The Arab states of the Gulf remain some of the most novel and fascinating developmental experiences anywhere in the world. Few advances have occurred in the six Arab Gulf Cooperation Council states in the realm of politics and participatory public life, as the countries’ social decision-making traditions rely more on quiet in-family, male-dominated consultations than on Western-style public contestation and elections.I spent a week in Qatar this month lecturing and meeting with students and faculty at Northwestern University’s Doha campus. I sought to spend more time with Qataris to better understand the dynamics of a society that, like others in the GCC, has always guarded its privacy.
Two things happened during my stay in Doha that merit our attention. Qatar sent 1,000 troops to the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and a monthlong public exhibition called Her Majlis (Majlis’ha) opened at the Hamad Bin Khalifa University student center, showcasing the results of a research project organized by Northwestern University. The exhibition brought together faculty and students from several American and Qatari universities, with Qatar Foundation funding. (Full disclosure: I serve on the joint advisory board of Northwestern University in Qatar, but had no involvement in the project and was not even aware of it until last week’s opening.)
Between going to war in Yemen and opening an exhibition on the most private of private places – women’s meeting places at home – Her Majlis is far more significant in the long run. For this is a small but novel and significant step in the transformations toward durable nationhood that we only occasionally witness in conservative Arab societies. Locals and foreigners have fought wars for thousands of years in the Middle East; but rarely have we seen such a synthesis among American academic research traditions, activist young Qatari students and a variety of older Qatari women.
The result is an exhibition and three short video documentaries in which Qatari women – sometimes on camera, sometimes without showing their faces – speak about their lives, activities, aspirations and the role of their majlis in advancing personal goals and the wellbeing of others in their societies and others.
I see few other signs of change, self-confidence, pride and healthy social engagement in Arab Gulf society that are as clear as this example of Qatari women sharing with the public their most guarded personal space. The exhibition includes a large wall with blank spaces allowing women to express their sentiments of their majlis experiences. My favorite described a majlis as “A unique and understudied social institution … like a cross between an intellectual salon and a tupperware party.”
A nationally representative survey of Qatari women’s views that was part of the project showed intriguing combinations of views: 89 percent regard election to the Shura Council (a proto-parliament) as positive, while 90 percent view enforcement of the wearing of traditional full-body-covering clothing for Qatari women as a good thing. Also, 92 percent want children of Qatari women to have Qatari citizenship, regardless of the husband’s nationality.
Is this a clash of Western political values and local traditions, the coexistence between the two, or what exactly? That is for Qataris to determine, and in this exhibit the women say they tell their own story and clear up misconceptions about their actual roles and opportunities in society.
The panel discussion of faculty and students at the exhibition opening seamlessly blended perspectives, traditions and personal and professional values from Arab and Western cultures. No clash of anything here, I thought, just men and women from both worlds learning about each other … but actually learning about themselves.
So, Qatar’s sending of 1,000 soldiers to Yemen is certainly newsworthy, but will fade from view in the years ahead, leaving our region ready again, as it has been for millennia, for new battles by many protagonists. The Her Majlis project, on the other hand, links two critical realms: the self-confident will of Qatari women to look inward and discuss their private worlds, without apology or exaggeration; and the ability of local and foreign institutions and individuals to work together on social research projects that may have a lasting impact on society.
We need to watch this Arab-Western blending of gender, identity, media technology, personal narratives and political theory, as faculty principal investigator Jocelyn Sage Mitchell called it. Because more than war, more than hosting world football or tennis championships, more than anything else I have seen in the Gulf in recent decades, these dynamics reveal an expanding relationship among the perceptions and actions of individuals across their private spaces and public realms.
That, I once read in a learned book – maybe from 10th-century Baghdad, maybe from 1960s New York – is what durable state-building and meaningful nationhood are all about.
