[ 2010-2-20 9:33:19 | watches1751 ] 

          Byline: by Teresa Levonian Cole                                                                      MEN in white dishdashas and flowing head-dresses float through the Souq Waqif, followed by women dressed head to toe in black.                              Like draughts on a board, they mingle in the narrow lanes of the market, pausing to buy colourful spices, fresh honey and pistachios from Iran.                              Turn a corner, and you're dazzled by bolts of colourfully sparkling fabrics, walls lined with shoes, DIY stores selling objects whose use can only be guessed at. While you are admiring a hand-made lute-like oud or a set of Bedouin drums, a muezzin wails his exhortation to prayer as if from some invisible minaret.                                           Venture into the square and you'll find leather saddles, carpet bags and striped blankets for your camel. Continue through the maze to see ancient tailors at work, polishing the silver braiding on a bishoot (man's cloak), and on to a clutch of shops selling every accoutrement for the falconer's art, from leather hoods and gauntlets to grizzly lures. You might think you are in a traditional Arab market, and you'd be right. And also wrong. For Souq Wafiq is ersatz, rebuilt to echo its ancient origins at the behest of the Emir of Qatar himself. It is one of the few allusions to traditional Bedouin life amid the Brave New World that is Doha, capital of Qatar.                          Replica Chopard Watch     Qatar is a small country, with big ideas. It protrudes from Saudi Arabia, its only land neighbour, and into the Persian Gulf like a periscope making clandestine surveys along the coast.                              'Nine years ago, there were just two high-rise buildings here,' says my guide, Jamal, as we drive through a forest of gleaming skyscrapers twinkling in the sun, just 6km from the souk. 'Now there are about 70, with a total of 300 planned in this area.' Before us rises an extraordinary hourglass-shaped building girded in steel latticework, nicknamed the Tornado.                              To my left, a monolith clad in triangular glass plates twists skywards like a heliotrope seeking the sun. To my right, a hybrid building of traditional design superimposed on a glass skyscraper forms the ghostly Barzan Tower.                                     Welcome to central Doha, which crowds into the northern section of Doha Bay. It is also where many of the country's five-star hotels huddle as sentinels against the encroaching desert.                              In the past decade, every leading Silver Cufflinks hotel group has rushed into the capital, while The Pearl -- a manmade island development to trump Dubai's Palm -- is set to be home to 41,000 people by 2012, offering the first chance for foreign investors to buy freehold property in Qatar.                              Qatar, too, has cultural ambitions rivalling those of Abu Dhabi. It's hoped the Emir's flagship project, the spectacular new Museum of Islamic Art, will put Doha on the cultural map, just as Gehry's Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao.                              The museum perches at the southern tip of the Corniche, a cubic masterpiece whose solidity seems to fluctuate according to the play of light and shadow through the day. Works on display range from Sicily to Iraq, from the 6th to the 19th centuries. Spectacular early Syrian glassware, Persian carpets, bejewelled daggers, zoomorphic incense burners, Iznik ceramics and Koranic calligraphy are all represented, from the ceremonial to surprising personal items. Who'd have thought that Shah Jahan, the Mogul emperor, owned a miniature painting of St Jerome? Or that this architect of the Taj Mahal, despite his abundance of exquisite gems, wore a simple white jade pendant to cure his heartache on the death of
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