A (Class)Room for All: A Crucible for Collaborative Learning

Scholarship can be viewed as a space for teaching and learning. In the Arab Gulf, this space is inhabited by several modes of communication. A traditional one is Majlis (also named Diwaniya), which gives people opportunities to exchange knowledge and engage in critical thinking to solve problems. Exchanges may range from quotidian events to scholarly matters of interest to the community. They can give rise to genuine dialogue, thereby transforming the acquisition of knowledge and the decision‐making process that follows into participatory activities. The format gives rise to the emergence of instances of servant leaders whose thoughts and actions are meaningful to the community. In this sense, Majalis (plural form) embody both the traditional form of scholarship (acquiring specialized knowledge and circulating it among the few) and a more popular form in which the goal is to involve a broad array of people. In the digital age, some Majalis have moved online, broadening their reach. In this manuscript, the Majlis phenomenon is explained as a form of impactful and transparent scholarship for people from different walks of life. This type of knowledge exchange invites us to rethink the notion of audience and the privileging of text over speech.