THE REFORMATION PROCEEDS:

Wave of Change in The Persian Gulf (David Ignatius, January 13, 2004, Washington Post)

A leading advocate of change here is Sheik Nahayan bin Mubarak, the United Arab Emirates' minister of higher education and a member of its ruling family. He's one of the boldest of a new generation of Arabs who are slowly beginning to transform how this region deals with itself and the modern world.

I met Nahayan at his father's "majlis," a traditional Bedouin tribal gathering where the men greet each other by touching noses. It's part of a culture that's only a few decades past its desert nomad roots; when I asked Nahayan how old he is, he answered apologetically that he wasn't sure, 47 or 48 -- when he was born there was no running water, few clocks and little sense of time. A few hours later, at Nahayan's suggestion, I was roaming the computer lab at one of the universities he oversees.

"Education is the future of this region," Nahayan says, and he is determined to set it free from the religious conservatives and traditionalists who have used it to block progress. The Higher Colleges of Technology, for example, have grown over the past 15 years from fewer than 500 students to about 15,000. Roughly 60 percent of them are women, and at UAE University, which Nahayan also oversees, the percentage of women is even higher.

The goal isn't simply to educate people, Nahayan says, but to give them the tools to create businesses of their own so they won't depend on the government for handouts. Indeed, on the day I visited Nahayan he had just signed an agreement with MIT to establish an entrepreneurship center in the United Arab Emirates.

Nahayan has been attacked by religious conservatives because of his emphasis on women's education, his insistence on English as the official language at the technology schools and his refusal to limit access to the Internet. Radio Tehran even broadcast a false story claiming he closed a mosque at one of the colleges, he says.

"I will not be swayed," he says. "Those fighting change are doing so because they want to preserve their own power."

Read something surprising the other day: even in Sa'udi Arabia there are more women graduating from college than men.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 13, 2004 03:36 PM