10 percent of the school’s graduates since 2014 bear the surname of the ruling Al Thani family, according to a Middle East Forum report
Northwestern University has defended its campus in Hamas-friendly Qatar by arguing that it provides Middle Eastern women access to an “elite” education. An outsized share of the campus’s graduates, however, are themselves members of the Qatari elite, including the ruling Al Thani family, a new report shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon shows.
Northwestern Qatar, known as NU-Q, has graduated 729 students since 2014, according to the report from watchdog group Middle East Forum. Roughly 9 percent of them come from some of the most powerful families in Qatari business and politics, all of which have close ties to the Al Thanis. More than 10 percent, meanwhile, bear the Al Thani surname, meaning that about one in five of all NU-Q graduates since 2014 represent the Qatari elite.
The phenomenon hit its peak in 2020, the report states, when 35 percent of that year’s graduating class was composed of royals or members of other elite families. Qatar, the report notes, places strict legal restrictions on changing either surnames or tribal names, making it all but impossible for someone with the last name “Al Thani” not to be a member of the royal family.
The findings contradict Northwestern’s portrayal of the campus. When the school faced criticism for its presence in Qatar earlier this year, its media relations department released a statement arguing that the campus provides the kind of elite education people in the region—especially women—would not be able to otherwise access.
“Northwestern University in Qatar has provided international students—over 70 percent of whom are women—access to an elite, western education and helped further the foreign policy interests of the United States government,” the statement read.
The report tells a different story, one in which the campus exists more to provide Western legitimacy to Qatari elites than to educate the country’s marginalized.
“Taken together, the data suggests a systematic admissions pattern in which NU-Q has enrolled a disproportionately high number of students from the same ruling families who fund, govern, and benefit from the institution,” the Middle East Forum report states.
“The Al-Thani royal family has placed at least one graduate in every graduating class from 2014 through 2025, with no gaps,” the report goes on. “In essence, NU-Q acts as a training center for Qatar’s next generation of leadership, and many of its alumni later assume influential roles in the country’s business and politics sectors.”
Northwestern opened its Qatar campus in 2008 with funding from the state-run Qatar Foundation, founded by former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and chaired by his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. Qatar has since provided the university with $737 million.
The relationship has come under increased scrutiny since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel and the wave of anti-Semitism on college campuses that followed. Hamas’s leaders were living in luxury in Qatar as the terror outfit carried out the attack, for which Qatar said Israel was “solely responsible” because of “its ongoing violations of the rights of the Palestinian people.”
Two weeks after the attack, Qatari officials attempted to use NU-Q to spread their messaging on Israel and Hamas. A Qatar Foundation staffer emailed the school’s dean with talking points on Qatar’s “diplomatic role and mediation efforts in Palestine/Gaza and Afghanistan,” according to an August 5 House Education Committee interview with former Northwestern president Michael Schill. Another email from the foundation’s CEO, sent five days after the attack, read, “Finally, let there be no doubt about this—QF always has and always will stand with Palestine.”
Schill’s House interview also revealed that Northwestern’s contract with the Qatar Foundation includes a clause that effectively prohibits students and faculty from criticizing the Gulf state’s regime. That contract expires in 2028, and Northwestern is conducting a “multiyear review” of its relationship with Qatar.
Students at NU-Q learn from professors like Ibrahim Abusharif, who cofounded and served as treasurer for an organization that raised and laundered money for Hamas and was forced to pay damages to the family of a 17-year-old U.S. citizen killed in a 1996 terror attack in Jerusalem. Another NU-Q affiliate, joint advisory board member Rami Khouri, has defended Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and praised Hamas as representing “the bottomless arsenal of the human spirit.”
In addition to the Al Thani family, which has given an estimated $1.8 billion to Hamas since 2007, the elite families represented within NU-Q’s graduating classes include that of Mohamed Jaham Al-Kuwari, Qatar’s ambassador to Switzerland and former ambassador to the United States. After Israel killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in October 2024, Al-Kuwari cited a Telegraph report to state that “the video clip that documented the last moments of [Sinwar’s] life made him a hero.” He referred to a Gazan woman who said she was “proud of [Sinwar] because he was killed fighting on the battlefield and not hiding in the tunnels.”
Other families, such as the Al-Mana and Al-Emadi business empires, have sent several of their family members to NU-Q, as has the Al-Khater family, which has maintained a presence in Qatar’s government for decades. Mubarak bin Ali Al-Khater served as minister of foreign affairs in the 1990s, and Lolwah bint Rashid Al-Khater became education minister last year.
Northwestern University did not respond to a request for comment.
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