Have any of the American presidential candidates agreed to give Al-Jazeera an interview? Sheikh smiled. "We would be interested, but I believe they would not agree, especially John McCain." Is that reticence because of the station's perceived links to Muslim radicalism? "We do not support al-Qaida's policies. Al-Jazeera tries to cover all sides in the U.S. conflict with al-Qaida. It attempts to balance stories by giving both points of view." He said that the channel gives the United States 10 times as much coverage as it gives radical Muslim movements, and noted that it carries live White House, Pentagon and other news conferences. It has interviewed many U.S. officials, including, recently, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Sheikh insisted that the channel was just doing good news gathering by airing portions of al-Qaida tapes. "Al-Jazeera edits a one-hour al-Qaida tape down to four minutes, and we put on the air what we think is newsworthy." He pointed out that some al-Qaida communiqués have made threats on which the terror organization followed through. "They don't just cry wolf."
The Bush administration's hatred of Al-Jazeera is legendary, and leaked information from the British government suggests that Bush even considered bombing its offices in Doha. Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad were bombed by the United States, even though the station says it provided Washington with its coordinates. Correspondent Tarek Ayoub was killed in the Baghdad bombing, and he is clearly viewed in the studio as a martyr to journalistic freedom in the face of brutal U.S. tactics. While I was there, the report came that the United States had released Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese who had been working for Al-Jazeera for only one month when the Pakistani military arrested him at the Afghanistan border. He was sent to Guantánamo and alleges he was tortured and repeatedly asked about Al-Jazeera's administration and structure. The news room went wild with joy at the news of his release.
The country where Al-Jazeera is based is relatively pro-American. It is a tiny but very wealthy place, with 15 percent of the world's proven gas reserves, and Qatar's citizens are well aware of how precarious their position is. One Qatari recalled to me how he woke up on Aug. 2, 1990, to find that Kuwait, another small Gulf country, had just vanished as a result of its annexation by Saddam Hussein. Qataris clearly fear that without the right alliances, they could also be gobbled up one day.
Despite its insecurities, Qatar, perhaps the world's richest country per capita, is emerging as a powerful, polyglot city-state that is as much Indian Ocean as Arab, as much Hindu, Buddhist and Christian as Muslim. It now has a population of more than a million, but Qatari natives are a small minority. Some 90 percent of its residents are guest workers. Twenty percent are from other Arab countries, and 20 percent are from India. Iranians, Filipinos, Nepalis and Pakistanis all make up about 10 percent each. Although the 2004 census suggested that about 30 percent of the population was non-Muslim, the country is attracting so many immigrants so fast that I suspect the proportion is now far higher.
The man who pays the network's bills is definitely pro-American. Al-Jazeera is subsidized by the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani, who has taken his country into a firm military alliance, and a secret defense pact, with the United States. The United States maintains a military base at al-Udeid, west of the capital. Former CIA director George Tenet asserted in his memoirs that Sheikh Hamad had provided information used in the capture of top al-Qaida operatives Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed in Pakistan. Qatar has hosted Israeli President Shimon Peres and, despite its sympathies with the Palestinians, has fair relations with Israel.
One might think an easy answer to the question of why Al-Jazeera has planned so many stories on the U.S. presidential race is that, with the base at al-Udeid, it is in some ways yet another 51st state. But the Qataris I talked to are far more pro-American than the station, which is dominated by expatriate Levantine intellectuals, like Sheikh, who is Palestinian. Within the globalized, cosmopolitan milieu of Qatar, the Arabic service of Al-Jazeera is an island of pan-Arab nationalism. In fact, Al-Jazeera Arabic tends to be more reflective of the typical concerns of the larger Arab world, the issues that matter to Egyptians, Jordanians, Palestinians and Lebanese: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Arab world has been deeply shaped by American policies and interventions, and the Arab public expects the next U.S. leader to be consequential for them. In the age of the sole superpower, the American president is in some ways president of the world. Ahmed Sheikh and other Arab observers are asking whether the next one will bother to do his or her homework this time.
About the writer
Salon contributor Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East."
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)