Last year the whole world looked at Qatar, although not so long ago – before the World Cup (which took place in November/December 2022) – the country was not known to everyone and did not attract so much attention.
You have probably heard about the restrictions on importing certain books and about possible problems at the airport: even the Foreign Office announced certain rules for traveling to Qatar in connection with the World Cup, which people should follow, e.g. that homosexuality and affiliation with the LGBTQ+ movement were forbidden in Qatar and would be punished. Accordingly, this also affects books on the subject. Religious, anti-Islamic books are also affected.
Even though the Qatari government claims to have no censorship, the Ministry of Culture reviews every book that relates to their culture before it is allowed to be published and sold in Qatar: in effect, a case of classic state pre-censorship.
And this is not a new phenomenon. In our research, we also found books that were banned and not allowed to be sold in Qatar in the 1980s. And even today, books are not allowed to be imported into the Arab country or sold there.

As a group of students from the University of Kassel, we set ourselves the task of researching whether there is censorship in Qatar. In our research, we contacted worldwide publishers, among others. We wrote to the National Library in Qatar, which denies the existence of censorship. We even asked the Qatari Ministry of Culture about banned books, but received no response. From the official side, there is a lack of transparency regarding the topic of censorship – and of course there is no official index of banned titles.
Nevertheless, during our digital research we found individual books that are banned. This concerns, for example, the comic series The Boys and the drama Love Comes Later. Official voices on these bans cannot be found, but various sources testify to this. You can find them now in “Die Kasseler Liste”.

Kassel, April 2023