Tiny, Wealthy Qatar Goes Its Own Way, and Pays for It

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Tamim lauds his country’s democratic values. In 50 years, he recently predicted, Al Jazeera will be seen to have “changed the whole idea of free speech in the region.” In many respects, it already has.

But the openness goes only so far.

In 2012, a Qatari poet was sentenced to life in prison for insulting the royal family. (Tamim pardoned him in 2016.) Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel offers blistering coverage of other Arab heads of state but treats Qatar’s royals with kid gloves. Since 2016, the authorities have blocked Doha News, a rare online news outlet that provides critical reporting. In 2005, the government stripped 5,000 tribesmen, accused of disloyalty, of their Qatari nationality.

Although foreign workers make up 90 percent of Qatar’s three million residents, they have paltry rights, and Qatar’s World Cup preparations have been marred by a stream of reports by human rights organizations about abuses of migrant workers. A new law announced in October could significantly improve the situation if it is put in place.

Prince Mohammed bin Salman tried the @Oculus #Rift virtual-reality headset during his recent @facebook HQ visit. pic.twitter.com/PxhvfYGO46
— Arabian Veritas (@ArabianVeritas) June 30, 2016

Even the slavery museum is not quite as it seems. To avoid offending Qataris about a delicate aspect of their history, it opened in 2015 without the fanfare usually accorded a royal project.

As a result, few Qataris seem to have heard of the museum, and it is often empty.

An ice rink at the City Center shopping mall in Doha. For Qatar, with the world’s highest average income, even skating in the desert is possible.CreditTomas Munita for The New York Times

Royal Swagger

For over a century, Qatar’s rulers were plagued by insecurity, usually at the hands of their own relatives.

Tamim’s grandfather toppled a cousin as emir in 1972, only to be pushed from the throne himself by his son, Hamad, in 1995. The ousted emir, who learned of his fate while on vacation in Switzerland, denounced his son as an “ignorant man” and then retreated into exile.

Once the gas billions flowed, starting in about 2000, family tensions eased, paving the way for an ambitious, reform-minded cast of royals.

Tamim’s mother, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, 58, is one of the most famous people in the Arab world, known for her glittering gowns, ageless looks and advocacy of education and social issues. Sheikha Mozah, as she is known, behaves like a Western-style first lady, speaking at United Nations conferences and touring refugee camps in safari wear with a lightly bound scarf over her head.

She carved out her own power base through a multibillion-dollar foundation that created a philharmonic orchestra by recruiting musicians from 30 countries, built an $8 billion research hospital and brought branches of American universities, including Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M, to Qatar.

Tamim’s younger sister, Mayassa, is Qatar’s culture czarina — an art world behemoth who, at the age of 30, had an estimated annual budget of $1 billion. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York typically spends about $30 million on new acquisitions.) In 2008 she cajoled the architect I. M. Pei out of retirement to build the acclaimed Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, and later snapped up major works by Gauguin, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst. When she bought Cézanne’s “Card Players,” with its un-Islamic scene of drinking and gambling, for an estimated $250 million in 2011, it was the world’s most expensive painting.

For Tamim, there has been little that money can’t buy — until now. CreditPool photo by Brendan Smialowski

In Europe, Qatari royals have a reputation as high rollers with a yen for ostentatious real-estate and aristocratic prestige. After the 2008 financial crash, they bought Greek islands, French castles and so many iconic London properties — including Harrods department store, a share in Heathrow Airport and the Shard, western Europe’s tallest building — that it periodically induces anxious headlines in the British press about Qatar’s owning “more of London than the Queen.”

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