The architect of Qatari autonomy

For most of its modern history, Qatar was a place that things happened to. It was a quiet peninsula prized for its energy resources and consulted about little, living on the margins of larger ambitions. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who died in Doha on Sunday at the age of 74, refused that inheritance.

Despite what many commentaries will reduce his legacy to, he did not just make Qatar rich. He made it relevant. And for a small state, this is a form of security.

That was the legacy of his 18 years in power, and it outlived him. The country he handed on in 2013 has sat at more tables and has brokered more conversations than a peninsula its size had any business reaching.

The break came in June 1995, when Sheikh Hamad took the throne from his father and ended a long national habit of caution. Deference had been the small state’s survival instinct: keep your head down, defer to the powerful, and wait.

Sheikh Hamad inverted it. A country with no strategic depth in territory or numbers could not outweigh its region, so he set out to make the peninsula – wedged between Saudi Arabia and Iran – indispensable to its neighbours. He grasped something most rulers of small states never do, which until today defines Qatar: being needed is safer than being armed.

The immense wealth that Qatar acquired under his reign was a mere instrument; the true achievement lay in what he built with it. Sheikh Hamad used the proceeds of the country’s North Field, the single largest reservoir of non-associated gas on earth, to expand his country’s reach.

Al Jazeera, launched in 1996, gave Doha a voice in every Arab household and an argument in every Arab capital. Qatar Airways, the sovereign wealth fund, the 2022 World Cup bid, and the patient mediation efforts in Lebanon, Darfur, and Palestine were threads of one design. Each made the country a little harder to overlook.

By the time Sheikh Hamad allowed the Taliban to open a political office in Doha in 2012 upon the request of Washington, the smallest state in the room had become a key diplomatic force multiplier for the United States. Qatar routinely hosted the conversations larger powers could not hold themselves. The emirate’s access became its currency.

What set Sheikh Hamad’s statecraft apart from mere chequebook diplomacy was that it drew on a national principle. Long before the wealth, Qatar had thought of itself as the Kaabat al Madioum – the Kaaba of the oppressed, a haven for the persecuted and the exiled – a phrase that reaches back to the Nabati verse of Emir Jassim bin Mohammad Al Thani, who wrote that whoever sought refuge with Qatar would be protected.

Sheikh Hamad took that inherited ethos and made it a modern instrument of state. Al Jazeera, branded a voice for the voiceless, became the broadcaster for those marginalised by traditional broadcasting. The open door to dissidents, political fugitives and movements the region wished to bury, was the practice of a revolutionary disruptor hoping to lead the region to a new socio-political order.

This kept Qatar close to the pulse of the Arab street, particularly during the Arab revolutions in 2011. Sheikh Hamad’s somewhat impulsive support for the revolutions in the sentiment of solidarity with the oppressed and weak was consequential, but brought exposure and backlash from across the region.

At home, Sheikh Hamad governed by the same conviction that drove him abroad: that societies are meant to be opened and led by government for the people. He enfranchised both women and men by holding the first municipal elections in 1999 and gave the country’s first constitution in 2003.

The vision he shared with his wife, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, to build a knowledge economy around schools, universities and research rather than on gas alone, was as far-sighted as it was, at first, unwelcome among more conservative Qataris who mistrusted the speed of it. He pressed on anyway.

The society he leaves behind is freer and more emancipated than the one he inherited, and it ranks among the most prosperous on earth, measured not only in income per capita but in education, healthcare and public services.

In 2013, Sheikh Hamad did something that is very rare among monarchs in the region: he peacefully handed over power. Handing the throne to his son, Sheikh Tamim, while he was still politically dominant, was an act entirely in character for a man who adapts quickly before events could force his hand. He had taken power by deposing his father and was ready to give it up by choice to allow his legacy to be carried on by the next generation, as the world around started to change more rapidly.

Sheikh Hamad gave Qatar the means to be sovereign and autonomous, an interlocutor the system cannot route around. He gave his country an idea of itself and a direction of travel towards the future.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.