Qataris say the West sees the country in a simplistic and prejudiced way

When singer Rod Stewart was offered more than $1 million (R$5.4 million) to perform in Qatar, he turned it down.

“It’s not right to go,” Stewart recently told The Sunday Times of London, joining a string of public figures who have declared boycotts or outright condemned Qatar, the Gulf country that currently hosts soccer’s World Cup.

Heading into the tournament, which kicked off last weekend, Qatar has faced a growing barrage of criticism over its disregard for human rights by the authoritarian monarchy, including the criminalization of homosexuality and documented abuse of migrant workers.

Stewart, however, expressed no such disapproval when he performed in 2010 in Dubai or in 2017 in Abu Dhabi, cities in the neighboring country, the United Arab Emirates, which also has an authoritarian monarchy and has faced allegations of human rights violations, but which has cultivated a friendlier image for the West.

Stewart declined a request for comment through his public relations firm.

That kind of dissonance has increasingly frustrated Qataris, who face the glare of the international spotlight that accompanies World Cups. The tournament brought a disproportionate burst of negative coverage, they say, and generated descriptions of their country and its people that seem outdated and formulaic, painting a picture of Qatar they barely recognise.

Qataris say they are denouncing the double standard. Why do Europeans buy natural gas from Qatar, they ask, if they find the country so disgusting that they can’t watch football there? Why don’t some of the international figures who spoke out against Qatar do the same to the United Arab Emirates?

They also said they hoped the first World Cup held in an Arab country would dispel stereotypes about Qataris, Arabs and Muslims.

However, sometimes it seems the opposite is true.

In a speech last month, Qatar’s emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani called the criticism “an unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced”. Speaking to a German newspaper, Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said some of the criticism was racist and arrogant.

Organizers have said at least 15,000 journalists are expected to visit Qatar, whose population is 3 million, for the World Cup.

The torrent of reporting has been overwhelming for a country that rarely makes the global news. That’s partly why the Qatari authorities wanted to host the tournament. It fits in with a broader decades-long effort by rulers to transform the once obscure country into a prominent global player, a strategy funded by vast natural gas wealth.

But the media response was not what Qatar had hoped. Asked by a television presenter about his impressions of the country, a French reporter replied that “there are many mosques”.

In a photo caption, the Times of London wrote “Qatarians are not used to seeing women in Western dress in their country”, a sentence that was later changed. (In fact, foreign residents make up more than 85% of Qatar’s population, and women wearing jeans or short dresses are relatively common, unlike in neighboring Saudi Arabia.)

“A lot of reporters criticize all Arab countries together,” said Justin Martin, an adjunct professor of journalism at the Institute of Graduate Studies in Doha who spent 10 years in Qatar. “It’s a combination of abject ignorance and Orientalist narratives.”

Even some Qataris who take the criticism as an invitation to improve say they have been dismayed by the media coverage, which they believe is underpinned by prejudices based on racism, orientalism and Islamophobia.

An article in a British tabloid condemned Qatar’s “savage” laws, a reference that was later changed to “brutal”.

On TalkTV, a relatively small British channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, the presenter asked a guest “How much respect should we show for cultures that we consider, frankly, an abomination?” during a segment on Qatar’s treatment of LGBTQIA+ people.

Khalifa Al Haroon, who runs an online tour guide called I Love Qatar, said his biggest concern “is that all this racism, or what are being perceived as articles fueled by racism, is distracting attention from the critical issues”.

Loving your country means solving its problems, he added, and he believes attention to workers’ rights has helped to instigate positive change. But he said he was bothered by the simplistic depictions, which he found discriminatory.

“How can we focus on the problems when it’s all about the tone, the language, the words used?” said Al Haroon.

Martin, the journalism professor, said he believes part of the reason the coverage has been so fierce is because moving the tournament from summer to November (autumn) has angered fans and sports journalists, disrupting other countries’ football calendars. There was also “enmity” over the restricted availability of alcohol in Qatar, a relatively conservative Islamic country, he noted.

The Times of London and TalkTV did not respond to requests for comment.

Stereotypical images have also done damage, say many Qataris. British football magazine When Saturday Comes created a World Cup wall graphic featuring representations of men with big noses, two of them in Gulf Arab garb, including one pushing a wheelbarrow full of money.

The poster was used as an example of prejudiced portrayals by the Qatar-owned channel Al Jazeera in an interview with Hassan Al Thawadi, who runs the organization of the World Cup in Qatar.

“They have a stereotyped idea that has been ingrained in the Western world for generations and ages,” said Al Thawadi. “In general, it is a concept of uncivilized people, about whom the only positive thing is money.”

Andy Lyons, editor of When Saturday Comes, dismissed suggestions that the wall chart uses stereotypes. The magazine’s cartoonist “draws most of the figures” with big noses, and the money was intended to represent the bribes that US investigators and FIFA itself said were paid to several FIFA council members in choosing the tournament’s venue, he wrote. Lyons in an email.

Criticism of the World Cup host country accompanies all tournaments, to varying degrees. South Africa faced them over security concerns ahead of the 2010 competition, Brazil heard them over corruption and criminality ahead of the 2014 edition and Russia over political repression, homophobia and police brutality in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup.

For Qataris and other Arabs, however, much of what they are seeing hurts because it is the sum of centuries of negative representations by Americans and Europeans.

Still, some analysts see the government’s efforts to highlight bigotry as encouraging nationalism and diverting attention from abuses.

Political participation in Qatar is severely limited. LGBT+ people face bigotry and potential lawsuits by authorities. Women hold leadership positions but must have permission from a male guardian to marry or, before age 25, travel abroad.

Mira Al Hussein, an Emirati-born sociologist who teaches at Oxford University, said she thought “the outrage at the racist and Orientalist tones that characterize Western criticism of Qatar in recent times is justified.”

“But we cannot deny the fact,” she added, that Qatar and the other Gulf States are constantly in the headlines due to a “lamely human rights record.”

While the Qatari government has improved protections for migrant workers, activists say the changes fall short.

Vulnerable migrant workers, mostly from South Asia and Africa, built the infrastructure that made the World Cup possible. They face abuse and exploitation, working grueling hours for small wages — though scholars point out that Gulf societies are just one place in a global system that produces these hierarchies.

A series of incidents in the run-up to the tournament did not help. Journalists chafed at restrictions on where they could film. A sudden decision to ban beer in stadiums sparked protests. FIFA has banned team captains from wearing rainbow armbands to matches as part of a campaign for social justice.

When FIFA president Gianni Infantino lashed out at Western critics of Qatar on Saturday, he effectively removed the narrative from some of these episodes.

But as disconcerting as his comments were to some, they resonated with many in the Middle East, who particularly focused on one of his remarks: “I think with what we Europeans have done around the world over the last 3,000 years , we must apologize for the next 3,000 years before we start lecturing.”

Youssef Cherif, director of the Columbia Global Center at Columbia University in Tunis, Tunisia, said Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had comparable labor and human rights violations.

But, he added, “while both autocracies have won the hearts and minds of Arabs, only one of them has won in Western circles, and that is the UAE.” He attributed the difference to the fact that the Emirates had created a “lovely, modern Orientalist brand of themselves”.

Qatari organizers have tried to use the World Cup to introduce visitors to their culture and, more broadly, Islam, with translations of prophetic phrases displayed across the capital, Doha. Officials emphasize that it is the first World Cup in a region teeming with soccer fanatics.

“For 450 million Arabs, it is something they thought they would never see in their lifetimes,” Ali Al-Ansari, Qatar’s US media attaché, said in a written statement.

“The success of this World Cup will not be measured by how it is seen by some people and groups in a small number of European countries, who unfortunately cannot overcome their prejudice,” said Al-Ansari.