Welcome to Qatar
I was standing by the side of the road, on the edge of the desert, scanning the horizon for signs of a cab.
It was January 2012, sometime around dawn. I had been in Qatar for a few weeks, and I was starting to understand that the country’s strict Muslim façade didn’t have much to do with the day-to-day reality.
The previous night had started innocently enough. I’d been invited to drinks at a hotel bar with a few new arrivals. They’d just joined a local architecture firm, and were being shown around town by their Qatari boss. A private table had been booked at a hotel bar, and I was to meet everyone around 9pm.
It was a solid, respectable plan. But like a lot of things in Qatar, it went sideways pretty quickly, and got weird soon thereafter. By midnight we had abandoned the cocktail bar for a VIP table at the upstairs nightclub. As the drinks flowed and the tequila shots came out, the Qatari boss started passing around bumps of coke and hitting on his new female staff.
Dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt, he looked just like the other middle-aged Arabs sliding around the dance floor with a bottle of champagne in one hand, and a twenty-something girl in the other. When the club lights eventually came on at 2:30am he insisted we continue the party. That meant piling into his luxury SUV and holding on for life as he drunkenly swerved through city traffic, the suburbs and vast industrial stretches before pulling up outside a rundown block of apartments on the edge of the desert.
We knocked on one of the doors, there was a brief discussion in Arabic, and we were all ushered into a cramped living room full of Sudanese guys rolling weed and watching hip hop videos while random Eastern European girls hung around looking bored.
The Qatari boss disappeared into a side room with one of his new female staff soon after, leaving me with a joint in my hand, a room full of strangers and growing sense of unease. More guys showed up soon after, and the atmosphere gradually began to shift from drunken after-party to something more menacing and paranoid.
When one of the Sudanese guys began demanding everyone’s name and who had invited them, I decided it was probably time to up and leave. A fight in the kitchen provided a suitable distraction, and I used the opportunity to slip out the back door and begin walking back towards town. It would be almost an hour before a cab came past…
I spent three years in Qatar, working for a government-funded arts institution before returning home to Australia. And the one thing that always struck me was the huge disparity between daily life and my expectations going in.
Qatar’s online presence and the books I’d read before heading over, all painted the country as a safe, but boring, construction site. A developing nation where middle-aged British oil workers lived in compounds, the locals kept to themselves, and the most fun thing you could do a Friday night was catch a plane somewhere else. I quickly came to realise that wasn’t the case.
By 2012 Qatar was riding the crest of a huge and powerful wave. Rich beyond its wildest dreams, the country was leveraging its oil and gas reserves to drag itself into the 21st century. And just like Dubai before it, the country was moving at breakneck speed, trying to cram a century worth of social and economic progress into a short window of opportunity.
What had begun in 1995 with the arrival of a new Emir and his modernisation agenda had slowly gathered momentum, and when Qatar was named the host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, it formally introduced this small but wealthy kingdom to the rest of the world.
But what the outside world couldn’t see, and what the new hotels, shopping malls and construction efforts helped obscure, was the social upheaval taking in Qatar.
Bedouin tribes, which had etched out a sparse desert existence for centuries, suddenly found themselves trying to navigate a path between their religious roots and the allure of the modern world.
This book attempts to capture that brief moment in time. The uneasy mix of money, ambition and religion that all came together when a wealthy, isolated kingdom, opened its doors to the world.
You can find more tips on living and working in Qatar in my book — God Willing: How to survive expat life in Qatar.