Mohamed Fahmy: Qatar’s fatal deceit

Then-Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, left, of Gaza and then-emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani arrive at a ceremony in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, in 2012. Photo by Mohammed Salem-Pool/Getty Images

Article content

Qatar’s support for Islamist terror groups gives the small nation significant geopolitical leverage in its role as a mediator in Middle East conflicts. Its strategy of attempting to position itself as a global mediator goes beyond neutral diplomacy, as it maintains relationships with actors that fuel conflicts while presenting itself to the world as a broker capable of solving those very conflicts.

Article content

Article content

To understand the wealthy Gulf state of roughly three-million people — foreign workers constitute up to 94 per cent of its workforce — it is useful to examine how the Al Thani ruling family welcomed prominent Muslim Brotherhood figures fleeing Egypt’s crackdown.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Among them was Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a student of Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Sunni Islamist organization — in 1928. In 1962, al-Qaradawi was appointed head of the Qatari Secondary Institute of Religious Studies, and went on to lead the department of Islamic studies at Qatar University.

Article content

Al-Qaradawi was granted Qatari citizenship in 1968 and became one of the Brotherhood’s most influential voices. His Al-Jazeera program, “Sharia and Life,” reached an estimated 40- to 60-million viewers worldwide. Al-Qaradawi drew international controversy for issuing several fatwas — legal rulings on matters of Islamic law — permitting and encouraging suicide bombings.

Article content

In 1999, al-Qaradawi was barred from the United States. In 2008, he was barred from Britain. And in 2012, he was prohibited from entering France by then-president Nicolas Sarkozy following the al-Qaida-inspired Toulouse attacks. When he died in 2022, his funeral in Doha was attended by a senior member of the Al Thani family, Qatari ministers, as well as two senior Hamas figures.

Article content

Article content

But Qatar’s relationship with the Brotherhood did not end with providing refuge to its exiled leaders. Doha continues to support, harbour and fund the group’s regional branches, including its offshoot Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, Israel, Australia, Japan, the European Union and others.

Article content

Article content

Then came Al-Jazeera, the cable news network established in Doha in 1996. It quickly became one of the Arab world’s most-watched networks and Qatar’s most powerful soft-power tool, amplifying Islamist voices while extending Doha’s regional influence.

Article content

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice determined that AJ+, a subsidiary of the Al-Jazeera Media Network, should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, concluding that it engages in “political activities” on behalf of the Qatari government and is designed, among other things, to “influence American perceptions” of domestic and foreign policy.

Article content

How deep-rooted is this problem? The Muslim Brotherhood was designated a terrorist organization more than a decade ago by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. More recently, the United States designated its Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian chapters as terror groups.