Amal Al-Malki

Dr Amal Mohammed Al-Malki Al-Jehani is the founding Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, the founder of the Translation and Interpreting Institute, and an academic, writer and researcher.

The eldest child of loving parents, she grew up at the meeting point of two cultures: her father was Qatari and her mother Lebanese. That dual inheritance shaped her identity and encouraged an early openness to different cultures.

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon and attacks affecting relatives there contributed to her Arab awareness, while the Second Gulf War in 1990 deepened her connection to Gulf and regional identity. Political events were therefore never abstract; they entered family life and encouraged critical thought from an early age.

Her home differed from many others in its art, furnishings and library of religious works, legal books and Arab and international novels. Her father’s connection with diplomatic circles brought ambassadors and their families into the house. He included her in discussions of literature, politics and culture, accelerating her intellectual maturity.

From the age of five until thirteen, she attended summer school in the United Kingdom and developed advanced English. At school in Doha, that fluency sometimes led her to correct teachers and taught her not to remain silent when her ability was underestimated. She entered Qatar University at sixteen and completed a bachelor’s degree in English in 1996.

Arabic nevertheless remained her first language of writing. At Rabia Al-Adawiya Secondary School, Maryam Fakhro encouraged expression beyond prescribed composition templates. She also loved poetry and music and bought an oud during her first university year, although family concern about social attitudes prevented her from continuing. The same father later encouraged her daughter to learn piano, a sign of changing expectations between generations.

She began publishing Arabic articles, poetry and short stories at fifteen, initially under pseudonyms in a field dominated by men. At nineteen, she accepted a weekly column with Sayidaty magazine in London, again using a pseudonym because her family was wary of writing on divorce and the challenges facing women in Arab and Muslim societies. After four years, she stopped because she no longer wanted to publish without her real name.

A master’s degree in Applied Linguistics and Translation from SOAS University of London followed in 1997. She remained in London, translated Arabic literary texts into English and continued to research until choosing comparative literature for doctoral study. In 2003, aged twenty-eight, she became the youngest Qatari at the time to earn a doctorate; her work examined identity formation after colonialism and drew on feminist theory.

The research gave academic form to questions about individual and collective identity, class, tribalism and the position of women. It also altered her understanding of relations between societies and the multiple identities that shape a person’s place in the world.

On returning to Qatar, she chose academic work and joined Carnegie Mellon University in Education City as its first Qatari lecturer. Appointment required teaching first at the university’s Pittsburgh campus without a guarantee of a Doha position. She accepted, proved herself through teaching and publication, returned as a visiting professor and became part of the first cohort of Education City academics to receive a Qatar National Research Fund grant. She served at the university from 2005 to 2016.

Academic life became another route for writing and public engagement. She lectured in Education City and at universities in Europe and the United States, published on women’s rights and Arab identity and used social media for dialogue. The 2014 #I-Half-Qatari campaign broke public silence around the experience of children of Qatari women and holders of Qatari documents and the discrimination they faced.

In 2012, Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser commissioned her to establish the Translation and Interpreting Institute. The institution combined language teaching, research, professional translation and interpreting services. Within ten years, its master’s programmes had secured accreditation from the University of Geneva under Swiss academic standards.

A larger institution-building assignment followed in 2016, when she founded the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. In 2017, the college launched a master’s programme in Women, Society and Development, the first in Qatar to examine women’s position through social, economic, political, postcolonial and feminist perspectives rooted in the Middle East. A second master’s programme in Digital Humanities and Societies examined technology’s effects on culture and the methods used to study digital life.

Leadership of the college and institute did not end her relationship with students. Teaching, research and close mentorship remained central to a career in which institution building was intended to create intellectual space for questions not easily addressed elsewhere.

Her publications included ‘The Craft of Writing: Teaching Creative Writing in Qatar’, issued in 2010 during Doha’s year as Arab Capital of Culture, and ‘The Image of Women in Arab Media: Traditional Stereotypes and New Media’, published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing and Bloomsbury in Britain. The latter became a substantial reference on Arab women and media.

The study moved beyond a simple positive-versus-negative view of representation. It examined political, economic and social difference, Western stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women, early digital news and the importance of class, wealth, skin colour and religious affiliation when assessing women’s rights. She lectured on the work in London, Washington, Paris and Bucharest and discussed it on Arabic- and English-language television.

An English-language podcast, ‘Women of the Middle East’, launched in 2020 and reached listeners internationally. She also became a participating member of the Arab Network for Feminist Civil Society, which brought together more than fifty institutions and associations.

Discrimination accompanied achievement. A British academic of Arab origin advised her to abandon doctoral study, return home and marry; she found another supervisor and continued. Similar doubt surrounded her entry into American higher education, but each challenge strengthened an academic and public record devoted to expanding the space available to Qatari and Arab women.