Msheireb Museums

Four restored merchant houses in the Msheireb neighbourhood form a cluster of small museums covering different aspects of Qatari history and identity. The Mohammed bin Jassim House covers traditional architecture and domestic life; Bin Jelmood House — one of the most compelling — deals directly with Qatar's history in the Indian Ocean slave trade. The Company House and Radwani House complete the quartet.

Of the four, Bin Jelmood House is the most unusual: it approaches Qatar's central role in the 19th-century slave trade without evasion, with well-researched displays on African and South Asian captives brought through the Gulf. It is also the only Gulf museum to deal with this topic seriously. Worth an hour at minimum; the complex as a whole can occupy a morning.

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A story
The Msheireb district was the old commercial heart of Doha — a dense neighbourhood of coral-and-gypsum merchant houses that was bulldozed in the 1970s. Four of those original houses were restored and now serve as museums, sitting incongruously at the edge of a vast new development that is itself trying to reconstruct something of the old urbanism.

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