The Museum of Islamic Art, built on its own island in Doha, Qatar, opened last month. Roger Mandle is executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority.

AP / Hassan Ammar

SOUTH DARTMOUTH

Commuting is out of the question. Work is several thousand miles away. So Roger Mandle comes home just a few times a year. And this is one of those times.

“I like to think that I have two homes,” says Roger Mandle. “One is here and one is in Doha.”

Mandle, the former president of the Rhode island School of Design, is the executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority. For those who don’t know, Qatar (pronounced “cutter”), is a Middle Eastern country. Its capital is Doha. And its cultural ambitions are enormous.

“I think what they’re really after is a kind of cultural renaissance for the nation, and for the Middle East.”

The nation is relatively new. It has been only 37 years since its independence from England. And now the oil-rich country is making its mark with art.

Last month, with lots of fanfare and lots of international dignitaries, Qatar opened a huge new $1.6-billion museum, the first of what’s expected to be several new museums to be built. Mandle was brought in to oversee the operation of that museum and an unspecified number of others to follow.“I am sort of in an invention with a whole group of pioneers,” Mandle says. “Every day is new. It’s hard to be predictive of exactly where it’s all going to go, which is part of the excitement.”

That’s what Mandle wanted: excitement. After 15 fruitful years leading RISD, during which time he greatly expanded the campus and its buildings, and the school’s endowment and reputation, Mandle thought it was time for something new.

“It was really time after 15 years to think of something else. It was healthy for the school, and healthy for me.”

Mandle, 66, ended his tenure as RISD president last May, and has been replaced by John Maeda, a former professor and digital-arts pioneer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Overseeing a fledgling country’s sweeping, multi-billion-dollar project to celebrate and promote its culture was not something Mandle thought of doing. A friend, who Mandle describes as “a very major figure in the art world,” had the thought for him.

Mandle saw this man more than a year ago. And Mandle told his friend he really didn’t know what he’d do after retiring from RISD. The friend said, “I think I have an idea.”

Two weeks later, Mandle was contacted by Sheikha Mayassa, the 25-year-old Duke University-educated daughter of Qatar’s leader, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the emir. E-mails were exchanged. Phone calls were made. And eventually Mandle and his wife, Gail, took a trip to Qatar.

“We were both intrigued and decided to say yes.”

Qatar, which is located on a peninsula that juts off Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, is three times larger than Rhode Island but with the same size population.

It’s a new country essentially honoring its heritage from scratch. The country previously had a national museum, which Mandle characterized as “a sputtering effort” that was “pretty unprofessional.”

“Their idea is to bring these cultural institutions together for their own people first. If they happen to be good enough to stand up to the competition on the world stage, that’s great.”

Well then, art is off to a great start in Qatar. Last month, the 337,000-square foot Museum of Islamic Art opened, designed by celebrated architect I.M. Pei, and constructed on its own man-made 64-acre island.

“Pei decided he did not want the museum to compete with this changing urban landscape. So he asked for the right to build an island.”

Clearly money’s not an issue in oil-rich Qatar, which is undergoing great development, which explains its population. The majority of residents in Qatar are foreigners who are there to construct and design buildings, and to offer managerial expertise.

“We’re all there helping to build the society.”

The society is overwhelmingly Muslim. So, Mandle says, “it’s not a surprise in a fairly conservative country with liberal aspirations that the first museum would be the Museum of Islamic Art.”

Because of all the foreigners in the country, the common form of communication is English. In addition to the creation of museums, Qatar has also created “Education City,” a collection of satellite campuses for several elite American universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and Northwestern. In addition, Qatar has also recently created a symphony orchestra and film festival, the Tribeca Film Festival Doha, which will debut next fall.

Why, one might wonder, is all this happening now? There has been a change in leadership, from a father to his son. And with the change in leadership, come changes in society — very big changes, especially in the Arab world.

“It’s pretty damn remarkable. The emir felt the nation desperately needed this enlightened policy.”

In Qatar, Mandle says, women attend universities and perform jobs. The country recently allowed a Catholic cathedral to be built in the capital, and has Jewish members on the board overseeing its cultural projects.

Mandle’s focus is the museums, which he says are not simply new, but a new concept in museums.

“We’re really thinking about museums in a very different way.”

The Museum of Islamic Art has classical museum components and presentations, Mandle says, with conventional exhibits and lectures.

“You may see just one bowl in a case. You might think that’s an enormous expanse of space to give over to one little bowl. But by doing so, that bowl becomes really important. Otherwise, it might be passed up unseen on the shelf.”

The Museum of Islamic Art also offers 10,000 iPods that provide visitors with narration and music for their tours. And the museum has numerous trained college students to initiate discussions about the art.

“We’ve been teaching them not only the information, but also techniques of engagement with the public.”

Greater conceptual changes, Mandle says, will be seen in the National Museum, which is being designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, and for which construction is expected to begin next summer.

“Whole walls will come alive with images that create context for the experience of the objects.”

This, Mandle says, is huge: context. Most museums don’t have it. A Chinese vase has no context in a Paris museum, Mandle says, nor does an African artifact have context in a New York museum.

And context, Mandle says, creates greater understanding of art and culture.

“I’ve always thought of museums as basically seducing people to get them interested in the culture surrounding these objects more. You can fall in love with a Vermeer, which I have done, but until you’ve been to Holland, you don’t really know about Vermeer. You don’t know about the light. You don’t know about the atmosphere, the humidity, the scale of the country, the food.

“All of those things could give you a connection to what Vermeer’s art is about. What it doesn’t do is transport you back in time. That’s a problem we all struggle with. We haven’t figured out a time machine yet.”

But Mandle and others working on the Qatar National Museum have figured out a way for the museum to give greater context to its art objects, covering 1,200 years of Islamic art, from earthenware bowls to silk carpets: Take a trip.

“If we’re talking about the desert, why just have someone stand in the middle of the gallery and show people what the desert looks like? We’re going to encourage people to go to the desert.”

The National Museum, according to Mandle, will provide shuttle buses to different parts of the nation so visitors can better appreciate the artifacts they see.

From a personal point of view, what Mandle has seen in Qatar he likes a lot, except the summer’s 120-degree days with high humidity that fogs up his glasses every time he steps outside an air-conditioned building. Mandle likes the great diversity of food that can be attributed to the great diversity of Qatar’s foreign workers. And Mandle also likes the way business is conducted in the country: personally.

In Qatar, Mandle says, before any business meeting begins, the people present must ask each other how they’ve been and what they’ve been doing.

“You don’t get to business without going through that protocol. You have to do that. If you don’t, you’re insulting the person you’re encountering.

“I find that great. It slows everything down. I’m sure people who are used to typical U.S. corporate life would grind their teeth about it and say, ‘What a huge waste of time.’ But it isn’t. I think it’s humane, it’s decent and it’s thoughtful.”

Mandle will be returning to his job and home in Doha in early January.

But he says he’ll be returning to this area repeatedly thereafter, for the indefinite future.

“I’ll work as long as they will have me and as long as the projects are as exciting as they seem to be.

“I don’t have any time limit established.”

brourke@projo.com