Nearby sat the event’s principal architect, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the second wife of the emir, out of three. For the past eight years, she’s worked on creating Qatar’s Education City, which formally opened earlier this month and also includes branches of Cornell Medical School and Virginia Commonwealth University. She decided to fund American universities in Qatar when she noticed that her children, who attended English-speaking primary schools in Doha, were becoming “strangers” to their own Arab, Muslim culture: “One Christmas, my eldest son had to play the Christmas tree,” she told NEWSWEEK. “I felt embarrassed and humiliated.”
Driven, imaginative and rather daring by regional standards, Sheikha Mozah has emerged as an icon of the tiny emirate’s modernization efforts. In a region where First Ladies steer clear of public policy, Sheikha Mozah is head of the Qatar Foundation, which oversees the education and medical care of the state’s 150,000 citizens. Where other Gulf consorts tend to be invisible to the public eye, Sheikha Mozah “came out” for the first time in September, raising Qatari eyebrows by allowing herself to be photographed. Later, discussing the national and international press attention generated by the photo shoot, she came to realize that the publicity might help further her cause: “I thought, ‘They [now] know that for education, we are willing to do everything’.”
At the palace dinner to celebrate Education City’s inauguration, it was not so much the emir as Sheikha Mozha, resplendent in crimson velvet and ruby-and-diamond jewelry, whom the movers and shakers lined up to greet. The union between the gazelle-like Sheikha Mozah and the burly 53-year-old emir is not a traditional Gulf marriage. “He’s a friend, more than a husband,” observes Sheikha Mozha, who married Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani as a high-school student, a quarter century ago. Doha court watchers even quip that in the emir and Sheikha Mozha, the Qataris are getting two leaders for the price of one, just like the Americans got with Bill and Hillary Clinton. “With many other Arab First Ladies, [their work] is more about… conferences, seminars and small-scale social projects,” notes Asmaa Bekada, who produces a women’s program on the Arab satellite TV network Al-Jazeera. “Sheikha Mozha’s work is more concrete. You see the results.”
Sheikha Mozha’s high profile fits neatly into a key platform of her husband’s reform plans: women. Extending the vote to women was not simply a progressive reform, notes the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s Simon Henderson, but a canny extension of his own political base. For Qatar’s women, the change from traditional roles as homemakers to career women has happened in a few years, notes Dr. Ghalia al-Thani, vice chair of Qatar’s National Committee for Human Rights. “I almost worried it was too fast.” She says Sheikha Mozha “has been an absolute inspiration for both men and women to become agents of change.”
In part, it’s because the fortysomething consort has refused to limit her work by gender, as many elite women reformers do in the conservative Gulf region. “I don’t like to frame [the Qatar Foundation’s] issues as women’s issues,” she says, wearing black slacks and pearls, her red-streaked hair uncovered in the privacy of her pale-blond-wood study. “Why are we dividing our country in terms of men and women?” That’s a pertinent question, but a risky one in a region where life is organized around the notion of two communities, divided by gender. Argues Sheikha Mozha: “If you want to solve problems in this region, you have to solve the problems of all Arabs.” Indeed, she thinks the vogue for feminism in Arab countries was “a big mistake,” since it was, like so many “isms” imported from the West, a foreign model blindly applied to Arab culture. The vogue in the 1970s and ’80s for women to abandon their own Arab and Muslim values in favor of miniskirts and an unquestioning embrace of Western trends left many feeling culturally adrift.
Though outspoken and opinionated, Sheikha Mozha delicately sidesteps commenting on American actions in Iraq. “I do not think democracy can be enforced from the outside,” she says diplomatically. Maybe not from outside, but certainly from above. She supports her husband’s decision to grant elections and a constitution to his politically quiescent nation. The emir, she says, “is clever enough to anticipate the needs of his people.” His most famous reform–the establishment of the groundbreaking Al-Jazeera network–is proof. “Arab leaders always say, ‘[Democracy] should come gradually’,” she notes. “But Al-Jazeera opened our eyes. Our people are ready for democracy. Listen to their comments, their arguments, their debates on Al-Jazeera! Who can judge they are not ready?” After an hour with Sheikha Mozha, even the staunchest dictator might start seeing things her way.
