Gulf ‘Goliaths’: UAE And Qatar, So Near Yet So Far Apart

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar have one thing in common: they are tremendously rich. The UAE is the world’s seventh largest producer of oil with around 111 million barrels of crude reserves, while Qatar has the third largest reserves of natural gas behind Russia and Iran. And so the term Goliath, what they lack in physical size they make up in sheer wealth.

That’s where the comparisons end because when it comes to politics, they could not be more divergent.

“For the Emiratis, 9/11 was a wake-up call,” says Navdeep Suri, who served as India’s ambassador there from 2017-19. “The idea that from this prosperous place, Emiratis actually joined hands with the Saudis to bomb the World Trade Centre. That saw the initiation of a number of steps and we saw an acceleration of that post the Arab Spring.”

“What you have is a new generation of leaders who have the resources and who have a fairly clear understanding of what their country’s place in the world is going to be.”

Ambassador Suri, who was on The Gist on Sunday, recalled what senior UAE leaders told him, that “We don’t want our future generations joining Al Qaeda or ISIS. We want to create a different paradigm in the relationship between state and religion.”

This is not to say they are secular or are becoming secular, Suri clarified, but there are distinct developments underway in the UAE and the inauguration of the Swaminarayan Mandir in Abu Dhabi is testimony to that. More important is their dealing with political Islam.

They have banned the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a 90-year-old transnational Sunni Islamic organization famous for its one slogan: “Islam is the solution”. Anticipating a threat, the UAE has declared it a terrorist group, saying ‘We have zero tolerance for extremist ideologies and violence’, and they decided to contest the ideological space occupied by Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The UAE has set up the Hidaya, a global centre of excellence to fight extremist ideologies, and created its online avatar, meaning they will not leave that space uncontested. They got prominent theologians to say that what ISIS and Al Qaeda are saying and doing is profoundly un-Islamic.

Suri notes that the logical step was to create the Ministry of Tolerance and put it under a senior member of the royal family, and to proactively promote interfaith harmony. He says that “It led in some form to the Abraham accords and the rapprochement with Israel. I saw the way they went about cleansing their texts of anti-Semitic material and now in Abu Dhabi you have the House of Abraham’s family where in one compound and all of the same size, you have a mosque, synagogue and church.”

The Swaminarayan mandir should be seen in that context, a conscious evolution towards what we see today, to distance the state from matters of religion.

Qatar, on the other hand, decided to use political Islam as an instrument for its own ambitions, says Suri. Recall that Qatar, and also Turkey under Erdogan, gave very strong support to the MB in Egypt and there was also a countervailing move by the Saudis and UAE against that government and everybody knows who won that contest (Gen Al Sisi, Egypt’s current president).

The Qataris have patronized some of the most regressive figures like the late Egyptian cleric Yusuf Qaradawi, who was given a platform on Al Jazeera to spout his venomous message. He criticized the leadership of Saudi Arabia and the UAE and because of the reforms they were carrying out, portrayed them as not sufficiently Islamic.

So Qatar supported the forces of political Islam, putting its formidable financial resources to good use. It wielded the Arabic language Al Jazeera TV network as a megaphone and built up a huge following in the street. It criticized everything under the sun except of course, the government of Qatar. There is no democracy in Qatar but by supporting MB in Tunisia or in Egypt, it tries to give the impression the Qatari regime is democratic and their society is open.

“It’s very critical of India in Kashmir, on human rights abuses etc,” says Suri noting that any incident involving Muslims in India becomes a stick to beat India with.

Suri believes the incident involving the eight Indian ex-navy personnel who were sentenced to death was a shock.

“But we told them it cannot be business as usual and it took intervention at the highest level,” Suri notes. He believes that the prime minister going there and meeting the Qatari Emir sent a positive signal.

“We also have a strategic partnership, and struck a $72 bn LNG deal. There is a significant Indian community and our firms continue to get projects,” he said. “But there will be irritants going forward so long as Qatar continues to pursue the policies that it does.”