The Best Collection in the World

Notes from the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani Museum

Photo by the author of a gallery of vehicles

As many of you know, I live in Doha, which is a change in many dimensions from Amherst, Massachusetts, and Arlington, Virginia, my most recent (and at times simultaneous) previous residences. The change has been pretty much unambiguously good, not least—to be honest—because of the 900 extra hours of sunlight per year compared to Western Massachusetts.

Americans like to think of their country as quite new—for instance, “New” England—and by comparison with Europe it’s true that the average building or institution that you encounter on a daily basis is much newer. (Amherst College, venerable though it may seem, was founded after the Napoleonic Wars.) But if you want to see life in a really new place, you need to head outside of the United States—perhaps Doha, for instance. Living in the United States, I often despaired that anything would be built; living in Doha, it seems like the whole place is up for reinvention all the time. Consider these Google Earth photos of Doha, for instance:

Satellite photos of Doha, 1984-2022

And of Amherst:

Satellite photos of Amherst, MA, 1984-2022

This is unfair in some regards—most obviously, Amherst doesn’t have a giant natural gas endowment—but I should also note that the pace of development in the lower row of photographs was regarded as absolutely unacceptable, borderline traumatic by not a few residents of the community.

Cards on the table: I like places where things happen, and I like places where people want things to happen.

It’s not the case that Qatari society is brand-new—people have lived here for a long time—but it is the case that modern Qatar represents a radical discontinuity from the past, and it’s also the case that the future feels immanent in a way that it doesn’t in other places I’ve lived in the United States.

You can also witness the results of that velocity of change more plainly in some circumstances than in others. For example, there’s the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani Museum, which is perhaps the best personal collection I’ve ever seen, or ever will, and which should be well worth an entire day on anyone’s Qatar itinerary—and possibly even a stopover on its own.

Private museums seem to be more of A Thing around this region, or at least the only other genuinely brilliant one I’ve been to—the Tareq Rajab Museum in Kuwait City; astonishing—but this one sets a standard that I would assume would be tough to beat. It is probably worth, like the Louvre if for different reasons, multiple days. Many captions are only in Arabic, but—can you believe this—your phone can translate them instantly and, as far as I can tell, perfectly enough that this is not a problem.

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