Sue's Brother Alan

Alan and his new wife, Kirsten came to San Francisco last weekend. We had a great time showing the sites of the city.. Twin Peaks, Japense Tea garden and Muir woods. Alan is currently spending one month in Qatar doing emergency doctor administration and work and the next month at home in his 100 acre farm house near Pittsburgh where they have a golden lab dog and motor about in their ATV. I was wondering about what Qatar was like and the web did not let me down. This is wiki version of its history.

During the pre-Islamic era, the peninsula was often dominated by various Persian dynasties, the last of which (the Sasanians) included the Qatar peninsula, which they called Meshmahig ("Big Island"), in their province of Bahran/Bahrain with its capital at Shirin (probably, the modern Qatif). This province included the island of Bahrain and the costal regions of modern Saudi Arabia.

In the Islamic era, Qatar was one of the earliest locales occupied by the Muslims. Qarmatians arrived in the area very early during the Islamic era and spread their influence widely, as they did in the neighboring Hasa region. In medieval times, Qatar was more often than not independent and a participant in the great Persian Gulf-Indian Ocean commerce. Many races and ideas were introduced into the peninsula from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Malay archipelago. Today, the traces of these early interactions with the oceanic world of the Indian Ocean remains in the existence of small minorities of races, peoples, languages and religions, such as the presence of Africans and Shihus.

After centuries-long domination by the Ottoman and British empires, Qatar became an independent state on September 3, 1971.

Although the peninsular land mass that makes up Qatar has sustained humans for thousands of years, for the bulk of its history the arid climate fostered only short-term settlements by nomadic tribes. Clans such as the Al Khalifa and the Al Saud (which would later ascend thrones of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia respectively) swept through the Arabian peninsula and camped on the coasts within small fishing and pearling villages.

The British initially sought out Qatar and the Persian Gulf as an intermediary vantage point en route to their colonial interests in India, although the discovery of oil and other hydrocarbons in the early twentieth century would re-invigorate their interest. During the nineteenth century, the time of Britain’s formative ventures into the region, the Al Khalifa clan reigned over the Northern Qatari peninsula from the nearby island of Bahrain to the west.

Although Qatar had the legal status of a dependency, resentment festered against the Bahraini Al Khalifas along the eastern seaboard of the Qatari peninsula. In 1867, the Al Khalifas launched a successful effort to quash the Qatari rebels sending a massive naval force to Wakrah. However, the Bahraini aggression was in violation on the 1820 Anglo-Bahraini Treaty. The diplomatic response of the British to this violation set into motion the political forces that would eventuate in the founding of the state of Qatar. In addition to censuring Bahrain for its breach of agreement, the British Protectorate (per Colonel Lewis Pelly) asked to negotiate with a representative from Qatar. The request carried with it a tacit recognition of Qatar’s status as distinct from Bahrain. The Qataris chose as their negotiator the respected entrepreneur and long-time resident of Doha, Muhammed bin Thani. His clan, the Al Thanis, had taken relatively little part in Gulf politics, but the diplomatic foray ensured their participation in the movement towards independence and their dominion as the future ruling family, a dynasty that continues to this day. The results of the negotiations left Qatar with a new-found sense of political selfhood, although it did not gain official standing as a British protectorate until 1916.
The Emiri Diwan.
The Emiri Diwan.

The reach of the British Empire diminished after the Second World War, especially following Indian independence in 1947. Pressure for a British withdrawal from the Arab emirates in the Gulf increased during the 1950s, and the British welcomed Kuwait's declaration of independence in 1961. When Britain officially announced in 1968 that it would disengage politically, though not economically, from the Persian Gulf in three years' time, Qatar joined Bahrain and seven other Trucial States in a federation. Regional disputes however, quickly compelled Qatar to resign and declare independence from the coalition that would evolve into the seven-emirate United Arab Emirates. On September 3, 1971, Qatar became an independent sovereign state.

Since 1995, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has ruled Qatar, seizing control of the country from his father Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani while the latter vacationed in Switzerland. Under Emir Hamad, Qatar has experienced a notable amount of sociopolitical liberalization, including the enfranchisement of women, a new constitution, and the launch of Al Jazeera, a leading English and Arabic news source, which operates a website and satellite television news channel. Qatar ranks as the ninth richest country in the world per capita [4].

Qatar served as the headquarters and one of the main launching sites of the US invasion of Iraq [5] in 2003.

In 2005, a suicide-bombing killed a British teacher at the Doha Players Theatre, shocking a country that had not previously experienced acts of terrorism. It is not clear if the bombing was committed by an organized terrorist group, and although the investigation is ongoing there are indications that the attack was the work of an individual, not a group