The Doha Experiment by Gary Wasserman

Author:Gary Wasserman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-04-28T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Teaching While Jewish

I have my religion and you have your religion.

—Qur’an (109:6)

Sporting an unusually wide grin, Hussein, one of my best and most serious students, came up to me after our Introduction to International Relations class. He asked if he could touch me. Turning to his friend with something approaching a twinkle in his eye, he explained he had never touched a Jew before. With a shrug, I obliged. His provincialism toward this racy topic illustrated a simple fact: few of these students knew any Jews.

Later, Hussein would tell me what little background knowledge he had acquired in his exclusive private school in Saudi Arabia. Beyond the surprising revelation that Al Gore was a Jew, there was his Islamic studies teacher’s assertion that Israel’s Mossad was behind 9/11. This was followed by the curious bias—heard elsewhere from students—that Arabs were incapable of planning such a complex, successful operation and that the United States had it coming anyway. I asked how his teacher could support the attack on 9/11 yet see it as some mammoth Zionist conspiracy, presumably serving Israeli interests. He looked at me for a moment, resigned that yet another naïve foreigner failed to appreciate how holding two contradictory opinions at the same time was consistent with the political views permeating the region.

The conversation with Hussein took place several years into my teaching experience in Doha, in fall 2009. I am sure of this, because when I first arrived, I followed the advice to keep my faith to myself. A Georgetown colleague in Washington, who was an expert on the region, had described becoming “a private Jew” when he lived in Arab countries. This meant not revealing your religion and avoiding public debates on contentious topics such as Israel. His advice was that casual socializing was easier when not broadcasting your faith, whatever you might share with close friends. The parallel dilemma facing gays in these conservative societies came to mind. Gay friends in Qatar generally kept their homosexuality undeclared and discreet. And they faced the added burden of being outside the law and in theory faced jail or—more likely for expats—expulsion.

To this I added my own reasons (or excuses?) for keeping my Judaism to myself. One was that I didn’t want to be “the Jewish professor”—and for almost all of my time in Doha, I was Georgetown’s only one. That wasn’t what I was doing, wasn’t how I saw myself, wasn’t how I wanted to be identified. I was a professor of American politics. To this could be appended a montage of labels: male, old, grumpy, tough, liberal, American, stupid, etc. But not primarily Jewish.

My concern was that, if only for its novelty in the Arab world, the “Jewish” label would dominate. I didn’t want the burden of representing the other 16 million Jews in the world whom my students hadn’t met. It was too easy to imagine their unspoken responses: “Y’know, he’s Jewish.” “Yeah, I could tell.” Or “So that’s what those horns are.” Or “No wonder he flunked me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.