Will Qatar Add Bangladesh to its ‘String of Misbaha?’

China has its “String of Pearls,” strategic ports across the Indian Ocean in which it has commercial or military interest that it can leverage in times of conflict. Increasingly, Qatar seems to be assembling its own String of Misbaha, Islamic prayer beads.

Qatar invests with a purpose. Whether with universities or entire countries, it dispenses largesse to those who will endorse and normalize its embrace of Islamist ideology.

When Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first rose to power in Turkey, Turkish intelligence told me that Qatar (and also Saudi Arabia at the time) underwrote his Justice and Development Party (AKP) with billions of dollars for his slush fund so he could outperform other parties in constituent services, prop up the deteriorating Turkish lira, and perhaps even buy votes. As Erdogan sough to “raise a religious generation” inside Turkey, Qatar became his chief financier.

The same has been true with Somalia. Alongside Turkey, Qatar has worked to support the Islamization of Somalia’s traditionally moderate approach toward religion. Here, a young Somali Al Jazeera journalist named Fahad Yasin played a crucial role. Fahad Yasin began his career as a religious tutor for Wadah Khanfar, a Palestinian who was chief editor at Al Jazeera. As the Islamic Courts Union gained ground in Somalia offering a vision of strict Islamic law to replace the warlordism that had dominated Somalia since that country’s 1991 collapse, Al Jazeera dispatched Fahad to Mogadishu as its stringer. He quickly distinguished himself by gaining access to the most radical Islamist groups’ camps, including those affiliated with Al Qaeda. Fahad had no difficulty interviewing Al Shaabab figures who, at the time, were sheltering al Qaeda operatives responsible for the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Fahad confided to friends that while employed with Al Jazeera, he trained as informant for Qatari intelligence. In 2012, Qatar sought to insert their man in Somalia more deeply into Somali politics. Fahad used Qatari money to buy votes for Somali politicians who would further Qatar’s ideological agenda. Fahad himself bragged about this role as Qatar’s bagman. Perhaps Qatar and Fahad’s biggest success was in 2016, when they threw support behind Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo’s presidential campaign. Capturing Somalia was relatively easy since, despite billions of dollars in U.S. democratic assistance, the country has failed to hold one-man, one-vote elections, instead allowing a convention of a few hundred unelected elites to choose the country’s leaders. In effect, Qatar needed only bribe a few hundred men rather than buy the votes of millions. With money greasing the right palms, Somalia’s political investment paid off. Farmaajo became president and ultimately appointed Fahad his national security advisor. Today, Somalia follows the lead of both Qatar and Turkey.

Gaza is another member of Qatar’s String of Misbaha. Former Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accord as part of a simple bargain: In exchange for a cessation of terrorism and a recognition of Israel, Jerusalem would recognize the Palestinian Authority as a proto-government to take control of Palestinian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank pending a final status agreement. Rather than side with the internationally recognized Palestinian government, Qatar cast its lot with Hamas, an Islamist group that, in 2007, seized control over Gaza in a bloody coup. While Qatari officials say every U.S. administration dating to George W. Bush’s turned to them as intermediaries, the reality is more complex: Qatar maintained the contacts and leveraged its position to mediate. Likewise, they won support within the U.S. intelligence community by selectively leaking intelligence about some terrorist groups less prone to taking Doha’s direction while carefully protecting groups like Hamas that would follow Qatar’s lead.

Today, Qatar appears prepared to add Bangladesh as its newest and perhaps most valuable client yet. With more than 170 million people, Bangladesh is twice Turkey’s size and occupies a critical position along the Indian Ocean. In August 2024, a protest movement ousted the increasingly autocratic Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s elected prime minister and installed in her place Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Laureate who had long clashed with Sheikh Hasina’s secularist Awami League. With the Awami League in disarray Yunus literally opened the doors of Bangladesh’s prisons to free Islamist terrorists and an Al Qaeda-supporting fringe. Yunus remains silent as Islamist mobs increasingly rampage through Dhaka and regional cities, targeting religious minorities, liberals, and journalists like Farzana Rupa and Shakil Ahmed.

On April 21, 2025, Yunus received a red carpet welcome in Qatar. The following day, he met Moza Bint Nasser, the mother of Qatar’s emir and the chair of the Qatar Foundation, where she reportedly promised support top revamp Bangladesh’s early childhood education. Gone will be a half century of Bangladeshi laicism as Qatar works with the unelected Yunus to impose an Islamist agenda, much like it did with Erdogan two decades before.

As the United States looks inward, and the Trump administration puts the United States out of the business of democracy export, other countries with ideological agendas seek to fill the vacuum with their own ideologies. Qatar is pushing forward with its effort to transform countries from Turkey to Somalia and now Bangladesh from traditional Sufism and moderation into far more conservative Islamist societies in which the Muslim Brotherhood and their Deobandi compadres can grow a new generation to promote and Islamist vision and perhaps fund if not staff an expansion of Islamism across Central Asia, Africa, and now South Asia.

Qatar may be small, but its ambitions are outsized. By capturing Bangladesh while the West sleeps, the Persian Gulf’s richest gas giant is slowly reshaping the trajectory of a region.