He had been coaxed out of retirement to design it. It was designed by I M Pei (1917 – 2019), the Chinese-born architect known for modern designs such as the Louvre pyramid in Paris and the Bank of China tower in Hong Kong. I was in middle school when it was constructed on a man-made island on the south side of Doha’s Corniche, a stretch of seafront along which the city is built.

The Museum of Islamic Art was one of them. Some of the new buildings gave you vertigo. Doha’s suburbs were encroaching, rapidly.ĭowntown, a glittering skyline was emerging construction cranes and cement skeletons gave way to metal and glass towers and I could see growing when we drove through the city. Take-away restaurants and residential compounds were appearing, rows of houses were being built on once-flat desert.

Ours was a small neighbourhood – a row of cement houses with metal gates, one main street and some stray cats. My favourite time of day was when the sun would set directly into my room, the light filtering through the tinted windows and onto my blue-painted walls. My bedroom window faced open desert, the rocky ground forming a simple line across the horizon, the faint trace of electricity lines silhouetted against the sun. Growing up, I lived in Umm Slal, a small town on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar‘s capital city.

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