“The Cry of Mixed Youth” front page headline of a Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al-Rai following a demonstration organized by students on September 18 to protest a recent decision to ban gender mixing at Kuwait University, the country’s main public university institution.

The issue has been on the minds of the small Gulf petro-monarchy for just under a week after Salafi MP Mohammed Haif, at the head of a parliamentary commission on “promotion of values”, announced an agreement with the Minister of Higher Education and the President of Kuwait University “strict adherence to the separation of the sexes” reminds me of a Kuwaiti newspaper Arab Times.

End of consensus

This statement violated a kind of modus vivendi that seemed to have settled on this sensitive issue. Indeed, a 1996 law prohibits diversity in universities, but in 2015 the Constitutional Court