Qatar Culture & Language

Qatari culture is Gulf Arab, recently and rapidly reshaped by wealth, and consciously curated by a state that treats culture as strategy.

The museums

The Museum of Islamic Art, designed by I. M. Pei in his eighties after travelling the Muslim world to study its architecture, sits on a purpose-built island and holds ceramics, manuscripts, metalwork and textiles spanning fourteen centuries. The National Museum, by Jean Nouvel, is built as a cluster of interlocking discs modelled on the desert rose crystal, and tells the country’s story from geology to gas.

Pearling

The dhows, the diving songs sung to set the rhythm of hauling, and the merchant houses of Al Wakrah and Al Zubarah are the heritage the country foregrounds. Natural Gulf pearls remain among the most valuable in the world.

Falconry

UNESCO-listed and taken seriously: Souq Waqif has a falcon souq and a dedicated falcon hospital, and the birds are valued in the tens of thousands.

The kitchen

Machboos spiced rice with meat or fish, harees, thareed and luqaimat dumplings in date syrup are the Qatari dishes. What fills the streets is Indian, Nepali, Filipino, Lebanese and Egyptian, and the best cheap food in Doha is usually South Asian.

Al Jazeera

Launched in 1996 with state funding and an unusual degree of editorial latitude, it changed Arabic-language broadcasting by carrying opinions the region’s state channels did not, and made a country of a few hundred thousand citizens a household name across the Arab world. It is also the clearest single example of Qatar’s strategy of buying influence rather than waiting for it, and it has cost the country diplomatically more than once.

Majlis and coffee

The majlis as an open sitting room where matters are brought, and Arabic coffee with dates as the formal reception, both UNESCO-listed and both real.

Arabic is the official language, in a Gulf dialect. In practice English is the working language of the country — in shops, hotels, hospitals, taxis and most workplaces — and all signage is bilingual. A visitor needs nothing else.

Given who makes up the population, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, Nepali, Tagalog and Bengali are all widely heard, and in many service settings they are what is actually being spoken.

A few Arabic words are warmly received: as-salamu alaykum as a greeting, shukran for thank you, min fadlak for please, and inshallah, used constantly.