Chapter 6 reaches the end of our foray into Heidegger’s analysis of technology. The chapter examines Sloan’s memoirs of General Motors and identifies a cybernetic fantasy of control in the ghost-written account, laid bare by the increasing inability of technological systems to reveal anything; and where humans are not even the ordinary fabricators anymore, the earth merely becomes a globe, that is gridded and dug over. The invention of the radio that for Heidegger heralded an epoch of the nearness of the distant and the gigantic, soon eclipsed any real nearness to being and to the world (and so also the possibility of pluralistic appearances in spaces such as the polis), was itself soon itself eclipsed by technologies no longer need to bring ‘any-thing’ near, where things and pictures and meaning and desires and ends are giving way to patterns and correlations; the cycles of the Gestell become one continual switching (there ‘is’ nothing as such to extract, unlock, store etc.., save for information).

This chapter attempts to build on chapter 2, which dealt with the two building blocks necessary for the formation of contracts, namely offer and acceptance. Here, we examine the remaining two requirements: the intention (nīyya) to be bound and the existence of good cause or causa. Unlike English law where so-called consideration is additionally required, this is not entertained in the CC, even if in places the language seems to suggest consideration. This is in fact not true. The chapter goes on to show how the parties’ intention to be bound may be expressed and how the courts can make sense of such intent when the parties disagree about what it is they had offered or accepted. Intent has been a significant aspect of Islamic law. A significant part of this chapter will deal with the legal nature of promises, as unilateral acts, and whether they are enforceable under any circumstances. As will be demonstrated, Qatari law is generally reluctant to enforce promises.

In other chapters, we examined how party autonomy shapes the parties’ contractual relations. Indeed, party autonomy is the cornerstone of the law of contracts and in general terms, the law intervenes in this process only sparingly with mandatory rules. In this chapter, we examine those circumstances where the civil law (both the CC and special laws) not only intervenes but invalidates the parties’ express consent on the ground that their agreement lacked good faith or imposed unfair terms on the weaker party. The imposition of good faith is equally justified by reference to public policy even if not expressly spelt out. This ‘parental’ regulation of contracts is not without contention and as the reader will come to realize, the contours of the application of good faith differ among jurisdictions, although our emphasis here is on the Qatari experience.

This chapter is meant to serve as an introduction to the book, particularly to that part of its audience that is unaccustomed to the history and sources of Qatari contract law, as well as the institutions and forces that shape and develop it.

For the purposes of this chapter, our focus will be on Regulation No 4 (2005), known as the QFC Contract Regulations. This was one of the first Regulations adopted following the creation of the QFC, which in turn evinces the determination to create a legal system that is distinct from ordinary Qatari law.

Chapter 5 details the emergence of machinery and organizational order through industrialization. No longer mere prostheses that allow humans to reach further, lift higher, hit harder or handle materials that would slice or burn skin, machine complexes and industrial installations no longer rely on the human body’s provision of labour force, but can instead conjure immeasurable forces from nature itself. Heidegger’s notion of the Gestell (enframing) characterizes these changes in terms of a gradual displacement of the human. No longer in control (or even in the picture), existence becomes wrapped up in continuously unfolding cycles of unlocking new resources, extracting, storing, distributing and switching over, in which whatever is made is always and only ‘there’ in potential service to what is to come: everything is a means for further progress, and progress is nothing more than the tightening and quickening of cycles of unlocking extracting, storing, distributing and switching. What is lost in this technological condition is the intimacy of the human being with their world; the care and concern that might be had for things understood as things in and of themselves, not merely input or output variables (and this includes fellow humans and the self).

This chapter will examine three distinct issues. The first concerns agreements whereby the creditor or debtor to an existing contract is substituted by a new (third) party. Two types of substitution are envisaged, namely: assignment of rights (assignment) and assignment of debt (novation). The second focus of the chapter is on the effects of contracts on bona fide third parties and how the law mitigates any adverse impact. The third is an innovation of the Qatari CC, examining agreements the sole object of which is to attract third parties. This chapter will not deal with the rights of successors (heirs) to a contract following the death of the contracting party

This chapter examines an important, yet relatively obscure dimension in the life cycle of a contract. Whenever the parties, upon formation, disagree about the meaning of a particular term, they will turn to the courts for clarification. Consequently, the courts must determine, but effectively interpret/construe the term in question in light of the contract as a whole. The CC sets out several interpretative tools that guide the courts in this process. These consist of literal interpretation, ascertainment of the parties’ common intention or their shared subjective understanding, as well as maxims such as the contra preferentem rule. Contractual interpretation under the CC is predicated on rules and principles typically associated with the civil law tradition, but there do exist several differences that are peculiar to the CC

Chapter 10 offers a way through, not by opposing poverty, but reframing it. Being poor in world and captivated by its technological environment, marks the regress of humans from homo faber to animal laborans; but while the latter still could locate the self within a cosmic and divine order, all such locating is now forfeit. Our second reading of poverty, aided by Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, however, embraces the possibility of new beginning; the wind that stirs and in whose uneven gusts the potential for the revision of the self emerges.

Chapter 1 covers the raising of consciousness and conscience and the interplay of authenticity and estrangement through a reading of Hannah Arendt, whose work we have found a profound inspiration throughout the book, notably her re-imagining of the ancient Greek city state of Athens and the polis as its political forum. The polis is an idealized space in whose relational confines an organized condition of authenticity can appear. It is a space to which those responsible for the administrative defence of the city, the strategoi, belong, but over which they have no authority. Separated from the household (oikos, the root term for economics), the polis is not primarily concerned with necessity, a condition Arendt calls labour, preoccupied with activity aimed at sustaining the metabolic persistence of life. Nor is it primarily a matter of work, of making and fabricating functional, symbolic and institutional things that last, such as temples, or laws, and that in return let the makers and fabricators ‘live on’ in reflection of the things they have produced. Drawing from the structure of the polis, we argue in this chapter for the intimacy between strategy and authenticity