Entry #7
During last week’s reading, I felt particularly interested and fascinated by Neha Vora’s book “Teach for Arabia” where she discussed “an ethnographic account of the experiences of students, faculty, and administrators in Education City” (quote source). As a Qatari myself it felt weird, for a lack of a better word, to read about how my own culture is interpreted for instance through western faculty members amongst Education City’s Universities.
From the start of chapter 2, Vora was interviewing faculty within education city, I felt a very negative tone when Anna was describing her accounts with Qataris and the Qatari culture. In Anna’s interview, she mentioned how “and you know they could be very articulate and very strong about something but they continue to wear their abaya and they continue to cover themselves”, as a reader I don’t see her point in this statement. While wearing the abaya is a form of cultural representation, how would the way women dress overlap with how articulate and strong they are? Especially considering this in an academic setting. To myself, her approach on the matter seemed like an attack on both the culture and religion, which are two separate entities that have been stereotypically intertwined as one.
On page 52, Vora pointed out how Anna had decided on Qatari’s illiberalism according to American standards of liberalism. I found this interesting because many of the liberal rights that have been implemented in America have all been recent. According to Vora during a discussion with our professors, many of the ivy league schools were built off of slavery, in addition to schools in the past not accepting of everyone. Vora also mentioned that there was a program where native American children were forcibly taken from their parents to bring them up to what they regarded as a civilized society. These are acts that I would see the American academy acting illiberal. Going back to Anna’s view of Qatar as illiberal, I would argue that the standard shouldn’t be what America would consider liberal, but instead how a person’s freedom of speech, liberty, and rights are expressed.
Another point that I wanted to elaborate on from the reading was about the stereotyping and privilege of Qataris. I can acknowledge how Qatarization can be viewed as discriminatory towards expats, however, I think it’s logical that a state would work towards protecting its nationals. Especially when considering the population of Qataris is a fraction of Qatar’s population (“In early 2017, Qatar’s total population was 2.6 million: 313,000 Qatari citizens and 2.3 million expatriates”). When looking at Education City and Qataris who attend there, I think the reason that Qataris face marginalizing is due to the presumption of everything being handed to them. While it is true that the state has prioritized nationals and has offered opportunities, Qataris are still monitored and are held to the standards of their contracts.
It’s honestly disheartening to me when this presumption is made because I worked hard to get into an EC university. In hindsight, something that I think helped me was my ability to speak English with an American accent, even though I attended an independent school that prioritized Arabic. But since my grandmother is Australian, I grew up speaking both it and Arabic comfortably. Throughout reading “Teach for Arabia” I was reminded of different instances where different faculty members would assume I’d gone to a private school. I think this can be unfair to Qataris that don’t speak English as fluently and are not treated equally. As mentioned on page 61 “…they teach more to the non-Qatari students and students like me who are used to this kind of thing… This is a disadvantage to them and it is kind of sad because they’re not valuing what they are learning because of the distance they feel and the anger they feel towards the professor”.