Aisha AlObaidan

Aisha Abdul Rahman AlObaidan is a graduate in education and Arabic from Qatar University, a retired school principal, and a writer whose journalistic career has extended for nearly four decades.

She spent a simple childhood in Msheireb within a religious, conservative and financially comfortable Qatari family. Her parents met the needs of their daughter and her two younger brothers without extravagance. A strict father required prayer on time, perseverance in education and memorisation of the Holy Qur’an. Play remained largely within the extended family, where cousins studied, talked and shared traditional games together. Meals, television and even sleeping rooms were communal despite the size of the houses, establishing the intimacy that made Friday outings to gardens, farms, the sea or rain-fed desert a lasting family ritual.

She attended Amna Mahmoud Al-Jaida School, Qatar Preparatory School and Qatar Secondary School for Girls, using summer centres to study the following year’s curriculum. By secondary school, family trust allowed friendships beyond relatives within clear limits. At the same time, local and Gulf stories, magazines and newspapers filled a small cupboard that she guarded like treasure. Her reading moved from short stories to Taha Hussein, Ihsan Abdel Quddus, Youssef Al-Sibai and Yahya Haqqi, alongside classical and modern poetry by figures including Omar Abi Rabia, Imru’ Al-Qais, Elia Abu Madi, Nizar Qabbani, Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, Fahd Al-Askar and Muhammad Mahdi Al-Jawahiri. Her father’s own reading in religion, belief and early poetry strengthened the habit.

University gave her the first sustained space for writing. After allowing her thought and language to mature, she published light poetic reflections in successive issues of ‘Al-Jami’ah’, the Qatar University alumnae magazine. She collected the monthly ‘Doha’ magazine from the Ministry of Information and Kuwait’s ‘Al-Arabi’, retaining some issues as references even after the arrival of the internet.

Her first newspaper article responded to a cassette recording in which two performers impersonated fictitious Qataris and insulted the community. At two in the morning, indignation moved her to write for the open ‘Nafitha’ column in Al-Arab under the initials ‘A. Obaidan’. Continued publication led several years later to her own weekly column, ‘Wamda’, under her full name. During the Gulf crisis and blockade of Qatar from 2017 to its resolution in 2021, she devoted the column to defending the country and the Amir.

Books and magazines remained an absorbing refuge from pressure and a way to test differing analyses before forming her own view. The ambition to place her work before an editor-in-chief became a concrete plan built on regular practice. Her newspaper career began with Al-Arab in 1984 and continued through Al-Raya, Al-Watan and Al-Sharq.

Throughout that career, she set boundaries inherited from her father. Journalism could examine every issue and corner, but it must stop before harm to the country and the Amir, must not violate anyone’s dignity or memory and must respect the values of conservative Qatari society.

Her articles addressed the concerns of citizens and residents and sometimes changed public decisions. When the Ministry of Health set residents’ health-card fee at QAR 200, she argued that their financial circumstances should be considered. His Excellency Ali bin Saeed Al-Khayareen, the minister, responded by reducing the fee to QAR 100; the revised decision appeared in the official newspapers the following day.

She represented Qatar abroad at conferences on Gulf women in journalism, attending by invitation of Kuwait’s Ministry of Information over successive years. She also took part in the 2015 Syrian donors’ conference led by Sheikh Sabah. In 1992, His Excellency Yousuf Al-Sumait, Kuwait’s Minister of Information, invited her to visit after liberation in recognition of the weekly articles she had written from the Iraqi invasion until Kuwait’s liberation, allowing her to witness the destruction left by the withdrawal.

Entering journalism when few women did so brought internal and external challenges. Early hesitation came from uncertainty about what to write and fear of society’s response, particularly her father’s reaction to seeing her name in a local newspaper. Later, while working for the Ministry of Education, forthright articles questioned decisions and exposed failures in the operation of independent schools under the Supreme Council for Education. They sometimes led to direct questioning or published replies, but she kept journalism separate from educational employment and continued because she regarded an honest word as both a trust and a responsibility before God.