Mr. Muhammad Hammam Fekri, the General Supervisor of Hassan Bin Mohammad Historical Studies Center, and Heritage and Rare Books Advisor at Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, delivers a lecture titled: “The Journey of British Documents from English into Arabic, Project: Qatar and Gulf States in the British Archives,” on Sunday, 11th of September 2026, at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. The lecture was held at the invitation of the Departments Comparative Literature and History at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
The lecture highlights the importance of British archival documents for the study of Qatar and the Gulf region’s history. It also explores the experience of the Hassan Bin Mohammad Historical Studies Center in locating, compiling, selecting, and translating these documents into Arabic, making them accessible to researchers through its project, “Qatar and the Gulf States in the British Archives.”
Mr. Fekri traces the formation and development of these archival collections, from the commercial activities of the East India Company to the establishment of a network of British political residencies and agencies across the Gulf. He examines how the British presence contributes to the accumulation of diverse archival materials, including official correspondence, administrative and political reports, memorandums, letters exchanged with commercial and oil companies, and Arabic-language correspondence received from local rulers.
The lecture also introduces several major archival collections, including the records of the India Office, political and secret records, selected records of the Government of Bombay, and Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf. It presents samples from these sources to illustrate aspects of Qatar’s political relations and the social and economic life of Qatar and the wider Gulf region.
Furthermore, the lecture examines the evolution of access to archival documents, from consulting original records and using microfilm to photocopying and digitization. It highlights how these developments have facilitated historical research and expanded opportunities for researchers to access and utilize these sources. The lecture also emphasizes the importance of translating archival documents into Arabic to support historical scholarship, alongside the need to approach these materials critically by considering their historical context, the nature of the institutions that produced them, and their corroboration with other sources.
