Bury My Heart in Doha: Reflections on Performing Western Academia Overseas

Abstract

Critical reflection on the course of the Western university system has never been more important than at the juncture of its exportation around the world. The importation of Western academic institutions in the modernizing states of the Muslim world is fraught with contradictions, responding to the desire to craft a citizenship recognizable to the nation-state. Despite the relationship of Western universities to modernization as a disciplining project, these institutions also carry promise. Western universities overseas can hope to revive, in dialogue with their host societies, an alternative person-centered vision of learning shared by Western humanists and classical Islamic pedagogies alike.