Forgotten World (156): Qatar
It’s time to have another week of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World – a look at parts of the world that hardly feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 155 entries here.
Dominated by the Al-Thani family for almost 150 years, the mainly barren country of Qatar was a British protectorate until 1971, when it declared its independence after following suit with Bahrain and refusing to join the United Arab Emirates. This former pearl-fishing centre, once one of the poorest Gulf states, is now one of the richest countries in the region, thanks to the exploitation of large oil and gas fields since the 1940s.
In 1952, the year that the Sheikh was born, Qatar had fewer than 40,000 people, most of them barefoot nomads and fisherman, and not a single school. According to IMF figures, the country now has 950,000 residents and they have just surpassed those of Luxembourg to become the richest, while the nation hosts Education City, a complex of branch campuses from some of the world’s most prestigious colleges.
Diplomatically Qatar follows a subtle course: it hosts and helps to fund the satellite channel al-Jazeera but it invited the Americans to set up an important airbase near the capital Doha.