It is a common feature of many academic and journalistic narratives to blame the Muslim World’s ills on Saudi Arabia’s exporting of Wahhabi Islam. As Bano and Sakurai (2015) have noted, while this narrative may have some merit, it can be overly reductive. In the decades prior to the founding of the Islamic University of Medina in 1961, which signaled the commencement of Saudi Arabia’s exporting of its version of Wahhabi Islam (Farquhar 2017), al-Azhar was establishing an international network of missions to export its own Azhari Islam. This paper uses the relationship between the Azhar missions, and the Wahhabi ulama of the Eastern Arabian Peninsula in the early / mid-twentieth century to engage the debate around Islam in modern Qatar. As Baskan and Wright (2011) articulated, Qatar presents a conundrum inasmuch as it is nominally a Wahhabi state like Saudi Arabia, yet it pursues very different policies, most obviously toward the Muslim Brotherhood. To date, academics who study Qatar have emphasized the impact of an influx of Muslim Brotherhood emigres from countries such as Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s (Roberts 2017, Kamrava 2013, Ulrichsen 2014, Freer 2018), and this paper complicates this narrative in two main ways. First, I use the example of Muhammad b. Mani‘ and his students to argue that in the early twentieth century there was an established Wahhabi elite on the Qatari peninsula, complete with its own scholarly families such as the Al Mahmuds. These families usually hailed from the neighboring Najd highlands and several of them played a key role in establishing the early religious education systems in both Saudi Arabia and Qatar. While Baskan and Wright (2011) acknowledge the existence of these families the key question, then, is what happened to them? Second, I show that the influx of emigres to Qatar, of whom the most famous is Yusuf al-Qaradawi (2002), did not view themselves as coming to spread the Brotherhood ideology. Rather, they came as Azhari missionaries and developed Qatar’s religious education system along the same lines as they envisioned for al-Azhar. Consequently, I argue that Qatar is an example of the successful export of Azhari Islam, which continues to shape Qatari policy to this day. Moreover, and following Lauziere (2016), the paper further calls into question the utility of using categories such as Wahhabi, Salafi, Azhari, or Brother/Ikhwani to categorize the Sunni ulama, especially in the early / mid-twentieth century.