Student from Saudi Arabia versed in politics, women, gas

ORONO – Politics, women and the price of gas.

Those were the topics Abdullah Alqahntani’s fellow students at the University of Maine most often asked the 23-year-old Saudi about during his four years in the chemical engineering department.

Alqahntani arrived on the Orono campus four years ago, equipped with detailed answers provided by three older brothers, all of whom graduated from UM. Just as his siblings – Saeed, 30, Ahmed, 27, and Ali, 25, – did, Alqahntani earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.

“I found it how they described it,” Alqahntani said of what his brothers had told him about the campus and Maine. “But I had never seen snow before!”

Snow, apparently, was difficult to explain to a little brother who had spent his whole life living on the Persian Gulf with a vast desert stretching to the east of his hometown of Dhahran.

As for those hot topics that kept coming up, the easiest to answer turned out to be the one about women – for one very simple reason.

“We [men] always talk about women everywhere,” he said during an interview last week on campus.

Educational opportunities for women and their traditional place in society are changing in Saudi Arabia, Alqahntani said. While he and his brothers were studying at UM, four Saudi sisters also were taking classes in chemical engineering.

The war in Iraq, which borders Saudi Arabia to the north, and the politics surrounding it proved harder to discuss, he said, partly because before they got to know him, U.S. students seemed “a little bit afraid” of him and knew little about his home country or the region.

“People here take only the news they want to hear from the Middle East,” he said.

American students also don’t know much about his religion, Islam.

“People know what my religion is,” Alqahntani said, “and some know what’s prohibited, but most don’t understand” the tenets of the religion.

He added that he has not felt discriminated against while in the United States or been pulled aside at airports for secondary inspections because he’s from the Middle East.

The most heated topic of conversation with his fellow students, especially recently, has been the price of gasoline.

“They blame me and my country,” Alqahntani said. “It’s not my fault. It’s not our fault. Prices are up because of a lack of refineries in the world. Aramco produces 8 million barrels of oil a day.”

The company is expanding rapidly to meet the world demand for oil, according to information on its Web site.

Aramco also pays the tuition and expenses of about 200 students each year to colleges and universities in the United States. Alqahntani and his brothers all were sent to UM by the company.

As much as he has grown to love Maine and winter, Alqahntani is looking forward to going home. He has not been back in 21/2 years because of concerns over his ability to renew his student visa.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is about a fifth the size of the continental United States, with a population of 27 million. Alqahntani’s family lives in Dhahran on the Persian Gulf. The metropolitan area, which includes two other cities, Dammam and Khobar, is home to about 1.6 million people, about 400,000 more than live in the state of Maine.

Alqahntani is the sixth of seven children – one girl and six boys. His younger brother, who is 16, has visited Orono but has not yet decided whether he wants to follow them into the oil business.

Next month, he will join his brothers and his father at Aramco, which produces 95 percent of the nation’s oil, according to information on the U.S. State Department Web site.

He will start off in the loss-prevention department, but expects to move up within the company as his brothers have done. Saeed, according to his younger brother, is a consultant who recently oversaw construction of a natural gas plant in Italy. Ahmed is a project manager and is living in the United Kingdom overseeing construction, and Ali works in Aramco’s research department.

“My brothers have a good life back home,” he said. “We have benefited a lot from the department and the university.”