A Derridean approach to Qatar’s paradox of hospitality

Abstract

Qatar has been heavily critiqued for its alleged inability to be hospitable to fans and tourists from different cultural, gender, and religious backgrounds (Todman, 2022). It has been damagingly portrayed as an “unwelcoming and closed conservative country” (Al-Ansari & Zahirovic, 2021: 203). This article examines Qatar’s paradoxical positioning of hospitality. It draws on the Derridean notion of hospitality to conceptualize the Qatari cultural and sociopolitical context as being conditioned by “hostipitality,” a term that Derrida coined to explain the contradictory nature of hospitality, “a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility’” (2000b: 3). This article, therefore, utilizes Derrida’s theory of “hostipitality” to deconstruct the Western mindset of liberalism and the alleged unconditional respect for all. Two examples are used, the Qatari World Cup and Souq Waqif, to further contextualize and problematize the paradoxical positionality of Qatari hospitality. How can applying the Derridean hostipitality help negotiate Qatar’s controversial hospitality positioning? How do the cases of the World Cup and Souq Waqif exemplify the paradoxical aspect of conditioned hospitality? Additionally, the “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment is used to situate the paradox and help reconcile hospitality with hostility to form an emerging conception of negotiated conditioned hospitality. This study invokes the paradox of the “Ship of Theseus” to respond to the Derridean contradictory notion of hostipitality and further problematize Qatar’s positionality of hospitality.