In a seminal work published in 1970, writer Alvin Toffler managed to capture the sense of a world of such immense change at the physical, economic, political and social level that all were afflicted in one way or another by what he termed “future shock“. In his book of the same name Toffler identified a key phenomenon of the times, the stress and alienation of modern Western living; realizing the omnipotent and ominous role of media in the psycho drama of “super-industrial” societies, he also coined the phrase “information overload”.

One can only wonder what he would make of Doha. A number of Gulf Arab cities have witnessed sudden shifts in urban geography over the past decade, with all that involves in terms of social and cultural jolts, but Doha is arguably the most radical. Little more than a sleepy backwater before the U.S.-backed coup of 1995 that brought the current Emir Hamad bin Khalifa to power, with his foreign minister Hamad bin Jassim at one side and royal consort Sheikha Moza, mother to crown prince Tameem, on the other, the city has been transformed beyond all recognition. The sleepy downtown area of the old Souq Waqef faces off against the otherworldly skyscrapers of the West Bay district, with schizophrenic effect. Arising out of the sea on reclaimed land, these structures, some of which are indeed stunning (one resembles a giant vase), almost give the impression of floating on air. Even in the downtown area, which has seen a tasteful renovation of the souq, with cafes and walkways that can be used in the months of the year when the unbearable humidity recedes, disjointed change is coming with a mammoth shopping mall and luxury apartment project planned right next door that will dominate the old part of town.

In the scramble to be a world city, yesterday, signposts appear for buildings that don’t yet exist. In vain, during a recent visit I followed the signs and asked directions for the Qatar National Museum, which will afford the leadership an opportunity to further mould its self-image through crafting a chosen narrative of the historical trajectory under Al Thani rule that led up to this moment. I arrived at a large hole in the ground surrounding by cranes. Traffic between the two main parts of town is often impossibly crowded, and the city extends into the desert where the effect of the innovative architecture of Qatar Foundation buildings is for the moment lost amid the dust, roadworks and construction, sitting like giant table ornaments in an incomplete still-life canvas. One of them is the Arab contemporary art museum ‘Mathaf’, where giant portraits of the emir and Moza greet visitors, with the word Nefertiti – title of a recent exhibition – situated close enough to suggest comparison to the Pharaonic royal beauty, a hint of the creeping megalomania that oddly perhaps makes further advances with each further sign of popular ill-ease and desire for control of destiny. To which I will return later.

This bold move to imagine a new city and a new country has a name: the Qatar National Vision 2030. Under the direction of a ‘General Secretariat for Development Planning’, its website says that $130 billion has been earmarked for investment over the next 5-6 years to create an “advanced society diversified beyond oil”. It will also have to prepare Doha for hosting the 2022 soccer World Cup. “Qatar’s very rapid economic and population growth have created intense strains between the old and new in almost every aspect of life,” the plan says. “It is now imperative for Qatar to choose the best development path that is compatible with the views of its leadership and the aspirations of its people.” Yet there is little indication that the authorities are taking into account the views and fears of the people at all. Elections to an ‘advisory council’ are supposed to be held this year, but there has been no movement in that direction.

The fabric of life in Doha feels as out of sync as the city’s architectural profile. One the one hand it’s developing a line in brash displays of cosmopolitan sophistication, whether it’s New York jazz players in the St Regis hotel (where the humidity breeds maggots in the saxophones), Prince Charles and Camilla fly in to spend a night or two of political holiday-making in the Ritz Carlton, or Sheikha Moza and her retinue occupy lounges of the swanky ‘ W’ of an evening. But the pressures of this development are causing a retreat into the safer reaches of conservatism for ordinary people. There are some family-only areas of towns where unmarried Qataris cannot live, and malls with special days reserved for families only, a Saudi Salafi phenomenon gaining ground; bachelor numbers are rising as foreigners earning less than $2,000 a month cannot bring their families. “Qataris don’t feel comfortable in many places and it’s going to increase as they talk about tripling the population,” Salah Elzein, director of the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, told me.

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To get it in some perspective, the project to develop Qatar is something akin to an attempt to transform a quiet emirate like Fujairah or Umm al-Quwain in the UAE into another Dubai, notwithstanding the deep rivalry and resentment felt towards that city, which Qataris usually describe as having “gone too far” in its uber-modernity and internationalism. Yet, thrust into this vast experimental laboratory, Qataris are worried. They were 40 percent of the population at independence in 1971; now they are 12 percent, less than 300,000 people among 1.9 million in total. Now, muddling through as the ambitions clash with new realities, sports authorities are paying low income Asians (with no hope of becoming Qatari) to attend soccer matches to help fill impressive but otherwise largely empty stadiums.

Last year, Ali al-Kuwari, a prominent intellectual from one of the major Arab tribal groups with privileged status in the socio-political set-up in Qatar, published a collection of essays by prominent figures in society under the title The People Want Reform In Qatar Too. The result of a series of monthly salon discussions among 60 or so people from different backgrounds between March 2011 and February 2012, the book spells out baldly the angst over the future of Qatar. The book discusses issues including the spending of Qatar’s natural gas wealth, the Qatar Foundation, Qatar Airways, the population imbalance, education, media, environment and constitutional and judicial reform.

“Most of the attendees found that there is no precise information about reasons and justifications for controversial public policies. This means that Qataris are always surprised by policy decisions, as if they were a private affair that citizens have no right to know about or take part in,” Kuwari writes in the introduction. “For a start, the government of Qatar does not disclose its population policy and does not publish information about the number of nationals, their make-up or expectations for any change in their portion of the overall population. The hiding of information extends also to public expenditures.” Decision-making is opaque and restricted to a very small clique of people; there is no media freedom or civil society that is independent of the authorities; and the law does not allow political parties or labour unions. Despite the state’s riches, there is public concern over talk of putting social services in the hands of the private sector and a new social security scheme that would reduce government commitments.

“At present there is a railway and metro project being implemented costing $40 billion, about which there has been no public discussion despite its size and implications for the population imbalance since it is based on an assumption of a population of five million people. That would mean a 200 percent increase within ten years – this is frightening,” Kuwari writes. “The main reason for the population imbalance is official policy since 2004 of expanding real estate with massive projects and the infrastructure that requires, with the aim of selling investment homes to buyers who would gain permanent residency, regardless of whether there is a need and whether society can cope with it. So the imbalance is not only the result of a traditional need for imported labour but also an unjustified official choice.” Neither Kuwari nor anyone else involved in The People in Qatar Want Reform Too received public rebuke of note, despite these stinging criticisms of a speculative bonanza that has made some Qataris extremely wealthy.

With media avoiding frank discussion of such issues, the efforts of a small intelligentsia could be reasonably safely ignored – Qatar’s population-to-wealth divide is an autocrat’s dream after all. However, less so the work of a young poet, with a gift for Gulf vernacular verse, with access to YouTube and who had made a name for himself in the UAE on the popular Sha’ir al-Milyon TV show for poets. Mohammed Ibn al-Dhaib al-Ajami was arrested when he returned to Doha from Cairo, where he was studying at Cairo University, in November 2011, months after he composed poetry in praise of the Tunisian revolution that removed Zein al-Abideen Ben Ali in January of that year. A court subsequently sentenced him to life – later reduced to 15 years – for insulting the emir and his family, though in a poem he read out privately a year before the Arab Spring uprisings.

The rulings did not mention the Arab Spring poem directly – that would open the leadership to clear charges of hypocrisy – but it appeared to have touched a nerve. For Ajami, Tunisia was: “A warning to the country whose ruler is ignorant, whose ruler deems that power comes from the American army. A warning to the country whose people starve while the regime boasts of its prosperity. A warning to the country whose citizens sleep: one moment you have your rights, the next they’re taken from you. A warning to the system – inherited – of oppression. How long have all of you been slaves to one man’s selfish predilections?” The closing section could not be more discomfiting: “The Arab regimes and those who rule them are all, without exception, without a single exception, shameful, thieves. This question that keeps you up at night – its answer won’t be found on any of the official channels… Why, why do these regimes import everything from the West – everything but the rule of law, that is, and everything but freedom?”

If Qataris appear reticent to question or criticize what their rulers are planning for them, morning radio show Watani al-Habib (My Dear Nation) offers something of an antidote. Venting in their own discursive space, callers are usually careful to stick to the practical consequences of urban development. Some slip over the line into issues of poverty, inequality and how the money’s being spent. Najeeb al-Nuaimi, former justice minister, says the programme is a trap to catch those who talk out of line. “Some will complain about retirement (payments), others talk about justice. State security immediately called them and said why did you dare to talk against the government and if you do it again you will be stripped of passport,” he says. “People say why is the government investing abroad and not spending here?”

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When the emir and his team seized control in 1995, the predilection was to make of the country that which his conservative ageing father, Khalifa bin Hamad – unable and unwilling to stand up to Saudi bullying over borders – was not wont to do. Like Sultan Qaboos’ father in Oman a generation before, he was shunted aside because others – at home and abroad – deemed him lacking in “vision”. With vast natural gas resources and emerging liquefication technology, Qatar offered possibilities. The new team embarked on a series of moves to set Qatar apart as an independent polity making itself important to as many regional and international players as possible and developing links with political groups in the Arab world that cut across regime lines. The United States was invited to establish the Udaid airbase, Israelis were allowed to open a trade liaison office, and various Arab and Muslim opposition figures were offered sanctuary in Doha. And of course the pan-Arab news channel Al Jazeera was established, instituting a genuine revolution in Arab media and the culture of political debate.

As David Roberts has pointed out, these striking moves were partly driven by a search for identity in a state-nouveau sharing many features with its neighbours. “Pan-tribal and pan-religious links further complicated notions of a Qatari identity, leaving few religious, cultural, economic, societal, or political features specific to Qatar. Consequently, the new Qatari elite has been assiduously filling in many of these blanks for decades,” he writes. But the more the gas flowed and the more wealthy Qatar became (the wealthiest in the world since 2010, according to per capita income), the more outlandish the nature of its crystal visions. The regime has not only conjured up a city, it has constructed a network of political alliances stretching the length and breadth of the Arab world, based, controversially, on Islamist political movements linked to Egypt’s Brotherhood. Foreign policy is another empty canvas on which Qatar’s rulers can paint at will.

Qatari, indeed Gulf, closeness to Islamist movements is not in itself new. The Qatari state, before and after the era of British tutelage, has traditionally made use of Salafi imams, judges and bureaucrats with Saudi training, a policy that began in earnest during the era of Sheikh Jassim (died 1913), the man seen as the founder of modern Qatar. But in the 1950s Brotherhood cadres from Egypt were invitedm including a then-young cleric named Yousef al-Qaradawi. Subsequently, Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE shifted their position on the Brotherhood by degrees after the group took part in parliamentary elections in Egypt in 1984, after the 1990-1 Gulf crisis when it opposed the Western intervention to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait, and after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, which drove a desperate Saudi Arabia to brand the Brotherhood as the true source of a posited Islamic dysfunction, rather than its Wahhabi Salafism. But Qatar stuck with them. From the beginning Qaradawi was a weekly guest on Al Jazeera, given a pulpit which he used to establish himself in time as one of, if not the most, widely respected cleric in the region; he became at the least the one whose opinions reached the widest audience. In addition, Al Jazeera had a strong contingent of Islamist-leaning broadcasters and journalists and that trend deepened when Palestinian correspondent Waddah Khanfar took over as managing director from 2003 to 2011.

Qatar always presented this tilt as part of a service to the Arab world, to give a voice to repressed but nevertheless influential political trends and heal the region’s wounds. It was also a plain tactic in the drive to establish Qatar as an independent power that had shed its traditional client status with Riyadh. But come the uprisings of 2011, Qatar was in a position to take on the mantle of enabler of distant revolts and benefactor of a network of Islamist groups linked to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. It did so with gusto, providing the political and financial muscle for armed rebellions that brought down the emir’s once close friend Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya and which the emir still hopes will bring down his other former friend Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Doha has maintained close links with the Brotherhood-run government in Egypt – providing loans, handouts and promises of massive investment as a lifeline as Brotherhood opponents clash daily with Islamists and their new friends, the security forces – as well as the Ennahda-led government in Tunisia, the Hamas-run government in Gaza, and Islamist parties in Libya, Yemen and Morocco. Al Jazeera has been there to give them a platform and promote their narrative.

Of course, the policy of Brotherhood promotion has become hugely controversial across the Arab world. It is causing strains with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where the government has put 94 Islamists on trial for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government (the same charges Mubarak’s regime used against the Brotherhood in the show trials of the 1990s). In endless Twitter commentary and interviews, Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan done the most to reveal the publicly unstated thinking of UAE officialdom towards Qatar, once even warning that Qaradawi would be arrested if he set foot in the country. In this, one of a series of such Arabic articles he has penned on Middle East Online, Emirati writer Hamad al-Mazrouei attacks Qatar’s ruling elite for “religious extremism” and asks whether Qatar would be safe from any “bites from the snakes it has collected in its lap” (“‘Indama tastathmir Qatar fi al-tatarruf al-dini“, 9 April 2013). Kuwaiti MP Nabil al-Fadl recently attacked Hamad bin Jassim, foreign minister since before the 1995 coup, for using Al Jazeera and Qaradawi to stir dissent in the Gulf, in sentiments typically heard in government circles across the region. Both countries fear Islamists in their midst because the Islamists are adept at playing the process of modern democratic politics and both are suspicious of Qatar’s motives. In the view of a recent skit by Egyptian TV satirist Bassem Youssef (who has made a career out of ridiculing the Islamists), the Brotherhood government of President Mohammed Morsi has replaced the devotion to the Arab nation in Abdel-Halim Hafez’s classic song Watani Habibi (My Dear Nation) with love for Qatari Habibi (My Dear Qatar).

The question of Qatar has become a favourite parlour game. Influenced by this pervasive anti-Brotherhood atmosphere in their host countries, diplomats, analysts, policy makers and journalists in places like Dubai or Abu Dhabi feverishly debate the opaque decision-making processes in “the tiny state” of glib media parlance and wonder if Qatar as a state or perhaps certain members of the ruling elite themselves are going to pay some kind of price for the insolence of their dissonant tone in this post-Spring era of fear and loathing. He who came by coup could leave by one too, commentators suggest.

The issue was recently broached in public, and in a manner that I think reveals how mistaken the speculation is. At an Arab leaders’ summit convened in Doha in March the emir and his foreign minister displayed supreme confidence as they compered proceedings as if they had been anointed rulers of the Arab world. I’m not sure such confidence has oozed from summit hosts since the days of Nasser. At a post-summit press conference, Hamad Bin Jassim, who is also prime minister of course, was happy to take an apparently planted question from a senior Egyptian journalist with Al-Ahram. Tossed a soft-ball, Bin Jassim picked up on the most ridiculous of the rumours in the fevered environment of Egypt, that Qatar would ‘buy’ the Pyramids or ‘rent’ the Suez Canal, in order to easily knock them down and argued that Qatar’s help for post-uprising Egypt began during the rule of the military rule before the Brotherhood won elections.

“There are people who want to spread these rumours, like buying the Pyramids or renting the Suez Canal. Egypt’s affairs are Egypt’s and nothing to do with us. Qatar deals with governments not individuals,” he said, warming to the theme. He then repeated the charge, very much believed by Islamists in Egypt, that there is a conspiracy of Mubarak-era loyalists, using misguided revolutionaries, to ruin their project. “There are huge amounts of money that have gone to media in Egypt to launch a campaign against Qatari-Egyptian relations and against Doha, while Qatar has done nothing wrong… Doha has its opinion on supporting countries undergoing transition. These countries did not have strong relations with Doha before the change because they believed Doha wanted a bigger role than it warrants, but it’s not true because Doha wants strong Arab countries with dignity. Qatar didn’t call for these revolutions but they started because of circumstances there – authoritarianism, and the desire for leaders to pass on their rule (to sons). Qatar has given support to Arab Spring countries without consideration of who rules them.”

The truth is, Doha remains for now a mini ‘Ikhwanistan’, an oasis of Brotherhood-style Islamists where suppressed debates elsewhere – such as ‘will Al Saud survive the uprisings?’ or ‘is the ongoing trial of 94 Islamists and rights activists in the UAE a sham?’ – are fair game for public discussion. Islamists from around the region are a notable presence in university departments, think tanks and other non-government organisations; there is a constant stream arriving in the country from around the Arab world for seminars and forums. “They (UAE) claim that these people formed an organization in the UAE but there’s no proof,” a Qatari law professor said. “Courts are not clear there, the conditions of the law would be good if they were implemented, but the trial is hidden and lawyers can’t see their clients, there’s pressure and there’s abuse to get confessions, the prisons are in a bad state. That makes it all dubious. I know there are Muslim Brotherhood people in the UAE, but is there an organization as such?” A Sudanese analyst suggested the UAE would soon face pressure to change tack and accept the Brotherhood: “For how long can the UAE continue aggressively standing against the Muslim Brotherhood and making that the basis of its policy? You start having problems with Egypt and Qatar, and maybe Turkey. How much will you achieve with that?” Mohammed al-Mukhtar al-Shangiti, a Mauritanian Islamic studies professor who often comments on Al Jazeera, launched into a scathing critique of Saudi Arabia when I visited him at the Qatar Foundation. “The Saudi state is a disaster for Islam and for Saudi people, and I hope it will change peaceably and gradually, otherwise it will change violently,” he said. “These are explosive youth and they cannot let the situation go on like this. Saudi Arabia as it is today cannot continue.” You don’t often hear such opinions expressed so bluntly and openly in the Gulf.

There are Qatari symphathizers, though with no organizational presence as such they present no threat to the regime.  One is Jassim Sultan, a Qatari who promotes Islamist thought through a studies centre and a website promoting and Islamic “renaissance” (nahda), the name used by Tunisian Islamist party Ennahda and the slogan used by Egyptian Islamist president Mursi during his election last year. “Qaradawi is not new in Qatar and the Brotherhood is not new in Qatar. When the modern state was established, the ministry of education and other institutions were set up by many Muslim Brotherhood people,” Sultan explained in his downtown office. The Gulf fear of the Brotherhood and Qatar’s promotion of them was exaggerated, he said. “Nothing has changed in the Islamists’ thinking about the existing regimes. The Brotherhood in Gulf usually involved people from the ruling family or close to the ruling family, so they are hardly subversive groups.” Sultan’s Nahda group was involved in organizing a conference on Islamist themes in Kuwait two years ago, with guests from around the Gulf including Saudi Arabia, that was prevented from going ahead, apparently because of Saudi pressure, Saudi columnist at Al-Hayat newspaper in London told me last year.

Peppering his speech with reverential references to Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna or its infamous ideologue Sayed Qutb, who was executed under Nasser, Sultan was sanguine about the Brotherhood’s performance in Egypt and Tunisia so far. He says that they, as well as their secular liberal and leftist opponents, were suffering from political immaturity that derives from decades of repressive rule and suppressed public debate. “I’m not disappointed with the Islamists in general because I know that they have not had a chance to review thinking that has remained unchanged since the movement was founded. They will be unable to manage a diverse society. The old ideas are not able to create new societies, and I fear that this is not something for Islamists only but leftists too. There is a big nostalgia for the former Socialist situation in Egypt and you find a tense language used towards capitalism and economic systems in the world,” he said, displaying the neo-liberal sympathies that dominate Brotherhood thinking in Egypt today. He pointed to the dispute among Islamists in Egypt over whether to accept foreign loans with interest as an example of modernist challenges that Islamists needed to get over, a dispute in which Brotherhood pragmatists will likely carry the day. “There has not been enough understanding yet of politics, economy and the demands of reality. Islamist movements are still far from this since they have been isolated from society for a long time, their knowledge and ideological base springs from the 7/8th century. Someone could be an engineer but while he has a modern mode of thinking regarding his work his ideology belongs to another era.”

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As with the breakneck urban growth wrought upon them, ordinary Qataris are far removed from it all. But there is unease, if restricted for the most part to some intellectual quarters. Some individuals have been touched by the tension with the UAE. Some people seen have been stopped from entering the country and a Qatar Petroleum official has been detained without a clear reason. One key issue is if the policy is based on a strategic reading of how to maximize Qatar’s importance at this juncture, or whether ideological affinity does not play some role. “It’s a difficult question. Perhaps it’s to support Arab peoples, to support the oppressed, to encourage Qatar’s role in the Arab world. It’s complex and it’s not clear. The Qatari people don’t create political decisions. There is no parliament, this is the direction of individuals in the state and the people are distanced from it,” said Hassan Al Sayed, a constitutional law professor at Qatar University. “Maybe most people support it, but intellectuals ask, where will this lead to? – though that’s a minority. Some think it could lead to disasters, politically, financially, even on a personal level.”

Within the country, the authorities have tried to strike a balance among different ideological forces in society, expanding the ideological palette from the Salafi base to include Brotherhood thought and, the most recent addition, liberals. A large mosque in the name of Mohammed Ibn Abdulwahhab, the Salafi ideologue who helped found the modern Saudi state, was opened in 2011 in Doha, in an apparent effort to mollify Salafis over liberal and Brotherhood gains. “The Salafi hardliners are not happy about the opening (to other groups), but they are quite free here, there are no restrictions against them. There’s no political opposition really in Qatar,” said Mohammed Alahmari, a Saudi who runs a Doha think tank.

Defenders argue that the emir himself is closer to Arab nationalists than Islamists in personal beliefs; he has secular Palestinian Israeli intellectual Azmi Bishara as an advisor and some say he even mocks the Brotherhood in private. But how much influence Bishara has is open to question, and in his appearances on Al Jazeera he has never veered from the party line, which is unfortunate for such a prominent and acclaimed public intellectual in the era of the Arab Spring. What would ditching the Brotherhood look like? Perhaps Al Jazeera would be ordered to give more airspace to political alternatives in Egypt at the time of parliamentary elections later this year. But would Qaradawi be ordered to talk the Brotherhood down? He already made clear his preference last year for renegade Brotherhood member Abdel-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, ejected from the group for insisting on running for president, while declaring on Al Jazeera his general approval of Brotherhoodism. Qatar could push the group into accepting some kind of wider inclusive government in Egypt, a constant source of rumour and gossip, but that hardly amounts to dumping them. Qatar has become so involved in promoting its Islamists, and in its Syrian project to bring down an Arab regime, that to step back now could be dangerous, as Mazrouei hinted at.

In the view of former justice minister Nuaimi, who has taken on the case of jailed poet al-Ajami, the shift towards the Brotherhood has become even more marked in recent years, after Khanfar stepped down and an Al Thani took over. He predicts it will not last. “The Muslim Brotherhood is running the show. They have a monopoly and you get attacked if you attack the Brotherhood. It’s new and it became more clear that Al Jazeera is backing them in the last five years. Qaradawi said this is the age of the Brotherhood, the Brotherhood is Islam and Islam is the Brotherhood,” he said. “They (government) think that the Brotherhood is the political future of the Arab world – this is the big wave, so let’s ride it. They think the Islamists will be the strongest. I think they are wrong. I predict that in five years they will be out in Egypt and Tunisia and then Qatar will put them aside.”

Ultimately, it is a very narrow group of people who would decide on any such major shift in approach to the Islamist movement; a policy change along those lines may well be run by the ruling family’s powerful Western backers first for approval. But it is the unfolding melodrama of a nation and its stratagems for expansion in which Qataris are very much spectators.