The history of Qatar

Qatar is a small, flat desert peninsula jutting north from Arabia into the Persian Gulf. For most of its history it was a sparsely settled land of nomadic herders, fishermen and pearl divers, on the edge of larger powers based in Bahrain, Persia, central Arabia and Mesopotamia. In the nineteenth century the Al Thani family emerged as its leaders, balancing between Bahrain, the Saudi state, the Ottoman Empire and Britain, which made Qatar a protectorate in 1916. Oil and then natural gas transformed one of the poorest corners of the Gulf into one of the richest countries in the world, independent since 1971 and known today for its gas exports, its broadcaster Al Jazeera, its role as a diplomatic mediator and its hosting of the 2022 World Cup.

Danish archaeologists working in the peninsula from the 1950s collected tens of thousands of stone tools from more than a hundred Stone Age sites, most along the coast. After the rising sea flooded the Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago, people came to the new shoreline to fish and hunt. At Al Da'asa on the west coast, seasonal campers left fire pits for drying fish, flint tools and painted pottery from the Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia, the cultural predecessor of Sumer, around the sixth millennium BCE. Graves at Al Khor contain beads of carnelian and obsidian brought from far away.

In the Bronze Age the peninsula lay within the trading orbit of Dilmun, centred on neighbouring Bahrain, and its people dived for pearls and grew dates. On Al Khor Island, millions of crushed murex shells and Kassite Babylonian pottery from the second millennium BCE point to an early purple-dye industry. Settlement remained thin, however, and the land was used mostly by nomadic tribes moving in from the Arabian interior.

Assyria claimed a victory over the land of Bazu, which may have included the peninsula, around 680 BCE. After Alexander the Great sent his admiral Androsthenes to survey the Gulf, the Seleucid Empire briefly extended its influence over eastern Arabia, and burial mounds and pottery of the period have been found near Dukhan. The Parthian Empire and then the Sasanian Empire dominated the Gulf trade routes, and Qatar supplied them with pearls and purple dye. The Roman writer Pliny called the inhabitants the Catharrei, nomads always in search of water, and Ptolemy's map marked the peninsula as Catara.

Under the Sasanians, Christianity of the Church of the East spread along the Gulf coast. In Syriac the region was known as Beth Qatraye, and it produced a remarkable group of seventh-century monks and writers, the best known being Isaac of Nineveh, a mystic still read in Eastern churches today.

In 628 the Prophet Muhammad sent an envoy to Munzir ibn Sawa, the ruler of eastern Arabia, who accepted Islam along with most of the Arab tribes of the region, though Christian communities lingered for some decades. Under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, the peninsula became known for pearls, camels and horses, and the ninth-century settlement at Murwab, with its stone houses, mosques and fort, shows a period of prosperity. Later, eastern Arabia fell under the Usfurid dynasty from 1253 and then under the island kingdom of Hormuz from the early fourteenth century, which drew much of its income from the Gulf pearl fisheries.

The Portuguese Empire gained control of Hormuz and in 1521 seized Bahrain and mainland Qatar, and a Portuguese map of 1563 records a settlement called Catar. The Ottoman Empire took over the al-Hasa coast to the west in 1550. After the Portuguese were driven from the Gulf in the early seventeenth century, Ottoman interest waned, and in 1670 the Bani Khalid tribe expelled them from al-Hasa and became the main power over Qatar.

In 1766 the Al Khalifa and Al Jalahma clans of the Utub tribal confederation migrated from Kuwait to Zubarah on Qatar's north-west coast, which grew into a busy centre of trade and pearling. In 1783 the Utub seized Bahrain from Persian control, and the Al Khalifa moved their seat to the island while claiming authority over the Qatar mainland.

For the next century Qatar was contested. The Wahhabi state of the Al Saud, rising in central Arabia, raided and besieged Zubarah in the 1780s and 1790s, while the Al Khalifa, Oman and later Egyptian forces fought for the coast. Society was divided among tribal sheikhs in small coastal towns such as Al Bidda, Doha, Fuwayrit and Al Wakrah, and the population included many enslaved people brought from East Africa. Britain, seeking to protect the sea route to India, signed the General Maritime Treaty with the Gulf sheikhs in 1820, and an East India Company ship bombarded Doha in 1821 in retaliation for piracy.

In 1848 Mohammed bin Thani moved his family from Fuwayrit to Al Bidda and became the leading figure of the peninsula. He shifted between Bahraini and Saudi protection, and in 1851 Qatari forces under his son Jassim fought off a Saudi army at Mesaimeer. A Bahraini and Abu Dhabi attack on Doha and Al Wakrah in 1867, and a Qatari counterattack, led the British political resident Lewis Pelly to impose a settlement in 1868. That agreement recognised Mohammed bin Thani as a representative of the peninsula's tribes and is regarded as the foundation of Qatar's separate existence from Bahrain.

In 1871 the Ottomans expanded into eastern Arabia, and Jassim bin Mohammed Al Thani, now effectively ruler, accepted their flag and a small garrison in Doha. He used Ottoman backing in a long border war with Abu Dhabi between 1881 and 1893, but resisted Ottoman efforts to tax and govern directly. When the governor of Basra arrived with troops in 1893, Jassim's forces defeated them at the Battle of Al Wajbah, an event Qatar now celebrates as a foundation of its independence. Jassim, who died in 1913, is honoured as the founder of the modern state. In an Anglo-Ottoman agreement of 1913 the Ottomans renounced their claim, and their last soldiers left Doha in 1915 during World War I.

In 1916 Abdullah bin Jassim Al Thani signed a treaty with Britain that placed Qatar within the system of British-protected Gulf states, giving up control of foreign affairs in exchange for protection. Hard times followed. Japanese cultured pearls and the Great Depression destroyed the pearling economy in the 1920s and 1930s, and many families left the peninsula. Rivalry for oil sharpened border disputes with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which was awarded the Hawar Islands by Britain in 1939. A concession signed in 1935 led to the discovery of oil at Dukhan in 1940, but production was delayed by World War II, and exports began only in 1949.

Oil revenues built the first schools, hospitals, power stations and a modern bureaucracy in the 1950s and 1960s, largely staffed by foreigners, while members of the ruling family received generous allowances. Workers and Arab nationalists staged strikes and protests, especially in 1956 and 1963, which were met with arrests and modest reforms. Abdullah's son Ali ruled from 1949 and Ali's son Ahmad from 1960, with Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani increasingly running the government as heir apparent.

When Britain announced in 1968 that it would withdraw from the Gulf, Qatar joined talks on a federation of nine emirates with Bahrain and the Trucial States. The talks failed, and Qatar declared independence on 3 September 1971, while the remaining Trucial States formed the United Arab Emirates. In February 1972 Khalifa bin Hamad deposed his cousin Ahmad and ruled for more than two decades, expanding social spending on housing, health and education. The oil price rises of the 1970s brought great wealth, and in 1971 the vast North Field gas reservoir, shared with Iran, had been discovered offshore. Qatar became a founder of the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981 and sent troops to fight in the 1991 Gulf War, including at the Battle of Khafji.

On 27 June 1995 the heir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, deposed his father in a bloodless coup, and a counter-coup attempt failed the next year. Hamad launched an ambitious strategy to give the small state a global profile. Al Jazeera, founded in 1996, transformed Arab broadcasting, liquefied natural gas exports began the same year, and Qatar became the world's leading exporter of LNG. A constitution approved by referendum in 2003 provided for a partly elected advisory council. The United States moved its regional air operations to Al Udeid Air Base, which served as a command centre for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2001 the International Court of Justice divided the disputed territories with Bahrain, awarding the Hawar Islands to Bahrain and Zubarah to Qatar. The vast majority of the country's residents are foreign workers, many from South Asia, working under a sponsorship system long criticised by human rights groups.

Hamad handed power to his son Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in June 2013. During the Arab uprisings of 2011 Qatar backed rebels in Libya and Syria and supported Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, angering neighbouring monarchies. In June 2017 Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt cut ties and closed their borders and airspace to Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and of being too close to Iran, which Qatar denied. The blockade ended with an agreement in January 2021.

Qatar held its first elections to the Shura Council in October 2021, but in November 2024 it returned to a fully appointed council. In late 2022 it hosted the FIFA World Cup, the first in an Arab and Muslim-majority country, after a decade of construction that drew international criticism over the deaths and treatment of migrant workers. Qatar hosted a political office of the Afghan Taliban, and with Egypt and the United States it mediated between Israel and Hamas during the war in Gaza, helping to broker the ceasefires of 2023 and January 2025. On 9 September 2025 Israel struck a building in Doha in a failed attempt to kill Hamas negotiators, an attack that was followed weeks later by the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire of October 2025 (see Palestine and Israel). During the war involving Iran in 2026, Iranian drones struck the gas industrial cities of Ras Laffan and Mesaieed on 2 March, and QatarEnergy halted its gas production.