ON 2 DECEMBER, the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar—known, if at all, as the home of Al Jazeera and the temporary headquarters of the US Army Central Command—shocked most of the world by winning its bid to host the 2022 World Cup.
A friend had sent me pictures taken after the World Cup announcement along the corniche in Doha, which was overrun with flag-waving Qatari boys attacking each other with cans of silly string and driving white jeeps covered in loving decals of the emir. Qatar’s World Cup, a local newspaper declared the next day, was “a victory for the umma.”
A few days later I arrived in Doha to attend a conference. It turns out that there’s not much to do in Doha besides attending conferences: on religious dialogue, on the environment, on education. Often all the participants are here on Qatar’s dime, showing the kind of largesse the country’s rulers regularly deploy to turn this little emirate into an international destination.
For the conference I was there to cover, 1200 educators from around the world had been flown in and put up at Doha’s five-star hotels. Over lunch, I overheard one American academic say to another: “I’ll go ahead and say it if you won’t. They want to own education.” He didn’t say it critically but with laughing awe.
These days, it seems that Qatar has no ambition, no matter how improbable—whether it’s becoming a leader in global education or hosting the World Cup—that it doesn’t have the means of achieving.
There is some private head-shaking here over the World Cup decision—sceptics point to the oppressive summer heat, the near-universal ban on alcohol. But mostly there is a celebratory mood in the air, a sense that the country—long overshadowed by bigger, flashier and more dangerous neighbours—is having its moment in the sun. At the education conference’s opening session, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded a televised message by congratulating Qatar on its World Cup bid. Former UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told the audience that “Qatar has proven once again that it can play in the big boys’ league.”
Fifty years ago—as photographs from the time attest—Doha was little more than a handful of dhows and tents; despite the country’s huge oil and gas reserves, Qatar remained a quiet backwater for decades after their discovery, until 1995, when the current emir deposed his own father in what everyone calls a bloodless coup.
In the last 15 years, the new emir, Hamad Bin Khalif Al Thani, has embarked on an astounding spending spree to develop and modernise the country. Today, the once sleepy bay of Doha is dotted with skyscrapers in various states of construction, five-star hotels and architectural status symbols like the Islamic Museum, built by IM Pei. For the world cup, Qatar has promised to build 12 air-conditioned football stadiums and spend 60 billion dollars (2.7 trillion rupees) on new infrastructure.
The speed at which Doha is being transformed is hard to overstate—and hard to imagine anywhere outside the Persian Gulf. The city itself truly does feel like the set of a sci-fi movie; a new world imagined into being only yesterday. In fact, Qatar Steel recently commissioned Syd Mead, who designed the sets for the movie Blade Runner, to come up with a vision of Doha in 2050. He envisioned a gleaming, blue-skyed city, all towers and landing pads, hovercrafts floating overhead.
Part of the strangeness of Qatar at the moment is that it can apparently afford anything. The country’s GDP is over 100 billion dollars—more than 330,000 dollars per year for each of Qatar’s 300,000 citizens, who remain a minority in their own country, outnumbered by more than a million foreigners (whether well-paid Western consultants or low-wage labourers from the subcontinent and East Asia).
The public face of the new Qatar is Sheikha Mozah, the second of the amir’s four wives, and the only one ever seen in public. I was at a gala dinner she attended and when she stood up half the room did too, to take her picture with their cell phones. She has a dramatic, feline beauty; regal bearing; a killer wardrobe; and fluent English. The Sheikha oversees the Qatar Foundation, which undertakes a staggering array of philanthropic, cultural, scientific and educational initiatives. They’ve launched an English-Arabic publishing house; funded medical and scientific research; created a renowned regional literary competition; and assembled a world-class Qatar Philarmonic Orchestra. And to educate 1,000 or so Qatari students, the foundation has enticed six top American universities to open branch campuses here.
Other attempts to brand Qatar as an intellectual hub in the Persian Gulf haven’t fared so well. The project of setting up a Center for Media Freedom in Doha, for example, floundered. Robert Menard, a veteran journalists’ rights advocate, resigned last year, saying “certain Qatari officials never wanted an independent Centre…one that was free to criticise Qatar itself.”
Qatar remains an absolute monarchy and its citizens follow a conservative version of Islam. It is a crime to criticise the emir or religion. Women—for all their gains in education and their increased visibility—are still required to have male guardians. Homosexuality and in fact any sexual relations outside marriage are technically a crime. And
Amnesty International says the foreign maids and labourers that keep the country running are regularly the victims of sexual violence and ill treatment.
None of this usually comes up in Doha’s conference halls (although it is often discussed in the hallways, sotto voce). Qatar’s wealth stuns and silences. It becomes awkward, when you’re here, to note that all the reforms and plans, good as they may be, come from one high place, their budgets unspecified, like manna from the sky. It’s hard to know what Qataris themselves make of it all, because there is no public debate; little contact between expatriates and locals; and all public figures tend to be allies or representatives of the government.
Meanwhile all of Qatar’s new ventures are touted—by armies of eager Western PR agencies—as part of the country’s strategy to become a ‘post-carbon,’ ‘knowledge-based’ economy. By the time the oil and gas finally run out, the thinking goes, Qatar will be a thriving, innovative, entrepreneurial society and an international landmark.
But there are also more immediate reasons for Qatar to spread its wealth—to be patron, client and middle-man to as many countries and interests as possible. When you’re a tiny country with enormous wealth in a volatile region (and a ruler from a large family full of possible contenders for the throne) it makes sense to keep a high profile, and to buy yourself as much leverage as you can, in every direction. To host an American base, for example, but also to found Al Jazeera (and then to use Al Jazeera, if WikiLeaks is to be believed, as a negotiating tool with some of your neighbours).
On my last night in Doha, I went to a party in the Pearl, Doha’s newest luxury real estate development. It’s built on a man-made island (that seems to be de rigeur in the Gulf these days) and benefits from off-shore status: restaurants can serve alcohol here. There is a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce dealership on either side of the entrance. Nonetheless, its high-end European brand stores are mostly empty. (I’m told Qataris who can afford to prefer to fly to London or Paris to shop).
That evening, the weather was balmy and perfect. From the balcony of my friends’ apartment, I looked at the Pearl’s half-built condos and its artificial bay. My friend is half-Qatari and she told me she is planning on going into “animal training.” When I asked what animals, she said “big cats.” It has become quite popular to have lions or cheetahs as pets here, apparently. There are stories of women smuggling them under their abayas on flights from Africa; once here, people install their ‘pets’ in the passenger seats of their sports cars and cruise. The cats have to be de-fanged and de-clawed; although my friend knows one man who just has his cat’s teeth filed every three days by a servant. Lots of the animals die when they are young, she said, and she wants to teach people here to take better care of them.
Everyone at the party was young, intelligent and excited. They’d come here, from the West and other Arab countries, to work at new museums, new publishing ventures. The old hands—people who have been here longer than six months—warned of the 90-percent-humidity, 50-degree summer weather (“it’s like standing in front of an airplane engine”). They gave advice about all the other great nearby places you can fly to when, inevitably, you will want to get out of Doha.