Education City
Qatar Foundation's campus of universities, museums and open-air commissions including M.F. Husain's Seero fi al ardh.
Education City is Qatar Foundation's academic and cultural campus in Al Rayyan, home to branch universities, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, and several large-scale outdoor works. The best known is Seero fi al ardh, Maqbool Fida Husain's final major installation, unveiled in December 2019: a 20-minute animated show about human progress, inspired by the Qur'anic verse inviting travellers to walk the earth and observe creation.
The campus is designed as a green counterpoint to central Doha, with shaded paths linking buildings and artworks that reward unhurried walking rather than a single photo stop.
Exhibo editorial
Education City asks for a different pace from the Corniche or Souq Waqif. Hire a campus buggy if the heat is fierce, but if you can walk, do: the art here was planned for people moving between libraries and lecture halls, not tour buses.
Pair Husain's installation with Mathaf if you have half a day; the museum gives context for the modern Arab commissions scattered outside.
How to find it
Education City sits off Al Luqta Street in Al Rayyan. The Education City tram links key stops; Seero fi al ardh is signed within the campus. Check Qatar Foundation listings for show times before you travel.
Similar places
All places
Related stories
Why Doha Is Full of Roundabouts
An old circle at a crossroads, sharpened by British road engineering, became the way an Arabian city found its way and remembered itself — and it took the bulldozers to reveal it.
In a city where a landmark was more useful than an address, Doha's roundabouts became its navigation, its landscaping and its national image all at once. Now they're being torn out for signalled junctions — and the affection for them arrived, as one scholar put it, only posthumously.
The Animal We Drew Everywhere Once It Was Gone
From Neolithic rock to airline tailfin — how the Arabian oryx vanished from the desert, came back from nine animals, and multiplied everywhere as a symbol in the very decades it was gone.
The last wild Arabian oryx was shot in 1972. By then it was already a picture — carved on Bronze Age tombs, mistaken by the ancients for a unicorn, praised by poets as the eyes of the beloved. This is the story of an animal that went extinct in the wild and was brought back from nine survivors, and of the strange gap between the creature and the emblem it became: fast, sharp and ascendant on a nation's tailfin, while the animal itself survives by standing still in the shade.
Seventy Thousand Solomons: The Empire That Performed a Legend
A demon catalogue in the conqueror's library, a sixteenth-century text where kingship is an office held seventy thousand times, and the columns a sultan dragged across three provinces to prove he held it.
Mehmed II kept a Greek catalogue of demons in his library at Topkapı. Seventy years later a sultan named for a prophet was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and hauling Roman columns out of Egypt and the Lebanon into a mosque above the Golden Horn. In between, Ottoman writers turned Solomon from a warning into a job — and the empire applied for it in stone.
