The desert skyline city — a pearl-diving port turned global art capital, with Souq Waqif and I.M. Pei on the Corniche
Doha is the only Gulf city to have absorbed the ambition of global cultural prestige as seriously as its economic growth demanded — the Museum of Islamic Art (I.M. Pei, 2008, his last major project at age 91), the National Museum of Qatar (Jean Nouvel, 2019), and the Arab Museum of Modern Art (Mathaf) are institutions with serious collections and curatorial programs that compete with European counterparts, not decorative gestures. The city was a pearl-diving village of 12,000 people in 1950 and is now a city of 2.8 million, a transformation produced entirely by the North Dome natural gas fiel…
Qatar's recorded settled history begins in 1783, when the Al Thani family from Najd (central Arabia) settled the peninsula's eastern coast. British protection was formalized in 1916 after the Ottoman garrison withdrew during WWI. Pearl diving was Qatar's primary economic activity until 1939, when the Japanese cultured pearl industry collapsed the natural pearl market globally, destroying the Gulf pearl economy almost overnight — an entire civilization made economically obsolete within a decade. Oil was discovered in 1940 (commercial production 1949); the current Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad A…