Much of the current literature on Turkish and Qatari cooperation pays attention to the importance of shared ideology because the ruling elites in both countries are deemed to be strong backers of the Muslim Brotherhood movement.[56] The founders of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came from the Milli Görüş movement, which is part of a larger Muslim Brotherhood network. Muslim Brotherhood-oriented concepts and ideology have influenced foreign policy decisions of the AKP throughout its rule, although with varying intensity.[57]

While the AKP is firmly ensconced in the Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘ecology of thought’, Qatar’s rulers are Wahhabis – as are Saudi Arabia’s. The largest state mosque in Doha is named after the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.[58] Qatar is also a constitutional tribal monarchy, ruled on the basis of sharia law. So, what explains Doha’s pro-Brotherhood attitude and policies? For a start, Qatar’s ‘Wahhabism of the sea’ – in contrast with Saudi Arabia’s ‘Wahhabism of the desert’ – is much more tolerant of the Shi’a faith and of Muslim Brotherhood exiles who have been welcomed by Doha since the 1950s and 1960s.[59] Moreover, the exiled Muslim Brotherhood community in Doha – the Mecca for regional exiles (Kabaa al Madiyoom) – is not politically active in Qatar and is not perceived as a risk to the security and stability of the kingdom.[60] Lastly, there are deep personal connections between the Qatari elites and Muslim Brotherhood leaders. For example, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian theologian and spiritual leader of the Brotherhood, became the Islamic scholar of the Al-Thani Family. More generally, kinship ties have also facilitated a shared view on critical issues such as the unity of the Muslim community, conciliatory approaches towards Iran, and support for Hamas.[61]

Ultimately, Qatar’s state structure and ideology are more like the Wahhabi dominated Arabian Peninsula than Turkey’s pro-Islamist majoritarian democracy. The Al-Thani family has no ideological objection to the Muslim Brotherhood and sympathises with aspects of its approach but does so without being part of the Brotherhood ecology itself. [62] Moreover, it is not strongly committed to maintaining Doha as an active political base for the Brotherhood’s activities outside of Qatar, at least not in the more recent past. As a result, the ideological ties between Ankara and Doha are relatively weak. Instead, the key drivers of Doha’s positive relationship with the Brotherhood are good personal connections, a generally tolerant religious attitude, and the fact that the Brotherhood is not perceived as a threat.[63]

In a similar vein, several reports suggest that economic cooperation between Turkey and Qatar plays an important role in shaping their relationship.[64] However, a brief examination of trade data since 2002 suggests that Turkey’s trade volume with Saudi Arabia and the UAE has been consistently and significantly higher than its trade with Qatar. In the two years following the 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis, Turkey’s trade volume with Saudi Arabia declined from $15 billion to $8 billion and remained at the level of $5 billion with the UAE. However, the trade volume with Qatar reached just about $1.4 billion – i.e. roughly one-sixth of trade with Saudi Arabia and one-third of trade with the UAE (see Figure 1 below). Furthermore, Turkish-Qatari trade today sits at a level already achieved in 2008. Taking these observations together suggests that the Turkish-Qatari partnership does not have strong economic drivers.

From an economic point of view, we should also note an important factor that helps explain Qatar’s need for an autonomous and Iran-friendly foreign policy. Qatar shares the world’s largest gas field with Iran (North Dome/South Pars).[65] While their joint possession and exploration does not create many operational dependencies on a daily basis, they do generate broader supply chain, and longer-term production and commercial, dependencies that are coordinated and optimised through Iran and Qatar’s membership of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF).[66] Being seen to contribute to sanctions against Iran, or facilitating strikes against it, would be likely to trigger retaliation. As Qatar is much more dependent on the North Dome gas field than Iran is on the South Pars field, any rupture in its relations with Iran would threaten the source of revenue that makes Qatar the richest country in the world on a per capita basis.[67] It is in large part for this reason that Doha ‘has avoided assimilation with Saudi foreign policy to limit the risk threats against its offshore gas and oil fields from Iran’.[68]

Ideological and economic considerations aside, it is worth noting that the Brotherhood’s organisational network and political infrastructure also serve as an important capacity enhancement for Turkey and – especially – tiny Qatar. As it is, both countries have weak institutional capacities to pursue their foreign policies. A 2012 Turkish think tank report notes that the country had only 26 Arabic-speaking diplomatic personnel in 2011, of whom only six were working in the Middle East.[70] With a population of just 300,000, Qatar has also struggled to provide enough staff for its roughly 100 diplomatic representations around the world to pursue its foreign policy aims effectively.[71]

Taking the absence of ideological and economic drivers together, it appears that Doha has largely aligned itself with Ankara for pragmatic reasons. In other words, to protect itself from worse than the Quartet embargo.[72] After the Qatar diplomatic crisis of 2017, Qatar had little choice but to strengthen its pragmatic hedging policy under Turkish leadership. Today, Doha is largely dependent on Turkey (and, paradoxically, the US) for military protection to safeguard its space for pursuing an autonomous foreign policy. For Turkey, partnering with Qatar has been an opportunity to shift the balance of forces in the Gulf as far as its bid for soft power leadership of the Sunni world is concerned. While this claim has been accepted in some East Asian Muslim countries (example.g. Malaysia and Pakistan), it has been challenged by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt.[73]