Football in the Hands of the Other: Qatar's World Cup in the British Broadsheet Press
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Football in the Hands of the Other: Qatar’s
World Cup in the British Broadsheet Press
Thomas Ross Griffin
Department of English Literature and Linguistics,
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Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
Using reportage of the 2022 World Cup taken from The Telegraph and The
Guardian, this paper demonstrates how Bhaba’s ‘dynamics of writing and textu-
ality’ are implemented to represent an Orientalist discourse that describes Qatar in
colonial terms. Citing work by cultural critics such as Edward Said and Stuart Hall,
it is argued that the British media constructs such a discourse to re-assert a form of
colonial dominance which has historically greatly benefitted the former. Adapting
theoretical frameworks on ‘grammars of exchange’ by Said and on mimicry by
Homi Bhaba, it is contended that the British media’s dominance allows it to replicate
the process of knowledge formation that enabled colonial discourse to thrive
throughout the 19th century, and that Qatar’s success in mimicking many of the
cultural attributes of the West has transformed it into a viable threat which must be
controlled. The paper concludes by arguing that the cultural narrative of Qatar
conveyed to global audiences by the British media is a Western invention. It insists
that such homogenising, Eurocentric narratives represent an ideological agenda
with little relevance to the actual culture of Qatar and their exposure challenges the
reductive hierarchies of neo-colonial racism that they promote.
Keywords: Qatar, World Cup 2022, Postcolonialism, Orientalism, Culture Studies,
Telegraph, Guardian
‘When the World Cup was running everywhere in the world, things were
cool, and then as soon as Africans and Middle Easterners were getting it,
all of a sudden it was bribery and corruption. That was interesting’
(Trevor Noah, Doha, February 2017)
Until the early part of the 21st century, Qatar was a country that had
rarely, if ever, caught the attention of the West and its newspaper media.
At best, it was a tiny Gulf state located somewhere within the Arab world,
a cultural curiosity whose name defied Western grammatical convention
which was defined by little more than its inordinate wealth. However, all
this was to change when FIFA’s Sepp Blatter announced that Qatar had
won the right to host the 2022 World Cup finals on the 2nd December
2010. The aim of this research is to examine this transformation. Using
reportage of the World Cup taken from The Telegraph and The Guardian,
from the announcement of its successful bid in December 2010 until the
31st May 2017, this paper argues that rather than presenting an accurate
account of Qatar’s preparation for the World Cup in 2022, the British
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017) 170-182
© 2017 Geo Publishing, Toronto CanadaFootball in the Hands of the Other 171
broadsheet press chooses instead to present an Orientalist discourse
which posits the Gulf state as the harbinger of a likely and potential threat
to the cultural hegemony of the Wes.t1
The Qatari Other
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While such a claim may seem far-fetched, the media’s ability to affect
such a process is one discussed in quite some detail by Stuart Hall in
“Culture, the Media, and the Ideological Effect”. He describes it as ‘the
first of the great cultural functions of the modern media, the provision
and the selective construction of social knowledge, of social imagery,
through which we perceive the “worlds”, the “lived realities” of others,
and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours into some intelligible
“world-of-the-whole”’ (1979, 340-341). More simply put, the media often
creates an image of a society that the dominant cultural power then uses
to integrate the culture of that society into a greater whole. This is not to
say that the image of Qatar created by the British newspaper media is a
work of fiction. Rather, I suggest that what is represented is selectively
represented to suit a grand narrative rooted in an imperial ideology that
views the non-Western subject as an inferior “Other”. We are given an
image of Qatar that is based not on reality but on decades of British colo-
nialism. It purports to “know” Qatar, but this knowledge is founded on
a bedrock of anachronistic stereotypes that in every conceivable way
‘oppose the clarity, directness and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race’ (Said
2003, 39).2
As can be expected with the enormous influx of oil and gas wealth
over the last fifty years, much has changed in Qatar. Its successful bid to
host the 2022 World Cup is perhaps the most significant demonstration
of this change. Yet this modern depiction of Qatar is at significant odds
that “known” by the West, an image borne out of an imperial grand
narrative that still views non-Western subjects such as Qatar as an infe-
rior “Other”. Prior to its unforeseen victory in Zurich in 2010, the country
was a sporadic presence at best in The Telegraph and The Guardian. On
the rare occasions it was mentioned, analysis rarely strayed beyond
formulaic pieces juxtaposing the country’s small geographic territory
with its inordinate wealth.3
However, as the sporting world comes to terms with the reality that
one of the Cultural West’s most prized possessions is suddenly in the
hands of the Arab “Other”, something much darker, much more sinister
has become associated with Qatar. Since 2010, it has since become known
as a 21st-century byword for greed, corruption and many of the ills of
modern society. Upon surveying a multitude of articles from The
Telegraph and The Guardian on Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup,
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Thomas Ross Griffin 172
it is thus hard to imagine the Gulf state today as anything other than the
alleged hotbed of moral and ethical decay first stumbled upon by the erst-
while European explorers of 19th-century Arabia. Writing in 2010 in the
immediate wake of Qatar’s successful bid, Steve Wilson in The Telegraph
adopts many of the stereotypical motifs commonly found in pieces about
the Arab World. Sand dunes, camel races, and a blistering hot sun set the
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scene for a reader’s first consideration of a Middle Eastern World Cup.
The landscape is exotic and the people are hostile. It is an environment
where even basic survival isn’t guaranteed, ‘the daily commute is only
slightly less foreboding than a game of Russian roulette […], Toyota
Land Cruisers, the vehicle, or weapon, of choice for the locals and
Western expats, lie by the side of the highways like carcasses of big game’
(2010). Everyday markers of civilization such as pavements, Wilson tells
us, are rare and even rarer still in ‘a country steeped with strong Islamic
sensibilities’ (2010) are casual venues where a supporter can watch a game
while enjoying a beer. In reality, Qatar has as many of the trappings of
modernity as any first-world nation. However, the underlying message of
Wilson’s piece is striking. Virtually replicating the colonial experience in
a 21st-century medium, Qatar is represented as much as a place of
curiosity, excitement, and even of danger to the modern-day visitor as it
would have been to adventurous political agents over a century before.
Once it becomes apparent that this desert World Cup is truly
happening, the response of the British broadsheet press is nothing if not
consistent in enforcing the image of Qatar as an aberrant “Other”.
Rather than describing the country as a rapidly developing 21st-century
society, in January 2011 Paul Kelso portrays Qatar intent on using their
unfathomable wealth to accumulate as many of the jewels of Western
culture as possible. The success of their bid to host the World Cup itself,
despite ‘the apparent indifference of the local population to football’
(2011), is a testament to the ease with which they eschew the ethics and
values of civil society to achieve such aims. Views such as these are not
confined to one or two disgruntled hacks. A plethora of respected jour-
nalists over the last seven years have transformed Qatar from a country
once described by travel guides as the most boring place on earth into a
rogue state only too willing to breach the parameters of decency and civi-
lization set by Western society. The extent of this change can be seen in
The Telegraph alone, where a multitude of pieces begin to use Qatar as the
yardstick to measure the depths of deplorable behavior reached by other
countries over the course of 2011 through to 2017. Articles discussing the
use of indentured North Korean labor in Poland and Malta (Freeman
2015), Azerbaijan’s staging of the European Formula One Grand Prix
(Johnson 2016a & 2016b), and blood doping in women’s professional
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cycling (Cary 2016) have all seen Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup
shoehorned in as a marker of how far these nations and sports have
strayed from socially acceptable behavior. Qatar, a country whose inter-
national sporting successes are both rare and sporadic, is now mentioned
as a central figure amongst a rogue’s gallery of some of sport’s most noto-
rious villains.
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This practice has far from diminished in recent years. In December
2016 The Telegraph published a piece by Callum Davis on Qatar’s efforts
to bring Murtaza Ahmadi, better known to Western audiences as “Plastic
Bag Boy”, to meet his idol Lionel Messi during a Barcelona FC visit to
Doha. However, any goodwill potentially accrued by Qatar for enabling
Murtaza to have this lifetime experience is quickly undermined by an
accompanying piece in the same newspaper by journalist Sam Wallace
(2016) titled ‘Lionel Messi and Murtaza Ahmadi’s happy ending hides
Qatar’s tragic truth’. An article initially introduced as a critique of the
Cultural West’s ability to turn its back on one of the worst human
tragedies of recent history, the Syrian refugee crisis, Wallace’s attentions
quickly shift to an indictment of Qatar’s use of South Asian labour. Once
more, an image of Qatar, simplified to meet the demands of a colonial
binary, is portrayed to the reader. Presented as an abusive, oppressive,
misogynistic nation wedded to archaic and brutal traditions, the infer-
ence is that Qatar has little right to take its place amongst the liberal and
just societies of the West. The closing scene of Wallace’s article serves as
an implicit warning. He describes how the young Murtaza refuses to leave
the side of his idol. The referee, a Qatari official by the name of Fahad Al-
Marri, intervenes and carries the young boy to the sideline. In Wallace’s
own words, ‘it was an instinctive, tender moment’ (2016) as Al-Marri
kisses the child on the hand and turns to begin the game. However, rather
than viewing it as an act of warmth or sincerity, Wallace is quick to
diminish any value in Al-Marri’s actions. He describes it as a façade, free
publicity that ignores the abuses that are accepted as everyday norms in
countries such as Qatar. To quote Wallace once more, it is ‘just the image
that Qatar would like to convey to the world’ (2016).
Unwanted Intruders
What is occurring here is a process of disassociation which pervaded colo-
nial discourse as the imperial mission moved from the Age of Discovery to
the Age of Empire. Throughout this period, what was once exotic and a
curiosity turned into something much more sinister as commercial and
colonial motivations merged as one, and the “Other” became something
that had to be managed as much as it had to be encouraged. As Ziauddin
Sardar (1993) notes in Barbaric Others, traditional views of the “Other”,
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Thomas Ross Griffin 174
which had been commonly accepted, were thus suddenly challenged and
disrupted which allowed new meanings to occur. Qatar’s status is being
similarly transformed. No longer is it just a repository of lazy stereotypes
made noticeable only by their extravagant spending power or exotic
appearance as they occasionally stray into a world dominated by the
Cultural West. From the moment it was announced as the host of the 2022
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World Cup, Qatar and by transitive property the Arab World, became an
unwanted intruder into a Eurocentric/Western-oriented ideological
sphere. What Oliver Brown views in July 2015 as ‘the ghastly travesty that
is the Qatar World Cup’ demarcates the beginning of a moment in time
where ‘the will to host spectaculars is shifting inexorably from democra-
cies to dictatorships’ (2015).
Telegraph journalist Paul Hayward continues in this vein some six
months later, accusing Russia and Qatar of ‘steadily killing’ the World
Cup. Amplifying aspersions cast in previous articles of this threat posed
by the non-European “Other”. Heyward appears to be suggesting that a
previous détente towards an oligarch-driven Russia and a Qatari nation
energized by petrodollars has allowed both to not only gain a foothold in
Britain’s sporting and cultural sphere, but also to corrupt the values and
ideals which allowed the latter to achieve such a vaunted position in the
first place. Russia is described in no uncertain terms as ‘autocratic’ and
‘corrupt’ (2016), a rogue state which allows the murder of dissidents and
other acts of criminality with little regard for the values of the Cultural
West. Qatar is held in the same regard by Hayward, only protected ‘from
British governmental outrage because Qatari sovereign wealth […] feeds
London’s addiction to foreign wealth’ (2016). To address the crux of
Heyward’s argument, in attempting to engage with the non-European
“Other” on equal terms, British integrity has become corrupted and is
subsequently threatened. Repeatedly throughout The Telegraph in
particular, one can clearly delineate the image of the Arab as irrational,
duplicitous, naïve, archaic in their world views, corrupt, and ill-suited to
the demands of what is deemed to be civilized society in the 21st century.
It would appear that Hayward is suggesting that until such a threat is
dealt with and there is an essential separation between Western and non-
Western subjects, nations such as Qatar, one of the loci of the contempo-
rary “Other”, ‘will hold world sport in their grip’ (Hayward 2016) and
thus continue to threaten the cultural hegemony of the West. Qatar itself
might be a country of too infinitesimal a proportion to be viewed as a
legitimate threat. But as the harbinger of an Arab World culture, one
alien and exotic yet rich in history, values, and social structure, the possi-
bility of its World Cup exposing and legitimizing that culture is one of
which the Cultural West is only too aware, and as such the latter is quick
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to use whatever means necessary to re-assert essential lines of difference
between Western and non-Western cultural spheres.
The Mimic Men of Qatar
The outcome is quite expected. But what exactly is the nature of this
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threat potentially posed by the non-European “Other”? A possible
answer to these questions can be derived from the views on mimicry of
postcolonial critic Homi Bhaba. In its simplest terms, Bhaba saw
mimicry as one of ‘the most […] effective strategies of colonial power and
knowledge’ (1994, 85). By valorizing the alien culture of the imperial
power, the native Other was encouraged to realize their own cultural
inadequacies and to take it upon themselves to learn the ways of the colo-
nial master; their habits, their customs, their language, their education,
even in some extreme cases, their religious views. As such, for Bhaba,
‘mimicry is, […] a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline,
which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power’ (1994, 86).
However, as Bhaba goes on to state, the resultant colonial being is
‘the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is
emphatically not to be English’ (1994, 87 sic). She might have been reared
to Western ideals in a Western-education system by a Western educator
to the highest degree of fluency. Yet by virtue of her race, the colonial
subject will never be truly essentially Western. Ironically, however, those
who reached this stage of “development” were not a glorious reflection of
the rectitude of imperial endeavour. Rather, they were often viewed as a
threat both to the authority of the colonial agent and the rationale under-
pinning of the entire process of colonization; that the “Other” needed to
be brought up to the standards of modern civilization. Demonstrating
that they too had the capacity for reason, language, and all other trap-
pings of what the West deemed to be the markers of civilization, the colo-
nial subject defied stereotype. In mimicking the colonial master, the
Other could no longer be viewed as a savage, an uncontrollable, impul-
sive, lesser being that needed persistent and on-going management. The
separation that in Bhaba’s eyes ‘repeats obsessively the mythical moment
or disjunction’ (1994, 82) between races is suddenly elided and viable
questions can subsequently be raised by the colonized subject as to why
they truly need to be implicated in a society which allows for a colonial
hierarchy based on the ideas of race. This, the dominant world order for
centuries, is the catch-22 of mimicry. To quote Bhaba once more, the
threat, or, ‘the menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing
the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (1994,
88). It is the ease with which the colonized can take on the habits and
abilities of the colonizer that demonstrates how tenuous the assumed
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Thomas Ross Griffin 176
superiority and the moral authority of the latter truly is. This is the threat
posed to the Cultural West by the actors of the Arab World of which
Qatar is currently the brightest star.
In many of the articles published on Qatar by the journalists of The
Telegraph and The Guardian, this colonial mimesis is a recurring point
that comes repeatedly to the fore. It was the presence of Western, partic-
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ularly British, actors that allowed Qatar to develop, to obtain the values,
ideals, and social structures that allowed the Gulf state to thrive. The
British gave it life, they gave it protection, they gave it culture. Even when
discussing Qatar’s ability to host the World Cup in 2022, Kevin Garside
highlights how the head of the team tasked with ensuring everything is
ready, Hassan Al-Thawadi, is ‘an urbane 31-year old Anglophile’ (2009)
educated in Sheffield University. But what happens when a desert penin-
sula, a country smaller than the Falkland Islands, starts to demand
notice, requests parity, and attempts to engage with the long established
civilization centers of the world such as Britain on the same terms of priv-
ilege and wealth that the latter had long since held as their own? What
happens when this country is steeped in the religious practices, history,
and beliefs of that one people capable of rivalling the cultural hegemony
of the West?
Where once great wealth poured into Europe’s foremost capitals,
London and Paris, it would appear that today, many roads lead to Doha
and the greater Middle East, reversing a flow that for centuries saw riches
and fortune only moving in the opposite direction.4 In their successful bid
for the 2022 World Cup, the “mimic men” of Qatar have demonstrated
their ability to not only imitate but ultimately emulate their old colonial
masters. Despite being considered a ‘preposterous candidate’ (Blake
2015, 289) by many, Qatar successfully overcame rival bids from two
exemplars of the Cultural West, the United States and Australia, to win
the right to host the 2022 tournament. This in itself is a threat to the
cultural hegemony of the West, because in doing this, Qatar has demon-
strated what Bhaba calls the ‘ambivalence of colonial authority’ (1994,
91). According to Bhaba, this ambivalence centers on the movement of
the colonial subject from a near perfect imitation of the colonial master,
only separated by ‘a difference that is almost nothing but not quite’ to a
menace, an entity whose ‘difference is almost total but not quite’ (1994,
91). Qatar has replicated this movement in obtaining the rights to host
one of the most valuable cultural artefacts of the West.
As previously stated, Qatar in itself poses little threat to anyone
beyond its borders. But in the context of its status as a World Cup host,
it can be seen as a synecdochal representation of a larger Arab world
culture and one which is attempting to change an image of itself long since
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Football in the Hands of the Other 177
perpetuated by the Cultural West. As noted by Lincoln Allison and Terry
Monnington in their article, “Sport, Prestige and International
Relations”, for centuries, states have used sport as a highly effective
means ‘to sell themselves and enhance their image abroad’ (2005, 5).
Mega sporting events such as a World Cup or an Olympic Games adver-
tise a country in its entirety, revealing to a global audience the host
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nation’s people, their customs, their values, the very fabric of their
culture, to a global audience. Already Qatar is anticipating the arrival of
over one million football fans for the duration of the tournament in 2022.
This will be over one million people whose views of Qatar and the Middle
East will no longer be mediated by a third party. The image of the emirate
that Qatar wishes these people to take home with them is quite simple,
that of ‘a modern, progressive nation with a rich Islamic culture and
heritage’ (Kamrava 2015, xxi). In doing so, Qatar will prove that Bhaba’s
point relating to ‘ambivalence of colonial authority’ (1994, 91) that lies at
the root of the Cultural West’s deepest fears. The “Other” is taking on too
many of its habits, they are demonstrating that they too have similar abil-
ities, they are proving that it is truly the case that the long-perceived supe-
riority of the Cultural West is a façade.
The ITUC Report
A multitude of articles have cast doubt both on Qatar’s ability and suit-
ability to host the World Cup. But perhaps the most significant catalyst
propelling Qatar’s transformation into the apotheosis of everything
wrong with the Arab “Other” was a series of front-page articles ran by
The Guardian newspaper on a report issued by the International Trade
Union Confederation (ITUC). Despite being later revealed as wildly
inaccurate, the damage was already done to the image of Qatar.
The effect of The Guardian’s reportage is twofold. Firstly, a bevy
of articles by journalists such as Robert Booth (2013a, 2013b, 2013c)
and Owen Gibson (2013a, 2013b, 2014a, 2014b) published between
September 2013 and May 2015 describes a version of events which almost
completely elides Western commercial interest in the building of Qatar.
As a nation spending approximately $500 million a week on the infra-
structural projects needed to host the World Cup, it is naïve to think that
British, North American or other Western contractors and consultancies
are not an active presence in what is essentially the world’s largest
construction site (Agence France-Presse 2017). This is not an attempt to
shift blame. However, it is noticeable that in this period, the latter are
discussed only once for the role they play in a very real international
concern: the mistreatment of migrant workers in the Middle East.
Written by Robert Booth, it states that the British government are both
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Thomas Ross Griffin 178
aware and against the practices outlined in the erroneous report
published by the ITUC. However, occupation of the moral high ground
seems to be limit of British action. Once again, the essential difference
between Western and non-Western actors re-appears. Although ‘several
firms have pledged to use their influence to improve safety standards and
living conditions’ (Booth 2013b), the article is quick to apportion true
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blame to ‘Qatari clients’ and ‘small building companies from countries
including India, Lebanon and Egypt’ (2013b), despite British contractors
having approximately $20 billion worth of contracts in Qatar in their
order books by 2013. While this piece is somewhat admirable in its intent,
it is lost amongst the forty-six others lamenting the state of affairs in the
emirate published in The Guardian between September 2013 and
December 2015. The issue is brought to bear in two individual articles
published in April (Pattinson) and August of 2016 (Pattinson &
Adhikari), but with nothing like the attention given to the series of pieces
based on the initial ITUC report that saw a series of articles written in
quick succession in the last quarter of 2013. But what is the role of these
Western actors in the Middle East? Are they akin to Joseph Conrad’s
Marlow, mere observers of a human catastrophe, or are they Kurtzian
figures whose morals and values have been warped by such close prox-
imity to the debauched and deviant “Other” (Conrad 2011)? The answer
to such a question is never truly discussed to any great degree by the
British broadsheet press. It becomes clear that just as the accounts of 19th
century European nations scouring Africa and Asia of their natural
resources, taking advantage of cheap or indentured labour to amass great
fortunes, were shielded by the façade of the colonial mission, the role
played by Western commercial interests as they extract the maximum
possible profit from Qatar today is often equally marginalized. These
actors also fade into the background, much like the dying Kurtz, lost in
every debate in the unrelenting focus on the deviancy of the “Other”.
The resultant outcome is a narrative which ignores the reality that
many of the building contractors and consulting firms benefitting from the
industry boom taking place in Qatar in preparation for the 2022 World
Cup are companies whose origins lie in Britain and other parts of the
Cultural West. It is a version of events in which the Qataris and their
government are painted as the arch-villains of the piece, the migrant
workers their hapless and helpless victims. However, the active role that
Western actors play in this modern-day morality play are disregarded
almost completely, an oversight that enables the West to consolidate its
position of moral authority by dictating the terms and conditions of what
is and is not civilized behaviour. The repeated publication in The Guardian
of what appear to be apolitical representations of another culture can thus
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Football in the Hands of the Other 179
be understood as what Edward Said calls ‘grammars of exchange’ (1994,
67) in Culture and Imperialism, a system of rhetoric which “narrativizes”
Qatar in a manner which is similar in part to the Orientalist discourse which
described the Gulf region throughout colonial times. By amplifying certain
aspects of the narrative, particularly in relation to issues of the treatment of
South Asian workers and gender equality, such articles consolidate the
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authority of the Cultural West, allowing its national actors to act as a
source of moral adjudication on what it perceives to be the shortfalls of
Qatari society. Despite being derived from a report that is now accepted by
all as wildly misleading, this perception has readily become fact about
Qatar in the 21st century, replicating the process from colonial times of how
European perception or knowledge of something eventually became
accepted fact. Taking advantage of their status as the dominant producer
of knowledge by way of written artefact (novel or newspaper), to revert to
Said once more, the colonial powers were able prevent other narratives
from both forming and gaining a foothold in the public eye. Other cultures,
reliant on less pervasive or more fragile knowledge bases (oral histories
being a prime example and a common means of information
storage/knowledge preservation in both African and Arab cultures), saw
their traditions and mythic structures rapidly disappear, submerged as they
were under a much more commonly accepted and read Eurocentric narra-
tive of events.
Ultimately, what was widely known steadily came to be taken as fact
when countless narratives each exclaimed the potential for savagery and
deviancy of the non-European Other. The same dynamic is being replayed
today in the descriptions of Qatar. Mediators of information such as The
Guardian and The Telegraph, due to their cultural and historical standing
are once again propagating what is “widely known” more often than what
is actually happening. What occurs is the repetition of a bevy of outmoded
colonial stereotypes. However, affiliated to a genuine human rights
concern, and presented in a medium identified as a source of both trust-
worthy, reliable information, and the liberal values of a democratic society,
these stereotypes are reinvigorated in the 21st century.
Conclusion
I conclude by suggesting that the image of Qatar that is presented to the
Cultural West is a simulacrum (Baudrillard 2006), it is the product of an
Orientalist discourse which exists only in the Western mind. Britain’s
broadsheet newspaper media presents to their readers a discourse
comprised of ‘cultural conventions, rules, and codes that serve to construct
boundaries of meaning’ (Fair 1991, 9) that tell the reader that the Arab
world represented transitively by Qatar is a potential threat in every way to
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Thomas Ross Griffin 180
countries that constitute the Cultural West. To do this, the journalist, as JE
Fair states, assumes the role of ‘storyteller’, relying ‘upon ideas and images
drawn from dominant interest, thought, and meaning but evoked as “fact”’
(1991, 9-10). But such realities, to draw once more from Fair, ‘cannot
endure outside Western discourses […] for it is within these discourses that
the West confirms the “Otherness”’ (1991, 10) of Qatar and the Arab
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world. Not only is this a discourse which allows nations such as Britain to
maintain its position of cultural dominance, it also allows free license to
portray the Arab “Other” as it sees fit, obviating the reality presented by a
multitude of economists, social scientists and historians that there has been
a ‘steady shift of power and influence away from the West – its traditional
home for the past five hundred years – to the East’ (Kamrava 2015, 66). In
simpler terms, rather than informing the reader of a specific set of events,
Western cultural artefacts such as The Telegraph and The Guardian become
an ‘apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of
racial/cultural/ historical differences’ (Bhaba 1994, 70). In the case of the
Arab “Other”, this difference continues to be a potential threat to the sanc-
tity and integrity of Western society.
Notes
1 The primary research material has not taken into account the bevy of news-
paper articles written on Qatar as a result of the recent Saudi blockade which
began June 5 2017. Given the enormous attention the GCC crisis has
garnered from the global media, the aforementioned crisis provides ample
opportunity for an extension of this research.
2 The prevalence of these stereotypes can be seen in the historical portrayals of
Qatari Arabs found in colonial representations of the emirate. In his histor-
ical account of the Gulf state, Allen J. Fromherz (2012) includes the views of
several British colonial agents who describe the Qataris of the late 19th
century as truculent, cunning, and untrustworthy with little regard for
loyalty or human life. Quoting an unnamed British agent, Jill Crystal’s
depiction of Qatar during this period is equally unflattering. The native
population were ‘an ill-famed clan, half Bedouins, half villagers, and all
pirates’ who existed in a society ‘which almost dispenses with the ordinary
machinery government’ (1990, 29). Equally unbecoming portrayals of the
Qatari Arabs stemming from the same period can be found in Habibur
Rahman’s The Emergence of Qatar (2010) What quickly becomes clear here
is that the colonial portrayal of the Qatari Arab mirrors the colonial
portrayal of the Arab “Other” which Edward Said criticises to great length
in Orientalism. Rather than presenting a society rich in tradition and values,
these colonial portrayals of Qatar describe a country existing in a cultural
vacuum, situated somewhere on the margins of civilization and inhabited by
what Lord Robert Salisbury, Prime Minister of Britain at the height of the
The Arab World Geographer / Le Géographe du monde arabe Vol 20, no 2-3 (2017)Football in the Hands of the Other 181
imperial age, described as the ‘half-civilized races.’ (Wilson 2013, 226).
3 Examples of such headlines include Richard Spenser’s piece in The
Telegraph, “Qatar: a tiny state with global ambitions” (2010), Jeff Randall’s
“Small Country, Growing Voice” in the same paper, (2006) and Pete
Nichols’ “Qatar Using Black Gold to Tap into Top Performers” in The
Guardian (2005).
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4 Examples of note include Harrods and Claridge’s Hotel in London, Paris St
Germain FC and the Annual Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe horse race in Paris.
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