Reminder: Qatar’s Foreign Policy: Islamists YES – Islamic State NO

Dr. Andreas Krieg, Lecturer Defence Studies Department, King’s College London, Qatar Armed Forces – @andreas_krieg

In recent weeks, Qatar has come under criticism once more – this time not for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, or for the inhumane working conditions of many local labourers, and also not for alleged unorthodox practices when it came to winning the bid for the FIFA World Cup 2022. This time criticism revolves around Qatar’s alleged support for the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) as the world’s current ‘empire of evil’. This time, it is not Qatar’s neighbours who engage in public ‘Qatar-bashing’ but Western politicians, blogs and social media outlets. These unsubstantiated allegations if echoed often enough, might develop into just another cyber-myth surrounding the rich Gulf Emirate.

Based on the populist image that has been drawn by Western media, Qatar is ruled by an ultra-conservative, Wahabist family who ideologically subject the country’s foreign and security policy to spreading radical Islam. In fact, Qatar has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and affiliate groups in Libya and Syria; it supports the Brotherhood’s Palestinian offspring Hamas, as well as backed jihadi militants in the Libyan and Syrian Civil War. Based on this observation experts believe to have identified a trend whereby Qatar’s foreign and security policy is increasingly ideologically motivated by radical Islamist considerations. In so doing, media reports lump together Islamist political parties, charity organizations or religiously motivated opposition forces and Al Qaeda. More recently, in many reports, particularly at the more conservative end of the spectrum, the distinction between political Islam and global jihadi organizations such as IS, completely vanished. Despite its development into an established, respected and sustainable political power in the Arab World, political Islam and its role in the Arab public sphere has been discredited. Yet, it is important to differentiate between those Islamists that primarily cater for the inclusive provision of public goods or adl (social justice), and those subordinating common good with brute force to the fanaticism of a minority. Although IS has realized in the meantime that the administration of territory and people requires more than terror and brute force, its mujahedeen nonetheless belong to the latter group.

These nuances are important to understand when judging Qatar’s raison d’état post-Arab Spring. As a small peninsula at the Gulf, wedged between the regional superpowers of Iran and Saudi Arabia, Qatar traditionally had to choose between autonomy and influence when defining its foreign and security policy. Influence meant typically having to bandwagon along Saudi Arabia as its bigger brother, thereby relinquishing its autonomy in parts. Achieving autonomy, on the other hand, was tantamount with the loss of influence, resulting in an augmented sense of insecurity. The Father Emir, who handed over his rule to his son Sheikh Tamim last year, tried in his reign to overcome this dilemma by establishing Qatar as an independently acting, yet influential regional player – a player who autonomously from the sometimes counterproductive ideological conventions of Riyadh approaches foreign and security policy with a degree of pragmatism. Fuelled by the sheer unlimited wealth generated from its hydrocarbon resources, Qatar managed to not only attract the US as its external protector or open an Israeli trade office, but also to build relations with the Taliban and Hamas as well as reach out to Hezbollah and the Houthis when needed. The hedging of international and transnational relations was the direct path to transform neutrality into influence.

The Arab Spring seemingly created new opportunities for Qatar to expand its influence. The region threatened to sink further into the authoritarian quagmire and Qatar’s neighbours adopted a growingly hostile stance towards the dawn of democratization on the horizon. Qatar on the contrary, saw the developments as a chance to buy credit and trust from those that it deemed to be the region’s future decision-makers: the Arab publics who had taken to the streets. Qatar decided to support those groups and organizations who it thought could most effectively fulfil the people’s demand for more social justice. A new maxim in Qatar’s foreign and security policy emerged: to align with those forces who could most effectively, sustainably and inclusively provide social justice and security (adl wa al-amin). This maxim was not just inspired by the altruistic decision to do what is right, but by the pragmatic attempt to gain influence as a small state. Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its Islamist offshoots in other countries, can be partially explained by these pragmatist considerations. As the only opposition force amid decades of tyranny able to provide public goods inclusively to the masses whenever states were unwilling or unfit to do so, Islamism was regarded by Qatar as the people’s natural choice to be supported. In countries where the path to more social justice remained obstructed by tyrannical regimes refusing to step down, like in Libya and Syria, Qatar intended to support those militant groups that with discipline, morale and experience could most effectively engage regime forces militarily: jihadist fighters who regarded the liberation of their home country from authoritarian oppression as their personal duty under Islam such as the Tawhid Brigades in Northern Syria.

The ‘Islamic State’ is neither an organization that caters for the common good of the masses, nor an organization in which Syrians or Iraqis fight to liberate their homeland. IS is an organization of fanatic, extremist mercenaries, who under the banner of the Prophet, claim to establish what can only be described as a scurrile caricature of the once mighty caliphate. Thereby the self-proclaimed mujahedeen go against all conventions of what is commonly accepted as moral interpersonal or interstate behaviour. Thus, while some wealthy Qataris have privately funded IS’ predecessors in Iraq and Syria, the State of Qatar has not done so, knowing that this organization stands in opposition to Qatar’sraison d’état. Actively supporting a transnational or even global jihadist organization such as IS rejecting the legitimacy of the current regional international set-up, would be pragmatically and ideologically suicidal for Qatar. Qatar would further lose the hearts and minds of the people in the region, alienate its allies in the West and the GCC while gaining little more than the influence over a group of extremist thugs that in the eyes of Qatar’s pious leadership, negate fundamental principles of Islam. In respect to IS, Qatar stands firmly with the rest of the Arab World and the GCC making the containment of IS a foreign and security policy priority. In the meantime, Qatar has realized that the future of the Arab World belongs to the individual in a growing Arab public sphere. In the long-run, power in the Arab World will not be in the hands of autocratic tyrants but those who can cater for the needs of the majority. Qatar will continue support those who cater for the greatest possible number of people in their area of responsibility – even if that means supporting Islamist groups such as Hamas.