Middle East & Africa | Qatar’s new emir

A hard act to follow

A remarkable emir bows out

|CAIRO

IF ANYONE understands the frustration of being a crown prince, it is Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. For two decades he played second fiddle to his own father. But on a sweltering summer day in 1995 he informed Qatar’s unsuspecting emir, then on holiday in Switzerland, that his royal ruling services would no longer be required.

Sympathy with the impatience of youth may be one reason for Hamad’s announcement on June 25th that he was handing power to his 33-year-old son, Tamim. The move was unusual. Changes of power during two centuries of al-Thani rule have tended to be non-consensual, and few Arab monarchs anywhere have ever willingly abdicated (see chart). The new emir is barely half the age of his youngest fellow-sovereign in the Gulf Co-operation Council, the six-member club of oil-rich Arab states.

Other reasons may have prompted Hamad to resign. Now 61, he has long championed reform elsewhere in the Arab world, to the point of generously funding revolutions in Libya and Syria. But he stood out ever less comfortably for failing to practise at home what he preached abroad. His bold foreign policy has also sometimes strained relations with bigger neighbours, such as Saudi Arabia. In his ten years as crown prince, Tamim may have sensed a need to smooth such ruffled feathers.

Despite Qatar’s immense wealth and small population, there are special challenges to managing a society so closely knit that the extended al-Thani clan alone—some say—makes up a fifth or so of its 250,000 citizens. The generational change at the top may soon be reflected at other levels, allowing the gentle removal of long-serving officials in favour of fresher blood. On June 25th Hamad’s closest and most powerful associate, his cousin Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, who has been Qatar’s foreign minister since 1992 and its prime minister (holding both posts) since 2007, was promptly sacked.

The new emir has a tough act to follow. His father’s reign of 18 years witnessed momentous change, not least a rise in population from barely half a million to nearly 2m, most of them expatriate workers. Before Hamad’s era the emirate had been a sleepy backwater, modestly prosperous from oil but unable to cash in on its much bigger reserves of offshore natural gas, partly because neighbouring Saudi Arabia obstructed the building of overland pipelines to export it.

As emir, Hamad took the risk of debt to build what would become the world’s largest facilities for condensing and exporting liquid natural gas. This brought not just independence but colossal profits which have made the emirate the world’s richest country per person. In 1996 Hamad also launched Al Jazeera, a television satellite channel that revolutionised Arab journalism with its slick production and blunt reporting and served as a vehicle for promoting Qatar’s own brand. And while the emirate pursued an aggressively non-aligned foreign policy, wielding its wealth to coax and cajole as well as to promote Islamist causes, Hamad also quietly bought superpower insurance by inviting America to base its regional military headquarters in Qatar’s flat desert interior.

Surprisingly little is known about the inner thoughts of the new emir, one of his father’s 24 children. Along with many other Gulf royals, he studied at private schools in Britain (unusually, two different ones: Harrow and Sherborne) and did a military training stint at Sandhurst, then chaired Qatar’s Olympic committee, drove tanks, and doled out fat bonuses to his soldiers.

He is thought to be conservative and religious, with two wives. His mother, the glamorous and feistily modernising Sheikha Moza, is the favourite of his father’s three wives. An older brother was crown prince for a while. It is said that of his rival candidates, “One played too much, the other prayed too much.” The new man will need to be canny.

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "A hard act to follow"

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