The State of Qatar has been independent only since 1971. Along with Bahrain, Qatar decided against becoming another United Arab Emirate and the road less traveled has paid off royally. Like its Gulf neighbors, Qatar has grown rich on fossil fuels, especially natural gas but when we briefly visited twenty years ago, it seemed to have just lifted its head out of the desert sand. I say “briefly” because with the Doha 2006 Asian Games only days away—who knew?—hotel rates had tripled from what we expected. All the taxi drivers were in training for the expected crowds. The looks we got from the men just after Friday noon prayers—we saw no women that day—made us feel like the infidel outsiders we were. So, tails between our legs, we hotfooted it back to the airport and flew to Oman.
Doha today is a much different place—more people live in Doha now, about one million, than were in the entire country back in ‘06. Only one in five is a Qatari citizen so we don’t feel too out of place. Expats, who do all the heavy lifting, can make around $3000 a month while Qatari families average more than $200K annually, giving Qatar the fourth-highest GDP in the world. Doha—the entire country, for that matter—is modern with an impressive skyline, shopping malls and a burgeoning tourist industry. And it’s still growing!
Doha’s corniche is pristine compared to that of Cairo. Lots of green, no crumbling walkways, dhows of all shapes and sizes and the ever-present Doha skyline across the water. Memorializing the pearling history of Qatar is a giant oyster with a one-in-5000 pearl.
Ramada Encore is a bit out of the way but just a 15-minute walk from the restaurants and shops of Souk Waqif. The I. M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, where we spent much of Sunday, is across the busy road from the souq on the Corniche. There are scads of mom-and-pop groceries around and the Ramada even has a decent room service menu.
Whatever we missed in Riyadh with Thamer’s lectures on Islam and Mohammed (PBUH!) was covered in minute detail in the Museum of Islamic Art. And then some! Truth be told, we wanted to visit as much to see the architecture of I. M. Pei—who designed the Louvre’s (in)famous Pyramid—as the art itself but the museum turned out to be a gem. In addition to countless pages of Islamic calligraphy from the Qur’an, there is the actual textile which decorated the tomb of the Prophet in Medina, another that covered the door of the stone Ka’ba in the center of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and an actual Umra scroll recording a pilgrimage to Mecca.
