There, standing in a grey puddle of light under the glass-domed lounge at the Bayerischer Hof in Munich, Germany, former Afghan spymaster Amarullah Saleh understood the nation he had given his life to build was about to die. For almost a decade, the Taliban had enjoyed safe haven in Doha, operating a de facto embassy there with diplomatic protections. They received funds, drew up combat plans, and travelled to meet their top leaders in Karachi and Peshawar. The killing in Afghanistan, however, had continued without interruption—and President Ashraf Ghani wanted the jihadists gone.
He said as much to the Emir of Qatar during the Munich Security Conference in 2020. A smile on his face, the Emir replied: “Well, we have only permitted them to stay in Qatar. Everything else, including their expenses, is managed and overseen by the Central Intelligence Agency. If you want this to end, ask the CIA to stop.”
This week, Qatar’s role as peacemaker in the Middle East came under assault, as a squadron of Israeli combat jets targeted terrorist group Hamas’ headquarters, not far from Doha’s famous Corniche. The bombing took place just as Hamas was discussing a Gaza ceasefire proposal made by US President Donald Trump. There was no reaction from the formidable air defences at Al-Udeid air base, home to the Qatar Emiri Air Force, the United States Air Force, and the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force.
For decades, Qatar has sought security and prestige as the mediator between the United States and nations in conflict across the Middle East—sending billions of dollars to Hamas with the complete approval of the Israeli Prime Minister, funnelling cash to Benjamin Netanyahu’s aides, helping the Islamists who seized power in Syria, and exerting influence from Egypt to Libya and Tunisia.
As the world order threatens to buckle under new strains, however, peacemaking is becoming an ever more dangerous business. Earlier this year, Al-Udeid was struck by Iranian ballistic missiles, in retaliation for American attacks on that country’s nuclear infrastructure.
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The haven in the desert
“The Kaaba of the dispossessed”—that’s what the founding ruler of Qatar, Sheikh Jassim Bin Mohammed Bin Thani, once called his Emirate. Located at the fringes of the reach of two great empires, Britain and Turkey, Qatar had long provided safe haven to those who had reason to flee elsewhere, from pirates to traders and rebels.
Late in the nineteenth century, though, tensions between the tribes grouped around Sheikh Jassim and the Turkish rulers escalated. In 1892, Sheikh Jassim won an historic victory against Turkish forces, establishing himself as the region’s most important chieftain, historian Habibur Rahman recounts.
Inside months, though, the Sheikh would learn his imperial patrons were in decline. The British, committed to the defence of Bahrain, launched a pre-emptive attack on Sheikh Jassim’s forces in 1895. This established the British as the principal power in the Persian Gulf. Following the outbreak of the First World War, the Turks evacuated their last outposts in Qatar, after which Jassim’s Qatar became a British protectorate.
Like other Persian Gulf emirates, Qatar soon found itself confronted with the problem of creating a modern nation-state. The discovery of oil in 1939 eventually led to some revenues becoming available, but the entire country did not have a single modern school operational in that year, scholar David Roberts has written. The one educational institution was a seminary set up by the Saudi cleric Al-Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al-Manna, who also served as the Emirate’s sole judge.
The task of setting up an education system fell to Jassim Al-Darwish, a former student of al-Manna. The first school founded in Qatar was up and running in 1951, but had just 241 students, all boys, taught by six male teachers. To hire more recruits, Al-Darwish turned through his seminarian contacts to the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna. Al-Banna picked another Brotherhood member, Abdul Badi-Saqr, to head the building of an education system.
As Roberts notes, though, these hiring decisions were at least as much the consequence of opportunity as of ideological choice. The availability of educated Muslim Brotherhood cadre was the consequence of Egypt’s growing crackdown on the religious right-wing. Later, Khalifa Bin Hamad Al-Thani, who ruled from 1972 to 1995, also recruited Arab nationalists like the Syrian Abdullah Abd Al-Daim.
The West’s jihadists
The real force behind the hiring of Islamists, though, was the United Kingdom. Fearing Arab nationalism would prove a toxic influence, the British forced the sacking of Al-Daim. Then, in 1958, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Ezzeddin Ebrahim was appointed assistant director of knowledge, in charge of devising a school syllabus. The director of the Islamic Sciences division of the education department, Abdullah Bin Tukri Al-Subai, was despatched to the famous Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo to hire teachers. The most famous of his hires would turn out to be Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who emerged as a pole star for the Brotherhood in the Gulf.
Figures like Al-Qaradawi were to play a critical role in what became known as the Islamic Awakening of the 1970s, the ideological movement that laid the ground for the large-scale recruitment of Arab youth into the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, and later into national jihadist movements. Together with other influential figures in the Brotherhood, Al-Qaradawi would give religious sanction to so-called martyrdom operations.
Across the region, British influence was placing Islamists in similar positions of authority, part of a programme intended to roll back Communist influence. Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, gave Islamist leader Said Ramadan a radio slot and wrote the foreword to one of his books.
The Brotherhood repaid the favour, propagandising for Pakistani causes in the Middle East. Among other things, Al-Banna described the accession of Hyderabad and Kashmir to India as an illegitimate occupation of Islamic lands.
Yet the Brotherhood were not the only radicals to find safe haven in Qatar. Large numbers of Palestinians displaced from the West Bank and Gaza made a home there, wielding influence in the intelligentsia. Mohammad Yusuf al-Najjar and Kamal Adwan, both later assassinated by Israeli intelligence for their role in the 1973 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, spent many years in the Emirate.
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The final act?
Learning from Iraqi dictator Saddam Husain’s invasion of Kuwait that small, oil-rich states were also vulnerable, Qatar moved to tighten its links with the United States after 1990.
From 1996, Qatar sank billions of dollars into Al-Udeid air base, which currently hosts over 11,000 United States troops and more than 100 aircraft. And, when needed, Qatar has proved willing to moderate its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Following a bruising six-year spat with its neighbours Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which opposed the Brotherhood, Qatar agreed to scale down the visibility of the Emirate’s clients.
To many experts, it seems clear the Emirate’s alliance with Islamists is driven by a desire for glory. Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, who ruled from 1995 to 2013, sought to win global support for Qatar by bringing about an Israeli–Palestinian reconciliation. He saw himself, Gil Feiler and Hayim Zeev argue, as a kind of Islamist Gamal Abdul Nasser, the founder of a new kind of Arab identity.
Even if the current Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, isn’t driven by those messianic passions, he clearly understands Qatar derives its value from its parallel ties to Islamists and the West. In Afghanistan, Syria and Libya, Qatar succeeded in placing Islamists whom the West hopes it will be able to control. This is a dangerous place to be—but fate has placed the Emirate in a part of the world where there is no quiet place in shade to hide.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)