
Making History
DOHA, THE ISOLATED CAPITAL OF QATAR, is more a half-city than a city. Only partly built up. With a resort here and a luxury hotel there and long stretches of sand in between, the Persian Gulf lapping at its eastern side. I was there for the opening of the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, having landed a couple weeks or so after Qatar won the bid for the World Cup in 2022—an event that will quite literally make Doha. Over the next decade the workers will be brought in, the plots of land divided and subdivided, and this place at the end of the desert will materialize.
The people were visibly