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Gulf Economies
Most states do not divulge all demographic parameters of their population. At times, this data is unavailable due to the weakness of the regime as is the case with many sub-Saharan African countries and, more recently, with Yemen, Syria, and Iraq due to their prolonged civil wars. In other countries, such as the United States, Belgium, and France, there is a lack of data on the religious composition of the population due to official separation of church and state.
While none of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states1 have ever published the religious composition of their indigenous populations, Qatar has lagged further behind: It does not even make public the total size of its indigenous population, considered "a national secret." As the online editor of a Qatari-based business publication was told when approaching the Qatar Statistics Authority (QSA) for the data: "We regret to inform you that the required data is not available."2
Until the early 1980s, the Qatari authorities did not in fact have complete demographic data of their indigenous population. Since then, and certainly following the implementation of the 1986 census, this data has been comprehensive and accurate and deliberately hidden. Why are the Qatari authorities not publishing the basic data on the number of their citizens as do all other countries? The reason for this, it seems, is quite simple: The national population is too small to match the country's political needs and aspirations. Since Qatar prefers not to naturalize vast numbers of foreigners, including Arab Sunnis, the only option has been to hide the small size of the national population through the evasive pretense of not having the data. The principal aim of this article is to explore this "secret."
Population Growth in Qatar
The first estimate of Qatar's population made by John Gordon Lorimer of the British Foreign Office in 1904 put the emirate's total population at approximately 27,000.3 Before the discovery of oil, pearl fishing was the emirate's economic mainstay; however, the development of the Japanese cultured pearl industry at the beginning of the 1930s, together with the Great Depression, and the onset of World War II led to a severe economic recession and an attendant sharp decline in Qatar's population to some 16,000 by the...