A team of WashU undergraduate students competed at Qatar Debate’s Midwest Arabic Debate Championship this spring, held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The three students — Minnatallah Ahmed, now a senior majoring in health care management at Olin Business School, along with Ahmed Ahmed and Mohammed Kuziez, who both earned biomedical engineering degrees in May — also had participated in the fourth annual U.S. Universities Arabic Debating Championship at the University of Utah in October, where they competed against students from 41 other universities. The competitions’ primary goal is to give students an opportunity to practice the Arabic language and debate skills among both Arabic learners and native speakers.
Juman Al Bukhari, a learning and development senior consultant in WashU Human Resources who has experience in Arabic linguistics, helped organize and mentor the WashU team and has served as a judge at the debate competitions for four years.
The fifth U.S. Universities Arabic Debating Championship will take place Sept. 27-29 at New York University.
If a team of three or four students is interested in participating in the championship, or to learn more, email Al Bukhari. Both native Arabic speakers and students who are learning Arabic are welcome.
