Religion and History in Qatar

Qatar's official religious tradition is close to that of Saudi Arabia, the Hanbali school as interpreted by the eighteenth century reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, and the ruling Al Thani family adopted it in the nineteenth century. The application has diverged sharply. Qatar has never had a religious police force with powers comparable to the Saudi one, has never enforced gender segregation in commerce or the driving ban, and permitted purpose built churches decades before its neighbour. The reason is partly demographic necessity and partly strategy: a state with a citizen population in the hundreds of thousands and a resident population in the millions cannot govern as though the residents were not there, and a small state adjacent to a large one benefits from being distinguishable from it.

Qatar accordingly positioned itself as a venue rather than only an adherent, founding Al Jazeera in 1996, hosting the Doha Debates, funding the Qatar Faculty of Islamic Studies and the Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, and providing a base for the Egyptian theologian Yusuf al Qaradawi, whose weekly programme reached a very large audience and whose positions were sufficiently contested to be part of the case its neighbours made during the blockade of 2017 to 2021.