Qatar

Qatar was a poor stretch of pearling and fishing villages, nominally under Ottoman and then British influence, with the Al Thani family emerging as its leading dynasty in the nineteenth century and a 1916 treaty making it a British protectorate. Oil, found in 1939 and exported from 1949, brought the first wealth; independence came in 1971, when Qatar chose to stay separate from the new UAE federation.

The real transformation was natural gas: Qatar sits on part of the world's largest gas field and, from the 1990s, built a massive liquefied-natural-gas industry that made it, per head, one of the richest countries on Earth. Under Sheikh Hamad, who ruled from 1995 to 2013, that wealth funded an outsized global profile — founding the broadcaster Al Jazeera, buying trophy assets worldwide through a sovereign wealth fund, hosting the forward base of the US military in the region, and pursuing an activist foreign policy that made Doha a venue for talks between adversaries and a refuge for exiled political figures.

Sheikh Hamad handed power in an orderly transition to his son Sheikh Tamim in 2013. From 2017 to 2021, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a land, sea, and air blockade on Qatar, which it weathered by deepening ties with Turkey and Iran before the rift was healed. In 2022 Qatar hosted the FIFA World Cup, the first in the Arab world, after a vast building programme that also brought intense scrutiny of the treatment of the migrant workers who built it, and it has since been central to Gaza ceasefire and hostage negotiations.

Qatari society is small, wealthy, and built on tribe, family, and a conservative Sunni Islam. National dress is worn with pride — the white thobe and headcloth for men, the black abaya for women — and majlis gatherings, cardamom coffee with dates, falconry, camel and Arabian-horse racing, and pearl-diving heritage remain touchstones even as daily life is thoroughly modern.

The state has invested heavily in culture and knowledge as a national project: I.M. Pei's Museum of Islamic Art and Jean Nouvel's desert-rose National Museum, the branch campuses of Education City, a busy calendar of art and sport, and, in Al Jazeera, a media voice out of all proportion to the country's size.

Ramadan reshapes the rhythm of the year, and the small citizen population — a minority in their own country — lives alongside a vast, stratified expatriate workforce that does most of the actual work.

Almost the entire population lives in or around Doha, a fast-built city of glass towers on the bay, ringed by planned districts, malls, and a new metro. Qatari citizens — perhaps one in eight residents — enjoy free health care and schooling, subsidised housing and energy, and largely government employment, alongside a "Qatarisation" push to bring more nationals into skilled private-sector roles.

Everyone else is an expatriate on a work visa, from South Asian construction and service workers at one end to Western and Arab professionals at the other, in a sharply layered society. Labour reforms passed before the World Cup — a minimum wage and an easing of the rules tying workers to one employer — were called significant but are unevenly enforced.

Life runs on the calendar of the heat: an early start, indoor air-conditioned days through the summer, and social life outdoors on the Corniche and in the desert in the cool half of the year.

Qatari cooking is Gulf Arab, with strong Persian, Indian, and Levantine influence. The national dish is machboos — spiced rice cooked with meat or fish, dried lime, and a baharat spice blend, close to a biryani. Harees (wheat and meat pounded to a porridge), thereed (a stew over torn flatbread), grilled Gulf fish such as hammour, and ghuzi (a whole roast lamb over nut-studded rice) fill out the traditional table.

Sweets include luqaimat, fried dough balls in date syrup, and balaleet, sweet vermicelli with egg. Dates and light, cardamom-scented coffee are offered to any guest.

Beyond the Qatari kitchen, Doha's restaurant scene reflects its population — outstanding South Asian, Iranian, Lebanese, Turkish, and Filipino food alongside the full international range — with karak, strong sweet spiced tea, sold from roadside stalls as the everyday drink. Alcohol is served only in licensed hotels.

Doha's waterfront Corniche runs from the West Bay skyline past the dhow harbour to the Museum of Islamic Art, set on its own island with one of the world's finest collections of Islamic art. Nearby, the restored Souq Waqif is a warren of lanes selling spices, textiles, falcons, and food, liveliest in the evening, and the Msheireb district pairs modern architecture with museums of Qatari history.

The National Museum of Qatar, built as an interlocking cluster of discs like a desert rose, traces the country's story, while Katara Cultural Village stages concerts and exhibitions by the beach and The Pearl and Lusail are showpiece planned marina districts.

Out of the city, the desert leads to Khor Al Adaid, the "Inland Sea", where dunes meet a tidal lagoon on the Saudi border, reached by 4x4 with a guide. The north holds the ruined fort and pearling town of Al Zubarah, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the mangroves of Al Thakira, and the rock carvings at Al Jassasiya.