Georgetown Community Classes Explore Religion, the Lives of Gulf women

Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is preparing to welcome a new round of lifelong learners to its campus ahead of the start of community classes on 16 October. A number of the classes, which cover a range of academic and professional development topics, have already reached maximum capacity, less than a month after registration opened to the public.

The Fall session will run for six weeks and features a diverse mix of courses, including The Growing Importance of Risk Management in Today’s World, Introduction to Writing: Short Stories, How to become a Social Entrepreneur and Arabic Formal Writing. Registration for the courses, which are available in either Arabic or English, is open until the end of the first week of classes.

One of the courses, titled ‘Religion, Peace and Violence’, will be offered for the third time by GU-Q Professor Akintunde Akinade. The course aims to enable students to understand themes of reconciliation and forgiveness, as well as the perspectives on nonviolence and peace, in various religious traditions.

“In our globalized world, religion is becoming increasingly ambivalent and laden with many interpretations. In many contexts, it is used to justify violence and mayhem. However, religion is also imbued with many insights about peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation,” said Dr. Akinade, who teaches theology at GU-Q. “Beyond the rhetoric of war and polemics, the course enables students to understand the enduring contributions of religion to peacemaking and justice. I encourage students to be analytical, contextual, historical, and global in their engagement with religion.”

“Each time I teach the class, I find students to be engaging and passionate in their responses to the complex questions posed in the course,” said Akinade. “The classroom provides an auspicious context in which students can wrestle with some of their preconceived notions about the role of religion in public life. One of the joys of teaching is to help students to expand and deepen their understanding of religion in the world today. I cherish the opportunity that would enable students to come to terms with the complexities of religion in our fragile world.”

A new course, Women in the Gulf, will be taught by Qatar University Associate Professor Hatoon al-Fassi. It explores the development of activism that lead to the right to education, work and public participation for women in the modern era in the six countries of the Gulf.

Dr. al-Fassi, an advocate for women’s rights whose research interests include the social, economic and political participation of women in the Gulf, will be teaching a topic that is rarely offered independently at regional universities.

“I hope [students will] learn something new about the main challenges and motives that drive Gulf women in their contemporary quest for being,” said al-Fassi. “That they change, or correct, some of their stereotypical ideas on the subject with more factual ones. And to make use of receiving a personal experience by sitting in my class and listening to my own experience as a Gulf academic woman.”

Classes will be held at GU-Q’s Education City campus and each class will be convened once a week in the evenings from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. All residents and nationals of Qatar over the age of 18 can take part, regardless of the level of previous study. More information is available on the Community Education Program website: https://cee.georgetown.edu/community-education/fall-2016-classes