Qatar: Qatar's woman beside the man

ASMA AL-ASSAD was not the only Middle Eastern consort making a statement in Paris this week. The wife of Qatar's emir was also hard to miss in a vivid green pantsuit cinched wickedly around her slim waist.

But Sheika Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned grabs attention for more than her fashion sense. As the Christian Science Monitor reported last year, "the glamorous mother of seven rivals her husband in terms of influence in her native land".

Last year she was ranked 79 on the Forbes list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. The Times, of London, named her one of the 25 most influential business leaders in the Middle East.

A commoner who studied sociology at Qatar University, she married the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, in 1977, despite his father having exiled her father after he called for a fairer distribution of wealth in the small oil and gas-rich nation. She is the second of the emir's three wives.

In 1995, her husband overthrew his father in a bloodless coup, and set about modernising the country, although it remains the personal fiefdom of his family.

Sheika Mozah has been at the forefront of this work, reforming the education system, establishing the region's first battered women's shelter, and encouraging a modicum of free speech.

Her work has been internationally recognised. She is a UNESCO special education envoy, and in 2005 the UN secretary-general asked her to be a member of a group set up to develop creative mechanisms for fighting terrorism.

Sheika Mozah has earned admiration for the way she has struck a balance between modernity, Islam and Arabic culture. "People tend to believe that to be modern you have to disengage from your heritage, but it's not true," she told the Christian Science Monitor.

But as the first and only ruling spouse in Qatar to show herself publicly, she has also earned enemies. In 2005 she won a defamation case against an Arabic newspaper in Britain, which had published stories alleging she had improperly interfered in political, judicial and security matters in Qatar.

---Sydney Morning Herald