Musheireb Heart of Doha

For this active blog post I decided to revisit an area of Doha that I had not been to in a while, and to check on its development. In our sophomore year as journalism students we were stationed in the area of Musheireb and reported on the different issues that the community was facing.

Before I delve into a more sociological analysis of the Musheireb community, I will touch briefly on the history of the area. The Musheireb area is located behind Souq Waqif, close to the Al Kout Fort, which was built in 1917. It is part of the area that made up the founding city of Al-Bida and is the area where Al Kahraba Street is located (the first street in Qatar to have electricity and be fully lit). As this area was the beginning of the capital city, it had many traditional buildings and families that had built their lives around the fishing and pearling industry. After the discovery of oil, the economy flourished and the capital shifted across the corniche and adopted a more modern approach. Many of the more historical buildings and neighbourhoods were forgotten or destroyed to make way for more aesthetic buildings to celebrate the country’s new found wealth. Some argue that this destruction of what appears to be the original capital city of the country is why there is not a strong sense of history.

The reason I wanted to discuss the issue of Musheireb, and actually went there to see how it has changed, is that it relates to readings discussed in class such as that of Phil Cohen’s reflections on subcultural conflicts and the working-class community, and also readings relating to cultural and political resistance. After the Qatari families moved out of Al-Bida and Musheireb, it became inhabited mainly by south-Asian bachelors who live and work in the area doing blue-collar jobs. This created an interesting mixture of culture, as it is such a close community full of different types of small shops, ethnic restaurants and some very strange houses. Walking down the streets it felt more like being in a remote town in Nepal or India, than it did being in one of the richest countries in the world. Some of the houses from the olden days are still intact and some of the architecture is refreshingly different. However, the reason our journalism class was even reporting there in the first place was due to Msheireb Properties, a company that has taken a large portion of the community, and is in the process of changing it into a ‘luxury community’ with townhouses, designer shops, restaurants and other living spaces and using various communications strategies to make their goals known. Their aim is to “bring people back to their roots – to make Doha unique and rediscover a sense of community and togetherness”.

Although I commend the passion of those who wish to transform the country into a thriving hub of modernity, our readings on the transformation of East London made me think of the repercussions of such a change. We can examine this from the point of view that after the influx of wealth into the country, the older generation was more reluctant to move from their homes but the younger generation was eager to create and express a difference from their parent culture and yet still maintain an identity with them. This can be seen as the youth of that generation buying into the consumer culture, moving out into larger houses and more spread out areas, buying landcruisers and all things luxurious, while still maintaining the traditions of their forefathers, some even holding onto the seafarer habits. While this isn’t necessarily a subculture, it is still evident as a split from the parent culture and the issues between this new culture and the parent culture most likely caused a weakening of historical and cultural continuity. This conflict of tradition versus modernity came from the end of a particular community and the emergence of new communities all around Doha including a new south-Asian community in the abandoned areas.

Now, the south-Asian community is being forced to leave the majority of the community and move to places such as Barwa Village, far away from the city, their customers and their friends. This relates back to the reading as it is mentions that the improvement of material conditions can destroy the functions of the communal space and destroy traditional patterns of socialization. I returned to the areas where we used to report and found that the majority of the shops, with shopkeepers we knew and people who we spoke to, are now cornered off for construction. An entire section of the community and part of the Kahraba Street (Panasonic Square) has been demolished and turned into a massive building site. More and more shops were closed and I couldn’t find a single shopkeeper that I knew. Most of the people I approached didn’t want to talk about it as when we were reporting, the issue was relatively new, but now with the looming presence of such a huge organization, I am sure that nobody wanted to speak a word of resistance. This alludes to the reading about cultural and political resistance. The power in this situation lays with the government who make choices on what gets built where, in this case, although the working class has created a comfortable existence in their own corner of society, they have no citizenship rights and their sponsors get the final say, so they have no chance of resisting or revolting against the decisions that impact them.

It is clear that in this on-going quest for modernity and to somehow create a history through “finding a new essence of Qatari architectural tradition”, the urban regeneration has, in this case, broken many community and family ties.