Qatar: A Short, Subjective, Heretical History: Part I

Dodge Training Car for young Al Thanis in the Fifties. Little Al Thanis sit in front. Big Daddy Al Thani sits in back with gear stick and brake. Background shows cars owned by the Emir, Dad and Grandpa...

Camel in Car. Goat in Ute. Bedouin tribes herded camels OR goats. The pig-headed creatures cannot get along.

Some time back, a bloke called William Gifford Palgrave decided that academia was not much fun, and went off to do a spot of globetrotting, before becoming a Jesuit priest, a spy and finally a diplomat.

Pretty ordinary sort of career path really.

Observant body that he was, he left a record both of Bedaa (now a suburb of Doha) and of Doha itself. It is, he wrote,

...the miserable capital of a miserable province. To have an idea of Kater, my readers must figure to themselves miles on miles of low barren hills, bleak and sun-scorched with hardly a single tree to vary their dry monotonous outline; below these a muddy beach extends for a quarter of a mile seawards in slimy quicksands bordered by a rim of sludge and seaweed.

The low barren hills of miserable Qatar

At least they've done something about the slimy quicksands, sludge and seaweed.

And on Doha:

The houses...are even lower or meaner than at Bedaa' and the marketplace is narrower and dirtier.

Fairly obvious you might think, but that is because you need to apprise yourself of one last fact to truly comprehend Mr W.G.'s prescience, nay, let us call it genius!

He penned this description in 1836, 170 years before Qatar University built the accommodation he so accurately describes!

Descriptions of Qatar from then right up to the 1970s remain much the same: Repeated use of the word miserable. Complaints that there is nothing here.

I know this will surprise regular readers of this blog.

It surprised the British too. Before they could import machinery to drill for oil they had to import 'a hundred thousand tons' of everything else. Including a jetty.

So let us turn to another constant in what we might call the history of Qatar: the Al Thani royal family, money and cars.

(So you're sick of reading about cars. And you think I'm not? There is nothing else in this miserable place.)

The royal family here is big. Even in 1970, it made up half the population. So right there you've got trouble. Most of it coming from the fact that the British didn't sign deals with countries, they signed them with the current ruling sheikh or the family (tribe). So how to distribute oil money bucks?

Plant, British Foreign Office, circa 1950, tries desperately to persuade the Emir that his money and Qatar's money are two different things.

Taking 75% for himself will simply not work.

Banking the state's money offshore before abdicating and demanding an allowance from the said state will also not work (although, true, it did for Dad).

Although famed for his state budget drawn on the back of an envelope, Plant reports:

Unless we can exercise some control over the ruler's financial affairs we shall never make any progress in the introduction of a proper administration.

Response of the extended Al Thani royal family to the tight-fistedness for which all Al Thani rulers are reknowned:

How can you spend money on roads and hospitals and such like nonsense when we haven't even got a decent Cadillac to ride in?

Okay, yes, it would now read a 'a decent white Toyota Land Cruiser to ride in' but does this not sound terribly, terribly familiar?

Well, SOME people had decent Cadillacs. From the private collection of Sheikh Faisal, the Emir's cousin...

Short interlude to examine the relationship between the White Land Cruiser and the Al Thani family.

Points of Interest:

1. More than half the cars on Qatari roads are 4WDs.

2. The Emir owns a white Toyota Land Cruiser, so that would be a good reason for everyone else to own one.

3. Qataris usually have a big sticker on the back of their car announcing their ethnicity so you know to give way to them (See the post 'Bugger' below on Give Way Rules).

Can't read the Arabic but what this says is "I'm Qatari. Get out of my way."

4. Al Thani family members have a different sticker on the back of their car. It reads: im royal. Yes, royal means you don't have to punctuate.

Story to illustate the significant Cruiser-Al Thani relationship:

A colleague who lives on this compound, Andrew, and I live in a state of mutual loathing and avoidance, but end up at the same parties from time to time. Last party Andrew explains his near-arrest.

Andrew is going straight in the left lane. There is a separate lane to go left, but he's not in it. Neither is the Al Thani in the white Land Cruiser, who does want to go left.

From the far right-turning lane.

Into which he has pushed.

Scraping two cars, including Andrew's.

His Excellency U-Turns in front of the two cars going straight, and, goaded beyond endurance, Andrew does what I in fact did when the police came for me (see Arrested & Arepas below).

He gives the guy the finger.

Now Andrew does not have Mohammed Abbas out there protecting him. Andrew gets called into the police station. Police giggle. Until Mr, or should that be Sheikh, I'm so sorry Sir, Al Thani arrives.

Al Thani: He disrespected me.

Cars, buses & trucks disrespecting each other.

Yes. It has been a long hard 3 years. I am really glad to be going. Because whatever you hear to the contrary, Qatar does NOT share a history with the other Gulf countries.

Much love,

Simone, Chronicler of Qatar

PS: With some poetic licence, the source of my historical information was:

Crystal, J. (1986) Patterns of state-building in the Arabian Gulf, Kuwait and Qatar. PhD Thesis. Harvard University, Retrieved 1 March, 2009, from ProQuest 5000 database.