“Well, this is awkward…” read a tongue-in-cheek (and now-deleted) tweet from the official account of Budweiser, an American subsidiary of the multi-billion-dollar beer conglomerate Anheuser-Busch InBev. Posted two days before the first game in this year’s FIFA World Cup, the subtweet was a reaction to a joint decision made by FIFA and Qatar to remove alcoholic beer from stadiums in a country where drinking alcohol isn’t possible in most public locations. (Budweiser Zero—a non-alcoholic beer—could remain.) Any regular Bud products with standard ABVs were limited to the eye-wateringly expensive private boxes, or designated fan zones far from the stadiums.
Having paid $75 million to be a sponsor—and having commissioned an expensive marketing campaign featuring football stars Lionel Messi, Raheem Sterling, and Neymar Jr. with a song by rapper Lil Baby—Budweiser can perhaps be forgiven for the snark. Disrupting distribution, sales, and promotion strategy for one of the biggest sports events in the world 48 hours before its start is exactly the kind of thing to put a corporate team on edge.
But despite Budweiser’s evident frustration—or the backlash that followed—this decision wasn’t simply about banning “fun” for fans who wanted to drink in their seats. For Qatar, the issue of alcohol has long been linked with power: who wields it, how, and when.
Budweiser may have made an admission of the awkwardness of the situation, but Qatar’s decision should not have come as a surprise. As the Wall Street Journal reported the day after the deleted tweet, and one day before the World Cup’s start, “[T]he Qataris were intentionally ambiguous about what they would allow in regards to alcohol,” and “FIFA’s evaluation report, a 38-page document assessing Qatar’s bid and the country’s promises ahead of the 2010 vote, didn’t make a single mention of alcohol or beer.”
Even still, the Western response to Qatar’s change of heart ranged from perplexity to outright fury. In Forbes, a Villanova University professor and past president of the American Academy of Advertising wrote that, “The about face on the part of the Qatari government just two days prior to the event is not defensible by any reasonable ethical standard and, as a result, criticizing this change of plans is not a matter of respecting another culture.”
However, there were clear warnings from the beginning of Qatar’s bid to host the World Cup. The country stayed non-committal throughout the planning process until it was past the point of no return, and ultimately did what it wanted—not only in regards to alcohol, but many controversial policies.
On almost every major controversy related to Qatar being selected as the host country—its lack of footballing history and football-related infrastructure, its exploitation of immigrant workers, a climate that would make a summer World Cup dangerous, the treatment of LGBTQ+ fans—the same pattern played out. The Qataris made token gestures towards those expressing concern about these issues, suggested they would resolve any controversies, and then rescinded those promises.
Regarding the country’s climate, for instance, Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani—the 2022 Qatar bid chairman—said this: “The event has to be organized in June or July. We will have to take the help of technology to counter the harsh weather. We have already set in motion the process. A stadium with controlled temperature is the answer to the problem. We have other plans up our sleeves as well.” Ultimately, however, those stadiums were not built and the tournament was moved to the winter, disrupting European club seasons and upsetting the Football Association, the European Leagues, and the European Club Association in the process.
This was all seen as the price for choosing Qatar to be the World Cup host—a price that many federations were willing to pay in exchange for hefty bribes. The eight-year process whereby federations, under the direction of FIFA, choose a host nation has historically been one filled with quid pro quo agreements and other forms of backscratching. FIFA knows this and has introduced changes to deter corruption. But as reported by the New York Times, even with new rules in place, the bidding process for Qatar (and Russia before it) saw federation officials receive large sums of money in exchange for brushing aside any concerns they had about Qatar hosting the multinational tournament.
If these forms of corruption were an open secret from the time Qatar won the bid, why the surprise about its change of heart around beer? Because most commenters underestimated the seriousness of the alcohol issue.
“Truly, Allah has cursed khamr (alcoholic beverages) and has cursed the one who produces it, the one for whom it is produced, the one who drinks it, the one who serves it, the one who carries it, the one for whom it is carried, the one who sells it, the one who earns from the sale of, the one who buys, and the one for whom it is bought.” [Narrated by at-Tirmidhi and Ibn Majah]
-Yusuf al-Qaradawi, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam
These are the words of the late Islamic cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi (1926-2022). He was born in Egypt, but emigrated to Qatar in the 1960s when the Egyptian government, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, with which al-Qaradawi was associated. He would come to be, through the support of Qatar and its news network Al-Jazeera, one of the most influential Islamic thinkers of the 20th century.
After arriving in Qatar in the 1960s, he won renown for his wasiti Islam (a middle-path or moderate form of Islam), but there was and still is a general misapprehension in the West of this middle path. It was not one between tradition and modernity, between living as religious nomads in tents and being secular, Westernized, capitalist citizens. The middle path of Qatar, and others, was one between extreme Islamic modernity (Al-Qaeda, ISIS, violent strains of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other extremist movements) and the socialist/secular modernity best exemplified by Arab Socialism (Baathist Iraq, Nasser’s Egypt, the Arab League, etc.). The wasiti way was an anti-colonial movement looking to take the best from the West (advances in science, technology, and education) and chart another course that did not leave the Muslim wold subservient to the West or the USSR.
Qatar’s banishment of alcoholic beer from most of its stadiums can be seen as an implementation of this middle path: keeping beer, and other alcoholic beverages, cordoned off from Qatari society, and punishing those who cross that boundary. Qatar’s penal code has four articles on punishment for the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol. These recent bans are not departures, but are rather the assertion of a policy that is upheld in the country when it is not hosting the World Cup.
Additionally, having the power to assert this ruling on one of the biggest world stages is a significant legitimation factor for Qatar’s ruling family, the Al-Thanis. As Alan Fromherz, professor of history at the Georgia State University, notes in his book “Qatar: A Modern History,” the Al-Thanis have “maintained their power not through force or domination but through their historical legitimacy as leaders and defenders of the idea of Qatar and Qatari independence decades before the discovery of oil.”
This decision—standing firm in the face of foreign pressures—is just the latest way for the Al-Thanis to reinforce that position.
But it is not enough to understand the alcohol ban merely within the context of Qatar’s contemporary legal structures. Rather, this power-play with beer—which so shocked the American and European commentariat—can also be seen as a subversion of the old colonial order.
Between 1916 and 1971, Qatar was a British protectorate, where, in exchange for the protection of the British Navy, it ceded all of its external affairs to Britain, as well as some of its internal ones. In practice, this meant the people who helped run Qatar as part of Britain’s informal empire in the Gulf—i.e. expatriate bureaucrats and their local collaborators—“were entitled to the protection and ‘good offices’ [diplomatic representation and mediation] of British civil and military officers around the world.”
This fit with the rest of the colonies in the Middle East, where Western powers had special areas, if not entirely separate legal systems, that meant beer was always available for thirsty expats no matter local views on alcohol consumption. For example, in the 1920s there was local support for limiting new liquor licenses in Egypt, and the Egyptian government, still under the sway of the British, agreed to help. It only later revealed that the European Districts (al-Aḫṭāṭ al-Urūbīya) in five cities—Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said, Ismailia, and the Suez, which were the hubs of the alcohol trade—were exempt from this effort.
After 1971, specifically following President Jimmy Carter’s announcement of the Carter Doctrine in 1980, it has been the United States that has run its own informal empire in the Gulf. Since 2001, Qatar has happily played a growing role in that empire. While the country, now empowered by massive wealth, is more able to provide pushback to policies it disagrees with, Americans still enjoy certain freedoms that native residents cannot.
One need only look at what the U.S. embassy says about alcohol to see that: “Alcohol is legal in Qatar, but highly regulated and only available in limited locations, to non-Muslim non-Qatari adults aged 21+. Public intoxication can cause legal consequences, including deportation. Some venues that do serve alcohol may refuse entry or service to patrons they believe to be Muslim, regardless of the patron’s actual religion, nationality, or personal choice. However, most hotels and restaurants catering to international patrons will serve alcohol to guests who are 21+, including via room service.”
We can thus assume that all the pieces written about the shock at the removal of beer from stadiums were not due to bafflement at the caprice of Qatar, but rather shock that Qatar was publicly asserting itself beyond the bounds of what appeared to be a historically agreed-upon relationship.
That looks especially stark when viewed against past policy reversals at the World Cup. Prior to hosting the World Cup in 2014, the Brazilian government made alcohol illegal at football matches to address violence among rival fans. Yet FIFA, with the support of Budweiser, who has worked with the organization since 1985, pressured the Brazilian government to pass a new law allowing alcohol back in stadiums. And in 2012, then Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff signed into law “a bill that in principle allows the sale of beer during 2014 World Cup matches.”
As FIFA’s general secretary, Jérôme Valcke, said at the time: “Alcoholic drinks are part of the FIFA World Cup, so we’re going to have them. Excuse me if I sound a bit arrogant but that’s something we won’t negotiate.”
The battle over alcoholic beer at the World Cup in Qatar was not simply a squabble over money and beer, but rather the collision of two histories: the history of Western colonialism and the history of Qatar as a modern nation-state. Its resolution—Qatar removing alcohol from stadiums—was not a regime cracking down on foreign visitors, but a very visible assertion of its new place in the world. That assertion is designed to win it legitimacy at home, and signals to the West—so used to being able to force compliance—that Qatar can play the game, too.
Words by Omar FodaIllustrations by Tim Green
