High school students will take Jineology courses in North and East Syria in the 2021-2022 academic year, which started on 12 September. During the classes, students will be educated in many topics such as gender inequality, solutions to social problems, social injustice, and problems specific to women such as violence against women and women’s unpaid labor. The Jineology book to be studied in schools discusses possible solutions to various problems such as the difference between the sexes, and the problems of male-dominated societies, and their impact on social life, Yeni Özgur Politika reports.

Jineology classes were taught in schools until recent years in the schools in the Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), but were temporarily halted due to some changes in the material content of the subject. This year the Jineology course has been reintroduced to the curriculum and will be taught both in Kurdish and in Arabic under the scientific and literary section of the 11th grade. Teaching of Jineology is also to be started in the 12th grade next year, according to the Education Committee of the AANES.

Jineology (the science of women) can be defined as a form of feminism, as advocated by the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan and practiced within the Kurdish women’s struggle. It focuses particularly on the specific problems of Kurdish women within their culture and society. There is also a Jineology Department at the University of Rojava which is the first of its kind in the academic world of the Middle East. The department is part of the Faculty of Languages and Social Studies, and was founded in Qamishli on 15 September 2017.

The department’s aims are to study women’s lives and circumstances, the history of women’s struggle, oppression and exploitation, to question the male-dominated understanding of history and to rewrite it, and also to achieve changes in the mentality of society in the region. Feminist academics from all over the world visit the department every year.