So as long as it doesn't sink to SA standards, it's not barbaric? Marital rape is not a crime. Women are not equal in any way. 15 years in jail for speaking your mind. Flogging for drinking and kinky sex. Migrants who are enslaved, beaten, tortured, and can't leave because their passports have been confiscated. Apostasy is illegal and can carry a death penalty sentence.
Muslim leaders in America know it's a bad idea.
"Yaser Birjas, imam of the Valley Ranch Islamic Center in Irving, cautioned that people who move from America to Muslim countries are often disappointed when they discover restrictions they never experienced in the U.S.
“Here in America, you have much more freedom practicing the faith,” he said.
For others, the family move to the Middle East sends an unfortunate message.
Yousuf Fahimuddin, a Muslim journalist in the San Francisco Bay area, believes the family’s departure will only perpetuate the idea that Muslims are not loyal to the U.S.
“I don’t think moving to Qatar, a country with its own share of problems, constructively helps fight prejudice,” Fahimuddin said in an email."
Who gives a shit? It's still freakin Qatar. I'd take the worst we have to offer over the best they have.
"since the eighteenth century—European missionaries, followed by American Christians, were founding dozens of schools and institutions of higher learning in the Middle East, while the French established institutions of higher learning in North Africa. Thus, neither the globalization of higher education nor “Westernization” is a new trend in the Middle East.....
In the course of the nineteenth century, higher education clearly became a nationalist issue as well as a geopolitical tool in the Middle East. Increasing resentment in the region against both Western imperialism and Ottoman rule contributed to education being seen as a means of acquiring power.
Geopolitical and nationalist dynamics, then, combined to convey on higher education a powerful political symbolism, especially in Palestine and Egypt. Schools and universities nurtured nationalism throughout the region, and the new states emerging from decolonization moved swiftly to control the campuses on their soil. Indeed, campuses remain a central concern for contested regimes,
most of the universities in the Arab world shifted a long time ago from being matrices of development to becoming objects of policing. Practically, this is illustrated by the presence of intelligence services on campuses, and the consequent control that they exercise over the faculty and the student body
Three places of especially flourishing academic activity are Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Each of these countries, however, has followed a distinct pattern of academic development; together, they also exemplify three degrees of state control over higher education. In Qatar, funding is mainly governmental, through the Qatar Foundation:.....The development of local higher education may eventually relocate previously mobile student populations in stable enclaves within the Arab Middle East, and foster a collective Arab identity at the expense of the overture to the West. Furthermore, previous experience shows that imported knowledge, techniques, and institutions can be domesticated.
neither analysts nor human rights NGO’s consider any of the GCC countries to be democratic or liberal. This raises the question: How sustainable are the educational reforms in these countries? The Gulf States retain a primary interest in exercising political control over society, as well as in securing the primacy of their own citizenry vis-à-vis foreign residents....In the realm of academic governance, independent faculty senates are absent, while intrusive political funders are present. And from the perspective of outside the Gulf, to what extent are top-ranking foreign academics ready to live and work in authoritarian countries? Repressive local laws against homosexuality, for example, kept the University of Connecticut from closing a deal with Dubai."
http://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/meb/MEB36.pdf
You cannot separate geopolitics and higher education. I don't know what "really smart" students or faculty would be interested in an educational process, even a free one, when the environment is suppressive and the antithesis of freedom.
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