The Jewish professor in Qatar

Gary Wasserman writes about his experience teaching locals at a Georgetown branch in Doha.

By AARON LEIBEL
Doha, Qatar (photo credit: NASEEM ZEITOON/REUTERS)
Doha, Qatar
(photo credit: NASEEM ZEITOON/REUTERS)
While I was reading The Doha Experiment: Arab Kingdom, Catholic College, Jewish Teacher, my mind kept drifting back to Daniel Pearl, the Jewish American journalist who was beheaded by terrorists in 2002. I wondered then and still wonder: What was Pearl thinking, a Jew, going to interview a terrorist in Pakistan?
OK, author Gary Wasserman is a harmless academic, not a reporter trying to link the “shoe bomber” to al-Qaida; Wasserman is not an Israeli citizen, as was Pearl; and Qatar is not the “Wild East” that is Pakistan. But, still, he is a Jew working in the hostile Persian Gulf.
It’s not that the Jewish professor was unaware of the dangers. He writes in the introduction that “[a]fter eight years, the fears I took with me to the Middle East have subsided. Teaching at Georgetown University’s new Foreign Service School in Doha, Qatar, didn’t get me killed, kidnapped or even treated badly.”
What exactly were he and Georgetown doing in Doha? In some ways, all the parties – Georgetown University, the students, Qatar and the faculty – benefited greatly from the attempt to replicate the School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Georgetown got lots of money plus the possibility of connecting with some of the wealthy and powerful elites of the Arab world; the students got a good education and a very good name on their diplomas; Qatar, which admired American education but not its culture, had its students benefit from the former and avoid the potentially corrupting influences of the latter. Many students’ parents also favored the arrangement whereby their daughters could stay at home and learn without the “social rebellion, sexual experimentation, drug and alcohol abuse, a debased online culture and secular questioning of religious beliefs,” Wasserman writes.
For faculty members, the financial advantages were staggering: six-figure salaries, free housing, subsidized travel, no taxes, and the non-Qatari, mostly Asian workers (gardeners, au pairs, maids, etc.) provided cheap labor.
But everyone also had to live with the downsides of the arrangement. Georgetown was accused of selling its academic standards for Arab petrodollars; the students missed out on living abroad, an experience that surely would have broadened the outlooks of youngsters raised in Qatar; and the Qataris knew that despite their efforts to contain what they considered a contagion, some Western “germs” – ideas like democracy, equality for the sexes and respect for other faiths – might contaminate some students.
Wasserman tells of one woman student who might have been suffering from the “virus” called women’s rights. A recent graduate, she asked Wasserman for a recommendation for her application to graduate school in England. But the woman was vague when he asked what she wanted to study. It turns out that her parents wanted her to get married and going to school in England was a way to escape this pressure – at least temporarily.
But the faculty members had to pay the highest price. They had to go along with censorship of some of the books they ordered for their classes and, in general, had to teach and live in a non-democratic society. Then, there is Doha, not usually termed the “Paris of the Middle East.” Wasserman says he came to “grow protectively fond of Doha, the way a father cares for his plain teenage daughter who gets all dolled up for her high school prom. You found yourself remarking wistfully to your wife that she has, after all, done the most with what she has been given to work with.”
In addition, many faculty members came with ideals – that the students would pick up “[s]ubstantive attitudes, liberal values and supportive social behavior,” the author notes, and that “this next generation would apply liberalism in a lifetime of benevolent relations with women, minorities, and dissenters – not to mention with each other.” By and large, those hopes were not to be realized. His ideals “had been sanded down by experience,” Wasserman writes.
Qatar was not a place in which individualism and freedom would flourish easily. To ensure that such subversive ideas didn’t contaminate society, the faculty, ensconced in a guarded compound, was completely isolated from the Qataris. Many had virtually no contact with the locals. After Georgetown, the author notes, most students would return to “the enveloping ties of faith, family and custom” virtually unchanged.
The goal of the Qatari leaders, to protect, not supplant the traditional society, was realized.
While he never felt unsafe, Wasserman did encounter the antisemitism so prevalent in the Arab world. Ella, a Syrian student, graduated near the top of her class.
But when interviewed about the 2012 US presidential election, she opined that the outcome didn’t matter “because the Zionists controlled the banks, the media and both political parties and wouldn’t let anything change in America.”
Another student later told him that Al Gore was a Jew and that the Mossad was behind 9/11. The Arabs were incapable of such a sophisticated attack, he said.
Interestingly, the antisemitic nonsense that many of his students believed – that Jews controlled the government in Washington – burnished his reputation with them, for they believed what he told them “had the added luster of being ‘inside dope.’ Supposedly, being Jewish gave me access to the inner circles of the American elite,” Wasserman writes.
It seems that even antisemitism can come shrouded in irony.
Aaron Leibel is a former editor at The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish Week. His novel, Generations: The Story of a Jewish Family, which spans 1,500 years and three continents, is available online.