my parents asked if we wanted to stay in Oman or go home to Jordan. We always chose to stay and with the savings, we could go on vacation or buy things like our color TV.
With my grandparents, three of them passed away when I was in 4th or 5th grade. One of them was disabled for a long time and that’s my memory of him. He was my grandfather from Dad’s side. My mom’s father was my favorite. I have thought that if I had grown up while he was present, my life would have been different. He was a very ethical man, everything had to be right. I saw so many instances where if he faced someone who was wrong, he was not afraid to stand up for his belief. That left an impression on me. At the time, he was also sick and was nursed by my mother as his other daughters were living in Kuwait. I would take care of his medications and give them on time even though I was young; he would say, “Even if I had an army of nurses, they wouldn’t do as good a job as you do.”.
My Dad’s mother was not educated but was my model of a very tough woman; she did everything for her kids and worked hard. Thinking back, I can’t imagine how she did it. They came from Palestine to Jordan and she had three little kids with her. They had no land, no home and were coming to a foreign country. They had to work on farms to secure their daily meals and then work hard at home to take care of the kids. She would be pregnant, deliver her baby and the following day, she would be working back on the farm. All her kids were educated like my Dad. Her husband was my disabled grandfather who couldn’t help much, so she carried the family.
When growing up, going to mosque was not something we did. But it’s important to clarify that in Islam, men should be going to mosque, not women. It is preferred for women to carry out their prayers at home. You don’t want her to leave home five times a day as she has other responsibilities and you want to protect her and not expose her to people outside. Men are supposed to go the mosque especially for one of the Friday prayers. They also can pray at home, but the reward is higher for going to mosque. My Dad, not being that religious, would go some Fridays but not always. In the States, women go to mosque more often than in Jordan. You can get acquainted with others of the same faith. People seem more likely to go to the mosque when they’re the minority in place and for cultural reasons.
I was admitted into Chemical Engineering and started my university life. Like the years before the university, I was so used to doing the right thing, studying hard and compromising a lot for the family. I was top of my class from the first semester and graduated second overall with an excellence rating. Part of my tuition fee was returned for being in the top 5 in college and I would work hard every semester as that would help pay for the next semester’s tuition. I really loved the discipline as well, it was a good match for me and reinforced my love of math, chemistry, problem solving and working hard. I never missed a class in my entire college life and did everything I was supposed to do.
I always wanted to be a professor. After finishing my undergraduate studies, I went straight into my Master’s in Jordan. Being a Teaching Assistant, you got free tuition and a small salary. It was about a $100 stipend and I had five classes to assist with. I couldn’t believe I could study for free.
In Jordan, there were PhD programs in only a few disciplines. So, I looked for a job after my Master’s and worked in a community college as a teacher. Most of my professors at University got their PhDs from the US or Canada. I knew I had to get my PhD since I was limited with what I could do with MS only. I wasn’t yet married, and if I went to study in the US, I had to go alone. There was no resistance from my parents. But the society was resistant including my professors. Even though they knew I was a good student and would be a good representative, I was female and they tried to talk me out of it.
I went ahead and took the GRE graduate and English TOEFL exams. I got a scholarship to study in Massachusetts. I left Jordan and came to the U.S.
But for me to come, my parents had again to bear the brunt of diminished income. The Community College job paid me a higher salary than my parents’ combined salaries even considering their 30 years of seniority. We had more luxuries at home with my job; we got a new carpet, refrigerator, TV and it helped also with tuition for my siblings. When I told my father, I wanted to quit and go for my PhD, he said without a second’s hesitation, “Quit and go.”
In Jordan, everyone wanted to come to the US! I was pleasantly surprised that the US is beautiful in nature and was not just industrial and concrete buildings. To see the lakes and rivers and the diversity of people from all around the world was very exciting. Being single was not difficult but being apart from my family was really difficult as I had done everything with my siblings and my family up to that point.
Many things impacted me. The first thing that comes to mind was how many people were willing to give me a hand even though they didn’t know me. I remember a lady in the supermarket calling her daughter with an Arabic name and asking her to “Come on” in Arabic. I Introduced myself and said it was my second day in the States, and she said, “You wait for me here at 5 o’clock and I’ll take you to my home and we can get acquainted.” She came at 5 as she had promised, I had a meal with her family and we’re still friends to this day.
I had an American professor who noticed early on that I was quiet in class and wasn’t interacting with the other students. She asked, “How are you doing?” I just started crying and saying, “I’m OK.” I told her it was culture shock. I was missing my family and was also stressed about finances since I wouldn’t get my salary for another six weeks the way the system operated. What I had was not sufficient to buy stuff and my books which were so much more expensive than they were in Jordan. I had to pay a three month advance on housing and I couldn’t ask my parents for more money as it was already a stretch for them to have given me funds for my ticket. She kindly offered to give me money and take me to her home. Later, when I got into the Advanced leadership program, I invited her to be my mentor. There were so many people like her and the woman at the supermarket who helped me. I also remember an Egyptian guy who met me in the International office. He showed me how to get phone cards to call my family, how to get around and do things that students needed to get done without me even having to ask.
My PhD program involved rotations in different laboratories. I chose a project on how bacteria interact with surfaces using a single cell approach, basically asking how a single cell makes the decision to stay under stress. In terms of the actual science, it was a fundamental question of how each cell makes its decision on whether to stick to a surface or not. I had never taken classes in biology so that part of the project was hard. The techniques involved in this project had resulted in a Nobel prize in 1986. Even so, it was still relatively new and allowed for innovation. I was working with a new professor which meant we had to buy equipment and set up the lab. I would be taking a risk to work with someone who had not yet established her research program and been recognized for her work. But it was a unique, innovative, hot topic and science at the cutting edge. Not many people had addressed these questions so whatever you did, could be a revolution and a new contribution. To me, that was exciting.
In 8th grade, I remember that we learned about atoms as the smallest thing there was, and here, I could manipulate a single molecule. In simple terms, my PhD study asked, “What is the role of the molecule that covers the bacterial surface in controlling how they interact with different substrates?” That’s as simple as it gets. And the answer is that bacterial cells are really very smart; they manipulate the composition or make up of their surface molecules and they also control the conformation of these molecules so even if they can’t genetically evolve or change, they can still quickly change how they represent themselves on their surface in order to attach well to that surface.
It all turned out better than I expected. Part of it was that I had an excellent advisor. Let’s say that I was lucky as not everybody gets a good advisor and retains a good relationship with their PhD mentors.
At the university itself, things were fine. It was a small school with about 4000 students. It also meant it was not often that you would see a woman with a head scarf. It was not an issue with my professors, with my colleagues, or with anyone that I encountered on campus. Until 9/11! This happened during my PhD studies and, all of a sudden, it was a turning moment.
I did a lot of thinking then.
Would I be safe if I kept wearing my Hijab, would I be perceived as a threat, what would people be thinking about me? All these questions came to mind. My professors were very supportive, they knew me, and offered a lot of help. My Department chair said, “Study from home until all this settles down.” My major advisor said, “Work on the computations and study at home till things get better.” I didn’t change my dress code or remove my hijab, I stuck with it. I had no problems on campus but I did have problems with the outside community.
Not everyone was comfortable with me, and I don’t blame them. For instance, when I was in a supermarket, someone would invariably say something negative and bad. One time I was doing my laundry, and someone said, “Get out of this country, go ride a camel.” It was all outside the university. Someone spit on me and that was common, not just once but many times. I was surprised too that I felt it more in Boston in the city than in my smaller college town. The aftermath of 9/11 was on all the media, it was what people were talking about all the time, and it severely restricted my movements. I did everything I could in the middle of the day, my shopping, my laundry, anything. I didn’t leave my house after sunset or stay out late.
Students at my university were eager to engage in discussion. They didn’t blame me for the incident, they didn’t see me as “those” people. Our discussions were open-minded, and people recognized that Islam is not that way. I myself didn’t think what the terrorists did was right and in discussions, students would listen and knew where I was coming from. But I didn’t have the opportunity for community discussions outside the university. That was also because Mum and Dad always told us to focus on our job, our science and not get engaged in political discussions that can hurt us or may lead to useless directions. They wanted us to be on the side; they didn’t mind us sharing our opinion, but they didn’t want us to be the representatives or active ones.
Before 9/11 happened, I can’t remember if students were interested in my beliefs. It may have been more about noticing my head scarf; that would trigger questions like, “Is the scarf needed, do you have to pray 5 times a day when I would take a corner in the lab to pray, is it easy to fast?” And they’d say, “Really you can do that, you don’t get hungry.” All this was curious for them, wanting to know about something different, a different way.
Questions became slightly different after 9/11. I was asked, “Do you have to fight non-Muslims, is that what Islam tells you, do you hate us, do you belief in jihad?” These questions were from all kinds of students including international students from China and India as well as native Americans.
Of course, I got more questions because of wearing the hijab and I still do. Every Ramadan, I still have people who don’t know about Ramadan and questions like, “What do you experience when you fast?” I remember organizing a summer picnic for students doing research under the US National Science Foundation program called REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). I helped prepare items for the picnic and everything to be grilled but I didn’t eat because I was fasting. And I heard comments like, “Oh my god, how disciplined are you to see all this, and not eat, and not only that, you prepared all this too?” I feel it is my responsibility and that I have to represent Islam in the right way to all people and promote an acceptance of it to all cultures. There is a phrase in the Quran, “You can’t force anyone in religion on anything, you have to get it on your own. You have to accept a non-Muslim, you accept them and not force them to become a Muslim.” I want people to respect what I believe but also, I want others to understand that I’m not going to force them to become something different.
Sometimes, people are accepting and tolerant and sincerely feel “OK, it’s your right to believe what you want.” But there are others who have misconceptions about Islam and judge you even if they don’t know you. I have experienced this so many times. It bothers me sometimes but there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t control it. It invariably happens with airport screenings – I am always the “random” sample for screening; probability laws don’t agree with the frequency in which this happens, I can’t always be the “random” sample.
Even some scientists look at you or ask you scientific questions with an angry undertone and are racist. I’m not shy at meetings about responding back and replying but it hurts when that happens. I also feel that lay people at a supermarket think that you’re stupid if you’re wearing a scarf or that you don’t know English, speaking to you slowly or with a loud tone. There are a lot of these incidents and if I was not wearing the scarf, they wouldn’t have these pre-judgements without knowing me.
With faith and science, religion is always present, there is an impact. The essence of Islam itself is that God is watching in all that you do. Even if someone is not watching, God is watching. Even if someone is not watching and you do something wrong, God knows. If you are paid to do 40 hours of work, and you choose to do 30, God knows. So, I am always trying to be the best I can, devoted to do true science, honest in what I do, honest in treating my colleagues, giving credit where appropriate. I think that background in religion has always kept me on the right track, and I have never failed to do that. That’s in part why I can work with any of my colleagues, I have never had a fight, I can work in all disciplines, my religion has been a big influence.
With science to religion, working in biology is very interesting. The more I work in biology and see how complicated things are with biological constituents, the more I’m amazed. Even with a simple protein, finding more than 100 scientists working on that one protein, and still not being able to figure out everything about that protein, is amazing. That’s not even talking about a cell with thousands of different proteins and then thinking about a whole organism. Even modelling the behavior of cells in my work and figuring out, for example, that a simple bacterial cell has something like 10,000 molecules on its surface and you can pile up 1,000 bacteria on the head of a pin, and each has 10,000 molecules times 1,000 cells all communicating in some fashion. All this makes me realize there is a creator to this world, and God has extreme power. We are there to help to evolve the science and figure out key things to what God created, and it has reinforced my thinking of this ultimate power of God’s presence. I see how incredible we are as scientists even in solving simple things and how much resources and intellectuality we put into it. This aspect of science helped me to think about religion in a different manner and to size myself in the appropriate perspective. OK, I can try my best, but I am not going to change the world, because we are limited as humans and we don’t have that capacity as humans. From the science, I can see things, I can appreciate the importance of things and why they are happening.
When I talk to friends about these things, you realize people don’t get to where they are from nothing, their journey is unique and everyone has a different value and story.
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Reference for poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mahmoud-darwish