How to Understand How Qatar sees Qatar’s Relationship with Saudi Arabia, the Role of al-Jazeera, and Qatar’s Massive Support for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, & Other Forces which strive to force mak
- Sep 12, 2025
- 4 min read
Excerpt from: Ira Stoll’s Brilliant Article on Qatar
Quotes from Harold Rhode:
The Origins of Qatar
Yet there’s another aspect of Qatar that is less well known. I didn’t realize it until talking with former Pentagon official Harold Rhode, who is knowledgeable about the history, religion, and culture of the Middle East. It turns out, Rhode explained to me, that the Al-Thani family ruling Qatar are relatively recent arrivals. Their tribe, Banu Tamim, used to live in the Najd region of what is now Saudi Arabia; they only arrived in the Qatar peninsula in the 1720s after being defeated and forced out. It took years of violent conflict with Bahrain’s Al Khalifa family, the Ottoman Empire, and the neighboring Saudis before the al-Thani family consolidated control. Key milestones include a 1868 letter from a British diplomat, Lewis Pelly, recognizing Muḥammad bin Thānī, as the “ruler of ‘the Guttur tribes,” and the 1893 Battle of Al Wajbah, a victory by Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani over Ottoman forces. A 1913 agreement between Britain and the Ottoman Empire gave Great Britain control of Qatar, and, after World War I, Qatar existed as a British protectorate from 1916 to 1971. It only declared independence in 1971.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia
The Najd region of Saudi Arabi is a tough neighborhood, one of the most violent places on earth. Not for nothing does the Saudi Flag feature the phrase “there is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger,” along with a sword.
The Qataris and the Saudis are both Wahhabis, a kind of radical and extreme variety of Islam. They hate each other going back to the 18th century, when the Banu Tamim were pushed out to the coast.
For the context of the Saudi-Qatar conflict, a brief detour into the recent history of Saudi Arabia will be helpful. In 1979, an ultra-extreme faction took over Mecca, a story that Yaroslav Trofimov tells in his 2007 book “The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda.” The Saudis brought in French Muslim forces to help retake the mosque. The Saudis also negotiated a deal with the extremists in which the Saudis funded jihad worldwide (including in Afghanistan) in exchange for the ultra-extremists not pushing inside Saudi Arabia.
When Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, “MBS,” took over control of Saudi Arabia in 2017, he changed the deal. Qatar picked up the sponsorship of the extremism—and it meddled inside Saudi Arabia, too. That generated more conflict. From 2017 to 2021 Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates imposed a blockade on Qatar.
The foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, Adel al-Jubeir, explained it publicly in a 2019 talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Qatar continues to fund extremists and terrorists and continues to involve itself in our internal affairs,” al-Jubeir said. “Allowing clerics to go on television and justify suicide bombings is not acceptable. Allowing people to spread hate is not acceptable. Funding people in other countries who spread these ideas is not acceptable. Using your media in order to cause mischief in our country is not acceptable. Providing hundreds of millions of dollars toward Hashd al-Shaabi and Hezbollah in Lebanon in order to bring your hostages out is not acceptable. So that’s the problem that we have with Qatar. Other than that, they’re a wonderful country.”
Al-Jubeir went on, “we finally said enough is enough. So when you decide you want to come over from the dark side, we’d be happy to embrace you.”
Al Jazeera
The “media” reference is to Al Jazeera, which the Qatar monarchy totally and completely controls. The English version of it is bad enough, but the Arabic version is toxic, “inflammatory,” “an aggressive mix of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism,” as Fouad Ajami explained in a landmark 2001 article, “What the Muslim World is Watching.” Irritating, from the Saudi point of view, is even the name of the outlet, which is the Arabic world for an island or peninsula. It is a reference to “Jazeerat al-Arab,” the peninsula of the Arabs. For tiny Qatar to usurp the name of the entire Arabian Peninsula is a humiliating insult to the Saudis.
The Bottom Line
The al-Thanis, in other words, are not indigenous to Qatar. They aren’t some ancient civilization. They are a bunch of desert nomads, defeated by the Saudis. The Al-Thanis are what the campus leftists would call settler colonialists or imperialists. That is, if the term were applied with any principled consistency rather than as an insult against Israelis and Americans. They came from somewhere else (in this case, today’s Saudi Arabia), and used colonial power (that of the Ottoman and British empires) to seize the local resources (in this case, land on which was eventually discovered oil and gas) and enrich themselves.
All of this might just be historical or geographical trivia except that Qatar is hosting Hamas terrorists who are part of an organization that kidnapped and killed Americans. And it is sponsoring a network, in Al Jazeera, that is spreading the worst worldwide propaganda aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing Israel and America.
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