Letter from QatarThe scrum at airport immigration was unbelievable, writes Michael Jansen
The line of arrivals, most of them Asian labourers brandishing precious letters awarding visas, stretched the length of the terminal and zig-zagged between tapes to a handful of desks. There cool men in white thobes and headcoverings thumped passports with right-to-enter stamps and waved each person through. The crush in the parking lot was as bad and the streets of Doha were jammed with holiday eve traffic. Qatar, a rapidly developing country with an ambitious ruler, Sheikh Hamad al-Khalifa al-Thani, and only 200,000 citizens, is a land of opportunity for both manual workers and highly educated professionals. There are now 600,000 foreign employees and that number is growing.
When I rang Issa the next morning, he said, "We're going to the beach. We'll pick you up in 15 minutes." Some 70km (45 miles) later, we were sitting on the crusty shale on an empty strand on the Gulf of Bahrain, half way up the fat thumb of the Qatar peninsula which sprouts from the Saudi coast between Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Issa, a research scientist, offered me a tin of Guinness before setting up his apparatus to grill two huge slabs of fish.
His wife, Mariam, a teacher of computer science, unpacked snacks. Samiha, a medical specialist, took a seat next to me. Khalil and Nour, a married couple who practise family medicine, organised a second fire for cooking kebab, while their two larger children pitched a small tent. Joujou, the two-year-old, climbed into his bathing suit and set off to paddle in the shallow water. Khalil's mother, Samira, a famed children's court judge often consulted by Arab governments trying to effect legal reforms, observed: "It's a grand day for our picnic."
The week before, a sandstorm drove them into the walled garden of the villa of a member of the ruling family who greeted them with a feast.
"Qataris like Iraqis," remarked Issa. "They welcome us and even thank us for working to build their country. They say this in a very dignified way to show they really value our work."
Issa and Mariam and their friends, members of the Iraqi brain drain, feel at home in Qatar which hosts about 1,000 Iraqis, almost all professionals. The clear blue sky, rough desert, and baking summer heat remind them of Iraq, lost for the forseeable future. Here they can help construct a young country, 35 years independent, while they wait to return to Baghdad.
Qatar, which began to modernise a decade ago, is hurrying to build 21st- century infrastructure and educate its people at the same time. Doha is a handsome city of wide avenues, well-watered parks, elegant traditional buildings with delicately carved facades and stylish blue, gold, green and pink glass high-rises. Qatar can trace its history to 4,000 BC, the Neoli- thic period, but possesses no ancient monuments. To make up for the deficit, it is resurrecting 19th- and 20th-century ruins and building modern monuments. Souq Wagf is a splendid example, located next to a tiny fort at the hear of old Doha. Dubbed the "standing souq", where bedouin once came to trade animals, meat, wool and woven items, Souq Wagf is now a mall with a difference.
Issa, Mariam and I wandered along cobbled streets and alleyways gazing into the one-room shops crammed with rolls of material, ready-made cloaks for women, household goods, spices and coffee, vintage swords and rifles, and finely worked gold jewellery. A girl of six or seven, hair in tight braids, bounced past on a donkey arrayed in red, bells jangling.
In one streetside stall, a village woman rolled dough on to a concave metal plate heated by charcoal, spread the bread with cheese or eggs and served the savoury crisp rounds to waiting women . Across the road, an antique dhow, the vessel of Qatar's once-important pearling fleet, rested on the pavement in front of a shop selling wooden chests. As we made our way down an alley, Issa nodded to several men sitting on chairs smoking water pipes with fat clay bowls.
We took seats and ordered tea and a shisha (a water pipe) for Issa from the waiter. Women do not ordinarily frequent such hole-in-the-wall places but the smokers nodded a greeting. Qataris are generally polite and friendly although theirs is a fundamentalist Wahhabi state like Saudi Arabia. Although he would have known from the lilting Arabic spoken by Mariam and Issa, the man next to us asked, "Where are you from?" "Baghdad." "Welcome, you are one of us," he responded.
The men resumed their discussion of property prices, drawing in Issa. The shisha brotherhood knows no divisions of nationality or station.