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A Voice from the First Class of Exchange Students at the University of Qatar
Sam Parker
Published in 2005
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Along with four other students, I spent the previous academic year studying Arabic at the University of Qatar in Doha on a full scholarship program. As the firstAmerican recipients of the scholarship, we accepted the offer with the understanding that we would be “trailblazers.” I consider myself lucky to have been on this trail, as I learned a great deal of Arabic and had a cultural experience far more unusual than I had expected.
The University of Qatar offers four-year degrees in a broad range of disciplines to both men and women, most of whom are Qatari. The campus is divided into two parts, one for men and one for women, which are separated by a wall with a guardhouse for professors and administrators to pass through. The humanities classes, such as literature, history and the like, are taught in Arabic, while the science, computer and business classes are taught in English. The university is spacious, grassy, and very well-equipped, boasting an Olympic-sized swimming pool, purportedly the fastest internet connection in the Gulf, a well-stocked library, and more. Like Qatar as a whole, everything in the university seems new—new academic programs, new facilities, new students from around the world.
We American students took part in a pre-existing bridge program in Arabic language, literature, rhetoric and Islamic history designed for non-Arab Muslim students from around the world who hope to continue their studies at the University of Qatar. In our year, these students were from West Africa, South Asia, the Philippines, and Chechnya. Nearly all of them had had all of their formal education in Arabic and therefore initially knew a lot more Arabic than we Americans did. Almost none of them spoke English or any Arabic dialect, so our lingua franca in and out of class was textbook fusha, perhaps one of the only foreign language environments for which MAAS Arabic prepares you perfectly.
We stayed in student housing for foreigners, most of whom were Arabs from throughout the Arab world, with the rest comprising the students in our class and a surprisingly large portion of Balkan Muslims enrolled in the regular university. For me, living there was the best part of the program and I think it will continue to be so for future male students. We stayed up late playing foosbol, soccer, pool, talking about school, everything. We lived in a completely foreign environment, the only three non-Muslims in the dorm, forced to speak Arabic on a daily basis. There was no American-student-abroad bubble. The two American female participants in our program had a different experience, as they were moved to a University of Qatar guest house instead of the female dormitory. This gave them more opportunities to interact with Qatari nationals.
As is often the case with study abroad programs, much of the real value comes with the experience of living in another country, and our program at QU was no exception. In our case, however, the so-called “cultural experience” was of a completely different ilk from what people usually imagine, and this stems from misconceptions that people who are not familiar with the Arab world have about the Gulf. For one thing, Qatar is not a particularly “Arab” country—less than one-fifthof the population is made up of Qatari nationals, since they have to import their manual labor and service industry jobs to support their growing economy. Outside of school and the dorm, we American students encountered very few Arabs in our day-to-day interactions, and therefore spoke very little Arabic. The language of the street is English, very bad English. Western culture is prevalent, despite the mosques and kafiyas. Doha boasts malls, SUVs, cell phones, American restaurants, etc. Almost the entire country has been developed in the past 40 years, most of it in the past ten, as Qatar prepares to host the 2006 Asian Games.
Yet the reason that Qatar is such an interesting place to be right now is precisely because it is the very picture of globalization. On one level, it is like a modern-day Venice in that it is a city-state composed almost solely of people—be they American, European, from the developing world, or from Qatar itself—who are brought and held together not by common culture, history or religion, but by the potential for economic advancement. The rootless, hybrid “third culture” that this creates makes for some amusing juxtapositions, like a Qatari woman in a niqab ordering Cobb salad at Chili’s in English to her Filipino waitress or a bunch of Bangladeshi construction workers climbing into a yellow school bus with “Clayton County Public Schools” written on the side. But on a deeper level, Qatar’s experience of globalization is important because of its effort to shape its future, to make itself more than the mere product of global economic forces. Education City, the revamping of its primary and secondary education systems, and our own scholarship program are all evidence of Qatar’s desire both to import and export students and knowledge. Because of Qatar’s small size and unique economic and demographic composition, Qatar’s much-touted political reform may not be particularly relevant to the rest of the Arab world, but their emphasis on education is bound to have a real and lasting effect. It was truly a pleasure to be a part of it.
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