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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
'A wonderful and sometimes devastating book ... sophisticated, nuanced, fair-minded and yet very hard hitting' SIMON KUPER, author of SOCCERNOMICS 'This will transport you to Qatar and teach you with humanity and empathy some of the dark truths about globalisation' BEN JUDAH, author of THIS IS LONDON 'John McManus is a remarkable, compelling writer' RORY STEWART, author of THE PLACES IN BETWEEN 'Wise, well informed, fair-minded and honest' PETER OBORNE, author of THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH AN INTIMATE PORTRAIT OF LIFE IN ONE OF THE WORLD'S RICHEST NATIONS AHEAD OF THE FIFA 2022 WORLD CUP Just 75 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity. Ahead of Qatar's time in the limelight as host of the 2022 FIFA Men's World Cup, anthropologist John McManus lifts a lid on the hidden worlds of its gilded elite, its spin doctors and thrill seekers, its manual labourers and domestic workers. The sum of their tales is not some exotic cabinet of curiosities. Instead, Inside Qatar opens a window onto the global problems - of unfettered capitalism, growing inequality and climate change - that concern us all.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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‘This is a wonderful and sometimes devastating book. John McManus takes us through Qatar from top to bottom, treating everyone he meets with equal respect no matter where they stand on the country’s ethnic hierarchy that he describes so well. The book is sophisticated, nuanced, fair-minded and yet very hard-hitting, and the writing is mercifully clear.’
Simon Kuper, Financial Times columnist and author of Soccernomics
‘Insightful and empathetic, McManus’s conversations with Qataris and expats shed deep insight into a land of extremes. Written on the eve of hosting the World Cup, Inside Qatar tells the story of the richest, hottest country in the world as it takes global centre stage. An outstanding book.’
Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History, Oxford University
‘This will transport you to Qatar and teach you with humanity and empathy some of the dark truths about globalisation.’
Ben Judah, author of This is London
‘If you want to understand Qatar read this very readable book. It is wise, well informed, fair-minded and honest about what it is like to live in this tiny city state.’
Peter Oborne, journalist and author of The Assault on Truth
‘John McManus is a remarkable, compelling writer – wry, alert to incongruencies, an elegant prose stylist – with an anthropologist’s concern for hidden structures, and a photographer’s eye for detail.’
Rory Stewart
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To Robin, Sinop and Margot
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Contents
A note on particulars
I wanted the book to be accessible for a general reader and so the transliteration of Arabic has been done with an emphasis on making it easy to read rather than strict accuracy. For the sake of consistency, I have used a capital and a hyphen for the widespread ‘Al-’ prefix (meaning ‘the’) in all names, places and companies. All dollar figures are US dollars.
I spoke English with everyone I met in Qatar, but very few of them were native English speakers. As far as possible I have left their own words, including idiosyncrasies, intact – not to poke fun or mock, but to convey what it is like to interact with others in English in Doha.
Not everyone I spoke to was happy having their name mentioned. When an asterisk follows the first use of a name, it indicates a pseudonym.
During the course of my research, I was a visiting fellow at Qatar University – an unpaid position. Aside from a one-off honorarium for taking part in a media conference at Northwestern University in Qatar, I did not receive payment from any Qatari institution.x
Maps
1
‘Excuse me, kind sir. I am very ill’
I have gone in the opposite direction.
Away from the coast, the skyscrapers, the world-class museums, the traditional Souq renovated to within an inch of its life. Past the building sites of $600-million stadiums, heading south-west, in search of the answer to a question: what is Qatar like for most people who live here?
As I turn off the expressway, proportions seem to stretch and grow. Roads become longer and straighter. Kilometres of highway unfold without a kink, flanked on the right by a strip mall and then on the left, across scrubby desert, by the squat forms of labour camps.
It is Friday, the one day a week that most people (but not all) have off in Qatar. I now start to see some of them – male workers coming and going. Some are in T-shirts and jeans, others shalwar kameez, a few in blazers.
I pull off the main road and into a large car park full of people and vehicles. I open the door and I’m hit by the dusty, humid air. There are car horns and chatter and a restless, tense energy.
What is this place? Who are these people?2
In a sense I can answer these questions easily: this is the Industrial Area, the district of Doha reserved for its most numerous residents – the men working low-income jobs. More specifically, this is ‘Asian Town’, the newly built complex of malls, an amphitheatre and a cricket stadium that is designed to keep them amused and away from the rest of the population.
But in another way I can’t answer these questions at all. Having arrived in Doha only days previously, I know nothing of years living apart from your partner and children; of being drawn by the lure of salaries many times what you could earn at home; of feeling disappointed, or worse – exploited, broken – by the ceaseless rotation of camp, bus and building site.
I leave the car and go into the small, covered arcade closest to me. I pass mobile phone vendors, jewellers, shops selling shoes, bags, consumer electronics – even oil-filled radiators, a puzzling sight on a hot spring day but one I would later come to understand after experiencing a Qatari winter. The noise is cacophonous, with passers-by chatting to each other as they promenade and shop assistants shouting at them as they go past.
‘Hello my friend!’
The use of English signifies this comment is aimed at me. I spin to see a young man, five-foot-five, beckoning to me from the entrance of his shop.
‘You want watch? Hublot. 240 rials [$65].’ With nothing better to do, I follow him inside. The shop seems to have a lot of everything. Overflowing shelves rise up to the low ceiling. There is a waist-high glass cabinet, and the man is gesturing manically 3at items laid out on its top. ‘You want scent? Or mobile? Or—this is Kuwaiti scent. Very special.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t use cologne.’
‘No, me neither,’ says the man in agreement. ‘You want sex ring?’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Sex ring. You can go for two hours.’
My mind cycles through the few things I know about Qatar. The population is overwhelmingly comprised of men, most of whom work six- or seven-day weeks and live in labour camps. Their contact with the opposite sex comes mainly in the form of the occasional interaction with a shop assistant or administrator. Workers have more opportunity for intimacy with each other, of course. But living four to eight people in a dormitory room does not exactly offer a lot of privacy.
‘I don’t want to go for two hours! Ten minutes is enough,’ I say, attempting to defuse the awkwardness with a joke.
The guy looks at me and shrugs.
‘OK, so you go for 30 minutes then you pull it off.’
I leave the shop and continue walking. There is a row of currency shops, their posters imploring me to send cash to loved ones in Africa and India. There are cafés selling Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Indian, Nepali and Filipino fare. One shop has a scrum unfolding inside. I watch as people tussle and shout to purchase various bulky, fluorescent suitcases. And everywhere there are men. They sit in clusters on the faded grass and stand in the arcades. They wander in twos and threes, arms round 4each other’s shoulders. They survey posters advertising music concerts and line up in huge queues at cash machines.
These are the men who have built Qatar. It is their tales that fill reports by human rights organisations and draw outrage in the West. It is on their backs that this peninsula the size of Devon and Cornwall, a place that even 30 years ago was a backwater, has become a country of villas, skyscrapers and football stadiums.
I’m finally where I want to be: in Doha to find out for myself what it’s really like. And yet I’m struggling. Now that I’m here in person, it feels less like reality and more an immersive video game. I can move around, challenge my senses, but only within a pre-calculated range of interactions, all of which are superficial and slight. I grab a tea from a shop and sit at the benches inside. Looking at the people, I try to find a way in, but the man my age sitting opposite is absorbed by his phone. The greying men in skullcaps to my left are already deep in conversation.
During the rest of the week I occupy a different Qatar to the one these people inhabit. We are separated by walls – walls circling construction sites and walls around camps. Now those walls are removed, I’m beginning to understand that the physical separation is only half of it. It suddenly feels foolhardy to think that I will find a way to understand the lives of those on the other side. I shrink back out, aware of the scale of the challenge I’ve set for myself.
The car park has become busier. As the sun begins to set, queues are forming alongside big, white buses. Day trip over, workers line up ready to be whisked back to their accommodation.5
As I turn to leave, I am stopped by a man.
‘Excuse me, kind sir. I am very ill.’
He is wan-faced, the exhaustion round the eyes alerting me to the fact that he is telling the truth.
‘I had work accident and went to hospital. Tomorrow I go home to India but need to collect money for flight.’
He is holding his left arm slightly oddly. On cue, he pulls back the long sleeve and reveals a nasty-looking gash of around nine inches tracing up his inside arm. It has been partially stitched, but towards the top a small white bandage has worked free of its moorings, revealing raw and exposed skin.
I get out my wallet and give him 50 rials, around $14. He takes it without thanks and launches into another spiel.
‘My family. And I’m 200 short—’
He pulls out a large wad of notes and folds my money in.
‘Fifty is good, but if you could give 50 more then I will only be 100 short …’
I can feel the pricks of irritation. I expected him to be grateful. Fawning, even. The empathy that he should evoke is missing, and I’m not sure why.
I tell him I don’t have any more cash.
In my pocket the money laughs, aware of the lie.
‘OK sir, thank you.’
He wanders off. My shame lingers.
I had yet to learn an important principle of Qatar, at least for people from my background: if you want to live here guilt-free, then you’d better cultivate steely detachment.6
7I remember precisely where I was when Qatar was awarded the right to host the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup.
It was a December morning in 2010. I was sat with my brother in my parents’ living room in Leicester, watching the TV with incredulity and amusement. I had heard of Qatar before, but I’m not sure I could have told you much about the place. Small, its wealth derived from petrochemicals, I probably could have guessed. But that would have been it.
It was eight years later that I first visited. Like most football fans, I had spent the intervening time following the news stories that accompanied FIFA’s surprising decision to award the contest to Qatar: the accusations of corruption in the bid; the exploitation of workers building the stadiums, unpaid wages, unexplained deaths. That period had also seen me move to Turkey, write a book about football in that country and try – with mixed success – to carve out a niche as a social anthropologist writing about sport in the Middle East. Given all this, I felt almost obliged to get to know the place that would host the Arab world’s first football World Cup.
Coming in to land, I asked the air hostess who had sat down opposite me what Doha was like. She laughed nervously.
‘Well … haha.’
My first trip unfolded in a haze of the surreal and mundane. I swam in a November sea the temperature of bath water, drank coffee with consultants in the atriums of world-class museums and attended a top-division football match where I counted a grand total of 116 spectators. All the while, I couldn’t shake 8the feeling that a certain experience was being curated for me. From my interactions, it would have been impossible to know that Qatar’s population was 72 per cent male or that, in one of the world’s richest countries, many get by on earnings of around 1000 rials ($275) a month. From my air-conditioned taxis, I would look out on the men in overalls sweating and at the walls of enormous villas and I could sense that I was only getting part of the story.
Early mornings were spent on a computer in a coffee shop where I befriended the Nepali barista, Bishnu*, who was little more than a boy, thin as a rake, with a fluff moustache. Bishnu hated the food provided by his company, liked American customers (‘If they knock something over, they clean it up. Not asking you to do it’) and when he first arrived in Doha it wasn’t the heat or the dust that disconcerted him so much as the lack of animals. ‘It was four or five months before I saw a dog!’ he told me disbelievingly.
Bishnu explained the hierarchy by which the potpourri of Qatar is organised.
‘So who’s at the top?’
‘Of course, the Qatari. Second, European countries and the US. Third, other Arab countries and nationalities.’
I had already grasped that categorising individuals like this was not only encouraged but expected in Doha. Racial logic is visible everywhere. All security guards are black Africans. ‘All Asians cook smelly food,’ I was told by my estate agent, herself Asian. In a 2020 report, the UN special rapporteur on racism 9described Qatar as operating ‘a quasi-caste system based on national origin’. It made me intensely uncomfortable, but resisting it was a bit like trying to hold back the sea.
‘Fourth is like Philippines.’
‘Why are they next? Because they speak good English?’
‘No! Because their government is strong. The embassy is strong. The fifth, always Nepal, India, Sri Lanka.’
I waited for him to continue but he added, ‘That’s it.’
‘You’re at the bottom?’
Bishnu let out a cathartic laugh.
‘Yeah.’
I let Bishnu in on my plan. That I wanted to learn what Qatar was really like. To prise apart the different layers of experience, uncover how life truly unfolds for people living and working here. ‘Does that sound crazy?’
‘Yes!’ he replied with a laugh.
‘Why?’ I asked, a little hurt at his reaction.
‘Well,’ said Bishnu, gearing up to be tactful.
‘Some people you don’t need to ask. You can see their situation. And you feel the pain.’
I arrived back home in Turkey and set to work. I wrote project outlines and grant applications. I applied for scholarships and research awards, one of which a non-profit anthropology foundation decided to fund. I would spend a year in Doha. It wasn’t a great expanse of time, but it was long enough, I reasoned, to seek 10out some of the complexities. As the World Cup approached and all nuance was lost under the waves of promotion and condemnation of Qatar, I wanted just to listen – to the stories of people who have made it their home.
In all of my preparation, I hadn’t come across a book that did this. Academics have produced works analysing Qatar’s economic and foreign policies; journalists have investigated allegations of corruption in its World Cup bid; both camps have scrutinised the nation’s purported link to Islamic extremism. What was missing, I felt, was a book about what Qatar is actually like as a place to live. How does it feel to move around Doha as an Indian, a Briton, a white man, a brown woman, a cleaner or a minor royal? What are the hopes and dreams of those living in the skyscrapers and the labour camps? Do any of them ever encounter each other for more than a fleeting moment?
This is a book written by an outsider, for outsiders. As such, it is necessarily selective. The book is also, despite my best efforts, male-dominated – a consequence of Qatar’s lopsided gender ratio and the conversations opened up (or closed down) by being a man. But as well as limitations, there is under-appreciated utility in being an outsider. I faced a steep learning curve, yes, but being fresh to Qatar was in some ways a blessing. It allowed me to assess the lay of the land before I became too habituated to its idiosyncrasies, too bogged down by its baggage.
I arrived in Doha in the midst of the country’s biggest modern crisis. At dawn on 5 June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt announced that they were 11severing all diplomatic ties with Qatar. Land, air and sea routes were cut. It was the biggest disruption in Gulf relations in a generation.† There had long been simmering tension between Qatar and its neighbours, in particular over Qatar’s support for Islamist groups that were seeking to topple Arab dictators. But the severity of the action came as a surprise. Reliant on other Gulf states for everything from concrete to cow’s milk, Doha had to scramble to adapt. The blockade hit the real estate and tourism sectors particularly hard. But it also forced companies to seek out new markets and stoked national pride as locals – and even foreigners – rallied round Qatar’s leader, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.‡ The embargo would come to a partial end in January 2021. But being in Qatar in the years prior to this point felt a bit like walking into a bar after a particularly brutal brawl and wincing at the destruction.
Even against that troubled backdrop, the Qatar I got to know felt like a modern-day boom town, a global Wild West, with both the promise and the iniquity that the historical parallel conjures. I want to do justice to the diversity that I saw and experienced around me. That of course means telling the stories of the people who wished they had never come: those cheated 12out of livelihoods, abused, deported, exploited – these stories should be told until the day that no one suffers them. But not everyone’s experience of Qatar is negative. And so it also means including the tales of the hustlers and the lovers, the do-gooders and bullshitters, the preachers and armchair philosophers, the entrepreneurs and adventurers whom I also encountered. ‘Qatar is like sweet poison,’ a Pakistani businessman once told me, capturing the country’s mix of allure and danger.
Looking back, my despair on that first trip to the Industrial Area was overcooked. I did get to meet many interesting people: labourers, cleaners, engineers, nannies, IT consultants, bureaucrats, taxi drivers, DJs, teachers, priests, public relations managers, football coaches, hoteliers – all living variegated versions of the Qatari Dream. I also met Qataris, the privileged few who struggle to make sense of the conservatism, opulence and diversity that is all around them. The sum of their tales is not some exotic cabinet of curiosities but a glimpse of life on the coalface of globalisation.
The people of Qatar have much to teach the rest of us. They show the corrosive effects of inequality, the insatiability of hope and the fallacy of believing that you will be judged by your individual actions alone. They show how good people perpetuate broken systems – and the bravery required by those who want to change the status quo. But perhaps most of all, the people of Qatar force us to reflect on many of the global problems – of unfettered capitalism, growing inequality and climate change – that concern us all.
† There is much debate – driven by petty nationalisms – over the name of the region we are talking about. Should it be called the Persian or Arab Gulf? I don’t want to get involved and so will just call it ‘the Gulf’. I trust the reader to know I’m not talking about the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Alaska or any other Gulf.
‡ The name of Qatar’s royal family, the Al Thani, has no hyphen because the ‘Al’ means ‘house of’ rather than ‘the’.
2
‘Now, everybody they like falcon’
Nasser* is talking to me as we rush out of Doha in his four-by-four, down eight-lane highways paved in immaculate tarmac.
‘What you think for yourself, the falcon is thinking the same,’ he says with the cadence of someone used to being listened to.
‘The falcon, he don’t like to look at the sun direct. The falcon is like a child from the beginning … if he’s tired he will be crying; if there is any pain he will cry. Many things about the falcon—’ Nasser seems to feel a rush of sensation. It overwhelms him, causing him to stop speaking.
‘It’s very difficult to talk with you everything at the same time.’
Nasser likes falcons. He owns twelve. I’ve just watched his Bangladeshi helpers rush around loading three of them into the jeep. And now we are heading to the desert, where Nasser trains his birds.
Nasser turns to check on the falcons sat in the back. He has a Roman nose that takes up most of his face, the rest of his head being closed off by a tightly wrapped white headdress. ‘Tah!’ he exclaims.
Nasser trains his birds to perch on the seats of the car facing backwards, in order to protect their long tail feathers from 14damage if he drives over a bump. But one has spun itself forward. Taking his right hand off the wheel, he leans back and gently nudges the bird back round. Its tail drops into the footwell where it oscillates gently, like a toddler’s wiggling legs.
‘This one is new,’ he offers by way of explanation.
The trip is my first time going to watch falcon training. In my initial months in Qatar I have tried hard to befriend Qataris. I’ve attempted to muscle in on conversations, injected myself into proposed trips and plans. The reactions have all been the same: unfailingly polite, but invitations have not been forthcoming. Until, that is, I started to become interested in falcons.
Historically an important part of Bedouin life, falconry has recently undergone a renaissance in Qatar, as it has across the whole Gulf region. These birds of prey have become a hobby and status symbol, a source of bonding among men (women are conspicuously absent in the falconry world) and totems of the nation. There is a society in Doha dedicated to their development, the headquarters shaped like the hood that owners place over the heads of their birds to keep them quiet. Qataris race their best specimens in competitions where the prizes are brand new Land Cruisers. When they are unwell, there is a state-subsidised falcon hospital that can handle 1,000 birds a week. If you watch any promotional video of the country – and if you are here for a year, you will see many – there will be the metamorphosis of something into a falcon, or a falcon into something. Lush computer graphics of birds and shots of the desert confirm that they are one and the same.15
I want to understand what it is about these birds. Why are they so revered? Helen Macdonald, author of the bird-memoir H is for Hawk, has noted how encounters with animals are really encounters with ourselves – who we think we are and who we want to be. Qataris and falcons: in my head, the two have fused. Understanding falcons will help me understand Qataris: citizens of one of the wealthiest nations in the world by GDP per capita;* a people who make up only 11 per cent of the population of their own country; custodians of possibly the most rapid development of anywhere on earth, now struggling to carve a role for themselves out of the swirling vortex they’ve set in motion.
‘Now, everybody they like falcon.’
We race out of the city. Past the old palace at Al‑Rayyan, past the intersection with the shopping mall, past the turning at Al-Shahaniya for the camel racing track, heading west.
‘Maybe before, with the life it’s very difficult, the falcon is for the rich people,’ Nasser tells me. ‘Now, alhamdulillah, thanks God, everything gets good. Everybody they are working, they are with salary, they can buy. But, still, if you have a lot of money you can buy very nice falcons.’
16I clarify what a lot of money is. Over $100,000, I am told.
‘But also here, the people they like each other. Sometimes they buy the falcon and send it, like a gift,’ adds Nasser. He gestures to one of the birds in the back, which was given to him by a friend. He knows precisely how much it cost: 128,000 rials, around $35,000. I quip that he must be a good friend and Nasser shrugs. ‘This is normal between the people here.’
Until the mid-20th century, Qatar was one of the poorest places on the planet. With a climate unsuited to growing almost anything, it had an economy based around pearl diving, an industry that collapsed in the space of a decade as a result of the development of Japanese cultured pearls and the 1929 Wall Street crash. By 1940, the population of Doha – never particularly big – had sunk to less than 16,000. The situation was so parlous that the ruler at the time, Sheikh Abdullah Al Thani, had to take out a mortgage on his own house. Then after the bust came the boom. Geologists working for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company discovered oil onshore at Jebel Dukhan in 1939. In 1949, oil exports began and Qatar commenced the journey from poor backwater to modern entrepôt.
The road is becoming more spindle-like. The traffic has thinned out. Instead of buildings we are now flanked by desert – not the large sand dunes of the imagination but a plain dotted with scrub. We pull off the tarmac road and onto a track that bumps and winds across the flat land. All this time, the falcons have been sitting patiently in the back. They are so quiet that I 17am only reminded of their presence by the occasional nibbling of the seat cushion or puffing out of feathers.
The short-wave radio suddenly crackles into life. Nasser picks up the mouthpiece and replies. We are within range of his brother and friends.
Training our eyes forwards, specks appear. A couple of four-by-fours, maybe a kilometre apart, move in tandem across the land. As we get closer, I begin to see two dots in the sky ahead of the jeeps. They keep rising and falling, occasionally crossing paths. Nasser straight away picks out that it’s a falcon closing in on a pigeon.
‘You see the wing? He’s very strong – this is the peregrine.’
Globally there are more than 60 species of falcon, ranging from small kestrels to hulking gyrs. Despite the superficial resemblance to other birds of prey, such as hawks, eagles and vultures, the falcon family is distinct. In the Gulf, two kinds of falcons dominate: sakers and peregrines, known in Arabic as saqr and shaheen. Both subscribe closely to the classic idea of the falcon: large, regal, with a fierce beak and tapered wings. In both species, females are a third larger than males. Consequently, all birds used for hunting are females, despite Nasser’s persistent use of the male pronoun.
Falcons used to be exclusively caught from the wild. Then in the 1970s, in response to near-extinction, humans worked out how to artificially inseminate them in captivity. The process involves elaborate choreography whereby a handler builds a bond with a male bird by bowing and chirping like a courting female falcon. If successful, the bird copulates with a latex 18hat worn by the handler. Its sperm is taken up in a pipette and deposited in the female. Nasser isn’t so keen on the farmed birds.
‘If you are going for the top falcon, it’s from the wild. From the wild, he’s learning with his mother and father, flying with him in open area. But from the farms, he cannot fly too much. Only in the pen.’
The trade in wild birds is discouraged but still rampant. ‘In Qatar there are no regulations, it’s open season,’ a French breeder once told me. I ask Nasser about the legality of purchasing wild falcons. ‘Sometimes it’s illegal,’ he answers enigmatically.
The rise of falconry in the Arabian Gulf is normally given a functional explanation: it was a necessary means of survival, a way in which nomadic people could add a bit of protein to their otherwise sparse diet by using the birds to catch small mammals. But this prosaic rendering overlooks the clear spiritual and social importance of falconry in the Middle East. Falconry appears in the Quran, which says that believers can eat ‘what you have taught your hunting birds and beasts to catch’. In the 9th century a whole genre of hunting poetry emerged, called tardiyyat, in which the birds are frequently mentioned. Falcon imagery has been incorporated into objects as diverse as rings, coins, statues and religious standards. Clearly, for many centuries, falconry has fulfilled both sustenance and spiritual needs across the Islamic world.
As we join the entourage of vehicles, the falcon succeeds in its chase. It grabs the pigeon and both hit the ground. I expect a tussle but as we pull up next to it, the work is done. The falcon is 19stood upright as if posing for a photo, the pigeon pinned under its talons, already dead.
A man hops out of the other car. He is in his fifties, all wrinkles and smiles, carrying an air of the countryside due to the worn, beige-coloured jacket he wears over his thobe, the white, ankle-length garment that all Qatari men wear.† Nasser’s brother, I assume (we are never formally introduced). A halo of feathers, mostly pigeon, surrounds the birds. The man levers his gloved arm under the falcon and manages to pull the prey out of its talons – no mean feat as the bird’s toes have a tendon mechanism that operates like a ratchet. The falcon quietly observes him as he produces a pocketknife and hacks off the pigeon’s head. He then places the body of the bird in the fist of his glove and holds it out. Without hesitation, the falcon hops onto his hand and dives its beak into the cavity where the pigeon’s head once was. There are crunches and cracks as it hungrily eats. It lifts up its head, red entrails smeared across the tip of its beak.
‘Doctor! What you say?’ he calls cheerfully to me.
‘… It’s good!’ I find myself spluttering, a bit unsure of what I’ve just witnessed.
Everything in Qatar changed when the oil – and later gas – began to flow. So profitable is the income from hydrocarbons that the Qatari government has no need to tax individual citizens. Qatar jealously protects its wealth by making citizenship by birth or naturalisation next to impossible to obtain. Mechanisms have 20been created for distributing the largesse in the form of free university education, generous gifts of land and well-paid jobs in the state sector. Politically, the wealth has tempered demands for democracy (Qatar is an autocratic monarchy, political parties are banned and its constitution gives near-absolute powers to the emir – the head of state). Socially, the change in lifestyles has been destabilising. Elderly Qataris who remember having no running water watch as their grandchildren race Ferraris down Doha’s streets. There has been a huge influx of migrants who came firstly to work in the extraction industries but then in construction, hospitality and retail. The population of Qatar has roughly doubled every decade. In November 2021 it stood at close to 2.7 million, of which Qataris were believed to number between 300,000 and 350,000.
It is within this context of rapid change that contemporary falconry should be understood. Every day in Qatar, a battle is being waged within the small community of nationals over the question: who are Qataris and what do they stand for? Hawking, its proponents argue, is one of the few shared cultural touchstones, a thread linking present and past, and consequently an important receptacle for passing on Qatar’s traditional values of thrift, self-denial and egalitarianism. Flying falcons is an easy, visual way of marking oneself as Qatari. It is a hobby not open to the other 89 per cent of the population.
It’s now Nasser’s turn. Or, rather, the turn of one of Nasser’s falcons.21
22He goes to the back of the jeep and takes out a silver box half the size of carry-on airport luggage. The clasps open with a snap. Inside is expensive-looking electrical equipment padded liberally with foam. Nasser extracts a delicate antenna, perhaps fifteen centimetres long. With the help of his brother he attaches it to the tail of the bird.
‘Very dangerous with the wind now.’
He gets his phone, swipes and taps and it starts emitting a bleep. He’s activated a tracking app.
‘If the falcon moving somewhere, you leave him here but you cannot catch him in maybe 50 kilometres.’ Nasser mimics with his hand an object being swept away. ‘The wind will take him.’
I think of how precarious the human hold is over these birds. You shell out a small fortune and attach transmitters but still an unanticipated gust or a moment’s inattention can see them gone.
The other man removes the bird and drives away with her. Here at his car, Nasser opens the bonnet. He then takes a falcon glove and a piece of raw pigeon – all red, pink and bulbous – and places both on top of the engine.
‘It’s better if the pigeon is warm.’
Nasser then gets out a piece of rope perhaps eight-foot long with a lure tied on the end, a codpiece of feathers known as a tilwah.
The feathers on the tilwah come from the houbara, a sand-coloured bustard native to the region, although no longer living in the wild in Qatar due to overhunting. Pigeons are the main prey for falcons but that’s only due to their abundance; what 23most Qataris want to catch are houbara. So keen are they to hunt the birds that groups from the Gulf organise hawking trips to lands where they are more plentiful – Azerbaijan, Iraq, Pakistan. These trips can take on lavish proportions, costing millions of dollars and involving hundreds of people camped out in a mini city of tents. The desire of Gulf men to hunt with falcons can even have geopolitical implications. During a 2014 hunt in Pakistan, Saudi Prince Fahd bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz killed 2,100 houbara over 21 days, about twenty times more than his allocated quota, sparking a diplomatic incident. The following year, nine members of the Qatari royal family were kidnapped by Iranian militias while hunting houbara in Iraq. To get the hostages released, the Qatari state is reported to have paid $360 million in cash and forced the proxies they were supporting in the Syrian civil war – who were fighting Iranian-backed forces – to make several battlefield concessions.
A crackle of radio informs us that the bird is about to be released. Nasser readies himself, twirling the tilwah and making high-pitched yelps.
At first, I can’t see anything. Then, emerging out of the wind and the fading light is a small black object going at a clip. Falcons are the fastest beings on the planet. When they dive, they can reach speeds of over 160 miles per hour. Every detail about these birds seems scarcely credible: a kestrel can see a two-millimetre-long insect at eighteen metres away on account of eyes so large their backs press into each other in the middle of the skull; when a falcon pulls out of a dive it experiences gravitational force 24equivalent to over 25Gs (human pilots black out over 7Gs); they migrate so far that Siberian peregrines have been found wintering in South Africa (during their annual migration, birds often land on ships and hitch a ride). Given all this, today’s training must feel rather tame for the bird.
Nasser’s falcon is honing in on the tilwah. Nasser gives it a yank, shifting its direction and the falcon suddenly zips past and banks away into the sky. She then takes another dive from the opposite angle. Nasser tugs the tilwah again and the bird arcs back into the sky. After doing this four or five times, Nasser lets the lure rest on the floor while he goes and grabs the glove with the meat from the car engine. The falcon swoops in and grasps the tilwah in a tangle of claws and feathers. Nasser then crouches down and substitutes the glove and the pigeon meat for the lure. The crunch of bones and sinew follows.
When we climb back into the four-by-four, Nasser is visibly more at ease.
‘Now he will relax. If he’s relaxed, I’m relaxed!’
The bird rides up front, on the armrest between Nasser and me, the plume on her hood looking faintly ridiculous. There’s something about Nasser’s smiles and the falcon’s carriage that make the journey feel like a regal procession – the victorious hunter returning home.
Our destination is barely a kilometre away, a group of objects that Nasser keeps calling his camp. But ‘camp’ 25evokes too bucolic and rudimentary a scene. As we pull up, I count ten trailers parked in a large square. There is a scattering of service tents surrounding a larger entertaining tent modelled on a majlis, a lounge where guests are received and consultations happen among men. This tent has the added benefit of a fireplace and a 60-inch flat-screen TV. The compound is criss-crossed by paths of elaborate decking, so that you don’t have to tread in the sandy scree, and lit by heavy-duty spotlights that are starting to flicker into operation. It is not something you could fling up in a day.
Sat in a collapsible picnic chair in the middle of the compound is a younger Qatari man in his twenties. In his hands is a large remote control, like the kind a small kid would use to direct a racing car. In front of him, on the ground, one of the Bangladeshi helpers is setting up a drone. He folds out the six legs, each with a propeller on the end.
No one introduces me to the four Bangladeshi men who are working at the camp. Nor did Nasser introduce me to the three men who prepared the jeep for our trip. Yet the entire endeavour of falconry – like everything in Qatar – rests on the labour of these people. It is Bangladeshi home helpers who feed, water and lock the birds up at night. Indian veterinarians and anaesthetists give them endoscopies and injections when they’re unwell. Sri Lankan and Nepali cleaners patrol the tents at festivals, wiping up their shit. Falconry is presented as a solely Qatari pursuit. The political geographer Natalie Koch believes that the erasure of non-Qataris from falconry is a coping strategy ‘to assuage 26the anxiety of citizen-nationals about their minority status’. If outsiders must be acknowledged, then it is only in ancillary roles: as servants helping make it happen or, like me now, as guests cooing and clucking their appreciation.
The Bangladeshi guy takes a piece of wire or string maybe fifteen feet long. Halfway down its length is a small, deflated parachute with something at the end which looks like a pigeon. I peer closer. It is a pigeon, but a pretend one, a cuddly toy. He checks everything is secure and then backs away.
The man in the chair jams back the joystick, sending the drone whizzing angrily into the air. It pulls the string with the parachute and the pigeon after itself. A falcon is let loose and immediately starts going after the pigeon.
‘Habibi yes! Yalla!’ shouts someone. Baby, yes! Come on!
Then, a groan. The falcon has had its attention diverted by a real-life pigeon that flaps across the sky perpendicular to the drone.
Contrary to my expectations, it’s actually very difficult for a falcon to catch a pigeon. The pigeons in Qatar are not the obese vermin that you accidentally kick when leaving a London branch of McDonald’s, but rather sleek racing pigeons. They often have too much gusto and stamina for falcons which, like highly tuned dragsters, burn bright but then give up after a few minutes. Close to two-thirds of young wild falcons die in their first year, mostly from starvation, a fact that seems completely contrary to their legend as the world’s most successful hunter.27
The bird grows tired of the real pigeon. Chasing the fake one is a less strenuous prospect, given that it’s bobbing invitingly under the drone around a kilometre up in the sky. After some simulated dogfighting impelled by the man in the chair, the falcon grabs the doll pigeon, the line detaches and bird and toy go twirling together to the earth, the parachute lending the descent a slow grace.
After retrieving and feeding the bird, Nasser gives me a tour of his camp in the rapidly fading light. He gets most excited when showing me the place where they have their campfires.
‘We are in the desert,’ he declares theatrically, a twinkle in his eye.
‘The sky—’ he can’t find the word and so gestures at the encroaching night.
‘Then we start talking. Talking about the past or talking about anything in life. This is night in the desert.’
If the falcon is an object used to quell anxiety over what it means to be Qatari, then the backdrop for this performance is the desert. The Qatari state plays a role in the mythologising. At the National Museum of Qatar they have an exhibition detailing how, in old times, families would spend winter in the desert herding animals, and summer on the coast taking part in the pearl harvest. There is an easy omission of the histories of the non-nomadic inhabitants of the peninsula, such as the businessmen with familial links to India or the Iranian ship builders. That would complicate the narrative. The way the past and present are discussed seems to manufacture opposites – desert/city, 28original/new, Bedouin/urbanite – with the lingering sense that the former might have been better.
29In the way Nasser talks, I begin to understand that his camp takes its cue from this mythologising. It is a redoubt. An escape from the city, with its capitalism, consumption and cosmopolitan churn.
‘Life is difficult … You have to work hard to keep your money. Money like blood for the humans, really. You cannot move without money.’
I find myself conflicted. How much political and ecological damage is done in pursuit of the chimera of an authentically ‘Qatari’ space? If feels less like the desert is being respected and more like it’s being conquered. The peninsula is dotted with hundreds – possibly thousands – of these camps, making true wilderness hard to find. Another popular pastime is ‘dune bashing’ – using four-by-fours or buggies to drive fast up and down huge sand dunes. On weekend afternoons the mounds of Khor Al-Adaid, a UNESCO nature reserve, echo to the roar of engines. Maybe it’s not the desert but the technology that is the star of the show. This expanse of barren land totally shaped life on this peninsula for millennia. Now, with air conditioning and four-by-fours, it feels like people no longer have to respond to its diktats.
Then again, a few months after my day of falconry I had the chance to spend a night in the desert with another Qatari. Driving in, the land looked like something out of a Neil Armstrong photograph. On the horizon, other camps were small clusters of 30light. They maintained a magical allure, glistening like ships on a sea. In the morning we awoke to fog so thick the driver lost his way and we got stuck in a sand drift. It was a reminder that the desert is not wholly passive. It can shred car tyres and make you drive around in circles. Falcons often fly away, never to be found.
On the drive back to Doha, Nasser shares his views on how Qatar has altered.
‘It changed very quickly, very quickly.’
Some of this change has his approval. He likes the latest technologies. But other elements cause him concern.
‘Everything is free now, I don’t like everything to be free … Like women, too much free. Children are free.’
Qatar is not as restrictive a country as Saudi Arabia. Women have been allowed to drive, albeit under certain conditions, for several decades. They’re encouraged by the state to work. Three times as many Qatari women as men graduate from university. Yet at the same time, most Qataris adhere to various schools of Wahhabism, an austere, ultra-conservative movement that eschews even music and shaving as part of the return to a ‘purer’ form of Islam. The country is shaped by highly patriarchal notions of family. Women require the approval of a male guardian – usually their father or husband – to marry, study abroad or, in many cases, even to obtain a driving licence.
‘Now, if my son he need to go and drink alcohol, I cannot stop him,’ continues Nasser. ‘Before I can stop. Now, the government, they say, “No, this is not your responsibility. After eighteen, he’s responsible for himself.”’31
Faced with the proliferating number of paths available to them, Qataris fracture along different lines – and not simply by generation. Within families, liberal fathers despair at their sons’ religious zealotry; twenty-something daughters chafe at having to obtain written permission from their fathers before being permitted to leave the country. Nasser marvels at how his fourteen-year-old son behaves.
‘When he’s sitting with you, he speaks with you about the politics, he speaks with you about the business. All the time, the child— they like the business!’
The world his son inhabits is miles away from Nasser’s life with his safe government job – good hours, no hassle – and even further away from his own father’s.
‘With my dad it was different. My dad was too much strong,’ he chuckles. ‘We were afraid of him too much. In that time, if you are not listening to your father he will hit you. Now he cannot hit you.’
Despite acknowledging the fear he felt, Nasser sounds rueful.
‘Different life. Different 100 per cent.’
Our journey to the desert is being re-wound – from track to spindle road, spindle to highway. Wide horizons and stars morph back into overpasses and streetlights. We drive past a man stood next to a parked car. In a flash Nasser flares up.
‘See, this is Indian. He is stopped and doing something wrong in the street.’32
I failed to see what happened, although I flinch inwardly at the instant racial profiling. Nasser tells me angrily that the man was urinating by the side of the road.
‘I can make trouble for him … I can stop, call the police, “Come, please, take this man.”’
It’s a terrifying glimpse of the power that Qataris feel they have over others. Non-Qataris live under this shadow constantly, afraid that it will be brought to bear on them. And then, like a storm cloud on a blustery day, Nasser’s anger passes.
‘I’m not going for trouble.’
We are back in the suburbs, driving past gated compounds with villas poking over the tops of walls. Pulling up where we started, the Bangladeshi helpers approach the car. With a wave and a sharp tongue, Nasser gets them to unload the boxes and the birds. The falcons are brought to their home, a small outhouse maybe fifteen feet by eight, with sand on the floor and an air conditioning unit thrumming away. Each bird is tied to an individual perch set at distances across the floor. Their hoods are taken off. One helper is ordered to go and produce large saucers of water for them to drink. Qataris are perpetually worried about their birds becoming dehydrated, a not unreasonable concern when nursing an animal that breeds in Siberia through the Qatari summer.
Nasser then takes me on a tour of his compound: the outside seating area, the patriotic rock garden (‘I do the rocks, from my culture. My country, I bring these rocks’) the long bench, like a carpeted balancing beam, used as a perch for the falcons of his 33guests. The tour culminates in tea and dates in the majlis, a large structure reminiscent of a tent but sat on a concrete plinth and with doors, air conditioning and a thick carpet.
‘The majlis for the men,’ I am told. ‘For any man. It’s coming like your home.’
I am excited. Many people have told me about the importance of majalis (the plural of majlis) in Qatar. They are framed as the social centre, where men hang out and chat about life, politics, the universe. If you want to understand Qataris, people say, you need to be here. This is the first time I have been invited in. I excitedly wait to learn the secrets.
Inside, the room feels hangar-like. At one end, a huge TV screen is playing a Turkish soap opera. A stuffed houbara sits underneath looking on angrily. Two petrified Bangladeshi men are crouched on the floor by the stove in the corner preparing a constant supply of tea. Nasser leads me to the opposite end of the room – so far away that the sofa edge partly obscures them, giving them the appearance of being sat in a pit.
A procession of Qatari men turn up. First is an old guy who isn’t very friendly, then a man in his early forties, tall, with a neatly clipped beard and incredible English. Prompted by my last name, he wants to talk about Scotland.
‘How many Scottish tribes are there?’
‘Er …’
The word ‘tribe’ sounds odd in the Scottish context. The question, though, is revealing.
There are numerous tribes in Qatar, extended groupings 34tens of thousands of people large, to which individuals view themselves as belonging. Most important is the Al Thani (House of Thani), whose members have been de facto rulers of Qatar since the 19th century.‡ The rest are ranked and ordered by various contested categories and histories, including those who trace their lineage to the Bedouin tribes of the Qatar peninsula, those whose families come from settled communities, those who map their ancestry to tribes from elsewhere (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen) and those who are the descendants of slaves. Despite a national Qatari identity now beginning to exert a pull, tribe and family remain key to how Qatari politics, business and society functions.
We move on from Scottish tribes to kilts. Can I confirm that a true Scotsman doesn’t wear anything underneath?
All eyes on me. I would ruin everything by saying that I have no idea. I feel I can’t point out that, despite my Scottish granddad, I’ve been to Scotland fewer than half a dozen times in my life and have never worn a kilt. Instead, I nod. Nasser’s face exhibits shock.
Yet maybe it’s not so ridiculous having an Englishman pronounce on Scottish traditions. After all, kilts were invented in the 18th century by a Quaker from Lancashire called Thomas Rawlinson, and that other central element of Scottish culture – the differentiated ‘clan tartan’ – is an even later invention. It 35is only retrospectively that these objects have come to stand as symbols of Scottish culture in its entirety.
