Dhabiya Al-Sulaiti

Dhabiya Abdullah Mohammed Al-Shaheen Al-Sulaiti is a researcher, Director of Al-Khamis Reserve for Desert Truffles and Wild Plants, General Manager of Al-Ghaf Food Company, and General Manager of Al-Araib for cultural, artistic, environmental and educational consultancy.

She was selected among one hundred of the most influential Arab figures in social responsibility for 2022.

She grew up in a large, open household in Old Salata by the seafront, surrounded by her parents, siblings and a senior maternal figure known as Um Al-Ouda. Her childhood combined peace with active, largely communal games that depended on individual skill. Her mother had no formal education and her father earned a primary certificate later in life, yet both strongly supported advanced study. Before household telephones were available, their daughter helped write letters to relatives travelling or living away.

She attended Khawla Bint Al Azwar School through Year Five and completed Year Six at nearby Al Khansaa Primary School, walking there with a large group of neighbourhood girls. In 1977, Qatar University awarded her a bachelor’s degree in arts and education, specialising in Arabic, with an excellent grade. Reading had already become an absorbing habit: she examined newspaper and magazine scraps used to wrap bread, listened to Radio Baghdad’s broadcasts of postgraduate-thesis discussions and spent breaks in a tiny school library on the roof. The librarian gave her old periodicals and allowed her to help clean the books, encouraging the private library she began while still young.

Her mother initially refused to let her attend preparatory school in Umm Ghuwailina because of the distance. A visit with her father changed that decision when they discovered that the school stood on former farmland belonging to her father and uncles. Memories of the old trees, together with meeting the bus supervisor and driver from their neighbourhood, reassured her mother.

A second educational difficulty arose when plans for postgraduate study in Cairo conflicted with duties as a mother and homemaker. She chose at that stage to care for her family and continued as a teaching assistant in Qatar University’s Arabic Department.

Because she had not completed postgraduate study, she later relinquished the assistantship so another person could use the opportunity and moved to the Center for Documentation and Humanities Studies. There she researched linguistic documentation, particularly the relationship between the Qatari dialect and Arabic. Graduation research into Qatari vocabulary in the poetry of Mihyar Al-Daylami began a sustained engagement with Qatar’s language, culture and heritage.

At the centre, she interviewed Qataris of different ages and regions and worked with the Folklore Heritage Center for the Arab Gulf States to collect approximately three thousand traditional stories. A four-woman team also gathered research on Gulf folk medicine, diving diseases and historic maternal and childhood illnesses in Qatar. For the 1997 book ‘The Dress and Adornment of Qatari Women in the Past’, she collected, recorded and wrote the clothing chapter and proofread the entire study.

Her positions included teaching assistant in Arabic at Qatar University; researcher at its Center for Documentation and Humanities Studies; Senior Researcher and Assistant Head of Research and Planning at the Supreme Council for Family Affairs; and consultant to the Qatar National Museum on social, cultural and environmental heritage.

She and her husband bought a farm intending to grow vegetables and palms, but rocks, salinity, desertification and highly saline groundwater made cultivation difficult. Her late husband, Khamis Mohammed Khamis Al-Sulaiti, an engineer known as Abu Mohammed, planted palms, sidr and leafy vegetables rather than abandon the land. Its response encouraged gradual agricultural and environmental restoration, and after retirement he devoted himself to a farm that became distinguished in agricultural and environmental development.

The couple made the protection of Qatar’s wild plants a priority, particularly shaflah, a medicinal food plant threatened by urban expansion. She warned the responsible authority about the environmental damage caused by uprooting large numbers and proposed bridges above the plants, but construction plans continued. She therefore cultivated shaflah on the farm, gathered its buds, flowers, fruit, leaves and seeds from wild areas and taught relatives and acquaintances why it should be protected. The work expanded to seasonal and perennial native plants and trees formerly grown in Qatari homes, linking her environmental research to their linguistic heritage.

In 1997, she and her husband, Khamis Mohammed Khamis Al-Bukhamis Al-Sulaiti, established Al-Khamis Reserve for Desert Truffles and Wild Plants. The reserve was the first to propagate different kinds of desert truffle naturally without prepared truffle beds and protected rare, endangered Qatari plants through a native seed bank. They removed rocks, replaced soil and built channels, traps, ponds and tanks to collect rainwater. As the work succeeded, the reserve grew to more than twenty thousand square metres.

In 2000, they established the ‘Samra Khattaf’ nursery, named after a historic samra tree on the farm that had been damaged and which they worked to save. They cultivated salam, awsaj, samr, qart, athl and rare wild bimber trees and distributed seedlings widely. Wild bimber reached Kuwait, where it became known as Qatari wild bimber.

Writing and research also united the couple. Her husband published ‘Growing Desert Truffles in the State of Qatar’ in 2012 and began ‘Clouds and Rain in Qatar’ during medical treatment. He died on 27 July 2019 before completing its final lines. She preserved the manuscript, supervised its review, printing and production and brought the first edition to publication through Katara Publishing House in 2021.

Their agricultural work was accompanied by direct community education about Qatar’s land and environment, including meetings with students, social and environmental activities, school workshops and online communication. In late 2017, she established the group ‘Together We Plant and Green Qatar’ to exchange knowledge about wild, field and household cultivation and to discourage trees harmful to soil, people and the environment.

Her cultural and social work included a family educational forum for women and children, established in 2003 to encourage research into Qatar’s history, strengthen neighbourhood ties and reinforce shared values. Voluntary meetings built pupils’ confidence and capacity to contribute. She also delivered workshops on attachment to the land, led campaigns to preserve rawdas and native plants and called for an organisation concerned with Qatar’s wild environment, later named the Al-Shabhana Environmental Association.

On Qatar Environment Day in 2022, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change honoured her at the ninth Qatar International Agricultural Exhibition and the third Qatar International Environmental Exhibition for pioneering research into heritage and identity and for contributions to their preservation across Qatar and the GCC.

Her initiatives included Qatar’s first cultivation of native mashmum at Al-Khamis Reserve in 2019. During the growing Covid-19 threat, the reserve advised Al-Shifa Primary School for Girls and supplied environmental materials for a respiratory-friendly mask intended for people with asthma and shortness of breath, using oil extracted from wild bimber leaves. The reserve also worked with the Municipal Council and Al-Khor Girls Center on the initiative ‘Towards an Atmosphere Free of Unpleasant Odours’.

Her research and publications span language, literature, criticism, heritage, identity, the environment and social responsibility. They include ‘Changing Values in the Qatari Story’; ‘Terms of Endearment in Qatari Society: Occasions and Meanings’, later translated into English; a 1995 study of Gulf-family socialisation before oil; ‘Illness and Cure in Folk Tradition’; ‘A Gulf Reading of Al-Mu’jam Al-Wasit’ in 1996; the clothing chapter in the joint study of Qatari women’s dress and adornment; and a concise dictionary of disease names in folk medicine. Conference papers addressed the family’s educational and security role and plants in the Qatari environment.

She provided linguistic and heritage reviews for ‘Growing Desert Truffles in the State of Qatar’, ‘Castles, Fortresses and Towers in Qatar’ and her late husband’s ‘Clouds and Rain’. She also helped collect and document Qatari folk medicine relating to mothers and children, diving, cauterisation and cupping. Her story collections include ‘The Green Ordinary’, published by Katara Publishing House in 2021, ‘Amusing Tales and Stories’ from Yildiz Publishing House in 2023 and ‘Land and Sea’, also published by Yildiz in 2023.

The publication of ‘Clouds and Rain’ fulfilled a promise made to her husband, who had entrusted her with the complete draft before his death. She assembled a team, carried the text through proofreading, review, printing and publication and saw it issued by Katara Publishing House at the end of December 2021.