DOHA, Qatar — When 31-year-old Samir Shanny was growing up in West Bay, an area just north of this gleaming city’s central zone, there were only a few tall buildings and none of them sparkled the way the Qatari capital’s skyline has as host of the World Cup soccer tournament over the past month.
Mr. Shanny remembers being a kid who loved jumping on his bicycle, finding a few friends and trekking down endless dirt paths that extended across the Connecticut-sized Persian Gulf nation — paths that today are paved over by multi-lane highways linking Doha to a widening multitude of other new cities that have blossomed in the desert up since the 1990s.
“People only ever talk about the bad when it comes to Qatar,” Mr. Shanny said in an interview. “Nobody talks about how 20 years ago this was all desert and now it’s full of skyscrapers.”
Indeed, the lead-up to the World Cup saw international media outlets scrambling to accentuate the negative, document, whether it was the heat, the state of gender rights or the allegations of abuses suffered by many of the millions of foreign workers whom Qatari authorities relied upon to build the infrastructure and stadiums now hosting one of the world’s greatest sports spectacles.
Less attention has gone to the near-inconceivable transformation that Qatar itself has undergone over the past three decades — an evolution from sleepy Arab backwater to globally-connected power player featuring dozens of shiny skyscrapers, including the iconic and cylindrically-shaped Doha Tower that opened in 2012.
The transformation has only accelerated since Qatar shocked the world in 2010 by having its bid chosen to become the first Middle East nation to host the World Cup.
People who grew up here have a unique perspective largely overlooked by a world intently focused only on the soccer pitch.
“We have seen barren lands of sands turn into cities. Dead ends turn into a whole different world beyond Doha,” said Anushka Mohapatra, a graduate student in the United States who was born in Qatar.
“It’s almost nostalgic to see how much everything has changed, transformed and developed over time especially when Doha first won the [World Cup] bid, it seems so unreal,” Ms. Mohapatra said. “It’s been amazing and overwhelming in a way to see how Qatar has progressed and developed.”
Roots of a transformation
The roots of the changes, and the money that has financed them, actually go back decades before Mr. Shanny or Ms. Mohapatra were born.
Life changed forever in 1971 with the discovery just off Qatar’s Persian Gulf coastline of the largest known natural gas field on earth. The finding soon enriched the tiny nation and propelled its ruling monarchy to lay the ambitious groundwork for the dramatic growth and internationalization that now defines the place.
There were just 130,000, mostly poor and predominantly Arab people, living in Qatar in the early-1970s. By 2000, the population had more than quadrupled, with a widening patchwork of immigrants and guest workers from around the world — especially from impoverished corners of South Asia — beginning to pour into the country to satiate its need for labor.
As of 2022, there are nearly 3 million people in Qatar, with Doha home to a population of some 700,000.
During the World Cup, some have reflected on the transformation that’s been playing out their whole lives.
Kelandeth Abdulkader first landed in Qatar in 1960 at the age of 27. “I have grown up seeing the development of this country from a desert to a dreamland,” Mr. Abdulkader wrote recently in a firsthand report published by the Doha News.
Shamat Khan, who has lived in Qatar since the 1970s, marveled, “It’s wonderful! You cannot imagine. It grew so fast, and now it’s so beautiful. There was nothing here before the 2000s. There were very few roads and now they are everywhere.”
The pace of construction has been at times profoundly disorienting. Taxi drivers in Doha have been known over the years to complain they couldn’t find their way because traffic routes changed nightly as a result of constant development. Residents compare it to living in a construction project, alongside some 1.7 million mostly Nepali, Indian and Pakistani guest workers who did the vast bulk of the work.
Change at the top
It wasn’t just money that influenced the rapid transformations. Qatar’s initial development can be attributed to the two most recent emirs of the ruling monarchy, analysts say.
Since the 1800s, the House of Thani has been the ruling family.
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani overthrew his father, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad al Thani in a bloodless coup in 1995 and is credited with having “ushered in wide-sweeping political and media reforms, unprecedented economic investment, and a growing Qatari regional leadership role,” according to the CIA World Factbook.
The younger sheikh opened a previously inward-looking society to the world and transformed it from a very conservative Islamic country into a worldwide educational, developmental and commercial hub. He would go on to serve as the emir until 2013.
By the late 1990s, the Qatari government had also established Al Jazeera, the international news network that quickly brought a jolt of energy and controversy to the Arab-language television media piped into millions of homes across the Middle East.
Al Jazeera’s reporting gave Qatari leaders outsized influence over regional public opinion. The network is now one of the biggest players on the global media stage — and known for its critical coverage of the powers that be in the Persian Gulf, while delivering regularly neutral and even positive coverage of Qatar.
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, meanwhile, opened Qatar’s borders to the international community soon after taking power. In 2008, a pilot program was launched for a 2030 development vision through four interconnected initiatives, according to the Qatari Government Communication Office, focused on human, social, economic, and environmental development.
Qatar is currently the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas in the world, and the country’s exports of LNG, crude oil and other petroleum products account for a significant portion of government revenues. In 2021, “hydrocarbon revenue contributed around 37% of Qatar’s GDP, a 9% increase from 2020,” according to a recent report by the International Trade Association.
Architects from around the world have descended on Qatar since the late 1990s, hoping to make real Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani’s goal of Qatar becoming a world-class sports and education destination.
After officially receiving the bid for the World Cup back in 2010, the government intensified its plans to create a country of the future. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani — Sheikh Khalifa’s son and the current Emir of Qatar — has continued his father’s legacy of modernization.
Human rights and reforms
Qatari officials say they are now aiming to have the entire nation connected via “Qatar Rail” by the end of the decade. A Danish engineer working to build the network said the goal involves expanding a newly minted metro rail system beyond Doha and the surrounding cities to connect more of the country.
The Doha subway currently serves 37 stations on around 46 miles of track, all built in the last 12 years. at a cost of $36 billion. Roughly 60 more stations to be built by 2026. Plans have been made to connect the northern town of Al Khor with the southern town of Mesaieed as well as more western tracks west toward Industrial City — all to keep up with Qatar’s 2030 vision.
The World Cup is not the end goal: Qatar is eyeing a bid to host the 2036 Olympics as well as the world cricket championships. Officials say the infrastructure now in place, along with what’s now in the works, will only strengthen the bids.
But the campaign is likely to keep a bright spotlight of Qatar’s labor standards and its laws regarding gay rights. The country has enacted a raft of reforms in recent years, including the partial dismantling of a system that tied workers to their employers, and approved a minimum wage — changes praised by the U.N. as well as rights groups.
But critics say abuses, ranging from unpaid wages to harsh working conditions in one of the hottest countries on Earth, are still widespread, and that workers — who are barred from forming unions or striking — have few realistic avenues to pursue justice.
Human Rights Watch noted last month that Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, had admitted in a TV interview that there have been “between 400 and 500” migrant worker deaths in response to a question about deaths “in the last 12 years from any construction related…to the World Cup.”
“It was a striking admission from a Qatari official,” the New York-based advocacy organization said.
Education and sports
Qatar’s reach into international sports competitions is not their only focus. The Qatar Foundation, which was created in 1995, has employed different strategies to boost the country’s educational system and resources, including the creation of a new “Education City” focused solely on education.
By the mid-2000s, several universities from the United States, Europe, and around the Middle East had opened satellite campuses in Education City. “Investing in the human commodity is the most important thing,” foundation President Saad al-Muhannadi said in a 2014 interview with MEED, a Mideast focused publication.
“[The aim was] introducing quality educational programs and building research to be part of our culture,” he said. “That is why we are so keen on mandating that every program and initiative of Qatar Foundation has to have research and development and quality be part of it.”
QF also says its investment isn’t solely about academics. The foundation is also investing in sports for both men and women. It has specifically touted plans for a post-World Cup use of Education City Stadium as “a hub for sport, development and education and a home for women and girls sports at every level.”
But it is clearly sports that has kick-started Qatar’s effort to revamp its global image.
Qatar hosted the Asia Games, its first major international sporting event, in 2006 and claims to have since hosted over 600 international and regional events. In June, Qatar 2022 CEO Nasser Al Khater told Doha News that future plans include a world handball championship, a weightlifting title, and a Formula 1 auto race in the next decade.
QF official Alexandra Chalat wrote recently in the organization’s newsletter that the Qatari organizers are already considering how to build on the “legacy” of the World Cup, even with the matches yet to conclude.
“How are we using an event, where the world is watching, to enable genuine learning and development?” she wrote. “And how are we doing that amidst controversy, media backlash and cultural clashes?”
• Guy Taylor contributed to this report.
