PREREQUISITE
- Calling Qatar
- Checking in with Professor David Mednicoff, in the Middle East this
year on a Fulbright
By Faye S. Wolfe
 - WHERE IN THE WORLD?
When Google Earth zooms down into Qatar,
the quadrant that materializes on the screen looks like Italian marble, a warm
shade of taupe with brown flecks. Pull back and that square of desert is absorbed
into a peninsula shaped like a raggedy mitten extending out from the much larger
Arabian Peninsula into the Persian Gulf.
Roughly half the size of Massachusetts, Qatar is
home to 880,000 people (the Bay State has 6.4 million); 60 percent
live in the capital, Doha. With virtually no arable land, for much of its
history Qatar was inhabited mainly by nomadic tribes. Variously governed
by the Portuguese, the Turks, and the British—as a protectorate—it became
an independent nation in 1971. Amir
Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani now rules Qatar. Thanks to oil and natural
gas reserves, it has one of the highest per capita incomes in the
world.
David Mednicoff, an award-winning teacher and professor of Legal
Studies and Public
Policy and Administration at UMass Amherst, is in Qatar
for the year as a Fulbright
Scholar to do research and teach. With
him are his wife, Joya
Misra, a UMass Amherst sociology professor,
and their four-year-old daughter, Amina. We spoke to him in early
October.
How are you settling in?
We’re just getting the hang of life here. Doha is experiencing breakneck
growth and development. Traffic is hellish, and people drive very aggressively,
without regard to lanes. As a native Bostonian, I’m in my element.
Tell
us about your teaching.
I’m teaching political and social theory at the University
of Qatar.
My course is part of a new interdisciplinary program in International
Affairs that aims to train Qataris for careers in diplomacy and public
policy. The state-sponsored university has a men’s campus and a women’s
campus, with a wall between the two. They’re breaking down part of
the wall just so that students can attend this program.
Qatar is experiencing
major transformation, and the 19 women I’m teaching are at the
forefront. It’s very interesting talking with them about democracy,
women’s rights, and other hot-button issues. They’re willing and
able to express themselves; they have a commitment to critical
thought. Recently I “crossed over” to the women’s campus—students
can’t go between campuses, but faculty can—and ran into some of my
students. On their own ground they were more assertive, dynamic,
immediately much more open. I think they’re dedicated, hardworking,
and expecting to be an important part of a social revolution.
What about the research you’ll be doing?
Being
here offers me a good opportunity to carry out the field work for
my major current research project. I’m attempting to document and
explain how diverse local conceptions of the rule of law connect to
government and democratization in the Arab world today. My research
involves observing these relationships in a variety of contexts in
five Arab societies that represent a good sample of Arab countries
generally. This study is highly relevant for understanding Arab law
and politics in relation to American foreign policy. I am fortunate
to have several other research grants besides the Fulbright that will
allow me to return to my other country cases once I’m finished here.
Why Qatar?
Because it’s a distinctive, unusual society. It’s socially conservative,
more so than other Arab countries in which I’ve lived. It follows a
rather strict version of Islamic practice based on traditional Islamic
law, but there is also an unusual political openness and a determination
on the part of the government to foster diverse media and thought.
Aljazeera [the Arab international news network] is based in Qatar.
Whatever Americans may think about Aljazeera, it has indisputably transformed
Arab regional media culture. Qatar’s mix of political and media openness
is not common to many third-world countries, or to the Arab world in
particular. The coexistence of conservative Islam and democratizing
openness makes Qatar a very interesting case for studying the rule
of law and its connection to politics.
 - UMass Amherst professor David Mednicoff (far right) welcomed US Ambassador
Chase Untermeyer to his classroom at the University of Qatar.
What else strikes you about Qatar?
Qatar is one of the richest societies in the world. Doha is a boomtown,
like Las Vegas, but built on oil, not sin [Laughs]. You’ll go through
an intersection that’s been taken apart, and the next day there’s a
traffic light; it has been completely rebuilt.
In summer, everyone goes
to the malls, because they’re air-conditioned. My daughter has had more
McDonald’s Happy Meals since we arrived than she ever did in Amherst.
The supermarkets have the brand of waffles she likes and my favorite
obscure cereals . . . there’s an unexpected familiarity. There are many
American chain restaurants and they’re very popular.
You can’t help feeling
wistful about their domination. Qatar is truly Westernized globalization
in action, for better and for worse, but Doha was always a trading post
and open to foreign influences. So Dunkin’ Donuts need not seem more
foreign than Egyptian bean dishes did a century ago.
Qatar is still a crossroads—and at a crossroads?
Yes. Qatar is attempting to develop its own national identity, but
it has also made a strategic social decision to be open to the world.
Native Qataris form a minority within their own society. There’s a
huge expatriate presence: mostly people from India and Southeast Asia
who work in engineering, construction, domestic care, or other service
industries. A wide variety of nationalities is represented, people
attracted by the rapid change.
Qatar has recently become a magnet for
qualified talent from other Arab countries as well. At the university,
there are faculty from Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and North Africa as well
as Qatar and Western countries. Native Qataris have to speak English
a lot in their daily lives because they interact with so many non-Qataris.
Is there one element of life in Qatar that stands out?
Doing research and living in a Middle Eastern country, it’s impossible
to ignore religion, and how it connects to other things. Ramadan [the
Muslim month of fasting from sunrise to sunset], for instance, dominates
everything. It’s very seriously observed here—I could be pulled over
by the police for driving with an open bottle of water in my car
during the daytime.
It’s a puzzle. I’m wondering where this particular
sort of Islam fits into a society that is coping with such dislocating
change. Americans don’t necessarily see Islam’s immense global diversity.
For instance, Qatar’s notion of Islam is very different from that
of Morocco’s. [Although Islam prohibits the consumption of pork or
alcohol] there you can go to restaurants that serve pork and buy
alcohol in many stores—Morocco even has a winemaking industry. Not
so in Qatar. Yet bars and night clubs exist here. The puzzle is nicely
summed up by my students. They strongly believe that all people should
have the right to practice their own religion in public, yet, for
now at least, their society is reluctant to have non-Muslims express
their religious identity openly.
In a nutshell, I’m in a society of
greater diversity and complexity than we might imagine would be the case,
given Qatar’s size. I need to be constantly aware of the complexity,
particularly given my ambitions as a scholar and a teacher, to mediate
between the post-9/11 United States and the Muslim-dominated Middle East.
It’s all too common for each side to simplify the other. Altogether Qatar
is a very interesting place for studying the rule of law and its connection
to politics. And the Fulbright gives me access to people and places that
it would be very hard for me to have if I were here on my own.
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