Kuwaiti education is seeing its fair share of intrigue. In January, ten Kuwaiti lawmakers filed a no confidence motion against Kuwait’s sole cabinet minister over alleged legal and administrative irregularities, according to a report initially filed by AFP.

Education Minister Nuriya al-Sabeeh was the target of the motion, over allegations that she had failed to rigidly enforce gender segregation in Kuwait universities. Kuwait’s elected parliament passed a law enforcing absolute segregation of gender at all universities within the sovereignty of Kuwait, and some conservative elected representatives are looking to ensure that the law is also applied to foreign schools.

The no confidence motion was presented by a motley aggregation of Islamist and tribal MPs. And Nuriya al-Sabeeh was a natural target for their ire. Not only is she the first female to hold a ministry post, but she had angered the patriarchal conservatives by refusing to wear a head scarf when she was sworn into office.

Nuriya al-Sabeeh was subjected to a ten hour grilling, where she categorically denied all charges levied against her and accused her opponents of using education as a political agenda. She insisted - perhaps not entirely without foundation - that the no confidence stemmed from a politicisation of education, and not from her lack of performance.

Nuriya al-Sabeeh was not without her support base. Her speech was applauded by an audience at the chamber galleries, while dozens of students demonstrated outside Parliament in her support. Al Sabeeh also had backing from liberal MPs, who agreed that attacks against her were largely political.

Crucially, she also had support from some religious leaders, who issued religious edicts to do away with the no confidence motion that was tabled against her. In a unique and heady mix of religion and politics, preachers noted that the political status of a minister was dissimilar from that held by a country’s leader.While a vote of no confidence may be tabulated against the latter, the jurisprudence can not be applied to the former. Convoluted logic it may be but it helped. The wellspring of support allowed Nuriya al-Sabeeh to survive the no-confidence movement.

Al-Sabeeh did not emerge from the episode entirely unscathed. She bent her energies towards reinforcing ministry rulings on coeducation in all private universities by segregating males from females in an attempt to ward of criticism. She warned that universities not heeding segregation policies would receive strict penalties. As Kuwait’s only female resistance, Nuriya al-Sabeeh has a hard slog ahead of her.