Building Qt 4.8.5 libraries from source for static linking on Linux is not as simple as passing the "-static" option to the configure step.
Qt does not seem to support building the WebKit module statically. It tries to automatically disable building of WebKit for you during the configure step when building statically, but still proceeds to try to build it in the make step. Adding the "-no-webkit" flag does not help either.
The only option is to go down to the src/3rdparty directory and remove or rename the webkit subdirectory.