Qatar

Rise to Power and Influence

Allen J. Fromherz

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781848851672
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786729774
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

What role does Qatar play in the Middle East and how does it differ from the other Gulf states? How has the Al-Thani tribe shaped the history of modern Qatar? And how is a traditional tribal society adapting to its status as a burgeoning economic superpower? Qatar plays a crucial part in the Middle East today. With the second greatest natural gas resources in the region, Qatar's economic clout is considerable. At the same time the Qatar story is replete with paradoxes: the state hosts the Al-Jazeera media network, an influential expression of Arab nationalism and anti-Americanism, while also hosting the principal US naval base in the region. Its leaders, like Saudi Arabia's, adhere to the Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam, yet Qatar eyes its Saudi neighbours with suspicion. It is a fervent champion of the Palestinian cause, yet welcomes the Israeli Foreign Minister to present the Jewish state's case in its capital, Doha. With this groundbreaking modern history, Allen Fromherz presents a full portrait which analyses these paradoxes and Qatar's growing regional influence within a broader historical context. Drawing on original sources in Arabic, English and French, as well as his own fieldwork in the Middle East, Fromherz offers a multi-faceted picture of the political, cultural, religious, social and economic make-up of modern Qatar, its significance within the GCC states and the wider region.

1

Qatar – A New Model of Modernity?

So rarely has a country of so few seemed to change so quickly over such a short period of time. Qatar’s rise from an economically devastated backwater to the world’s richest nation per capita in a matter of decades appears unprecedented. This rise is even more striking since Qatar’s previous status as among the poorest of poor nations is within the living memory of the older generation of Qataris. The pearl price collapse and the disruptions of the Second World War had harmed the traditional exports of the Gulf. Yet even by dismal Gulf standards, Qataris were more marginal, more economically underdeveloped than the poor citizens of Kuwait, Bahrain or Dubai. In 1940 the British Political Resident provided a glimpse of Doha, capital of Qatar:

[Doha is] little more than a miserable fishing village straggling along the coast for several miles and more than half in ruins. The suq consisted of mean fly-infested hovels, the roads were dusty tracks, there was no electricity, and the people had to fetch their water in skins and cans from wells two or three miles outside the town.¹

The entire population of Qatar had fallen to 16,000. Entire villages that had survived for centuries were depopulated as tribes emigrated en masse to neighbouring, more prosperous shores. In 1944 only 6,000 fishermen were engaged in the pearl harvest as opposed to 60,000 some 20 years before.² In stark contrast to today, many Qataris were in dire straits. The one thing that may have made it better than equally poor places on earth was the fact that it was not a theatre of war.

Only some 15 years after 1950, the end of the ‘years of hunger’, however, a visitor could remark that Doha had become:

[A] Sprawling city of concrete buildings, traffic lights, ring roads and soda stalls; air conditioning is the rule; the waterfront area has been reclaimed, and much of the filth removed; a large merchant class has grown up and social life has become conventional and ‘big city’.³

From a place of poverty in the 1940s to an ‘overgrown fishing village’ in 1955 to a large city in 1965 and a growing capital in the 1970s, Doha is now the capital city of one of the most economically successful countries in the world. Qatari citizens, who endure the world’s most stifling heat and who were at one time forced to survive on brackish water and reduced to starvation by the collapse of the pearl market, can now live almost perpetually in an air-conditioned, climate-controlled bubble, moving between five-star hotels, five-star shopping malls and even five-star universities imported profectus in totum from abroad. Qatar’s population has boomed, far outpacing government predictions. It is now at around 1.7 million, more than 80 per cent of which consists of expatriate workers from around the world, servants and employees of the relatively small population of approximately 278,000 Qatari nationals in 2014. This is under twelve percent of the total population of approximately 2,477,000. Thousands of Qataris were resident outside of Qatar. Interestingly, most of the non-Qatari population are single men with almost 1,900,000 males,⁴ the greatest number of these men are most likely single workers from South Asia. For comparison, the population of Qatari nationals is approximately the population of Baton Rouge, Louisiana or Plymouth, England. Businessmen from abroad often wonder at the fact that weeks, months, even years can be spent in Qatar without even meeting a Qatari, so high are Qataris on the pyramid of economic development that has shaped their success. Much of this development, much of this disorienting, feverish change, a change in the physical environment so visible to the outsider, obscures what has not changed within Qatari society. To understand Qatar it is important to understand not just the image of rapid change and progress projected to the outside world, but the much-slower moving internal structures of Qatari society.

In much the same way that Dubai had so skilfully adopted the branding of its success, Qatar has created an externally digestible narrative, even a brand of economic boom and opportunity where a range of opinions and beliefs are welcome. In Qatar, people are able to debate differences in internationally publicized venues such as the BBC’s Doha Debates: Qatar’s Forum for Free Speech in the Arab World.⁵ According to this projected image of Qatar, an image actively promoted through Qatar’s tightly controlled international media outlets such as Al-Jazeera, there are virtually no internal problems. In the marketed image of Qatar, all Qataris accept being ruled by the Emir, and always have done. In the idealized vision of Qatar, the image projected to the outside world, there is no politicking, there are not always even clear positions on international affairs, except a position defined by security, development and prosperity. Qatar seems full of venues for dialogue that enhance Qatar’s image and the image of the ruling Al-Thani family. Yet this idealized narrative obscures a much more complicated and interesting local history, a history that lies just beneath the five-star hotels, international news channels and premium airport lounges. Qataris themselves have not forgotten this history, even as they are concerned that new generations will not remember the way of life that defined Qatari culture. Expensive and widely publicized attempts to showcase Qatari and Islamic culture in Doha attest to this concern with the preservation of the image of cultural authenticity. It is unclear, however, if these massive cultural projects, projects such as the building of the new Qatar National Museum and the Museum of Islamic Art designed by I. M. Pei and completed in 2008, achieves this aim of authenticity. Yet Al-Thani family’s concern with the apparent loss of visual and public authenticity does not mean that Qatar has broken completely from its past. In fact, this book argues that the traditional, underlying structures that defined Qatari life for decades remain remarkably resilient.

Qataris are the privileged citizen elite of a booming, modern state. There is little indication that Qatar’s prosperity and rapid growth will be checked in the near future. Unlike other Gulf States such as Dubai, that have seen the dramatic bursting of their economic bubbles, Qatar’s economy continues to expand rapidly. Qatar’s economy is the fastest growing on earth with 19 per cent growth.⁶ Qatar relies primarily on long-term natural gas contracts that are not subject to the same short-term price fluctuations as crude oil. Yet, despite these riches and the stunning pace of development, there are still a surprising number of similarities between Qataris of today and the impoverished Qataris of 1940. Wealth has transformed Qatari society in some ways, but not nearly to the extent that it has been transformative in the Qatari economy or built environment. In fact, economic modernization has done little to damage long-established lineage loyalties. The names, loyalties and social networks of the past, a past that in some respects has actually been artificially deepened, somehow dug into memory as deeply as the gleaming new skyscrapers of the skyline are high, and they are still important for understanding Qatar’s present and future. While Qatar’s present economic success was created in recent decades, the future of Qatar lies as much in its historical particularities as it does in the deceptively impressive, emerald towers of glass that symbolize Qatar’s wealth and prosperity. Some of what seems to have changed so quickly has not, in fact, really changed much at all.

Briefly, the history of the Naim tribe is instructive. Long a rival and even outright enemy of the dominant Al-Thani Sheikh of Qatar, most of the Naim left Qatar decades before the oil boom, leaving their vast grazing lands, or dira, that cover much of the north of Qatar behind them. When they returned in the 1950s, their ancestral claims remained untouched. Indeed, many Naim could claim that their tribal chief should rightly be called an Emir, as he had been in the recent past.⁷ In fact, the legitimacy of the claims of Al-Thani and of Qatar over inland areas and over the Qatar national border is tied to their association with Bedouin tribes such as the Naim. This was especially true because of the ‘importance Ibn Saud [ruler of Saudi Arabia] attached to tribal territory as a basis for defining state boundaries’.⁸ In the midst of territorial disputes, urbanized rulers such as Al-Thani actively competed to lure Bedouin into their territories as citizens.

There are other ways that tribes like Naim have been able to maintain a sense of internal coherence despite state intervention, changing cultural influences and the growth of state-licensed property ownership. The non-ruling tribes of Qatar remember their past and they are careful to transmit that past even to the most ‘Westernized’ of their sons. While genealogy in the West has lost its functional meaning, becoming an internet hobby of ancestral Facebook, genealogy and ancestry in Qatar is still functional – an important indicator of social position, status and rights. As much as some in Al-Thani elite may want it to do so, development and modern education has not caused deep memories of historic rights to disappear. The chiefs of the Naim still have a throne; they still have the trappings of independence within their own group and social dynamic. Anie Montigny-Kozlowska, an anthropologist writing in French, observed in the 1980s that only very recently have Al-Thani appropriated the title of ‘Emir’ exclusively for themselves within Qatar.

[Only recently,] the names of the heads of groups evolved. Now there is only one Emir who directs the state. Traditional Emirs, chiefs of tribes or a sub-division of tribes have been renamed by the now, official state function they occupy as Rais al-Baladiyya (President of Municipality or Mayor) or Emir al-Qawm (Chief of the Village). Nevertheless, the old titles have not been forgotten.⁹

A similar pattern of tribal groups being incorporated into the state while also losing some of their formal power, if not the memory of that power, prevailed for other Qatari tribes and lineage groups as well. Al-Sudan and Al-Ainain, for instance, were in Qatar long before Al-Thani. They were also chiefs of Doha and Wakra before Al-Thani, a fact even Al-Thani recognized this when they gave Al-Sudan tax-exempt status during the pearling years. Modernization and rapid economic change has not destroyed either these memories or the lineage groupings and consequent cultural attitudes and norms of Qataris themselves as quickly as might be expected in classic Western models of development. While the devastation of the 1940s may have created a gaping hole that makes the present development that now plugs it seem even more impressive, Qatar is not a place ‘without a past’ or ‘without a culture’ as it has been described in popular literature.¹⁰ Ironically, anxiety about a lack of historical roots appears to be felt more by visitors to Qatar than by Qataris themselves. Perhaps expecting exotica, adventure and orientalized Arabness, the expatriate is disappointed by the modernity, by places that look ‘Western’ or ‘just like home’. Many Qataris, in contrast, rarely express the same level of postmodern angst. The environment has appeared to change, but many fundamental human relations remain the same for a Qatari. From their perspective, they are still bound by many of the same social rules and strictures as their parents, even if the built environment often appears Western and modern. Even so, the strictures and social rules are changing, albeit at a much slower pace than the rise of the skyscrapers.

It is not simply that the Western visitor does not see the ‘real’ Qatar, or that the elusive ‘real Qatar’ as experienced by Qataris cannot, in fact, be experienced by the vast majority of visitors. In fact, explanation for the feelings of ‘inauthenticity’ experienced by the Westerner or Westernized visitor in Qatar comes from the intellectual, social philosophies shaped by the particularities of Western history, particularities that seem obvious to the Westerner but do not easily apply to Qatar or to the way Qataris experience their country today. First, there is an assumption among many in the West that modernization is exhilarating yet painful, necessarily leading to historical loss and to the collapse of a past identity. There is a deep assumption in Western literature and thought that an essential conflict must exist between tradition and economic modernity.¹¹ This assumed, ‘inevitable’ conflict, experienced so vividly in the West, has been foisted upon the Middle East. According to this classic theory, Qatar should be a boiling stew of problems brought about by the conflict between tradition and modernity, but it is not. Instead, many of the same social structures, many of the same arrangements of lineage remain in the midst of apparent modernity. Qatar is a stable country and many political scientists, at one time predicting its fall, now predict a long-term future for Qatar’s existing political system. The old political system is usually the first to go after the forces of modernity and tradition have clashed. Yet Qatar remains a monarchy and many social structures remain unchanged. What explains this?

The answer is to be found in Qatar’s history. Only through history can the differences between the historical experience of modernity in Qatar and in the West be explained. Although often assumed to be universal, or structural, the limitations of Western philosophical and sociological perspectives about tradition and modernity are evident in Qatar. From a Western perspective, Qatar should be doomed to what the nineteenth-century sociologist Émile Durkheim called ‘anomie’: the devastating situation that arises when cultural norms shift too rapidly. Anomie occurs, he said, when a ‘social type rests on principles so different from the preceding that it can develop only in proportion to the effacement of that preceding type’. The new economic principles, the division of labour perpetuated by the endlessly expansive, assimilative amoeba-state, fundamentally alter social relations.¹² It is easy enough to witness this erasure of non-work-related identity in post-industrial USA. What you do is who you are. One of the first questions that most new acquaintances ask in the USA is what do you do, where do you work? This appears to Americans as the most reliable way of knowing somebody. In many cultures, however, what you are, that is what you are in terms of inherited relations with others, is more important than what you do. Indeed, the extended names of Qataris, ‘Muhammad bin Khalifa bin Ahmad bin…’, for instance, reflect a long string of ancestors rather than the merely one in the case of Western names. The transfer of identity from what one is to what one does can create tremendous fissures in society. In fact, Durkheim, with typical French flair, identified this erasure of the traditional self with suicide. According to Durkheim, ‘anomic suicide’ both individually and culturally, the self-erasure of a culture’s essential existence and the self-destruction of people who feel ‘rootless’, occurs not only when a society is devastated by economic depression but also during economic boom when the possibilities are limitless. Most Arab countries also experienced a particularly pernicious form of anomie: not only was modernization a threat to traditional values, it often seemed to originate from an outside, Western culture that was associated with a much more invasive form of colonization than that experienced by Qatar. Qatar was never really colonized, especially not in a way remotely similar to the colonization of states such as Algeria or the Congo.

This relative lack of anomie is new for the Arab world. The renowned scholar and Arabist G. E. von Grunebaum could remark in the 1960s that ‘it is the near impossibility of painless accommodation to culture change which is causing much of the unrest that is today tormenting the world outside of the core countries of Western civilization.’¹³ Fifty years later, modernization is no longer equated with Westernization. Indeed, technocratic, one-party rule in China has become an alternate model of development. The leaders of Qatar and other Gulf States can choose from an expanding buffet of choices when it comes to selecting their culture of modernization. Grunebaum would be criticized today for suggesting that ‘the West’ is the only relevant core style of modernization. Also, modernization, whether Western-style or Chinese or Indian, need not immediately break those traditional bonds that Durkheim felt so vital to the social psyche.

According to the classic Durkheim model, Qatar should have experienced the particularly pernicious whiplash of both forms of anomie, from depression in the 1940s to an endless economic boom, accelerated to a white-hot pace in the last decade. Yet the expected feeling of anomic rootlessness, while real in many circumstances, is deceptive in others. Just below the gleaming surface of commercialized modernity, the political, social and cultural realities of Qatar remain deeply rooted despite the seeming anomic whiplash of economic change. Even if some of the past has been or refashioned as sanitized, state-controlled ‘heritage’, the social structures, beliefs, and fundamental values and motivations of Qataris are still shaped by historical and social forces that have persisted and are often more profound than recent economic changes.

Durkheim’s theories, so useful for the sociology of Western industrialization and modernization, simply do not apply as well to Qatar. This does not mean Durkheim’s theory was fundamentally flawed. But rather, it means that Qatar cannot be explained by the same modernity-tradition paradigm used in the West. Reasons for this can already be grasped a few sentences later in Durkheim’s work.

In effect individuals are here grouped no longer according to lineage, but according to the particular nature of the social activity to which they concentrate themselves. Their natural milieu is no longer the natal milieu but the occupational milieu. It is no longer the real or fictitious consanguinity which marks the place of each one, but the function which he fills.¹⁴

In Qatar, despite enormous economic changes, individual Qataris are still grouped according to lineage, or a largely ‘fictitious’ if authentically felt consanguinity. Although the word ‘tribe’ has become problematic, a term often associated with categorizing, orientalizing tendencies in Western scholarship, the creation of and adherence to ‘tribal’ lineage is an internally recognized social form in Qatar. As the anthropologist Richard Tapper noted, ‘Administrators – and many academics – still take a highly positivist view of tribes in the Middle East. They expect them to be mappable, bounded groups with little membership change, and they want an exact terminology for classificatory and comparative purposes.’¹⁵ This desire to map out tribes into a manageable and unchanging human taxonomy is problematic and does not reflect the history of lineage and myths of lineage in Qatar. This simplistic approach must be avoided. Yet ignoring tribes is itself a form of politically correct, neo-orientalism: it means ignoring the major self-identified groupings of Qatar’s society, whether imagined or not. The risk of over-categorizing is less than the risk of ignoring a major part of Qatari society. While certainly not experienced as a positivist category, one’s qabila, one’s extended ‘tribe’ or family, remains the fundamental determinant of an individual Qatari’s social position and future. This remains true even if that ancestry is in some ways imagined, created or politically repo-sitioned. As the historian and master at tribal negotiation Ibn Khaldun observed while living among the tribes of North Africa, ‘When the things which result from (common) descent are there it is as if (common descent) itself were there … In the course of time, the original descent is almost forgotten.’¹⁶ The use...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Al-Thani Rulers and Princes
• Maps of the Persian Gulf and Qatar
• Preface to the New Edition
• 1 Qatar – A New Model of Modernity?
• 2 Qatar – Geography of a Near Frontier
• 3 The Origins of Qatar – between ‘Emergence’ and ‘Creation’
• 4 Creating Social Realities – Qatar and the British in the Twentieth Century
• 5 Sheikh Khalifa and the Enigma of Independence
• 6 Sheikh Hamad, Sheikh Tamim and the Future of Qatar
• 7 Qatar’s Political Economy – A Classic Rentier State?
• 8 The Emir and the Exercise of Authority in Qatar
• 9 Conclusions – Change or Continuity?
• Timeline
• Notes
• Bibliography