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.

From Art to Politics!

Politics or art? This art work was sprayed by Banksy on the apartheid wall in Palestine. Banksy is a street artist. Street artists use different mediums to show their art in the streets. Banksy’s real identity is anonymous. Yesterday, I watched “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which is a documentary about street art and Banksy. What does the whole movement of street art mean? And why is significant?



The narrator stated, “Street art was poised to become the biggest counter cultural movement since punk.” While the film is supposed to be about Banksy, it ended up being about the person who was planning to make the film. He calls himself Space Invader. He started by taking videos of the street artists. Later, he becomes part of the street art subculture. A subculture is a group of people who share a style, language, type of music, activities and beliefs. He becomes involved in their activities and later performs street art himself. But, what do Space Invader and the street artists have in common?

Space Invader makes his living through selling used clothes. He would buy them cheap and see people paying lots of money to buy a piece from him because it would have a designer name. The street artists are opposed to consumerism and the hegemonic ideology of the people, which prevent them from seeing the things going on around them. The concept of hegemony refers to the way people perceive some things as common sense. Hegemonic ideas are ideas that most of the people believe and see as being the common sense ways to think or behave. The hegemonic ideology of most of people is to consume products and to understand the world in the way it is shown through media. As a shopkeeper, Space Invader has understood how consumerism is stupid. People were paying a lot of money just because of the brand’s name. Street artists and Space Invader share the same belief about consumerism.

Through street art they perform a type of cultural resistance. Stephen Duncombe perceives cultural resistance as “culture that is used, consciously or unconsciously, effectively or not, to resist and/or change the dominant political, economic and/or social structure.” The definition can be seen visually through street art.

(Screenshot from the film)

The sculpture above was made by Banksy. It is a resistance against the social hegemonic idea of respecting a national symbol that does not mean anything. Banksy uses the street art culture to change the way people perceive symbols. Whether Banksy was conscious about the message he is sending or not, and whether his art would be affective or not, doesn’t matter. Either ways, it is considered cultural resistance.

There are four means of cultural resistance, content, form, interpretation and activity. The content of the message is to attract people’s attention to what they are not seeing or noticing about the worlds around them. For example, by drawing on the apartheid wall in Palestine, Banksy attracted the world’s attention to the wall. The form is concerned with the medium of the message. Street art was always in streets and many people did not understand its purpose. The form is a typical street wall, but it took a step forward by appearing in the film. The different mean allowed the street message to be clearer. The interpretation part is related to the society and how they interpret the art. Before I watched the documentary, I interpreted street art as something beautiful, which is ruining public property. Activity is not only the performance of street art, but also the meaning behind it. When they are drawing on public property they are attracting attention to what people are not seeing. An example of this is the street art on street ads. It reflects the street artists’ belief about being opposed to consumerism.

(Screenshot from the film)

Banksy had an art exhibition in Los Angeles. He brought an elephant that was colored with the same colors of the wallpaper. In the documentary the narrator says that the purpose of the camouflage elephant was to show “how easy it is to ignore the things right in front of us.” Then he continues talking about how the people in media saw “what’s right in front of them.” The reporter in the next shot was talking about animals’ rights.
In the Youth Culture in The Middle East class, we discussed how today’s culture could be tomorrow’s commercial object. This is what is happening with the street art culture. The street art found its way to art auctions, where people were doing what the art itself was opposed to; consuming art in the form of a “commodity.” Spending lots of money just because this artist made this piece of art. Banksy himself comments on this issue saying, “It is not about the money.”

I’m a fan of art that appreciates beauty. I understand and relate to Banksy and the street artist’s resistance. I was an art student, and I didn’t like the way people try to tell others how to see art. It is like a project under construction to spread a hegemonic idea of what art should be. It aim is to teach people to ignore the beautiful art in front of them because it doesn’t follow certain rules. It also encourages consumerism and seeing art as a commodity and doing it to please people. Street artists do art because they like it and they have a message behind it. This is why they never reveal their real identities. For them it’s about the art and the message, and not the fame or the money.

Once Upon A Subculture

Throughout the years the subculture of hipsters has evolved significantly. There has been resistance from society towards hipsters and what they embody and represent. I associate hipsters with being totally against the mainstream and conventional ideas. The phrase “don’t trust the system,” reminds me of the hipster style since it seems that the subculture strongly value nature, originality and freedom beyond the confinements of society. The hipster subculture is a culture within the larger culture. They have their own set of beliefs, values and interests. The subculture discussed is at variance with the larger culture. It seems to me that hipsters are completely against the materialistic way of life and the obsession with consumerism. However, that has drastically changed as the subculture has been accepted and incorporated into the larger culture.

Recently, hipsters have been made apart of the mainstream and larger culture. Websites like Tumblr has helped incorporate the subculture into the larger society. It has become the norm and popular to dress and have similar beliefs which were originally that of hipsters. Is it ironic that a subculture that is built on a belief that is completely against society become incorporated into the mainstream? Are we all hipsters at heart? Has the incorporation of the hipster lifestyle abolish the hipster subculture? All these questions formulated in my head when the hipster incorporation took place. It was confusing seeing a subculture resisted by the masses becoming a trend. However, further reading suggested that the taking on of a subculture by the popular media is a frequent occurrence.

Hebdige brought up two ways in which this occurrence happened. The subcultural styles are incorporated into the mainstream culture by the commodity form and/or the ideological form. The commodity form is “the conversion of subcultures signs into mass-produced objects.” This implies that corporate companies use these subculture styles to create new trends. The ideological form is “the labeling and re-definition of deviant behavior by dominant groups.” The two forms can be applied to the diffusion of the hipster subculture into the popular media. Since culture is not fixed it can take on many different trends and continuously alter.