Last year while attending a conference with my female Qatari teaching assistant, I arranged for her to meet a prominent Qatari academic to see what kind of advice she might provide her. When the more senior Qatari scholar heard that the TA had just been accepted into a prestigious graduate program in the U.K. her immediate, and perhaps only half-joking response was, “well there goes your marriage prospects.” Although the data regarding female educational attainment in the Gulf paints a very optimistic picture, over the past few years there has been a growing concern about the possible serious societal and political implications of this progress. These tensions are perhaps best seen in the seemingly contradictory state policies regarding women and their role in society. On the one hand the state has placed a great deal of emphasis on the importance of educating and empowering women in their official Qatar National Vision 2030 plan (QNV2030). This vision has been incorporated into school and university curricula, and become an integral part of the state’s image of itself and a blueprint for their imagined community. Like other development strategies, QNV2030 has borrowed from liberal feminist and the human capabilities approaches in which employment and education are considered “crucial for women’s advancement and capacity to live a good life” and an important if not essential means to “eliminate gender discrimination and oppression” (Abu-Lughod, 2009). Long-terms benefits also include leading “to many positive development outcomes and to support economic growth” (QNDS, 2011). However, we find that women’s education, which carries important “symbolic capital” for the state within the international context can also be incompatible to the social needs and expectations of local constituents. Some researchers argue that the same state development projects, specifically those that are geared towards empowering women by increasing their education and employment rates, are in fact the same factors that paradoxically lead to an increase in divorce rates and the breakup of the traditional family structure. This paper will look at some of the unintended consequences of promoting women’s education and similarities with policies in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as attempt to adopt strategies like those being currently developed in Palestine that place gender issues within unique national contexts.

Gender courses are a new phenomenon in universities in the Gulf. It is found as a program only at Kuwait University. However, courses from different departments and universities have started to emerge in the region depending on the faculties’ expertise and the universities’ flexibility and willingness to venture into women’s and gender studies. Qatar University is a good example. Courses on gender are taught in many departments, in addition to the interdisciplinary Department of International Affairs. In this paper takes the example of a “Women in Islam” course. It is a course that has been developed to adopt the theory of Islamic Feminism, which means, it takes upon itself to challenge the textual and public discourse related to women in Islam with a special focus on the application of Islam in the Gulf. The course is taught, both to women and men, but separately, and in both Arabic and English. Each variation, whether it is the gender or the language, reflects its own challenge. The experience of reclaiming Islam to women by re-reading the history of women in Islam, re-reading the Qur’anic sacred texts’ exegeses, and re-reading the Hadith tradition with a critical point of view, has brought multi-faceted challenges to the classroom. Over the course of the semester, students’ attitudes move from resentment, resistance, objection, and complaints, to excitement, enthusiasm, eagerness, and an impatience to go and change the world. The questions to be discussed here include: To what extent could such courses succeed in reclaiming the production of knowledge in the arena of Islamic studies and gender in particular to women? To what extent can they alter women’s status in a region that is threatened with extremism every day? What are the dynamics of relationship between the higher education administration and the need for change and a more tolerant reading of Islam towards women? And how can the administration face social, religious and political pressure, on the one hand, and the internal pressure from other faculties and departments, such as the Faculty of Sharia, which considers itself the only program entitled to teach such a course? To answer these questions, the paper will refer, in addition to the personal experience, to students’ notes and blogs on which they were required to write their class by class reflection, as well as their analysis of verses’ exegeses assignment, which measures the students’ level of critical thinking.

Discussions that explore meanings women attach to their educational experiences are unlikely to be found in international organization's reports or government documents coming from the Gulf region. Instead reports tend to gloss over gender inequalities and raise what Ringrose (2007) calls a “successful girl discourse”. In this presentation, I hope to contribute to a growing critical body of literature, that attempts to capture the complexities of the educational settings using ethnographic tools in the Arab world (e.g. Adely, 2012: Herrera, 1992). I argue, such investigations are of importance in a corporatized higher-education setting, where hopes that the “expansion of higher education opportunities, and the spread of credentialism” would lead to “‘development’ in an automatic fashion” are prevalent (Mazawi, 2008, p. 69). This is intensified in Qatar, which has a small national population and growing economic aspirations, making it in need of “human capital”. This investigation therefore employed a combination of qualitative research methods to capture such dynamics. From the focus groups, I found myself intrigued by what Massumi (2002, cited in MacLure 2010, p. 282) calls the “odd beast”; cases that did not fit with the overall shared views in the discussions. I found these women, that did not follow the conventional belief that education was “empowering them” to enter the labor market, had different stories to share. They offered alternative views on what their education meant to them and revealed a shift from perceiving education as a private good to one that views education as a public good—“to provide society with benefits that can be collectively shared” (Labaree, 1997, p. 2). Unfortunately, such voices often get unheard when the institution focuses primarily on the labor market, failing to address non-economic concerns women raise. I conclude by raising questions on the "pedagogical conditions” that can be structured to enable these women to become more visible (Giroux, 2002, p. 451).

This paper is based on long experience in teaching gender issues in hostile, or at best unwelcoming environments, such as the Occupied West Bank and in Qatar. Gender and gender relations are context specific, thus the challenges faced in teaching gender studies in a colonial context where dealing ¬¬¬with gender could be seen as an integral part of the de-colonization process would differ from teaching it in a context where gender as a concept is contested and rejected. This paper argues that mainstream concepts in gender and women’s studies should be reconsidered and re-constructed in their own specific contexts. This paper also sheds light on how gender studies and women’s issues are always in flux to reflect the context in which they operated and how this context is also shaped by what women do in their daily lives. It also aims to problematize the mainstream wisdom of dealing with gender and women’s studies in the Arab world from a universal conventions angle that focuses on issues such as women’s rights, gender violence, Islam and conservatism, etc. with little attention to contextualizing these issues in their respective environments. In Occupied Palestine, for example, feminist NGOs and activists driven by the universal conventions on women’s rights are losing their power and popular bases to Islamists because of the de-politicization of their gender agenda and the disregard of the colonial context. In the Palestinian context, colonialism affects all aspects of Palestinian life: land tenure (Tamari 1984, Hilal 1977); judiciary (Shehada 1988, 1997; Welchman 2003) political system (Giacaman2004, Hilal and Khan 2004, Jad 2008); and economy (Roy 1995, 2000, Hammami 2013). Thus, as this paper concludes, separating gender studies and activism from the general colonial context perpetuates women’s subjugation and isolation. And in the case of Palestine it also inadvertently fed the Islamic movements of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, now seen by many as the main defenders and protectors of a devastated land and people from the colonization policies and practices. Earlier work in the Palestinian context is then applied to the equally, but differently, challenging environment in the Gulf, where societies attitudes are often in conflict with both government policies to “modernize” and more conservative religious traditions. What are the major challenges to be faced, and how can gender studies be most effectively adapted to and promoted within these environments?