When the singer Rod Stewart was offered more than $1 million to perform in Qatar, he said, he turned it down. “It’s not right to go,” Mr. Stewart told the The Sunday Times of London recently, joining a string of public figures to declare boycotts or express condemnation of Qatar as the Gulf nation hosts the soccer World Cup. In the prelude to the tournament, which started this past weekend, Qatar has faced an increasing barrage of criticism over its human rights record, including the authoritarian monarchy’s criminalization of homosexuality and the well-documented abuse of migrant workers.