One part of Neha Vora’s book, Teach For Arabia, that immediately stood out to me was the campaign shown on page 23, where Vora adds an image of a leaflet about clothing modesty that was part of a campaign in 2012 called “Reflect Your Respect”. This campaign was mainly led by Qatari women and was mostly aimed at foreigners and tourists in the country.
The leaflet was handed out to people in public and it portrayed what was seen as appropriate and inappropriate in relation to Qatar’s traditional Islamic culture. This was a campaign that was led by a specific group, not a government campaign, so it was not heavily enforced, and not everyone agreed with these views. After having multiple discussions with both local and expatriate women in Qatar about this image and this campaign, both have said that they have seen this image multiple times, but have never actually been told to cover up by neither the local authorities nor the Qataris themselves. Although, this shouldn’t erase the fact that in some places in the country there is a dress code and there have been some incidents where people were told to cover up in public, however it does not seem to be a common experience. I think this illustrates several things, one being the complexity of societies; how people in the same society of the same ethnicity and the same religion can have conflicting ideas. This could be because of the different interpretations that people have of tradition, religion, and other beliefs that were implanted in our heads by authority figures such as governments, our elders, and religious leaders. The Qatari government not enforcing these dress codes in public also presents another point about where the Qatari government is headed towards, and how that conflicts with the views of the society in Qatar since this campaign displays the presence of Qatar’s conservative, and what could also be described as ‘illiberal’, society members.
In class, we discussed an event that was supposed to occur a couple of years ago in Education city when some Northwestern students invited the musical group Mashrou’ Leila, a group that advocates for LGBTQ+ rights specifically in the Middle East, caused a backlash on Twitter and as a result, the Qatari government canceled the event, despite Mashrou’ Leila performing in Qatar years before. So why did the Qatari government take action now and reveal their anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment? A lot of us who knew that Mashrou’ Leila had visited Qatar before were left confused as to why there was a sudden change of heart, and we thought that it might have been due to the backlash and pressure from Qatar’s conservative society which rejected any advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights in the country and the region. The amount of backlash that the event received on Twitter was even published in local newspapers, and so the government may have felt compelled to cancel the event in order to not upset their society. I also think that some governments in the Middle East, such as the Qatari government, which can be labeled as authoritarian regimes since they do not have democratic voting systems and limited free speech, rely on pleasing their societies to make sure that they won’t rebel against them and overthrow the government in power. These governments, especially the Gulf governments who have distributed their oil wealth to their people, try to please their people thus prompting loyalty and nationalism, and so from there these governments slowly try to change and transform how their countries and societies work. We can see this in the Qatari government’s actions in this situation; the government’s previous actions show their acceptance of more liberal ideas, however, when pressured by their society members, the government takes a different approach. Acceptance, in this case, doesn’t really have the same definition of acceptance in the sense of liberalization, so instead of actively supporting LGBTQ+ rights in the Middle East, governments in the region have started to acknowledge, but not necessarily welcome, these ideas and have stopped enforcing some of the laws regarding these topics.
This clash between the society’s conservatism and the government’s more liberal direction seems to also exist in regards to women’s role in Qatar. Neha Vora talks a bit about this and describes Qatar’s 2030 vision of modernization, which includes Qatari women being educated and employed in mixed-gender workplaces, and how the traditionalist society in Qatar considers this a threat to a woman’s purity, reputation, and overall Qatari and Muslim culture. When talking about this topic with other Qatari women who currently study in Education City universities, they have expressed the same aggravation that I have about some of the judgmental comments we have received from family members, friends, and strangers who deem us as corrupt, shameless, and westernized. We are stuck in a situation where we are encouraged to study and work in these gender-mixed western places and simultaneously protect our virtue from these same things. I think this goes back to the idea that Middle Eastern governments are approaching acceptance and liberalism in their own way, and as Vora points out in her book; it is not a misreading of liberalism, rather it’s their own interpretation of it and is a reflection of the contradictions within liberalism which liberal piety conceals.
I found Neha Vora’s book, Teach For Arabia, very fascinating since it was someone writing about the experience of being a student in Education City and attending a foreign university in the Middle East, an experience I can relate to on some level. Although the book describes her experience as a professor at Texas A&M in the early 2010s, some of the topics and examples that were brought up were still very relevant to me, despite being a Northwestern student almost a decade after she left Education City.