While in Qatar, undergrad Alex Bills met hundreds of Arabic speakers who helped him notice the similarities between his culture and theirs.
Debates push participants to think outside of the box, to explore complicated topics, and, in the case of BYU’s Arabic debate team, to speak completely in Arabic. In May 2024, the team took off for the Qatar Debate hosted in Doha, Qatar. After a week of debates against native Arabic speakers, they returned, placing 11th out of 96 universities worldwide. Between the rigorous debate schedule and sightseeing around the city, undergraduate Alex Bills (Middle Eastern Studies, Russian ’24) left with a greater confidence in his Arabic and a deeper appreciation for the Arab culture behind it.
For a week, Bills and his peers participated in debates from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Doha, where they were repeatedly assigned a topic, a stance in the debate, and a rival team. After getting this information, the team would bolt to their assigned room and strategize together—then, the debate would begin. Though this practice proved daunting to many students, Bills says, “Presentation and debate is a way to kind of simulate that kind of pressure that you’re going to experience in another country while in a classroom setting.” After years of training, he found practicing for and participating in these debates exciting because the experience expanded his capacities as a language learner and gave him a greater confidence in his own skills.
It’s always nice to talk to somebody new and just get their perspective on the world.
Though Bills enjoyed the rigor of debating, he found that the most valuable part of being in Qatar was talking with native Arabic speakers in an immersive environment. Bills says that before starting Arabic classes, he had “heard about the Middle East in the news a lot but didn’t actually know anything about it.” He wondered what people in Middle East were actually thinking and saying. He says that eventually he realized “the only way [he] could get that knowledge was to speak Arabic.”
While in Qatar, Bills and his teammates wandered into an Islamic center and took a tour of the mosque. He says, “We got to watch them do the call to prayer live, which was super cool. And, so, we hung around and then we just chatted with the Imam [prayer leader in a mosque] afterwards and asked him questions.” Bills continues, “It’s always nice to talk to somebody new and just get their perspective on the world.”
Though this wasn’t his first time seeing Islamic culture up close, Bills was able to make connections between their customs and his own. Bills found that one of the biggest similarities rested in the sense of community he saw in the mosque. During the service, Bills noticed congregants didn’t have a self-assigned seat or pew like he sees in Utah. Instead, everyone filed inside the mosque and sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the order they entered, praying and worshiping together, regardless of who they sat next to. Bills notes, “One of the things that I like about the Church is that there’s a strong community, but it’s cool to see how other people have that too and how that’s kind of manifested in different ways.”
During their downtime, Bills and his teammates were also able to try various cuisines, meet an array of people, and visit museums and other attractions around the city. Through these travels, he found the lifestyle in Qatar very different than that in Utah. However, Bills left with a greater appreciation for each person and culture he encountered. He says, “People are people, wherever you go. You’d be surprised at how similarly people act. People are cool, people are nice, and everybody’s just trying their best.”
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