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This paper examines the spread of English as a medium of higher education in the Arab world, addressing questions about the relationship between higher education, language shift and cultural (re)production through such post‐colonial educational bilingualism. Drawing on exploratory ethnographic research, it documents how both Arabic and English have been implicated in the re‐configuring of collective identities through mass higher education in one Arab Gulf country against a context of rapid modernisation with a regional undercurrent of recurrent pan‐Arab and Islamist‐tinged nationalism. It examines how far the resulting linguistic‐cultural dualism amounts to a loss of linguistic–cultural diversity, and how far there is a linguistically‐framed discourse of resistance to such a process. Theoretically, the paper engages with discourses relating to socio‐cultural reproduction, collective identity, educational standardisation, change and cultural chauvinism, and markets. It offers insights into the potential for both language and higher education to act as tools or fields for cultural transformation and for resistance identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]