The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History 9781472587602, 9781474295741, 9781472587626

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
List of Abbreviations
Introduction J.E. Peterson
Gulf historiography
The design of the book
From 1971 to the present
A few notes on style
Notes
Bibliography
1 Trends and Patterns in the Archaeology and Pre-modern History of the Gulf Region D.T. Potts
Dysfunctional archaeologies
Trans-regional control in the pre-modern Gulf
Conclusions
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
2 Religion and Religious Movements in the Gulf, 1700–1971 Michael Crawford
Religious authority, temporal power and schism
Complex geography of belief
Poles of religious influence beyond the Gulf
Sufism and popular religion
No end to the schism
Wahhābī assault on Gulf pluralism
The British approach to religion
Religious authority and political power among the Shīʿah
Religious authority and political power: the Ibā d․ ī dichotomy
Ottoman twilight and pan-Islamism
Nation states and religious establishments
The politicization of religion and the modern roots of Islamic radicalism
Conclusion
Notes
3 Patterns of Intra-Gulf Relations Iraq and the Gulf Until 1980 Hala Fattah
The setting
The region in transformation
From region to nation states
Bibliographic essay
Acknowledgement
Bibliography
Arabia and Iran Lawrence G. Potter
Pre-modern historical patterns
The twentieth century: the shattering of unity and rise of modern states
Conclusion
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
4 The Age of Imperialism and Its Impact on the Gulf J.E. Peterson
The imperial march in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf
The structure of European imperialism in Asia and the Gulf
The impact of the European Age on the Gulf
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
5 The Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Arab World Fahad Ahmad Bishara and Patricia Risso
Monsoons, markets and networks in Gulf history
Trade and politics in the Gulf, Middle East and Indian Ocean, c. 1600–1820
Commercial expansions and transformations, c. 1820–1914
Bombay, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean world, c. 1850–1950
The Gulf, the Arab world and the Indian Ocean in the age of oil
Conclusion
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
6 The Economic Transformation of the Gulf Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Bernard Haykel , Steff en Hertog, Clive Holes and James Onley
The traditional economy of Eastern Arabia, 1700s to the 1950s
The Gulf date and pearl booms of the nineteenth century
Credit networks
The pearl-diving season
The long decline of the twentieth century
The role of the oil sector in national development
Impact on state building and regulation
Conclusion
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
7 Tribes and Tribal Identity in the Arab Gulf States Dale F. Eickelman
Arabian Peninsula tribes in the historical imagination
Tribes and governance in Oman
The traditional and contemporary ecology of tribes
Genealogical tradition, society and the state
Bibliographic essay
Bibliography
8 Social Structures and Transformation in the Gulf and Arabia Until 1971 Hala Fattah
The rise of the risk-taking badawi and hadari in Arabian and Gulf societies
The fluidity of social standing in the Gulf and Arabia prior to the early twentieth century
The rich and the powerful
The marginalized
Lateral divisions: sects and ethnicities
Continuities in the oil era
Conclusion
Bibliographic essay
Bibliography
9 Language, Culture and Identity Clive Holes
Language and dialect
Aspects of traditional culture
Dress
Concluding remarks
Bibliographic essay
Note
Bibliography
10 Six Sovereign States: The Process of State Formation Frauke Heard-Bey
The formative background
Common aspects of state formation
Conclusion
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
11 The Oil-Driven Nation-Building of the Gulf States After the Second World War Steffen Hertog
GCC state formation and consolidation in comparative perspective
Monopoly of coercion
Bureaucratic consolidation
Economic consolidation
State–society relations
National identity
Conclusions
Bibliographic essay
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Chronology
Index
Maps

Citation preview

The Emergence of the Gulf States Edited by J.E. Peterson on behalf of ALTAJIR TRUST, LONDON

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The Emergence of the Gulf States Studies in Modern History Edited by J.E. Peterson Advisory Editors: Bernard Haykel Frauke Heard-Bey Mohammed al-Muqadam James Piscatori

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Altajir Trust 2016 on behalf of Altajir Trust, London 11 Elvaston Place London SW 7 5QG England All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN :

HB : ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4411-3160-7 978-1-4411-0023-8 978-1-4411-2382-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peterson, John, 1947Title: The emergence of the Gulf States : studies in modern history / edited by J. E. Peterson. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015047965 | ISBN 9781472587602 (hardback) | ISBN 9781472587626 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH : Persian Gulf States—History. | BISAC : HISTORY / Middle East / General. | HISTORY / Modern / General. Classification: LCC DS 247.A135 E54 2016 | DDC 953.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047965 Cover design: Sharon Mah Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Foreword His Excellency Mohammed Mahdi Altajir List of Abbreviations Introduction J.E. Peterson 1

vi ix xiv xvi 1

Trends and Patterns in the Archaeology and Pre-modern History of the Gulf Region D.T. Potts

19

2

Religion and Religious Movements in the Gulf, 1700–1971 Michael Crawford

43

3

Patterns of Intra-Gulf Relations Iraq and the Gulf Until 1980 Hala Fattah Arabia and Iran Lawrence G. Potter

85 100

4

The Age of Imperialism and Its Impact on the Gulf J.E. Peterson

127

5

The Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Arab World Fahad Ahmad Bishara and Patricia Risso

159

The Economic Transformation of the Gulf Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Bernard Haykel, Steffen Hertog, Clive Holes and James Onley

187

7

Tribes and Tribal Identity in the Arab Gulf States Dale F. Eickelman

223

8

Social Structures and Transformation in the Gulf and Arabia Until 1971 Hala Fattah

241

Language, Culture and Identity Clive Holes

263

6

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85

10 Six Sovereign States: The Process of State Formation Frauke Heard-Bey

289

11 The Oil-Driven Nation-Building of the Gulf States After the Second World War Steffen Hertog

323

Glossary Chronology Index

353 363 373

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List of Illustrations Figures 1.1 ‘The Jewel of Muscat’. A modern reconstruction in Oman of a ninthcentury Arab sailing vessel. Photo Miguel Willis. Copyright 2010 Oman Ministry of Foreign Affairs 1.2 ‘A View of Lingah’ from R. Temple (1810), illustrating British naval action against ‘pirates’ in 1809. © Crown Copyright: UK Government Art Collection 2.1 Christian and Jewish merchants in Basra (1891). P.H. Hotz, Royal Geographical Society 2.2 The mahmal (the camel litter sent along with the Egyptian hajj delegation) passing through Makkah on the way to ʿArafat (c.1914). Humphrey Bowman Collection GB 165-0034 Album 1, Middle East Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford 2.3 An Ikhwan member (1923). Major R.E. Cheeseman, Royal Geographical Society 3.1 Landing the cable of the Indo-European Telegraph at al-Faw, northern Gulf (1865). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans 3.2 Distant view from the sea of Bushihr (Bushire) on the Iranian coast of the Gulf (1856). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans 3.3 Wind tower in al-Bastakiyyah area of Dubai (1937). Sir Rupert Hay, Royal Geographical Society 4.1 Fort al-Jalali, constructed by the Portuguese, and the British consulate in Muscat harbour (1905). Percy Cox, Royal Geographical Society 4.2 A durbar held by Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, with the Trucial Shaykhs aboard the RIMS Argonaut off of Sharjah (1903). British Library Board (Persian Gulf) PG 49/1 (7) 4.3 Telegraph Island in Elphinstone Inlet of Oman’s Musandam Peninsula. The name comes from the establishment of a station of the Indo-European Telegraph on the island in 1864. J.E. Peterson 5.1 Maritime view of Bombay with a number of East Indiamen in the foreground (c.1750). © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 5.2 View of the boat harbour in Kuwait as seen from the British Political Agency (1911). W.H.I. Shakespear, 1911, Royal Geographical Society 6.1 Pearl dealer in Kuwait (1946). Reproduced from the BP Archive 6.2 Suq al-Khamis (Friday market) in al-Hufuf, al-Ahsaʾ (1905). Percy Cox, 1905, Royal Geographical Society vi

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35 44

48 66 89 101 108 132

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166 174 188 197

Illustrations

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6.3 A pearling boat on the Bahrain pearling banks (1926). Sir R. Hay, 1926, Royal Geographical Society 199 6.4 ʿAbdullah al-Sulayman, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Finance, and Aramco Vice-President J. MacPherson approving the Saudi Arabian Railways agreement in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (1947). Saudi Aramco Archives 208 7.1 Gathering of tribal leaders at a majlis of a tribal shaykh, near Kuwait (1911). W.H.I. Shakespear, Royal Geographical Society 225 7.2 Bedouin of the ʿAjman tribe on the march near Thaj, now in Saudi Arabia (1911). W.H.I. Shakespear, Royal Geographical Society 234 7.3 A reception following the opening of a Qurʾanic school near Nizwa, Oman (1978). Guest house (sablah) etiquette offers a key index of notions of person and social value. Dale F. Eickelman 236 8.1 King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and his son Saʿud returning from prayers on a Friday in Riyadh (1939). Gerald de Gaury, 1939, Royal Geographical Society 244 9.1 Four men and a boy at a coffee hearth inside a house in Bal Qarn tribal territory in ʿAsir (1946). Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, 1946 © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (Accession Number: 2004.130.6331.1) 271 9.2 Abu Dhabi shaykhs standing outside Qasr al-Husn fort in Abu Dhabi (1948). From left to right, a shaykh from the Naʿim tribe, Shaykh Hazzaʿ ibn Sultan Al Nahayan, Shaykh Shakhbut ibn Sultan Al Nahayan (the ruler of Abu Dhabi), Shaykh Khalid ibn Sultan Al Nahayan, unidentified young man. Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, 1946 © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford (Accession Number: 2004.130.17650.1) 280 9.3 A woman of Haʾil, now in Saudi Arabia (c.1900). Gertrude Bell Archive, c1913, Newcastle University 283 10.1 ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Al Saʿud, later king of Saudi Arabia, and Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner of Iraq, at the ʿUqayr conference (1922). H. St. John B. Philby, Philby Collection 16/1235, Middle East Centre Archive, St Antony’s College, Oxford 294 10.2 The Bahrain Constituent Assembly in session (1972). M.H. Kamaluddin, Diaries of a Minister 297 10.3 The signing of the agreement ending the treaties of protection between Britain and the Trucial States (1971). Seated (left to right): Sir Geoffrey Arthur (British Political Resident in the Persian Gulf), Shaykh Zayid ibn Sultan Al Nahayan (ruler of Abu Dhabi), Shaykh Rashid ibn Saʿid Al Maktum (ruler of Dubai). Standing behind them on the left are Ahmad ibn Khalifah al-Suwaydi of Abu Dhabi and Mahdi al-Tajir of Dubai. No credit 301 11.1 Sultan Qabus ibn Saʿid Al Bu Saʿidi on his annual ‘meet the people’ tour at Shinas on Oman’s al-Batinah coast (2005). Hamid alQasmi/AP, Ref AP 05020802281 330 11.2 Kuwaiti oil riggers during training (1957). Reproduced from the BP Archive 331

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Illustrations

11.3 Boy on a camel with the UAE national flag during a parade in Dubai celebrating the UAE National Day (2012). Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters/Corbis, Ref 42-48843653

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Maps (between pp. 240–241) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

From Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius (1528–98), Antwerp, 1570. British Library Board Maps C.2c.3 The Indian Ocean The Arabian Peninsula: topography and place names The Arabian Peninsula: imperial zones of influence and expansion of the First and Second Saudi States The Arabian Peninsula: boundaries and the expansion of the Third Saudi State The Gulf: boundaries and oil and gas fields The Gulf: ports and communications The United Arab Emirates and boundaries

Tables 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

The pearling industry in the Gulf, 1907 Gulf trade with India, 1904 Kuwait’s retail merchant community, 1904 Merchant groups in Eastern Arabia

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Graphs 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

Percentage share of military spending in GDP, 1988–2012 average Annual electricity generation in Saudi Arabia, 1969–84 Water supply from Saudi desalination plants, 1970–84 Paved roads in Saudi Arabia Ratio of government to private consumption in GCC and select international cases 11.6 Segmentation of GCC labour markets by sector and nationality

327 332 332 333 340 341

Notes on Contributors Fahad Ahmad Bishara is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and a Prize Fellow in Economics, History and Politics at Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics. He was previously Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. His current book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1940 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press) is a legal history of economic life in the western Indian Ocean, told through the story of the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of East Africa during the nineteenth century, a period of emerging modern capitalism in the region and the transformations in Islamic law that accompanied it. He is also working on a history of the dhow trade between the Gulf (specifically Kuwait and Sur) and the Indian Ocean. He received his PhD in history from Duke University in 2012 and holds an MA in Arab Gulf Studies from the University of Exeter. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center. Michael Crawford is an independent writer and consultant on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. After being called to the Bar in 1978, he served the British government in London and overseas, including in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, from 1981 to 2009. He has published on Saudi history, non-state actors and counterproliferation. His short study of the founder of the Wahhabi movement, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, came out in late 2014. Dale F. Eickelman is Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College, USA . His publications include Moroccan Islam: Tradition and Society in a Pilgrimage Center (1976, Arabic translation, 1989), Public Islam and the Common Good (co-edited with Armando Salvatore, 2002), Muslim Politics (co-authored with James Piscatori, 1996, 2003), The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, 4th edn (2002), New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere (co-edited with Jon Anderson, 2nd edition, 2003) and Knowledge and Power in Morocco (1985, Arabic translation 2010). A former President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin), Professor Eickelman currently serves as senior adviser to Kuwait’s first private liberal arts university, the American University of Kuwait. In 2009 he was named a Carnegie Scholar for a two-year project entitled ‘Mainstreaming Islam: Taking Charge of the Faith’ and in 2011 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. He is currently President of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies (TALIM ). ix

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Hala Fattah received her PhD from UCLA in the history of the Modern Middle East in 1986. She has since authored two books (The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf, 1750–1900, published by SUNY Press in 1997 and A Brief History of Iraq, published by Facts on File in 2008) and various articles on late Ottoman and independent Iraq. She taught the history of the modern Middle East, Iraq and the Gulf for three years at Georgetown University in the US , and then worked as a researcher in Jordan at Prince Hassan ibn Talal’s office and the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. In 2004, she became the resident representative for The American Academic Research Institute on Iraq (TAARII ), an organization devoted to academic exchange. In 2006, she joined the Scholar Rescue Fund, a programme focused on the placement of endangered Iraqi scholars in neighbouring Arab and non-Arab countries. Under her management, SRF was able to place forty Iraqi scholars in Jordanian universities to research and teach in their specialties. From 2013 to 2015, she was Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at Qatar University, where she taught the history of the Indian Ocean. Hala Fattah is now an independent scholar and a consultant in Amman, Jordan. Bernard Haykel is a Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Director of the Institute for Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia at Princeton University. He received his doctorate in 1998 in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford with an emphasis on Islam and history. Haykel’s teaching and writing lie at the juncture of the intellectual, political and social history of the Middle East with particular emphasis on the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. He has written extensively on Saudi and Yemeni culture and politics, including Wahhabism, Salafism and aspects of the Islamic doctrine and law. He is the author of Revival and Reform in Islam and the editor of Saudi Arabia in Transition. Frauke Heard-Bey received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1967 for research into the history of the capital Berlin during the First World War, published as Hauptstadt und Staatsumwälzung. Berlin 1919 (Kohlhammer, 1969). She followed her husband in 1967 to the emerging oil-producing state of Abu Dhabi. In 1969 she joined the Centre for Documentation and Research, which later became the National Archive. Her research into the social, economic and constitutional history and current developments of the countries of the Gulf resulted in academic publications including: From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates (Longman, 1982; 3rd edn, Dubai, 2004), Die arabischen Golfstaaten im Zeichen der islamischen Revolution (Europa Union Verlag, 1983); From Tribe to State: The Transformation of Political Structure in Five States of the GCC (Universita Cattolica del Sacre Cuore, 2008; CR iSSMA Working Paper No. 15). During nearly five decades, she has published many articles in German, English and French and participated in conferences on the region. Steffen Hertog is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include Gulf politics, Middle East political economy, and political violence and radicalization. He has published in

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journals such as World Politics, Review of International Political Economy, Comparative Studies in Society and History and International Journal of Middle East Studies. His book about Saudi state-building, Princes, Brokers and Bureaucrats: Oil and State in Saudi Arabia was published by Cornell University Press in 2010 and a book about political radicalism and higher education co-authored with Diego Gambetta, Engineers of Jihad, is forthcoming in 2016 with Princeton University Press. Clive Holes was Lecturer and then Reader in Arabic at the University of Cambridge, 1987–96. He was Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saʿud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford from 1997 until his retirement in 2014, and is currently an Emeritus Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Professor Holes spent many years living and working in the Arab world and his research and publications range widely over the Arabic language and its dialects, especially those of the Gulf. He is the author of Modern Arabic: Structures Functions and Varieties (2nd edn, Georgetown, 2004) and the three-volume study Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia (Brill, 2001–16). He has also published on Arabic popular literature, including several articles and two books on the oral ‘nabati poetry’ of Arabia and neighbouring areas. Professor Holes was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. Mohammed S. al-Muqadam is Assistant Professor of History at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. He served as head of the department during 2009–14 and previously was Dean of Student Affairs during 2001–9. He received his BA and MA degrees from Portland State University, with his MA thesis on Oman and the United States, 1828–56. His PhD thesis at the University of Exeter was on ‘Oman’s Relations with Persia, 1737–1868’. He also spent 1997–98 at Tehran University where he studied Persian. James Onley is a Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Exeter, England. He specializes in the history, politics, society and culture of the Gulf Arab states, Iran and India, as well as British imperialism, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies (published by Routledge since 2011) and was Director of the Centre for Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter during 2005–12. He is the author of The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth Century Gulf (Oxford University Press, 2007), which was runner-up for the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award, and has published over thirty articles and chapters on the Gulf. J.E. Peterson is a historian and political analyst specializing in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf and based in Tucson, Arizona, USA . He has taught at various universities in the United States and France and has been associated with a number of leading research institutes in the United States and the United Kingdom. Until 1999, he served in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defence in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. Affiliated with the Middle East Center at the University of Arizona, he also serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Middle East Journal, the Journal of

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Arabian Studies, the Journal of Oman Studies, Liwa (the journal of the National Archives of the United Arab Emirates) and the academic advisory board of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research. He is the author or editor of a dozen books and monographs, the most recent of which are The Arab Gulf States: Further Steps Toward Political Representation (Gulf Research Center, Gulf Papers, 2006); Historical Muscat: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (Brill, 2007); Oman’s Insurgencies: The Sultanate’s Struggle for Supremacy (Saqi, 2007) and The GCC States: Participation, Opposition, and the Fraying of the Social Contract (London School of Economics and Political Science, Kuwait Programme, December 2012, No. 26), as well as the forthcoming Saudi Arabia Under Ibn Saud: Economic and Financial Foundations of the State. He has also published some forty scholarly articles and an equal number of contributions to edited works. He is presently working on a study of Oman since 1970 and a modern history of Arabia. James Piscatori has worked at several universities in Britain, Australia and the United States. In Britain, he was Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford; Professor of International Politics in the University of Aberystwyth; and Dean of the School of International Affairs at Durham University. In addition, he was Professor at the Australian National University and Associate Professor in the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He has also been Senior Fellow at two research institutions – the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He has served on several international collaborative committees such as the Committee for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies of the Social Science Research Council, and was co-editor of a series on Muslim Politics for Princeton University Press. He is the co-author of Muslim Politics and co-editor of Monarchies and Nations: Globalization and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, as well as author of a number of articles and contributions to edited books. Lawrence G. Potter is Adjunct Associate Professor of International Affairs at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1996. He also serves as Deputy Director of the Gulf/2000 Project, based at Columbia, which is the largest research and documentation project on the Persian Gulf states. A graduate of Tufts College, he received an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a PhD in History from Columbia. Potter was a Visiting Fellow for 2011/12 at the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. From 1984 to 1992 he was Senior Editor at the Foreign Policy Association. He has edited a number of volumes on the region, most recently The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (Hurst, 2013) and The Persian Gulf in History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). D.T. Potts is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. He has been researching the archaeology and early history of Iran, Mesopotamia and Arabia for

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over forty years. His most recent book is Nomadism in Iran: From Antiquity to the Modern Era (Oxford University Press, 2014). Patricia Risso is Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of New Mexico. Her PhD is from the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montréal. Her research interests are cultural and economic contacts between India and the Middle East during the early modern period. In the last several years she has focused on cross-cultural perceptions of maritime violence that is often referred to as piracy. Her publications include Oman and Masqat: An Early Modern History (1986), Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean (1995; in Arabic trans., 2009) and a multi-authored two-volume text, Sharing the Stage: Biography and Gender in World History (2008).

Foreword His Excellency Mohammed Mahdi Altajir When I think of the Gulf and its history, I recall an observation of the brilliant Arab historian and social philosopher Ibn Khaldun about historical change. In his Muqaddimah, written as long ago as 1377, he says: When conditions have changed completely, it is as if creation had fundamentally changed, and the world had been entirely transformed, as if it were a new creation, a rebirth, a new world.

Ibn Khaldun never had the good fortune to visit the Gulf region but his prescient words are a particularly apposite summary of the recent history of the region, where the changes witnessed over the past couple of generations have indeed created a new world. The Gulf States may be unrecognizable in many respects compared to what they were only fifty years ago, but for those born into the Gulf of the twenty-first century, much of what they see and experience may be taken for granted. It is here that Ibn Khaldun’s championing of the writing of history is also important. As conditions change, as new ways of life emerge, overlaid on others, there is a risk that the knowledge of how these communities had got to this point would be forgotten. Not only would the memories be lost of those whose efforts, skill and sacrifice built the present, but, more dangerously, the lessons that history provides as a guide to the future would also be ignored. This book is an attempt to counteract such forgetting. In doing so it will serve to remind those who live in and around the Gulf, as well those who pass through, that something exceptional took place here in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than that, it will do justice to those forces and to those individuals who contributed to the making of the modern Gulf States. These were the people who helped to build the economies and states of the region, benefiting from the natural endowment of oil and gas, but also relying on their own understanding, determination and ambitions to transform the lives of its inhabitants. In this story it is the power of these human relationships, the connections they created, and the trust and vision that they generated that stand out. Whether they were of the ruling houses of the Gulf shaykhdoms, or merchants active through history across the waters of the Gulf and beyond, or British imperial servants who left their mark on Gulf economies, state boundaries and institutions or the people who found and produced the oil – all have contributed to the making of the modern Gulf. In my own lifetime I have been particularly privileged to know and to serve with Their Highnesses Shaykh Rashid ibn Saʿid Al Maktum and Shaykh Zayid ibn Sultan Al Nahayan, and with their sons Shaykh Muhammad ibn Rashid Al Maktum, Shaykh Khalifah ibn Zayid Al Nahayan and Shaykh Muhammad ibn Zayid Al Nahayan. Shaykh xiv

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Rashid and Shaykh Zayid showed great foresight in the creation of the United Arab Emirates, as in their contributions did His Highness Shaykh Sabah ibn Salim Al Sabah of Kuwait, my good friend and colleague Ahmad ibn Khalifah al-Suwaydi, other leading members of the merchant community and British officials, in particular Sir Geoffrey Arthur and Mr Peter Tripp whom I remember for their dedication, friendship and shrewd advice as we worked to a common end. The hope is that this book will be a testimony not only to the impersonal forces, but also to these, and many other individuals whose vision, activities and s.abr (for which there is no adequate translation) have helped to make the Gulf what it is today. It will be a powerful reminder that these constitute the bedrock on which trade, commerce and prosperity have been built, securing the Gulf States in an often dangerous region. I end by thanking the Trustees of the Altajir Trust, in particular the Chairman, Professor Alan Jones, and the Director, Mr Richard Muir, who with the editor, Dr J.E. Peterson, have produced this book.

List of Abbreviations Aramco

Arabian American Oil Company

Bapco

Bahrain Petroleum Company

BP

British Petroleum

CE

Common Era

EIC

East India Company

GCC

Gulf Cooperation Council (properly the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf)

GDP

gross domestic product

HMG

His/Her Majesty’s Government

ICJ

International Court of Justice

IMF

International Monetary Fund

IPC

Iraq Petroleum Company

IRI

Islamic Republic of Iran

OIC

Organisation of the Islamic Conference

OPEC

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

PCL

Petroleum Concessions Limited

PDO

Petroleum Development Oman

PFLOAG

Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf

RAF

Royal Air Force

SABIC

Saudi Arabian Basic Industries Corporation

SAS

Special Air Service

SIPRI

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

SOCAL

Standard Oil of California

UAE

United Arab Emirates

UN

United Nations

UNDP

UN Development Programme

VOC

Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company)

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Introduction J.E. Peterson

The six Gulf States in their present form are creations of the twentieth century. Saudi Arabia emerged under that name in 1932 although the roots of the Third Saudi State date back to the beginning of the century. Kuwait became fully independent in 1961. For all practical purposes, Oman dates its modern, unified statehood to 1970. Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates received their independence in 1971. But the origins of the political foundations and leadership of all can be traced to roughly the eighteenth century. More broadly, these countries and the region boast one of the longest historical spans in the world. While the exceptional civilizations of the larger Gulf entities of Iran and Iraq (or Mesopotamia) are far better known, the Arab littoral also possesses tangible and cultural remains of an equally long and notable history and prehistory. The relatively short lifespan of the modern Gulf States is not because little happened between the early Islamic era and the modern period, but because much of the history was not recorded and was consequently lost. Furthermore, the largest part of the history of the modern period was compiled and written by Europeans. Indeed, European archives – particularly the British – still remain as perhaps the most comprehensive source of primary data for pre-1971 history. Of course this is an over-generalization for the region as a whole. The primary focus of this book is the territory presently occupied by and the entities of the six member Gulf States of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC ): Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE ) and Oman.1 Oman has been a conscious sociopolitical entity continuously for several thousand years. The western part of Saudi Arabia, alHijaz, home to the holy places in Makkah (Mecca) and al-Madinah (Medina), likewise has been prominent in history since the introduction of Islam and before. Similarly, Bahrain’s long history has persisted into the modern era. But the other smaller Gulf States are relatively recent in appearance. Their predominant ethos derives from a badu (bedouin or originally pastoral and nomadic) heritage even though their ruling families and other prominent families evince a more hadar (settled or urban) orientation. This book covers the history of the Gulf States approximately from the eighteenth century to 1971. The chapters examine key themes that have shaped Gulf history over the period. Nearly a dozen chapters, each by a leading scholar in the field, draw on each author’s core expertise and previous research acquired in the course of extensive careers. At the same time, the contributors have been encouraged to adopt a fresh and broad interpretive approach to their subjects rather than simply provide chronological 1

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

narratives or ‘state of the art’ essays concentrating on extensive reviews of relevant literature. Authors also carried out new research to underpin their conclusions and insight. In this way the work as a whole and the individual chapters provide a fresh contribution to knowledge of the area in an overarching elucidative approach. A fundamental goal is to set a new standard or base for the future scholarship and understanding of this vital region. History is often divided into distinct periods, whether as a matter of convenience or because of significantly changed circumstances that dictate separate epochs. Such periodization makes sense on certain levels but at the same time seems simply arbitrary. Nevertheless, it is often necessary to carve out periods of history to examine. Accordingly, this work concentrates on a time frame that roughly encompasses the period of 1800 to 1971, with some exceptions. Why this specific period of about two centuries? This span represents the period that arguably has witnessed the greatest concentration of change in the region’s long history. Inasmuch as the chapters in this volume lay the essential foundation for understanding the emergence of the six states of the Arab littoral and the fundamental pillars on which their society and politics rest, it is precisely this time frame that permits the exposition of this foundation. The starting date is basically arbitrary as it represents the beginning of the extension of British influence into and along the Gulf, a development that put in process the consolidation of political authority on the Arab littoral into the proto-states that evolved into the durable states of today. Similarly, the ending date is also somewhat arbitrary. In one sense, all histories require an end date. It is difficult to conceive of a more appropriate year than 1971: the year of official British withdrawal from the Gulf when the remainder of the six states received their full independence. These events were soon followed by the oil price revolution of 1973–4 that sent the Gulf States’ economies soaring and ushered in a new era. Of course, history did not end in 1971 and a brief summary of many of the events that deeply impacted the Gulf in the succeeding decades is provided later in this introduction; this provides a contextual continuity past the volume’s cutoff date and it offers some perspective on how the region’s modern history and economic and social transformation impacted – and continues to impact – contemporary events. It should be noted, however, that for good reasons not all chapters conform to the 1800–1971 time frame. Obviously, the opening chapter by Dan Potts covers a huge span that ends long before 1800. This of course is necessary to set the scene and to introduce underlying concepts and continuing factors that have shaped the Gulf ’s history into the period of our focused examination. Similarly, it would not, for example, have made much sense for my chapter on the impact of European imperialism not to have begun with the appearance of Europeans in the region at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Similarly, while Frauke Heard-Bey’s chapter is concerned with the process of state formation and emergence of the six extant states, the final chapter by Steffen Hertog details the development of these states during the crucial early decades of the impact of the oil era, a period in which the form and patterns of the nation state took shape and evolved into their present appearance. His story necessarily takes us well into the 1980s.

Introduction

3

Gulf historiography It is not an exaggeration to say that Gulf historiography is still in its infancy. For the most part, scholarship is only now moving beyond country case studies. Practitioners are displaying more sophisticated methodology and the range of sources is expanding. While there never can be a resolution of the dialectic between historical ‘facts’ and interpretation, between perceptions of Orientalism and indigenous revisionism, the broadening and deepening scope of literature on the Gulf States builds on earlier works and also takes advantage of archives previously closed, oral history, a trove of traditional accounts that were not utilized by or available to earlier scholars and especially access to countries and individuals for research on subjects that would have been clearly impossible even in the closing years of the twentieth century. If one takes the long-term view of Gulf history, historical writing on the region is a relatively recent phenomenon, as the surveys of the literature in the bibliographical essays at the end of each chapter of the book demonstrate. Most of the population in what now comprise the Gulf States was not literate until quite recently and the centres of education, religious studies and literature were outside the Gulf. As a consequence, much of our understanding of the Gulf in the sixteenth, seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries derives from the accounts of European travellers in the region. Some of these were political figures while others were merchants or even a few engaged in ‘scientific inquiry’. Some of the first were Portuguese, such as Afonso de Albuquerque, the admiral who conquered his way up to and into the Gulf in the early years of the sixteenth century, his contemporary, Duarte Barbosa, whose encyclopaedic treatise covered most of the Indian Ocean and then Ruy Freyre de Andrada, writing a century later. The tradition of travel writings continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early in the nineteenth century, John Lewis Burckhardt, J.S. Buckingham, George Thomas Keppel, Robert Mignan and W.F.W. Owen were among those merchants who published their extensive travel accounts. Vincenzo Maurizi wrote of his personal experiences as physician to the ruler of Muscat about the same time. At mid-century, William Palgrave criss-crossed the Peninsula and Gulf although his account is tainted by later accusations that he had fabricated his visits to various localities. Lady Anne Blunt famously published her account of a trip to the Najd in central Arabia in 1881. Perhaps the most famous explorer of his age, Sir Richard Burton, disguised himself as a pilgrim to enter Makkah. Around the turn of the twentieth century, J. Theodore Bent and Mabel Bent travelled around the littorals of the Arabian Peninsula and wrote extensively about it, in some cases being the first Westerners to provide published details on tribes and societies. The experiences of Charles M. Doughty in central Arabia complemented the Bents’ accounts. British civil servants in the Gulf were responsible for the bulk of Western exploration of Arabia as well as the translation and publication of essential regional texts. Among the former are the indomitable mid-century British Resident in the Gulf, Lewis Pelly, and George Sadleir, the first European to cross the Peninsula by land early in the century. At the latter end of the century, S.B. Miles, the long-time British Political Agent in Muscat, published posthumously a sweeping history of Oman that he had intended to be part of a larger Gulf history. Meanwhile, both J.R. Wellsted and later A.W. Stiffe

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

published extensively regarding their explorations along the coasts of Arabia as part of their duties with the Royal Navy. Sir Arnold Wilson, the first civil commissioner of the Iraq Mandate, published a comprehensive history of the Gulf in the 1920s. But the most important accomplishment of this sort was the encyclopaedic Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ʿOmân, and Central Arabia, edited by J.G. Lorimer and published for internal use by the British Indian government early in the twentieth century. Perhaps the most exhaustive source of information on Gulf history and people ever, the Gazetteer remains an essential reference today. There is no space to list even the most important of the numerous twentiethcentury memoirs of British officials serving in the Gulf for HMG (His/Her Majesty’s Government), local governments or with the military. Having said that, special mention must be made of H. St. John B. Philby, a British official in the region early in his career and then a businessman in Saudi Arabia and confidant to King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz: Philby used his position to carry out numerous expeditions throughout the kingdom and wrote a bookshelf ’s worth of books about them. Mention might also be made of Bertram Thomas and Wilfrid Thesiger, the first and third Europeans (Philby was the second) to cross the Rubʿ al-Khali or Empty Quarter desert, not to mention T.E. Lawrence. Alongside European historical accounts, notable traditional historians were active. In the twentieth century, prominent members of the ranks of ‘traditional’ historians (admittedly an imprecise description) included ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Rashid of Kuwait, Nur al-Din ʿAbdullah ibn Humayd al-Salimi, his son Muhammad and Salim ibn Hamud al-Siyabi of Oman and Saudi historians Hamad al-Jasir, Khayr al-Din al-Zirkali and Mohammed Almana. Perhaps the first scholarly book on the Peninsula was C. Snouck Hurgronje’s late nineteenth-century study of Makkah society, although he was preceded by Carsten Niebuhr, the leader of the Danish Arabian Expedition in the mid-eighteenth century. The first stirrings of Western or outside scholarship on the Gulf States occurred after the Second World War and such scholarship remained very small until the early 1970s, determined in part by the difficulty of access to the Gulf countries. Among the more notable names in this respect are George Rentz, R. Bayly Winder, Ahmad Abu Hakima, J.B. Kelly and J.C. Wilkinson. But from the 1970s on, the body of work increased steadily and then almost exponentially in the 1990s. Access became easier, the nature of academic inquiry became more acceptable to governments and nationals alike and the foundations of fundamental scholarly writings permitted the gradual creation of a growing edifice of steadily more focused and specialized research. But it would be an injustice not to note that scholars from the Gulf began to appear at this time. Although mostly educated at Western universities, as well as in Cairo and Beirut, many of the first generation had only brief academic careers before being drafted into senior government positions. Undoubtedly the most prominent Gulf historian has been Dr Shaykh Sultan ibn Muhammad al-Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah. With the expansion of higher education throughout the Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s, a wide network of Gulf scholars began to emerge. A significant proportion of these trained as historians and published in both English and Arabic, as well as a scattering of other European languages. Regrettably, the authors of many good historical theses subsequently absented themselves from scholarly publication. Gulf historians naturally displayed a

Introduction

5

deeper knowledge of the local scene but they have also been more uncritical in their reliance on earlier Western writers. They have also tended to concentrate on their own country and understandably to avoid politically and culturally sensitive topics. At the same time, they have spearheaded an emergence of revisionism, often with an antiimperialist cast regarding the historical experience with Britain in the Gulf.

The design of the book A great deal of care and sustained planning has gone into the design and structure of this volume, with careful concentration on selecting the best possible mix of topics and authors. The first step involved the recruitment of a board of advisory editors who would help match the best authors available with the most important and relevant trends in modern Gulf history. An initial meeting was held in London in November 2011 with the director of Altajir Trust, the editor, the four advisory editors and the board of trustees of Altajir Trust. Building upon an extensive earlier email discussion of possible authors and topics, the group selected the authors we should approach to contribute along with the topics that were felt to be best suited to their strengths and expertise. Emphasis has been placed on inviting established scholars with impeccable reputations on the principle that scholars who have spent their careers thinking about, researching, spending time in and/or living in, contemplating and writing about the Gulf will have formed a wealth of experience and deep insights about the region that only time and long exposure can create. This should not ignore the growing volume of contributions to Gulf history and related subjects by younger, dedicated scholars and indeed this volume benefits from their inclusion as well. As the next step, we asked each contributor who agreed to participate to produce a proposal or outline of his or her topic, which was then read and commented upon by the editor and advisory editors. Final versions of the proposals were then circulated to the entire group and discussed at a workshop at Ashbridge outside London in July 2012. The commentary on each other’s topic and lively exchange of ideas helped bring the group closer together and served to bring individual topics into closer focus and to make clear how they complemented each other. First drafts of chapters were produced fifteen months later and these too were read and commented upon by the editor and advisory editors. This led to the production of second versions that were circulated before a second workshop involving the entire group at Ashbridge in January 2014. Again, the intensive exchange of ideas and comments enriched the process and final versions of each contribution were completed by summer 2014. As a consequence of this careful and involved process, it can be said with full confidence that the contributions stand as landmarks in their particular subjects and the overall result is a work of reference and authority that will stand out for many years to come. As a result of the careful process outlined above, most of these authors will be well known to readers familiar with the Gulf and they enjoy superlative reputations in the field of Gulf studies and Gulf history. It may seem odd for a book of history to include contributions from a wide variety of contributors who are not historians. But an

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

archaeologist, an anthropologist, a linguist and a political scientist are among the authors in large part because they are the best-equipped authorities to write in English on their topics. Individually and collectively, their perspectives provide valuable contributions and insights that otherwise might not be apparent. It is also unfortunately true that it has been exceedingly difficult to find suitable historians from the Gulf able or willing to participate, despite our best efforts. The inclusion of eleven chapters has been intended to be broadly comprehensive while recognizing that not all relevant subjects relating to modern Gulf States history have been covered, nor can they possibly be in a single volume. It will be noted that there are not separate chapters on women or slavery, for example, although both are important subjects in Gulf history and society. An effort has been made to provide some discussion of these and other relevant topics in the appropriate chapters, however. I also wish to acknowledge and express my gratitude to H.E. Mohammed Mahdi Altajir for initiating this project and for his keen interest and support throughout. Similarly, I wish to thank the members of the board of trustees of the Altajir Trust – Alan Jones, Charles Tripp and Noel Brehony – and its director, Richard Muir, for their backing, participation and welcome assistance. All this holds especially true for the advisory editors – Bernard Haykel, Frauke Heard-Bey, Mohammed al-Muqadam and James Piscatori – who helped shape the project, provided advice at all stages and guided its maturation into final form. Acknowledgement and thanks should also be given to Mohammad al-Rumaihi who read and made invaluable comments on a number of chapters.

From 1971 to the present There are many justifiable reasons for concentrating on the period chosen for this work. It can be argued that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before 1971 were a period of rapid transformation of the Gulf – a transformation, it should be stressed, that began well before the impact of oil. Indeed, the economic and social revolution that oil spawned plays a central role in this volume’s narrative. Moreover, once we move beyond 1971, we enter a grey area between history and politics. To cover the last forty-plus years both objectively and comprehensively would require at least another volume and quite likely an entire bookshelf. But the following remarks are aimed at briefly and succinctly outlining the major developments of the very recent past, a kind of sequel or epilogue to the body of the book in essence. It also provides a guide to how the trends and fundamental factors outlined in the present volume’s various contributions have played a role in the enfolding of contemporary events. Undoubtedly the first major disturbance after 1971 was the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The Gulf States had always been suspicious of Iranian intentions in the Gulf. The Shah’s move to assert Iran’s ownership of the strategic islands of Abu Musa and the Two Tunbs, just inside the entrance to the Gulf, was taken simultaneously with official British withdrawal from the Gulf in late 1971 – and essentially was a quid pro quo for Iran’s acceptance of Bahrain’s self-determination of its independence via a popular referendum.

Introduction

7

The Iranian Revolution did far more than just unseat a ruler with whom the Gulf States were reluctantly willing to work, not to mention one of the most important regional allies of the United States. The resurgent Islamist orientation of the new regime in Tehran provoked the Arab littoral state’s fears that the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI ) would have an adverse impact on their own legitimacy – a fear that was stoked by the pan-Islamic revolutionary rhetoric and activities emanating from the IRI . The foreign policy of the new Iranian regime was perceived as consisting of a combination of universal ideological fervour similar to the new Communist regime in Russia some seventy years earlier and of a renewed Iranian nationalist emphasis on hegemony in the Gulf. Some rhetoric in Tehran even suggested that the Islamic Republic might take action to reassert control over Bahrain, a control that had been conspicuously absent for two centuries. Suspicions also emerged among the Gulf States’ majority Sunni community (in every country except Bahrain) about the loyalty of the minority Shiʿah population, a new and troubling development. All these concerns intensified with the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980. Saddam Husayn, no friend to the Gulf States before, responded to Iranian provocations and chose to exploit what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to deal a decisive defeat to an arch-enemy at a moment of its weakness, to exert Iraq’s control over the vital Shatt al-ʿArab waterway that the two countries share and even to ‘liberate’ the Iranian region of Khuzistan (otherwise known as ʿArabistan in the earlier days of Shaykh Khazʿal) with its heavily Arab population and site of the great bulk of Iran’s oil production. But Saddam miscalculated badly. The Arab population of Khuzistan did not rise up to welcome his invading armies and Iranian forces – the regular military forces inherited from the Shah and the new Revolutionary Guard – were able to withstand the plodding attack of Iraq’s army. Eventually the Iranians were able to counter-attack, regain their territory and even advance the fighting into slices of Iraqi territory. The end result was a drawn-out, static campaign of ‘trench’ warfare on a scale not seen since the First World War experience in Europe. Echoes of the devastation of the earlier war were even revived by the use of poison gas, the horrific numbers of combatant and civilian casualties on both sides and the emergence of a war of attrition, complete with missile attacks on each other’s cities. With no end in sight, the two leaders – Saddam Husayn in Baghdad and Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini in Tehran – were forced to accept a negotiated end to the war in 1988. The Gulf States were largely bystanders in this regional titanic clash, but that is not to say that their concern was not intense. They had looked upon both of the Gulf ’s big powers as threats for many years: Iran was perceived as having hegemonic ambitions to the detriment of its Arab neighbours while Iraq had contested Kuwait’s sovereignty since before its 1958 revolution and Baghdad had actively intrigued in the Gulf States after it. It is not surprising that the six Gulf States banded together in the GCC (properly, the Cooperation Council of the Arab States of the Gulf) in 1981. A primary impetus was certainly security, involving both closer coordination of policy and a belief in greater strength in numbers. At the same time, the GCC represented an embryonic attempt at closer political, economic and cultural unity. Over the ensuing decades, annual summits have produced joint resolutions of agreement on regional and international affairs. A rapid deployment force with its headquarters at Hafar al-Batin

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

near Kuwait was created and GCC armed forces played their role in the 1991 liberation of Kuwait. Steps have been taken toward economic integration with the establishment of regional standards and the largely free movement of capital and work or residence for members’ nationals. In 2011, the deteriorating situation in the region and widespread unrest throughout the Arab world, echoing to a certain extent in the GCC , led to the call by King ʿAbdullah of Saudi Arabia to transform the GCC into a Gulf Union similar to the European Union. The proposal received considerable attention over the following years but gained no traction, particularly after Oman flatly rejected the idea. But an equally important development has been the maintenance and intensification of the Gulf States’ relations with the West. In some ways, these have even approximated the depth of relations with the Arab world. As some of the contributions in this volume explain, the Gulf traditionally looked to the Indian Ocean – particularly India and East Africa – as much or more than it did to the Arab world. But with the new horizons of the oil age and independence, ties to the northern Arabs were strengthened. The impetus for this was based partially on ethnicity, religion and language. The impact of Egypt on the Gulf in literature, Islamic leadership, movies, education and more was immense, even during the days that Gamal Abdul Nasser loudly advocated revolution in the Gulf. The emergence and persistence of the never-resolved Arab–Israeli conflict further cemented bonds, particularly as Egyptian and Palestinian teachers emphasized the problem to young Gulf students. While fully engaged in support for the Palestinian cause, the Gulf States also hesitantly took some steps to begin relations with Israel, and the Arab position on a resolution to the conflict came to follow the form of Saudi Arabian King Fahd’s Peace Plan. As Gulf economies grew, the influx of Arab labour from managers to unskilled workers expanded by leaps and bounds, encouraged by the advantages of communication in a common language, shared cultural affinities and a feeling of brotherly solidarity. These qualities, however, brought their own threats, as Gulf nationals felt themselves being submerged by non-Gulf immigrants, many of whom never seemed to leave, and Gulf governments feared that Arab expatriates brought with them the seeds of discontent and subversion. Gradually, labour immigration trends shifted to more emphasis on Asia – the Indian subcontinent in particular but also as far away as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, China and South Korea. There was no question of political problems but the threat of cultural attenuation was greater. Most of the Gulf States remain deeply tied to Britain, their previous protector. Even Saudi Arabia, which was never subordinate to Britain although dependent to a certain degree early in the twentieth century, has maintained manifold close ties despite various crises over the years. The British connection is not just political in nature but includes many other aspects. In the early years of development, the Gulf States relied heavily on British advisers, contract government officials, business managers, construction companies and imported goods. The British influence remains predominant in such widely variegated aspects as the reliance on British expatriates, the widespread use of English and traffic organization. Britain remains a favoured destination for Gulf students in higher education and for investment by Gulf nationals and governments

Introduction

9

alike. The rulers of the Gulf and their families value their connections with the British royal family. Saudi Arabia is the exception where the United States has occupied a very similar role since the kingdom’s original oil concession was obtained by American interests. While the concessionary company has reverted to Saudi ownership, its name, Saudi Aramco, reflects its origins: Aramco was short for the Arabian American Oil Company. Since the 1930s, the American government, companies and individuals have been heavily invested in the development of Saudi Arabia. Washington considers Riyadh to be one of its most important partners in the Middle East and beyond, despite the strains in the relationship that have appeared in recent years. The United States is one of Saudi Arabia’s biggest trading partners and thousands of Americans work in the kingdom. Saudis who study abroad most often go to the US . Even the organization of traffic reflects an American influence in sharp distinction to the other GCC states. Security has become one of the most important aspects of the Gulf–American relationship. The United States, in cooperation (and sometimes competition) with the United Kingdom, has provided the lion’s share of military hardware to GCC states and has acted as a security umbrella over the Gulf States. While American involvement in the Gulf is long-standing – beginning perhaps with the presence of American medical missionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century and including the positioning of a small US naval force in Bahrain after the Second World War as well as a short-lived air force base in Saudi Arabia – Washington long deferred playing a direct security role in the region, preferring to rely on the UK and then on a Twin-Pillar Policy. The defence capabilities of Iran and Saudi Arabia were built up to permit them to serve as American security surrogates in the region. The importance of Iran to US national interests was highlighted by President Jimmy Carter’s declaration in Tehran in November 1977 that Iran was an ‘island of stability’. Less than a year and a half later, the Shah was in exile and Riyadh clearly did not have the muscle to act as a surrogate on its own. As a consequence, the US articulated the Carter Doctrine in 1980: ‘An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America. And such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military’.2 This warning was directly aimed at the Soviet Union, seen at the time as the greatest threat to American and GCC interests. It spurred the formation of what was to become the US Central Command, a military organizational structure tasked with defending Western friends in the Gulf and beyond. A decade later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The first principal step toward assuming a more direct US role in the Gulf came in 1987 when Iranian desperation during its war with Iraq caused the IRI to attack oil tankers transiting GCC ports. Kuwait, which was closest to the hostilities and whose tankers were most at risk, reached agreement with the United States for its tankers to be reflagged as American ships. This step naturally required a US naval presence in the Gulf to provide protection and American forces in and around the Gulf have continued to expand since then. Only a few years later in 1990, Saddam Husayn, having escaped near-catastrophe in his conflict with Iran, invaded Kuwait, claiming it as Iraq’s nineteenth province. The

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

United States assembled a wide-ranging coalition of forces to retake Kuwait, which was accomplished in the 100-hour Operation Desert Storm, the second Gulf War.3 While Kuwait was successfully reconstituted as an independent state, Saddam remained ensconced in Baghdad. Years of intrusive inspections by international teams of Iraqi facilities for weapons of mass destruction and efforts to restrict Saddam’s freedom of action against his own people produced only indecisive results. As a consequence of frustration and of a feeling of increased insecurity because of the September 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al-Qaʿidah, Washington organized a military attack on Iraq in 2003. The Iraqi government was toppled and the US, in occupation of the country, attempted – albeit clumsily – to create a new regime in Iraq. While the Kurds in northern Iraq were allowed to enjoy a large degree of autonomy, the remainder of the country suffered through near-civil war in the ensuing years. The majority Arab Shiʿah dominated the government while elements of the minority Arab Sunni community resisted with violence. The tense situation continued through the withdrawal of US troops into 2014 when the emergence of Daʿish (al-dawlah al-Islamiyyah fil-ʿIraq walSham; also known variously as ISIS or ISIL and subsequently self-described as the Islamic State) out of the chaos of the Syrian civil war posed a direct threat to the government in Baghdad and to Western and GCC interests. As these words are written, there is increasing pressure on the US and the West to take strong military action against Daʿish. Such action would be the latest in a long line of US instances of involvement with Gulf security. In the forty-plus years since 1971, the US military presence in the Gulf has grown and its footprint deepened. It is not surprising that Gulf observers have come to regard the US as a Gulf power – and the most powerful one at that – and not as an outside influence. In the meantime, the advantage of oil income meant that the socio-economic development and change swept forward in all GCC states. From being one of the poorest regions on Earth, the Gulf States became one of the wealthiest. A heavily illiterate population was transformed into a highly educated citizenry, many of whom enjoyed a good standard of living. But while economic change exploded, social continuity remained relatively persistent and political leadership essentially has not changed. All six states possess hereditary rulers who are supported by and are drawn from distinct and inviolable ruling families. Succession has been a constant challenge, both in the manner of selection of heirs apparent and in the quality of leadership. Partly, it is a problem of ageing leadership. King ʿAbdullah of Saudi Arabia was about ninety when he died in early 2015 and his successor and half-brother Salman was about eighty. King Salman was the first monarch to establish a line of succession that moved beyond the generation of sons of King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (Ibn Saʿud, r. 1902–53) to his grandsons. Sultan Qabus of Oman was seventy-five in 2015 and has no offspring, thus raising questions about who will succeed him. On the other hand, the death of Shaykh Zayid, ruler of Abu Dhabi (1966–2004) and president of the UAE (1971–2004), passed without crisis and Shaykh Khalifah of Qatar, who had deposed his father in a 1995 coup, voluntarily abdicated in favour of his son in 2013. But as the Gulf States’ populations grow steadily more educated and more aware, the political systems continue to resist change and exercise authoritarian control.

Introduction

11

While the majority of Gulf States’ nationals have regarded their governments and leaders as legitimate, there is a long history of opposition as well. Inconclusive efforts to expand political participation emerged in the early 1920s in Kuwait and Bahrain and those two states plus Dubai saw renewed attempts to expand decision-making in 1938. Bahrain has been a particular focus of opposition over the last century, in part because of restrictions on its Shiʿah majority. Labour strikes occurred in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s and in Bahrain in the mid-1960s. Underground leftist movements penetrated all of the Gulf States in the 1960s and early 1970s, aided in part by the fullscale war in Oman’s southern Dhufar province. Bahrain experienced simmering discontent for much of the 1990s. The unrest that swept the Arab world in 2011 and toppled the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen (and plunged Syria into civil war) was more subdued in the GCC . Persistent protests for economic and political change were held in Oman while scattered demonstrations occurred in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. In Bahrain, however, the spirit of 2011 energized the country’s long-standing opposition, mostly Shiʿah but not exclusively, to a Sunni government stubbornly resistant to compromise.

A few notes on style A conscious decision was made to eschew footnotes throughout each of the chapters. It was felt that this would, first, help the contributors concentrate on the broader themes and questions, rather than produce a more standard scholarly paper on a narrow topic. Each contribution – and the book as a whole – is intended to be interpretative, representing the broad sum of knowledge and scholarship on each subject. The seminal work done by other authors is acknowledged by reference in the text to their names when appropriate. The decision was also made to eliminate references to their specific works as a way of highlighting their work as a whole and thereby not limiting their influence to a single reference to a single work. Drawing upon an example from my own chapter, I have cited five works by the late scholar Charles Boxer in my bibliography and could have added many more. I would not wish a single reference, complete with page number(s), to indicate to the reader that this was the sum total – or even the only relevant mention – of his vast contribution. A short bibliographic essay and bibliography follows the text of all but one chapter. These are intended to give interested readers a thorough introduction to the literature on the modern history of the Gulf overall and more specifically to the literature pertaining to each of the chapters in the book. In general, the only notes that have been retained are substantive ones, as well as specific citations required for quotations from archival sources. There is one significant exception, however. At the second workshop of this project, it was the consensus of the group that the extensive notes in Michael Crawford’s chapter on ‘Religion and Religious Movements in the Gulf, 1700–1971’ should be retained. These notes represent a wealth of material on Arabic-language sources that may not be familiar even to specialists in that field and thus have considerable value as they stand. There is no bibliographic essay or bibliography for this chapter as it would be redundant.

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

While there can be no objection to using ‘state’ to refer to the contemporary (or post-1971) Gulf States, given their relative fulfilment of Western conceptions of statehood, usage for periods prior to that time can be seen as problematic in Western terms. The broad definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary is ‘a community of people living in a defined territory and organized under its own government’. Premodern political entities generally did not control recognized territory or enjoy a legitimate monopoly on coercion, frequently cited (and derived from Weber) aspects of definition of a state and many of the entities mentioned in this book could barely be described as having a government. Nevertheless, the term ‘state’ is employed throughout this book since there does not seem to be any accurate and efficacious alternative. It should be noted that the rulers and the areas they controlled or influenced in what is now the United Arab Emirates were recognized by the British as ‘Trucial States’ from the mid-nineteenth century. A similar problem of terminology arises with the term ‘citizen’. The word is often used in translation of the Arabic word, muwatin. But rather than denoting a citizen – i.e. someone who possesses rights and privileges in a state that exists as a vessel of its people – muwatin more closely connotes someone who belongs to a homeland, watan, and thus may be better translated as ‘national’. Effort has been made in this book to use ‘national’ or even ‘resident’ whenever feasible. The chapters conform generally to the style of transliteration used by the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Library of Congress/British Library. The only diacritics used are those of the ʿayn and the hamzah. There are two exceptions to this. First, as Michael Crawford’s chapter deals with a multitude of Arabic names and sources, it was felt best to transliterate these fully to avoid confusion. Second, Clive Holes’ chapter deals heavily with linguistic terms and phrases and it seems best to transliterate these fully as they are spoken since there are no written equivalents for a number of the terms he discusses.

Notes 1 For the sake of convenience, the term ‘the Gulf ’ will be used either for the six member states of the GCC or the larger Gulf region, depending on the context. Similarly, in an attempt at neutrality, the Gulf will be used instead of Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf. 2 President Jimmy Carter, in his State of the Union Address, 1980; reproduced at www. jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/speeches/su80jec.phtml. This policy statement bears a striking similarity to the declaration by Lord Lansdowne, the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, in Parliament in 1903: ‘we should regard the establishment of a naval base, or of a fortified port, in the Persian Gulf by any other Power as a very grave menace to British interests and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal’ (Lorimer, Gazetteer, Vol. I, pp. 367–8; citing The Times, 6 May 1903). 3 The numbering of Gulf Wars has undergone considerable ambiguity over the years. The Iran-Iraq War was the first Gulf War and referred to as such by Western media. However, when Western forces became involved in confrontation with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm become known as ‘the Gulf War’ and later as ‘the First Gulf War’ after the American-led invasion of Iraq was designated ‘the Second Gulf War’. A clear way of

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avoiding confusion is to simply call the three conflicts the Iran-Iraq War, the Kuwait War and the Iraq War.

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Kelly, J.B. Arabia, the Gulf and the West: A Critical View of the Arabs and Their Oil Policy. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Basic Books, 1980. Kelly, J.B. Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Kelly, J.B. Eastern Arabian Frontiers. London: Faber, 1964. Kelly, J.B. ‘Arabian Frontiers and Anglo-American Relations’. Government and Opposition, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Summer 1992), pp. 369–84. Kelly, J.B. ‘The Buraimi Oasis Dispute’. International Affairs (London), Vol. 32, No. 3 (July 1956), pp. 318–26. Kelly, J.B. ‘Eastern Arabian Frontiers’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1965), pp. 307–12. Kelly, J.B. ‘The Future in Arabia’. International Affairs (London), Vol. 42, No. 4 (October 1966), pp. 619–40. Kelly, J.B. ‘Hadramaut, Oman, Dhufar: The Experience of Revolution’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May 1976), pp. 213–30. Kelly, J.B. ‘Jeux sans frontières: Philby’s Travels in Southern Arabia’. In C.E. Bosworth et al., eds, The Islamic World from Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1988), pp. 701–32. Kelly, J.B. ‘The Legal and Historical Basis of the British Position in the Persian Gulf ’. In St. Antony’s Papers No. 4, Middle Eastern Affairs No. 1 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958; New York: Praeger, 1959), pp. 119–40. Kelly, J.B. ‘The Persian Claim to Bahrain’. International Affairs (London), Vol. 33, No. 1 (1957), pp. 51–70. Kelly, J.B. ‘A Prevalence of Furies: Tribes, Politics and Religion in Oman and Trucial Oman’. In Derek Hopwood, ed., The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin; Totowa, NJ : Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), pp. 107–41. Kelly, J.B. ‘Salisbury, Curzon and the Kuwait Agreement of 1899’. In K. Bourne and D.C. Watt, eds, Studies in International History: Essays Presented to W.N. Medlicott (London: Longmans, 1967), pp. 264–5. Kelly, J.B. ‘Sovereignty and Jurisdiction in Eastern Arabia’. International Affairs (London), Vol. 34, No. 1 (1958), pp. 16–24. Kelly, J.B. ‘Sultanate and Imamate in Oman’. Chatham House Memoranda. London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1959. Keppel, George Thomas. A Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England, by Bussorah, Baghdad, the Ruins of Babylon . . . in the Year 1824. 2nd ed.; London: Henry Colburn, 1827, 2 vols. Lawrence, T.E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. Oxford: privately printed 1922; Subscribers’ Edition, 1926. Reprinted London: Cape, 1973. Abridged as Revolt in the Desert. New York, George H. Doran, 1927. Lawrence, T.E. The Letters of T.E. Lawrence. Selected and ed. by Malcolm Brown. London: J.M. Dent, 1988. Lorimer, J.G., ed. Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ʿOmân, and Central Arabia. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, Vol. 1: 1915; Vol. 2: 1908. Reprinted Farnborough, Hants: Gregg International, 1970; Shannon: Irish Universities Press, 1970; in six volumes. Reprinted London: Archive Editions, 1989. Reprinted Reading: Garnet, 1998, for Sultan Qaboos University. Maurizi, Vincenzo. History of Seyd Said, Sultan of Muscat; Together With an Account of the Countries and Peoples on the Shores of the Persian Gulf, Particularly of the Wahabees. London: J. Booth, 1819; reprinted Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1984.

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Mignan, Robert. A Winter Journey Through Russia, the Caucasian Alps and Thence Across Mount Zagros by the Pass of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand Greeks, into Koordistan. 2 vols; London: Richard Bentley, 1839. Miles, S.B. The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf. London: Harrison and Sons, 1919. 2nd ed., London: Frank Cass, 1966. Reprinted, Reading: Garnet, 1994. Niebuhr, Carsten. Travels Through Arabia and Other Countries in the East. Trans. into English by Robert Heron. 2 vols; Edinburgh, 1792. Reprinted Reading: Garnet, 1994. Owen, W.F.W. Ed. by H.B. Robinson. Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia, Madagascar. 2 vols; London: Richard Bentley, 1833. Palgrave, William Gifford. Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia. London: Macmillan, 1865. Reprinted in ‘new edition’ in one volume, 1868. Reprinted in 2 vols; Farnborough, Hants: Gregg International, 1969. Pelly, Lewis. Report on a Journey to the Wahabee Capital of Riyadh in Central Arabia (1865). Bombay: printed for Government at the Education Society’s Press, Byculla, 1866. Reprinted Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1978; Naples: Falcon Press, 1978. Pelly, Lewis. ‘Account of a Recent Tour Around the Northern Provinces of the Persian Gulf ’. Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, Vol. 17 (1865), pp. 113–40. Pelly, Lewis. ‘Remarks on the Tribes, Trade and Resources Around the Shore Line of the Persian Gulf ’. Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, Vol. 17 (1865), pp. 32–112. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabia of the Wahhabis. London: Constable, 1928. Reprinted London: Frank Cass, 1977. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabian Days. London: Robert Hale, 1948. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabian Highlands. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabian Jubilee. New York: John Day, 1953. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabian Oil Ventures. Washington, DC : Middle East Institute, 1964. Philby, H. St. John B. The Empty Quarter. London: Constable, 1933; New York: Henry Holt, 1933. Philby, H. St. John B. Forty Years in the Wilderness. London: Robert Hale, 1957. Philby, H. St. John B. Land of Midian. London: Ernest Benn, 1957. Philby, H. St. John B. A Pilgrim in Arabia. London: Robert Hale, 1946. Philby, H. St. John B. Saudi Arabia. London: Ernest Benn, 1955. Reprinted Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968. Philby, H. St. John B. ‘The Golden Jubilee in Saudi Arabia’. Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 1950), pp. 112–23. Philby, H. St. John B. ‘Riyadh: Ancient and Modern’. Middle East Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1959), pp. 129–42. Philby, H. St. John B. ‘A Survey of Wahhabi Arabia, 1929’. Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1929), pp. 468–81. Qasimi, Sultan ibn Muhammad al-, ed. The Gulf in Historic Maps, 1493–1931. Exeter?, privately printed, 1996. Qasimi, Sultan ibn Muhammad al-, ed. The Journals of David Seton in the Gulf, 1800–1809. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995. Qasimi, Sultan ibn Muhammad al-. The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf. London: Croom Helm, 1986. 2nd ed.; London: Routledge, 1988. Qasimi, Sultan ibn Muhammad al-. Les Relations entre Oman et la France (1715–1905). Trans. by Abdeljelil and Mireille Temimi. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995. Comprendre le Moyen-Orient. Also published in English as Omani-French Relations, 1715–1900. Trans. by B.R. Pridham. Exeter: Forest Row, 1996.

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Qasimi, Sultan ibn Muhammad al-. Taqsim al-imbraturiyyah al-ʿUmaniyyah 1856–1862. Dubai: Mu’assasat al-bayan, 1989. Qasimi, Sultan ibn Muhammad al-. The White Shaikh. Sharjah, privately printed, November 1996. Rashid, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-. Tarikh al-Kuwayt. Ed. and notes by Yaʿqub ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Rashid. Rev. ed. Beirut: Manshurat dar maktabat al-haya, 1978. Rentz, George S. The Birth of the Islamic Reform Movement in Saudi Arabia: Muhammad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703/4–1792) and the Beginnings of Unitarian Empire in Arabia. Edited with introduction by William Facey. London: Arabian Publishing, 2004. Publication of PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1948. Rentz, George S. ‘Literature on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’. Middle East Journal, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1950), pp. 244–9. Rentz, George S. ‘Notes on Oppenheim’s Die Beduinen’. Oriens, Vol. 10, No. 1 (31 July 1957), pp. 77–89. Rentz, George S. ‘The Saudi Monarchy’. In Willard A. Beling, ed., King Faisal and the Modernisation of Saudi Arabia (London: Croom Helm; Boulder: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 15–34. Rentz, George S. ‘Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia’. In Derek Hopwood, ed., The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), pp. 54–66. Sadleir, George Forster. Diary of a Journey Across Arabia (1819). Reprinted Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1977. Salimi, Muhammad ibn ʿAbdullah ibn Humayd al-. Nahdat al-aʿyan bi-hurriyat ʿUman. Cairo: Dar al-kitab al-ʿArabi, n.d. (1961?). Salimi, Nur al-Din ʿAbdullah ibn Humayd al-. Tuhfat al-aʿyan bi-sirat ahl ʿUman. 5th ed.; Kuwait: Dar al-taliʿah, 1974. First published 1927. Siyabi, Salim ibn Hamud al-. Isʿaf al-aʿyan fi ansab ahl ʿUman. Beirut: A.H. 1384. Stiffe, A.W. The Island of Hormúz (Ormus). N.p., 1880? Stiffe, A.W. ‘Ancient Trading Centres of the Persian Gulf, IV: Maskat’. Geographical Journal, Vol. 10 (1897), pp. 608–18. Stiffe, A.W. ‘A Visit to the Hot Springs of Bosher near Muscat’. Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, Vol. 15 (1859), pp. 123–27. Thesiger, Wilfred. Arabian Sands. London: Longmans; New York: Dutton, 1959. Reprinted New York: Viking Press, 1984. Thesiger, Wilfred. Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The Last Nomad; One Man’s Forty Year Adventure in the World’s Most Remote Deserts, Mountains and Marshes. London: Collins; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979. Thesiger, Wilfred. The Life of My Choice. London: Collins; New York: Norton, 1987. Thesiger, Wilfred. The Marsh Arabs. London: Longmans; New York, Dutton, 1964. Thesiger, Wilfred. ‘The Badu of Southern Arabia’. Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol. 37, No. 1 (1950), pp. 53–61. Thomas, Bertram S. Alarms and Excursions in Arabia. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931. Thomas, Bertram S. Arabia Felix: Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932. Thomas, Bertram S. ‘Among Some Unknown Tribes of South Arabia’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 59, Parts 1–2 (1929), pp. 97–111. Thomas, Bertram S. ‘Arab Rule Under the Al Bu Saʿid Dynasty of Oman’. Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 24 (1938), pp. 27–53. Reprinted London: Humphrey Milford, 1938.

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Thomas, Bertram S. ‘The Kumzari Dialect of the Shihuh Tribe, Arabia, and a Vocabulary’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 20, Part 4 (October 1930), pp. 785–854. Reprinted as an Asiatic Society Monograph, No. 21. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1930. Thomas, Bertram S. ‘The Musandam Peninsula and Its People the Shihuh’. Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, Vol. 16, Part 1 (January 1929), pp. 71–86. Thomas, Bertram S. ‘The South-Eastern Borderlands of Rubʿ al-Khali’. Geographical Journal, Vol. 73, No. 3 (March 1929), pp. 193–215. Wellsted, J.R. Travels in Arabia. 2 vols; London: John Murray, 1838. Reprinted Graz: Akademische Druke, 1978. Wellsted, J.R. Travels to the City of the Caliphs, along the shores of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. Including a voyage to the coast of Arabia and a tour on the island of Socotra. London, 1840; 2 vols; reprinted Farnborough, 1968. Wellsted, J.R. ‘Narrative of a Journey into the Interior of Oman’. Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 7 (1837), pp. 102–13. Wilkinson, J.C. Arabia’s Frontiers:: The Story of Britain’s Blue and Violet Lines. London: I.B. Tauris; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Wilkinson, J.C. Ibadism: Origins and Early Development in Oman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Oriental Monographs. Wilkinson, J.C. The Imamate Tradition of Oman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Cambridge Middle East Library. Wilkinson, J.C. The Organisation of the Falaj Irrigation System in Oman. Oxford: University of Oxford, School of Geography, July 1974. Research Papers, No. 10. Wilkinson, J.C. Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj of Oman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Al-Bahrain and Oman’. al-Wathiqa, No. 5 (July 1984), pp. 42–55 and No. 7 (July 1985), pp. 231–51. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Britain’s Role in Boundary Drawing in Arabia: A Synopsis’. In Richard Schofield, ed., Territorial Foundations of the Gulf States (London: University College of London Press, 1994. SOAS /GRC Geopolitics Series, No. 1), pp. 94–108. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Changement et continuité en Oman’. In Paul Bonnenfant, ed., La Péninsule Arabique d’Aujourd’hui (Paris: Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, 1982), pp. 393–415. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Changes in the Structure of Village Life in Oman’. In Tim Niblock, ed., Social and Economic Development in the Arab Gulf (London: Croom Helm, for the University of Exeter Centre for Arab Gulf Studies, 1980), pp. 122–35. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Islamic Water Law with Special Reference to Oasis Settlement’. Journal of Arid Environments, Vol. 1 (1978), pp. 87–96. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘The Julanda of Oman’. Journal of Oman Studies, Vol. 1 (1975), pp. 97–108. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Nomadic Territory as a Factor in Defining Arabia’s Boundaries’. In Martha Mundy and Basim Musallam, eds, The Transformation of Nomadic Society in the Arab East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 44–62. Wilkinson, J.C. ‘Oman and East Africa: New Light on Early Kilwan History from the Omani Sources’. International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1981), pp. 272–305. Wilson, Arnold T. The Persian Gulf : An Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928. Reprinted 1959. Winder, R. Bayly. Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1965. Zirkali, Khayr al-Din al-. Shibh al-jazirah fi ʿahd al-malik ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. 4 vols; Beirut, 1970.

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1

Trends and Patterns in the Archaeology and Pre-modern History of the Gulf Region D.T. Potts

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of archaeological and historical literature examining the past 8,000 years of human occupation in the Gulf region, but only rarely have scholars taken a step back from their particular fields of expertise to look more broadly for trends that might be relevant to both the earlier and the later periods, and to the Iranian and Arabian sides of the Gulf. The aim of this chapter is to examine a number of issues from an explicitly holistic perspective, before turning to some illustrations of interconnectedness or centripetal interaction in the Gulf from premodern times. To begin with, however, a few words about the physical configuration of the Gulf are in order. The Gulf as we know it today is a shallow, epicontinental sea – a trough c.1,000 km long, 200–350 km wide – bordered by eight countries: Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE ), Oman (Raʾs Musandam) and Iran. The creation of this trough has been explained by the theory of plate tectonics and attributed to the movement of two of its plates. Sometime between c. twenty-five million and twelve million years ago, the upthrust of the Arabian plate in the west against the Asian plate, followed by the downward warp of the eastern side of the Arabian Peninsula, created the floor of the Gulf. The formation of the Zagros Mountains c. 5 million to 2 million years ago caused the marine transgression that inundated the area, creating a vast sea. During the Late Pliocene (3.6 million to 2.6 million years ago), when sea levels worldwide were up to 150 m higher than they are today, the coasts of Arabia, Iraq and Iran were up to 100 km inland from where they currently are. Thereafter, cooler temperatures locked up more and more of the Earth’s water supply in the polar ice caps, and sea levels fell accordingly. In the Gulf the successive phases of marine regression that ensued are marked by marine terraces at 110, 70, 50–45, 40–38, 25, 18–15 and 10–7 metres above modern sea level. Dating these episodes is difficult, however, and seismic activity, resulting in both tectonic uplift and subsidence, complicates our understanding of the geomorphology of the Gulf ’s coasts. Between 70,000 and 17,000 years before the present, when worldwide sea levels were up to 120 m below their present levels, the trough between the southernmost ranges of the Zagros Mountains in Iran and the Arabian Shelf was not the shallow, epicontinental sea that it is today, but a river valley through which the combined 19

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effluent of the Euphrates, Tigris and Karun rivers ran southward, through the Straits of Hormuz, and into the Arabian Sea or Gulf of Oman. From a purely geographical perspective, this palaeo-river divided the valley floor into an Iranian and an Arabian hemisphere. Yet the human effects of the river’s presence were probably very different. Instead of separating the populations of these two hemispheres, the river almost certainly acted as a magnet, drawing late Pleistocene bands of hunters and gatherers to its banks in search of game, water fowl, fish and shellfish, and creating opportunities for interaction between groups exploiting the resources of the river’s catchment area, at least on a seasonal if not year-round basis. Unfortunately, we have no way of retrieving either the material remains of the earliest inhabitants of this region or the evidence of their interactions because, around 17,000 years ago, worldwide sea levels began to rise, eventually transforming the TigrisEuphrates-Karun river valley into the Gulf as we know it. Several generations of geomorphologists and hydrologists have documented the progressive infilling of the Gulf, the implications of which are wide-ranging from the standpoint of human geography and prehistoric settlement. As late as 10,000 years ago sea levels were still c.40 m lower than they are at present, after which they rose by fits and starts. The valley became covered, in part, by a discontinuous lake, and only gradually assumed its present form. Thus, for example, at 6000 bce , Bahrain was not yet an archipelago; Qatar was not yet a peninsula; and the coast of Abu Dhabi was significantly further north than it is today. In other words, Bahrain, Qatar and many of what are today the offshore islands in the area of the Great Pearl Banks, including Dalma, Marawah and Sir Bani Yas, were part of the Arabian mainland. Thereafter, the sea level in the Gulf continued to rise, reaching a high point c.2–3 m above modern levels about 6,000 years ago, before receding gradually to its current level at a rate of c.0.4 m/1,000 years, according to Kurt Lambeck. To complicate the situation, however, tectonic uplift and subsidence must also be considered, and Lambeck has emphasized that, west of the Straits of Hormuz, towards the eastern end of the Zagros Mountains, late Holocene beach deposits have been observed at elevations of 30 m above sea level which cannot be explained by ‘eustatic and glacio-hydro-isostatic models’. Moreover, due to the effects of local topography, the infilling of the Gulf did not proceed smoothly or uniformly, affecting all parts of the region at precisely the same rate. As such, it would be unwise to make generalizations about the situation throughout the Gulf at a given point in time, and as Bernier and his colleagues showed, the detailed study of microenvironments along the Gulf coast is the only way to arrive at insights into the situation in a specific topographic zone. Be that as it may, it seems clear that the infilling of the Gulf had many consequences. From the outset we should dispense with the notion that the Gulf, any more than its predecessor, the palaeo-river formed by the combined effluent of the Tigris, Euphrates and Karun rivers, ever acted as a barrier to communication. As we know from excavated prehistoric sites in Kuwait (e.g. al-Sabiyyah) and surface finds made at coastal sites in eastern Saudi Arabia (e.g. Dawsariyyah and ʿAyn al-Sayh), boats made of wood and/or reeds covered with bitumen were being used by the inhabitants of the Gulf ’s coasts by 6000 bce . Thereafter, sailing technology was certainly not static and the sailors of 3000 bce , 1000 bce or 1000 ce had, at their disposal, vessels, sails and rigging that

Pre-modern History of the Gulf Region

21

must have been technically more advanced than those of their ancestors thousands of years earlier. But technological constraints did not hinder communication and, as a glance at Whittingham and King’s Reed’s Tables of Distances clearly shows, the distances between the coasts are modest. Thus Bahrain is only 175 nautical miles from Bushihr (Bushire), while Bushihr is only 150 nautical miles from Kuwait. Similarly, the distance from Bandar Abbas to Bandar Lingah is only 110 nautical miles. Compared to overland travel, either on the Iranian Plateau, particularly if the Zagros Mountains had to be traversed, or through the east Arabian desert, seaborne travel in the Gulf was relatively easy, both for the transport of goods and people. While the holistic approach to the study of the Gulf encouraged by the above reading of its geomorphology and hydrology is appealing, it has found much less favour among archaeologists than historians. This is due to a constellation of factors and reflects a scholarly trajectory that needs to be dissected before it can be properly understood.

Dysfunctional archaeologies Archaeological research in the Gulf began in the late 1870s and is thus much younger than in other parts of the Near East such as Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt or continental Iran. By the early twenty-first century, hundreds of sites had been identified along the east Arabian coast, from Kuwait to Oman, and on many of the major islands fronting it (e.g. Faylaka, Tarut, Bahrain, Sir Bani Yas, Dalma, Marawah). Yet the evidence from the Iranian coast is largely limited to the areas around Bushihr and Siraf and to just a few of the Iranian Gulf islands (principally Kharg and Kish).1 The imbalance in the quantity of data available from the two sides of the Gulf has an obvious effect on our understanding of the past and may be attributed to a variety of factors. Fundamentally, this discrepancy reflects the relative intensity of survey and excavation along the Arabian seaboard, particularly in the past thirty-five years, and the much more desultory nature of the exploration that has occurred along the Iranian coast. In fact, the 1979 Islamic revolution, which ended decades of intensive archaeological research in continental Iran, prompted many scholars who had formerly worked in Iran to initiate survey and excavation in eastern Arabia (principally the UAE and Oman). In addition, the isolation of Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution has made it difficult for scholars in the West to access what information has been published in Iran on research conducted along the Iranian coast, and for Iranian scholars to access publications concerned with sites in Arabia.2 But there are other reasons why it has been difficult to discern patterns and establish correlations between the Arabian and Iranian hemispheres; indeed, why very few attempts have been made to unite the two hemispheres into a coherent whole. First, the archaeology and early history of settlement in the Arabian hemisphere has generally been studied by a different set of scholars than those concerned with the Iranian evidence. Second, indigenous scholarship in virtually all of the countries bordering the Gulf – Oman, the UAE , Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran – is overwhelmingly national in orientation and there is little engagement with work being

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

done outside the nation in which scholars in these countries work, even when it is clear that the pre-modern archaeological remains found in one state are related to those of another.3 Although meetings of archaeologists and museum professionals from states of the GCC do occur, few of the participants have the overview of the corpora of contemporary and related archaeological finds from across the region that Western academics typically have. And finally, the politicization of the terms ‘Persian’ and ‘Arabian’ Gulf has obscured the common histories and archaeologies of the two hemispheres. Despite these mitigating circumstances, however, it is obviously tempting – and timely – to try to view the Gulf region holistically. In the current, admittedly imperfect state of our knowledge about the Iranian coast, it certainly does seem as though this area was less densely occupied (density being a relative term) than the Arabian shore (including major islands like Faylaka, Tarut, Bahrain and Muharraq), particularly in the pre-Islamic period. A survey by Andrew Williamson and Martha Prickett (published by Seth Priestman and Derek Kennet) identified hundreds of sites along the coast, overwhelmingly Islamic in date, but the evidence of early sites is slim. It is frustratingly difficult, however, to interrogate the available evidence with a view to determining whether periods of elevated settlement density, which might reflect higher population levels and/or economic activity, coincided on the two coasts of the Gulf and its main islands. Can we reasonably speak of anything like alternating rhythms of expansion and contraction in settlement and economy on the two coasts? Of coordinated periods of activity, or contrasting ‘boom’ in one area accompanied by ‘bust’ in the other? Bearing in mind that, apart from copper and pearls (and horses in the medieval and later periods), most of the commodities being moved around (sugar, porcelain, yarn, indigo, lead, wood, drugs, pepper, coffee, paper, silk, tobacco, tin, steel, cochineal, beads, iron, turmeric and many others) originated outside the region, how integrated were the economies of the two coasts? Did similar patterns emerge in the two coastal zones only when both were united under a single political system? What were the local economic effects of overarching, bi-coastal political unification in the Gulf when it did occur? A rough and ready assessment of the settlement record on the two sides of the Gulf might look something like this: early sites, ranging from the Neolithic (c.6000 bce ) through the Hellenistic-Parthian era (first century ce ), seem to be located predominantly on the Arabian side of the Gulf. Later sites, beginning with Siraf, in the Sasanid and early Islamic period, followed by Kish in the medieval period (eleventh century) and ultimately Hormuz (with Qishm, which provided it with drinking water from cisterns as well as foodstuffs) in the later medieval and Safavid/Portuguese periods, were predominantly located on the Iranian side of the Gulf. In the early modern era – beginning with the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century – supraregional powers blurred this pattern by periodically extending their authority through conquest from the Iranian side (viz. Hormuz) to the Arabian side (al-Qatif, Bahrain, Julfar) of the Gulf. In many instances, however, the ability of a particular power, even the Portuguese, and certainly the Safavids and Afsharids, to manage such a bi-coastal situation for more than a few years was difficult to sustain. Yet historical reality was hardly as neat as presented in this simplistic reconstruction. Although our image of Bronze Age settlement is based largely on excavations in the

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Arabian hemisphere – Qalʿat al-Bahrain, Barbar and Saʿar, on Bahrain; Umm al-Nar, Tell Abraq, al-Sufuh, Asimah and Hili 8, in the UAE ; Bat, Maysar and Raʾs al-Jinz in Oman – a major site dwarfing virtually all of these in size (with the possible exception of Qalʿat al-Bahrain) called Tol-e Peytul was located on the Iranian coast near Bushihr. While early twentieth century excavations there by Maurice Pézard were limited, enough votive inscriptions in Elamite were recovered to confirm the identification of the site as ancient Liyan and to ascertain the presence of one or more major sanctuaries in the second millennium bce to, among other deities, the Elamite goddess Kiririshaof-Liyan. Although this is the only significant Bronze Age site found to date on the Iranian coast, the size of the mound suggests that Liyan may have been the major metropolis in the Gulf. Later, shortly after the Persian Empire was founded in the midsixth century bce , Cyrus the Great built a palatial complex at Taoce, near modern Borazjan, a short distance inland from Bushihr. We are fortunate in having both the partially excavated ruins of this palace as well as cuneiform texts describing work details sent from Babylon to construct it (these workers presumably got there, not by travelling overland, but by sailing down the Euphrates into the Gulf and docking at Liyan). In the early third century bce a successor to Liyan was founded by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus I Soter (r.  281–261 bce ) and populated by colonists from Magnesia-ad-Maeandrum in Asia Minor as Antiochia-in-Persis, perhaps with the intent of making this a major trade entrepôt for long-distance commerce with India. Roughly 600 years later the founder of the Sasanid Empire, Ardashir I (r. 224–41  ce ) established Rev-Ardashir on or near the site of the Seleucid town, according to Tabari. By the early fifth century, Rev-Ardashir was the seat of the Metropolitan of the Nestorian church of Fars, and the main point of contact between the Christian provinces of Bet Qatraye (north-eastern Arabia) and Bet Mazunaye (south-eastern Arabia) and the church hierarchy. By the eighth-ninth centuries the town seems to have ceded some of its importance to Siraf. Nevertheless, the site remained inhabited for Reshahr, a contraction of Rev-Ardashir according to Hamza, as cited by Yaqut, was sacked by the Portuguese in 1532 and razed by the Safavids in 1540. Its successor, Bushihr, was first attested in the late sixteenth century but only became important once Nadir Shah decided to make it the centre of his Gulf navy in 1734. Despite a dearth of excavation, Tol-e Peytul and Antiochia/Rev-Ardashir warrant a reconsideration of the primacy of the Arabian side of the Gulf over the Iranian side during the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Seleucid and the Sasanid periods. Conversely, although Siraf, near modern Bandar Tahiri on the Iranian coast, is most often invoked as the major Gulf port during the early Islamic era (see below), Bahrain, al-Qatif and Kadhimah (Kuwait) were certainly important at this time, judging by the numismatic evidence, which includes large quantities of Chinese cash, and imported Far Eastern ceramics. Thus, not all of the important post-Sasanid settlements in the area were situated on the Iranian coast and islands. Moreover, it seems clear that, by looking at the Gulf holistically, interesting new questions arise and, even given our incomplete knowledge of many periods, certain patterns begin to emerge. For example, the Gulf often seems to have been dominated by at least one major trading entrepôt that acted like a magnet, attracting trading vessels from smaller, secondary ports within the Gulf, as well as the larger ports outside

24

The Emergence of the Gulf States

Figure 1.1 ‘The Jewel of Muscat’. A modern reconstruction in Oman of a ninthcentury Arab sailing vessel. of it (e.g. in the Indian subcontinent). At the moment, a brief catalogue of such sites would include Ur, in southern Iraq (c.3000–2000 bce ); Tarut, in eastern Saudi Arabia (c.2300–2100 bce ); Bahrain (c.2100–100 bce ); Liyan, on the Iranian coast (c.2000 bce and later); Antiochia-in-Persis and Rev-Ardashir (c.300 bce –600 ce ); Siraf (c. 500– 900 ce ); the island of Kish (900–1100  ce ); Hormuz (c. 1200–1500  ce ); and Bandar Lingah (1700–1900  ce ). On the Arabian side, places like Tarut island and the port of al-Qatif, as well as Bahrain, were important during the Bronze Age (Bahrain also during the Iron Age), while Julfar became a significant appendage of the kingdoms of Kish and Hormuz and eventually, via their conquest of the latter, of the Portuguese. Settlements like al-Zubarah in Qatar, or Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Raʾs al-Khaymah, in the UAE , only achieved importance much later, beginning principally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. What particular factors influenced the location and success of those sites? Is there a pattern in their distribution through time? What influence did geomorphology, geography and of course subsurface water sources have on this seemingly shifting pattern of site supremacy? And why do there seem to be so few sites on the Iranian side of the Gulf? In answer to this last question, a closer look at coastal Iran is required. Unlike eastern Arabia, the coastal plain of southern Iran is narrow, backed by the high ranges of the Zagros Mountains, and relatively uninviting for human habitation. This is clear, not only from the reports of nineteenth-century European mariners, but from the description given by Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander the Great’s fleet on its westward journey from the mouth of the Indus River, in the late fourth century bce , which shows that there was little settlement on the Iranian coast aside from a few

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fishing villages and date gardens. Although Nearchus, in Arrian’s account, noted a number of anchorages, his remarks uniformly highlight the very modest nature of settlement along the Iranian coast. As noted above, the only early, major settlement known is Tol-e Peytul (ancient Liyan) on the Bushihr peninsula, an important Elamite stronghold founded by at least 2000 bce . Liyan was the gateway to highland Fars. Via the steep pass known as Kotal Dukhtar one ascends from the coast up through the Zagros Mountains onto the Iranian Plateau and gains access to the capital of Fars: Anshan in the Bronze Age, Persepolis in the Achaemenid period, Istakhr in the Sasanid period and Shiraz since the coming of Islam. Thus, Liyan and its successors Antiochia-in-Persis, Rev-Ardashir, Reshahr and Bushihr represented the natural outlet to the Gulf for any power based in Fars. While the Gulf coastal plain in Iran is undoubtedly narrow and generally uninviting for human settlement, it is also true, though generally overlooked, that inland from the first range of mountains backing the coast are plains running north-west–south-east in line with the main folds of the Zagros Mountains and it is here that much larger settlements supported by agricultural hinterlands are located. And although these sites are not in fact on the coast, their relationship with the Gulf is likely to have been strong in all periods. In modern times, for example, the town of Bastak, which is well inland from the actual coast, ‘behind’ Kish, as it were, was responsible for much of the Iranian population of the Bastakiyyah area in Dubai, just as many families in Galehdar, in southern Fars, have members elsewhere in the Emirates. Examples such as these suggest that our understanding of Iran and the Gulf should not be limited strictly to the actual Iranian coast itself, but must be broadened to include settlements just behind the southernmost range of the Zagros. Finally, although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss in any detail, the Gulf ’s involvement in much wider networks of contact involving Mesopotamia/Iraq, the Iranian Plateau, Central Asia, the IndoIranian Borderlands, the Indian subcontinent and East Africa, should not be forgotten.

Trans-regional control in the pre-modern Gulf In the Islamic era the Gulf was marked by a centripetal pattern of development that bound both the eastern and western Gulf coasts (and principal islands) together under a succession of competing powers seeking to build, maintain, extend and defend their particular spheres of influence. Both the Achaemenid Persian and Sasanid empires achieved some measure of bi-coastal control during certain periods in their history. Under the Achaemenids, the island of Bahrain may have functioned as the capital of the fourteenth satrapy, but while this undoubtedly included the Persian coast and certain other islands, like Qishm, it is not clear that the mainland of north-eastern or south-eastern Arabia was under Achaemenid control. The Sasanids, on the other hand, did control the entire eastern seaboard, as well as Bahrain, according to literary sources, beginning as early as the reign of Ardashir. Moreover, as noted above, the Christian population in the ecclesiastical provinces of Bet Qatraye (north-eastern Arabia and Bahrain) and Bet Mazunaye (south-eastern Arabia/Oman) was administered by the Metropolitan of Fars based in Rev-Ardashir.

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

Beginning in the tenth century, however, the Gulf began to be contested by a growing number of foreign powers, resulting in phases of political and economic integration that are usually associated only with the early modern era. In the following discussion I shall highlight five configurations illustrating this point, extending in time from the tenth century to the early nineteenth, which specifically demonstrate the bicoastal nature of political power in the Gulf during the pre-modern and early modern era. These are as follows: ● ● ● ● ●

Carmathians–Buyids–Sirafis–Seljuqs–Kingdom of Kish (c.900–1229 ce ) Kingdom of Hormuz–Bani Jabr–Portuguese (c.1229–1630) Safavids–Portuguese–Yaʿrubi Imamate–East India Company (c.1600–1750) Afsharids–Yaʿrubi Imamate–Al Bu Saʿid Dynasty (c.1732–1800) Qawasim–Al Bu Saʿid Dynasty–Wahhabis–East India Company/Bombay Marine (Indian Navy) (c.1800–1880)

Carmathians–Buyids–Sirafis–Seljuqs–Kingdom of Kish In 928 the Carmathians (al-Qaramit․ah) of al-Ahsaʾ, best known for their seizure of the Black Stone from the Kaʿbah in Makkah, conquered much of south-eastern Arabia. Although Yusuf ibn Wajih, founder of the Wajihid dynasty based at Suhar on the Batinah coast of Oman, was tributary to the Carmathians, his successor, a freed slave named Nafiʿ, sought the protection of the powerful Buyid dynasty in Iran, no doubt thinking that the Buyids could help him escape the thrall of the Carmathians. After the Carmathians launched a second invasion of Oman, the Buyids counter-attacked in 966. Their presence in the Gulf region is attested by, among other things, a hoard of Buyid and Samanid coinage spanning the period from 921 to 980 found in Raʾs alKhaymah. Additionally, Buyid control of the region is confirmed by the minting of Buyid coins in Oman between 972 and 1043. In a description of the area written between 985 and 988, al-Muqaddasi described the inhabitants of Hafit, Dibba, Julfar and Tuʾam (al-ʿAyn/al-Buraymi) as ‘heretical Arabs’, and said that these towns were ‘dominated by a branch of the Quraysh’, a clear reference to their Carmathian captivity. On the other hand, when al-Muqaddasi described Hafit, Dibba and Julfar as dependencies of Suhar, in Oman, this is probably because, like the Wajihids before them, the Buyids stationed their governors there. An unsuccessful revolt against the Buyids by the Buyids’ governors, the Mukramids, led to a resumption of direct Buyid rule in Oman in 1041. Thereafter, an Ibadi revolt threatened Buyid control in eastern Arabia but they were not dislodged from the region until 1063 when the Seljuqs, who had already toppled the Buyids in Iran, launched an attack on Oman from Fars. For the next eighty years Oman was a Seljuq dependency. Meanwhile, around 1010 another power had been established on Qays or Kish, a small island measuring 8 × 16 km, about 19.2 km from the coast of Iran. Situated between the island of Hendorabi and the coastal settlement of Bandar Charak in the southern Gulf, Kish was to play a major role in the region’s history for over two centuries. In order to understand the rise of the kingdom of Kish, however, we must first say a few words about the earlier port of Siraf. Siraf ’s relatively short-lived but

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hugely successful floruit is epitomized in Istakhri’s description of the city’s wealth, written sometime before 950, when it was said to be nearly equal in size and splendour to Shiraz, with multistorey houses of teak, a fortune of 60,000,000 dirhams having been gained by its merchants whom Istakhri considered the richest in all of Fars. Its wealth was based on the transshipment or re-export of imported goods that it purveyed to destinations as far flung as East Africa and China. Its demise, on the other hand, was summed up succinctly by al-Muqaddasi who suggested that, although it was the commercial rival of Basra, Siraf never recovered from a series of disasters suffered in the late tenth century. Empirical evidence exists in the form of an account of an earthquake on 17 June 978, in which most of Siraf ’s houses were destroyed and over 2,000 people were killed. Aftershocks went on for a further week and the surviving inhabitants are said to have fled by sea. But the site, if abandoned, was reoccupied for we have a report of yet another earthquake thirty years later, in the spring of 1008, when many were killed, and some ships were sunk, probably by a tsunami. Both Wassaf and Ibn al-Mujawir state that refugees from Siraf, who fled the earthquake and flood-ravaged site, settled the island of Kish. Writing around 1110, Ibn al-Balkhi attributed the rise of a kingdom on Kish around 1010, i.e. two years after the second Siraf earthquake, to the fact that ‘the ancestors of the present amir of Kish came to power and gained possession of Kish and other neighbouring islands. Consequently the revenue formerly taken by Siraf was cut off and fell into the hands of the amir of Kish’. As a result, Siraf ’s trade declined so much that, according to Ibn al-Balkhi, it ‘fell into complete ruin’.4 From this point onward, for roughly three centuries, the kingdom of Kish was the major trading power in the Gulf. Hamdallah Mostawfi referred to it as a stopping point on the way to India, and Ibn Khordadbeh and Idrisi both described it as lying on the route from al-Ubulla, the precursor of Basra, to India and China. One of the richest and most famous merchants of the twelfth century, Ramisht of Siraf, whose business affairs extended from China to the Red Sea, may well have been a member of one of the Sirafi families that migrated to Kish following the earthquake of 1008.5 Who was the amir who set Kish on its path to becoming a trading superpower? Yaqut says Kish was also called Jazirat al-Qays ibn ʿUmara or Bani ʿUmara and, in combination with the testimony of Idrisi who says Kish had been seized by ‘a certain governor of Yemen’ who ‘fortified it, peopled it and fitted it with a fleet by the aid of which he made himself the master of the Yemen littoral’, Maximilian Streck and S.D. Goitein both suggested that the founder of the kingdom of Kish was South Arabian. But Istakhri called the Arabian coast opposite Kish Sif ʿUmara and he attributed a fortress there, Qalʿat Ibn ʿUmara, to the Julanda of Oman. Moreover, Qays ibn ʿUmara is considered in Omani genealogies to have been a member of the Julanda ibn Karkar family of the Bani Salima, which is perhaps why Yaqut regarded the capital of Kish as the residence of the ‘prince of Oman’. A later king of Kish was identified in a letter from the Cairo Geniza of 1135 as ‘son of [walad] al-ʿAmid’. Although Goitein suggested this was an Arabic name, Jean Aubin noted that the name al-ʿAmid was common amongst the Buyids and the Seljuqs in Iran. On the other hand, another ruler of Kish, who bore the good Persian name Jamshid, is said to have built a palace on the island called the Qasr Ayvan that was modelled on that of the Buyid ruler ʿAzod al-Dawla, near Siraf, and Yaqut says that the king of Kish dressed in the Daylamite style, i.e. the style of the

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mountainous region along the Caspian from which the Buyids hailed. According to Mostawfi, Kish was a ‘great emporium’ – dawlat khana – and Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Kish in 1170, wrote, ‘The islanders act as middlemen and earn their livelihood thereby’. Idrisi suggested, however, that the king of Kish was a great pirate, preying on shipping in the Gulf. He wrote, ‘The people of India dread him and only resist him by the aid of ships known as meshiat which, although made of a single piece of wood, are capable of carrying up to 200 men . . . The ruler of Qais possesses fifty such vessels constructed of one piece, without counting many others, which are made of several pieces’. Indeed, Ibn al-Mujawir wrote that, ‘The prince of Qays has neither cavalry nor infantry; but all the people of the island are mariners’. In May 1229, Kish was conquered by Sayf al-Din Abu Nadar, the prince of Hormuz, on behalf of Abu Bakr, the Atabeg of Fars who, as he was tributary to the Shabankara nomads and the Khwarazmshahs, sought to expand his wealth by seizing control of the maritime revenue of Kish. Although Sayf al-Din attempted to double-cross his patron and retain Kish for himself, he was ousted, in November 1230, by Abu Bakr who proceeded to annex Bahrain in 1235 and al-Qatif in 1244. As the Persian historian Natanzi wrote, ‘He conquered the islands and the coasts of the sea of Oman, such as Qais, Bahrain and Qatif, from Cambay to Basra’. Here was a truly bi-coastal Gulf empire that greatly exceeded that of the Buyids and Seljuqs several centuries earlier and surpassed even that of the Sasanids and Achaemenids.

Kingdom of Hormuz–Bani Jabr–Portuguese In about 1291, Bahaʾ al-Din Ayaz, one time Hormuzi governor at Qalhat in Oman, seized control of Hormuz. Although forced to evacuate Hormuz in 1300, he moved to Qishm and then to Jarun, an uninhabited, waterless island in the Straits of Hormuz, where he established the new centre of the kingdom. Kish continued to control Qatif, al-Ahsaʾ and Bahrain, and made several attempts to conquer Hormuz, as did the rulers of Fars with the backing of the Mongol Ilkhans. Finally in 1331, while the ruler of Hormuz, Qutb al-Din Tahamtan II , was away from Hormuz on the mainland, the forces of Kish attacked Hormuz. Instead of returning to retake his island capital, the Hormuzi leader headed straight to Kish which he captured, looting the treasury and destroying the kingdom of Kish once and for all. According to the later Portuguese chronicler Pedro Teixeira, Kish’s dependences, which included Julfar (near modern Raʾs al-Khaymah), now swore allegiance to Hormuz, and this is reflected in the large number of Hormuzi coins bearing the mint name Jarun, the original name of the island to which the originally coastal kingdom of Hormuz was transferred, at both alNudud and al-Mataf in northern Raʾs al-Khaymah. According to Ibn Battuta who, in 1347, embarked in a ship at Muscat and visited Qurayat, Shabba, Kalbah and Qalhat, ‘All these towns form part of the province of Hormuz, though they are reckoned to be in the district of “Oman” ’. Hormuz now controlled an enormous area extending from the northern Gulf island of Kharg (which today belongs to Iran), through al-Qatif and Julfar, to Kalbah, Qalhat and Qurayat. Because they lacked a navy, the Timurids were unable to conquer Hormuz when they came to power in Iran in the late fourteenth century, but Hormuz

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nevertheless paid them tribute in return for continuing autonomy. The Chinese admiral Zheng He visited Hormuz on his fourth and fifth voyages of 1412–14 and 1417–19, respectively, and the intensity of Chinese trade at this time probably explains the presence of Longquan celadons and Martaban stoneware at Jazirat al-Hulaylah, Dalma, and elsewhere in the UAE at this time. After Sayf al-Din Mahar became king of Hormuz in 1418 he sent governors to al-Qatif, Bahrain, Qalhat, Oman and Julfar, a move which was unpopular with local Arab shaykhs, some of whom had formerly been employed as governors themselves. As part of their strategy for maintaining a bicoastal empire, the Hormuzis paid subsidies to the Arab leaders of the coast, and maintained forts at Julfar, Khawr Fakkan and Kalbah in order to safeguard their maritime commercial interests. Pearls were unquestionably the most important and lucrative natural resource in the Gulf. Exploited since prehistoric times, their trade became increasingly important until the commercial production of cultured pearls began in 1913.6 After Bahrain, Julfar was now the second most important pearling port in the area, as well as an important shipbuilding centre. In the 1470s Julfar was used as the base for a naval assault on Hormuz by the combined forces of the Bani Jabr, the powerful Arabian tribe that had won control over al-Qatif and Bahrain earlier in the century, and Salghur, the Hormuzi governor of Qalhat who had married the daughter of a powerful Nabhani tribesman in Oman. Later, Julfar allied itself to the governor of Lar who built a fleet at Julfar in another bid to overthrow the ruling house of Hormuz. But these intra-Gulf struggles were soon to be completely overshadowed by the arrival of Afonso de Albuquerque.

Safavids–Portuguese–Yaʿrubi Imamate–East India Company The submission of Raʾs al-Hadd, Qurayat, Qalhat, Muscat and Suhar placed coastal Oman in the hands of the Portuguese. On 21 September 1507 they arrived at Orfaçao, i.e. Khawr Fakkan on the east coast of the UAE , which their commander, Afonso de Albuquerque, described as ‘a large town of the kingdom of Ormuz’ with ‘very good houses; it is very strong on the land side, and the reason of it is this, that it was more fearful of being attacked by land than by sea’ – a point on which he elaborated when he noted that ‘all this interior is under the dominion of the Benjabar [Bani Jabr of Najd], as the other parts are’. Albuquerque continued, ‘Many worthy merchants of Guzarat live there’ and after describing the topography of the area he wrote, In the interior are many estates with good houses, many orange trees, lemon trees, zamboa [citron] trees, fig trees, palms, and all sorts of vegetables, and many water pools, which they use for irrigation; in the fields is much straw stubble, as in Portugal, and there are many maize [sorghum] fields. There were also many fishing barks, and many nets, all of which were burnt; in the town there were also large stables for horses, and many straw lofts for their straw; for this port exports many horses to India. The country has a temperate climate and fine air. After passing this mountain, which overlooks the place, all the interior country is composed of large fields under cultivation and farms.

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The Emergence of the Gulf States

Thus, with a few strokes of his pen, Albuquerque provided an important snapshot of conditions in south-eastern Arabia at the time of the Portuguese entrada: the coast was under the control of the kingdom of Hormuz; the interior was controlled by the Bani Jabr; Indian merchants from Gujarat were prominent in the region’s trade; and the agricultural regime of the area was highly developed and diverse. In contrast to the ports on the east coast of Oman, however, Julfar remained in Hormuzi hands a year longer. The last independent king of Hormuz, Khvajeh ʿAtta or ‘Cogeatar’, ordered a fleet of warships to be built there in order to repulse the Portuguese. But soon afterwards all of the dependencies of Hormuz became dependencies of the Portuguese vassal state of Hormuz, an entity seen by Portugal as a buffer against potential territorial and commercial encroachments on the part of the recently founded Safavid empire to the north. Individual ports or vilas were ruled by a governor or guazil whose domain was a guazilado or vizirat. A summary by Joao Barros of Hormuzi revenue, dating to 1515, lists income from Julfar, Khawr Fakkan and Bidya, calculated in gold parduas. Unlike the maritime ports in south-eastern Arabia, however, the interior remained largely under the control of the Ban Jabr. In 1518 Duarte Barbosa wrote of Julfar that ‘persons of worth, great navigators and wholesale dealers’ lived there. ‘Here is a very great fishery as well, of seed-pearls as of large pearls’, he wrote, ‘and the Moors of Ormus come hither to buy them and carry them to India and many other lands. The trade of this place brings in a great revenue to the King of Ormus’. Interestingly, Duarte Barbosa also mentioned Calvam, i.e. Kalba, ‘which the King of Ormus maintains . . . for the defence of his lands, inasmuch as behind all these Moors dwell many Moors of the nature of wild Arabs who are under the rule of xeques [shaykhs]. These from time to time come down upon these villages and make war on them, and this folk often rebels against its king’. Sometime after 1523 the Bani Jabr seized control of Julfar and built a fort overlooking it at Luwar or Loa. They were not expelled until the winter of 1544/5 by the Hormuzi-appointed vizir of Julfar, Reis Abadim, brother of Rukn al-Din, the Portuguese-appointed vizir of Hormuz. Meanwhile, concerned by a drop in revenue, probably occasioned by the high tariffs imposed at Hormuz and a consequent increase in smuggling and/or diversion of goods to other ports, the Portuguese seized the customs house of Hormuz in 1543, ending the collection of customs revenue by their Hormuzi vassals. By the mid-sixteenth century the Ottomans had entered the scene as serious rivals to Portuguese power and while their rivalry produced a series of fierce naval battles, the Ottoman–Portuguese confrontation in the Gulf was a stand-off. Nevertheless, it did serve to divide the region into two distinct, yet porous spheres of influence for the first time in many years. While the Ottomans controlled the area between Basra and al-Qatif, the Portuguese were safely lodged on Hormuz and continued to hold its former dependencies in south-eastern Arabia. But the area in between was not secured by either power and offered opportunities to the Safavids, who seized Bahrain in 1602 and sacked Julfar in 1614. Eight years later, with the help of English East India Company firepower, the Safavids succeeded in taking Hormuz, and the following year Khawr Fakkan, Dibba, Rams and Julfar came under Safavid control, only to be reconquered by Portuguese forces under Ruy Freyre in 1625. Thereupon Portuguese customs houses were built at Khawr Fakkan and Dibba,

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customs agents installed at Dibba and Rams, and a Portuguese garrison established at Julfar in 1630. But it was not the Safavids who eventually dislodged the Portuguese from Arabia. Rather, it was the newly established dynasty of Yaʿrubi Imams based at al-Rustaq in Oman which had come to power in 1624 under Nasr ibn Murshid. Their maritime strength was sufficient to drive the Portuguese out of Khawr Fakkan in 1643 and, five years later, Muscat. The balance of power was changing in the Gulf and the Yaʿrubi Imams now came into direct conflict with the Safavids; the Arabs of Julfar; and the English East India Company, whose suppression of the ‘Muscateers’, beginning in 1704, foreshadowed events in the Gulf during the early nineteenth century.

Afsharids–Yaʿrubi Imamate–Al Bu Saʿid Dynasty After the fall of the Safavid dynasty to the Afghans and the restoration of a new Afsharid state under Nadir Shah Afshar in 1736, the Persians set about acquiring a navy through the purchase of English vessels. A year later Nadir Shah sent a force to Oman, ostensibly to lend support to the Yaʿrubi Imam Sayf ibn Sultan II who was locked in a power struggle with his rival, Sultan ibn Murshid. After assembling at Bandar ʿAbbas, the fleet moved to Khawr Fakkan, where they left troops before sailing to Julfar for a meeting with the Imam. It did not take long for Sayf to realize, however, that Nadir Shah had no intention of helping him, but rather wanted to take possession of Oman and the Gulf coast himself. In all of the subsequent actions involving the Persian navy Julfar was the most important centre of Afsharid control and was nominally under the authority of Rahmah ibn Matar al-Hawali (i.e. of the Hawalah Arabs at Bandar Tahiri), who had been made governor of the town in the 1720s, i.e. late in the Safavid period, and confirmed in his post by Nadir Shah. But the assassination of Nadir Shah in June 1747 put an end to the territorial ambitions of the Persians in Arabia at this juncture and Rahmah ibn Matar quickly asserted his independence, refusing to acknowledge the authority of the new, Al Bu Saʿid dynasty in Oman which had succeeded the Yaʿrubi Imams.

Qawasim–Al Bu Saʿid Dynasty–Wahhabis–East India Company/Bombay Marine (Indian Navy) Although an al-Qasimi named Sayf ibn ʿAli ibn Salih had signed a treaty with the Portuguese in 1647/8 on behalf of the ruling Yaʿrubi Imam, it was not until the mideighteenth century that the al-Qawasim (sing., al-Qasimi) began to emerge as an important force in the region. In yet another clear sign of the bi-coastal nature of political power in the Gulf, Rahmah ibn Matar forged an anti-Al Bu Saʿid alliance with his father-in-law, Mulla ʿAli Shah, deputy-governor of the Persian port of Bandar Abbas and admiral of Nadir Shah’s fleet. Not to be outdone, the Omani leader, Ahmad ibn Saʿid, made an alliance with Mulla ʿAli Shah’s enemy, Nasir Khan, the governor of Lar and Bandar ʿAbbas. Nevertheless, by the mid-1750s Rahmah ibn Matar and Mulla ʿAli Shah controlled most of the southern shores of Iran as well as the coasts of southeastern Arabia, in what was an even greater territorial mini-empire than the kings of

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Kish or Hormuz, or their Portuguese or Safavid successors, had enjoyed. The Qawasim ruler of Raʾs al-Khaymah and Al Bu Saʿidi forces fought a major battle at Bithnah in al-Fujayrah shortly before 1758 but by 1763 the Qawasim had reached a peace agreement with the Al Bu Saʿids and their allies, the Hawalah Arabs at Bandar Tahiri, near the old port of Siraf. Between the 1770s and the 1790s, the Qawasim and the Al Bu Saʿid dynasty were in an almost constant state of war, largely because of Omani claims to the entire coast of al-Sir or what is today the southern shore of the Gulf between Abu Dhabi and Raʾs Musandam. It was in this context that attacks on two English East India Company vessels, the Bassein and the Viper, occurred in 1797. East India Company sources are conflicting in their appraisal of these attacks. Writing in 1819, F.B. Warden, a member of the East India Company Council in Bombay, attributed them to the Imam of Muscat’s navy, but almost seventy years later, in his History of the Indian Navy, Charles Rathbone Low identified the attackers as Qawasim, noting that the Bassein was taken off Rams on 18 May and ‘carried into’ Raʾs al-Khaymah, from which it was released two days later. In October, an attack on the Viper, while off Bushihr, was made by Shaykh Salih, the nephew of the Qawasim ruler Shaykh Saqr, who persuaded the captain of the Viper to supply him ‘with powder and shot, ostensibly to attack the Sooree Arabs’ at Basra. A naval battle followed in which the Qawasim were driven off but at the cost of the lives of thirty-two of the Viper’s crew of sixty-five. When questioned about this attack by the British Resident at Bushihr, Shaykh Saqr protested that Shaykh Salih had acted on his own, having left Raʾs al-Khaymah and established himself amongst the Bani Khalid on the Persian coast. Saqr insisted that he had no quarrel with the English, only with the Omanis who, in 1798, attacked the Qawasim off Dibba. The following year elements of the Bani Yas from Dubai assisted the Qawasim in launching an attack on Suhar. But by now a new geopolitical factor had emerged in the form of the central Arabian Wahhabi movement, on which the expansionist First Saudi State was based. The Wahhabis first appeared at al-Buraymi in 1795 under Ibrahim ibn Sulayman ibn ʿUfaysan. The dangerously poised balance of power in which the Qawasim, Omanis and Wahhabis were all at war received yet another shock when, in early 1799, Napoleon wrote to Saʿid ibn Sultan in Oman and Tipu Sultan in Mysore offering protection. Intercepted by Capt. Samuel Wilson, the British agent at Mocha in Yemen, the letters were forwarded to the Governor-General of India, the Marquis of Wellesley, who in turn dispatched his Resident at Bushihr to Muscat to conclude a treaty excluding any French influence in the region. This set a precedent for the better-known treaties of the early nineteenth century. In 1800 the Wahhabi commander, Salim ibn Bilal al-Harq, with 700 cavalry, attacked the Bani Yas and subdued the Bani Naʿim and Bani Qitab and other groups of alDhahirah. He then built a fort in al-Buraymi from which he intended to launch an assault on Oman, the Imamate tradition of which was considered heretical by the Wahhabis. Two years later, after breaking down their resistance, the Wahhabis succeeded in binding the Qawasim to them by a treaty. In so doing, the Wahhabi forces, which were terrestrial and had come out of the central Arabian desert around alDirʿiyyah, near modern Riyadh, acquired a proxy naval force. In 1803, the Wahhabis signed a treaty, which they immediately abrogated, with the Imam of Muscat, but the

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Wahhabis were hindered from launching an all-out attack on Oman by the murder of the Wahhabi leader ʿAbd al-ʿAziz in the same year. These events also had the effect of inciting the Bani Yas and Dhawahir to join forces with the Al Bu Saʿid against the combined forces of the Wahhabis and their Qasimi allies. The distinguished American historian of Saudi Arabia, R. Bayly Winder, described the events of this period as a ‘religio-commercial maritime war . . . waged between the Ibadites of coastal Oman and the Wahhabi Arabs’. Qasimi raiding at sea, whether against foreign shipping or Omani naval vessels, was not unlike the privateering that French and British vessels had practised for centuries.7 Be that as it may, because these actions involved the inhabitants of both the Persian and Arabian coasts, it is important to examine them in some detail here. Scholars have often debated the extent to which the raiding was or was not dictated by the Wahhabis. Francis Warden was adamant that, ‘up to the year 1797’ no acts of piracy had been committed against East India Company vessels, ‘except by the Muskat Arabs during the period of their ascendancy’. This was in spite of the fact that the Gulf had been in a state of continuous maritime war since the death of the Persian leader Karim Khan Zand in 1779. The main actors in this period of continuous, low-level warfare were the shaykh of Julfar or Raʾs al-Khaymah; the Imam of Muscat; the ʿUtub Arabs, who had dispossessed the Persians of Bahrain; and the Persians. Warden was of the opinion that most of the ‘troubles that prevailed’ at this time were due to the conduct of Sayyid Sultan, the Imam of Muscat, ‘in the prosecution of his ambitious views of aggrandisement’. Following the death of Sayyid Sultan the power of the Wahhabis grew correspondingly in the power vacuum that resulted and it was at this time that ‘the systematic prosecution of piracy, under the protection of that power, even to the Indian Seas’, began, although ‘not one of the petty States in the Gulf has voluntarily engaged in piracy’. J.G. Lorimer, on the other hand, writing slightly less than a century later, was frankly sceptical that the Qawasim took such action only at the behest of the Wahhabis. In this instance it may be helpful to consider a non-English source, namely one of the earliest first-hand accounts of the Wahhabis by the French consul in Damascus at that time, Louis Alexandre Olivier de Corancez. Corancez leaves the reader in no doubt that the Wahhabis were masters of Raʾs al-Khaymah. From here, he wrote, it was easy for Qasimi vessels to dominate the entrance to the Gulf and pillage Indian vessels, sometimes taking the booty to Abou-Schehs, by which was probably meant Busheab or Shaykh Shaib (the modern island of Lavan), off the Iranian coast, and sometimes pillaging the settlements on the coast itself. With strong forces of 400–500 men aboard, and twelve to sixteen cannon, the Qawasim dhows sought to board the vessels they attacked, effectively putting a halt to regular commerce. Importantly, they also stripped all captured warships of their artillery and, according to Corancez, each of their bases on the Gulf coast, particularly Raʾs al-Khaymah, was heavily fortified as a result. Corancez also noted that the principal shaykh of the Qawasim, ʿAbdullah ibn Gaour, was charged with dividing the spoils, 50 per cent of which went to Saʿud ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz. The death of the Al Bu Saʿid Imam Sayyid Sultan on 14 November 1804 during an engagement against the Qawasim and the ʿUtub of Bahrain off Bandar Lingah resulted in a reduced Omani presence at sea and an increase in Wahhabi–Qasimi raiding. On

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the receiving end of Qasimi attacks were the East India Company merchant brigs Shannon, Trimmer and Mornington, which were attacked in 1805 near Polior and Kish islands. Later in the year a combined Omani and East India Company force blockaded the Qasimi fleet near Qishm island which resulted in the restoration of the Shannon to Capt. David Seton and the first treaty of peace, on 6 February 1806, signed at Bandar ʿAbbas. This required the Qawasim to ‘respect the flag and property of the Honourable East India Company, and their subjects wherever and in whatever it may be, and the same the Honourable East India Company towards the Joasmee’. But as Lt. A.B. Kemball wrote in 1844, the treaty ‘does not appear to have been negotiated with the consent, or even the knowledge, of the Wahabee Shaikh’. Since the Treaty of 1806 forbade attacks in the Gulf, the Wahhabis at this point ‘urged and instigated’ the Qawasim to direct their attentions towards India, as Kemball noted. Moreover, the Wahhabis proceeded to ‘send out their boats without [the] permission [of Shaykh Sultan], and captured twenty country craft on the coast to the northward of Bombay’, and were emboldened to ‘commit a breach of the Treaty of 1806, and attack and capture the Sylph cruiser in the Gulf ’, on 20 October 1808. The year 1809 saw the Wahhabis appoint the shaykh of Rams, Husayn ibn ʿAli, as their ‘viceregent in the Seer principality’, as well as other ‘Wahabee officers throughout the Joasmee country’. The erstwhile ruler of Raʾs al-Khaymah, Sultan ibn Saqr, was invited to al-Dirʿiyyah, only to be imprisoned for two years. After his escape, Sultan managed to reach al-Mukha (Mocha) in Yemen, from which he made his way to Muscat. From there he was taken by the Imam to Sharjah and installed as ruler of the Qawasim, spending part of his time in Bandar Lingah on the Iranian coast. Apparently the alliance between the Qawasim and the Imam of Muscat was short-lived, however. Finally, the East India Company, which had signed a treaty with Muscat in 1799, sent an expedition on 18 November 1809 ‘determining to relieve the Imaum from the power of the Wahabees, and to suppress their piracies’. More than fifty vessels were destroyed at Raʾs al-Khaymah and at least another twenty at Lingah and Shinas on the Arabian coast, and in the ports frequented by them on the Iranian coast, such as Bandar Lingah and Laft, on Qishm. Four years later William Milburn wrote of Raʾs alKhaymah: ‘The town was taken by assault on the thirteenth of November, 1809; the enemy driven into the interior; all their guns spiked; about seventy vessels, principally dhows, burnt; their magazines blown up, and every injury done to the works. . . . Considerable plunder was taken in the town: one soldier is said to have had 1400 gold mohurs’, referring to a type of coin minted by the East India Company. But it was the actions of 1819 under Sir William Keir Grant, in charge of land forces, and Capt. T.A. Collier, in charge of naval operations, that resulted in the reduction of the Qawasim and the bombardment of Raʾs al-Khaymah. Partly destroyed in 1809 and ‘completely demolished’ in 1819, Raʾs al-Khaymah was described as the ‘chief town’ of the Qawasim. After the East India Company expedition, the date palms appeared ‘aged and neglected’ and not a single building was ‘entire, nor any part of one, sufficient to indicate what might have been its form, with the exception of a few fragments of two round towers at its west end’. Most of the inhabitants had ‘retired to town some distance within the date groves’, while a few had moved to Dhayyah and Rams, and others to Sharjah where they were ‘completely subjected to the Sheikh of Sharga’. Although it did

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Figure 1.2 ‘A View of Lingah’ from R. Temple (1810), illustrating British naval action against ‘pirates’ in 1809. not completely pacify the region, and ‘did not limit the right of the Chiefs to carry on acknowledged war with each other by sea’, the Treaty of 1820 certainly began the process of what the British considered the eradication of piracy in the region, though subsequent treaties were needed throughout the nineteenth century.

Conclusions The series of historical snapshots just concluded has demonstrated what was already known from the earlier prehistory and history of the Gulf, namely that over the course of the past millennium the political and economic fate of the region has been determined by the populations on both the Iranian and Arabian coasts, with the concerted involvement of tribes, multitribal units, and states based in the Iranian and Arabian hinterland, and with a succession of European powers, of whom the Portuguese, Dutch and English were most prominent. However, the creation of nation states in eastern Arabia during the twentieth century; the imperialistic forays of the last Shah of Iran; the Iranian Revolution; and two Gulf wars, have all contributed to the separation of the Iranian and Arabian hemispheres (though some families obviously still exist that have members on both the Iranian and Arabian coasts); to a division in scholarship on the two domains; and to a divergence in their historiography. But this is a recent, undoubtedly ephemeral phenomenon. As this review has shown, most earlier periods in history are marked by the clear integration of the two coasts, and there is no reason to believe that the intense interactions that characterized Gulf history in the

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third, second or first millennium bce were any less vibrant than those of the first and second millennium ce . Students of the earlier periods in the Gulf ’s history are scarcely aware of these later relationships, while those who work on pre-modern and early modern, let alone contemporary Gulf history, are often just as ignorant of conditions in the distant past. But, as emphasized here, a range of external factors is responsible for these fault lines in scholarship and perception. The key point is to view the Gulf holistically, and not to fall prey to the artificial divisions between Iranological and Arabian scholarship that have made it difficult to see what was going in all periods. Throughout most of its history the Gulf has served to link, rather than divide, its human inhabitants.

Bibliographic essay The geomorphological development of the Gulf, changing sea levels and the position of the coast through time is discussed in its entirety by Kurt Lambeck in ‘Shoreline Reconstruction for the Persian Gulf Since the Last Glacial Maximum’ and James Teller et al. in ‘Calcareous Dunes of the United Arab Emirates and Noah’s Flood’. Detailed studies of the northern shores of the Gulf (by Vanessa Heyvaert and C. Baeteman, ‘Holocene Sedimentary Evolution and Palaeocoastlines of the Lower Khuzestan Plain (Southwest) Iran’) and southern (P. Bernier et al., ‘Holocene Shoreline Variations in the Persian Gulf: Example of the Umm al-Qowayn Lagoon (UAE )’) are also valuable since conditions varied across the region. Distances between major and minor ports around the Gulf can be found in H. Whittingham and C.T. King’s Reed’s Tables of Distances. Evidence of the earliest hominid presence in the region is detailed in Jeffrey Rose’s ‘New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis’. A broad survey of the archaeology and pre-Islamic history of the Gulf, focusing on Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman, is given in D.T. Potts’s The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, who also provides a more recent survey of UAE archaeology in In the Land of the Emirates. The archaeological and iconographic evidence of late prehistoric and Bronze Age watercraft is discussed by Potts in ‘Watercraft of the Lower Sea’ and Robert A. Carter in ‘Watercraft’. Neolithic evidence of seafaring from coastal Kuwait is discussed in Carter and Harriet Crawford, Maritime Interactions in the Arabian Neolithic. French excavations at Liyan (Tol-e Peytul) are published in Maurice Pézard, Mission à Bender-Blouchir. The epigraphic evidence of an Elamite presence at the site is presented in Friedrich König’s Die elamischen Königsinschriften. For archaeological explorations in the valleys east of the Persian Gulf littoral see, inter alia, Heinz Gaube’s ‘Im Hinterland von Siraf ’, Reinhard Pohanka’s Burgen und Heiligtümer in Laristan, Südiran, Dorit Schön’s Laristan – ein südpersische Küstenprovinz, and Askari Chaverdi et al., ‘Early Villages on the Persian Gulf Littoral’. Survey results around Bushihr are presented in Carter et al., ‘The Bushehr Hinterland’. The Achaemenid Persian presence in the Gulf region is discussed in Potts, ‘Achaemenid Interests in the Persian Gulf ’ and ‘The Islands of the XIVth Satrapy’, as well as in Gauthier Tolini’s ‘Les travailleurs babyloniens et le palais de Taokè’.

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Late pre-Islamic archaeological evidence from eastern Arabia is presented in Derek Kennet, ‘On the Eve of Islam’. Pre-Islamic archaeological remains around Minab are described in Alireza Khosrowzadeh et al., ‘Kahur Langar Chini’. Evidence of Sasanid maritime trade is presented in David Whitehouse and Andrew Williamson, ‘Sasanian Maritime Trade’. The Nestorian Christian presence on the Persian coast is described in Adolph Rücker, Die Canones des Simeon von Rêvârdešīr. Early Islamic Siraf on the Persian coast is discussed by Nicholas M. Lowick in Siraf XV: The Coins and Monumental Inscriptions; by David Whitehouse in Siraf III: The Congregational Mosque and Other Mosques; and by Whitehouse et al. in Siraf: History, Topography and Environment. Chinese coin finds in the Gulf are discussed by Joe Cribb and Potts in ‘Chinese Coin Finds From Arabia and the Arabian Gulf ’ while imported Chinese trade ceramics are published by Moira Tampoe, Maritime Trade Between China and the West, and Axelle Rougeulle, ‘Les importations de céramiques chinoises dans le Golfe arabo-persique (VIIIe–XIe siècles)’. For a comprehensive survey of toponyms in coastal Iran attested in literary sources see Paul Schwarz, Iran im Mittelalter nach den arabischen Geographen, as well as for precise references to toponyms in the works of the medieval Arab authors cited in the chapter. Early Islamic archaeological remains on Bahrain are discussed in Karen Frifelt’s Islamic Remains in Bahrain and in Timothy Insoll, The Land of Enki in the Islamic Era. The epigraphic evidence in Arabic (eleventh–seventeenth centuries) is presented by Ludvik Kalus in Inscriptions arabes des Îles de Bahrain. Medieval and Portuguese Bahrain is discussed on the basis of archaeological and literary sources by Monique Kervran et al. in Qal‘at al-Bahrain. Evidence of medieval coastal settlement in Iran dating to the Islamic era can be found in Andrew Williamson’s ‘Regional Distribution of Mediaeval Persian Pottery in the Light of Recent Investigations’. For the kingdom of Kish and the contribution of documents from the Cairo Geniza see A.W. Stiffe, ‘Ancient Trading Centres of the Persian Gulf II : Kais, or Al-Kais’, Maximilian Streck, ‘Kais’, Samuel D. Goitein, ‘Two EyeWitness Reports on an Expedition of the King of Kish (Qais) Against Aden’; and ‘From Aden to India: Specimens of the Correspondence of India Traders of the Twelfth Century’, and S.M. Stern, ‘Rāmisht of Sīrāf, a Merchant Millionaire of the Twelfth Century’. For the history of the kingdom of Hormuz see William F. Sinclair, The Travels of Pedro Teixeira, Valeria Fiorani Piacentini, L’emporio ed il regno di Hormoz (VIII – fine XV sec. D.Cr.), Willem Floor, ‘Hormuz II : Islamic Period’, and M.B. Vosoughi, ‘The Kings of Hormuz: From the Beginning Until the Arrival of the Portuguese’. The horse trade from the Gulf to the east is discussed in Bert Fragner et al., Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel und Kultur / Horses in Asia: History, Trade and Culture. Ottoman–Portuguese rivalry in the Gulf during the sixteenth century is described by Salih Özbaran, ‘The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, 1534– 1581’, while the Portuguese presence on Qishm is discussed by Potts in ‘The Portuguese on Qeshm’. The development of Hormuz, Basra, Bandar ʿAbbas, Muscat and Bandar-e Kong between the sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries is discussed by Willem Floor in The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1700. Floor covers other Gulf ports on the Iranian littoral in The Persian Gulf: The Rise and Fall of

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Bandar Lingah, The Persian Gulf: Bandar Abbas and The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland. These and many smaller ports in the Gulf are discussed in James Horsburgh, The India Directory, or Directions for Sailing to and from the East Indies. . . . The products of the Gulf region as well as those shipped to and through it from India are detailed by William Milburn in Oriental Commerce; or the East India Trader’s Complete Guide. Richter et al. discuss recent archaeological work at al-Zubarah in Qatar and on the pearling industry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ‘Pearlfishers, Townsfolk, Bedouin and Shaykhs’. The Arab presence on the Iranian coast is studied by Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi in ‘ “Arabisiert” oder “Iranisiert?” Siedlungsgeschichte in der iranischen Provinz Hormozgān am Persischen Golf ’, and by Floor in The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs. Conditions in the Gulf during the mid-eighteenth century are described in Floor’s ‘The Iranian Navy in the Gulf During the Eighteenth Century’. Relations between the East India Company and the Arab tribes of the southern Gulf are discussed by A.B. Kemball, ‘Observations on the Past Policy of the British Government Towards the Arab Tribes of the Persian Gulf ’, Francis Warden, ‘Extracts from Brief Notes Relative to the Rise and Progress of the Arab Tribes of the Persian Gulf ’, and Charles R. Low, History of the Indian Navy (1613–1863). An interesting, virtually eye-witness account of the Wahhabis in their early phase is provided by L.A.O. de Corancez, Histoire des Wahabis, depuis leur origine jusqu’à la fin de 1809. In general on the rise of Wahhabism, see R. Bayly Winder’s Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century. J.G. Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ʿOmân, and Central Arabia (see Introduction) is an invaluable compendium on the peoples and places of the Gulf, southern Iran and the eastern Arabian Peninsula resulting from East India Company and Government of India interaction with the region. The intra-Gulf relationships of individual families, and their economic and linguistic correlates, are explored in William O. Beeman’s ‘Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis’. Important insights into the ethnography of Raʾs Musandam and the northern Emirates are contained in William and Fidelity Lancaster’s Honour is in Contentment.

Notes 1 Here I am treating the Gulf literally and not considering, e.g. survey around Minab which lies to the east of the Straits of Hormuz. 2 Happily, this situation is changing rapidly due to the fact that much scholarship on eastern Arabia is now freely available on the Web via sites like academia.edu. 3 This is largely the fault of the secondary and higher education systems, in which the archaeology of each country tends to be taught in isolation from that of its neighbours. 4 This is not quite true for a coin hoard of Tang and Song Chinese coins, post-dating 1265, was found at Siraf in an occupational level dated to the fourteenth century. 5 A single cargo from Canton brought to the Gulf by one of Ramisht’s agents is said to have been valued at the extraordinary sum of 500,000 dinars. 6 See H. Lyster Jameson, ‘The Japanese Artificially Induced Pearl’, Nature, No. 107 (1921), p. 396.

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7 Qasimi raiding on the high seas may also be compared with the sort of raiding that Arabian bedouin and Iranian nomadic tribes engaged in regularly.

Bibliography Askari Chaverdi, Alireza, Cameron A. Petrie and Helen Taylor. ‘Early Villages on the Persian Gulf Littoral: Revisiting Tol-e Pir and the Galehdar Valley’. Iran, Vol. 46 (2008), pp. 21–42. Beeman, William O. ‘Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis – Their Evolution and Way of Life’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 147–59. Bernier, P., Rémy Dalongeville, Bernard Dupuis and Vincent de Medwecki. ‘Holocene Shoreline Variations in the Persian Gulf: Example of the Umm Al-Qowayn Lagoon (UAE )’. Quaternary International, Vols 29–30 (1995), pp. 95–103. Carter, Robert A. ‘Watercraft’. In D.T. Potts, ed., A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 1 (Oxford, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), pp. 347–72. Carter, Robert A., K. Challis, Seth M.N. Priestman and Hossein Tofighian. ‘The Bushehr Hinterland: Results of the First Season of the Iranian-British Archaeological Survey of Bushehr Province, November-December 2004’. Iran, Vol. 44 (2006), pp. 63–103. Carter, Robert A. and Harriet Crawford. Maritime Interactions in the Arabian Neolithic: The Evidence from H3, As-Sabiyah, an Ubaid-Related Site in Kuwait. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010. Corancez, L.A.O. de. Histoire des Wahabis, depuis leur origine jusqu’à la fin de 1809. Paris: L’Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1810. Cribb, Joe and D.T. Potts. ‘Chinese Coin Finds From Arabia and the Arabian Gulf ’. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy, Vol. 7 (1996), pp. 108–18. Floor, Willem. The Persian Gulf: Bandar Abbas; The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran. Washington, DC : Mage, 2011. Floor, Willem. The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland. Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka’b, & Bandar Abbas. Washington, DC : Mage, 2011. Floor, Willem. The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1700. Washington, DC : Mage, 2006. Floor, Willem. The Persian Gulf: The Rise and Fall of Bandar Lingah; The Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930. Washington, DC : Mage, 2010. Floor, Willem. The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs; The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792. Washington, DC : Mage, 2007. Floor, Willem. ‘Hormuz II : Islamic Period’. Encyclopaedia Iranica, Vol. 12 (2004), pp. 471–6. Floor, Willem. ‘The Iranian Navy in the Gulf During the Eighteenth Century’. Iranian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1987), pp. 31–53. Floor, Willem. ‘Two Revenue Lists from Hormuz (1515, 1543)’. In Rudi Matthee and Jorge Flores, eds, Portugal, the Persian Gulf and Safavid Persia (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 51–78. Fragner, Bert, Ralph Kauz, Roderich Ptak, and Angela Schottenhammer. Pferde in Asien: Geschichte, Handel und Kultur / Horses in Asia: History, Trade and Culture. Vienna: Denkschriften der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophischehistorische Klasse 378, 2009. Frifelt, Karen. Islamic Remains in Bahrain. Højbjerg: Jutland Archaeological Society Publication 37, 2001.

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Gaube, Heinz. ‘Im Hinterland von Siraf: Das Tal von Galledar/Fal und seine Nachbargebiete’. Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran, Vol. 13 (1980), pp. 149–66. Goitein, Samuel D. ‘From Aden to India: Specimens of the Correspondence of India Traders of the Twelfth Century’. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 23 (1980), pp. 43–66. Goitein, Samuel D. ‘Two Eye-Witness Reports on an Expedition of the King of Kish (Qais) Against Aden’. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 16 (1954), pp. 247–54. Heyvaert, Vanessa M.A. and Baeteman, C. ‘Holocene Sedimentary Evolution and Palaeocoastlines of the Lower Khuzestan Plain (Southwest) Iran’. Marine Geology, Vol. 242 (2007), pp. 83–108. Horsburgh, James. The India Directory, or Directions for Sailing to and from the East Indies, China, Australia, and the Interjacent Ports of Africa and South America: Compiled Chiefly From Original Journals of the Honourable Company’s Ships, and From Observations and Remarks, Resulting from the Experience of Twenty-One Years in the Navigation of Those Seas. London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1809. Insoll, Timothy. The Land of Enki in the Islamic Era: Pearls, Palms, and Religious Identity in Bahrain. London, New York, Bahrain: Kegan Paul, 2005. Jameson, H. Lyster. ‘The Japanese Artificially Induced Pearl’. Nature, No. 107 (1921), pp. 396–8. Kalus, Ludvik. Inscriptions arabes des Îles de Bahrain: Contribution à l’Histoire de Bahrain entre les XIe et XVIIe siècles (Ve-XIe de l’Hégire). Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1990. Kemball, Lt. A.B. ‘Observations on the Past Policy of the British Government Towards the Arab Tribes of the Persian Gulf ’. Selections From the Records of the Bombay Government, Vol. 24 (1856), pp. 61–89. Kennet, Derek. ‘On the Eve of Islam: Archaeological Evidence from Eastern Arabia’. Antiquity, Vol. 79 (2005), pp. 107–18. Kervran, Monique, Fredrik Hiebert and Axelle Rougeulle. Qal‘at al-Bahrain: A Trading and Military Outpost. Turnhout: Indicopleustoi, Archaeologies of the Indian Ocean 4, 2005. Khosrowzadeh, Alireza, A. Aali, Derek Kenet [sic] and Seth Priestman. ‘Kahur Langar Chini: A Parthian Port on the Coast of the Persian Gulf ’. Archaeological Reports, Vol. 5 (2006), pp. 55–70 (in Persian). König, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die elamischen Königsinschriften. Graz: Archiv für Orientforschung Beiheft 16, 1965. Lambeck, Kurt. ‘Shoreline Reconstruction for the Persian Gulf Since the Last Glacial Maximum’. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 142 (1996), pp. 43–57. Lancaster, William and Fidelity Lancaster. Honour is in Contentment: Life Before Oil in Ras al-Khaimah (UAE) and Some Neighbouring Regions. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Low, Charles R. History of the Indian Navy (1613–1863). London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1877. Lowick, Nicholas M. Siraf XV: The Coins and Monumental Inscriptions. London: The British Institute of Persian Studies, 1985. Milburn, William. Oriental Commerce; or the East India Trader’s Complete Guide. London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1825. Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz R. ‘ “Arabisiert” oder “Iranisiert?” Siedlungsgeschichte in der iranischen Provinz Hormozgān am Persischen Golf ’. Die Welt des Islams, Vol. NS 45 (2005), pp. 108–50. Özbaran, Salih. ‘The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, 1534–1581’. Journal of Asian History, Vol. 6 (1972), pp. 45–87.

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Pézard, Maurice. Mission à Bender-Blouchir: Documents archéologiques et épigraphiques. Paris: Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse 15, 1914. Piacentini, Valeria Fiorani. L’emporio ed il regno di Hormoz (VIII – fine XV sec. D.Cr.): Vicende storiche, problemi ed aspetti di una civiltà costiera del Golfo Persico. Milan: Memorie dell’Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, Classe di Lettere Scienze Morali e Storiche, Vol. 35, No. 1 (1975). Pohanka, Reinhard. Burgen und Heiligtümer in Laristan, Südiran: Ein Surveybericht. Vienna: Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischer Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Kl. 466, 1986. Potts, D.T. The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity. 2 vols; Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990. Potts, D.T. In the Land of the Emirates: the Archaeology and History of the UAE. Abu Dhabi: Sultan ibn Zayed’s Culture and Media Centre, 2012. Potts, D.T. ‘Achaemenid Interests in the Persian Gulf ’. In John Curtis and St John Simpson, eds, The World of Achaemenid Persia: History, Art and Society in Iran and the Ancient Near East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 523–33. Potts, D.T. ‘The Islands of the XIVth Satrapy’. In Roland Oetjen and Frank Ryan, eds, Seleukeia: Studies in Seleucid History, Archaeology and Numismatics in Honour of Getzel M. Cohen (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming). Potts, D.T. ‘The Portuguese on Qeshm’. In Rudi Matthee and Jorge Flores, eds, Portugal, the Persian Gulf and Safavid Persia (Leuven: Peeters, 2011), pp. 99–118. Potts, D.T. ‘Watercraft of the Lower Sea’. In Uwe Finkbeiner, Reinhard Dittmann and Harald Hauptmann, eds, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte Vorderasiens: Festschrift für Rainer Michael Boehmer (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1995), pp. 559–71. Priestman, Seth M.N. and Derek Kennet, eds. The Williamson Collection Project: The Long-Term Regional Economic Development of Sasanian and Islamic Southern Iran. Oxbow, Oxford: British Institute of Persian Studies Monograph, forthcoming. Richter, Tobias, P.D. Wordsworth and Alan G. Walmsley. ‘Pearlfishers, Townsfolk, Bedouin and Shaykhs: Economic and Social Relations in Islamic Al-Zubarah’. Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 41 (2011), pp. 317–32. Rose, Jeffrey I. ‘New Light on Human Prehistory in the Arabo-Persian Gulf Oasis’. Current Anthropology, Vol. 51 (2010), pp. 849–83. Rougeulle, Axelle. ‘Les importations de céramiques chinoises dans le Golfe arabo-persique (VIIIe-XIe siècles)’. Archéologie Islamique, Vol. 2 (1991), pp. 5–46. Rücker, Adolph. Die Canones des Simeon von Rêvârdešīr. Leipzig: V. Drugulin, 1908. Schön, Dorit. Laristan – eine südpersische Küstenprovinz: Ein Beitrag zu seiner Geschichte. Vienna: Sitzungsberichte der Österreichischer Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Kl. 553, 1990. Schwarz, Paul. Iran im Mittelalter nach den arabischen Geographen, Vol. 3. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1912. Sinclair, William F. The Travels of Pedro Teixeira; with His ‘Kings of Harmuz’ and Extracts From His ‘Kings of Persia’. London: Hakluyt Society, 1902. Stern, S.M. ‘Rāmisht of Sīrāf, a Merchant Millionaire of the Twelfth Century’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 99 (1967), pp. 10–14. Stiffe, A.W. ‘Ancient Trading Centres of the Persian Gulf II : Kais, or Al-Kais’. The Geographical Journal, Vol. 7 (1895), pp. 644–9. Streck, Maximilian. ‘Kais’. Encyclopaedia of Islam, first ed., Vol. 2 (1927), pp. 649–51. Tampoe, Moira. Maritime Trade Between China and the West: An Archaeological Study of the Ceramics From Siraf (Persian Gulf), 8th to 15th Centuries A.D. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports International Series 555, 1989.

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Teller, James T., Kenneth W. Glennie, N. Lancaster and A.K. Singhvi. ‘Calcareous Dunes of the United Arab Emirates and Noah’s Flood: The Postglacial Reflooding of the Persian (Arabian) Gulf ’. Quaternary International, Vols 68–71 (2000), pp. 297–308. Tolini, Gauthier. ‘Les travailleurs babyloniens et le palais de Taokè’. ARTA 2008.002, pp. 1–11. Vosoughi, M.B. ‘The Kings of Hormuz: From the Beginning Until the Arrival of the Portuguese’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 89–104. Warden, Francis. ‘Extracts from Brief Notes Relative to the Rise and Progress of the Arab Tribes of the Persian Gulf ’. Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, Vol. 24 (1856), pp. 55–60. Whitehouse, David. Siraf III: The Congregational Mosque and Other Mosques from the Ninth to the Twelfth Centuries. London: The British Institute of Persian Studies, 1980. Whitehouse, David and Andrew Williamson. ‘Sasanian Maritime Trade’. Iran, Vol. 11 (1973), pp. 28–49. Whitehouse, David, Donald S. Whitcomb and Tony J. Wilkinson. Siraf: History, Topography and Environment. Oxford, Oakville: Oxbow Books, 2009. Whittingham, H. and C.T. King, Reed’s Tables of Distances Between Ports and Places in All Parts of the World, 10th ed. Sunderland: Thomas Reed and Co., Ltd, 1920. Williamson, Andrew. ‘Regional Distribution of Mediaeval Persian Pottery in the Light of Recent Investigations’. In James Allan and Caroline Roberts, eds, Syria and Iran: Three Studies in Medieval Ceramics (Oxford: Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 4, 1988), pp. 11–22. Winder, R. Bayly. Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.

2

Religion and Religious Movements in the Gulf, 1700–1971 Michael Crawford

Religious authority, temporal power and schism Ethnicity, tribe, confession and language cut across each other in Gulf communities to create an intricate patchwork of allegiances and identities. The sub-pattern of religious affiliation is complex. It reflects the outcome of tribal migrations that pushed confessional minorities to the Peninsula’s fringes, the intermingling of fluid coastal populations and the littoral’s long-standing trading links with distant communities overseas. A hybrid maritime culture evolved across the Gulf that was naturally religiously tolerant and outward-looking. From the sixteenth century this came under intermittent pressure from politically and doctrinally aggressive inland Muslim powers and from Christian sea powers driven by trading interests. These external forces, which sought to imprint themselves on a local religious culture they did not share, painted much of the picture we have today of pre-modern religious trends in the Gulf. Where Gulf notables left chronicles or religious works, these expressed the vibrant text-based intellectual culture of the educated few, not the popular religion of the illiterate majority, whose voices – male and female – are inaudible across the centuries. Historians of the Middle East have tended to portray the eighteenth century as an era of decline and political, religious and intellectual stagnation across the region. Research in recent decades has shown how awareness among leading members of society or notables of prevailing political and religious malaise and corruption (neatly encapsulated in the Arabic term fasād) triggered widespread reformist efforts. These ranged from the intellectual and gradualist to the aggressive and militaristic. Far from being reduced to a backwater by these currents, the Gulf had to contend between the mid-eighteenth and later twentieth centuries with the emergence in its immediate Arabian, Iranian and Iraqi hinterlands of rival religious ideologies that helped shape the modern Islamic world. Over this timespan the region’s religious elites, operating within widely varying confessional and political contexts, were preoccupied almost uniformly with three central issues. The first was the nature of religious and spiritual authority and its exercise. The second, generally addressed less explicitly in texts, concerned the interplay between 43

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Islam, religious movements and clerics on the one hand, and the state, political power and rulers on the other. The third preoccupation, overlaying and influencing the first two, was the enduring schisms between Sunnīs and Shīʿah. These three longstanding concerns assumed a new urgency as conflicting visions of mainstream Sunnism and Shīʿism fought for influence around the Gulf. This was against the backdrop of invasive Western thought and intrusive European political, military and commercial power. Ultimately, the Western international system of nation states was imposed on the region abruptly, after the First World War had led to the collapse of the supranational Ottoman state. Both Sunnī and Shīʿī religious elites then had to adjust not only to the implications of competing secular ideologies such as Arab nationalism and communism but to new territorial constraints on their roles, networks and influence. Issues of theology, religious and temporal relations, and confessional disputes raised arcane questions of spiritual mediation, religious hierarchies, and religious and political legitimacy that engaged only rulers, clerics and notables directly. The shifting responses of Sunnī and Shīʿī elites to these issues, however, could carry important practical consequences for local societies and economies, and for the religious and everyday lives of ordinary people. When the Wahhābīs from their launchpad in Central Arabia shook the religious consensus of the Sunnī world in the second half of the eighteenth century, even as their Āl Saʿūd champions contested the Ottomans politically and militarily, they sought to impose religious homogeneity and a single Sunnī religious identity on most of the Peninsula’s inhabitants. Their divisive campaign, directed against fellow Sunnīs and, most violently against Shīʿah, subjected religiously mixed littoral communities to fluctuating political, religious, military and trading pressures that the British presence helped to relieve from the early nineteenth century.

Figure 2.1 Christian and Jewish merchants in Basra (1891).

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45

Complex geography of belief In the cultural world of the Gulf, narrowly defined and so excluding Najd where the Wahhābīs originated, only a quarter of the population was Sunnī, although in the late eighteenth century the rulers on the Arabian side of the Gulf, save in Oman, were all Sunnī.1 In what is now the Saʿūdī Eastern Province, the Sunnī Banī Khālid, heading a religiously mixed tribal confederation, governed al-Ah ․sāʾ and al-Qa․t īf, which featured large communities of detribalized mainstream Imāmī (Twelver) Shīʿah.2 Bahrain’s Shīʿah belonged to the same indigenous ethnic and religious group, under Sunnī Āl Khalīfah rulers. Southern Iraq’s many Imāmī Shīʿah under Ottoman rule were concentrated in and around the Shīʿī shrine cities of al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ, while cosmopolitan Basra had a religiously mixed population, including Jews and Christians. While some Arabs in Khuzistan remained Sunnī, the powerful Banī Kaʿb converted to Shīʿism, as did numerous tribes in southern Iraq, giving local Shīʿism a peculiarly bedouin flavour.3 From the early eighteenth century modest Sunnī communities governed by Sunnīs under nominal Iranian suzerainty stretched down the Iranian coast from Bushihr (Bushire), especially around the ports of Charak, Lingah and Bandar ʿAbbas.4 Their trading and family links were with comparable seafaring communities across the Gulf rather than with elements in the Shīʿī Iranian interior. Arabic and Persian were spoken on both sides of the Gulf.5 In Oman, Ibād․ism, which is neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī and is otherwise largely extinct in the Middle East, prevailed. Where regional inhabitants were Sunnī, they were divided by school of law (madhhab).6 In Basra the Shāfiʿīs predominated although, as an Ottoman outpost, it contained some H ․ anafīs and nearby al-Zubayr was a H ․ anbalī centre. To the south, along the Gulf coast, Sunnīs were mainly Mālikīs with some Shāfiʿīs, whereas almost all Najdīs were H ․ anbalī. On the Persian coast Sunnīs were Mālikī, H ․ anbalī and Shāfiʿīs (as most Iranians had been before they converted to Imāmī Shīʿism).7 The segregating effect of the Sunnī law schools was exemplified by the tradition at the Great Mosque in Makkah of each school praying separately at a different time behind its own prayer leader.8 The Gulf ’s sedentary population served as guardians of Islamic learning, culture and law, whereas the religion of illiterate nomadic pastoralists tended to be purely nominal. For tribal reasons as well as from ignorance of Islam, the bedouin adhered to customary law, although they considered themselves as much Muslims as the townspeople. Relations between settled inhabitants, reliant on the transit trade, agriculture and maritime activities, and predatory bedouin who sat across desert supply lines and engaged in tribal raiding, were often tense. This was thanks to constant pressure on scarce resources from droughts, floods and disease. Yet bedouin and settled townspeople, and those in transition from nomadism to a settled existence associated with agriculture, trade, pearling or fishing, were also linked inextricably by tribal affiliation, protection arrangements and mutual reliance on each other’s produce. Most settlements in Najd and many smaller ones on the Gulf littoral were based around a few notable families, sometimes from different tribes or clans, making them prone to tribalism, internecine warfare, fission and, occasionally, disintegration.9 The qād․ī, the Islamic judge who held office at the pleasure of the settlement’s ruler (often from its strongest clan), not only applied the sharīʿah but acted as intermediary and

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conciliator of disputes within, and between, settlements. He and the local muftī (if not the same person) helped oversee mosque affairs and local religious education, although among Sunnīs the shaykhs of local Sufi orders might run their own mosques and madrasas.10 Under most non-Shīʿī rulers Shīʿī communities had their own qād․īs, muftīs, and mullahs. These were sometimes home-grown, often imported. Ordinary people had a low level of literacy, a grasp of Islam that was often conventional, handed down rather than taught, and a tendency to heterodox beliefs and practices. Most clerics, fearful of endangering a fragile, beleaguered Islamic culture, hesitated to contest these. Sunnī rulers understandably distrusted Sunnī revivalist or reformist influences that might upset the delicate social and political balance within settlements, induce leading inhabitants to defect to rival centres, or disrupt lines of communication or supply.11 Since immediate hinterlands to Gulf ports were mostly inhospitable and represented barriers to access to the Gulf, there were relatively few agriculturalists tied to the land save in fertile al-Ah․sāʾ, Basra, Bahrain and Oman. Littoral inhabitants, especially seafarers and merchants, were highly mobile. In the era before national borders, rulers and notables knew how quickly ports could lose business to rivals, as trade patterns shifted and floating populations transferred their interests and loyalties elsewhere.12 Acute vulnerability to changes in political or physical geography and rivalry for people and trade helped foster an open pluralistic religious culture. The commercial benefits of religious tolerance had been demonstrated by the remarkable trading success of the entrepôt on the Gulf island of Hormuz in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This became famous as one of the great trading centres of Asia. A mixed community of Sunnīs, Shīʿah, Christians, Jews and Hindus, ruled by Sunnīs who enabled freedom of worship, prospered until conquest by the militaristic Portuguese, and the activities of the English and Dutch East India companies, hastened the kingdom’s decline.13 We have no figures for the number of clerics, including teachers, on the Arabian coast in the later eighteenth century. Although always exposed to invasion and tribal disruption, Basra was a traditional centre of Sunnī learning until devastated by a plague in 1772–3 and a three-year Iranian occupation. Almost all clerics perished and schools disintegrated.14 It never recovered its intellectual (or commercial) pre-eminence, although the Mamluk rulers still exerted influence down the Gulf through itinerant merchants and Sunnī clerics of Basran origin. Learning flourished among both Sunnīs and Shīʿah in al-Ah․sāʾ under the Sunnī Banī Khālid until overrun by the Saʿūdīs in the mid-1790s.15 Other vibrant Sunnī centres were the now barely remembered port of alZubārah on Qatar’s north-west coast and al-Zubayr near Basra. Both towns profited from the arrival from Najd and al-Ah․sāʾ of anti-Wahhābī clerics, who reinforced local expertise and the pluralistic Gulf culture.16 In the mid-1770s the trading port of Kuwait had fourteen Sunnī mosques which a visitor described as full at prayer time.17 A Shīʿī diaspora from al-Ah․sāʾ, Iran and Bahrain soon took root there that was integral to Kuwait’s early development as a commercial centre. Further research is required into the numbers and spread of Imāmī clerics in al-Ah․sāʾ and Bahrain at this period. No hierarchy united them, perhaps because the prevailing traditionist outlook discouraged its development.18 There appear to have been no home-grown Shīʿī clerics in Kuwait, along the Trucial Coast, or in Oman at this time. Sunnī and Shīʿī clerics were sustained

Religion in the Gulf, 1700–1971

47

by rulers, donations and alms, the largesse of merchants, religious trusts (awqāf, sing. waqf), agricultural holdings and trading interests, and sometimes lucrative religious and judicial activities.19 When there was strong state support, as in Saʿūdī al-Dirʿiyyah in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the religious cadre could grow rapidly. Once Wahhābī investment in religious education and propagation became sporadic under the Second Saʿūdī State, Sunnī clerical numbers in Najd and the northern Gulf probably plateaued, only to resume growth in the early twentieth century. The clustering of senior Shīʿī clerics in Ottoman al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ from the mid-eighteenth century enabled Shīʿī clerical numbers there to expand and made Imāmī leaders more accessible to Gulf Shīʿah who had strong trading links to Iraq. When economic or political conditions deteriorated, Gulf and H ․ ad․ramī Sunnī clerics, like other inhabitants, migrated to Indian Ocean and East African ports. There they helped embed Gulf-linked religious networks within local and diaspora communities.20 H ․ ad․ramīs, all Shāfiʿī Sunnīs, were especially adept at combining religion and commerce.21 As reflected in their chronicles and histories, Gulf clerics, both Sunnī and Shīʿī, belonged to a cosmopolitan, trans-regional culture and moved readily between urban centres with different rulers.22 Tribalism, mixed ethnicities and diverse transnational links ensured Gulf inhabitants had complex identities that were not defined solely by religion. There are innumerable eighteenth and nineteenth century instances of political alliances grounded in tribal links or realpolitik and pursued regardless of religious affiliation. The Ismāʿīlīs in distant Najrān mobilized for the Sunnī ʿUjmān tribe against the Saʿūdīs in 1764/5 on the basis of a common Yām tribal origin when the Sunnī Banī Khālid were trying to suppress the Wahhābīs. These Ismāʿīlīs were an offshoot of the radical and egalitarian Carmathians, who ruled the indigenous Bah․ārnah population of Eastern Arabia in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Imāmī Shīʿism took over in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, if not earlier.23 The Ismāʿīlīs withdrew after inflicting a heavy defeat on the Saʿūdīs in a campaign without apparent religious overtones.24 Pragmatism grounded in political and commercial interests explains the support Ibād․ī Oman gave the Ottomans against Iranian Shāh Karīm Khān Zand in 1775–6,25 and the opportunistic, short-lived alliance between an aspiring Ibād․ī imām and the Wahhābīs in 1864–6.26 Just as religion was only one component in a Gulf inhabitant’s persona, it was but one – not necessarily decisive – factor in determining Gulf political and military alignments.27 It might serve too as an overlay to social, cultural and historical antagonisms between confessional communities or tribes.28 In Bahrain the long-settled Shīʿī Bah․ārnah viewed the arriviste Sunnī Āl Khalīfah rulers as alien, bedouin (‘Arab’) occupiers, who imposed themselves in the late eighteenth century and had no place on the islands.29 Religion became the means and language by which they expressed their perceived loss of birthright, exclusion and discrimination.

Poles of religious influence beyond the Gulf Most eighteenth-century non-Wahhābī Sunnīs, even when nominally the subjects of other sovereigns or local rulers, appear to have regarded the Ottoman sul․t ān as the

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Figure 2.2 The mahmal (the camel litter sent along with the Egyptian hajj delegation) passing through Makkah on the way to ʿArafat (c.1914).

Sunnī champion. In 1774 he explicitly revived the claim to be caliph in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca that ended a disastrous war with the Russians. This was so that he could assert continuing spiritual ascendancy over Crimean Tatar Muslims passing under Russian sovereignty. This laid the basis for Ottoman pan-Islamism that lasted until the caliphate’s abolition in 1924.30 In the eighteenth century, the sul․t ān’s name was praised in Friday prayers in Najdī mosques, even though Najd lay formally beyond Ottoman domains.31 His legitimacy and prestige were closely linked to custodianship of the Holy Places, a status he guarded jealously. Although Makkah and al-Madīnah were geographically remote for the Ottomans, barely economically viable and regularly exposed to droughts, floods and epidemics, they served as vital religious and regional hubs. The Ottomans sustained them and staffed them with muftīs and qād․īs, whose influence reached across the Peninsula. Ottoman rule was always indirect, exercised through the Hashimite dynasty which supplied the ruling sharīfs of Makkah, while the Ottoman governor sat in unhealthy Jiddah. This dual control was unsatisfactory for both parties, but every ruling sharīf appreciated that the annual Ottoman pilgrimage (․hajj) caravans amounted to a military reinvasion of al-H ․ ijāz.32 The Ottomans could always replace him with a more malleable member of his disputatious clan. Ruling sharīfs therefore tended to be more amenable to Ottoman direction before the ․hajj and at their most independent once the ․hajj caravans had departed.

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The Wahhābī occupation of the Holy Cities in 1803–13 represented unprecedented loss of face for the sul․t ān. Although, on their first capture, the Āl Saʿūd challenge to Ottoman sovereignty and governance arrangements was muted, the Wahhābī destruction of tombs and shrines and ban on Ottoman ․hajj caravans with traditional musical accompaniment forced the Ottoman hand. The controversial raid by the Saʿūdīs on the treasures in the Prophet’s tomb, to compensate for lost Ottoman financial support for the cities’ leading families and populace, highlighted how far the Ottomans ordinarily underwrote the Holy Cities with grain supplies and subsidies.33 It was Safavid Shāh Ismāʿīl of Iran (d. 1524) who placed Gulf communities on the fluid frontier between competing empires with rival dogmas by proclaiming Imāmī Shīʿism the state creed in 1501.34 The Safavids imported expertise from Imāmī pockets in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and al-Ah․sāʾ, and suppressed both millenarian extremists associated with the Safavid Sufi movement, and rival Sufi orders. They worked sporadically to extinguish Sunnism in Iran, boosting the religious influence of Imāmī Shīʿism and creating a religious hierarchy. Although this Imāmī establishment allied for a period with the highly organized Shīʿī Niʿmatullāhī Sufi order and tolerated individualistic and apolitical elite exponents of high Sufism, it ended by persecuting intellectual Sufis as well as Sunnīs in the dynasty’s final years.35 Hostility to Sunnism, at its strongest in the late seventeenth century and a contributor to the Afghan invasion of 1722, was reflected in public cursing of the first caliphs. This was an old Imāmī practice revived by the Safavids that made life harder for Shīʿah governed by Sunnīs in al-Madīnah, al-Ah․sāʾ, Iraq and elsewhere.36 Unsurprisingly, political quietism came naturally to clerics in the Shīʿī shrine cities of al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ. The Ottomans governed these mostly with a light touch while Iranian rulers viewed them, along with Basra, as lying within their sphere of influence.37 Thanks to an emergent Shīʿī clerical hierarchy in the shrine cities and Iran, religious trends in Gulf Imāmī communities were determined as much by events there as by local factors. Clerics of Gulf origin exercised considerable intellectual influence in those centres at least until the end of the eighteenth century.38 The Holy Cities of Makkah and al-Madīnah and Shīʿī shrine cities of al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ were the principal poles of religious attraction for Gulf Sunnīs and Shīʿah respectively, and the regional destinations for aspiring scholars, although some Gulf Sunnīs visited Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus and many Shīʿah were attracted to centres of contemporary learning in Iran.39 The pilgrimage presented an opportunity for intellectual exchanges among scholars. It also helped refresh the Islam of distant communities, while injecting new blood and ideas into the Holy Cities. Sunnī teaching circles in the Holy Cities in the 1710s–40s, featuring scholars from various countries, developed new approaches to teaching Prophetic traditions (․hadīth). These spurred Sunnī discontent with the prevailing fasād (corruption) within Islam and even exerted influence on contemporary Shīʿism.40 Yet those who shared the same teacher did not emerge with a uniform remedy or solution.41 Disparate Sunnī revivalist movements, some associated with Sufi orders like the Naqshbandīs and others, like the Wahhābīs, anti-Sufi, emerged in Central Arabia, India and elsewhere. They looked back to a purer version of Islam uncontaminated by later innovations, and to an earlier idealized society where Islamic law and norms had been enforced. These trends, widely

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divergent in their approach to reordering society, underlined the long-standing religious and cultural ties between the Peninsula, India, East Africa and further afield, as religious ideas, affiliations and practices flowed along trading links already cemented by kinship ties.42 The annual pilgrimage was often conducted in hazardous and unhealthy conditions by both Sunnīs and Shīʿah travelling by land and sea, sometimes for weeks and months. Numbers of pilgrims varied but during the pre-steam era were in the tens of thousands, rarely more than 100,000.43 The access of Shīʿah, who performed additional visits to the shrines of their own revered imāms in al-Madīnah, depended on the state of Ottoman–Iranian relations and was sometimes subject to discriminatory conditions or levies, as the Hashimites fended off suspicions that they were crypto-Shīʿah.44 The sul․t ān would not allow separate Iranian pilgrimage caravans under Iranian commanders ranking with Ottoman amīrs.45 The traditional route for Iranian pilgrims through Basra, down to al-Ah․sāʾ and then across Central Arabia was in only intermittent use, having been closed by the Ottomans when they occupied al-Ah․sāʾ from fear of Safavid infiltration.46 It was then disrupted by persistent disorder and conflict in Central Arabia. This forced a return to the northern routes, one from Baghdad and Kūfa, the other from al-Samāwa.47 Caravans were threatened not only by heat and thirst but by bedouin pillage. An example was the notorious ransacking of the Syrian caravan in 1757 by the Banī Sakhr. They had not been paid off and resented pilgrims’ consumption of scarce local resources.48 Pilgrims from elsewhere in the Peninsula often travelled by sea out of Muscat, the H ․ ad․ramawt and Aden. There ․hajj vessels from India, the Far East and East Africa called before moving up to Jiddah. The advent of steam ships in the 1830s and the Suez Canal in 1869 made such journeys quicker and less dangerous. They reduced the popularity of land routes, swelled numbers of pilgrims (and slaves in al-H ․ ijāz), and caused crowding and health hazards that required greater regulation and quarantines by the early twentieth century.49 With growing integration, the ․hajj became ever more an occasion for religious and intellectual exchanges both in the Holy Cities and en route. It was also a business opportunity for the sharīfs, H ․ ijāzī merchants, functionaries linked with ․hajj rituals, and commercially minded pilgrims. New communications, including postal services and the telegraph, enabled new connectivity across the Islamic world from the midnineteenth century. This stimulated the spread of ideas, networks and movements. The Holy Cities and Shīʿī shrines, which often served as sanctuaries for exiles, enjoyed a certain international status because of pilgrimages and visitations and benefited from external largesse. Ottoman official subsidies aside, many endowments in the Ottoman Empire and beyond were dedicated to the inhabitants of the Holy Cities. For their part the Shīʿī shrine cities benefited from the famous bequest from Shīʿī Awadh in India (a vital and much contested instrument of patronage), as well as the alms senior clerics received from followers, and subsidies and grants from the ruling Qajars after 1779.50 The Ottomans, who tried to avoid entanglement in clerical affairs at the shrines yet sometimes acted vigorously to quell local moves towards autonomy, sought to balance maximizing revenues from Iranian pilgrims with constraining Iranian influence.51 There were other regional hubs and centres of visitation (ziyārah) associated with leading Sufi or local saints that fulfilled important

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regional or local functions, such as that of the Prophet Hūd north of al-Mukalla in the 52 H ․ ad․ramawt.

Sufism and popular religion The Sufi orders had the potential to bridge the social and cultural divide between adherents of the Sunnī text-based religious culture in the Gulf, including trained clerics of spiritual or mystical inclination, and ordinary Sunnīs, who were mostly illiterate. For the latter Sufi rituals, esotericism and access to charismatic shaykhs lent emotional sustenance to harsh everyday existences in a way juristic Sunnism could not. Although accessible evidence for the pre-modern period is slight in relation to the Gulf, syncretist and ecstatic Sufism was widespread across the region. This remained so even after Sunnī Sufism underwent reinvigoration and reform in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the revival of the Naqshbandī and other sober orders advocating adherence to the sharīʿah.53 There were Sufis too among the Shīʿah.54 Yet for all their shared interest in spiritualism, Shīʿism and Sufism are not naturally compatible. They take a different view of the basis for the Islamic community, spiritual authority and transmission of special knowledge.55 Imāmī Shīʿism could be just as scholastic and arid as strict Sunnism. But its Imāmology had strains of esotericism, messianic longing and the yearning for a just society that gave it spiritual and emotional popular appeal.56 In popular Shīʿism, rites and rituals played a dense role in the believer’s calendar. A few reformist clerics in Iraq and elsewhere criticized some of these rituals, such as flagellation during the annual mourning for the Imām H ․ usayn at ʿĀshūrāʾ (10 Muh․arram) or the public passion plays called taʿziyah that developed in Iran in the late eighteenth century and flowered in the nineteenth.57 Most kept quiet to preserve their own status and economic interests and to avoid adopting a Wahhābī-style critique.58 Such practices embedded a mentality of victimhood, and even of resistance. This assisted political mobilization in the later twentieth century and became an essential element in Shīʿī political movements that sprang up from the late 1950s. They also supplied emotional outlets and enabled female religious participation to a degree strict Sunnism often disallowed. Whereas some sober Sufi orders eschewed practices inconsistent with the sharīʿah, the more heterodox licensed or encouraged activities or extravagant behaviour even moderate, tolerant Sunnī clerics denounced.59 Such practices shaded into pure folk religion that lacked the mysticism and organized structures of Sufism and often revolved around worship of shrines of pre-Islamic origin (such as that of the Prophet Hūd), sacred stones, trees or local holy men.60 These popular religious practices were ones in which women could, and did, play a leading part. Deprived of education until the early or mid-decades of the twentieth century and mostly banned from praying inside mosques, they featured prominently in the veneration of saints and rituals reflecting the unchanging patterns of life, as well as in the practices of exorcism (zār) used to combat mental health problems. Zār was imported by those of African descent living on both sides of the Gulf.61 The visitations, festivals (mawlids) and donations associated with both Sufism and folk religion played important social and economic

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roles within local communities. They guaranteed those associated with objects of veneration reliable revenues and special economic, sometimes even political, status because of their mediatory roles. Heads of regional Sufi orders had a long track record of creating new dynasties or polities. Examples, beyond the Arab Gulf where this did not occur, are the Safavids or in the Peninsula Idrīsī rule in ʿAsīr, established after the First World War and extinguished formally by the Saʿūdīs in 1934. The main centres of Sufism in the Peninsula, indeed the Islamic world, were the Holy Cities. There the orders drew strength from the renewal provided by the annual pilgrimage and the support and donations of pilgrim adherents, although the sharīfs and local clerics resented the religious and economic competition.62 The H ․ ad․ramawt, which had powerful mystical traditions and where the orders were deeply embedded in clan structures, was the exclusive preserve of the sayyid Bā ʿAlawī family order and offshoots.63 These orders emphasized scholarship, avoided esoteric activities and favoured worldly engagement.64 Iraq too had long-standing Sufi traditions, with one of the greatest orders – the Qādiriyyah named for ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jilānī (d. 1166) – based in Baghdad. Powerful Sufi orders with centres in Basra, some sponsored by leading local families, projected influence into al-Ah․sāʾ, Najd and probably down the Gulf.65 These centralized orders never embedded themselves in Arabia outside the Holy Cities. In Najd the orders appear to have been extremely weak or degraded, overshadowed by the strength of folk religion in its various guises.66 We lack evidence on Sufism among Sunnīs or Shīʿah in Gulf settlements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although some al-Zubārah clerics had strong personal or family links with Sufism.67 Because of their mercantile links, the ports on both sides of the Gulf may well have harboured outposts among local, Indian and African communities of Sufi orders that were strong on the fringes of the Indian Ocean.68 This topic, and the character of popular religious beliefs and practices among sailors and pearlers, awaits further research.69 The animistic rituals of the zār showed how commercial patterns (here of the slave trade) could inject even non-Islamic religious practices into Gulf communities.70

No end to the schism In 1743 Nādir Shāh, the ruthless Khurasānī general who ruled Iran in 1736–47 after overthrowing the Safavids, pursued a quixotic but calculated initiative to resolve the schism between Shīʿī and Sunnī Islam by holding a curious conference outside alNajaf. On installing himself as Shāh in 1736, he had proposed to the Ottomans that the Jaʿfarī school of Imāmī law be admitted officially as the fifth Sunnī school of law.71 The Ottomans, who feared the initiative, fobbed him off for years. Now camped outside alNajaf after invading Iraq during the war of 1743–6, he asked the Ottoman governor of Baghdad to send an Iraqi Sunnī cleric to oversee dialogue between leading Iranian Shīʿī mullahs and prominent Sunni ʿulamāʾ from the Shāh’s Afghan, Turkmen and other dominions. The Ottoman choice, Shāfiʿī ʿAbd Allāh al-Suwaydī (1693–1761), left a detailed account of the al-Najaf conference in December 1743, highlighting Nādir Shāh’s close interest in proceedings.72

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Notorious for his brutality, Nādir predetermined the outcome by clarifying for the mullahs present that any Shīʿī who denied the legitimacy of the first three caliphs (known as rafd․) or insulted them in line with Safavid practice (sabb) would forfeit his own life and the lives of family members. Shīʿī clerics therefore renounced these practices publicly, forcing sceptical Sunnī counterparts reluctantly to acknowledge the Shīʿah as Muslims.73 Professing concern at Sunnī subjects’ denunciation of Iranian Shīʿah as unbelievers (takfīr), the Shāh suggested his aim was to reduce religious tensions within his own camp, and with the Ottoman sul․t āns, whose precedence he acknowledged at Friday prayers in Kūfa after the conference. He told al-Suwaydī the Iranians could become Sunnīs only by degrees and this was a first step.74 Many theological, ritualistic and other differences remained, especially Sunnī distaste for the Shīʿī practice of taqiyyah (dissimulation), which undermined trust in Shīʿī public professions of faith, and the Shīʿī institution of temporary marriage (mutʿah). The Shāh hoped the concession over sabb and acceptance of the legitimate exercise of the caliphate by the first three caliphs, which he compensated for domestically by encouraging visitations and posing as the protector of shrines,75 would allow the Jaʿfarī school to take its place alongside the four Sunnī schools, as reflected by a pavilion (maqām) within the Great Mosque at Makkah. Not to be browbeaten by an elderly militarist with a loosening grip on power, the Ottomans rejected the overture even as Nādir Shāh claimed Ottoman agreement. When his hapless representative appeared in Makkah in 1744 brazenly to assert the new status, the dispute between the ruling sharīf and the Ottoman governor in Jiddah was over whether he should be killed immediately or sent to Istanbul for execution. The sul․t ān sided with the sharīf and ordered his despatch to the Sublime Porte.76 In seeking in effect to strip Shīʿism of its esoteric Imāmology and substitute a curious hybrid law school that was neither Sunnī nor Shīʿī,77 the Shīʿī Nādir Shāh was driven by political considerations, not religious conviction. He wanted to delegitimize the Safavids, undermine Shīʿī mullahs whose religious endowments (awqāf) he was expropriating, and deinstitutionalize their influence in Iran.78 The effect of these moves, combined with a treaty concession by the Ottomans guaranteeing Shīʿī pilgrims access to al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ, was to boost Shīʿī communities in Iraq and displace Iranian Shīʿī clerics into Iraq. Many Iranian clerics moved from Iran to Karbalāʾ and al-Najaf in the decades after the Afghan conquest of Isfahān in 1722.79 The attempt at Shīʿī–Sunnī rapprochement failed. Nādir was murdered a few years later and his Zand successor rehabilitated Safavid-style Shīʿism. Yet Nādir’s religious policies had enduring consequences. They shifted the centre of gravity in Shīʿism into Iraq. For the next two centuries much of its institutional and theological leadership resided beyond reach of Tehran’s rulers. Within Iraq the pull of the Shīʿī Holy Cities contributed to many Sunnī tribes in the south converting to Shīʿism from the late eighteenth century and to a new feeling of beleaguerment among southern Iraqi Sunnīs.80 In Arabia, this sense of pressure and Nādir’s ecumenical threat to core Sunnī beliefs may have contributed to a Sunnī revivalist reaction led by a Najdī cleric. He had campaigned in Basra in the 1730s against polytheism and now returned home to Najd to launch, in the words of Hamid Enayat, ‘the greatest fundamentalist challenge to Shīʿīsm since the beginning of Islam’.81

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Nādir Shāh had aspired to craft an inclusive pluralist framework for Sunnīs and Shīʿah. The Najdī sought to abolish pluralism under a single absolutist theology. The Gulf littoral gave rise to neither of these campaigns but rivalry and conflict between Wahhābism and Shīʿism, as restored by Nādir Shāh’s successors, were to mould its religious and political future.

Wahhābī assault on Gulf pluralism Muh․ammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–92), the founder of Wahhābism, was from a H ․ anbalī clerical lineage based in the small settlements of Central Arabia. Disgusted by what he saw as the degraded state of regional Islam, including in the Holy Cities, Basra and al-Ah․sāʾ where he studied, he launched a campaign to purge Sunnism of polytheism and saint worship. After expulsion from Basra and two failed attempts after 1740 to introduce a regime of godliness in Najd, he finally gained the unwavering support of the Āl Saʿūd.82 The ruling dynasty of al-Dirʿiyyah was without tribal standing, but its very lack of tribal affiliation or dependence on outside forces and talent for balancing interests made it an ideal instrument of power for Wahhābism. Though often portrayed by contemporaries, and even commentators today, as a desert or bedouin phenomenon, Wahhābism drew its core support from the detribalized settled population of southern Najd.83 It was a controlling small-town movement that championed enforcement of the sharīʿah at the expense of tribal law, and of Islamic norms through collective commanding of right and forbidding of wrong.84 It aimed to supplant a social system based on tribal and clan loyalties with a community of believers, united by belief, common allegiance to the regime of godliness and obedience to the Saʿūdī ruler. It sought ambitiously to impose one composite Sunnī identity on Najdīs to displace cross-cutting allegiances that caused persistent political and social instability. It challenged the prevailing Sunnī consensus yet introduced stifling conformism. It rejected religious hierarchies and stressed the equality of believers, yet built a new religious establishment around Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s descendants, the Āl al-Shaykh. It rejected the idea of laity treating clerics as infallible sources of authority but championed Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s writings as the irrefutable textual basis for an introverted movement that ceased looking beyond al-Dirʿiyyah for education or authority.85 It aimed to overthrow non-Wahhābī Central Arabian rulers but preached total submission to Saʿūdī political authority, save in the narrowest circumstances.86 Wahhābism juxtaposed the central concept of taw․hīd (the Oneness or unicity of God) with shirk, the heresy of associating things or people with God. Those engaged in popular religious practices not sanctioned by the Qurʾan or Prophetic traditions were guilty of unbelief (kufr). This exposed them to ejection from the community (takfīr), death, and jihād. Unbelief might involve worshipping trees or stones (as Wahhābīs claimed was common in mid-eighteenth-century Arabia), superstition, belief in dervishes or Sufi saints, or the association of another with God through sacrifice, intercession, prayers or other rituals, especially at gravesides or tombs. Ibn ʿAbd alWahhāb was as hostile to mainstream Sufi orders advocating close adherence to the sharīʿah, such as the Baghdad-based Qādiriyyah (with which senior members of his

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own H ․ anbalī school of law were associated), as he was to local holy men whose influence over local rulers and people he abhorred. Early Wahhābīs had an exclusivist and ideological worldview, buttressed by the concept of association with believers and disengagement from non-believers (al-walaʾ wa-al-baraʾ). It was not enough to declare takfīr of an unbeliever, the Wahhābī had to pronounce secondary takfīr of anyone who refused to make that declaration. It was insufficient for the Wahhābī to renounce shirk and unbelief, he had to renounce contact with anyone hostile to taw․hīd or its practitioners, even if that person was a close relative. If outside Saʿūdī dominions and unable overtly to practise and propagate taw․hīd, his duty was to emigrate to Wahhābī territory (hijra).87 This was a dogma, destined – indeed designed – to divide society. Wahhābism was especially hostile to reformist, moderate clerics, some based in Najd but many in alAh․sāʾ and the northern Gulf. These criticized the practices and beliefs of popular religion but feared the socially destabilizing effects of takfīr or jihād. They worried that the vulnerable settlements of Arabia, already under pressure from tribal migration and natural disasters, would be riven by perpetual conflict. They feared Wahhābī takfīr of illiterate and rapacious nomads would upset the delicate balance between desert and sown, and disrupt lines of supply and communication, as well as ․hajj routes. So it proved. Seventy years of conflict followed the arrangement that Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and the Āl Saʿūd reached in 1744 and then institutionalized as they harnessed political and military power to ideological intransigence and religious fervour. Wahhābism, which aimed to install a regime of godliness, was never a doctrine of state formation. But it much assisted the development and expansion of the Saʿūdī state, as the polity of alDirʿiyyah responded to the relentless hostility of powerful neighbours and demands of incessant military campaigning.88 This was a state that, as the self-proclaimed instrument of God’s will, would accept no borders, nor allow constraints on its territorial reach or ambitions, until encircled by the UK -backed nation-state system that required delineation of borders in the late 1920s. Wahhābism was not only a political and military threat to the Ottomans and neighbouring entities on the Gulf. It also represented a destabilizing ideological and cultural attack on the comfortable assumptions and compromises of the late eighteenthcentury Islamic world. This was even before the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 removed illusions about Islamic countries’ ability to protect themselves from encroaching Western political and commercial influence. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb announced his campaign to regional religious centres before taking refuge with the Āl Saʿūd. He earned a sharp refutation in 1743 from Makkah’s muftīs who saw him as a dangerous autodidact guilty of repudiating the whole panoply of Islamic learning.89 After a catalogue of battles, ambushes and assassinations in Central Arabia, in the 1770s the Wahhābīs spilled out of Najd into al-Ah․sāʾ on the Gulf side and into al-H ․ ijāz to the west. By the time Ibn Abd al-Wahhāb died in 1792 smallscale, attritional warfare was under way against the Banī Khālid and the sharīfian clan and their subject tribes. The Saʿūdīs crushed the Banī Khālid in 1791–6 and took the Holy Cities in 1803–5. This enabled the Wahhābīs to exploit the pilgrimage to spread their ideas ever further afield.

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Even as the Saʿūdīs pushed into ʿAsīr, Yemen, and the H ․ ad․ramawt while raiding towards Damascus and Baghdad, they worked to bring Oman and Muscat within their orbit.90 Driving hostile clerics before them, they sought to dislodge concentrations of vocal anti-Wahhābīs in al-Zubayr and al-Zubārah. They besieged al-Zubayr, without taking it, in 1803/4 and 1805/6, and reduced al-Zubārah in 1809. An Omani bombardment triggered the final flight in 1810/11 of the Āl Khalīfah from this to Bahrain and accelerated the lingering demise of this once vibrant commercial centre.91 Regional trade was further damaged by the reliance of the land-based Wahhābīs, who sought to monopolize transport and trade routes, on the Qawāsim of Raʾs al-Khaymah to privateer on their behalf.92 From time immemorial coastal areas had been subject to pulses or waves of popular, mostly tribal, movement from the centre of the Arabian Peninsula to the periphery. This systematic and persistent intrusion by an ideologically aggressive Najdī power was different. For all the fragility of their emerging state, the Saʿūdī rulers, guided first by Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and then by his offspring and other clerics, were strikingly successful at advancing the frontiers of their political and economic control. They injected preachers into settlements before waging military campaigns to overturn the status quo, appointed pro-Saʿūdī amīrs and Wahhābī qād․īs, and collected the Islamic tax (zakāt), which they later claimed amounted to tribute and evidence of Saʿūdī suzerainty. They enforced communal prayers in the mosque with all schools behind one imām, spread religious education and indoctrination, eradicated popular worship, levelled shrines and expelled religious opponents (if they did not invite them to alDirʿiyyah). The Wahhābīs’ exclusivist and absolutist outlook, ambition to impose one identity on those they ruled, prioritization of religion over commerce, and destruction of free ports challenged the outward-looking hybrid communities of the Gulf. These had ethnically and religiously mixed populations, relied on tolerance for communal peace, and depended for livelihoods on inland trade routes and overseas commerce. The effect of Wahhābī pressure was to drive them to acquiesce in the protection of a Christian power. The Saʿūdīs’ persistent religio-political claims of historic suzerainty based on shortlived intrusions in the period 1800–1818, hostility to bedouin and Sufis, and oppressive enforcement of Wahhābī norms were a challenge to Gulf societies. These also had to live with Wahhābī antagonism to the Shīʿah. Whether of indigenous Arab, Persian or other origin, Shīʿah formed sizeable majorities in the upper Gulf. None of the other Sunnī Gulf rulers claimed religious legitimacy as did the Saʿūdīs, nor presumed to impose their own creed on the Shīʿah. Even if politically sidelined, the latter were generally well integrated socially and economically on the Arabian side, especially in Kuwait and in Oman where the Lawātī Shīʿah were of Gujarati origin.93 But in Wahhābī demonology the Shīʿah were archetypal polytheists. They put idols on a par with God by attributing special powers or aspects of divinity to the fourth Caliph ʿAlī and his offspring. They were unbelievers and enemies of God and the Prophet, worse even than the Jews or Christians.94 The Wahhābīs tried to force the Shīʿah of al-Ah․sāʾ to convert in the 1790s and at intervals thereafter. In 1802 they stormed and sacked Karbalāʾ. They destroyed the mausoleum above Imām H ․ usayn’s tomb, despoiled the shrine and killed thousands.95 Sectarianism, of which the Safavids were once the Shīʿī exponents

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and which Nādir Shāh had sought to diminish, had arrived on the Arabian side of the Gulf.

The British approach to religion The British came to the Gulf originally only with trading profit in mind. They had no religious or missionary motive and their outlook remained largely uncoloured by religion even when they became embedded in various Gulf ports and their presence assumed a political dimension. The effect of their increasingly controlling role was to preserve the local culture of religious pluralism and tolerance against outside forces, especially the Wahhābīs who at various periods might otherwise have overrun much of the Arab Gulf littoral. By the early eighteenth century the heterogeneous inhabitants of Gulf ports had long become used to trading visits from Western ships and even to the semi-permanent trading posts of the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French. Commercial penetration of the Gulf by Europeans interested in profit, not dominion, developed slowly and fitfully. By the 1780s they had all but withdrawn.96 Resurgent British political interest and trade after 1790 led non-Muslim foreigners, mostly from India, to accumulate in the Gulf, especially in Bahrain and Oman, where Indian traders of all faiths were already well established and were to become commercially dominant in Muscat by the late nineteenth century.97 These communities were integrated into wider society, not cordoned off in enclaves.98 Missionary activity had been pursued by the Catholic Portuguese in the Gulf but they lost their Hormuz protectorate to the Iranians in 1622, and then Muscat, their last stronghold, in 1650. By the mid-eighteenth century they were gone, leaving behind, as the only overtly Catholic presence in the Gulf, a Carmelite monastery in Basra that became linked to the French.99 The monks did not proselytize and missionaries did not reappear in the Gulf until the American Protestant Arabian Mission, founded in 1889, became active in Iraq (to 1958), Kuwait (to 1967) and Oman (to 1970). It still runs the American Mission hospital in Bahrain today, with a humanitarian focus.100 Its medical personnel were even invited into Saudi Arabia in 1917 and on and off thereafter. By 1973 it had achieved just fourteen converts in Kuwait and Bahrain.101 A significant element in this failure of proselytization, which accounts in part for the lack of religious tension between European representatives and local rulers, was the absence south of Basra of sizeable indigenous Christian communities that could serve as surrogates or instruments for outside powers.102 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, religious differences sometimes raised their heads in specific personal and commercial disputes between non-Muslim foreigners and locals, but they did not affect relationships between outside trading powers and Gulf rulers or the Ottomans in southern Iraq. The arrival on the Gulf of the Saʿūdīs in the 1780s–90s did not change this. They were notoriously more concerned to correct fellow Muslims than tackle Christians or Jews (even if these lay by definition further along the spectrum of unbelief). They did not let the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 deflect them from occupying the Holy Cities in 1803–5. The Government of

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India, which then ran British policy in the Gulf, assured Saʿūdī Imām Saʿūd (1803–14) that it was neutral in such intra-Muslim conflicts and ‘the British Government does not concern itself with the hostilities carried on by you against the members of the Mussulman faith, on account of their alleged deviation from the ordinances of the Koran’.103 The British were interested only in peaceful maritime trading and the overstretched forces of the Indian government were ill-configured for war with a landbased power. The Saʿūdīs were equally pragmatic and made overtures in 1810 and 1813 to enter an alliance with the British who sidestepped them.104 The British developed protectorates over Gulf states which the Saʿūdīs threatened to disrupt in the 1850s–60s, but this did not stop the British Resident in Bushihr visiting Riyadh in 1865.105 Ibn Saʿūd even tried manipulating the British into assuming a protecting role when he was confronting the Ottomans and their local allies in the 1910s.106 When British military support for the Saʿūdīs’ neighbours forced the country to become a territorially bounded state in the late 1920s, relations with the British, though strained, remained businesslike. The Saʿūdīs found no difficulty after 1945 in developing a strategic relationship with the US , however incongruous this alliance of interest appeared to outsiders and however repugnant it was to uncompromising members of the Wahhābī religious establishment. British external protection of nascent Gulf emirates, designed originally to preserve the maritime peace and prevent what they labelled piracy (arguably a maritime equivalent of tribal raiding or levying of protection money), preserved them from Saʿūdī takeover at intervals from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. It tended too to suspend the natural lifecycle of Gulf regimes as the British became drawn into local domestic affairs. Their native agents, and the British officials from India who replaced them from 1900, remained wary of meddling in religious matters on the basis that these were for local rulers to handle. Yet there were times in the 1920s and 1930s when the British put pressure on rulers in Bahrain and Kuwait to offer a better deal to Shīʿī and other communities in the interests of political stability.107 British introduction of extraterritorial jurisdiction and commercial courts to protect foreign merchants and expedite the handling of commercial disputes also sidelined local sharīʿah courts and enabled the Gulf States swiftly to enact commercial codes of British Indian or French origin on full independence.108 The British, as rulers of India, pursued a broadly non-interventionist policy towards the pilgrimage of Indian Muslims to the Holy Cities.109 Where the delicate balance sought by London and Bombay of respecting rulers’ domestic prerogatives, especially in the religious sphere, while enforcing maritime peace and encouraging free trade, ran into trouble was over enforcement of a key British public policy – suppression of slavery and the slave trade. For a period from the mid-nineteenth century, this effort was a vital task of the British and Indian navies and manumission became a regular function of British officials, to the resentment of H ․ ijāzīs, some Ottomans and many Gulf inhabitants. This was a sensitive issue for Muslims because banning slavery or the slave trade appeared to forbid what God allowed. Confronted by a revolt, the Ottomans exempted al-H ․ ijāz from their prohibition in 1857.110 After 1890, British anti-slavery measures, always ill-resourced and ineffective, lost intensity for both local and imperial reasons and British officials came to tolerate

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local slavery.111 There were sizeable slave populations, mainly of East African origin, in al-H ․ ijāz and up and down both sides of the Gulf even at the start of the twentieth century. Whereas original slavery in the Gulf had mostly been of females, male slaves now played a major role in the social and economic system, particularly in the pearling and date industries. The slave trade too was deeply embedded. Bowing to political and economic realities, the British declined to force local rulers to abolish slavery completely in their dominions. This avoided an awkward confrontation with religious overtones.112 After 1945, with local pearling defunct and economic dependence on slave labour reduced, the British resumed pressure. In 1953, the rulers of Kuwait and Qatar declared slavery unrecognized in law or forbidden. In 1962, Washington helped convince Riyadh to follow up its abolition of the slave trade in 1936 with the abolition of slavery itself, to surprisingly little apparent fuss from Wahhābī clerics.113 Finally, in 1963, the Trucial Council declared slavery forbidden and Omani Sul․t ān Qabus followed suit in 1970.114

Religious authority and political power among the Shīʿah While Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb re-stoked dormant disputes among Sunnīs over religious authority, leading Imāmī Shīʿah in the eighteenth century had yet to resolve longlasting controversies over the relationships between text and reasoning, and between clerics and non-clerics. Their difficulty stemmed from the disappearance of the Twelfth Imām in 874 (known as the ghaybah). This deprived the community of its infallible guide and source of legitimate religious and political authority. It also inhibited the emergence of an accepted notion of consensus.115 Religious authority devolved on the mullahs as the absent imām’s deputies, but his notional existence still imposed constraints. Shīʿī clerics wrestled over the certitude of the transmission of Imāmī commands, the role of reason in theology and law, and the relationship between clerics and laymen. If the learned were the best qualified interpreters of the Qurʾan and Imāmī traditions, what special status did this bestow? What kind of clerical hierarchy should there be, and what authority should it wield? What was to be expected of the layperson? How were Islamic norms to be enforced and popular religion controlled? Could political power and rulers be regarded as legitimate and righteous in the imām’s absence? These questions were fundamental to the Imāmī community. After long arguments between the rationalist, legalistic U․s ūlī trend and strict literalist Akhbārīs, the former won, opening the way to an expansive conception of clerical authority. The Imāmī community accepted not only the practice of independent reasoning (ijtihād) (since certitude was unattainable during the ghaybah), but the requirement that every Shīʿī follow a living practitioner of ijtihād, a mujtahid. This ensured built-in capacity for self-renewal. No question could ever be taken as settled since consensus had no legal force.116 As holders of all religious authority, scholars with the right qualifications could now exercise great power and influence as sources of emulation (marjiʿiyyat al-taqlīd). From the 1760s traditionist and anti-rationalist Akhbārīs, once prevalent in al-Najaf, Karbalāʾ and other areas under Sunnī rule, and who held that only the imāms warranted emulation, not clerics who differed little from

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laymen,117 lost sway. The U․s ūlīs marshalled their arguments and sources of patronage. The influence of Yūsuf al-Bah․rānī (d. 1772), the last widely respected Akhbārī scholar, and of his less judicious successors in Karbalāʾ was ousted by U․s ūlī rivals, Muh․ammad Bāqir al-Bihbihānī (d. 1791/92) and Jaʿfar Kāshif al-Ghi․t ā (d. 1812).118 Akhbārism’s virtual elimination from the shrine cities was assured when al-Bihbihānī’s pupils won over Qajar ruler Fath․ ʿAlī Shāh (d. 1834), leaving pockets of Akhbārī thought in alAh․sāʾ, in southern Iran and in India.119 In Bahrain its strength is a distinctive feature of local Shīʿism.120 Although this extended controversy played out within an educated elite (dividing clerics just when they faced first Nādir Shāh and then the Wahhābīs), it had practical consequences. The Akhbārīs, fearing the influence of Sunnī jurisprudence on Imāmī Shīʿism, helped fuel Safavid hostility to the Sunnīs, partly by reviving old anti-Sunnī ․hadīth literature.121 Al-Bah․rānī tried to tone down this sectarian element, not least in the interests of Shīʿah under Sunnī rule.122 Akhbārism too inhibited the development of religious hierarchies and ‘often disallowed the central functions of the Islamic state in the absence of the Twelfth Imam’.123 The more pragmatic U․s ūlīs, who had had close relations with the Safavids, had no religious objection to associating with rulers, although their victory did not commit them to a close relationship with the Iranian state. Recognition in Imāmī law of the ruler’s function in ordering right and forbidding wrong in the imām’s absence did not translate into a clear, easily applicable doctrine of just and legitimate government in the ghaybah. Mujtahids, widely perceived by the people as their protection against rulers, retained wide scope to deny the legitimacy of any Iranian ruler and so could relieve followers of the duty of obedience. They preserved a certain doctrinal as well as geographical distance from successive Iranian dynasties that might translate into alienation from political power.124 When removed from government support, these mujtahids depended financially on alms (zakāt and khums, one-fifth of a family’s surplus income). This made them susceptible to popular pressure from the uneducated and ill-informed.125 Under the Safavids, Imāmī Shīʿism became inextricably melded with Iranian national consciousness; under the Qajars, the state became in a sense peripheral to both. Religious allegiance did not mean political submission to the ruler for Shīʿism became an autonomous force.126 However, Sunnī rulers identified Imāmī Shīʿah in Iraq and the Gulf with the Iranian state when this threatened and doubted their political loyalties, especially when their alms went to Iranian mujtahids based in Iran or Iraq. This suspicion became acute once the issue of governance during the ghaybah was resolved for Khomeini’s followers by his controversial doctrine of rule by the jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh). This was institutionalized after the Shāh’s overthrow in 1979. It sought to replace dispersed centres of learning and fragmented leadership with a religious hierarchy entwined with a state keen to export a revolution that Khomeini never saw as confined to Iran. The potential of this concept had first been developed by Ah․mad al-Naraqī (d. 1828/9) from the principle of marjiʿiyyat al-taqlīd which became established in the mid-nineteenth century. This had remained disorderly in practice, as there were almost always several mujtahids to emulate as marjiʾ at any one time.127 The concept of wilāyat al-faqīh remained peripheral to mainstream Imāmī thought until Khomeini asserted the right of the jurist (faqīh) to exercise the Hidden Imām’s general

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authority in lectures in al-Najaf in early 1970.128 Numerous strands within Shīʿism contested the presumptuousness of this stance. The Safavid crushing of both Sufi orders and intellectual Sufis had left the Imāmī clerical establishment unchallenged by alternative poles of religious authority and untroubled by the potential for mystics to transcend the Sunnī–Shīʿī divide.129 But the religious hierarchy’s legalistic and monopolistic approach did not always manage to cater for the emotional and spiritual needs of ordinary Shīʿah easily drawn to alternative, charismatic poles of religious authority. This gap was partly closed by Shaykhism. This originated with the highly original writings and activities of the enigmatic Shaykh Ah․mad al-Ah․sāʾī (d. 1826), an Imāmī of the Banī Khālid from alAh․sāʾ whom the Wahhābīs forced out to Iraq in about 1790. In Iran he developed novel mystical and philosophical ideas that gave emotional sustenance without creating a Sufi pole to rival the Imāms. Reassuringly for the establishment, he also accepted the obligation to obey the mujtahid.130 Despite winning initial support among Qajar notables, clerics and the people, especially in his native al-Ah․sāʾ, his doctrines and popularity threatened U․s ūlī mujtahids in Iran and Iraq. After twenty years in Iran he was subject to a takfīr in 1822 that drove him out to Karbalāʾ.131 Al-Ah․sāʾī never sought to establish a distinct school. After his death near Makkah an Iranian disciple, Kāzim Rashtī (d. 1843), made his doctrines, which had thousands of followers, the basis of the Shaykhī School. This aroused clerical resistance from those eager to keep the esoteric element of religion away from the common person and controlled by the elite.132 More U․s ūlī than Akhbārī and hostile to mainstream Sufism, al-Ah․sāʾī shared the Sufi view of the role of the spirit in giving religious legitimacy alongside scholastic jurisprudence and rationalism.133 Rashtī, however, propagated a millenarianism that helped spawn Babism. In 1844 a Shaykhī, ʿAlī Shirazī (d. 1850), claimed to be the gate (Bāb) of the Twelfth Imām. This adventist movement was suppressed by 1852 but a follower fashioned it in the 1860s and 1870s into the Bahāʾī faith. This has endured since, despite waves of repression in Iran and pressure elsewhere.134

Religious authority and political power: the Ibād․ī dichotomy Ibād․ism, the dominant creed in Muscat and Oman, derives from elements in early Islam that shared the beliefs that the caliph should be elected from any tribe and that an unjust imām could and should be deposed.135 This put them at odds with both Shīʿah and Sunnīs, from whose schismatic feud Ibād․īs stood aside. Some adherents, like the Khārijites, were extremist, but quietist moderates survived to establish a religiously sanctioned government under an imām based at al-Rustāq and then Nizwā in inner tribal Oman. Because of inherent weaknesses, this imāmate, established in the eighth century but subject to long hiatuses thereafter, was better suited from its alignment with tribal structures and identification with the isolated Omani interior to be an instrument of resistance to external intrusion than a vehicle for the emergence of centralized or institutionalized government.136 After the accession of an elected Āl Bū Saʿīd imām in 1749, dissension within his dynasty led to his son and successors

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exercising independent power from the entrepôt of Muscat which controlled the inland trade, while an imām held sway in Nizwā. Having exchanged the turbulent interior for this outward-looking port, the Āl Bū Saʿīd set out aggressively to create a commercial empire in the Gulf and East Africa and control the Gulf carrying trade. They intervened in the tribal interior, from which they were now alienated, only when their trading interests were threatened. They assumed the title sayyid, exercised purely secular political authority without religious sanction (hence the title sul․t ān bestowed by the British), and envisaged dynastic succession.137 Theoretically, this sul․t ānate was a secular part of a greater spiritual imāmate since the elected imām was meant to combine political and religious authority. The existence of a contemporary imām does not appear to have delegitimized the Āl Bū Saʿīd rulers of Muscat. After 1821 the imāmate went into abeyance and the community entered a state of clandestinity (kitmān), as Ibād․ī doctrine allowed. Ibād․ī devotees, worried by British control, foreign cultural influence and the sul․t āns’ failure to enforce the sharīʿah, kept the notion of the imāmate alive and championed Ibād․ī revivalism which, like other Salafi-style movements, harked back to a purer era.138 An attempt to restore the imāmate failed in 1845–50. Subsequently, the rule of an elected imām in Muscat lasted just three years (1868–71). In 1913 clerics secured the election of an imām as the focus of rebellion against Muscat, who was succeeded by another on his murder.139 An accommodation reached in 1920 broke down when Saʿūdī ambitions, oil concessions and the death of the old imām in 1954 precipitated a rebellion by a new imām in 1957.140 By 1962 the sul․t ān had established sufficient grip over central Oman with British military assistance to extinguish the discredited imāmate cause. The British justified this on the basis that the interior belonged to the sul․t ān and he was suppressing rebels. So ended the anomalous juxtaposition of a decentralized, isolationist, religiously sanctioned authority in the Omani interior, and a temporal power on the coast that notionally represented it to the outside world, yet belonged to just that outward-looking, cosmopolitan culture it despised and feared.

Ottoman twilight and pan-Islamism In 1914–15, after throwing in their lot with the Christian Central Powers, the Ottomans called for jihād against the British. Putting their pan-Islamist policy to the test as an external regional power seeking to influence Muslims throughout the Peninsula, they sent emissaries to Najd and elsewhere around Arabia to garner support. They received short shrift. The summons to jihād from the sul․t ān, as self-proclaimed Sunnī champion, had no resonance among peninsular Arabs, save with the pro-Ottoman Āl Rashīd of 141 H ․ āʾil, already locked in a fatal struggle with the Saʿūdīs. The Shīʿī majority in the upper Gulf were impervious, despite support for the summons to jihād from some of the Shīʿī mujtahids in Iraq.142 Sunnī rulers in Riyadh, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar had manoeuvred for decades to elude the Ottomans’ control, while sometimes exploiting them to counter British domination. They now prevaricated, conscious that British power, mobilizing for global war, had extended reach, whereas Ottoman influence in the Gulf had already receded sharply from its 1870s high-water mark.143 The deposition

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of feared Sul․t ān ʿAbd al-H ․ amīd II in 1908, and the subsequent struggle for the empire’s future direction in Istanbul that left the powers and reputation of the sul․t ān diminished, undermined the Ottoman cause. The Saʿūdī reaction was key for the Ottomans. Yet bitter Saʿūdī and Wahhābī antagonism towards the Ottomans had been an Arabian reality for a century. The Ottomans had expunged the First Saʿūdī State by exploiting the ambitions of governor Muh․ammad ʿAlī of Egypt and the ruthless military skill of his son Ibrāhīm. After capturing al-Dirʿiyyah in 1818, Ibrāhīm sent the Saʿūdī ruler to Istanbul for execution, scattered or exiled other Saʿūdī notables, and gained control of Central Arabia and al144 Ah․sāʾ as well as al-H ․ ijāz. Only British pressure protected Bahrain and other Gulf polities, including Iraq, from Cairo’s aggression. It took international conventions in 1840 to compel Egyptian withdrawal from Arabia, Syria and Palestine.145 Wahhābism survived the occupation, despite a breakdown of communal disciplines in Najd and rivalries within the surviving Saʿūdī elite. Although a branch of the Āl Saʿūd re-established itself in Riyadh and restored the Āl al-Shaykh,146 the dynasty was feebler, the Wahhābī movement more defensive, introverted and bitter. The less isolated clerics of northern Najd blamed the intransigence of southern Najdī clerics for the preceding catastrophe, which leading Wahhābīs struggled to explain in religious terms.147 On the Peninsula’s periphery, in the Gulf, H ․ ad․ramawt and elsewhere, those who succumbed to Saʿūdī power, resisted or watched anxiously from the sidelines (like the British or Persians) had been relieved at the First Saʿūdī State’s demise. Wahhābī coastal communities went on exercising local influence regardless of Saʿūdī fortunes.148 For the rest of the century, periodic Saʿūdī revivals and incursions that alarmed Gulf shaykhs, sul․t āns of Muscat and the British, were interspersed with spells of Najdī introspection or confusion, culminating in the self-destructive Saʿūdī civil war of the 1860s–80s that left the mildly Wahhābī Āl Rashīd of H ․ āʾil occupying Riyadh. The Wahhābīs never recognized the sul․t ān as caliph, but nor did the Saʿūdī imām ever claim the caliphate for himself.149 When the Saʿūdīs took the Holy Cities in 1803– 5, they appear initially to have sought suzerainty, not to eliminate all manifestations of Ottoman sovereignty.150 Explicit Wahhābī designation of the Ottomans as unbelievers (takfīr) came with the outbreak of hostilities. Thereafter the Saʿūdī ruler at intervals acknowledged subordination to the sul․t ān through gritted teeth, while rejecting the caliphate, which the Wahhābīs believed lay historically with the Arabs, not the Turks.151 Mutual hostility remained deeply engrained, matched by parallel enmity between Wahhābīs and pro-Ottoman Naqshbandī Sufis.152 This hatred became acute once the Ottomans, fearful of expanding British influence, reoccupied al-Ah․sāʾ from Iraq in 1871, exploiting a call for help from ousted Wahhābī ruler ʿAbd Allāh against his usurping brother Saʿūd, and resumed an active role in the Gulf. For most of the Wahhābī establishment this appeal to an unbelieving state was the ultimate betrayal.153 For the Shīʿah it was a relief, as they benefited from a more permissive religious atmosphere in al-Ah․sāʾ that even saw Jews from Iraq selling alcohol openly there.154 It took extended campaigning and manoeuvring by ʿAbd alʿAzīz (known as Ibn Saʿūd), founder of the Third Saʿūdī State who recovered Riyadh in 1902, to expel the Ottomans in 1913. When in 1914, after failing to interest the British in protecting his fragile state, he entered into a stillborn secret treaty with the

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Ottomans under which he accepted an Ottoman title, he showed how far pragmatism, not religious ideology, might drive Saʿūdī policy.155 Neither strand made him responsive to the Ottoman summons to jihād. The other Gulf shaykhs too were glad to see the Turks ousted from the Gulf, including the Āl Thānī rulers of Qatar, who had adopted Wahhābism as their emirate’s creed in 1902 in circumstances and for reasons that await research.156 As the modernizing Ottoman state was reasserting itself in the Gulf after 1871, so Iran was achieving territorial definition, recovering sovereignty and control over the autonomous principalities on the Gulf coast. Always a continental power with a weak navy to patrol its maritime periphery and collect customs dues, the Iranian state had imported Sunnī Arab tribal leaders in the eighteenth century under a lease system to help secure inaccessible coastal areas.157 It then relied on the British to enforce security.158 These were politically and religiously awkward expedients. The Qajars ended the independent Arab al-Madhkūr shaykhdom at Bushihr in 1850, the Muscati lease in Bandar ʿAbbas in 1868, and the Qawāsim presence at Lingah in 1887. Reza Shah extinguished the shaykhdom of Muh․ammarah in Khuzistan in 1924. Since these shaykhs held title under Tehran, the British declined to protect their shaykhdoms as they did those on the Arabian coast, indeed prevented the Qawāsim and Omanis from defending their interests by force.159 Many Sunnīs of Arab origin (known as ․hawalah) duly returned to the Arabian side of the Gulf, while Iranian Shīʿah (called ʿAjam) crossed to avoid bad droughts, Qajar or Pahlavi fiscal or reform measures, or simply to pursue better job or trading opportunities. These incoming ʿAjam were sometimes resented by indigenous Shīʿah.160 The Gulf ’s geography of belief became no simpler.

Nation states and religious establishments From the 1920s, instigated by the British, who generally acted to preserve the political status quo, delineation of borders led to the creation of territorial nation states in the Gulf, even as Sunnī Islam lost the territoriality once represented by the Ottoman caliphate, abolished in 1924, two years after the sul․t ānate.161 Boundaries between rival power centres and tribes were previously inexact, and local entities often thrived in elastic buffer zones, especially between the Ottomans and the Persians.162 Now artificial, if still porous, frontiers cut through traditional tribal grazing areas, severing tribal sections, and constraining the mobility that underlay the cosmopolitan outlook of so many Gulf inhabitants. Traditionalist Wahhābīs, Imāmī Shīʿī activists in Iraq, Ibād․īs and others found the very concept of the territorial state – artefact of man, not God – alien and illegitimate, and struggled conceptually, or in the case of the Wahhābī Ikhwān militarily, against the new order. Some elements stayed unreconciled to the nation state. Others accepted the reality while retaining a universalist Islamic outlook.163 The latter adapted by looking for new ways to pursue global religious ambitions, preserve and develop their trans-regional networks, and outflank the growing power of governments. In countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia or Oman, where nascent national identity could be associated closely with particular confessional loyalty, religious authorities

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were in principle better placed to preserve their status and influence, yet found themselves wrestling for much of the twentieth century with governments seeking to dominate domestically and modernize (save in Oman before 1970). For confessional minorities, such as non-Wahhābīs in al-H ․ ijāz or Shīʿah in al-Ah․sāʾ, the elision of dominant religious ideology with national identity evoked a sense of isolation, exclusion and discrimination.164 Their situation was exacerbated when rulers viewed or presented them as a potential fifth column responsive to the interests of a neighbouring power. Following the failed uprising against the British occupiers in Karbalāʾ in 1920 led by a mujtahid, Muh․ammad Shirāzī, this was the experience of Iraqi Shīʿah under the Sunnī monarchy and succeeding regimes.165 Under a 1924 law long-time Iranian residents were given a special identity card specifying their Iranian nationality.166 Iraqi Arab nationalists’ anti-Iranianism and anti-Shīʿism took root among Kuwaiti and Bahraini nationalists.167 Of all Arabian rulers, Ibn Saʿūd had the greatest difficulty establishing a stable government within a conventional nation state, especially once his domains encompassed al-Ah․sāʾ and al-H ․ ijāz with their heterogeneous religious traditions. At intervals both Wahhābī clerics and the settled and indoctrinated bedouin, who constituted the Ikhwān, challenged the domestic compromises he believed necessary. Through skilful posturing, timely concessions and occasional ruthlessness, he succeeded in isolating Ikhwānī extremists. When they would not accept his ban on tribal raiding beyond Saʿūdī borders against neighbouring countries, including Kuwait, he defeated them in battle.168 His vision of Wahhābism was in line with the grain of a long-term, if uneven, Wahhābī trend away from confrontation and towards greater accommodation with other currents in Sunnī Islam and prevailing regional conditions.169 He set out to submerge Wahhābism’s identity in the broader Salafī movement. His aim here was to protect it from charges of sectarianism, enlist the support of sympathetic Sunnī elements in Egypt, Iraq and elsewhere, and enable Saʿūdī influence to spread regionally and internationally. This was partly a response to a radically different regional situation. The Turks had abolished the caliphate in March 1924. King H ․ usayn of al-H ․ ijāz launched an abortive attempt to appropriate the title for himself. Then the Saʿūdīs reoccupied Makkah and al-Madīnah in 1924–5, with accompanying Wahhābī desecration of tombs. This sequence of events placed the Wahhābīs back at the centre of the Islamic world – and of controversy over control of the Holy Places and the pilgrimage. There was a brief pan-Islamist bid to internationalize al-H ․ ijāz. The anti-colonial, multi-sect Khilāfat movement in India tried to preserve the Ottoman caliphate as a symbol of Muslim unity and then find an alternative caliph among Arab monarchs to serve as a mobilizing counterweight to the British Raj.170 Disputes among proponents, the defects of individual candidates and a lack of consensus over the caliphal role caused these moves to fizzle out. This left Ibn Saʿūd in command of both Holy Cities and pilgrimage, though struggling financially.171 Taqī al-Dīn al-Nabh․ānī, founder of H ․ izb al-Tah․rīr, called for a restoration of the caliphate in 1952 but governments uniformly suppressed his marginal Palestine-driven movement. The episode served only to highlight how quickly pan-Islamist fervour had faded on the surface.172 A residual longing for transnational unity based on religion, however, persisted to an extent in the regional

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Figure 2.3 An Ikhwan member (1923).

consciousness, a phenomenon the twenty-first century extremist movement calling itself the Islamic State has sought to resuscitate and exploit. It goes too far to say that with the arrival of the nation state ‘in the twentieth century the historical unity of Gulf society was shattered’.173 Many aspects of society, especially

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family and community links, remained transnational in nature. Yet the general trend was towards greater state consolidation and competition, more authoritarian rule, and constriction of the mobility, fluidity and diversity that had distinguished indigenous communities.174 The advent of the nation state and drive to substitute state identity and patriotic loyalty for allegiance to confession, clan or locality had an exclusionary effect on long-included elements of those communities. In the Arabian Peninsula, nationals had to be Muslim. Non-Arabs, and even some local Arabs, struggled to gain full citizenship with all the welfare privileges it bestowed. The need to improve education beyond religious instruction, create state bureaucracies, and staff growing non-sharīʿah court systems led peninsular governments to break residual clerical monopolies. This turned clerics from independent mediators between government and people into salaried employees subject to institutional hierarchy and government control.175 Some Gulf States and shaykhdoms had always imported clerics, having failed to develop their own clerical class. This was so of Qatar and the Trucial States with Sunnīs, and Kuwait and Oman with the Shīʿah.176 Now governments brought in legions of nonGulf Arabs to supplement the few locals available with a modern education. Almost invariably Sunnī, teachers, secular lawyers and civil servants arrived in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere from Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, alongside nonskilled labour from the subcontinent and beyond. With the former came radical political and religious ideas, transregional links, and a new breed of lay intellectuals with invasive religious ideas that challenged the influence of traditional Sunnī, and to a lesser degree Shīʿī, clerics. This sudden descent of so many outsiders, Muslim and non-Muslim, began abruptly from the 1960s to change the Gulf ’s religious demography. It forced Gulf inhabitants, whose religiosity had been conventional and unquestioning, to confront their own sometimes weak understanding of Islam as clerics defined it, and to defend local religious traditions against the asserted orthodoxy of condescending new arrivals.

The politicization of religion and the modern roots of Islamic radicalism In the 1950s and 1960s, peninsular governments were subject to subversive propaganda from secular Arab nationalists working to upend West-supported monarchical and shaykhly rule. By 1971 they had achieved success in Egypt (1952), Iraq (1958), Yemen (1962) and Libya (1969). Nationalist and leftist ferment, encouraged by Gamal Abdul Nasser (d. 1970) and often associated with nascent labour movements, was comparatively limited in the Gulf, thanks partly to the stabilizing British presence. Saudi Arabia was at risk until the weak King Saʿūd was ousted in 1964 by the toughminded Fay․s al (d. 1975).177 Regional religious movements, both Sunnī and Shīʿī, found themselves debilitated by government reforms or regime hostility, competition from communism or secular nationalism, and their own lack of appeal to state-educated youth. Only later did it become clear that Nasser’s death marked the turn in the region’s ideological tide. Thereafter religion assumed a new importance in Gulf politics, partly because of the influence of regional exiles and the movements they represented.

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Repressive nationalist regimes outside the Gulf had left the mosque as the only autonomous space available to opposition forces that increasingly resorted to religion to express their grievances and mobilize the populace. The Arabian side of the Gulf, where governments were still institutionally weak and, save in Riyadh, religiously laissez-faire by tradition, became a zone where such elements could retreat, regroup, seek funds and proselytize. King Fay․s al spearheaded a domestic and regional Islamist response to Nasserism. He welcomed Muslim Brothers fleeing Nasserist persecution. They assumed influential Saʿūdī teaching posts but did not share the quietist, obedient approach of traditional Wahhābīs to political power.178 Muslim Brother ideological influence within the educational system politicized students and seeped into Wahhābī thought, shaping future contests between increasingly diverse and radicalized Wahhābī elements and the Āl Saʿūd.179 Correspondingly, some Muslim Brothers were influenced by Wahhābī doctrines and became Salafized.180 Clerical and lay offspring of Wahhābism challenged the religious establishment. Sometimes they fused distinct doctrinal strands, including even apocalyptic notions, into potentially explosive compounds, as in the unnerving attack on the Great Mosque in Makkah by Juhaymān al-‘Utaybī, his proclaimed Mahdī, and their followers in December 1979.181 The Muslim Brothers also laid the seeds of future political and cultural influence in Kuwait, Qatar and the northern Trucial States. They won support through educational and welfare activities. Internationally, King Fay․s al set out a claim for leadership of the Islamic world by founding the Muslim World League in 1962 as an instrument of Saʿūdī propaganda and Wahhābī activism and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in 1969 as a forum for Islamic governments.182 Conscious of the common Nasserist threat, he scaled back aggressive Saʿūdī and Wahhābī activities in the frontier areas of Gulf neighbours that were still a source of tension in the 1950s and 1960s.183 The indirect influence of Saʿūdī-supported Salafism as the new asserted orthodoxy still helped standardize Sunnī religious practice in the Gulf (affecting women especially), foster religiosity and sharpen sectarian hostility to Shīʿism. Among the Shīʿah new political movements arose in the Iraqi shrine cities in the late 1950s and 1960s to counter the appeal of Marxism, the decline of religiosity, and the loss of status and influence that clerics in al-Najaf and Karbalāʾ had suffered since the 1920s, especially once the centre of the marjiʿiyyah shifted to Qum in Iran.184 These drew for mobilization on traditional Imāmī motifs of resistance to oppression and stayed close to clerical hierarchies, exploiting existing network infrastructure for political purposes. The al-Daʿwah party, founded in 1958 in al-Najaf, modelled partly on the Muslim Brothers and H ․ izb al-Tah․rīr and grounded in the lay educated classes, was designed to revive the authority of the religious institution and fight secularism. Controversially it combined party obedience with a vow of allegiance to the marjiʿiyyah.185 A second, rival movement was created in Karbalāʾ by the Shirāzī clerical family, supported by the al-Mudarrisī clan. They rejected the concept of a political party, perhaps fearing the loss of control this could entail, but viewed political activism as a clerical duty. Founded in the late 1960s and exploiting religious rituals for mobilization, the Islamic Action Organization, like al-Daʿwah, retained autonomy from the marjiʿiyyah. Unlike al-Daʿwah it set out to compete with it.186 Both had a

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universal religious message and Islamic worldview, as well as narrow Iraqi political goals. Both were repressed by the Iraqi regime in the late 1960s. In the 1970s they extended their influence down the Gulf. Al-Daʿwah established a presence in Bahrain and Kuwait probably in the later 1960s and in Dubai in 1971. The Shirāzīs made Kuwait an important base for activity from 1971, while the al-Mudarrisīs established themselves in Bahrain in the early 1970s and developed links and influence in Saudi Arabia and Oman soon after.187 As the British managed their timely withdrawal from the Gulf, the stage was set for these militant movements to radicalize elements in Gulf Shīʿī communities. This was against the backdrop of sharply deteriorating relations between the Arabian side of the Gulf and Iran after the Khomeinist revolution of 1979, and the emergence of extreme Salafī elements beyond the control of the Saʿūdīs and Wahhābī religious establishment from the later 1970s.

Conclusion Events only a few years after the British withdrawal illuminated trends barely perceptible in 1972. Most observers of the Middle East at that point remained impressed by the vigour of secular nationalist regimes and movements and the apparent impotence, almost irrelevance, of religious movements. The foundation of Shīʿī activist groups in Iraq and introduction of the rule of the jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh) in Iran after 1979, taken with the fragmentation of Sunnism into competing Salafī and Islamist groups from the 1980s, prompted a swift re-evaluation of the political appeal of religion in many countries. This offered both a powerful mobilizing ideology and a means to challenge entrenched patterns of power. In terms of broad trends within the two main branches of Islam, a still longer perspective indicates that over the period 1700–1971 Sunnism and Shīʿism were moving, however uncertainly and unevenly, on contrasting trajectories in how doctrinally they tackled the nature of clerical authority and the relationship between clerics and political power. These trends exacerbated rather than softened sectarian tensions around the Gulf. Sunnīs within the Ottoman world had begun the period with broadly uniform views on clerical authority with a ready acceptance of close links between clerics and those wielding political authority. By contrast Imāmī Shīʿah were doctrinally and institutionally divided. Akhbārīs and U․s ūlīs held widely divergent views, especially on the status and role of clerics and the legitimacy of temporal rulers. Imāmī Shīʿism then shifted in a direction that gave clerics ever greater authority while distancing them to a degree from rulers in Tehran. Mujtahids entrenched their power and influence over ordinary believers and the doctrine of marjiʿiyyah helped consolidate and reinforce a clerical hierarchy, for all that it remained fragmented in practice. Political reengagement culminated in the political institutionalization of that hierarchy in Iran through rule by the jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh) and installation of the Ayatollāh as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. This did not end segmentation of the marjiʿiyyah within Imāmī Shīʿism for some mujtahids rejected the concept of wilāyat al-faqīh, nor did it overcome divisions imposed by nation states and fostered by local nationalisms.188 Yet it meant that Imāmī Shīʿism had captured the Iranian state and gained a regional

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champion for Shīʿah around whom they could rally. It could even attract disaffected Sunnīs beyond its borders and offer support to non-Sunnī Muslim minorities, such as Alawites and Zaydīs. By contrast Sunnism shifted from embodying a broad consensus to a state of doctrinal fracture. Wahhābism was an important factor in this transformation. It sought to level or uproot existing religious and spiritual hierarchies, and subverted the special authority of clerics even as it legitimized a political dynasty that guaranteed, and also controlled, its future. By the 1980s, Wahhābism was itself splintering into the conservative state variant and other more radical forms that challenged the very legitimacy of the Saʿūdī state and right of the Āl Saʿūd to rule. For all their ambition to standardize Islamic beliefs and practices, Salafīs of all hues propagated rival ideologies and visions of Islam, pursuing everything from apolitical conservatism to the almost nihilistic violence of jihadist elements from the later 1990s. Not only did they turn on each other, as well as on the Shīʿah, but they had to compete with Muslim Brothers and other Islamists, who generally eschewed violence but campaigned ruthlessly for educational and social influence and then for political power. Across the spectrum, lay intellectuals purveyed religious ideologies that usurped the authority of religious establishments. Sunnī Islam, which had once enjoyed the unifying protection of the Ottomans, splintered, with many religious groups now challenging those in political power. Over the centuries to 1971 the innately tolerant religious culture of the mercantile communities of the Gulf littoral had found itself buffeted by Wahhābī ideological and military aggression, by the anti-Sunnism of the Safavids, Zand and Qajar dynasties, and by the assertive pan-Islamism of the Ottomans. It survived and prevailed. This was partly thanks to the external protection of the British. But Gulf inhabitants with their transnational links also showed themselves determined not to have the complexities of their mixed identities, nor their engrained cosmopolitanism, reduced to a simple, narrow confessional paradigm imposed from outside. Since 1971, state rivalry and ideological hostility across the Gulf have heightened levels of sectarian antagonism in the wider region. Some regimes have resorted to exploiting and manipulating people’s identities to divide society along religious, ethnic or other lines and prevent the emergence domestically of broadly based political challenges. This trend has placed new and unprecedented strains on the religious tolerance, transnational outlook and hybrid cultural heritage that have been distinguishing features of the Gulf throughout its pre-modern and modern history.

Notes 1 Michael Izady, ‘The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity’, in Lawrence Potter and Gary Sick, eds, Security in the Persian Gulf (New York, 2002), pp. 33–90, at pp. 75–7, describes the contemporary demographic balance. This reflects the effort by the Bahraini government in recent decades to shift it by importing Sunnīs. 2 Laurence Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (London, 2008), p. 17.

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3 Izady, ‘The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity’, p. 63. For the bedouin features of local Shīʿism, see Hanna Batatu, ‘Iraq’s Underground Shīʿa Movements’, Middle East Journal (MEJ ), Vol. 35, No. 4 (1981), pp. 578–94, at pp. 584–6. 4 See, generally, Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, ‘The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf ’, in Lawrence Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York, 2009), pp. 129–45. Many of the so-called ․hawalah left after Reza Shāh (d. 1941) introduced economic and social reforms in 1933–6 (ibid., p. 135). 5 Izady offers a language map of the contemporary Gulf at http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/ images/maps/GulfLanguageGeneral_lg.png (accessed 11 January 2016). Persian was the dominant language among Gulf communities until the mid-seventeenth century (Izady, ‘The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity’, p. 72). 6 By Islamic consensus the four law schools (madhāhib) represent equally valid interpretations of the sharīʿah, a status reflected in the organization of Sunnī religious institutions. 7 Izady has prepared a valuable religious map of today’s Gulf, which conveys the nature of the patchwork (at http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/GulfReligionGeneral_ lg.png, accessed 11 January 2016). In showing the distribution of the four Sunnī schools, the map conflates H ․ anbalism with Wahhābism. As the map’s commentary explains, it is possible to be H ․ anbalī without being Wahhābī, just as it is possible to be Wahhābī in theology without being H ․ anbalī in law (fiqh). In considering how the map applies to earlier centuries, we should note that Wahhābism did not reach the Gulf until the late eighteenth century and was represented patchily in the southern Gulf during the nineteenth century. Salafism did not exist as a widely identified current of thought distinct from Wahhābism before the early twentieth century. 8 This was criticized by the Wahhābīs who, on taking Makkah in 1803, insisted that all schools pray together in one congregation with representatives of the schools taking it in turns to act as imām (the Makkah risālah of Shaykh ʿAbd Allāh Āl al-Shaykh abridged in Sulaymān ibn Sih․mān, ed., al-Hadiyyah al-saniyyah wa-al-tu․hfah alWahhābiyyah al-Najdiyyah [Cairo, 1925/6], pp. 35–50, at p. 37). 9 There are many documented examples of Najdī settlements riven by disputes, leading to migrations of tribal segments or families to the Gulf. Some founded new clerical dynasties there. The worst case of entrenched clan conflict destroying a prosperous centre of learning is that of Ushayqir in Najd’s al-Washm, which declined precipitously after feuding that lasted from 1697/98 to 1736/37 (Ibrāhīm ibn ʿĪsā, Tārīkh baʿd․ al-․hawādith al-wāqiʿah fī Najd [Riyadh, 1999], pp. 63, 66–9, 74, 79–80). A famous example of migration from a settlement is the case of the Āl Khalīfah who were among the leading ʿUtbī families to settle with the Āl ․Sabāh․ in Kuwait. After an encounter with the Banī Kaʿb in the al-Muh ․ammarah area and a falling out with the Āl S․abāh․ (Abdullah Al-Khalifa and Ali Aba Hussain, ‘The Utoob in the Eighteenth Century’, in Abdullah Al-Khalifa and Michael Rice, eds, Bahrain through the Ages [London and New York, 1993], pp. 301–34, at p. 304), they followed the Āl ibn ʿAlī to al-Zubārah in 1766 before making themselves rulers of Bahrain in 1782–3. They governed that from al-Zubārah until 1796. 10 An example was the al-Kawwāz mosque in the Mishrāq quarter of Basra, dedicated to the Shādhilī Sufi order but controlled by the Bāsh al-Aʿyān al-ʿAbbāsī family. This had a school attached (ʿAbd al-Qādir Bāsh al-Aʿyān al-ʿAbbāsī, al-Ba․s rah fī adwārihah al-tārīkhiyyah [Baghdad, 1961], pp 81–3). The famous anti-Wahhābī Gulf historian ʿUthmān ibn Sanad (d. 1826), a Mālikī, began his education there (ʿAbd al-Razzāq

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12

13

14

15

16

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The Emergence of the Gulf States Āl ․Sāniʿ and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-ʿAlī, Imārat al-Zubayr bayn hijratayn [n.p., 1988], Part 3, p. 77). This appears to have lain behind much of the early opposition from rulers to Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, who threatened to bring social and political disruption as well as exacerbate religious divisions. The political implications of such mobility are described in Peter Lienhardt’s ‘The Authority of Shaykhs in the Gulf: An Essay in Nineteenth-Century History’, in R.B. Serjeant and R.L. Bidwell, eds, Arabian Studies 2 (London, 1975), pp. 61–75. The progression of pearl merchant Ah ․mad Rizq (d. 1809/10) in search of stable business conditions close to Gulf pearling banks is indicative. He left Kuwait for al-Ah․sāʾ with his father in 1774/75, moved swiftly on to al-Zubārah, lived there until 1799 when Saʿūdī attacks threatened business, moved to Jaw on Bahrain’s west coast, left when the Sultan of Oman attacked in 1800–1801 and the Saʿūdīs arrived in their wake, and ended his career in Basra, where the Ottomans greeted him warmly and he had a mosque built (biography of Ibn Sanad by Dr H ․ asan Āl Thānī, ed., Ibn Sanad, Sabāʾik al-ʿAsjad [Doha, 2007], pp. 58–83). Mohammad Vosoughi, ‘The Kings of Hormuz’, in Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf, pp. 89–104, esp. at pp. 94–9; Edmund Herzig, ‘Hormuz “Ville sans Antécédents, de Durée Circonscrite” (AUBIN )’, Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BSMES), Vol. 12, No. 1 (1985), pp. 3–11. ʿAbd al-Rah․mān al-Suwaydī, Tārīkh ․hawādith Baghdād wa-al-Ba․s rah (Baghdad, 1978), pp. 48, 51; Ibrāhīm Fa․s īh․ al-H ․ aydarī, A․hwāl al-Ba․s rah (Baghdad, 1961), pp. 4–7. Al-H ․ aydarī was writing in 1869/70. Those not driven out by the plague fled the Persian occupation. Examples were the poet and merchant ʿUthmān ibn Salmān (d. 1811/12) and trader and patron Bakr Luʾluʾ al-Ba․s rī (d. 1787) (Ibn Sanad, Sabāʾik al-ʿAsjad, pp. 203, 220–1). According to Muh ․ammad al-Fākhirī, 50,300, amounting to almost the whole population of Basra, died there of plague, and about another 6,000 in al-Zubayr (Tārīkh al-Fākhirī [Riyadh, 1999], pp. 144–5). This is well attested in ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-ʿA․s fūr, Fatāwā ʿUlamāʾ al-A․hsāʾ wamasāʾilhum (Beirut, 2001, 2 parts), the biographies in ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Bābtayn, Aʿlām min al-A․hsāʾ (al-Khubar, 1996), and ʿAlī al-Bah․rānī, Anwār al-Badrayn (Beirut, 2003, 3 vols). Al-Ah․sāʾ harboured many of the best-known early anti-Wahhābī Sunnīs, including H ․ anbalīs Muh․ammad ibn ʿAfāliq (d. 1750) and Muh․ammad ibn Fayrūz (d. 1801/2), Mālikī ʿĪsā ibn ʿAbd al-Rah․mān ibn Mu․t laq (d. 1783/4), and Shāfiʿī ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-La․t īf (d. 1767/8). Some local Sunnī ʿulamāʾ did join the Wahhābīs. Al-Zubārah was home for a few decades to an impressive range of clerics from all the law schools, of whom ʿUthmān ibn Sanad offers numerous biographies in Sabāʾik al-ʿAsjad. Committed anti-Wahhābism seems to have been the common element. Already full of Najdī exiles, al-Zubayr succeeded al-Zubārah as a magnet for antiWahhābīs. Some critics claimed systematic Saʿūdī killing of clerical opponents (e.g. Ibn Sanad, Ma․t āliʿ al-Suʿūd [Baghdad, 1991], p. 197; Ah ․mad ibn Zaynī Dah ․lān, al-Durar al-Saniyyah [Cairo, 1966], pp. 44, 51, 56, and idem, Khulā․s at al-Kalām [Cairo, 1887/88], pp. 230–1, 236), but the evidence suggests relatively few Sunnī ʿulamāʾ were killed during the Wahhābī struggle in the Peninsula. Most Sunnī anti-Wahhābīs were driven into exile or had to endure Saʿūdī hospitality and Wahhābī indoctrination in alDirʿiyyah. Shīʿī clerics, by contrast, were killed by the Saʿūdīs in al-Ah․sāʾ as well as in the slaughter at Karbalāʾ in 1802. Al-Suwaydī, Tārīkh ․hawādith, p. 45. The Baghdadi al-Suwaydī was struck by how pious Kuwaiti women were (ibid.). Ibrāhīm Fa․s īh ․ al-H ․ aydarī describes all the merchants as

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18 19

20

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22 23 24

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Sunnīs of the Shāfiʿī, Mālikī and H ․ anbalī schools (he does not mention the presence of Shīʿah). There were some Shāfiʿī and H ․ anbalī ʿulamāʾ (A․hwāl al-Ba․s rah, pp. 8–9). By way of comparison, Sunnī al-Zubayr had ten mosques by the end of the eighteenth century, of which six had been founded in the previous fifty years (Āl S․āniʿ and al-ʿAlī, eds, Imārat al-Zubayr, Part 3, pp. 22–35). Only one (al-Najādah) was large enough to accommodate Friday prayers and its imām was muftī and qād․ī of the town (ibid., p. 23). Mosques were often founded by individuals (men and women) or by families. The Bāsh al-Aʿyān al-ʿAbbāsī family of Basra founded at least six mosques around the town, in addition to the al-Kawwāz mosque (Bāsh al-Aʿyān al-ʿAbbāsī, al-Ba․s rah, p. 83). Yitzhak Nakash, Reaching for Power (Princeton, 2006), p. 23. Thanks to Ibn Sanad’s panegyric in Sabāʾik al-ʿAsjad, the best-known Gulf benefactor and patron of Sunnī learning and clerics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the merchant Ah ․mad ibn Rizq (n. 12 above). His business associate, Bakr Luʾluʾ, also built a school or two in al-Ah․sāʾ and a mosque in al-Zubārah (Ibn Sanad, Sabāʾik al-ʿAsjad, p. 222). There will have been others whose generosity remained unsung. One anti-Wahhābī, the H ․ anafī Rāshid ibn Khinīn (d. c.1805/06) who fled al-Kharj ahead of the Saʿūdīs and settled in al-Zubārah, had his debts paid by Ibn Rizq (Ibn Sanad, Sabāʾik al-ʿAsjad, p. 152). He had previously received a gift under waqf of fertile land in al-Ah ․sāʾ from a fellow cleric (ʿAbd Allāh Āl Bassām, ʿUlamāʾ Najd khilāl thamāniyat qurūn [Riyadh, 1998/99, 6 vols.], Vol. 2, p. 184). An example of a longlasting waqf to endow a mosque, with ‘cupola’ school attached, for the benefit of a local H ․ anafī clerical family was one established by Ottoman governor ʿAlī Pāshā in al-Ah ․sāʾ in 1610. The al-Qa․s īm-based Āl Bassām combined strong clerical involvement with major trading interests in the Gulf and India (Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900 [Albany, 1997] pp. 77–8). Both Sunnī and Imāmī ʿulamāʾ were involved in the pearl trade. Imāmī clerical engagement in pearling (see Juan Cole, ‘Rival Empires of Trade and Imami Shiism in Eastern Arabia, 1300–1800’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES), Vol. 19, No. 2 (1987), pp. 177–203, at pp. 190–1, 194–6) lasted at least until the mid-eighteenth century. Thereafter it was dominated by the Sunnīs (see Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 20–1). ʿUlamāʾ could also be major landowners and agriculturalists. Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb highlighted other potential sources of income in accusing specific clerics of trafficking in superstition, selling talismans and amulets, receiving unjustified retainers from settlements, and taking bribes from parties to court cases (H ․ usayn ibn Ghannām, Rawd․at al-Afkār [Riyadh, 1949, 2 parts], Vol. 1, e.g. pp. 139, 184–7). Wealth in a cleric ensured him a student following and wider audience. An interesting example of short-term emigration is offered by Wahhābī clerics who, though heirs to an inward-looking religious culture, travelled widely across the Islamic world after the Saʿūdī civil war drove them into exile in the 1880s–90s (Nabil Mouline, Les Clercs de l’Islam [Paris, 2011], pp. 122–4). William Clarence-Smith, ‘Hadhramaut and the Hadhrami Diaspora in the modern colonial era: an introductory survey’, in Ulrike Freitag and Clarence-Smith, eds, Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden, 1997), pp. 1–18, at pp. 3–4. A point well made by Fattah in The Politics of Regional Trade, p. 21. Cole, ‘Rival Empires of Trade’, pp. 178–9. ʿUthmān ibn Bishr, ʿUnwān al-majd fī tārīkh Najd (Riyadh, 1982, 2 vols.), Vol. 1, pp. 93–5.

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25 Mohammed al-Zulfa, ‘Omani-Ottoman Relations During the Reign of Imām Ah․mad b. Saʿīd, 1741–83’, in R.B. Serjeant and R.L. Bidwell, eds, Arabian Studies (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 93–103; Patricia Risso, Oman and Muscat, An Early Modern History (London and Sydney, 1986), pp. 59–61. 26 J.B. Kelly, ‘A Prevalence of Furies: Tribes, Politics, and Religion in Oman and Trucial Oman’, in Derek Hopwood, ed., The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics (London, 1972), pp. 107–41, at pp. 112–14. The Wahhābīs were anathema to the Ibād․īs who saw them as Khārijites (John C. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman [Cambridge, 1987], p. 83). Risso (Oman and Muscat, p. 31) notes Wahhābī dislike for apparently Muʿtazilite elements in Ibād․ī theology. For reasons of pure realpolitik the Saʿūdīs supported the last imām against the British-backed sul․t ān of Muscat in the 1950s (n. 183 below). 27 Risso considers the significance of Muslim identity in trade and commercial relationships in ‘Muslim Identity in Maritime Trade: General Observations and Some Evidence from the 18th-Century Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean Region’, IJMES, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1989), pp. 381–92, esp. at p. 385, citing evidence of some sectarianism but suggesting that the profit motive tended to predominate. 28 In Trucial Oman rivalry between madhāhib was an element in the antagonism between the Ghāfirī tribes (including the Qawāsim of Raʾs al-Khaymah who were H ․ anbalīs) and the Hināwī (including the Banī Yās of Abu Dhabi who were Mālikī), although tribal issues were the ones that triggered confrontations (see Frauke Heard-Bey, From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates [London, 1982], p. 133). 29 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 18–30. 30 Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago, 1988), pp. 49–50. 31 Ibn Ghannām, Rawd․at al-Afkār, Vol. 1, pp. 112–13, 132. 32 Kamal Salibi, ‘Middle Eastern parallels: Syria-Iraq-Arabia in Ottoman times’, in Middle Eastern Studies (MES), Vol. 15, No. 1 (1979), pp. 70–81, at p. 74. 33 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Pilgrimage as a Means of Regional Integration in the Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire’, in Derek Hopwood, ed., Arab Nation, Arab Nationalism (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 1–17, at pp. 2, 6–8; idem, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517–1683 (London, 1994), pp. 76–91. The purloining of the jewels was a cause célèbre. Shaykh ʿAbd al-La․t īf ibn ʿAbd al-Rah․mān Āl al-Shaykh (d. 1876) later justified it on the basis that the Prophet had no need of such treasures and would have wanted them distributed to the poor and needy. He insisted that Imām Saʿūd had relied on fatwās from muftīs of each of the four schools in al-Madīnah (text of risālah in Muh ․ammad H ․ usayn Zaydān, ‘al-Wathāʾiq tatakallam’, in al-Dāra, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1975), pp. 159–91, at p. 164). See also Mah․mūd Shukrī al-Ālūsī, Tārīkh Najd (Cairo, 2005), p. 59, presumably relying on this risālah in his defence of Wahhābī actions. 34 Up to this point it was the Persians who were mainly Sunnī and the Arabs around the Gulf Shīʿī (Izady, ‘The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity’, p. 75). 35 Said Arjomand, ‘Religious Extremism (Ghuluww), ․Sūfism and Sunnism in Safavid Iran: 1501–1722’, Journal of Asian History, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1981), pp. 1–35. 36 See Etan Kohlberg, ‘Aspects of Akhbari Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nehemia Levtzion and John Voll, eds, Eighteenth-Century Renewal and Reform in Islam (Syracuse, 1987), pp. 133–60, at p. 148. Yousif al-Khoei describes the Shīʿah of al-Madīnah in ‘The Marjaʿ and the Survival of a Community’, in Linda Walbridge ed., The Most Learned of the Shiʿa (New York, 2001), pp. 247–50. See also Marco Salati, ‘A Shiite in Mecca: the Strange Case of Mecca-born Syrian and Persian

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38 39

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Sayyid Muh․ammad H ․ aydar (d. 1139/1727)’, in Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende, eds, The Twelver Shia in Modern Times (Leiden, 2001), pp. 3–24, at pp. 13–14. The Shīʿah of al-Ah․sāʾ became subject to Sunnī rulers from the 1460s, including the Ottomans in 1550–1670. The Safavid practice of cursing the first caliphs was cited in an official fatwā justifying Ottoman military campaigning against Iran in 1722 but the timing suggests Ottoman political anxiety about Afghan Sunnī rivals assuming power in Iran (Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 34–5). In anti-Shīʿī propaganda today Iraqi and some Gulf Sunnīs routinely refer to the Shīʿah as Safavids. Rudi Matthee, ‘Boom and Bust: The Port of Basra in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf, pp. 105–27, at p. 107. In the later nineteenth century Basra trade was dominated by foreigners, especially Persians and Najdīs (Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 70–1). Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, p. 16. The Iranian centres gradually revived under the Qajars to compete with the Iraqi shrines (Meir Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars of nineteenth-century Iraq [Cambridge, 2002], pp. 51–2). See e.g. John Voll, ‘ʿAbdallah ibn Salim al-Basri and 18th Century Hadith Scholarship’, in Die Welt des Islams, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2002), pp. 356–72. Ahmad Dallal, ‘The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750–1850’, in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 113, No. 3 (1993), pp. 341–59, esp. at p. 342. An interesting example of the intersection of trading and scholarly links is given by Guido Steinberg, who considers the case of later nineteenth and early twentieth century Wahhābī ʿulamāʾ in ‘Ecology, Knowledge, and Trade in Central Arabia (Najd) during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, in Madawi Al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis, eds, Counter-Narratives, History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (New York, 2004), pp. 77–102, at pp. 94–9. William Facey, ‘Jiddah: Port of Makkah, Gateway of the India Trade’, in Lucy Blue et al., eds, Connected Hinterlands: Proceedings of Red Sea Project IV held at the University of Southampton September 2008 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 165–76, at pp. 167–8. In the eighteenth century leading Shīʿah practised dissimulation (taqiyyah), disguising their Shīʿī allegiance during the pilgrimage. By the late nineteenth century they were open about their Shīʿism (Cole, review of Mirza Mohammad Farahani’s A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca 1885–1886 in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (BJMES), Vol. 19, No. 1 (1992), pp. 79–80, at p. 80). Hamid Algar, ‘Shiʿism and Iran in the Eighteenth Century’, in Thomas Naff and Roger Owen, eds, Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale, Ill., 1977), pp. 288–302, at p. 297. Jon Mandaville, ‘The Ottoman Province of al-Hasā in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 90, No. 3 (1970), pp. 486–513, at p. 498. See also Cole, ‘Rival Empires of Trade’, p. 183. As drawn by William Brice, ‘A new Map of the Pilgrim Roads of Arabia’, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 5 (1975), pp. 8–11, at p. 9. Venetia Porter, ed., Hajj, Journey to the Heart of Islam (London, 2012), p. 181. Ibid., pp. 196–207; Saurabh Mishra, Pilgrimage, Politics and Pestilence (New Delhi, 2011), pp. 38–41. Porter offers a map of the major maritime routes in Hajj, Journey to the Heart of Islam, pp. 186–7. Faroqhi covers the finances of the Holy Cities before the eighteenth century in Pilgrims and Sultans, pp. 74–91. On Shāh Fath․ ʿAlī’s support to the shrines cities in the early

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The Emergence of the Gulf States nineteenth century, see Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 127. The Awadh bequest is analysed in Cole, ‘ “Indian Money” and the Shiʿi Shrine Cities of Iraq, 1786–1850’, MES, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1986), pp. 461–80. The Awadh money helped support the U․s ūlīs against the Akhbārīs and Shaykhīs (ibid, p. 476). Awadh was annexed in 1856 by the British. They then acted as the conduit for the funds. Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, p. 118. See generally İsmail Safa Üstün, ‘The Ottoman Dilemma in Handling the Shiʿi Challenge in Nineteenth-Century Iraq’, in Ofra Bengio and Meir Litvak, eds, The Sunna and Shiʿa in History (New York, 2011), pp. 87–103. The Ottomans besieged and reduced unruly Karbalāʾ in 1842–3 (Cole and Moojan Momen, ‘Mafia, Mob and Shiism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala 1824–1843’, Past and Present, No. 112 (1986), pp. 112–43). This was awkward for Qajar Muh ․ammad Shāh. He still did not come to the aid of Karbalāʾ. Linda Boxberger, On the Edge of Empire: Hadhramawt, Emigration and the Indian Ocean, 1880s–1930s (Albany, 2002), pp. 156–9. The annual pilgrimage to the Hūd shrine was a considerable event with a regional, even international, reputation (Peter Riddell, ‘Religious Links between Hadhramaut and the Malay-Indonesian World, c.1850 to c.1950’, in Freitag and Clarence-Smith, eds, Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen, pp. 217–30, at p. 219). See generally Surinder Bhardwaj, ‘Non-Hajj Pilgrimage in Islam’, Journal of Cultural Geography, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1998), pp. 69–87. The orders were reacting partly to Wahhābī criticism. The Niʿmatullāhī order declared itself Shīʿī in the early sixteenth century (Arjomand, ‘Religious Extremism (Ghuluww)’, p. 17). J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford, 1973), pp. 135–7; Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, pp. 47–8. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (London, 1982), pp. 28–30. Messianism is embodied in the Hidden Imām who is also the Awaited Mahdī. Jean-Pierre Filiu notes that ‘paradoxically . . . apocalyptic beliefs encourage Muslims to endure the unendurable’ (Apocalypse in Islam [Berkeley, 2011], p. 29). An interesting description of the ʿĀshūrāʾ and ʿArbaʿīn rituals in certain Iraqi towns is in Faleh A. Jabar, The Shiʿite Movement in Iraq (London, 2003), pp. 185–98. Werner Ende, ‘The Flagellations of Muharram and the Shiʿite ʿUlamāʾ’, in Der Islam, Vol. 55 (1978), pp. 19–36. This was a point of disagreement between the al-Daʿwah party and the Shirāzī movement in the later twentieth century. The latter utilized the enthusiasm generated by ceremonial rituals for political mobilization. The former regarded some of them as uncivilized (Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 94–5). A good example is the condemnation by Shaykh ʿAbd al-Wahhāb ibn Sulaymān (d. 1741), father of the founder of Wahhābism, of the activities of dervishes in H ․ arma, a Najdī settlement notorious for them. He castigates the dervishes as devils for walking through fire, jumping from roofs and beating themselves with iron (Rashīd Rid․ā, ed., Majmūʿat al-Rasāʾil wa-al-Masāʾil al-Najdiyyah [Cairo, 1928, 4 vols.] , Vol. 1, pp. 523–5). Ibn Ghannam does a regional review of polytheism as defined by the Wahhābīs in Rawd․at al-Afkār, Vol. 1, pp. 8–13. Further research is needed into popular religious practices on the Arab Gulf littoral in the pre-modern period. Zār is well covered in Eleanor Doumato, Getting God’s Ear (New York, 2000), pp. 170–84. Women’s religious observance and participation could be badly affected by the spread of Wahhābism (Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, ‘Researching the Gulf ’, in Sonbol ed., Gulf Women [London, 2012], p. 20; Doumato, Getting God’s Ear, pp. 121–9). The

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one direct challenge on record from a common person to Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb came from a woman who confessed adultery and dared him to impose the Quranic penalty (Ibn Ghannām, Rawd․at al-Afkār, Vol. 2, p. 2). Alfred Le Chatelier, Les Confréries Musulmanes du Hedjaz (Paris, 1887), pp. 1–2, 7–9; Trimingham, The Sufi Orders, pp. 121–2. Trimingham describes Makkah in the nineteenth century as ‘the most important order-centre in the Muslim world, almost every order being represented there’ (p. 121). Le Chatelier devotes most attention to the Qādirī, Khalwatī, Shādhilī, Naqshbandī and Badawī orders. They were grouped by Muh ․ammad ʿAlī and the sharīfs thereafter under a shaykh al-․t uruq (Les Confréries, pp. 3–6). This exclusivity may date only from the nineteenth century (Ulrike Freitag, ‘Hadhramaut: a religious centre for the Indian Ocean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries?’ in Studia Islamica, Vol. 89 (1999), pp. 165–83, at p. 179). Clarence-Smith, ‘Hadhramaut and the Hadhrami Diaspora’, pp. 15–16; Boxberger, On the Edge of Empire, pp. 152–3. Freitag indicates that ʿAlawīs had differing views on worldly involvement (‘Hadhramaut: A Religious Centre . . .?’ p. 172). An example is the Shādhilī order. The al-Kawwāz Shādhilī mosque (see n. 10 above) was a centre of anti-Wahhābī propaganda. Ah․mad al-Qabbānī, author of various anti-Wahhābī tracts, was based there. The Naqīb of Basra was linked to the Rifāʿī order (Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 79–81; Pierre-Jean Luizard, ‘Les Confréries Soufies en Irak Arabe’, in F. Jong and B. Radtke, eds, Islam: Mysticism Contested (Leiden, 1999), pp. 283–309, at pp. 292–3; see also al-H ․ aydarī, A․hwāl al-Ba․s rah, p. 10). Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb condemns local holy men and idols, barely mentions Sufism or Sufi orders as such in Najd, and can identify only a few followers of mystics Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240) and Ibn al-Fārid․ (d. 1235) based in Riyadh (Ibn Ghannām, Rawd․at al-Afkār, Vol. 1, p. 147). Ibn Sanad was close to Shaykh Khālid (d. 1826) of the Naqshbandī order and wrote about him, though he was apparently not himself a Naqshbandī (introduction by Dr ʿAmmād ʿAbd al-Salām Raʾūf to Ibn Sanad, Ma․t āliʿ al-Suʿūd, pp. 17–18). The Āl Suh․aym had links to the al-Kawwāz Shādhilī mosque in Basra. The backgrounds and mystical links of al-Zubārah clerics merit closer study. The Naqshbandī revival was closely associated with the name of Shāh Walī Ullāh of Delhi (d. 1762), who exercised great influence in the Arab world. The order was likely already to have taken root around the Gulf. Izady mentions Kurdish Naqshbandī shaykhs arriving off Gulf vessels into the Shāfiʿī communities of East Africa under Omani rule (‘The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity’, p. 48). They may have been inspired by the Kurdish renewer of the Naqshbandiyya, Shaykh Khālid, who was inducted into it in India (Butrus Abu-Manneh, ‘The Naqshbandiyyah-Mujaddidiyyah in the Ottoman Lands in the Early 19th century’, in Die Welt des Islams, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1982), pp. 1–36, at pp. 3–6). He exhibited anti-Shīʿī and anti-Christian strains (ibid., pp. 15–16). The Naqshbandī order, which was favoured by the Ottomans and influential across much of the Islamic world, remained curiously weak in Makkah in the late nineteenth century (Le Chatelier, Les Confréries, pp. 129–60). Nile Green notes that ‘Muslim saints had for centuries acted as the supernatural protectors of travellers on the Indian Ocean’ (Bombay Islam [New York, 2011], p. 108). Bertram Thomas details some pagan and animistic practices in Z․ufār (Dhufar) in Arabia Felix (London, 1938), pp. 41–2, 55–6, 86–8. In ‘The Jinn in H ․ ad․ramawt Society in the Last Century’, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 38 (2008), pp. 277–81, Mikhail Rodionov considers local beliefs in supernatural beings.

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71 Michael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia (London, 2010), p. 164. Imām Jaʿfar al-․Sādiq (d. 765) was a leading jurist and teacher of al-Madīnah, who died there and was buried next to the H ․ aram. 72 ʿAbd Allāh al-Suwaydī, Muʾtamar al-Najaf (Cairo, 1973/74). 73 Ibid., pp. 44–9. 74 Ibid., pp. 26, 51, 53. 75 Arjomand, ‘Religion and Statecraft in Pre-Modern Iran’, Iranian Studies, Vol. 27 (1994), pp. 5–8, at p. 8. 76 Dah․lān, Khulā․s at al-Kalām, pp. 192–3. Trying to outflank the Sublime Porte, Nādir Shāh wrote disingenuous letters alleging Ottoman concurrence in a threatening tone to ruling Sharīf Masʿūd, the qād․ī, the H ․ anafī muftī and others. These caused consternation in Makkah. The Ottoman governor accused the sharīf of being a closet Shīʿī because of his opposition to the immediate execution of Nādir’s representative, Na․s r Allāh al-H ․ āʾirī al-Karbalāʾī. Fearing this accusation would reach the Sublime Porte, the sharīf had the Shīʿah cursed from the highest pulpit in the H ․ aram. Na․s r Allāh left for Istanbul in the caravan of the amīr of the Syrian ․hajj, Asʿad Pāshā al-ʿA․z m, governor of Damascus, who imprisoned him there before sending him on to Istanbul (see also ʿAbbas al-ʿAzzāwī, Tārīkh al-ʿIrāq [Baghdad, 1935–56, 6 vols.], Vol. 5, pp. 269–70). Al-Suwaydī’s post-al-Najaf travelogue shows there was widespread uncertainty about the outcome of the conference (Fattah, ‘Representations of Self and the Other in Two Iraqi Travelogues of the Ottoman Period’, IJMES, Vol. 30 (1998), pp. 51–76, at pp. 60–2). The sharīfs were at times generous towards Shīʿī clerics in Makkah (Salati, ‘A Shiite in Mecca’, p. 14). 77 Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, p. 40. 78 This is reviewed at length by Algar, ‘Shiʿism and Iran in the Eighteenth Century’, pp. 290–9; Axworthy, The Sword of Persia, pp. 164–6, 171–2, 176–7, 256–8. 79 Yitzhak Nakash, The Shiʿis of Iraq (Princeton, 1995), p. 15. 80 Nakash, The Shiʿis of Iraq, pp. 25–48. Some of the tribes that converted had been in Iraq for centuries, like the Zubayd, Dulaym and Āl Bū Muh․ammad. Others, including the Shammar and Z ․ āfir had moved to Iraq in the face of Wahhābī pressure and were subject to aggressive Shīʿī proselytizing, especially from newly arrived Persian ʿulamāʾ keen to develop their own local socio-economic base (ibid., pp. 27–9). Many of the Banī Tamīm, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s own tribe who emigrated to Iraq after about 1737, converted (ibid., pp. 26, 43). Detribalization among settled tribesmen, who felt displaced and alienated, helped encourage conversion (ibid., p. 45). Tribal shaykhs often remained Sunnī. This reinforced the political pattern on the Arabian side of the Gulf. 81 Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, p. 41. 82 The pre-Saʿūdī period is covered in M.J. Crawford, ‘The Daʿwa of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb before the Al Saʿūd’, Journal of Arabian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2011), pp. 147–61. 83 Abdulaziz H. Al-Fahad, ‘The ‘Imama vs. the ‘Iqal: Hadari-Bedouin Conflict and the Formation of the Saudi State’, in Al-Rasheed and Vitalis, eds, Counter-Narratives, pp. 35–75. 84 Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 165–92. 85 This changed in the later nineteenth century, especially after the outbreak of the civil war, as Wahhābī students travelled to Delhi and Bhopal to study under the ․hadīth experts from Ahl al-H ․ adīth (Steinberg, ‘Ecology, Knowledge, and Trade in Central Arabia’, p. 95).

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Letter of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb to the people of al-Qa․s īm in ʿAbd al-‘Azīz al-Rūmī, Muh․ammad Bultajī and Sayyid H ․ ijāb, eds, Muʾallafāt al-Shaykh al-Imām Mu․hammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (Riyadh, 1978,12 vols.), al-Rasāʾil al-Shakh․s iyya, p. 11. 87 See generally on hijra Elizabeth Sirriyeh, ‘Wahhābīs, Unbelievers and the Problems of Exclusivism’, in Bulletin (BSMES), Vol. 16, No. 2 (1989), pp. 123–32. 88 The link between Wahhābism and state formation is discussed at greater length in Michael Crawford, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (London, 2014), pp. 89–106. 89 Samer Traboulsi, ‘An Early Refutation of Muh ․ammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s Reformist Views’, Die Welt des Islams, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2002), pp. 373–415, texts at pp. 391–415. 90 Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (London, 1998), pp. 106–11. 91 Ibn Bishr, ʿUnwān al-Majd, Vol. 1, pp. 279–81, 289, 296, 306–9. A major archaeological excavation currently under way at al-Zubārah is shedding new light on its rise and fall (see e.g. http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/201306/the.pearl. emporium.of.al.zubarah.htm, accessed 11 January 2016). 92 Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, pp. 51–2, 56–7. 93 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 46–57, 147–9. 94 Joint letter of Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and Saʿūdī ruler ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz to Ah ․mad ibn Muh․ammad al-ʿUdaylī al-Bakbalī of Yemen in al-Rūmī et al. eds, Muʾallafāt al-Shaykh, al-Rasāʾil al-Shakh․s iyyah, pp. 94–8, at p. 97; Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s al-Radd ʿalā al-Rāfid․ah in ibid., Mul․haq al-Mu․s annafāt, pp. 13, 43–5 (although there is a question mark over his authorship of this). 95 Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 96–8. See also Jacob Goldberg, ‘The Shiʿi Minority in Saudi Arabia’, in Juan Cole and Nikki Keddie, eds, Shiʿism and Social Protest (Yale and London, 1986), pp. 230–46, at p. 232. By contrast, although the Wahhābīs did not regard Ibād․īs as true Muslims, they never sought to convert them nor to suppress Ibād․ism in Oman (Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman, p. 86). 96 B.J. Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf 1602–1784 (Leidschendam, 1995), pp. 68, 374–5, 379–80, 385–6, 397. 97 Calvin Allen, ‘The Indian Merchant Community of Masqa․t ’, BSOAS, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1981), pp. 39–53, at p. 52. 98 Elsewhere in the Middle East such enclaves often acquired their own jurisdictional privileges, secured and protected by colonial powers. 99 Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf, p. 30. Formally the King of Portugal enjoyed a monopoly on Catholic missions in Asia. 100 Catherine Woodward, ‘The Discourse and Experience of the Arabian Mission’s Medical Missionaries, 1920–39’, Part 1 in MES, Vol. 47, No. 5 (2011), pp. 779–805, at p. 782, and ‘The Discourse and Experience of the Arabian Mission’s Medical Missionaries, 1939–60’, Part 2 in MES, Vol. 47, No. 6, pp. 885–910. There was a Scottish medical mission in Aden 1886–1979 (ibid., Part 1, p. 783). The Arabian Mission still maintains a presence in Oman as a cultural centre and in al-‘Ayn in the UAE . 101 Woodward, ‘The Discourse and Experience of the Arabian Mission’s Medical Missionaries’, Part 2, pp. 889, 905. The mission’s involvement with the Trucial Coast is discussed by Fatma Al-Sayegh in ‘American Missionaries in the UAE Region in the Twentieth Century’, MES, Vol. 32, No. 1 (1996), pp. 120–39. 102 In Basra one of the major merchant houses was that of the Catholic ʿAbbūds. The Catholic A․s fars were under British or French protection (Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, p. 81). The Safavids supplanted Gulf merchants with Armenians in Isfahan in the 1620s and their descendants could later be found in small numbers around Gulf ports (Izady, ‘The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity’, pp. 55–6). 86

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103 Letter of the Hon Mr Jonathan Duncan in Bombay to the Wahhābī chief dated 9 August 1810, quoted in Persian Gulf Gazetteer, Part I, Précis of Nejd Affairs, 1804– 1904 by J.A. Saldana, p. 7, para 25 (A.L.P. Burdett, ed., The Expansion of Wahhabi Power [Cambridge, 2013, 8 vols.], Vol. 1, p. 72). 104 Introduction by Bernard Haykel and Michael Crawford to Burdett, ed., The Expansion of Wahhabi Power, Vol. 1, pp. ix–xxvii, at p. xi. 105 Lewis Pelly described Imām Fay․s al (d. 1865), when speaking to him, of including ‘nearly all the Peninsula of Arabia as being his kingdom’ (Report on a Journey to Riyadh [Cambridge, n.d], p. 47). He told Pelly he abominated his religion but drew a reassuring distinction between religious and political warfare: ‘when the question is one of religion we kill everybody; but in politics we make exceptions’ (ibid.). 106 Introduction by Haykel and Crawford to Burdett, ed., The Expansion of Wahhabi Power, Vol. 1, p. xvi. 107 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 34, 60–2. 108 Wahhābī ʿulamāʾ had strong religious objections to legislation and non-sharīʿah rules but gave ground in the 1950s and 1960s to preserve their collective influence and status (Mouline, Les Clercs de l’Islam, pp. 186–91). French legal influence came from Saʿūdī adoption nationally of Ottoman codes operative in al-H ․ ijāz and the involvement of Egyptian lawyers in drawing up commercial and other codes. See Maren Hanson, ‘The Influence of French Law on the Legal Development of Saudi Arabia’, Arab Law Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1987), pp. 272–91. 109 Mishra, Pilgrimage, Politics and Pestilence, pp. 10–11, 15–52. 110 Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York and Oxford, 1990), pp. 80–1. 111 These are well described by Matthew Hopper, ‘Imperialism and the Dilemma of Slavery in Eastern Arabia and the Gulf, 1873–1939’, Itinerario, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2006), pp. 76–94. 112 Jerzy Zdanowski, ‘The Manumission Movement in the Gulf in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, MES, Vol. 47, No. 6 (2011), pp. 863–83, esp. at pp. 867–8. 113 William Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery (Oxford, 2006), pp. 183–4. The text of the 1936 Saʿūdī regulations on the slave trade in English translation is in Lewis, Race and Slavery, pp. 167–9. 114 Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of Slavery, pp. 116–17. 115 Wilferd Madelung, ‘Authority in Twelver Shiism in the Absence of the Imam’, in G. Makdisi et al., ed., La notion d’authorité au Moyen Age (Paris, 1982), pp. 163–73, at pp. 163–7. The ghaybah raised doubts even about the validity and acceptability of Friday congregational prayers (Cole, ‘Rival Empires of Trade’, pp. 184–5), though the Safavids encouraged these as they helped legitimize their rule. Other subjects of dispute were the legality of the land tax and the power to declare defensive jihād during the ghaybah. 116 Madelung, ‘Authority in Twelver Shiism’, pp. 166–70. 117 The divisions among Akhbārīs sometimes exceeded the gulf between some Akhbārīs and U․s ūlīs (Kohlberg, ‘Aspects of Akhbari Thought’, pp. 146–7). Some leading Akhbārīs were gnostics while others were deeply hostile to Sufism (ibid., pp. 143–6). Prominent U․s ūlīs could also tend to mysticism (Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, pp. 47–8). U․s ūlism was strong in Bahrain until the late eighteenth century when Akhbārīs became more influential. The trends in al-Ah ․sāʾ require further research (see Cole, ‘Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi on the Sources of Religious Authority’, in Walbridge, ed., The Most Learned of the Shiʿa, pp. 82–93, at p. 84).

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118 Kohlberg, ‘Aspects of Akhbari Thought’, pp. 151–2. Perhaps recognizing that Akhbārism was doomed, al-Ba․hrānī sought to bridge the gap with the U․s ūlīs by conceding that in practice Akhbārīs had to exercise ijtihād (ibid., pp. 150–1). 119 R. Gleave article on ‘Akhbāriyyah and U․s ūliyyah’, in M. Gaborieau et al., eds, Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (hereafter EI3) 2007(1), pp. 92–6, at p. 96. 120 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, p. 19. Cole notes: ‘Akhbarism as an ideology suited most out-of-power Imamis better, as it required a less activist role and fewer ulama links with the Establishment’ (‘Rival Empires of Trade’, p. 197). 121 The anti-Sunnī element in the emergence of the Akhbārī movement is well explained by Devin Stewart, ‘The Genesis of the Akhbārī Revival’, in M. Mazzaoui, ed., Safavid Iran and her Neighbors (Salt Lake City, 2003), pp. 169–93, especially at pp. 169–70. The Akhbārīs specifically disliked the importation of Sunnī ․hadīth methodology based on rational historical criticism, elitist categorization of every believer as either mujtahid or muqallid (a layman obliged to emulate a mujtahid), the use of analogical reasoning (qiyās), and the theory of Shīʿī consensus. They wanted nothing to do with Sunnī scholarship, scholars or ideas (ibid., pp. 173, 179–85). U․s ūlīs could sometimes be just as anti-Sunnī. 122 Kohlberg, ‘Aspects of Akhbari Thought’, p. 148. 123 Cole, ‘Rival Empires of Trade’, p. 179. Classically, the doctrine of ghaybah indicated politically a ‘denial of legitimacy but an abstention from active opposition’ (Norman Calder, ‘Accommodation and Revolution in Imami Shiʿi Jurisprudence’, MES, Vol. 18, No. 1 [1982], pp. 3–20, at p. 4). 124 Madelung, ‘Authority in Twelver Shiism’, pp. 170–1. By contrast, Wahhābī thought failed to develop any practical doctrine of legitimate rebellion against an unjust ruler and placed such a premium on obedience it left no permissible outlet for criticism, other than advice from a cleric to the Saʿūdī ruler in private. 125 Ann Lambton, ‘A Reconsideration of the Position of the Marjaʿ al-Taqlīd and the Religious Institution’, Studia Islamica, Vol. 20 (1964), pp. 115–35, at pp. 132–3. 126 Algar, ‘Shiʿism and Iran in the Eighteenth Century’, pp. 299–300. 127 Jabar, The Shiʿite Movement in Iraq, pp. 171–9. 128 Shahrough Akhavi, ‘Contending Discourses in Shiʿi Law on the Doctrine of Wilāyat al-Faqīh’, Iranian Studies, Vol. 29, Nos. 3–4 (1996), pp. 229–68. Ironically, the qualification of marjiʿiyyat al-taqlīd had to be removed by constitutional amendment in 1989 to enable ʿAlī Khamenei to succeed as Supreme Leader (ibid., pp. 266–7). 129 The Niʿmatullāhīs did try to reinsert themselves into Iran under the Zands and Qajars (Cole, ‘Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i’, p. 83). 130 Cole, ‘Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i’, p. 91. 131 Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, pp. 58–60; Mohammad Amir-Moezzi, ‘Shaykh Ah․mad al-Ah․sāʾī’, in EI3, 2008(1), pp. 90–2, at p. 91. 132 Litvak, Shiʿi Scholars, pp. 60–1. 133 Cole, ‘Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi’, pp. 86–9. See also idem, ‘Casting away the self: the Mysticism of Shaykh Ah ․mad al-Ah․sāʾī’, in Brunner and Ende, eds, The Twelver Shia in Modern Times, pp. 25–37, and ‘Rival Empires of Trade’, pp. 196–7. 134 Cole, ‘Iranian Millenarianism and Democratic Thought in the 19th Century’, in IJMES, Vol. 24, No. 1 (1992), pp. 1–26, at pp. 1–3. The 750 Bahāʾīs constituted the largest non-Muslim community in Bandar ʿAbbas in 1912 (Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Bandar Abbas, The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran [Washington DC , 2011], p. 22).

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135 For the origins of the Ibād․īs, see article ‘Ibād․iyya’, by T. Lewicki in EI2, Vol. 3, p. 648. J.C. Wilkinson reviews the principles of the imāmate in ‘The Ibād․ī “Imāma” ’, BSOAS, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1976), pp. 535–51. It is worth noting that today Ibād․īs make up barely half the indigenous population of Oman. 136 Wilkinson highlights (‘The Ibād․ī “Imāma” ’, p. 545) the inherently unstable cycle of prosperity leading to degeneration into temporal, dynastic rule that then invites civil war and foreign intervention (idem, ‘The Origins of the Omani State’, in Hopwood, ed., The Arabian Peninsula, pp. 78–9). He offers a diagram of the cycle in The Imamate Tradition of Oman (Cambridge, 1987), p. 4 and elaborates further on pp. 5–7. 137 Calvin Allen, ‘The State of Masqa․t in the Gulf and East Africa, 1785–1829’, IJMES, Vol. 14 (1982), pp. 117–27. The non-religious title sul․t ān conferred by the British in 1856 (ibid., p. 126, n. 7) had unwelcome connotations in Ibād․ism of oppression. 138 Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition, pp. 230–1, citing a growth in Ibād․ī scholarship from the end of the eighteenth century. Wilkinson is sceptical of Omani Ibād․ī clerics having developed wider pan-Islamic vision by the early twentieth century (ibid., p. 245). Valerie Hoffman describes nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars as actively engaged in trying to actualize the Ibād․ī state according to a utopian vision (‘The Articulation of Ibādī Identity in Modern Oman and Zanzibar’, The Muslim World, Vol. 94 [2004], pp. 201–16, at p. 202). An Ibād․ī press in Zanzibar helped to stimulate Ibād․ī revivalism. 139 Kelly, ‘A Prevalence of Furies’, pp. 110–22. 140 The rebellion gained support less from the popularity of the imāmate cause than from dissatisfaction with the repressive and conservative rule of the sul․t ān, who refused, despite British prodding, to develop the country. This affected local perceptions of his legitimacy (Dale Eickelman, ‘From Theocracy to Monarchy: Authority and Legitimacy in Inner Oman, 1935–1957’, IJMES, Vol. 17, No. 1 [1985], pp. 3–24). 141 Two of Captain W. Shakespear’s final reports of 4 and 15 January 1915 to Sir P. Cox, the Political Resident then based in Basra, in Burdett, ed., The Expansion of Wahhabi Power, Vol. 4, pp. 551–8, 560–1. 142 This is explored in Werner Ende, ‘Iraq in World War I: The Turks, the Germans and the Shiʿite Mujtahids’ Call for Jihād’, in Rudolph Peters, ed., Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants, Amsterdam, 1–7 September 1978 (Leiden, 1981), pp. 57–71. 143 Frederick Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf (New York, 1997) offers a clear account of the Ottoman engagement in the Gulf 1870–1914. 144 Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 140–55. 145 J.B. Kelly, ‘Mehemet ʿAli’s expedition to the Persian Gulf 1837–1840’, Part I, MES, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1965), pp. 350–81, and Part II , MES, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1965), pp. 31–65. 146 The Āl al-Shaykh restoration was not uncontested (Rid․ā, ed., Majmūʿat al-Rasāʾil, Vol. 4, pp. 303–4). 147 They were inclined to blame the sins of the people (see Ibn Bishr, ʿUnwān al-Majd, Vol. 1, p. 277; Hafez Wahba, Arabian Days [London, 1964], p. 112; Steinberg, ‘The Wahhabi Ulama and the Saudi State: 1745 to the Present’, in Paul Aarts and Gerd Nonneman, eds, Saudi Arabia in the Balance [New York, 2006], pp. 15–16). 148 For instance, Wahhābīs constituted most of the majority Sunnī community in Lingah where a branch of the al-Qawāsim ruled until 1887, though Shīʿī numbers grew as the nineteenth century progressed (Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf, The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, 1750–1930 [Washington DC , 2010], pp. 10–11). By contrast, in Bandar ʿAbbās the Sunnīs were mostly Shāfiʿīs, who constituted about two-thirds of

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150 151 152

153

154

155

156 157 158 159

160 161 162 163 164

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the population in 1840, while a third were Imāmī Shīʿah. By 1900 the proportions were reversed. The position of the Shīʿah improved remarkably once Omani rule was replaced by Persian rule there in 1868 (Floor, The Persian Gulf, Bandar Abbas, pp. 20–1). The prevailing culture was religiously tolerant (ibid., p. 23). Madawi Al-Rasheed, ‘The Wahhabis and the Ottoman Caliphate’, in Al-Rasheed, Carool Kersten and Marat Shterin, eds, Demystifying the Caliphate (London, 2013), pp. 117–34, at pp. 117–18, 121–5. Neither the Āl Saʿūd nor the Āl al-Shaykh met the requirement under Islamic consensus for the caliph to be a Hashimite. For instance, they confirmed the Ottoman qād․īs in office. See further Mouline, Les Clercs de l’Islam, pp. 107–11. The Naqshbandīs’ association with the Ottomans and quintessential Sunnī nature may explain their ferocious suppression by the Safavids in the early sixteenth century (Arjomand, ‘Religious Extremism (Ghuluww)’, p. 11; Hamid Algar, ‘Naqshbandis and Safavids’, in M. Mazzaoui, ed., Safavid Iran and Her Neighbors, pp. 27–8). Later Naqshbandī thought, as developed by Shaykh Khālid, had interesting parallels with Wahhābism, including emphasis on the sharīʿah and anti-Shīʿism, but these elements of commonality would only have sharpened, not softened, Wahhābī hostility towards the Naqshbandīs. M.J. Crawford, ‘Civil War, Foreign Intervention, and the Question of Political Legitimacy: A Nineteenth-Century Saʿūdī Qād․ī’s Dilemma’, IJMES, Vol. 14 (1982), pp. 227–48, at pp. 236–40. Madawi Al-Rasheed, ‘The Shia of Saudi Arabia: A Minority in Search of Cultural Authenticity’, BJMES, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1998), pp. 121–38 at pp. 132–3, giving the view of H ․ amza al-H ․ asan, a local Shīʿī historian; Frederick Anscombe, ‘The Ottoman role in the Gulf ’, in Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History, pp. 261–76, at p. 272. Jacob Goldberg, ‘The 1914 Saudi-Ottoman Treaty – Myth or Reality?’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1984), pp. 289–314. On the subsequent treaty with the British, see Daniel Silverfarb, ‘The Anglo-Najd Treaty of December 1915’, MES, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1980), pp. 167–77. Allen J. Fromherz, Qatar: A Modern History (Georgetown, 2012), p. 62. The original transfer of Arabs to the Iranian coast is analysed by Nadjmabadi, ‘The Arab Presence’, esp. at pp. 132–4. Sir Arnold Wilson offers fascinating insights into the pre-war situation in S.W. Persia, Letters and Diary of a Young Political Officer 1907–1914 (London, 1942). This process is described in Lawrence Potter, ‘The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century’, in Roxane Farmanfarmaian, ed., War and Peace in Qajar Persia (London and New York, 2008), pp. 125–48. Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 36–7. Nadjmabadi analyses the various terms used in the UAE and Qatar for those coming from Iran (‘The Arab Presence’, pp. 140–1). Basheer Nafi, ‘The Abolition of the Caliphate in Historical Context’, in Al-Rasheed et al., eds, Demystifying the Caliphate, pp. 31–56. The Banī Kaʿb were classic beneficiaries (see Floor, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Banū Kaʿb’, Iran, Vol. 44 [2006], pp. 277–315). See Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 100–1, on Shīʿah clerics. Mai Yamani, Cradle of Islam: The Hijaz and the Quest for Identity in Saudi Arabia (London, 2009), esp. pp. 1–19, 39–58; Goldberg, ‘The Shiʿi Minority in Saudi Arabia’, pp. 233–9; Madawi al-Rasheed, ‘The Shia of Saudi Arabia’, pp. 121–38. Jörg Matthias Determann discusses this issue interestingly in the context of Saʿūdī historiography in Historiography in Saudi Arabia (London, 2014), pp. 63–176 passim.

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165 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 81–2. See also Elie Kedourie, ‘Anti-Shiism in Iraq under the Monarchy’, MES, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1988), pp. 249–53. 166 Jabar, The Shiʿite Movement in Iraq, pp. 69–70. 167 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 63–5, 134–5. Vali Nasr sees Arab nationalism, which he views as at heart a Sunnī phenomenon, as inherently biased against the Shīʿah (The Shia Revival [New York, 2006], pp. 91–2). 168 Joseph Kostiner offers a useful account in ‘On Instruments and their Designers: The Ikhwan of Najd and the Emergence of the Saudi State’, MES, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1985), pp. 298–323. The Ikhwān, whose raids were deniable by Ibn Saʿūd, were an early twentieth-century example of non-state actors. His capacity to control and direct the Ikhwān was a topic of regular discussion among British officials. 169 A magisterial exposition of this process is in Abdulaziz Al-Fahad, ‘From Exclusivism to Accommodation: Doctrinal and Legal Evolution of Wahhabism’, New York University Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 2 (2004), pp. 485–519. 170 Jan-Peter Hartung, ‘Who Speaks of what Caliphate?’ in Al-Rasheed et al., eds, Demystifying the Caliphate, pp. 81–94. 171 Nafi, ‘The Abolition of the Caliphate in Historical Context’, pp. 48–51. Steinberg describes the effect of Saʿūdī lack of funds in the religious sector in ‘Ecology, Knowledge and Trade in Central Arabia’, pp. 85–9. 172 See Madawi Al-Rasheed, introduction to Al-Rasheed et al., eds, Demystifying the Caliphate, pp. 8–9. 173 Potter’s introduction to Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History, p. 2. 174 This is the thrust of William Beeman’s ‘Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis’, in Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History, pp. 147–59. 175 Mouline, Les Clercs de l’Islam, pp. 175–211 outlines this process in relation to Saʿūdī Arabia. Other groups that had previously mediated between people and the ruler, such as merchants and notables, also lost influence over this period. 176 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 112, 147. On Qatar, see Birol Baskan and Steven Wright, ‘Seeds of Change: Comparing State-Religion Relations in Qatar and Saudi Arabia’, Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2011), pp. 96–111, at pp. 97–8, 108–10. 177 Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 354–68. 178 Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), pp. 171–5. 179 See Stéphane Lacroix, Awakening Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), pp. 37–73. 180 A good example is the Syrian Muh․ammad Surūr who sought to harmonize Islamic activism with Wahhābī theology (ibid., pp. 69–70). 181 Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix, ‘Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia: the Story of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi Revisited’, IJMES, Vol. 39 (2007), pp. 103–22. The story is told by Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca (London, 2007). 182 Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 131–3. 183 Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia, pp. 347–8. King Saʿūd also supported Imām Ghālib against Sul․t ān Saʿīd of Muscat until Ghālib and his entourage took refuge in al-Z․ahrān (Dhahran) in 1959. 184 Jabar, The Shiʿite Movement in Iraq, pp. 75–7, 151; Batatu, ‘Iraq’s Underground Shīʿa Movements’, pp. 586–8. 185 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 83–6. 186 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 88–99. 187 Louër, Transnational Shia Politics, pp. 120–9, 143–9. 188 Jabar, The Shiʿite Movement in Iraq, p. 177.

3

Patterns of Intra-Gulf Relations Iraq and the Gulf Until 1980 Hala Fattah

The residents of Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf were once the inhabitants of a region that over millennia fostered a dynamic exchange of capital, both cultural and commercial. This continued to be the case in the early to mid-twentieth century as merchants, pilgrims, migrant tribesmen, and labourers interacted with the religions, cultures and economies of the Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. Other obvious connections between Iraq and the Gulf existed in modern times. Until the First World War, the area now known as Iraq was under the sway of the Ottoman Empire, which periodically sought to seek to extend its contacts, influence and even control southward from Iraq along the Arab Gulf littoral. The southern Iraqi city of Basra has served as perhaps the most important point of contact between Iraq and the Gulf States throughout the ages. Furthermore, Shiʿah living in the regions bordering the Arab littoral of the Gulf looked to the important Shiʿah shrines in Iraq, to which pilgrimages were made and bodies were sent. But from the 1920s onwards, the connections between the peoples of Iraq and the Gulf came under the influence of perceptible, even radical, changes in the political, economic and social relations of the region caused to some extent by the increasing entanglement of colonial powers in the Gulf. In particular, the imposition of nation states in the Mandate era restructured the dynamics of the area, as did the discovery and exploitation of oil that followed upon earlier Western contact. This development eventually shattered the transnational economy, advancing the primacy of a new and now indispensable product for export – oil – over all other commodities and diminishing the influence of diverse polyglot regional hubs trading in established merchandise such as grain, livestock, pearls, cloves, dates and slaves. Thus the new monoculture of oil gradually, if unevenly, threatened to endanger what once had been a natural market between Iraq, the Arabian Peninsula and the Arab Gulf, particularly Basra, Kuwait and Muhammarah. And in the process, it eventually impacted the memory of a connected history as well. However, memories recede slowly, especially in the Arab world. While it is true that the impact of European colonialism destroyed some patterns and relationships that had long held sway in the region, continuities remained. Alignments in trade, as well as 85

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religious or population movements, changed very slowly. For a time in the early twentieth century, trade and transport created opportunities that rendered the region more immediate, accessible and available than ever before, arguably bringing the peoples of the region closer than in the past. Long-standing social, commercial, religious, cultural and demographic currents continued to run through the region throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. Well into the 1940s, movements of trade, pilgrimage, migration and intellectual efflorescence connected Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf with ports and religious centres in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Paradoxically, this greater contiguity of interests occurred just as the region was on the cusp of political division, with the emergence of nation states and the concomitant rise of national economies. Any study of the relations between Iraq and the Gulf in the early and mid-twentieth century must focus on the changing interdependence through history of the peoples of what was to become Iraq and the Arab littoral of the Gulf as they later came to grips with the challenges of a new era. In particular, it is useful to compare how these different societies have changed with the emergence of modern statehood after decolonization. This chapter therefore delineates the transformed circumstances of the peoples of the region as they went from being mobile pastoralists, traders, soldiers and seamen to becoming citizens of the new system of nation states in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf. Since this was not a seamless development, the similarities as well as differences in the history of the postcolonial Arab world must be studied together. To begin with, the structures of power, economic patterns and social relations of the region will be examined. Then an analysis will be undertaken of the religious, commercial, demographic and social connections that still tied the region together (if in attenuated form) at the turn of the twentieth century. Finally, the story of Iraq’s relationship with the Gulf will be further developed by describing another set of connections that predominated in the era of nation states, such as frontiers, oil and ideology. As part of this process, the similarities as well as differences that made these developments so complex in the mid- to latter part of the twentieth century will be delineated.

The setting In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, many patterns, customs and traditions in Iraq, Iran and the Gulf region linked the inhabitants of the two great empires, the Ottoman and the Qajar, with the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf shaykhdoms. The Ottomans absorbed Iraq into their dominions from 1534 onwards, although this was challenged by the Safavid Empire which occupied Baghdad in 1622 and again in 1638. Moreover, Ottoman control of the countryside outside the major urban centres of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul was never total, even in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, despite the insecurity in the Iraqi provinces (which, basing ourselves on Reidar Visser’s Ottoman sources, were always labelled Iraq by the Porte), the empire provided order, law and a functioning bureaucracy in the cities, as well as an all-encompassing ideology

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legitimizing the sultan and his descendants. Meanwhile, the Safavid Empire and its successor states, particularly the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties, gradually took over Persia and began to abut more fully on to the Ottoman domains. From 1823 to 1847, two internationally recognized treaties were signed in Erzerum (now in Turkey) to demarcate the Qajar–Ottoman frontier and to bring the intermittent warfare between the two empires to an end. As a result of this increased momentum, Basra, the most important Gulf port in the nineteenth century, became the link between late Ottoman Iraq, Qajar and Pahlavi Persia (later known as Iran), and the Gulf shaykhdoms on both coasts of the Gulf. While citizens of Iraq and Iran had long been accustomed to following the rules of empire, sometimes imperfectly relayed through various levels of provincial administration, Gulf populations were just beginning to come to terms with the distant presence of the British Indian Empire as personified through the system of a British Resident and his subordinate Political Agents scattered along the Arabian littoral. Although governmental regulations and pronouncements usually had sufficient impact to force the disgruntled urban notables of society in Iraq or contrarian shaykhs in the Gulf to toe the line, the real power at the local level lay not with government but with society. Social networks headed by leaders belonging to venerated religious, tribal or economic lineages still commanded the respect and allegiance that governments lacked, something that governors recognized and tried to co-opt in turn. At the beginning of the century, and in south-central Iraq in particular, several important social groupings can be identified. First, there were the tribes, whose leadership had been greatly weakened by Ottoman confiscation of communally held lands as well as by military offensives and political mismanagement. The decline in the prestige and power of the leading tribal families gave rise to relatively autonomous tribal subsections that sometimes took up arms to resist the claims of their former paramount shaykhs. Second, there were the urban notables of Basra and neighbouring towns – merchants, landholders and religious clerics – who had forged important links with regional elites in Kuwait, ʿArabistan (now Khuzistan), northern and central Arabia, and India. In Basra, a key port town linked to the India trade but also catering to the overland commerce from Syria, Iran (by way of Baghdad) and Najd, the most powerful figures were merchant-landowners with large property holdings as well as commercial interests in rice, dates, horses and slaves. Among the best known was the family of the Naqib of Basra as well as the families of Agha Jaʿfar, Mandil and Saniʿ; religious families such as that of the Bashayan were also prominent. Basra-based notables forged links with important personalities in the region, such as the Al Sabah amirs of Kuwait, the Al Rashid and Al Saʿud shaykhs from northern and central Najd and the rulers of Muhammarah in Arabistan across the Shatt alʿArab. Because of Basra’s mediating role with regard to Istanbul, the imperial capital, urban as well as tribal notables took sides in tribal wars in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. Basra notables also intervened on behalf of their favourites with their contacts at the Porte, and played off rival shaykhs against each other to curry favour either with local Ottoman representatives in Basra, or with British officials in Baghdad or Istanbul. For instance, the controversial Sayyid Talib al-Naqib hedged his bets in the local politics of the region, first becoming an Ottoman administrator in al-Ahsaʾ

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(eastern Arabia) in the early twentieth century, only to break with the Porte later on by leading a secessionist movement in Basra and appealing for British help at the same time. In this respect, the autonomy movement in Basra was owed indirectly to the ruler of Kuwait’s earlier successful manoeuvre. On 16 February 1899, Shaykh Mubarak Al Sabah, the ruler of Kuwait, made the commitment not to cede, sell, lease or mortgage any territory under his control in Kuwait to any foreign power without the previous permission of British authorities. This effectively guaranteed that Britain would become the protector of Kuwait for decades to come. The pact followed other similar agreements made by other Gulf shaykhs with Britain, all establishing a model for would-be autonomous shaykhs in the Gulf to follow: at various times throughout the late nineteenth century, some of them approached the British Resident in the Gulf for a similar agreement. Even after the erection of state borders, the fluidity of economic and social relations endured for a very long time. For example, the trade in contraband goods, whether shipped by sea or by overland carriage, continued to bedevil British and Iraqi officials even during the Mandate era, just as it had caused headaches for Ottoman customs masters decades earlier. Similarly, trade in livestock across the Shatt al-ʿArab waterway was vastly more profitable when Muhammarah shaykhs helped Iraqi merchants escape onerous Ottoman customs duties in the 1890s, and grain smuggling continued throughout the era of the Saudi blockade of Kuwait and British control of Iraq (from the 1920s to the 1940s). Anthony Toth reports that during the period between 1921 and 1943, the Saudi blockade of Kuwait led to large transgressions of Iraqi–Saudi– Kuwaiti borders, as hungry tribesmen tried to run food shipments through the desert borderlands without regard for national frontiers. Regional patterns held sway in other aspects as well. Both the ruling shaykhs of Kuwait and Muhammarah invested heavily in date palm plantations in southern Iraq. Meanwhile, Baghdad-based ʿalims (religious scholars) were approached to teach in the first Kuwaiti schools. Furthermore, merchants and landholders in southern Iraq, like their counterparts in the Gulf shaykhdoms, made frequent journeys to Bombay and other cities in India, as much to buy and sell goods as to place their sons in schools and to arrange for medical visits with reputable doctors. With the slow but seemingly irreversible loss of power and influence on the part of the Ottoman Empire and the corresponding rise of the British Raj, some regional elites (both tribal and urban) successfully repositioned themselves to benefit from the new political and economic challenges stemming from the intrusion of outside powers in the region. The effective British bid to counter Ottoman pretensions to control Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar created both dynamism as well as instability in the region. These rivalries were noted in consular dispatches and provoked comment in local newspapers of the period (for instance, the Baghdad-based Lughat al-ʿArab). Technologies new to the area, in particular railways, steamship transport and telegraphy, created opportunities for more people than ever before. Meanwhile, Iraqi merchants became agents for European firms, as did the more prosperous merchant families in the Gulf, while new challenges arose from the acquisition and development of private property in once-communally held tribal territory.

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Figure 3.1 Landing the cable of the Indo-European Telegraph at al-Faw, northern Gulf (1865).

The region in transformation Even by the beginning of the twentieth century, the region continued to exhibit continuity in certain aspects that had long defined it. As an occasion to strengthen ties between Muslims from all over the world, the hajj, the Islamic pilgrimage to Makkah (Mecca), has had the potential to galvanize millions through religious guidance and moral direction. From the sixteenth century to the early twentieth, the Ottoman province of al-Hijaz, in which Makkah and al-Madinah are located, prospered as an important centre of the region, attracting multitudes of the faithful for prayer and a search for spiritual regeneration. Hajjis who had fulfilled their religious duties on earlier travels to the Holy Cities warned the faithful about such hazards as attacks from bedouin tribes, storms affecting ships, venal governors and corrupt pilgrimage leaders. Furthermore, the volume and variety of the literary canon focusing on the manasik al-hajj, or the rites and rituals associated with this, form a valuable corpus for historians and formed links between the faithful in Iraq and the Gulf region. Three examples hold particular relevance for the Gulf region. The first of these is that of Shaykh ʿAbdullah al-Suwaydi, a Baghdad-based ʿalim with links to the eighteenth-century Mamluk governors of Iraq. His history of the hajj depicted every geographical stage of the journey while also launching into a sharp critique of the religious laxity of the worldlier Damascene and Ottoman ʿulamaʾ, in particular castigating the popular Sufism of his day. Seeking out Baghdad-based ʿalims

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like himself, he frequently identified the Iraqis both in his midst and at home as symbols of a ‘purer’ Islam and as a better class of Ottoman Arab subject. Almost a century-and-a-half later, Muhammad ibn ʿUthman al-Sanusi, a North African notable, wrote an important pilgrimage narrative, which has been analysed by Ali Chenoufi. Undertaking the pilgrimage in 1882, he described the perils of overland travel and an attack made on him by brigands. The attack was so traumatic that he was afraid of embarking on another hajj, or even venturing to Jerusalem. In a conversation with a fellow pilgrim, he recounts the opinion of Sayyid Salman al-Jili (al-Gaylani), the naqib or head of the ashraf (descendants of the Prophet’s House) of Baghdad. Noting that al-Jili and his family were the recipients of large donations from Muslim pilgrims from all over the world, and that the shrine of Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qadir in Baghdad benefited from many waqfs or charitable foundations specifically assigned to the mosque-madrasah itself, he states that, in comparison to the bounties at the disposal of the Qadiri shrine, al-Jili thought the revenues accruing to the Porte in the Hijaz were ‘derisory’. Three years later, a Persian diplomat and author made the same journey to Makkah and al-Madinah but in vastly different circumstances, the account of which has been translated and annotated by Hafez Farmayan and Elton L. Daniel. In 1885–6, Mirza Mohammad Husayn Farahani set off by horse-drawn carriage from Tehran to Enzeli on the Caspian. Embarking on a steamship to Baku in Azerbaijan, he eventually landed in Istanbul and from there made his way to Egypt and then to al-Hijaz. Like his predecessors on the hajj, Farahani recounted the various stages of the pilgrimage, and noted as well the differences in Sunni as opposed to Shiʿah rituals around the tombs of the Prophet and his immediate family. Nonetheless, he remarked on the complete tolerance between sects, and the fact that the Shiʿah did not need to practice taqiyyah or dissimulation to protect themselves, explaining it as a result of the weakness of Ottoman control of the Holy Places and the respect shown to Iranian pilgrims. These three accounts of the hajj in the Ottoman period provide evidence of geographical, social, literary and political patterns from which we can extrapolate certain similarities. First, all three followed different routes: the Iraqi pilgrimage set off from Baghdad; the Maghribi caravan started from Cairo, and the Persian pilgrims went to Istanbul and then to Suez to meet with the larger Egyptian–Syrian convoy. As the century wore on, transport technology diminished the perils of the overland journey, bringing wider and more diverse sectors of society into closer contact with one another. Because social and occupational limitations frequently discouraged more fluid associations between groups and classes, one of the merits of the hajj lay in opening up avenues of interaction between notables of different regions who would not ordinarily have met under other circumstances. As these narratives make clear, portents of new identities and affiliations were coming to the fore. Already in these accounts of the hajj, the Islamic universalism of the Holy Places was being tempered by proto-nationalist or quasi-sectarian attitudes that were to gain ground in the twentieth century. A second set of pilgrimage accounts vied in importance with the hajj. These were the narratives of Shiʿah travellers who came from all over the Islamic world to the sacred shrines of Najaf, Karbalaʾ, Samarra and Kadhimayn in what was then Ottoman and later Hashimi Iraq. For instance, Hafiz al-Rahman al-Islahi points out that Indian

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travel accounts from Hyderabad carried a large amount of information on the rituals of the pilgrimage. So much of this was in Arabic that al-Islahi (Dawr al-Hind, p. 59) claims that even during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘Arabic was not a foreign language in India’. Last but not least were the activities related to the corpse and bone traffic of deceased Persian, Afghan and Indian Shiʿah to the four shrine cities of Ottoman Iraq. According to Sabri Ateş and Meir Litvak, these cross-border journeys involved major religious and political issues between many different parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to religious links, trade and the contacts maintained by big merchants and occasional traders have always been the glue that further cemented the communities of the region. Gad Gilbar details the growth of the class of big Muslim merchants from 1860 to 1914 throughout the Middle East, positing the thesis that contrary to the standard argument, many entrepreneurs made large fortunes in Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Palestine, as well as in Iraq, eastern Arabia and parts of the Gulf, not because they were part of any government structure but despite it. His evidence also shows that, prior to the First World War, some export merchants in opium, carpets, pearls, silk, wool, skins and hides, and cotton ploughed back their earnings into commercial agriculture as well as into equipment benefiting handicrafts and textiles in Iraq. Meanwhile, Muslim as well as Jewish merchants in Baghdad started shipping lines and invested in horse-driven trams as a spur to more efficient transportation. Similarly in the Gulf, many merchants financed the construction of dhows. Some of these big merchants also invested in Europe and India. For instance, a firsthand witness to the vagaries of the pearl trade, the Kuwaiti merchant Saif Marzooq Al-Shamlan enumerates the Arab pearl merchants of Bombay hailing from Kuwait, Bahrain and Dubai. He also shows that a good proportion of these big merchants set up shops and businesses in Paris when it was still an important conduit for the buying and selling of pearls. Iraqi merchants of Jewish origin also sent family members to set up branches of the family businesses in Bombay and Hong Kong. Gilbar remarks that part of the rationale for this transfer of capital may have been growing tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim merchants in the last part of the nineteenth century, but surely this was also a wise investment strategy in the developing markets of the day. However, an emphasis on big merchants, whether Muslim or otherwise, tends to distort the picture of trade throughout the Ottoman–Qajar territories from the late nineteenth century to early twentieth. A concentration on rich and influential traders, while necessary to understand the dynamics of trans-local trade as a whole, obscures the fact that the region was home to many expatriate communities. Some of these had been in the area from before the dawn of the modern era and not all were independently wealthy. The Indian community was probably the most important. According to Patricia Risso, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, important clusters of Indian quarters were found in almost all the main Arab trading towns in the Gulf, including Basra, Bandar ʿAbbas, Bahrain, Qatif and Doha. Banyans, Khojas and Chalabis dominated the seaborne trade; they also functioned as moneylenders and bankers. But apart from the rich Indian merchant community, Risso (‘India and the Gulf ’, p. 197) observes that there were also poorer groups of ‘dockworkers, porters, construction workers and soldiers’, some of them Indian, others from the Gulf ’s other transient

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populations. Of these, the ‘Persianized’ Arabs (to use a term used by colonial officials such as Lewis Pelly as well as present-day Iranian writers such as Shahnaz Razieh Nadjmabadi) or the hawalah were important members of the regional groups that tied Iran to the Arab Gulf. It was in Iraq, however, that Indian migrant workers really captured the labour market, if only briefly in the early twentieth century. As a result of Britain’s occupation of Iraq in 1915–17, which opened up a second front in the First World War, British Indians poured into Iraq. While Indian Chalabis or big merchants were a significant factor in the regional trade tying southern Iraq to India in the eighteenth century, as Thabit Abdullah points out, they were a small, largely India-centred presence. It took the British presence in Iraq (and later the Mandate) to spur the importation – sometimes under duress – of a large Indian population of labourers to restructure the Iraqi economy in wartime. Thus the third factor paradoxically reinvigorating the regional connection was the introduction of largely involuntary labour into Iraq under colonial aegis. Radhika Singh and Stefan Tetzlaf have both written on this dimension of European imperial strategy in what has been termed the ‘making’ of Iraq. Singh argues that labour shortages in Iraq during the First World War led to the release of Indian convicts who then went on to staff service jobs in the British administration in Iraq. A fourth factor in bringing the people of Iraq and the Gulf closer was the advent of print newspapers with a regional focus. Lughat al-ʿArab, published in Baghdad, became a widely read journal throughout the Arab world in the early twentieth century. Its publisher, Father Anastase Marie al-Karmali, had already carved a niche out for himself as one of the most prolific writers in the Arabic language. Lughat al-ʿArab showcased al-Karmali’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Iraq and the Arab Gulf with articles on all the major Arab dynasties in the region, including the Al Saʿud, the Saʿdun shaykhs of lower Iraq, and the other principalities on the coast. Moreover, its monthly digest of news on the Gulf and Arab world was eagerly read. With its nationalist, anti-Ottoman, stance and its all-Arab regional leanings, it drew in an erudite audience from Najd to Bombay. The latter city was itself the home of several Arabic language newspapers catering not only to Arab businessmen in Bombay but to audiences all over the Arab world. One of the important newspapers in this regard was al-ʿArab al-Hindiyyah, published by a Syrian based in Bombay and carrying news not only of Cairo and Damascus but also of Kuwait and Bahrain. Arab shaykhs visiting Bombay received favourable treatment and news of honours granted to rulers in the Gulf by His Britannic Majesty’s Government during the Second World War received front-page attention. Funded by Arab investors, the newspaper captured a sizeable audience in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Arab world – and certainly in India. Indeed, it was not the only secular, reformminded newspaper editors that set up in Bombay at the turn of the century. For as Nile Green has argued (Bombay Islam, p. 90), ‘The industrialization of communication among Muslims was one of the major overall characteristics of Bombay’s religious economy. Powered by the spread of cheap mass-produced paper and inexpensive iron printing presses, Bombay’s industrialization enabled the city to become the most important Muslim printing centre in the Indian Ocean’. Green also makes the point that these publications were often connected to Sufi networks. Pilgrimage, trade,

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migration and print journalism were but four of the important features of the history of Iraq and the Gulf at the cusp of a new century. Other connections tying Iraq to Iran and the Gulf concerned the particular ways in which these countries were configured into nation states. Later, the introduction of new ideologies and oil-driven economies determined the differentiation of developments in Iraq vis-à-vis the Gulf.

From region to nation states The construction of nation states in the Arab world largely falls into two categories. Some states came into being as post-First World War mandates controlled by the British and French: Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan (part of the Mandate of Palestine), Syria and Lebanon. But there was also the more tranquil emergence of most Arab Gulf States as independent states prior to the British official departure from the region. While the historical development of the two categories was not similar, the particular way in which the borders of new states were configured – whether in the Fertile Crescent or the Gulf – had immense bearing on these countries’ later political development. Drawn to satisfy short-term imperial objectives, they created innumerable difficulties for the policies of successor states, as the instances of Kuwait and Iraq have shown. But border demarcations were not only determined by imperial fiat. Finalizing the territorial extent of newly sovereign states was a long process that did not always accommodate the wishes of the region’s people involved. For instance, H.V.F. Winstone and Zahra Freeth describe one of the more interesting law cases heard in Baghdad in the 1930s, held to determine ownership of the five estates forming the district of al-Faw in southern Iraq. Claimed by the descendants of Shaykh Mubarak Al Sabah of Kuwait, who consisted of some 120 people at the time, the lands in question were also demanded by the heirs of the last shaykh of Muhammarah in Arabistan-Khuzistan, Shaykh Khazʿal, and several Iraqi litigants of the Zuhayr family. The court case itself dragged on for years until final judgement was passed, granting some districts as personal property to the ruling shaykh of Kuwait, at the time Ahmad Al Sabah, while others were handed over to the tenants who tilled the land. The worst served were the heirs of Shaykh Khazʿal of Muhammarah who effectively received nothing at all. The drawn-out case was an example of several interrelated issues coming together for the first time: British secret wartime promises, negligent Ottoman land jurisdiction (some of the districts were unregistered) and the determination of nationality – Iraqi or otherwise – which in the words of Winstone and Freeth (Kuwait: Prospect and Reality, p. 117) was ‘waived [by the British] in the case of the ruler of Kuwait but not of the other members of the Sabah family’. The smuggling carried out early in the twentieth century by bedouin tribes across the Saudi–Kuwaiti–Iraqi frontiers has been mentioned above. Oil became the most important factor in the determination of borders (for example, Mosul as the most egregious case), even as the oil industry itself transformed the socioeconomic basis of Gulf societies. While the British and French were being tasked with developing the potential of Arab states under the League of Nations Mandate system,

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European and American oil companies were sending representatives to Iran, Arabia and the Gulf to negotiate concessions with the rulers of these places. Before and after the First World War, adventurers and individual investors were the first to grasp the vast potential of petroleum reserves in the area. They were soon followed by European governments avid for oil to run their navies. Eventually, the British government became part-owner of already existing oil companies, taking over shares of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC ; originally formed as the Turkish Petroleum Company) through its partial ownership of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP. The hunt for concessions sparked a need to delineate state borders properly. The investments by conglomerates such as the IPC and the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in Saudi Arabia eventually produced handsome profits, both for their shareholders and the countries that backed them. By the early 1950s, however, the tide had turned and Arab governments in the region began to demand their fair share of oil revenues, sparking a crisis with international companies that was to persist for several decades. As a result of the decolonization movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, Iraq as well as some Gulf States made attempts to break out of their postcolonial heritage and take control of their own oil industry. Arab nationalism emerged in this period as an ideological force for declaring ownership of natural resources and independence of action. Consequently, as Daniel Yergin details, all states in the region worked toward the nationalization of foreign-owned oil companies, even though some countries (Iran, Algeria, Libya and Iraq) were more insistent in championing that cause than their neighbours. It is clear that oil companies had a large impact on the governments of the day, especially those of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Ironically, they were at least partially responsible for the deepening of nationalist movements throughout the region since regional governments and much of their population resented that their oil policies were decided by foreigners. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, some governments were ready to take on the multinational oil companies and to eventually declare nationalization of the industry. Robert Vitalis has shown that even in a country as oil-dependent as Saudi Arabia, the introduction of a brash American oil industry, with its segregated facilities for American executives and Arab workers, and its repression of workers’ rights instigated strikes in the oil fields, leading over time to the transformation of Aramco’s service policies toward Arab labour in the camps. Moreover, the strikes in Saudi Arabia were taking place concurrently with protests and demonstrations in Kirkuk (Iraq) and Abadan (Iran), where multinational oil companies were also confronted by militant labour forces. In the 1960s, oil states around the world created a new cartel called the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC ) to provide a form of economic solidarity along with production and pricing alignments. Significantly, one of the co-founders of the organization was none other than a young man who had been cultivated as a potential leader by Aramco itself, the Saudi campaigner for equal rights and later oil minister, ʿAbdullah al-Turayqi. In this vein, new ideologies – communism, socialism and Arab nationalism – swept the Arab world, feeding an unparalleled spirit of resistance to foreign interests from the 1940s on. The nationalization of oil assets was the work of socialist republics such as

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Iraq, Algeria and Libya, as well as monarchies and shaykhdoms such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and some of the Gulf States, even though the routes taken toward economic autonomy between the two governmental systems were distinctively different. To be sure, the issues of borders, oil and ideology played out differently in the Fertile Crescent than they did in the Gulf. Nonetheless the social, economic and philosophical currents immersing the region from the 1920s onwards contributed to recreating new communalities for Iraq and the other emerging countries of the Gulf region – while many of the past’s common links of culture and tradition have receded. From even before the dawn of Islam, the inhabitants of what became Iraq and Iran had entered into strong ties with the peoples of the Gulf and southern Asia. While competing as well as at times collaborating to secure their livelihoods and to pursue their often divergent interests, the populations of Ottoman Iraq and Safavid, later Qajar and Pahlavi, Persia entered either willingly or out of necessity into social, economic, military, cultural and political networks tying them to each other and to the region as a whole. By 1971, new challenges from outside the Indian Ocean area had emerged to reorient and disrupt the patterns and traditions that had undergirded the world view of Iraqis and Iranians, thus conclusively dimming the memories of this autonomous historic region.

Bibliographic essay To begin with, it is important to note that Iraq’s association with the Gulf was not readily recognized by an older, colonialist-influenced tradition of historiography. Most pre-1970s authors saw Iraq as an Arab majority country with a penchant for Arab nationalism striving for leadership in the Levant and Fertile Crescent. That Iraq is now known as a Gulf State is largely a recent phenomenon, brought on as much by the country’s present-day political stance on Iran and Kuwait in the 1980s and 1990s as by the more recent scholarly literature on Baghdad and Basra’s historic ties to the Gulf region. In this respect, the late 1980s functioned as an important turning point in the scholarship on Iraq and the Gulf. Between 1988 and 2005, J.R.I. Cole published Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1772–1850; Hala Fattah brought out The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf: 1745– 1800; Thabit Abdullah issued Merchants, Mamluks and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth Century Basra; and Reidar Visser wrote Basra, the Failed Gulf State. Finally, Alastair Northedge’s brief but important chapter, ‘Al-Iraq al-Arabi: Iraq’s Greatest Region in the Pre-Modern Period’, with its concentration on fuzzy borders and geographical anomalies, stretched the associations between Iraq, Iran and the Gulf further into medieval history. While most of this literature focused on transnational trade and traders in the wider region, all of the books and articles written in this period were greatly influenced by the burgeoning historiography of the Indian Ocean. On a historic plane at least, these authors concluded that Iraq, Iran, the Gulf and India were connected by much more than had previously been acknowledged. In the 2000s, those connections became more implicit. For instance, R.J. Barendse’s The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century explored the

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Middle East alongside south-east Asia and East Africa in the relatively unknown seventeenth century. What was refreshing about his work was that for the first time, a world historian saw fit to include the Gulf and Arabia, Iraq and Iran within the Indian Ocean, still an uncommon interpretation among certain Eurocentric as well as Asiacentric historians today. To extend the trend further, Chapter 3 of Thomas R. Metcalf ’s book, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, concentrates on the induction of Indian conscripts in the Iraq campaign of 1915–17. In fact, some of the most innovative articles penned by historians of the First World War in India have been devoted to the direct and indirect influences of the British Indian Empire on early twentieth century Iraq. In a similar fashion, historians of the Gulf have moved closer to studying the interaction of the Gulf with trade, ports of call and regional ties in Iraq and Iran. Thus Nelida Fuccaro analysed the influences of Basra and Baghdad on Bahrain’s merchant traditions, and investigated the genesis and development of the city’s Persian community in a sizeable section of her book, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800. Meanwhile, Rudi Matthee published ‘Between Arabs, Turks and Iranians: The Town of Basra, 1600–1700’ in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Three years later, he wrote a chapter on ‘Boom and Bust: The Port of Basra in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ in Lawrence G. Potter’s The Persian Gulf in History. It is interesting to note that Ottoman experts have also branched out into the history of Iraq and the Gulf. Among the most prolific has been Selim Deringil, whose book The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 started a trend of investigating conversions and identity politics in late Ottoman Iraq among Ottoman specialists and Turkish historians. For instance, Gokhan Cetinsaya wrote The Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908, followed by several articles on the Ottoman policy on tribes, the Shiʿah clergy and the Empire’s struggle with the British role in the Gulf. Two of the best are ‘The Ottoman View of the British Presence in Iraq and the Gulf: The Era of Abdul-Hamid II ’ and ‘The Caliph and the Mujtahids: Ottoman Policy towards the Shiite Community of Iraq in the Late Nineteenth Century’. Finally, reprints of older material on Iraq and the Gulf are enjoying a brisk sale. Thus, C. M Cursetjee’s The Land of the Date was edited and republished by Paul Rich as A Voyage in the Gulf. The tale of a Parsee gentleman’s foray into the Gulf on the eve of the First World War is well written and even gripping at times. And after 2003 and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, all sorts of formerly prohibited books began to see the light of day. Amongst them is the surrealist gem, Mohammed Khudayr’s Basrayatha: Portrait of a City. Based on Basra’s history and its many legends, the novelmemoir depicts Basra as an emblem of endurance and resilience.

Acknowledgement I wish to express my great thanks and appreciation to John Peterson and the editorial board for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of my two chapters. I am also

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grateful to the Altajir Trust and H.E. Ambassador Richard Muir for their gracious hospitality over the last three years.

Bibliography Abdullah, Thabit. Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth Century Basra. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Anscombe, Frederick. ‘The Ottoman Role in the Gulf ’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed. The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 261–76. Ateş, Sabri. ‘Bones of Contention: Corpse Traffic and Ottoman-Iranian Rivalry in Nineteenth Century Iraq’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2010), pp. 12–32. Barendse, R.J. The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. Cetinsaya, Gokhan. The Ottoman Administration of Iraq, 1890–1908. London: Routledge, 2006. Cetinsaya, Gokhan. ‘The Caliph and the Mujtahids: Ottoman Policy Towards the Shiite Community of Iraq in the Late Nineteenth Century’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 41, No. 4 (2005), pp. 561–74. Cetinsaya, Gokhan. ‘The Ottoman View of the British Presence in Iraq and the Gulf: The Era of Abdul-Hamid II ’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2003), pp. 194–203. Chenoufi, Ali. La Mecque et le Vénérable Sanctuaire de la Kaaba dans les Récits des Voyageurs Musulmans de 1517–1900. Carthage: Fondation Nationale pour la Traduction, l’Etablissement des Textes et les Etudes (Beit Al-Hikma), 1989. Cole, J.R.I. Roots of North Indian Shi’ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722–1859. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Cursetjee, C.M. The Land of the Date. Bombay, 1918. Ed. and republished by Paul Rich as A Voyage in the Gulf. Allborough, 1991. Davidson, Christopher M. ‘Arab Nationalism and British Opposition in Dubai, 1920–66’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 43, No. 6 (2007), pp. 879–92. Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Dickson, H.R.P. Kuwait and Her Neighbours. London: George Allen, 1956. Eley, Geoff and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds. Becoming National: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Engdahl, F. William. A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. Palm Desert: Progressive Press, 2012. Farmayan, Ali and Elton L. Daniel, eds, trans. and annotators. A Shiite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885–1886: The Safarnâmeh of Mirzâ Mo․hammad H ․ usayn Fârâhani. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Fattah, Hala. The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf, 1745–1900. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Fattah, Hala. ‘Representations of Self and the Other in Two Iraqi Travelogues of the Ottoman Period’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (February 1998), pp. 51–76. [A fuller account of Shaykh ʿAbdullah al-Suwaydi’s journey is contained in this article.] Fuccaro, Nelida. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Gilbar, Gad. ‘The Big Muslim Merchant-Entrepreneurs of the Middle East, 1860–1914’. Die Welt des Islams, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2003), pp. 1–36. Green, Nile. Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Hamdani, Tariq Nafiʿ al-. Akhbar al-khalij fi majallatay Lughat al-ʿArab wal-ʿArab al-Hindiyyah (Historic News of the Gulf in the Journals Lughat al-ʿArab and al-ʿArab Al-Hindiyyah). Baghdad: Bayt al-warraq, 2010. Islahi, Hafiz al-Rahman al-. Dawr al-Hind fi nashr al-turath al-ʿArabi (The Role of India in Spreading Arab Culture). Riyadh: Ministry of Culture and Information, 2011. Khadduri, Majid, and Edmund Ghareeb. War in the Gulf 1990–1991: The Iraq–Kuwait Conflict and Its Implications. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Khudayr, Mohammed. Basrayatha: Portrait of a City. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007. Landen, Robert G. ‘The Changing Pattern of Political Relations Between the Arab Gulf and the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire’. In B.R. Pridham, ed., The Arab Gulf and the Arab World (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 41–64. Litvak, Meir. Shi‘i Scholars of Nineteenth Century Iraq: The ʿUlamaʾ of Najaf and Karbalaʾ. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Matthee, Rudi. ‘Between Arabs, Turks and Iranians: The Town of Basra, 1600–1700’. Bulletin of the School of African and Oriental Studies, Vol. 69 (2006), pp. 53–78. Matthee, Rudi. ‘Boom and Bust: The Port of Basra in the Seventeenth Century’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 105–27. Metcalf, Thomas R. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Nadjmbadi, Shahnaz Razieh. ‘The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf ’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 129–45. Northedge, Alastair. ‘Al-Iraq al-Arabi: Iraq’s Greatest Region in the Pre-Modern Period’. In Reidar Visser and Gareth Stansfield, eds, An Iraq of Its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy? (London: Hurst, 2007), pp. 151–66. Pachachi, Adnan al-. Fi ʿayn al-aʿsār (In the Eye of the Storm). London: Saqi, 2013. Petersen, Tore Tingvold. ‘Anglo-American Rivalry in the Middle East: The Struggle for the Buraimi Oasis, 1952–1957’. International History Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (February 1992), pp. 71–91. Risso, Patricia. ‘India and the Gulf: Encounters from the Mid-Sixteenth to the MidTwentieth Centuries’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed. The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 189–203. Schofield, Richard. ‘Borders, Regions and Time’. In Reidar Visser and Gareth Stansfield, eds, An Iraq of Its Regions: Cornerstones of a Federal Democracy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 167–204. Schofield, Richard. ‘Position, Function and Symbol: The Shatt Al-Arab Dispute in Perspective’. In Lawrence G. Potter and Gary Sick, eds, Iraq, Iran and the Legacies of War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 29–70. Shamlan, Saif Marzooq al-. Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Kuwaiti Memoir. Trans. by Peter Clark. London: London Centre of Arab Studies, 2000. Silverfarb, Daniel. ‘The Revision of Iraq’s Oil Concession, 1949–52’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (January 1996), pp. 69–95. Singh, Radhika. ‘Finding Labor From India for the War in Iraq: The Jail Porter and Labor Corps, 1916–1920’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 49, No. 2 (2007), pp. 412–45.

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Smolansky, Oles M. and Bettie M. Smolansky. The USSR and Iraq: The Soviet Quest for Influence. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1991. Tetzlaf, Stefan. ‘The Turn of the Gulf Tide: Empire, Nationalism and South Asian Labor Migration to Iraq, c.1900–1935’. International Labor and Working-Class History, No. 79 (Spring 2011), pp. 7–27. Toth, Anthony B. ‘Tribes and Tribulations: Bedouin Losses in the Saudi and Iraqi Struggles over Kuwait’s Frontiers, 1921–1943’. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (November 2005), pp. 145–68. Valenti, Peter C. ‘Creating a New Historiography of the Persian Gulf: The Case of Qatar’. New Middle Eastern Studies, No. 1 (2011). www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/archives/458 (accessed 16 December 2015). Visser, Reidar. Basra, The Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq. Piscataway: Transaction Books, 2005. Visser, Reidar. ‘Other People’s Maps’. The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 2007), pp. 64–8. Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Wilkinson, John C. Arabia’s Frontiers: The Story of Britain’s Boundary Drawing in the Desert. London and New York: I.B Tauris, 1991. Winstone, H.V.F. and Zahra Freeth. Kuwait: Prospect and Reality. London: Allen and Unwin, 1972. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Arabia and Iran Lawrence G. Potter

Relations between Iran and the shaykhdoms, later countries, on the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf underwent great transformations from the early nineteenth century until the departure of the British in 1971. The nineteenth century marked an important period of transition for the Gulf, with the assumption of British control, the perpetuation of ruling dynasties and the rise of new cities, as well as fitful attempts to modernize. Historically a backwater, the Gulf was tied into modern communication and transportation networks starting in the 1860s and then increasingly integrated into the world economy. The interest of European powers in the region, which arose in the seventeenth century for commercial reasons, had been overtaken by the late nineteenth century by security considerations, especially for the British, who were concerned with protection of the route to India. In the twentieth century, the Gulf played a critical role in world affairs due to its strategic location and the importance of its petroleum exports. Before the twentieth century the Gulf littoral, including both the Arab and Persian shores, may be regarded as an integrated unit. There were similarities in lifestyle and material culture, in food, clothing and architecture, and in the tribal nature of society and Islamic religious observance. Ethnically the Gulf was mixed, as typified by its port cities, with Arabs predominant on the Arabian littoral and parts of the Iranian shore, and Persians present in significant numbers on both sides. Many other tribal or communal groups made up the picture, including Indian traders, Baluch labourers, Hawalah merchants and African slaves. There was a fluidity of movement and lack of clear borders, and tribes moved easily from one side to the other. The port cities were oriented outward, toward the Indian Ocean, rather than inward toward the landlocked empires of the Qajars, Wahhabis and Ottomans. Aside from the local or country trade, the economy of the region was based mainly on export of dates and pearls, with widespread imports from India of food, wood and cloth. Labour migration within the region was normal, prompted both by seasonal demand (such as to harvest dates or dive for pearls) and changing economic and climatic conditions. Beginning in 1822, the Gulf was administered as an ‘informal empire’ by a British Political Resident, based in Bushihr (Bushire) on the Iranian coast, who reported to the East India Company until 1858 and to the Government of India thereafter. In the twentieth century, the historic ties which connected the people of the Gulf littoral were curtailed. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the redrawing of the map of the Middle East, and the rise of modernizing leaders in Iran (Reza Shah) and Arabia (Ibn Saʿud) after the First World War, nationalism became the dominant 100

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Figure 3.2 Distant view from the sea of Bushihr (Bushire) on the Iranian coast of the Gulf (1856). ideology. The issue of whether one was an Iranian, a Bahraini, or a Saudi national became important as new states promoted new identities. Borders were imposed and movement began to be regulated by means of passports and identity cards. Still, entrenched cultural patterns persisted and the imposed borders were often disregarded. By the mid- and late twentieth century, states had become the dominant factor in regional relations, although transnational groups, including radical Shiʿi and Sunni factions, played an important role. The rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s served as a foil to the historic Persian aspiration to be the dominant power in the Gulf, and led to an unsolvable war of words: was it the Persian or Arabian Gulf? Tensions were stoked by border disputes, especially between Iran and Iraq over the Shatt al-ʿArab, between the United Arab Emirates (UAE ) and Iran over the islands of Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb, and the competing claims between Bahrain and Qatar (now resolved) over al-Zubarah and some islands and shoals in adjacent waters. In recent decades, the Gulf has become an increasingly politicized environment, with the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC ), protected by the US , feeling vulnerable in the face of perceived Iranian irredentism. Primarily because of its oil, the Gulf has now become an important element and seemingly perpetual source of tension in international relations. Significantly, it was the venue for three major wars at the end of the twentieth century. Conflict between Iran and the Arab states in the early twenty-first century derives less from historical antagonisms and more from the rise of modern states and their attempts to impose national identities. The Gulf was always an arena of transnational groups, some of which now find themselves minorities in different states and have divided loyalties. In the process of disregarding minority and communal concerns, governments have inflamed sectarian tensions, especially between Arabs and Iranians

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and Shiʿi and Sunni Muslims. This, along with autocratic and ineffective government, lies behind much of the current turmoil in the region. The present-day Gulf is still a transnational space, but in different ways than before. The inclusive Khaliji culture (from khalij or Gulf) of the past is now a memory, and residents of the Gulf littoral are quick to identity as Arab or Iranian. History has become an important tool used by states to promote their own legitimacy, but in the process of rewriting history a more nuanced and therefore more accurate representation of the past has been lost. Arabs and Persians have lived with each other for many centuries, during which mutual differences usually did not lead to conflict. In that sense, the current mistrust, tension and sense of vulnerability felt by all sides is a product of the modern age.

Pre-modern historical patterns The political situation around 1800 The eighteenth century in the Gulf area had been a troubled one, marked by the end of the celebrated Safavid dynasty in Persia in 1722 at the hands of Afghan invaders and their expulsion in turn by the great warrior Nadir Shah (r. 1736–47). Nadir took an active interest in reasserting Iran’s control of the Gulf, building a navy based at Bushihr. He briefly conquered Bahrain and sent three expeditions to Oman to assist its leader. Following an interlude during which Persia was governed by the Zand dynasty in Shiraz (1750–94), the Qajar dynasty rose to power and ruled Iran from 1779 to 1924. The Qajars were initially preoccupied with fighting two wars with Russia in the northwest and trying to reclaim Herat in the north-east. The first ruler to show an interest in the Gulf was Muhammad Shah (r. 1834–48), and under his successor, Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96), Persia greatly increased her influence on its Gulf coast. On the Arabian side of the Gulf, the eighteenth century, as discussed by Malcolm Yapp, Ahmad Abu-Hakima and Willem Floor, saw the widespread movement of Arab tribes. Best known is the migration from northern Arabia of the ʿUtub Arabs of the ʿAnazah group, who, under the leadership of the Al Sabah family, established themselves in Kuwait in the 1750s. Those under the leadership of the Al Khalifah migrated to alZubarah (on the north-west coast of Qatar) in 1766 and ultimately came to rule over Bahrain in 1783. In Oman, the Al Bu Saʿid family came to power in 1749 in the wake of an Iranian invasion. Najd, in eastern Arabia, saw the rise of the Wahhabis and establishment of the Al Saʿud dynasty. ʿArabistan (later Khuzistan), the south-west province of Iran, witnessed a large-scale incursion of Arab tribes from Najd, especially the Banu Kaʿb (Chaub), who wielded considerable power in the latter eighteenth century. Because of the unsettled political conditions and the lack of central control, the ports on the Persian coast were fairly autonomous for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The German traveller Carsten Niebuhr, who visited the region in the 1760s, remarked (Travels Through Arabia, Vol. 2, p. 137) that ‘the Arabs possess all the seacoast of the Persian Empire, from the mouths of the Euphrates, nearly to those

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of the Indus’. Their settlements were independent of Persia, yet they did not belong to Arabia either. Shahnaz Nadjmabadi describes a process whereby Arab settlement took place with the blessing of the Iranian government, and the shaykhs paid regular tribute in return for the right to levy taxes on imported goods and collect taxes from the coastal residents. Two major Arab groups located in the lower Gulf were the Qawasim confederation and the Hawalah. The Qawasim rose to power along what came to be called the Trucial Coast, centred in the towns of Sharjah and Raʾs al-Khaymah, and later governed Bandar Lingah on the Iranian side. According to J.B. Kelly (Britain and the Persian Gulf, pp. 17–18), ‘ “Qawasim” was a term loosely applied to denote the tribes subject to the authority of the Qasimi shaikhs . . . but it applied more strictly to the shaikhly family itself. How many tribes acknowledged the authority of the Qasimi shaikhs, what their strength was, or how they were distributed, are difficult questions to answer’. Allied to the Wahhabis in central Arabia, the Qawasim, studied by Charles Davies and Sultan Muhammad al-Qasimi, were regarded by the British as pirates and became the target of major British raids on Julfar (now Raʾs al-Khaymah) in 1809 and 1819. They were rivals of the sultan of Oman and challenged the Omanis for supremacy in the Gulf. The Hawalah, the subject of recent treatments by Floor for the Iranian side and AlDailami for the Arab side, were groups of Sunni Arabs that migrated from Oman and Trucial Oman to the Iranian side of the Gulf starting in the late sixteenth century. Most settled on the Shibkuh Coast of Iran, stretching 280 kilometres from Banak in the north to Bandar Lingah in the south. Operating from many small ports, they often engaged in maritime violence (‘piracy’) or were engaged by rulers (such as shahs of Iran and imams of Muscat) to carry out their policies in the Gulf. However, they found it hard to cooperate with one another, had a poor resource base, and never formed a unified political entity. They later returned to the Arab side as individuals or groups, but many were unsure what tribe they belonged to and they freely intermarried. About 1900, they were found living in Bahrain, al-Ahsaʾ (Hasa), Qatar, Trucial Oman, and on Sirri Island.

The role of Oman In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Oman was the predominant regional power in the Gulf and indeed the western Indian Ocean, and has been the subject of studies by Calvin Allen, Beatrice Nicolini and Floor. Muscat had been one of the most important ports since the fifteenth century, and under the rule of Sultan ibn Ahmad (r. 1792–1806) and Saʿid ibn Sultan (r. 1807–56) the Al Bu Saʿid dynasty expanded its maritime empire, gaining footholds at Bahrain, Bandar ʿAbbas, Hormuz and Qishm. Oman leased a large area around Bandar ʿAbbas from Persia starting about 1790. (This was an important revenue source for Muscat: in 1802 Bandar ʿAbbas was providing a third of the sultan’s income.) Oman was on friendly terms with Britain, which offered support against encroachments by the Wahhabis, Qawasim and Persians. Under Nasir al-Din Shah, Persia made it increasingly more difficult to renew the lease. The 1856 renewal ‘demolished the basis of any claim to independent sovereignty which the Saiyid of Oman may have been inclined to cherish’, according to J.G. Lorimer

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(Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Vol.  1, p. 2045). The treaty raised the rental rate and specified that Bandar ʿAbbas and its dependencies, including Qishm and Hormuz, were to be considered subject to the Persian province of Fars. The Persian flag was to be flown at Bandar ʿAbbas. These terms were further strengthened, with a higher rent and a shorter duration, when the agreement was again renewed in 1868. Two months later it was cancelled outright by Persia upon the overthrow of the ruler in Oman, as provided for by a clause in the treaty. The power of Muscat declined dramatically following the death of Saʿid ibn Sultan in 1856 and the splitting of the empire into two branches based in Oman and Zanzibar. The ruler in Muscat was now deprived of most of his income as well as his fleet, and increasingly fell under the influence – and depended on the subsidy – of Britain.

Qajar policy in the Gulf For much of the nineteenth century, the Iranian coast was controlled by a string of principalities ruled by Arab shaykhs. According to Lewis Pelly, the British Political Resident, in 1865, the settlements on the Persian coast from Daylam to Kangan were estimated to be three-quarters Persian and one-quarter Arab, whereas those from Kangan to Bandar Lingah were one-quarter Persian and three-quarters Arab. Since a good deal of the area to the east of Lingah was leased to the Imam of Muscat, for much of the nineteenth century Arabs ruled on both sides of the Gulf. Persian policy toward the Gulf, such as it was, was carried out by the governor of Fars Province, based in Shiraz. He administered the entire area from Bushihr to Jask. He also formulated policy toward neighbouring Gulf States. Ever since the Persians were driven out of Bahrain by the ʿUtub Arabs in 1783, regaining it had been the constant aim of Persian diplomacy. This led, in 1822, to the Treaty of Shiraz, in which the British Resident at Bushihr acknowledged Persian sovereignty over Bahrain. This treaty, however, was immediately repudiated by the British Indian government. In 1861 the British recognized the shaykh of Bahrain as an independent ruler and after 1880 they took control of Bahraini foreign policy. Nevertheless, Persia never relinquished its claim but rather periodically invoked the Shiraz treaty. It also asked the British to loan vessels so it could retake the island. A key to Persian weakness in the Gulf lay in the fact that, unlike Oman or Britain, the shah did not have a navy. The British viewed Persian capabilities with derision: according to George N. Curzon (later to become viceroy of India) (Persia and the Persian Question, Vol. 2, p. 388), ‘Brave and victorious as the Persians have shown themselves at different epochs on land, no one has ever ventured so far as to belie the national character as to insinuate that they have betrayed the smallest proficiency at sea’. The issue did not become acute until, at the time of the negotiations over the Bandar ʿAbbas lease renewal, Oman threatened to blockade the port unless Persia came to terms. Tehran was dependent upon the British navy to dissuade the Omanis from doing so. Beginning in 1882, there was a political reorganization of the Gulf ports, which were removed from the jurisdiction of the governor of Fars and handed over to the Amin al-Sultan, the grand vizier and an intimate of the shah. The royal government

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was in dire need of revenue, and the customs duties from the southern ports were an attractive asset. In 1887 a Gulf Ports district, headquartered at Bushihr, was formed from Bushihr, Lingah, Bandar ʿAbbas and their dependencies. Starting in 1899, the customs were put under the control of Belgian experts, who aimed to introduce a uniform and efficient system of tax collection and to raise the rates. Within two years, all tax farms had been abolished and management placed in a new department, the Imperial Persian Customs, also directed by Belgians. In March 1900, the customs of Bushihr, Lingah and Bandar ʿAbbas were placed under its control, which led to a remarkable rise in revenue for Tehran. The new higher tariffs were opposed by the merchants and led to a sharp decline in legitimate trade in the Gulf, notably at Bandar Lingah, and a concomitant rise in smuggling. By the end of the nineteenth century, as outlined by Potter, the government of Nasir al-Din Shah had reasserted Tehran’s control over the entire Gulf coastline. The Arab shaykhdom of Bushihr was the first to fall in 1850, followed by the cancellation of the Omani lease of Bandar ʿAbbas in 1868 and the eviction of the Qasimi shaykhs from Bandar Lingah in 1887. Iran’s south-eastern boundaries were settled by the British in order to facilitate expansion of the telegraph line from India to Europe, which was given high priority after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Chahbahar, the best harbour on the Persian Makran coast, lay on the Persian side of the boundary determination of 1871, and was taken by force of arms from Oman in 1872. Iranian agents even made a half-hearted bid to extend Persian control over the shaykhs of the Trucial Coast in the late 1880s. By the early 1890s, according to Curzon, ‘the Persian Government [was] exercising along its shores and over its islands a more extended and emphatic authority than at almost any previous epoch during the last 300 years’ (Persia and the Persian Question, Vol. 2, p. 433). The culmination of this process came with the surrender of Shaykh Khazʿal of Muhammarah to Reza Shah in 1924.

The role of the British British policy toward the Gulf in the nineteenth century was influenced by their determination to prevent Persia from coming under undue Russian influence, which would present a threat to British India. From the 1870s, they also opposed the Ottoman presence in eastern Arabia. Britain imposed a maritime peace on the Gulf in stages beginning in 1836, and sought to stamp out the piracy, slave trading and arms trafficking that had been prevalent there. Their Political Resident carried out his duties with the assistance of a small group of officers posted in key cities throughout the Gulf. His style of rule depended upon collaboration with a cadre of ‘native agents’ drawn from local elites which benefited both parties, as explained by James Onley. The British always acknowledged Persian sovereignty over the northern shore, although Lorimer says (Gazetteer, Vol. 1, p. 1981) that ‘the British Resident at Bushehr [assumed] a certain responsibility for justice and security upon the Persian coast’. Britain twice occupied Persian soil at times of conflict over Herat, namely Kharg Island in 1838 and Bushihr, Muhammarah and Kharg in 1856–7. They were tempted to retain Kharg as a base but decided against it, fearing the Russian reaction. In 1888, the British minister in Tehran, Sir H. Wolff, gave an explicit assurance that if any other power

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should make an unprovoked attack, the British government would take steps necessary to prevent any infringement of Persia’s territorial integrity.1 As Mohammad Al-Muqadam notes (‘Oman’s Relations with Persia’, p. 276), the rulers of Oman and Persia repeatedly ‘attempted to extend their powers to the opposite coastline’. In general the British regarded the Persians as too eager to assert themselves in the Gulf, and sought to restrain them. They opposed Persian claims to Bahrain and regularly intervened on behalf of the sultan of Oman in his affairs on the Persian shore. For example, in October 1856, the British insisted that Persia renew the Bandar ʿAbbas lease on reasonable terms as a requirement for settling the Anglo-Persian War. However, the British also dissuaded the Omani sultan from ‘commit[ting] aggressions on any of the Persian ports’ when Tehran appeared reluctant to renew the lease in 1868.2 In the opinion of Colonel Pelly, ‘Were it not for us, the Arabs would plunder her coast and not allow a Persian boat to put to sea’.3

The rise of pearling cities The emergence of the Wahhabi movement in Najd in the mid-eighteenth century coincided with widespread ʿUtubi tribal migrations, probably hastened by drought, to the Gulf coast. Their settlement of Kuwait, al-Zubarah and Bahrain led to competition with the established ports of Basra, Bushihr and Muscat. The rapid rise of new regional emporia was a magnet for Arabian tribesmen and merchants, as shown in merchants deserting Basra and flocking to al-Zubarah. As Hala Fattah has demonstrated, the key to their success was that they were free ports with no customs duties. This was a major difference with the Ottoman port of Basra or the Persian port of Bushihr, and shifted much trade to the southern part of the Gulf. Nelida Fuccaro attributes the port towns that took shape in the Gulf in the second half of the nineteenth century to a resurgence of tribal power, large revenues from pearling that spurred the urbanization process, and British informal empire.

Patterns of migration in the Gulf There has always been movement of people from one side of the Gulf to the other because of economic opportunities, family and tribal ties, and lack of governmental controls. The case of the Hawalah Arabs has already been mentioned. Because of the rapid growth of cities such as Kuwait, Bahrain, Sharjah and Dubai, the nineteenth century was a period of considerable labour migration from Persia to the Arabian side. Such movement was completely normal in the pre-modern period. As Mohammad Taghi Razavian notes (‘Iranian Communities of the Persian Gulf ’, p. 327), it is important to remember that immigration observations within the Persian Gulf zone should not be studied as an external trend of population but only as the movements of people within a geographical region. It has been in accordance with this fact that whenever a resident of the northern coast has faced a problem he has immediately slipped into his dhow and sailed to one of the shaikhdoms and remained there until he was assured of the disappearance of the problem.

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Yacoub Al-Hijji reports (‘Kuwait and Iran’, p. 94) that Persian ports provided much of Kuwait’s needs in the nineteenth century: ‘From the Persian coast near Hindijan they imported wheat; from Bushehr they imported dried fruits and other articles; and from the Shatt-al-Arab waterway they bought dates, vegetables, fruits and other essential items’. Kuwaiti dhows brought their goods to the ports of Bushihr and Muhammarah (later Khurramshahr), while they transported Iranian (and Iraqi) dates to India. AlHijji speaks highly of the contribution made by Persian workers from Bushihr, Kangan, Behbehan, and Kish Island. He emphasizes the mixing of cultures that resulted from the influx of Iranian workers into Kuwait, and observes that the Arabic language there was peppered with Persian. The number of Persians was at first relatively small: Lorimer reports that in 1904, Persians made up 3 per cent of the population of Kuwait. From 1910 on, however, due to the high wages in this boomtown, there was a large influx of Persians of the ‘artisan and labouring classes’. A study by Mohammad Alhabib of the migration process from south-western Iran to Kuwait in the period 1880 to 1914 emphasizes the attractions of moving: Kuwait was politically stable, allowed Shiʿis to practise their rites, and had a thriving merchant community and demand for labour. At the same time, conditions in south-west Iran were politically unstable, there was a lack of work, and it was prone to frequent climatic disasters such as drought. Kuwait had the most intensive trade relations with Muhammarah, as well as Basra, Bushihr, Bandar ʿAbbas, Bandar Daylam, Manama and Muscat. Networks of Shiʿi families and friends facilitated much of this. Many Kuwaiti surnames were the same as those of Iranian villages or districts, and there were similar naming patterns in Bahrain. Fuccaro highlights the importance of Persians to the development of Manama from the nineteenth century until the promulgation of the Nationality and Property Law in 1937. Most immigrants arrived from coastal cities in Iran between the 1860s and early 1920s, and the majority were Shiʿi, particularly from the Bushihr area. She speculates that many were pushed out by famine and disease, as well as by high tariffs on food imports and local political instability. Many merchants came and created a demand for better-quality goods (Fuccaro, ‘Mapping the Transnational Community’, p. 46): ‘British observers who were generally familiar with the population of the southern Iranian cities took for granted the more refined taste and superior material culture of the Ajam immigrants’. There were many communal organizations for Persians, above all the maʾtams (Shiʿi houses of mourning). Poor Persian peasants also arrived in large numbers to do menial work and participate in the pearling industry, thereby swelling Manama’s population. Affluent residential districts, such as al-ʿAwadiyyah in Bahrain and al-Bastakiyyah in Dubai, were built by Iranian immigrants and distinguished by Persian architectural features such as badgir (known in Dubai as barjeel) or wind towers.

The transformation of the Gulf By the late nineteenth century, the Gulf had been significantly transformed from both a political and economic point of view. Persia retained her independence, albeit under heavy influence from Britain and Russia. The southern shaykhdoms, and later Kuwait,

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Figure 3.3 Wind tower in al-Bastakiyyah area of Dubai (1937). had entered into exclusive agreements with Britain, as discussed by J.B. Kelly, which offered protection in return for control of defence and foreign policy. Shaykhs throughout the Gulf, who previously ruled in consultation with their tribesmen and the merchants, became increasingly autocratic as the British treated them as rulers over

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the settled population. Britain was the key mediator in Arab–Persian relations in the Gulf. Britain successfully excluded other European powers, notably Russia, Germany and France. Thanks to the introduction of regular steamer service, the larger Gulf ports enjoyed reliable connections to India, and in 1916 the mail steamer from Bombay to Basra took seven or eight days. Likewise the establishment of a telegraph line allowed rapid communication between the Gulf ports and Europe. The unprecedented pearling boom on the Arab shore led to the rapid expansion of cities even as ports on the Iranian side declined due to adverse government policies.

The twentieth century: the shattering of unity and rise of modern states Shaykh Mubarak and Shaykh Khazʿal The boundaries at the head of the Gulf were decided by Britain after the First World War, and an interesting contrast can be drawn between Kuwait – which ultimately became a state – and the neighbouring Persian province of ʿArabistan and the Ottoman province of Basra, which did not. The British had supported Ottoman claims to Basra before the First World War, and despite a separatist movement that arose there in the 1920s, it opted to include Basra in the new state of Iraq. Kuwaiti independence was recognized but it found itself joining Iraq and Iran in disputing British-imposed borders. At the turn of the century, the ruler of Kuwait, Shaykh Mubarak ibn Sabah Al Sabah (r. 1896–1915) and Shaykh Khazʿal ibn Jabir of Muhammarah (r. 1897–1924) had a number of things in common. Both were Arabs who ruled over Arab populations, and both held an ambiguous political status, not wanting to be subservient to the Ottoman or Persian Empire, respectively. Both were far enough away from the capital to be autonomous, and both enjoyed British support. Each controlled an important port at the head of the Gulf and derived most of his revenue from large landholdings in southern Iraq. They were close friends, although according to B.J. Slot, Khazʿal appeared to be richer and more powerful. For his part, Khazʿal was jealous of Shaykh Mubarak’s independence and complained to the British that he was not receiving equal treatment. Shaykh Mubarak, who is treated in major works by Slot and Salwa Alghanim, had appealed for British protection in 1899 and was granted a secret bond (effectively making Kuwait a protectorate), modelled on Britain’s exclusive agreements with the Trucial shaykhs. In return for payment, the shaykh promised not to cede, sell or lease any part of his territory to foreigners without the consent of Britain, nor would he or his heirs receive any foreign power without British permission. Britain’s motivation was to control a projected railway terminus in Kuwait as well as to keep out other powers. A draft treaty of July 1913 between Britain and the Ottomans conceded that Kuwait would be an autonomous qaza (provincial sub-district) under Ottoman sovereignty, and a Turkish agent would be stationed there, but the outbreak of the First World War meant that the convention was never ratified. A British agreement with

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Shaykh Mubarak in November 1914, in which the shaykh promised to assist the British war effort, led to formal recognition of Kuwait as ‘an independent state under British protection’. Kuwait received full independence in 1961. In Kuwait Mubarak is known as ‘the Great’, and considered the father of the country. Although he owed his position to the British, Slot observes (Mubarak Al-Sabah, p. 424) that ‘Mubarak acted as a sovereign ruler, never countenancing any interference by the Ottomans or the British in the affairs of Kuwait’. Thanks to his astute negotiating ability and skill in playing off the British against the Ottomans, Mubarak was able to keep his own freedom of action and maintain Kuwait’s independent status. Shaykh Khazʿal’s long tenure as the almost-independent ruler of ʿArabistan is an illustration of Tehran’s historically weak control over the periphery, and its eventual triumph over formerly autonomous groups, including the Arabs in the south. The British had taken an interest in the territory of Khazʿal first to forestall the Russians, and later the Germans. A long-term interest was assured after the discovery of oil in his territory in 1908. Britain wished to remain on good terms with Khazʿal since he provided security for the oil operations, and extended seven assurances between 1899 and 1914 that promised to exert their influence on his behalf on condition that he follow British advice. However, none of the agreements clearly promised the one thing that he wanted: British protection from the central government. Khazʿal is the subject of doctoral dissertations by Mostafa Ansari and William Theodore Strunk. Had they so desired, the British might have made Khuzistan an independent emirate such as Kuwait. However, after the rise of Reza Shah (r. 1925–41) they preferred to deal with a strong central government in Iran. The Russians also reached the same conclusion, abandoning their own protégés in the Caspian area. After the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty, British Persian policy demanded that London recognize one government in Tehran and work through it. When the Iranian strongman became powerful enough in 1924 to enter ʿArabistan and arrest Khazʿal, the British did not prevent it. By issuing the assurances, the British may have simply helped to prolong a condition of independence that became incompatible with the rise of a strong central government. Critically, Khazʿal was not prepared to come to an accommodation with Reza Shah, and overestimated his ability to resist. He was sent to Tehran for eleven years of house arrest and died in 1936. In the end, Mubarak was hailed as a national hero in Kuwait while Khazʿal was widely reviled as an Arab separatist who was a traitor to the Iranian nation. Had matters followed another trajectory, the regional map could look very different today.

Post-First World War The collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of new states in the Gulf area, notably Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Britain at this time had virtually excluded her former adversaries in the region – Russia, Germany and the Ottomans – and, in the wake of war, exerted stronger control over regional states and leaders than at any other period. By the Second World War, however, its role had been much reduced. Britain gave up its mandate in Iraq in 1932 and in the same year Ibn Saʿud proclaimed the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Iran, the parliament refused to ratify a 1919 agreement that would

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have turned it into a British protectorate and a strongly nationalistic leader, Reza Shah, rose thanks to British help, although he refused to do its bidding. The Gulf entered a period in which the people-to-people relations and historic networks that had tied the region together and given it a distinct identity were increasingly overshadowed by relations between states that were often mutually hostile. As new states pursued new national agendas, they tried to implement an exclusionary nationalism that led to tension with their neighbours. As an ancient power, Iran had little regard for Iraq (from which it withheld recognition until 1929) or the small emirates in the Gulf area, whose treaties with the British it did not recognize. Iran considered Bahrainis as Iranian citizens and objected when the British required that Persians produce passports when visiting Bahrain. In order to curb immigration, Charles Belgrave, adviser to the Ruler of Bahrain from 1926 until 1957, introduced passports and a system of checking arrivals and departures soon after he arrived in Bahrain. In the late 1930s, the British promoted the employment of Indians instead of Iranians in the nascent oil industry in Bahrain. Under Reza Shah, the government in Tehran for the first time asserted control over the entire country. He restored the old name, Khuzistan, to the province that had been called ʿArabistan in Safavid and Qajar times, in an effort to disassociate Iran from any Arab reference. He settled ethnic Persians there, especially those working in the oil industry, to dilute its Arab nature. The Gulf shoreline became increasingly better connected to the rest of the country thanks to new roads and infrastructure, and the local shaykhs – if they were not executed – were now subject to the approval of Tehran. Despite the imposition of new borders, old patterns of movement in the Gulf area persisted and were driven by economic necessity. In the 1930s, many Arabs on the Iranian coast moved to the Arabian side of the Gulf. They were distressed by increased taxes, the introduction of military conscription, and Western dress codes, as well as the ban on veiling (imposed in 1936). At the same time, the mostly Sunni coastal Arabs felt welcome on the Arabian side, especially in light of the anti-Arab and pro-Shiʿi attitude of the Iranian government. In places such as Bandar ʿAbbas, the decline in trade caused bankruptcy for many traders, who relocated to the Arab shore or India: ‘On the opposite coast of the Gulf there was no monopolization, no trade restrictions and no taxes’, according to Razavian. ‘As a consequence, the Bandar Abbasi merchant found that his former fellow-citizen now living in the shaikhdom [of Dubai] was getting richer and richer while he himself was declining deeper and deeper into poverty’ (‘Iranian Communities in the Persian Gulf ’, p. 419). It was easier to emigrate than struggle against new government policies. Between 1927 and 1932, Iran and the British government carried out extensive treaty negotiations in an attempt to settle outstanding issues, especially related to the Persian Gulf. The overall goal of Tehran was to reduce the British presence there, which had started with the elimination of Shaykh Khazʿal in Muhammarah in 1924. Iranian negotiators, led by ʿAbd al-Husayn Teymurtash, the court minister of Reza Shah, aimed above all to receive acknowledgement of Iran’s claim to Bahrain, as well as to Abu Musa and the Tunbs. The British for their part hoped to negotiate a renewal of overflight privileges and landing rights for Imperial Airways on the Iranian coast, to clarify their position at

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Hengam Island (where they had a naval base), to have Iran renounce its claims to Abu Musa and the Tunbs, and to receive Iranian acknowledgement that the Britishprotected Arab rulers on the southern coast were independent. As Chelsi Mueller notes (‘Anglo-Iranian Treaty Negotiations’, online version, pp. 6 and 4, respectively), ‘the Iranian government had adopted a deliberate policy of challenging British supremacy throughout the Persian Gulf ’. She adds, ‘after the reassertion of Iranian central authority over ʿArabistan, the British evacuated most of their Indian troops from the Persian Gulf ports, relinquishing security in the coastal areas to Reza Khan’s army’. Teymurtash’s fall from the shah’s favour in 1932 and his subsequent murder put an end to the negotiations, and there was no agreement. But Iran continued its policy of reassertion in the Gulf, such as by regarding citizens from Kuwait, Muscat, the Trucial States and Bahrain as Iranian citizens. According to R.M. Burrell (‘Britain, Iran and the Persian Gulf ’, p. 187), ‘In the 1920s and 1930s the Persian Government did not have a Gulf policy as such. . . . The Gulf was, in effect, an area for the exercise of self-assertion and many of the actions taken in the Gulf are extensions of internal aims rather than foreign policy as such’. For the first time British control of the Gulf was challenged as Reza Shah began to build a navy, and in 1935 he forced the British to close their small military bases on the island of Hengam and at Basidu on the island of Qishm. Territorial disputes that had lingered for decades, such as ownership of Abu Musa and the Tunb islands and sovereignty over Bahrain, became a major preoccupation, and the British tried unsuccessfully to get the Iranians to give up claims of ownership. A review of the documents of the period in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Iranian historian Gholam Reza Vatandoust reveals an increased concern for developments in the Gulf, including smuggling, the presence of the British in the region, the status of Bahrain and the enforcement of the quarantine. The Arab shaykhdoms were not happy about this new Iranian assertion in the Gulf, but they let the British, as the protecting power, represent them in negotiations and would not yield to Iran control of contested islands. The Iranian crackdown on smuggling, however, directly affected the shaykhdoms. In order to build the transIranian railway (1927–38) without resorting to foreign loans, the Pahlavi government imposed a government monopoly on tea and sugar, which raised prices and imposed a real burden on poor people in southern Iran. This stimulated smuggling from the Arab ports to the Iranian coast, especially the stretch between Bushihr and Lingah, where large profits could be made.

The Second World War and afterwards Before the war, Iran (where oil had been discovered in 1908) had been the major exporter in the Middle East. Afterwards, there was a continuous increase in income to Arab states from the sale of oil, which was discovered in Iraq in 1927, in Bahrain in 1932 and in both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1938. Oil was subsequently discovered in commercial quantities in Qatar and Abu Dhabi in 1960, in Oman in 1963 and in Dubai in 1966. A common interest in safeguarding oil exports sometimes led to cooperation between Iran and the Arab states and at other times to conflict. When Iran nationalized

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its oil in 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company cut off exports while production was stepped up in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The delineation of offshore boundaries became important later as technology was developed to exploit hydrocarbon reserves under the seabed. This led to agreements to divide up the sea floor. The independence of India in 1947 removed the main rationale for the British presence in the Gulf, although it did not immediately lead to their departure. However, the Gulf, which had historically been closely tied to India, now became oriented more toward the Arab world. ‘The Iraqi revolution [1958] intensified the Arab-Iranian Cold War particularly in the Persian Gulf. Egypt and Syria sought to extend their power and influence into the Gulf to counter Iraqi and Iranian ambitions and British hegemony’, according to R.K. Ramazani (‘Arab-Iranian Relations’, p. 221). A campaign to replace the term ‘Persian Gulf ’ with ‘Arabian Gulf ’ or ‘Arab Gulf ’ was started by President Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt in the 1950s in his bid to promote pan-Arabism and oppose Iranian hegemony in the region. After the revolution in Iraq, the Baʿthist regime took up the campaign with gusto in an attempt to cultivate influence in the shaykhdoms and among ethnic Arabs in Khuzistan (increasingly referred to as ʿArabistan). This led to an unwinnable ‘name game’ that has poisoned regional relations down to the present day. Although the British had historically tried to keep the Gulf isolated from broader political trends in the Middle East and did not allow much travel there, this began to change with the development of the oil industry. In Bahrain, Belgrave took a dim view of the opening up of the Gulf (Personal Column, p. 237): Education, travel and, most of all, the propaganda power of the radio have exposed the Gulf Arabs to outside influences and have filled the minds of the Intelligentsia with political ideas which appeal to their emotions, but which they understand imperfectly. As the most effective part of this propaganda is directed against the British, the feeling of the Arabs toward the British has changed for the worse.

Mutual perceptions The Gulf has always been a creole area, a region of mixed descent, where the line between Arab and Persian was not clearly drawn, with many people bilingual and related to those on the other side. People in the region, as elsewhere, have multiple identities any of which can be activated depending upon the circumstances. Aside from Arab, the most important historic ethnicity is the ʿAjam, the generic term in the Gulf for Persians or Persian speakers. Historical stereotypes of the Other that asserted the superiority of one’s ethnicity were well known to both Arabs and Persians. In times of conflict negative stereotypes were invoked and stoked fear and suspicion. In the Gulf area, such tension has sometimes coincided with tension between Sunni and Shiʿi, and led to fears of irredentism. Thus Persians feared Arab expansion in the Gulf in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Arabs feared Persian expansion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Fred Halliday has pointed out (‘Arabs and Persians’, p. 2), ‘one of the most enduring features of the strategic situation in the Persian Gulf is the gap, as much

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psychological and cultural, as economic, military or political, between the Arab and Iranian perceptions of the region’. Arab–Persian relations in the period under discussion were affected by such factors, which stem from mutual ignorance and were affected by literary and media stereotypes. For example, Joya Blondel Saad has investigated the image of Arabs in modern Persian literature, and claims the necessity of constructing an Arab ‘Other’ to promote ‘Iranianness’. During the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8), Iraq emphasized its Arab identity and characterized the Persian enemy as ‘racist’ and ‘resentful’. Saddam’s government promoted the idea that Arabs were the rightful leaders of Islam, whereas Khomeini and his government were imposters, apostates, even Zoroastrians. While outside the temporal scope of this essay, such discourse has become widespread since the Islamic Revolution and has poisoned regional relations for decades. An example is the statement by a Kuwaiti political science professor, Abdullah K. Alshayji (‘Mutual Realities’, pp. 217, 220 and 224, respectively), that ‘historically, the relationship between the two sides has been fraught with animosity, rivalry, and distrust’. He points out that, ‘from an Arab perspective, the Persian mentality is influenced by strong nationalistic sentiment wrapped in chauvinistic Aryan feelings which the shah manipulated and fostered in the Iranian psyche. . . . This anti-Arab trend in the Pahlavi dynasty continued for 60 years’. He concludes that ‘the GCC states see the Iranian role as overbearing, dominant, and eager for opportunities to capitalize on the GCC ’s inherent weakness’. Iranian scholar and business consultant Bijan Khajehpour-Khoui believes that mutual perceptions have worsened due to the growth of nationalism in the twentieth century. He acknowledges (‘Mutual Perceptions’, pp.  240 and 246, respectively) that ‘the average Iranian has a negative prejudice about his Arab neighbors, due not only to deeply ingrained hostility throughout the past millennium, but also to more recent events’. He explains that Iran has a ‘big brother’ attitude toward the Gulf shaykhdoms, which Iranians perceive to need Iranian protection. All of this leads to an atmosphere of mistrust, which is exacerbated by the intervention of outside powers in the region.

Persians in Arabia and Arabs in Iran Before the 1960s, emigration from Iran to the Arabian states was easy and free of formalities, and as Nadjmabadi says (‘Cross-Border Networks’, p. 23), ‘most Iranian coastal inhabitants regarded Dubai as their second home’. Persians had always been part of the social fabric in the Arab port cities, and Peter Lienhardt observed that in the early 1950s all the shopkeepers in the market in Abu Dhabi were Persian or PersoArabs (his term). Sir Rupert Hay, a British Political Resident who served in the Gulf for eight years until 1954, commented that the largest colonies of Persians were in Bahrain and Dubai and that Persian shopkeepers predominated in any kind of suq or market, except in Muscat territory. He noted that ‘the Persians can, nearly all, speak Arabic fluently, but few Arabs will admit to a knowledge of Persian’ (Persian Gulf States, p. 148). Hay reports that a 1950 census in Bahrain recorded a population of 109,650, which included nearly 7,000 Persians.

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This free movement became problematic when immigration formalities were introduced after independence in all the formerly British-protected shaykhdoms. It became essential to obtain citizenship, which was almost impossible for non-Arabs, even if they had been working there for a long time. Despite this, labour migration continued because of demand on the Arab side and economic decline on the Iranian coast. Despite the historic episodes of migration by Arabs living on the Iranian coast to the Arabian shore, there remains a significant Sunni Arab minority in Iran living mostly between Kangan and Bandar Lingah. Many of them maintain family ties across the Gulf and engage in short- or long-term labour migration to places like Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE . The remittances of such workers, and their contributions to the welfare of home villages, play a major role in the economy of the region. Recent research by Majid Hojjati, which is probably applicable to the past, has demonstrated the important financial role emigrants from Lar (in southern Iran) play in their home town, especially in charitable organizations. Nadjmabadi has carried out extensive fieldwork in the southern Iranian province of Hormuzgan, studying the migratory process and how it affects identity. She finds (‘Cross-Border Networks’, p. 21) that ‘the Iranian migrants living and working in Arab countries do not perceive the Arab environment as a competing or different frame of reference. Given the historical entanglement of the two regions, these migrants [from the coastal region] actually feel less marginalised in Arab countries than when travelling to places in the interior of Iran’. Under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah (r. 1941–79), the Iranian government took a greater interest in the Gulf, advocated the departure of outside powers such as the US , and sought to project its power there. Iranian interests included safeguarding Iran’s access to the Indian Ocean (the Gulf being Iran’s principal outlet to the sea), protecting its oil exports, and preventing the establishment of any unfriendly Arab regimes in the region. Iran was very concerned to counter the propaganda of President Nasser and not let Egypt establish undue influence in the Gulf. Bernard Burrows comments, however, that the Iranians were never able to reconcile two objectives – befriending Gulf rulers so they would feel closer to them than the Saudis, and insistence on the Iranian claim to Bahrain. According to two well-known Iranian scholars, Shahram Chubin and Sepehr Zabih (Foreign Relations of Iran, p. 204), ‘Iran conducted a shrill defensive diplomacy prior to 1967, in which there was little evidence of constructive foresight and little assumption of positive responsibility toward its tiny neighbors’. The one notable Iranian action that found favour with the Gulf monarchs was their support for the sultan of Oman against the Dhufar insurgency in the 1970s. As was the case during the reign of Reza Shah, Chubin and Zabih note (Foreign Relations of Iran, p. 194) that ‘the British presence had psychological consequences for Iranian attitudes toward the Gulf, and emphasized the country’s weakness, vulnerability, and dependence’. Iran continued to have a stand-offish attitude toward the Arab shaykhdoms protected by Britain. In the 1950s, it did not recognize the independence of any of them, including Muscat and Oman, and maintained its claim to sovereignty over Bahrain and Abu Musa and the Tunb Islands. Rupert Hay (The Persian Gulf States, p. 148) reported that

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nationals of Gulf States visiting Persia are treated as Persian subjects and may be compelled to take out Persian identity certificates. Passports bearing British visas for any of the Gulf states are not recognized and a foreigner desirous of visiting Persia from them, if he is not already in possession of a separate passport with a visa for that country, will have to obtain a new passport and apply to the Persian Consul at Basra for a visa, as there is no Persian representative in any of the States.

British withdrawal from the Gulf The British announcement in 1968 that they would withdraw from the Gulf three years later marked the end of an era. The question was what would happen next. Iran opposed the idea of a British-sponsored federation of Arab shaykhdoms, especially if it included Bahrain, and did not believe it would be viable. In an effort to break the stalemate, the shah announced in January 1969 that Iran would not use force to retake Bahrain and would respect the wishes of a UN -sponsored referendum as to whether its inhabitants wanted to be part of Iran. In May 1970, the results, which favoured Bahraini independence, were accepted by the shah and the Iranian parliament. In return, the shah thought he had a deal with Britain to gain control over Abu Musa and the Tunbs. When this could not be negotiated in advance, on 30 November 1971, the day before the British departure, Iran took the Tunb islands by force. An agreement had been reached the previous day under duress between Iran and Sharjah to share sovereignty over Abu Musa. These actions outraged the Arab states and led to decades of tension with Iran. Nevertheless, for almost a decade Iran and the Gulf monarchies cooperated to maintain security there and keep the Gulf pro-West.

Conclusion From the late eighteenth century up to the 1920s and 1930s, people in the Gulf interacted easily and on many different levels. Whether this fostered a common Khaliji identity is debatable, but coastal people enjoyed a common lifestyle and felt different from those living inland. This changed with the rise of national states in Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia that raised impediments to free travel (such as passports and visas), and sought to create strong national identities. This also led to mutual misconceptions and acrimony. It was exacerbated by the policies of states which sought to rewrite history. In the case of the Gulf monarchies, with the exception of Oman, it led to an emphasis on a Najdi heritage to the exclusion of that of the many minority groups – such as the Persians, Indians, Baluch, Hawalah and Africans – that historically made the Gulf a transnational space. In recent times, Gulf history has become highly politicized, and the historic hybridity of its port cities has been obscured. On the Iranian side, it has led to an insistence on the historically Persian nature of the Gulf, disregarding Arab and other elements. Iran’s efforts to develop its own coast and establish free trade zones have paled in comparison to the glittering megaports on the Arab side. The struggle over the name of the Gulf is a product of political competition that tries to ‘Arabize’ or ‘Persianize’

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the history of the region, and will probably never be resolved. It has however fuelled what Fred Halliday has called (‘Arabs and Persians’, p. 6) the ‘ideologies of antagonism’ that accompanied national state-building. Hopefully the new generation in the Gulf can find a way to work together and transcend the disputes of the past.

Bibliographic essay As far as the author is aware, the topic of Arab–Iranian relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not been addressed before, although many books, articles and diplomatic documents touch on aspects of it. Part of the problem arises from the fact that most scholars work on either Iran, Iraq or Arabia, and there are few comparative studies. This chapter, on the other hand, has sought to review intra-Gulf relations as a whole and especially point out commonalities. The scholarship on Iran (and probably Iraq) exceeds that on Arabia, although the vast majority of studies concern the Iranian plateau and often omit mention of the Gulf. The British viewed the Gulf as a unit and governed it as such through a Political Resident in Bushihr (Bushire) (1822–1946), and British diplomats and scholars published most of the books on the region, especially the Arab side, before their departure in 1971. In recent years, indigenous scholars have begun to contribute studies combining Western academic standards and little-used sources in local languages, providing an important corrective to earlier works. The problem today is that due to the politicization of academia in the region, and government-promoted enmity between Sunni and Shiʿah, it is very hard for foreign or local scholars to engage in objective research there. Over several decades a number of indispensable multivolume collections of British documents and political reports on the Gulf have been published, and classic references republished, by Archive Editions (available from Cambridge University Press since 2009 as Cambridge Archive Editions). They are currently being digitized. One is the magisterial study compiled by J.G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ʿOmân, and Central Arabia (see Introduction), published in 1908 and 1915 with several reprints – that by Archive Editions (1986) appeared as a nine-volume set. This is extremely thorough, although it represents the official British viewpoint. See also: Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1957, eleven volumes; Iran: Political Diaries 1881–1965, fourteen volumes; Political Diaries of the Arab World: The Persian Gulf 1904–1965, twenty-four volumes; Iran in the Persian Gulf 1820–1966, six volumes; and other related titles. For excellent treatments of the modern period, see J.B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795–1880, supplemented with Briton Cooper Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914. A major reference work, with Alvin J. Cottrell as lead editor, is The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey, which contains valuable chapters, including two by Malcolm Yapp on ‘The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ and ‘British Policy in the Persian Gulf ’. Also of value is J.E. Peterson, ‘The Historical Pattern of Gulf Security’. James Onley, in The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf, has thrown light on how the British enlisted local collaborators to help them govern.

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The eighteenth century in Iran, Arabia and Iraq was one of transition and turmoil, and there was much tribal migration within the region. Under Nadir Shah (1736–47), Iran for the first time in centuries asserted itself on the Arab side of the Gulf. A treatment based on Arabic sources is Ahmad Mustafa Abu-Hakima, History of Eastern Arabia 1750–1800. See now Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs – The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792, which is based on Arabic and Persian sources and full of details, and a very hard to obtain volume by B.J. Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf, 1602–1784. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a period when non-state actors played a major role in the Gulf. Many small Arab principalities arose on the Persian shore, which are described by travellers such as Carsten Niebuhr in Travels Through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East. This was the heyday of the Hawalah, Arabs who migrated to Persia and later returned to play an important role on the Arab shore. They have long remained a mysterious group, but see now a chapter by Ahmed al-Dailami, ‘ “Purity and Confusion”: The Hawala between Arabs and Persians in the Contemporary Gulf ’, which discusses the situation on the Arabian side, especially Bahrain. Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Hula Arabs of the Shibkuh Coast of Iran, treats the Hawalah on the Persian side from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. The other significant group were the Qawasim, who were based at Sharjah and Raʾs al-Khaymah (as well as Bander Lingah on the Iranian side) and were allied with the Wahhabis. The most thorough treatment is Charles E. Davies, The Blood-Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy 1797–1820. See also the defence of his ancestors by Sultan Muhammad Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf. For the Arab side of the Gulf in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the rise of the pearling cities, much remains to be done. There is an excellent overview of Gulf history for this and other periods by the archaeologist Robert A. Carter, in his magnificent volume, Sea of Pearls: Seven Thousand Years of the Industry that Shaped the Gulf. Considerable excavation has been taking place on the Arab side of the Gulf which has illuminated the urbanization process, for example the ongoing Danish project at al-Zubarah (Qatar). For annual updates on field research, see the latest issue of The Bulletin of the British Foundation for the Study of Arabia (formerly the Society for Arabian Studies), published annually in the spring (see for example no. 20, 2015). An essential introduction to the economy of the period is Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900. For individual port cities, we have notable studies by Nelida Fuccaro (Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800) and Farah Al-Nakib (‘Inside a Gulf Port: The Dynamics of Urban Life in Pre-Oil Kuwait’). For Oman, see J.E. Peterson, Historical Muscat: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer and Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Muscat – City, Society & Trade. For the Persian side of the Gulf, see several studies by Floor in the same series: The Rise & Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh – The Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930; Bandar Abbas: The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran; and Bushehr: City, Society & Trade, 1800–1947. The major study of the Persian side of the Gulf in the eighteenth century is the PhD dissertation by Thomas M. Ricks, ‘Politics and Trade in Southern Iran and the Gulf, 1745–1765’, now turned into a book, Notables, Merchants, and Shaykhs of Southern Iran

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and its Ports: Politics and Trade of the Persian Gulf Region, AD 1728–1789. See also the relevant chapters in John R. Perry, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747–1779. For the Qajar period (1785–1924) in Iran in general, see volume 7 of the Cambridge History of Iran (Peter Avery et al., eds). See now the valuable survey by Gholam Reza Vatandoust, ‘The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: A Survey of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Persian Sources’. His appendices also offer an overview of the available documents in the Persian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1847–1921) and National Archives of Iran (1881–1989). A companion chapter by Fahad Ahmad Bishara, ‘Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf ’, offers guidance on histories written in Arabic, particularly in Kuwait. There is a long chapter on the Persian Gulf in George Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, which reflects the situation around 1890 and is particularly informative about British policy. Potter has an overview of the process in his chapter, ‘The consolidation of Iran’s frontier on the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth century’. The subject of migration to and within the Gulf has attracted increasing interest in light of the huge number of guest workers in the GCC states at present. For background see Ian J. Seccombe, ‘Labour Migration to the Arabian Gulf: Evolution and Characteristics 1920–1950’ and Andrzej Kapiszewski, Nationals and Expatriates: Population and Labour Dilemmas of the Gulf Cooperation Council States. For migration from the Iranian coast to the Arabian side, see the work of Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, such as ‘The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf ’ and ‘Cross-Border Networks: Labour Migration from Iran to the Arab Countries of the Persian Gulf ’. On immigration from Iran, see Nelida Fuccaro, ‘Mapping the Transnational Community: Persians and the Space of the City in Bahrain, c.1869–1937’. There is extensive information about Iranians who have migrated to the Arabian side in an unpublished doctoral thesis by Mohammad Taghi Razavian, ‘Iranian Communities of the Persian Gulf: A Geographical Analysis’. With the consolidation of modern states in Iran and Arabia in the interwar period, Arab–Iranian relations grew more fraught on an official level as controls on movement were introduced, citizenship was enforced, and Iran sought to reduce Britain’s role in the Gulf. See here R.M. Burrell, ‘Britain, Iran and the Persian Gulf: Some Aspects of the Situation in the 1920s and 1930s’, and Chelsi Mueller,‘Anglo-Iranian Treaty Negotiations: Reza Shah, Teymurtash and the British Government, 1927–1932’. There is fuller treatment of the Reza Shah period in Mueller’s doctoral thesis, ‘The Persian Gulf between the Two World Wars: The Arab Shaykhdoms, Britain and Iran, 1919–1939’. The disputes between Iran and the British-protected Arab states over Abu Musa, the Tunbs, and other islands in the Gulf that arose again at this time, as well as the issue of the Shatt al-ʿArab, are best covered by geographer Richard Schofield. See his ‘Position, Function, and Symbol: The Shatt al-Arab Dispute in Perspective’. On the islands, see Thomas R. Mattair, The Three Occupied UAE Islands: The Tunbs and Abu Musa, and three linked chapters in Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds, Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus. These include Jalil Roshandel, ‘On the Persian Gulf Islands: An Iranian Perspective’, Hassan Al-Alkim, ‘The Islands Question: An Arabian Perspective’, and Richard Schofield, ‘Anything but Black and White: A Commentary on the Lower Gulf Islands Dispute’.

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One useful source which sheds light on Arab–Iranian relations is the memoirs of British political agents who served in the Gulf, especially in the twentieth century. See for example Personal Column by Charles Belgrave, who advised the rulers of Bahrain from 1926 to 1957. Rupert Hay (who served as Resident in the Persian Gulf, 1941–2 and Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, 1946–53) has written The Persian Gulf States and Bernard Burrows, Political Resident in the Persian Gulf based in Bahrain from 1953–58, published Footnotes in the Sand: The Gulf in Transition 1953–1958. For the period of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941–79), see Shahram Chubin and Sepehr Zabih, The Foreign Relations of Iran: A Developing State in a Zone of GreatPower Conflict. There are also many publications by Rouhollah K. Ramazani, an Iranian-born professor of government and foreign affairs, including The Foreign Policy of Iran: A Developing Nation in World Affairs and ‘Arab-Iranian Relations in Modern Time[s]’. Although outside the scope of this essay, the book by Christin Marschall, Iran’s Persian Gulf Policy: From Khomeini to Khatami, deserves mention. Studies of mutual relations and mutual perceptions are few. A start was made with Khair el-Din Haseeb, Arab-Iranian Relations, an edited collection of twenty-seven papers that originated in a seminar in Doha in 1995. There is a major study by Ehsan Yarshater, the doyen of Iranian studies in the US , on ‘The Persian Presence in the Islamic World’, which thoroughly reviews Iranian–Arab relations over the centuries. Joya Blondel Saad, The Image of Arabs in Modern Persian Literature, examines literary evidence for Iranians’ perceptions of self and others. Since the Iran–Iraq War (1980–8) there has been a great rise in sectarian discourse and mutual disparagement between Arabs and Iranians, on which see Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf. Considering the fact that no serious studies of Arab–Iranian relations exist for the period under discussion, one certainly could be constructed from the huge variety of writing that already exists on the Gulf. Unfortunately, at present the mistrust and feeling of vulnerability that affects all Gulf States, along with the politicized atmosphere and rise of sectarian sentiment, does not bode well for such research.

Notes 1 In Iran in the Persian Gulf 1820–1966 [British Diplomatic Documents], A.L.P. Burdett and A. Seay, eds, Farnham Common: Archive Editions, 2000, Vol. 1, pp. 743–5. 2 Government of India to Government of Bombay, 19 June 1868, in Iran in the Persian Gulf, Vol. 1, p. 509. 3 ‘Report from Colonel Pelly, No. 56, 9 May 1868’, in Iran in the Persian Gulf, Vol. 1, pp. 508–9.

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the Early 20th Century: Foreign Institutions and Local Responses (Durham: University of Durham Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, 1986; Occasional Paper Series, No. 31), pp. 25–63. Kapiszewski, Andrzej. Nationals and Expatriates: Population and Labour Dilemmas of the Gulf Cooperation Council States. Reading: Ithaca Press, 2001. Kelly, J.B. ‘The Legal and Historical Basis of the British Position in the Persian Gulf ’. St Antony’s Papers, No. 4, Middle Eastern Affairs, No. 1. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. Kelly, J.B. Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795–1880. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Especially ‘The Persian Gulf in the Late Eighteenth Century’, pp. 1–61. Khajehpour-Khoei, Bijan. ‘Mutual Perceptions in the Persian Gulf Region: An Iranian Perspective’. In Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds, Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 239–51. Lienhardt, Peter. Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia. Ed. Ahmed Al-Shahi. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Maniʿ, Saleh al-. ‘The Ideological Dimension in Saudi-Iranian relations’. In Jamal S. al-Suwaidi, ed., Iran and the Gulf: A Search for Stability (Abu Dhabi: Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 1996), pp. 158–74. Marschall, Christin. Iran’s Persian Gulf Policy: From Khomeini to Khatami. London: Routledge, 2003. McIntire, Emily Wells. ‘From Lar to Kuwait’. Cultural Survival, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter 1983). Special issue on ‘The Search for Work’. Moghadam, Amin. ‘The Other Shore: Iranians in the United Arab Emirates Between Visibility and Invisibility’. In Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh, eds, Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 247–65. Mattair, Thomas R. The Three Occupied UAE Islands: The Tunbs and Abu Musa. Abu Dhabi: Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 2005. Mojtahed-Zadeh, Pirouz. ‘Diaspora vii: In the Persian Gulf States’. Encyclopædia Iranica, Vol. 7 (1996), pp. 379–80. Montigny, Anie.‘Les Arabs de l’Autre Rive’. Cahiers d’études sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le monde Turco-Iranien, Vol. 22 (July–December, 1996), pp. 51–81. Mueller, Chelsi. ‘Anglo-Iranian Treaty Negotiations: Reza Shah, Teymurtash and the British Government, 1927–1932’. Iranian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 5 (September 2016), published online 16 March 2015. Mueller, Chelsi. ‘The Persian Gulf between the Two World Wars: The Arab Shaykhdoms, Britain and Iran, 1919–1939’. PhD dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2015. Muqadam, Mohammad Saad Al-. ‘Oman’s Relations with Persia, 1737–1868’. PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 1996. Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz Razieh. ‘The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf ’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 129–45. Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz R. ‘Cross-Border Networks: Labour Migration from Iran to the Arab Countries of the Persian Gulf ’. Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2010), pp. 18–33. Nakib, Farah Al-. Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Nakib, Farah Al-. ‘Inside a Gulf Port: The Dynamics of Urban Life in Pre-Oil Kuwait’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 199–228.

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Nicolini, Beatrice. Makran, Oman, and Zanzibar: Three-Terminal Cultural Corridor in the Western Indian Ocean, 1799–1856. Trans. Penelope-Jane Watson. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Niebuhr, Carsten. Travels Through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East. Trans. Robert Heron. Edinburgh, 1792; reprint, Reading: Garnet Publishing, 1994. Onley, James. The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Onley, James. ‘Britain’s Native Agents in Arabia and Persia in the Nineteenth Century’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 131–41. Pelly, Lewis. ‘Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources around the Shore Line of the Persian Gulf ’. Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, Vol. 17 (1865), pp. 32–112. Perry, John R. Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747–1779. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1957. 11 vols; Gerrards Cross: Archive Editions, 1986 [British diplomatic service reports]. Peterson, J.E. Historical Muscat: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Peterson, J.E. ‘The Historical Pattern of Gulf Security’. In Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds, Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 7–31. Potter, Lawrence G., ed. The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Potter, Lawrence G., ed. Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf. London: Hurst, 2013. Potter, Lawrence G. ‘The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century’. In Roxane Farmanfarmaian, War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp. 125–48. Qasimi, Sultan Muhammad al-. The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf. 2nd edn; London: Routledge, 1988. Ramazani, Rouhollah K. The Foreign Policy of Iran: A Developing Nation in World Affairs. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966. Ramazani, R.K. ‘Arab-Iranian Relations in Modern Time[s]’. Encyclopædia Iranica, Vol. 2 (1987), pp. 220–4. Razavian, Mohammad Taghi. ‘Iranian Communities of the Persian Gulf: A Geographical Analysis’. PhD thesis, University of London, 1975. Ricks, Thomas M. Notables, Merchants, and Shaykhs of Southern Iran and its Ports: Politics and Trade of the Persian Gulf Region, ad 1728–1789. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2012. Ricks, Thomas M. ‘Politics and Trade in Southern Iran and the Gulf, 1745–1765’. PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1975. Roshandel, Jalil. ‘On the Persian Gulf Islands: An Iranian Perspective’. In Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds, Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 135–53. Saad, Joya Blondel. The Image of Arabs in Modern Persian Literature. Lanham: University Press of America, 1996. Schofield, Richard. ‘Anything but Black and White: A Commentary on the Lower Gulf Islands Dispute’. In Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds, Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 171–87. Schofield, Richard. ‘Position, Function, and Symbol: The Shatt al-Arab Dispute in Perspective’. In Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds, Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 29–70.

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Seccombe, Ian J. ‘Labour Migration to the Arabian Gulf: Evolution and Characteristics 1920–1950’. Bulletin – British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1983), pp. 3–20. Slot, B.J. The Arabs of the Gulf, 1602–1784: An Alternative Approach to the Early History of the Arab Gulf States and the Arab Peoples of the Gulf, Mainly Based on Sources of the Dutch East India Company. Leidschendam, 1993. Slot, B.J. Mubarak Al-Sabah: Founder of Modern Kuwait 1896–1915. London: Arabian Publishing, 2005. Standish, John F. ‘Bahrain and the Persian Claim’. In John F. Standish, Persia and the Gulf: Retrospect and Prospect (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 149–77. Strunk, William Theodore. ‘The Reign of Shaykh Khazʿal Ibn Jabir and the Suppression of the Principality of ʿArabistan: A Study in British Imperialism in Southwestern Iran, 1897–1925’. PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1977. ‘The United Kingdom’s Recognition of Kuwayt as an Independent State Under British Protection, 3 November 1914’. In J.C. Hurewitz, ed., The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2nd edn, Vol. 2, British-French Supremacy, 1914–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 6–7. Vatandoust, Gholam Reza. ‘The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: A Survey of the Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Persian Sources’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 73–102. Visser, Reidar. Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq. Münster: Lit, 2005. Yapp, Malcolm. ‘The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. In Alvin J. Cottrell, gen. ed., The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 41–69. Yarshater, Ehsan. ‘The Persian Presence in the Islamic World’. In Richard G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh, eds, The Persian Presence in the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 4–125.

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The Age of Imperialism and Its Impact on the Gulf J.E. Peterson

The entry of European powers into the Indian Ocean and the Gulf, their dominance until at least the Second World War and the process of decolonization constitutes the ‘age of imperialism’, a period that has also been called the Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history. This chapter focuses on the era of Gulf history from the initial entry of Europeans in the Gulf to the final imperial exit, defined as British withdrawal in 1971. There are several key logical assumptions about what was largely European imperialism in Asia – and for our purposes in particular the western basin of the Indian Ocean – that should be emphasized as being demonstrably facile and not particularly accurate. First among these is the conception of a dichotomy between Europe and Asia, of two geographical and cultural units interacting with each other on the basis of civilizational distinctions and political-military inequality. A second assumption is that the purposes of imperialist thrusts and their impact sprang from essentially the same motivations and methods of execution regardless of which European power or which region of Asia is examined. As will be shown below, the intentions and organizations of different European imperial impulses differed from one power to another and, furthermore, evolved over time. In addition, Asia was not a passive recipient of the imperialist thrust and the actions and methods of the coastal peoples differed considerably from one region to another. This can be illustrated by the fact that the western Indian Ocean littoral was characterized in places by land-based empires that had little direct interest in maritime trade and even less in acquiring a naval presence. At the same time, extensive networks of merchants criss-crossed the various shores in a complex and robust pattern of trade that prospered well before European intrusions – and after. With the above points in mind, the imperial impulse of the Vasco da Gama era is best described as a patina on the structure of Indian Ocean civilizations, a generalization that applies in particular to the Gulf. Even in the sixteenth century, empires were not new to the Gulf. From the ancient time of Mesopotamia, parts of the Gulf had been subsumed in larger imperial entities. But the entry of European powers into the Indian Ocean marked a qualitative difference. While earlier empires were ‘neighbourly’, European intruders came from strange and unknown cultures, employed different languages and religions, and their presence in Asia furnished only fleeting glimpses of their nature. Their use of force was 127

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superior and their power was exercised from a remote distance through locally based minions. Not until the late nineteenth century and after did British India assume a commanding and more ‘neighbourly’ position in the Gulf. The dramatic impact of the Europeans on the region was due in part to their projection as ‘gunpowder empires’.1 While the use of force had been a feature in the Gulf since time immemorial – as observable in the practices of piracy, maritime warfare and invasion – it had not applied to trade; the militarization of trade was essentially a European innovation. But it can also be said that European imperialism in Asia and the Gulf differed substantially from imperialism elsewhere in the world. Asian empires, such as the Ottoman and the Mughal, exercised some degree of control over wide swathes of territory that were generally contiguous and culturally similar. The global example of European imperialism in the early modern period was not so different, with the provisos that the territory was far from metropolitan Europe and cultures were markedly dissimilar – the Spanish empire in the Americas is a good case in point.2 The nineteenth-century scramble for territory in Africa has provided the impetus for theorization about the nature of imperialism. But European imperialism in Asia, particularly that of the big three players – the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English or British – displayed fundamental differences with experiences elsewhere. The ability to establish and maintain long-distance trading patterns was central; territory was secondary apart from the need to plant safe bases for administration, military or maritime control, and factories (which were trading posts incorporating storehouses, domiciles for merchants and their helpers, and sometimes garrisons and fortifications). Portugal, which elsewhere incorporated areas of both West and East Africa, as well as Brazil, into its empire, was content to hold a string of fortified ports around the rim of the western Indian Ocean and to employ gunboat diplomacy. This, it may be assumed, was sufficient to maintain such key requirements as facilitating maritime trade and asserting control of sea routes. In Niels Steengaard’s view, the Portuguese success was due to their transformation of the unpredictability of the peddling trade into a redistributive enterprise (the exchange of long-distance trade between Europe and Asia) by internalizing protection costs – such as customs duties, extortion by local authorities and attacks by robbers – into their integrated operations. Subsequent Dutch and English commercial empires also focused their trading requirements on a network of factories and fortified administrative centres. While it is true that expansion of the British Empire in India from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries varied from this practice, it is more appropriate to see it as the product of a long period of evolution away from the earlier basic pattern. At the same time, though, British priorities in and around the Gulf were focused on controlling the sea lanes and ensuring safe passage for British ships and unimpeded commerce – including the suppression of piracy (as the British perceived it) and the prevention of interference by other regional or international powers. At times the Gulf was a stage for European rivalry, as in the latter half of the nineteenth century when France, Russia, Germany and the Ottoman Empire (not a predominantly European empire of course but akin to it by its externality to the Gulf) sought to erode the British position by suborning local rulers, establishing a presence through the introduction of steamship lines and expanding communications to the

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Gulf by, for example, the so-called ‘Berlin-to-Baghdad railway’. But once Britain had established its supremacy in the Gulf, its primary goal was less to exert its power in the region than to maintain an environment conducive to British imperial interests as expressed through, and for the benefit of, the Government of India. It became clear as time went on that British interests in the Gulf until the independence of India were much more ‘Indian’ interests than imperial concerns as seen from London. With the above in mind, the aspect of imperialism that seems most suited to explaining its presence in the Gulf is a pericentric model, in which the emphasis of imperialism is based on the relations between metropole and periphery.3 This theoretical explanation owes much to the works of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson on informal empire. They reject the idea that empires functioned principally to serve domestic drivers but were characterized by commercial expansion, on ‘trade with informal control if possible; trade with rule when necessary’ (‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, p. 13).

The imperial march in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf Certainly trading links had existed around the basin of the Indian Ocean from time immemorial, but the spread of Islam over the western littorals – and deep into the east as well – created a cultural unity that also translated into a commercial nexus. The early Islamic empires united trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean through the Red Sea and the Gulf. At the same time, the larger Islamized commonality strengthened long-distance trade – both by caravans in the north and by sea in the south – between eastern regions of Asia and Europe, as well as relatively shorter trade between the Islamized western Indian Ocean region and points farther east and west. While eastern Asian powers in China and Indonesia had invested in naval protection for their shipping, this was not true of western Indian Ocean states and ports. On the eve of the European entry into the Indian Ocean, trade in maritime Asia was dominated by a number of city states prospering because of their ports – principally among them Malacca, Cambay (later superseded by Surat), Jarun (later Hormuz) and Aden – in what has been called an age of commerce. Gujaratis, among them Baniyas (often called Banyans in the Gulf), were important merchants throughout the immediate region as well as to the east, as in Aceh. Diasporas of, most notably, Armenians and Jews were also strongly represented in trade.

The Portuguese As Charles Boxer has pointed out, the role of the Portuguese in spearheading this new era of exploration has been attributed to its position at the westernmost point of Europe, its maritime tradition and its Iberian heritage of close connections to the ‘Moors’, including familiarity with their ship designs. Following the annexation of Ceuta on the North African coast in 1415, Portuguese ships advanced into the Atlantic, discovering the Azores and Madeira. An immediate spur was the gold and slaves to be exploited in sub-Saharan Africa. But there were other, equally important, reasons for Portuguese motivation besides the

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economic. Religious fervour embraced a crusade to find the mythical Christian king Prester John somewhere in the East, an impulse reinforced by the travels of a Portuguese priest, Pedro de Covilhã, who made his way overland during 1487–92 to India, the Red Sea, the Gulf and Abyssinia, where he found Prester John, a disappointingly minor king. The discovery, however, convinced the Portuguese that Columbus had not discovered America and that there existed a sea route to India. Shortly afterwards, the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) divided the world between the Portuguese and Spanish empires with the East falling to Lisbon. The way was paved for Vasco da Gama and his 1497–99 voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, up the east coast of Africa, and eventual landfall in Calicut.4 The Portuguese rapidly established themselves as the masters of the western Indian Ocean in the absence of any strong Asian naval power. Furthermore, remarkably, they were able to maintain their dominant position for nearly all of the sixteenth century. It was Afonso de Albuquerque, the second governor after Vasco da Gama, who firmly orchestrated the bloody Portuguese introduction to the Gulf. It has been conjectured that the Portuguese violence partly resulted from many of their impressed crews being criminals but it is also likely that it was Albuquerque’s intention to demonstrate clearly the consequences of opposing him. Nevertheless, the Portuguese interest in the area was not predicated on territorial acquisition. Initially, there was an ideological struggle between those who wished an emphasis on gathering tribute and those who saw trading opportunities. Albuquerque orchestrated the construction of a string of fortified bases across the western Indian Ocean. Eventually, however, Portuguese Asia came to focus on trade and the control of trade on sea. It was first and foremost a maritime empire and did not dislodge the existing land powers, as well as benefited from the absence of significant naval opposition in the Indian Ocean arena in that era. In the words of Sanjay Subrahmanyam, the Estado da Índia was an empire ‘written on water’ and its reach depended on major bases at Sofala, Hormuz (Ormuz), Goa, Cochin and Malacca (Melaka). An early goal was to throttle the spice competition from Mamluk Egypt and Venice through the Red Sea route, with an attempt to build a fort on Socotra to interdict shipping through the Bab al-Mandab. The Portuguese, however, were unable to establish dominance in the Red Sea because of the Ottomans and so concentrated on the Gulf as an extension of their Indian operations. The capture in 1515 of the island of Hormuz – in Charles Boxer’s estimation, one of the richest entrepôts in the world, channelling nearly all trade between Persia and India – provided a strategic regional headquarters and reduced Persia to a subordinate status, reinforced by the absence of any Persian naval power. The Portuguese did not found Hormuz. Rather, they took over a thriving enterprise supervised for several centuries by the Arab kings of Hormuz. The Hormuzi rulers also controlled the key Gulf islands of Qishm and Kharg, as well as the ports of Qalhat and Muscat on the Oman coast and tracts of the Persian coast, and they conducted extensive trade with India. Portuguese occupation of Hormuz was imperative on both strategic and trade grounds. For much of the sixteenth century, customs revenues from Hormuz were roughly equal to those of Malacca, and trade was dominated by imports of textiles and spices while the principal export to India was horses. The importance of Hormuz

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also lay in its use as a terminal for the maritime trade route from the east, easier and more reliable than the overland route via Afghanistan. The Portuguese were able to regulate the waters of the Gulf and neighbouring seas by permitting safe conduct to local shipping only with the issuance of a cartaz (licence), without which ships were liable to be sunk. It should not be forgotten as well that much of Portuguese trade in the Indian Ocean consisted of intra-Asian trade, both by agents (or contractors) of the Crown and by private Portuguese entrepreneurs. By 1570, the Portuguese had expanded to their maximum geographical limits in Asia and subsequently were restricted to strengthening their presence within those limits. The Portuguese were remarkably successful in their conquest and were able to maintain their monopoly for a full century. Their Asian bounty included gold, pepper (which constituted perhaps 40 per cent or more of all Portuguese spice trade), mace, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, silks, porcelain, silver, horses (from Persia and Arabia) and cotton textiles. As Boxer assesses the Portuguese epoch (The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, p.  49), ‘the Portuguese achievement in establishing a seaborne empire in Monsoon Asia was no less remarkable than that of the Spaniards in establishing their land-based empire in America [and] perhaps even more so’. As evidence, he points to the small population of Portugal, the perennial shortage of Portuguese shipping, the expenditure of resources elsewhere in Africa and Brazil, and that the ‘technological gap between the Portuguese and the majority of their Asian opponents was much less than that between the Spaniards and the Amerindians of the New World’. In the Gulf in particular, the emphasis was not on trade but on generating income from customs and the cartaz system. This also explains why the Portuguese in the Gulf did not mix with the local population as they did in India. The Portuguese were first in the Gulf but they were also the first of the Europeans to decline. Despite their supremacy in the Gulf, they failed to interdict the spice trade from Asia to Europe along the Red Sea and overland routes. More importantly, the Portuguese decline has been connected to the fact that the purpose of the Estado da Índia was trade, conducted by a government entity as if it were a private enterprise, and that its organization of trade did not differ from other Asian trading concerns. This eventually left the Estado vulnerable to other European innovators. At the same time, the Portuguese dominance did not displace Asian–European trade; it simply created competition for the overland routes through the Levant. It was left to the enterprising companies of the Dutch and English to divert Asian–European trade from its traditional routes. The loss of Hormuz in 1622 to the Persians, with English assistance, was a severe blow, cushioned only by retreat to Muscat as their regional fallback. Portuguese trade in the Gulf continued, perhaps even more vigorously than before, but they no longer controlled the largest customs house in the region and they faced growing competition. Meanwhile, Muscat and later Bandar Kung on the Persian coast acquired important roles as staging posts for trade to Basra and beyond. The Dutch emerged at this time as a serious threat, singling out Portuguese outposts in Asia. The revival of the Omani imamate placed additional pressure on the Portuguese in the Gulf. Muscat was lost to the Omanis in 1650, one of a number of setbacks that included the Dutch conquest of Malacca, Ceylon and Cochin in the same time frame. Kung was lost by about 1714 and by 1722 the Portuguese presence in the Gulf had permanently ended.

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Figure 4.1 Fort al-Jalali, constructed by the Portuguese, and the British consulate in Muscat harbour (1905). Nevertheless, the Portuguese Crown enterprise held on in Asia and Africa (and strengthened its position in Brazil) despite its losses. The continued maintenance of the ramshackle Estado da Índia owed much to pride but there were still profits to be made and most of the churches and fortresses they built across Asia were constructed (or rebuilt) following the glorious epoch of the sixteenth century. In the end, of course, the Portuguese gave way to the Dutch and the Dutch later gave way to English predominance. The enormous wealth generated for Portugal and Spain by their far-flung trading empires inspired the envy of other European powers who could only acquire a cut of the treasure by attacking the established empires. Originally, the Dutch campaign against the Portuguese was a subset of the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain, as well as Dutch designs on Portuguese trading profits. Because the Crowns of Portugal and Spain were united in 1580 in the person of Philip II of Spain, the Portuguese maritime empire became not only a legitimate target but a far more vulnerable one than inland Spanish possessions in the Americas. Furthermore, the conflict also represented a religious struggle between the Calvinist Dutch and the Catholic Portuguese, and resulted in two small European nations waging war across the globe. Boxer has called it ‘the first world war’. Why were the Dutch able to achieve primacy over the Portuguese? In Boxer’s view, the Dutch enjoyed superior economic resources, manpower and sea power. Although the two countries’ populations were roughly equal, available Portuguese manpower was consumed by redirection to Spanish requirements during unity and later to

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rebellion against Spain, while the Dutch were able to rely upon Germans and Scandinavians to beef up their army and fleet. The numbers of Dutch vessels of war far outnumbered what the Portuguese could muster. More fundamentally, the Portuguese venture in the Indian Ocean had been carried out by a state entity, the Estado da Índia, which used the military power of the Portuguese empire to guarantee its trading success. Senior positions and commands were based on social status whereas the Dutch tended to rely on merit. The experience and command of naval strategy of the Dutch commanders was clearly visible in hostile encounters between the two forces while the Dutch soldiers and sailors were better trained and disciplined (many Portuguese ranks were drafted or taken from jails). Contrarily, the Portuguese had planted deeper roots and many Portuguese lived out their lives in Asia and never thought of returning home. Some views hold that the ability of the Dutch to supplant the Portuguese lay in another, equally, important key to European success: the formation of some of the world’s first shareholding companies. Available investment was pooled in these companies for use in overseas trade, an innovation that the Dutch employed whereas the Portuguese had not. The earliest effective enterprise was the Dutch United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC ), which eventually gave way to the English East India Company (EIC ). Larry Neal has postulated (‘Dutch and English East India Companies’, p. 195 in Tracey’s The Rise of Merchant Empires) that the success of these companies was due to ‘the transformation of merchant trading or working capital committed initially to the duration of a particular voyage into fixed or permanent capital committed perpetually to the enterprise’. Both became joint stock corporations with shares traded on open exchanges. Niels Steensgaard posits a more structural explanation, using the fall of Hormuz in 1622 as a turning point between the Portuguese redistributive elaboration on peddling trade and the Dutch and English companies’ transformation of peddling into an institutional innovation. The latter approach internalized protection costs, maintained a fleet of ships for intra-Asian trade and minimized risk by creating permanent capital that was to circulate permanently in Asia and permit greater control of the market. An essential difference between the two approaches, as he sees it, because of the companies’ ability to obtain their protection at cost price, was that the Portuguese Crown had become the world’s biggest tax-gatherer whereas the companies emerged as the world’s biggest smugglers. It has been contended that the VOC was a primary instrument in integrating the Gulf for the first time into a European ‘world-economy’ created by the Dutch.5 While the Portuguese and Spanish empires were responsible for the emergence of the modern ‘world’ system, the Dutch, in Jonathan Israel’s view (Dutch Primacy in World Trade, p. 3), were the European leaders in forging ‘a world-trade network which linked all the major zones of the globe, often via intermediary depots’. But it has been remarked as well that the VOC was not as efficient an organization as some scholars contend. Sanjay Subrahmanyam observes (The Portuguese Empire in Asia, pp. 213–14) that the VOC was in fact a quasi-state organization, ‘authorised by the States-General of the Netherlands to wage war, make treaties, engineer conquests, and thus engage in a whole gamut of activities that were not strictly the business of “merchants”, as the Company’s employees rather coyly termed themselves’.

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Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that although the Dutch played a significant role in the Portuguese decline in Asia, the retreat was also the result of emergent and successful challenges from various regional powers, a context that also spelled the decline of the Dutch position much later. The most serious threat in the western Indian Ocean was posed by the Yaʿrubi forces of Oman, whose expanding fleet allowed them to attack the remaining Portuguese Gulf possessions as well as the west coast of India. But the Omanis had their greatest successes in expanding their control over the Swahili coast of East Africa at the expense of the Portuguese (undoubtedly the Omani advance owed much to the Portuguese paving the way). While Omani power along the coast diminished in the mid-eighteenth century because of internal political struggles, it was restored in the early nineteenth century by Saʿid ibn Sultan.

The Dutch The late sixteenth century saw the rise to economic prominence of the Dutch, particularly thanks to the VOC , founded in 1602 (through a union of ‘pre-companies’ created earlier, in the 1590s) with a monopoly in Dutch trade throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans. By the mid-seventeenth century, the VOC had helped the Dutch to become the most powerful trading nation in the world despite having one of the smallest populations of Europe. Part of this success was based on an expansion of trading patterns away from simply supplying Dutch exports to Asia in return for imports back to Europe. To avoid having to pay in gold and silver for spices, the VOC used the funds it built up over the years to purchase goods and commodities in one country and trade them in other countries for spices. As a consequence, the VOC engaged in intra-Asian trade nearly as much as it did in European– Asian trade. But the VOC was more than just an innovative trading company. Within the Indian Ocean, the VOC reigned supreme, acting as a political and military entity as well as a company. In Virginia Lunsford’s words (‘The Dutch in the Persian Gulf ’, p. 17 in Macris and Kelly’s Imperial Crossroads), ‘By 1699, the VOC was the richest private company in world history, possessing a fleet of over 150 merchant ships and 40 warships, 50,000 employees (including some 17,000–18,000 men in Asia), and a private military of 10,000 soldiers’. As the VOC grew more powerful, its resources served the interests of the state: at its apex, the company employed 25 per cent of the Dutch Republic’s sailors and 33 per cent of its soldiers, plus thousands of Asian soldiers. Dutch success was the result of a unique combination of entrepreneurial innovation and a supportive and protective government. Initially, Dutch attention on India had concentrated on the eastern coast because of the Portuguese presence on the opposite shore. But the Mughal conquest of Gujarat and their policy of divide and rule regarding European powers eventually gave the Dutch an opening for a factory at Surat in north-western India. The VOC ’s first activity in the Gulf was its agreement with Shah ʿAbbas I to open a factory at Bandar ʿAbbas (Gombroon) following the Anglo–Persian ouster of the Portuguese from Hormuz in 1622. The Dutch also benefited from English entreaties for their assistance in creating a monopoly in the market for Persian silk. Subsequently, the Dutch followed up the

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Portuguese retreat from the Gulf by establishing factories in former Portuguese centres at Basra and Muscat. Surat came to serve as an essential gateway to Bandar ʿAbbas and to al-Mukha (Mocha) in Yemen. But eventually Dutch dominance waned as well. A decline in the volume of intraAsian trade adversely impacted the VOC and its trade in Persia suffered with the vicissitudes of the Safavid state and then the death of Nadir Shah in 1747. An atypical alliance with the English EIC , pertaining to just the Gulf, deteriorated as the VOC became more protective of, as well as efficient in, its Persia trade and hostilities broke out again in Europe between the Dutch Republic and England. The VOC lost its Asian factories and its wealth in the 1780 Anglo–Dutch war and eventually its possessions in the Cape, Ceylon and Java were also taken over by the company’s English rival. The VOC ’s difficulties in the Indies was mirrored by its increasing subservience to the Dutch government as a consequence of its financial troubles. But the abandonment of an unsuccessful factory on Kharg Island in 1765 had already marked the Dutch departure from the Gulf and the Dutch position in Surat had deteriorated long before the British ousted them in 1795. These developments in the Gulf were just one manifestation of a gradual decline in the company’s fortunes worldwide. Steensgaard has speculated – although this has been contested – that the VOC ’s hold on a monopoly of spices restricted the company’s activities and outlook, leaving it to the EIC to expand trading opportunities through new commodities such as textiles, tea and coffee. It could also be said that the VOC ’s unwillingness to create territorial footholds in India in the mid-eighteenth century in the face of British and French aggressiveness doomed it to lose out in territory and influence on the subcontinent. The VOC ’s decline was mirrored by the EIC ’s rise. Similarly to the VOC , the EIC expanded beyond its original conception as a trading company to become a political and territorial entity as well, and eventually a fully-fledged colonial state centred on India. While direct trade was a spur to the EIC ’s interests in the Gulf, it was a minor consideration: perhaps more important were the role of the Bombay Marine in protecting Armenian and Indian merchants involved in ‘coastal’ trade with the Gulf and the Gulf ’s geopolitical importance as a conduit for communications between India and Britain. British interests in the Gulf also included interdicting slave ships and preventing competition from other Europeans, an interest that spanned the period from the Portuguese and Dutch eras through Napoleon and up to the Russian and German challenges in the nineteenth century. Indeed, British concern about its position in the Gulf continued in the early years of American interest in the region. Earlier English attempts to make contact with India and beyond had relied on overland routes through Russia to Persia or from the Levant to the Red Sea or the Gulf but these were never entirely satisfactory. The maritime route around the Cape of Good Hope was stymied by Spanish and Portuguese power until the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. But not long afterwards, the English experience mirrored that of the Dutch in the formation of a joint stock company, the East India Company (chartered in 1600), to exploit Asian trade.

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The English6 While the EIC started its operations as a strictly commercial corporation, the establishment of Fort St George at Madras in 1620 inaugurated a political role for the company, a transformation that accelerated over the next century as the company was increasingly structured as a state. As both the English and Dutch East India companies were created at roughly the same time, their competition persisted over an extended period of time. From the beginning of the seventeenth century up to the mid-eighteenth century, the rivalry was focused on competition for trading advantage, in both control of commodities and in arrangements with the states of producing areas, as well as head-to-head naval and military skirmishes. In addition, there was a tacit and sometimes explicit alliance against the heretofore predominant Portuguese. After this period, competition for power and advantage began to centre on inroads into India. The Dutch found themselves increasingly marginalized as the French emerged as the principal threat to the British position. The EIC got off to a slow and relatively unprofitable start and consequently it needed to be prompted for its fleet to open relations with the Mughal emperor and the Red Sea ports in 1607–8. Although the ships reached Socotra, headwinds prevented them from gaining Aden where it was hoped a factory could be established. A decade or so later, a desultory trade was established with al-Mukha in Yemen, which became profitable enough after Europe’s discovery of and infatuation with coffee for a factory to be established there about 1660. Access to the Gulf, particularly Persia, was another early English priority with an eye to barter for Persian silk. While a factory was established at Jask in 1616, the effective entry was provided by an alliance with Shah ʿAbbas I to oust the Portuguese from Hormuz in 1622. The English received, in addition to half the booty from Hormuz, half of the customs for half a century at nearby Bandar ʿAbbas, to which trade had been shifted as a result of the complete destruction of Hormuz. The elimination of Hormuz enhanced the company’s trading prospects in the region once the awkwardness of an attack on forces of a country with which England was at peace was squared with the home government. For the English, and then the Dutch, Bandar ʿAbbas had advantages over Hormuz and even over competing ports at Jask and Kung: routes inland from Bandar ʿAbbas were easier and safer and there was none of the demand for tribute by Persian officials that had characterized Portuguese Hormuz. The economic importance of Basra, strategically located at the head of the Gulf and commanding a deep hinterland, prompted the maintenance of a factory there in succeeding decades. The company was fortunate in that it was able to pay for three-quarters of the silk in commodities, especially English cloth, rather than scarce bullion. Nevertheless, complaints were raised about the low profitability of the silk trade, routed through an EIC regional centre in Surat, because of the competition from other English companies as well as from the French and Italians. The situation grew more dire in the following years with the decline of both Surat and Persian trade, first because of the death of Shah ʿAbbas and then in large part because of famine in India. In its first century, the English Empire resembled those of the Portuguese and the Dutch, in that the EIC ’s interests were focused on maintaining trading outposts and

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securing mastery of the seas against its European and Asian rivals. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the English Empire became more territorial, prompted in large part by the challenge posed by the French, but also motivated by the Industrial Revolution that required English control over raw materials in its areas of interest. The Mughal emperor’s surrender of the administration of Bengal in 1765 marked the EIC ’s transformation into a state ruling over a widespread territory and sizeable population. Later in the century, it became increasingly clear that, beyond financially contributing to the home government, the EIC was regarded as a department of the central government. By an Act of Parliament in 1784, the state began to exert stronger control over the company’s affairs, employing a Board of Control, and the Bengal presidency assumed primacy over the Bombay and Madras presidencies. From then, the company endured a slow death until final extinction in 1858 in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny. The three empires described above of course were not the only European intrusions in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf. The French seemed to start late and, for the structural reasons discussed below, were never serious contenders amongst the European powers. That is not to deny that there had been a French moment threatening the British in India, particularly with the capture of Madras in 1746 and the subsequent victory at the Battle of Adyar River. But the British were involved in some four times the amount of trade in Asia as the French in 1750. It was not long before the tide of French advance was stemmed by Lord Clive (commander-in-chief of India, 1756–60 and 1765–7) and the capture of Pondicherry in 1761 (although later restored to French possession) marked the end of an active French phase in India. It was not until later that the French turned their attention to the Gulf, most notably through a letter from Napoleon to the ruler of Muscat that was intercepted by the British and interpreted as part of a French threat to India. The Danish and Swedish East India companies never attempted a foothold in the Gulf.

The Ottomans The Ottoman Empire impinged upon the Gulf at different times to different degrees. Giancarlo Casale argues that the Ottoman Empire, through its expansion as well as its economic and intellectual accomplishments, participated in the ‘Age of Exploration’ just as fully as Western Europe. In that context, Ottoman attention to the waters and littoral of the Indian Ocean should not be surprising. The first spur to its expansion to the frontiers of the Indian Ocean undoubtedly was the entry of the Europeans to that body of water, which posed a serious threat to Ottoman income from the spice trade. When the Portuguese first intruded on Asian trade, the Ottoman Empire was still in a period of growth. It was only a decade after Albuquerque’s march up the African coast and into the Gulf that the Ottomans annexed Egypt (1517) and acquired mastery of the Red Sea. The Portuguese, in their attempt to monopolize the spice trade, were fully aware from the beginning of the Ottoman obstacle to their ambitions and they sought to block the Red Sea at Aden and to use Safavid Iran as a buffer. For their part, the Ottomans found themselves engaged in a war with the Safavids during 1534–5 that was aimed in part at securing the overland routes for silk (Tabriz–Erzurum–Tokat–Bursa)

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and spice (Basra–Baghdad–Aleppo). The Portuguese failed in cutting off the Red Sea because they were unsuccessful in capturing Aden, which fell instead to the Ottomans in 1538. The Portuguese were more successful in establishing a base at Hormuz, thus controlling the entrance to the Gulf and stymying Ottoman expansion in that direction, despite Istanbul’s advances in Mesopotamia and the Gulf itself. The Sublime Porte launched counter-attacks with the assembly of a fleet that besieged Hormuz in vain. The two powers unsuccessfully sparred over the upper hand in Bahrain at various times and the last Ottoman naval threat came with the sacking of Muscat in 1581. The consequence of this sixteenth-century rivalry between Istanbul and Lisbon was indeterminate. The Portuguese failed in their attempts to seal off trade routes from the Ottoman Empire, which continued to enjoy as much if not more trade via the Gulf during the ‘Portuguese century’ by directing it overland through Aleppo and the Levant. Between the Portuguese–Ottoman rivalry and Ottoman retrenchment in the mid-seventeenth century and later, the Ottoman Empire was fundamentally transformed, in the terminology of Immanuel Wallerstein and colleagues (‘The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy’, p.  96), from an ‘autonomous world-empire’ into one state among many ‘operating within the framework of . . . the capitalist world-economy’, a process of incorporation and ultimately peripheralization in that larger globe-encompassing structure. The eventual consequence for the Gulf was failure of Istanbul’s ambition of meeting and vanquishing the European power of the day in the Indian Ocean arena. A principal force for the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman expansionist push into the Gulf was the perceived British threat. Far from being a neglected backwater, the Gulf was one of a number of regions over which the Great Powers wrestled for superiority. Britain’s interest in the Gulf at this time centred strongly on protection of the lines of communication between India and London, a concern that raised London’s suspicions of the intentions of European rivals as well as of Istanbul. The Ottoman response was to seek to extend its control over the Arab littoral of the Gulf, including Kuwait, the eastern dominions of the Al Saʿud realm, and Qatar – and incidentally posing a secondary threat to Britain as a rival maritime power. But, as Frederick Anscombe points out, the empire’s inadequate communications, scarce resources and maladministration undercut Ottoman policy and resulted in Istanbul’s failure to cement its position in the Gulf. The Ottoman experience in the Gulf during the First World War mirrored the empire’s demise. With its positions in Kuwait, al-Ahsaʾ, al-Qatif and Qatar already lost, Istanbul was unable to prevent British conquest of what was to become Iraq, although it was not easy as the British military débâcle at al-Kut demonstrated. With the death of the Ottoman state, the emergence of a ‘British lake’ in the Gulf was assured.

British India The British Crown assumed control over the Government of India in November 1858 following the Great Mutiny and the curious system of dual government shared between the Board of Control and the Court of Directors was terminated. The Crown appointed a governor general (popularly known as the viceroy) and the cabinet position of a secretary of state for India was created in London. Until Indian independence in 1947,

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political references to India and the Government of India were understood to mean the imperial British government in India. British administrators of the new Indian state took refuge in the trappings and ritual of the Mughal Empire to entrench their authority and power. The declaration of Queen Victoria as empress of India was held at a durbar (court ceremony of a ruler) in the old Mughal capital of Delhi rather than the British capital in Calcutta, and Lord Curzon held his durbar as viceroy of India there in 1903 before his journey to the Gulf. As Sugata Bose points out (A Hundred Horizons, p.  19), though, the encompassing nature of the Mughal political entity in incorporating lesser entities mutated into a British centralizing tendency emphasizing subordination, or ‘an obsession with Mughal form while rejecting its substantive basis’. As Britain assumed increasing control over an Indian Empire, its concerns with the periphery changed from maintaining and expanding trade directly for the benefit of the company to involvement in and the protection of the affairs of what had become its Indian subjects. Indian merchants, particularly from Gujarat, were well represented as traders in the Gulf, buying dates and pearls along the Arab littoral for export. Trade between the Gulf (both shores) and India steadily increased until the Great Depression and competition from cultured pearls devastated the Gulf pearling industry. It was not until the emergence of the oil industry in Bahrain and Kuwait in the 1930s and 1940s that the economy recovered and trade and financial relations with India expanded. The Gulf had always been a focus of British interest and after the entrenchment of the EIC in India, the Gulf became an area of concern both for strategic reasons and the protection of Indian merchants and trade. These impulses found tangible expression initially in efforts to gain mastery of the sea and eliminate maritime threats to the British position and trade. Following the destruction of the power of the Qawasim (sing. Qasimi) with their base at Julfar (near present-day Raʾs al-Khaymah) on what the British labelled the ‘Pirate Coast’ (otherwise known as the Oman Coast and presently the United Arab Emirates (UAE )), Britain prodded the chiefs of settlements along the Arab littoral to accept maritime truces banning warfare by sea. These truces were made permanent by the General Treaty of Maritime Peace, signed in 1853 (and as a result of which the Pirate Coast was pronounced ‘transformed’ into the Trucial Coast). With the acquiescence of the local rulers, the need for enforcement of the maritime peace was minimal and, generally speaking, only indirect influence was exercised over the rulers’ political and economic policies. In this respect, British India’s relations with the Gulf shaykhdoms were no different from those of Indian principalities or other peripheral political entities. But after the assumption of direct control by the British Crown over India in 1858, the perceived importance of the Gulf increased dramatically. In the first half of the century, (British) India’s efforts had been focused on preventing ‘piracy’ and warfare by sea through the maritime truces. The second half of the century saw growing concern with perceived threats to the British position in the Gulf. The Ottoman push to reassert its sovereignty in eastern Arabia constituted the first threat while the second was the fear of Russian expansionism towards India and the Gulf. Other challenges around the turn of the twentieth century were seen as coming from France and Germany.

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The French threat was defused through diplomatic negotiations while German interests were bound up with the Ottoman Empire. India sought to reach a modus vivendi with the latter regarding respective zones of influence along the Arab littoral and on the waters of the Gulf. Indian policy in the Gulf was a reflection of its broader ‘forward’ policy of the 1890s and 1900s, prompted most importantly by its concern over India’s northwest frontier. As Michael Doyle puts it (Empires, p. 26), Nineteenth-century empires had, as Rome had, a ‘frontier problem’: a border area was no sooner secured than a raid by a native chieftain would upset the delicate condition of law and order and require the taking of the next line of passes, the next oasis, or the next falls upriver. Eminently defensive in character, this dynamic was nonetheless expansive in effect

This explanation aptly summarizes British India’s interest in its surroundings, including the Gulf, in what developed as an ever-expanding frontier. As India established itself in and around the Gulf with trade, political representatives and military outposts, it found it necessary to defend those elements, and that, in turn, deepened the concomitant commitment. The apogee of this determinant was the forward policy. Where to establish the frontier was a matter of heated debate in London and India and one result of the uncertainty was two disastrous wars in Afghanistan. India’s concern with its land frontiers centred on Russia’s advances, including areas far removed from the north-west frontier. By the turn of the twentieth century, the forward school of thought on frontiers acquired ascendancy over the stationary school. The forward policy was most closely associated with Lord Curzon (viceroy of India, 1899–1905). Curzon’s interest in the Gulf had been evident as early as 1889–90 when he spent six months touring Persia as a correspondent for The Times, subsequently recording his experiences in Persia and the Persian Question. Its pages reveal his satisfaction at the British tutelage in the Gulf (p. 465): ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the lives and properties of hundreds of thousands of human beings are secured by this British Protectorate of the Persian Gulf, and that were it either withdrawn or destroyed both sea and shores would relapse into the anarchical chaos from which they have so laboriously been reclaimed’. Curzon’s declaration – I should regard the concession of a port upon the Persian Gulf to Russia by any power as a deliberate insult to Great Britain, as a wanton rupture of the status quo, and as an international provocation to war; and I should impeach the British minister, who was guilty of acquiescing in such a surrender, as a traitor to his country

– anticipated the May 1903 declaration in Parliament by the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Lord Lansdowne, that made British supremacy in the Gulf a matter of official British policy (Lorimer, Gazetteer, Vol. I, pp.  367–8; citing The Times, 6 May 1903): ‘[W]e should regard the establishment of a naval base, or of a fortified port, in

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the Persian Gulf by any other Power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal’. Curzon chose to emphasize that policy by making a grand tour of the Gulf that same year in a display of the empire’s might and reach in each of the Arab littoral shaykhdoms. More specifically, the forward policy in the Gulf saw the imposition of agreements of protection on various rulers along the Arab littoral. The agreements bound the Arab littoral states to accept British advice and responsibility for defence and foreign affairs. They remained in force until British withdrawal in 1971 (with the exception of Kuwait, which received its independence in 1961), whereupon Bahrain and Qatar claimed independence and the seven states of the Trucial Coast formed the UAE . Indian interests were further secured through a strengthening of the residency system. A network of Indian officials was created to represent the empire in the more important of these settlements in order to enforce the maritime truce and to regulate the behaviour of the chiefs. Adopting the model for native states used in India, Political Agents were stationed (from various dates) in Kuwait, Bahrain, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Muscat (even though the last was technically an independent state). These agents were supervised by a Political Resident in the Persian Gulf who resided in Bushihr (Bushire) on the Iranian coast until Indian independence in 1947 and thereafter in Bahrain until British withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971. It was only after the beginning of the twentieth century that Britain began to concern itself with the interior of Arabia. Although oil – through the acquisition of concessions, the process of exploration, and finally production of crude oil – provided the enduring interest and concern, the development of air routes, both civilian (London–India) and military (Iraq–Aden), with their requirements for staging facilities and emergency landing grounds, constituted the first spur to assuring that rulers exercised reliable control over their peoples and land, as I have written. The possibility of oil deposits in hitherto meaningless frontier areas between the various states produced a requirement for precise territorial definitions of the Arab Gulf States. It also brought Britain, as protector of the small littoral states and home to oil companies holding concessions in the Gulf, into sharp conflict with Saudi Arabia over boundaries – most famously in the dispute over ownership of al-Buraymi oasis in the 1950s. It is also possible that an expansionist Saudi state would have swallowed up some or all of its weaker neighbours if it had not been for the British presence. Britain was able to maintain its superior position in the Gulf until its withdrawal in 1971. To be sure, there were increasing threats from Arab nationalism, such as the Iraqi revolution of 1958 and subsequent coups d’état there. Britain also was forced to grudgingly acquiesce in an American role in the Gulf as a result of both the American acquisition of the Saudi Arabian oil concession and the wartime cooperation in the region between the two allies. Official withdrawal from the Gulf, announced by the Labour government in 1968 and carried out in late 1971, spelled the end of an era but it was an ending that had been in process since the aftermath of the Second World War. The British position in the Middle East had been steadily eroded by events such as the Suez débâcle of 1956, the antipathy of Iraq after 1958, and the ignominious retreat from Aden in 1967.

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The structure of European imperialism in Asia and the Gulf The advent of European imperialism in the Indian Ocean has been classified as an early instance of the emergence of what Immanuel Wallerstein has termed a ‘world-economy’ that eventually brought all the various coexisting regions of the world together into a single political and economic system. Asia was a principal goal of the European powers on the verge of the ‘Age of Discovery’, prompted in particular by the combination of a growing burden of sending gold and silver from European mines, with falling production, to the Orient to pay for spices. As Michael Pearson puts it, the Indian Ocean was united and characterized by monsoons, ports, ships and sailors, and the Europeans utilized and enhanced these. But there were other motivations for European activities as well, including religion, the extension of civilization, prestige, competition and national rivalries.7 At the same time, the ability of Europeans to carry out long-distance trade (that is, large-scale trade in valuable or scarce goods) seems to have rested on the development of a structure of state-supported commercial law and more efficient and viable means of conducting long-distance trade – including the creation of reliable bills of exchange and systems of organization that enabled the employment of trustworthy non-kin agents. Indeed, a significant difference between existing pre-European Asian trade, whether through autonomous port cities or via ports attached to inland states,8 and the Europeans seems to be that the latter system was dominated by the state and perhaps by corporate control in the case of the companies in the administration of trade, backed by the use of force to control both direct and indirect trade. All the European actors were primarily merchants seeking either to exchange products from their home countries with Asian goods, especially spices, or to engage in intra-Asian trade to boost their profits. The innovation of Europe in Asia was the concept of maritime warrior merchants, i.e. they asserted their superior rights to monopolize or at least control trade by seizing territory (particularly economically or geopolitically advantageous ports), fortifying trading settlements and using their ships as armed vessels to attack indigenous navies and to extract protection costs for maritime trade. While the concept of ‘gunpowder empires’ offers a partial explanation for European success, it is easy to overemphasize its role. Certainly, the European intruders possessed superior firepower and more efficiently employed violence and coercion. In part, though, their success was the result of a weakness of Asian political entities during the early modern period. Nevertheless, militarization of trade was an essential aspect of European commerce in Asia. Trade could not be controlled by outsiders without military force, whether that meant shielding factories from local attack or protecting the sea routes along which the merchant convoys proceeded. But, at the same time, the military aspects of the enterprises also required capital and recurrent outlays, and the costs necessarily had to be recouped from trade. The discussion in the literature about why the Portuguese were superseded by the Dutch and the English frequently focuses on the relative merits of organization adopted by various European enterprises. Pearson, however, offers a thesis that seems to put state attitudes to trade at the heart of the matter and can be summarized succinctly as

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a linear scale with France at one end and the Dutch at the other. France’s inability to compete effectively in trade, or perhaps more accurately its lack of interest in doing so, has been held to be a consequence of its stifling of trade through excessive state control, based in part on the French Crown’s greater dependence on the taxation of natural resources than on customs revenues. At the other end, Dutch success owed much to the synergy of interests between state and merchants – state authorities and merchants were often the same – as shown in the creation and responsibilities of the VOC . Spain and Portugal lie closer to the French position while England approached the Dutch. Unlike the Dutch and English, the Portuguese Crown sought direct control over trade, a factor that is held to have hindered long-scale economic development and inhibited the formation of an indigenous bourgeoisie, as well as facilitated foreign economic penetration of Portugal. The European empires in Asia utilized differing strategies initially but eventually strategies and organizations were remarkably similar. The Portuguese first organized their venture as a state monopoly while the Dutch and the English created privately held trading companies. But over time the Portuguese Crown loosened its restrictions on private roles in the trade by farming out the Carreira da Índia (the ‘India Route’ between India and Portugal) and by tolerating private Portuguese merchants, particularly in the Bay of Bengal. As for the Dutch, particularly in south-east Asia, and the English in India, the great trading companies eventually grew more territorial, seizing and controlling indigenous resources and land. Philip Stern has emphasized the corporate role of the EIC even in its early incarnation, regarding it as a form of state already. The English EIC eventually was transformed into a territorial state ultimately controlled from London, as exemplified in the dual title of Victoria, queen of the United Kingdom and empress of India. One is tempted to regard the Ottomans as similar in motivation to their European rivals but there are fundamental differences. The Ottoman Empire was an Asian empire and its sixteenth- and nineteenth-century actions in the western Indian Ocean basin, on both land and sea, can be interpreted as a counter to European expansion as well as a reaction to threats to Ottoman trading fortunes. But, alternatively, Istanbul’s expansionist activities may be regarded as something as simple as the ebb and flow of imperial power in an environment that displayed a common culture and the religion of Islam, as well as the empire’s Middle Eastern epicentre. The British and Ottoman histories also betray another similarity: the propensity of empires to expand inexorably to protect frontiers. The European empires sought from the beginning to control key entrepôts, staging ports and maritime chokepoints. The Portuguese, as the first of these powers to enter the Gulf, sought to establish a chain of strategic points along the coastlines to protect and control maritime routes. The Dutch pursued a similar strategy, mostly at the expense of the Portuguese, but it was left to the English to establish the epitome of the strategy. For the Portuguese, the key ports were Goa, Hormuz and Malacca, supplemented by a number of lesser forts from Mozambique to the Moluccas, including Muscat and Diu. The Dutch were less concerned with military conquest but they established key factories in important ports at Malacca, Bandar ʿAbbas and Batavia (Jakarta). The British depended on, inter alia, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Cape Town, and Hong Kong.

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As for the Gulf, their goal was not conquest and the control of territory but domination and control of trade first, and that primarily as an adjunct of interests centred elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. Their footprint on the Gulf was light and consequently their ambitions were limited. As Rudi Matthee has pointed out (‘The Portuguese Presence in the Persian Gulf ’, p. 4 in Macris and Kelly’s Imperial Crossroads), the restricted impact of the Portuguese ‘was in part a function of long distances, primitive logistics, and small numbers’. Later, however, the British role in the Gulf was both more intrusive and, even if indirectly, controlling. Furthermore, even in the Gulf, European interest centred mostly on Persia where trading opportunities lay, and secondarily on Mesopotamia. As Pearson points out, Shah ʿAbbas I, in the early seventeenth century, sought out European powers, first to provide him with military technology he could use against the Ottomans and second for assistance in bypassing the overland route through Turkey to European markets for Persia’s silk. Thus he encouraged European traders in his ports and obtained English help to drive the Portuguese from Hormuz and regain control of that port. The Arab littoral represented few opportunities since it was seen as largely barren, lightly populated and possessing only a marginal hinterland. Attention was mostly restricted to control of or arrangements with strategic points such as Bahrain and Muscat. Meanwhile, European activities in the Red Sea were stymied by the Ottoman presence there. It should not be forgotten that European initiatives in the Gulf and Indian Ocean often owed their causes to events at or near to home. For example, Spain and the Dutch were locked in the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), provoked by the Dutch rebellion – eventually successful – against Spanish control. Consequently, when the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns were joined in 1580, Portugal became a Dutch adversary, resulting in the VOC ’s bellicose attacks against Portuguese targets that were directly meant to serve the Dutch national interest. British India’s forward policy later was directly tied to its imperial rivalries with fellow European powers. The Europeans were successful in trade in part because naval might protected trading vessels on the high seas and military might created and maintained trading centres along the coasts. But in combination with military power, the Europeans were not shy about establishing alliances with local powers to harry and defeat common foes, thus participating in divide and rule strategies to advance their power. There were no inherent European advantages in intra-Asia trade itself: the Europeans were simply foreign competitors as had existed in Asia for centuries if not millennia. European success depended on being able to extort privileges from rulers and ports, in forcibly directing trade to their own ports, and in creating (or attempting to create) monopolies in certain commodities. It should also be emphasized that European trade did not just consist of trading European products for Asian commodities to be sold in home markets for profit but also embraced heavy intra-Asian trade, carried out either by the monopolistic company or state or by private traders. Not least, it should not be forgotten that the European presence in Asia created only a thin veneer on the panoply of life and civilization that preceded it, endured it and emerged from it. The reliance of the Europeans on intra-Asian trade to finance their commercial empires depended on the cooperation and integration of extensive

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networks of indigenous suppliers, buyers, manufacturers and, of course, consumers. The Europeans, whether officials, company employees, or private traders, formed only one small part of this system. Finally, another testimony to the European role in the admixing of Indian Ocean civilization lies in the various communities that can be found scattered across the region far from their geographic and ethnic origins.

The impact of the European Age on the Gulf The discussion up to this point has concentrated on broader themes of Europeans in the Indian Ocean, including the Gulf. What follows is more closely concerned with the significance for the Gulf itself. The impact of empire on the Gulf is as important as is the impact of the Gulf experience on the empire. It is not only the policy and situation of the imperial power that requires consideration, but also the question of why a state or society came under imperial influence and what happened because of that. It is fair to say that the composition of each European empire in Asia directly affected its footprint and influence on the Gulf, particularly with regard to Persia. The Dutch and English (as distinct from British) presence was minimal and restricted to factories and maritime shipping. The Portuguese, however, entered the Gulf in force and established centres of control with bases, fortifications and churches, an approach that naturally suggested hostility with the hinterland behind these posts and ports, as well as leaving an architectural legacy of imposing fortresses. The British approach, after the establishment of a British state in India, was not that different, apart from the fortresses. Attempts were mounted to control maritime trade, punitive expeditions were sent to the Gulf and a physical presence (albeit a minimal one) was created on both littorals through the residency system described above, supported by a small naval force.

The role of the periphery in imperialism The conception of the Gulf as lying on the periphery of the British Empire, as one small part of India’s informal empire, is only part of the equation. The interaction between imperial agents and local leadership was multifaceted and complicated. European merchant empires across the globe constantly struggled with what was classified as piracy, starting with Spanish indignation at buccaneers who did not recognize Spain’s monopoly over Atlantic trade routes and Portuguese efforts to create trade monopolies in Asian trade by treating local opponents as pirates. This view of the European newcomers towards the indigenous traders and political entities continued into the early nineteenth century when British forces broke the back of the Qawasim at the entrance to the Gulf and then instituted the ‘maritime peace’ treaty system that served British interests in particular. The European judgement of piracy was mirrored by indigenous views that European activities at sea constituted piracy as well. At other times, cooperation was substituted for hostility. As Ronald Robinson writes (‘Imperial Theory’, p. 44), ‘Imperialism was only worthwhile if it could be had on the

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cheap. . . . [T]he imperialists, therefore, drew the necessary influence, finance, military forces and administrative authority largely from local resources and institutions in the countries imperialized. . . . Without local cooperation resources could not be transferred, commerce protected, strategic interests secured’. Rather than the British Political Resident in the Gulf exerting unchallenged control over subordinate political actors, it was more an interactive dance. The Resident could bring considerable influence to bear and pose the ultimate threat of military action but his role more often consisted of persuasion and negotiation. For their part, local rulers parried imperial demands into negotiated compromises and used the residential system to their own advantage, such as seeking assistance or alliance in disputes with neighbours. The question may well be asked ‘why did local rulers cooperate?’ Obvious answers might include their relative and absolute weakness, the material advantages to be gained in cooperation, the help provided for their extension of control over subordinate tribes and hinterlands, and alliance partnership against common enemies. Britain became a local power and, as the most powerful one, local rulers had no choice but to deal with it on that basis. A pertinent example of the dual edge of client/patron relations and simultaneous alliance between imperial power and subordinate actor is that of Britain and the Al Saʿud. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the latter sought British assistance in regaining territory from the Al Rashid, resisting the Ottomans, and gaining recognition as a legitimate regional actor. At the same time, Britain desired influence over the Arabian hinterland to safeguard its interests on the littorals, as well as more directly to exert a measure of control over the Al Saʿud in order to protect their subordinates along the Gulf. Oil later provided an additional complication. Britain did not desire to exploit Saudi oil – British oil concerns barely put up a fight in concession negotiations – but simply wished to control the possibility of exploitation in order to protect resources in Iran and Iraq and also prevent rival companies and powers from gaining a competitive foothold. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s role as a regional imperial power vis-à-vis the Gulf States should be noted.

The impact of Britain’s long dominance Over time the British Empire interacted with the Gulf through different and sometimes competing agents. While the residency system in the Gulf belonged to the Government of India, the Foreign Office and then the Colonial Office (particularly after the First World War) also had peripheral interests in the Gulf and frequently differed with the India Office, as well as the Government of India, in viewpoints and preferred policies. Britain’s lasting impact on the Gulf States can be discerned in a multitude of ways, including political, military, economic, linguistic, and sociocultural aspects.9 In the first place, the consequence of the treaty system imposed by Britain – through India – on the Gulf over the nineteenth century, as well as the subsequent assumption of protection over the smaller states, was to fossilize the political arena as it existed at that time. As rulers in treaty relationship acquired sovereign status in the informal empire of the Government of India, the first foundations of statehood were laid. The permanence of

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these political expressions through to full independence in 1961 and 1971 (Saudi Arabia and Oman apart) owed much to British conceptions and nurturing. It should not be surprising that many of the Gulf ’s rulers today are the products of British military academies. As part of Britain’s security umbrella over the Gulf, Britain established military units in various Gulf States and provided leadership through seconded (and contract) officers and other ranks. These units evolved into the armed forces of those countries and the British role in either command or advisory presence continued until quite recently. In other fields, Britain was the source of advisers to rulers – for example, Charles Belgrave who ran the Bahraini administration for decades – and it established courts in various Gulf States, initially for British subjects. Furthermore, London intervened in politics when it judged that local leadership had gone astray, thus playing roles in the deposition of Shaykh ʿIsa ibn ʿAli (Bahrain, 1923), Shaykh Saqr ibn Sultan (Sharjah, 1965), Shaykh Shakhbut ibn Sultan (Abu Dhabi, 1966), and Sultan Saʿid ibn Taymur (Oman, 1970). Late in the day, Britain sponsored the creation of the Trucial States Council, which fostered regular meetings of the often mutually hostile rulers of the Trucial Coast and created a small administration for development. It should be noted that the situation did not consist solely of Britain impacting local rulers and entities. Even as the British sought to mould the region’s politics, they found themselves ensnared through their treaty obligations in intra-Gulf rivalries that affected the emergence of the regional state system and disputes – al-Buraymi can be seen as a prime example. In some ways, a partnership developed between the Government of India authorities (and later Foreign Office representatives) and the local rulers. Many of the Political Residents and Political Agents spent their careers in the Gulf and were very familiar with each of the rulers with whom they dealt. The apogee of personalization of the official relationship was Curzon’s tour of the Gulf at the turn of the twentieth century, with its visit to and durbar in every capital. The economic impact undoubtedly was most visible in the role that British companies played in the development of the region’s oil resources. But the function of British merchant houses and commercial concerns in shaping and developing international trading patterns was perhaps more fundamental. These ranged from shipping agents Gray Mackenzie to the British Bank of the Middle East to the British India Steam Navigation Company to Cable & Wireless to even Gulf Aviation (later Gulf Air). From another point of view, the British legacy includes the predominance of the English language as the most prominent lingua franca of the Gulf. Even today, the British Council provides a highly sought-after service in English instruction. British universities still enjoy status as a preferred destination for Gulf students while a number of Gulf universities use English as the medium of instruction. Another impact has been a continuing preference for British standards, practices, products and companies. British planners, engineers and construction firms were responsible for the bulk of early development and infrastructural projects and remain competitive in this arena. The preference for things British can also be discerned in such easily observed aspects as the continued attraction of British clubs and traffic systems.

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Figure 4.2 A durbar held by Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, with the Trucial Shaykhs aboard the RIMS Argonaut off of Sharjah (1903). At a different level, British imperialism in the Gulf, precisely because it was exercised through the Indian Empire, left its mark on the continuing strength of the relationship with the Indian subcontinent. Trade was a major factor in this, as evidenced by the presence of Indian merchants in Gulf settlements for centuries, and the presence of Arab merchants in India. But India also served as a source of such things as food, for example, the appearance of rice as a Gulf staple despite the fact that rice is not grown there, as well as the ubiquitous fondness for tea. In the days before prosperity opened up Europe to Gulf travellers, India was a destination for education, holidays and medical treatment. Indian merchants were quick to take advantage of Gulf commercial opportunities, as demonstrated by Jashanmal department stores throughout the Gulf, the Dadabhai chain of toy stores emanating from Bahrain, and the various enterprises of the Khimji Ramdas family in Oman.

The Gulf ’s entry onto the world stage Another view of the impact of imperialism on the Gulf involves the incorporation of the Gulf into the broader international system. This can be discerned, amongst other factors, in European rivalries played out in the Gulf during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Concern about international implications of developments in the Gulf was expressed in Bismarck’s remark about the Gulf being a strategic wasps’ nest and in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s influential 1902 article on ‘The Persian Gulf and International Relations’. The Gulf ’s position as a putative or potential battlefield was

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also evident in Anglo–French tensions at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in Oman, as well as in the German thrust into the region, expressed in the aspirations for the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. Official American entry into the immediate region occurred during and after the Second World War with the creation of the Persian supply corridor to the Soviet Union, aerial staging to the East Asian theatre and the first diplomatic representation. The emergence of the Cold War, with its effect on the development of an Arab cold war in the 1950s and 1960s, conditioned Gulf relations with the ‘imperial’ powers, Britain and the US , as well as with local rivals in the Arab republics and monarchical Iran. The Gulf ’s emergence on the world’s stage was also marked by linkages to the outside world in air communications, beginning with the establishment of British military routes and the Gulf ’s essential role in the route between London and India. The Gulf ’s service as a staging route during the Second World War evolved into postwar civilian routes with staging to India, Singapore and Australia. Even Concorde could be linked to the Gulf: Bahrain was a Concorde destination until the inability to secure overflight rights across India doomed the role of the aircraft in providing speedier access to Australia. More centrally, the Gulf ’s place on the world stage since the first decade of the twentieth century has been thanks to its oil. The early days of oil industry were marked by economic imperialism. Subsequently, the emergence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC ) and nationalization produced the emergence of the Gulf States as equal, if not dominant, partners in the contemporary international oil industry and system of trade, and gradually as international forces more broadly. A recent example lies in Qatar’s blossoming as a serious player in regional political issues from Libya to Syria, complementing and sometimes competing with Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the UAE . It can also be said that the contemporary American concern with and presence in the Gulf is not far removed from European precedents. There is a continuity in concentration on trade and guns. American objectives are not territorial but the effect has been to create an informal empire in the region through the exercise, or threat of exercise, of military might and the cultivation of client states. The United States has become the most powerful local power much like the British before them. Imperialism has been an essential element in the Gulf throughout history and it looks to endure.

Bibliographic essay Imperialism. It will not be surprising that there is an enormous literature on imperialism, both in general and in various regions of the world – or that only a few pertinent authors can be mentioned here. It should be noted that this essay concentrates on works in the English language. Michael W. Doyle’s Empires provides a concise and illuminating introduction to the subject. A classic study is J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism; his ‘The Scientific Basis of Imperialism’ is also pertinent to this paper. Perhaps the most influential writing on theories of imperialism has been provided by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. Their article on ‘The Imperialism of Free

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Trade’ is essential reading, while many of their most important essays have been reprinted in Anil Seal, editor, The Decline, Revival, and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays, especially the principal article of the same title. Some of the pair’s works are reprinted in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy, along with a large number of original contributions by a variety of well-known explorers of the subject. Robinson also wrote an introductory essay on Wm. Roger Louis in Robert D. King and Robin W. Kilson, eds, The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of Wm. Roger Louis; the volume also contains a number of both theoretical and case study contributions. Another of Robinson’s key contributions is ‘Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire’. Another influential theorist on imperialism has been P.J. Cain. He, like Gallagher and Robinson, has used the British Empire as the basis for his conceptualization. Among his many works are Economic Foundations of British Overseas Expansion, 1815–1914 and two books with A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 and British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990. Also relevant is his Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance 1887–1938. Marshall G.S. Hodgson introduced the concept of ‘gunpowder empires’ in volume three of his comprehensive The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. Perhaps the most influential follow-up on the idea was by William H. McNeill who utilized the concept more broadly in his The Age of Gunpowder Empires, 1450–1800. A fundamental conception of the structure of European imperialism is its role in the creation of a ‘world-economy’ that characterizes the globe until today. This thesis was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, particularly in his Modern World-System. See also Wallerstein’s The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays. For a contrary view, see Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Another provocative essay is Niels Steensgaard’s ‘Violence and the Rise of Capitalism: Frederic C. Lane’s Theory of Protection and Tribute’. John M. Hobson, in his The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, presents an alternative view of Asia’s contribution in inventions as well as resources to the advancement of the West. European Empires in the Indian Ocean and India. There are two themes of equal importance in this segment of the literature. The first concentrates on the determinants in the society, politics and economy of key European countries that propelled them into imperial ventures, as well as attempts to explain the organization and relative success of their activities. The second approach focuses on each of the major European imperial experiences with detailed description of their historical progression and interpretation of the impulses and consequences involved. But in order to examine the impact of European imperialism on the Indian Ocean basin, it is first necessary to understand Asian society and economy before the Europeans intruded. This has been discussed comprehensively by K.N. Chaudhuri in Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, as well as from a somewhat different viewpoint in his Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean From the Rise of Islam to 1750. While

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Sugata Bose covers the situation after Europe’s arrival, he does so in large part from an Asian perspective in A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire; his seminal essay in this work, ‘Space and Time on the Indian Ocean Rim’, also appears in Leila Fawaz and C.A. Bayly, eds, with the collaboration of Robert Ilbert, Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Another valuable perspective is given in Sanjay Subrahmanyam ‘Of Imârat and Tijârat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750’ and a valuable review article by John E. Wills, Jr, discusses many relevant works in ‘Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination’. The Asian counterpart to European views of interaction is present also in M.N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean. The role of merchants and trade throughout the region, including both European efforts and indigenous Asian patterns has been a popular topic. The most authoritative exploration is in the two books edited by James D. Tracey, The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750, and the companion The Political Economy of Merchant Empires. Essays of particular interest in the first volume include Carla Rahn Phillips on trade in the Iberian empires, Niels Steensgaard on the English and Dutch long-distance trade, Larry Neal’s comparison of the Dutch and English companies’ performance in the stock and foreign exchange markets, and Irfan Habib’s disquisition on merchant communities in precolonial India. Contributions to the second volume that should be pointed out included M.N. Pearson’s essay on merchants and states, Thomas A. Brady’s study of the rise of merchant empires in Europe, Geoffrey Parker’s discussion of the development of European military power, Anne Pérotin-Dumon’s examination of power and law on the seas, and the essential corrective by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Filipe F.R. Thomaz on the role of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. Parker’s ideas receive more detailed examination in his The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. The subject of trade is also examined in Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau, eds, Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era. In addition to several essays on pre-European trade, key contributions include Om Prakash on the Portuguese and the Dutch in Asian maritime trade and C. Koninckx on Sweden’s abortive attempt to gain access to India. Mention must also be made of Denys Lombard and Jean Aubin, eds, Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea, incorporating translated papers from a Paris conference, among which are R.B. Serjeant’s contributions on Yemeni merchants and the Hadrami network, as well as Jean Aubin writing on merchants in the Red Sea and Gulf. Another important study is Holden Furber’s Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800. The literature on individual European empires is extensive. Much of Jeffrey R. Macris and Saul Kelly, eds, Imperial Crossroads: The Great Powers and the Persian Gulf is concerned with more contemporary subjects, but it is noteworthy here for two excellent surveys, Rudi Matthee on the Portuguese presence in the Gulf and Virginia Lunsford on the Dutch in the Gulf. The Portuguese Empire in the Indian Ocean has been explored by a number of authors, but none as thoroughly as Charles R. Boxer. In addition to his Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey

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and The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825, a representative sample of his many works must include Portuguese India in the Mid-Seventeenth Century and Portuguese Conquest and Commerce in Southern Asia, 1500–1750. Equally important is Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History. Studies on the Dutch Empire in the region have been the focus of attention more recently. Niels Steensgaard has provided a very influential and equally controversial comparison of the English and the Dutch, using Hormuz as a central focus, in The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade. Perhaps the most comprehensive coverage of the Dutch experience is in Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 and George D. Winius and Marcus P.M. Vink, The Merchant-Warrior Pacified: The VOC (The Dutch East India Company) and Its Changing Political Economy in India. The English East India Company has been the object of extensive examination. A classic exposition of the evolution of English companies over the ages is to be found in George Cawston and A.H. Keane, The Early Chartered Companies, A.D. 1296–1858. Essential studies of the East India Company include K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640, and the classic work by William Foster on England’s Quest of Eastern Trade. The collection of papers in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, eds, The Worlds of the East India Company are derived from a conference on the subject. Of particular interest are the contributions by Om Prakash on ‘The English East India Company and India’, Femme Gaastra on relations between the English and Dutch companies, Andrew S. Cook on establishment of the sea routes to India and China, and Andrew Lambert on the role of the Bombay dockyard and the Indian Navy in British imperial security. Philip Stern, in The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, challenges the view that the EIC was simply a trading enterprise in its first century or so and thus ‘weaker’ in composition than rivals such as the VOC . The impact of British India on the region, as well as on the nature of the British Empire, was immense. The debate over frontiers and ‘forward’ policy was clearly illustrated in Lord Curzon and his viceroyalty. Relevant works by Curzon himself include (under the name of George N. Curzon) Persia and the Persian Question and (under the name of Marquis Curzon of Kedleston) British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys and Government Houses (especially vol. 2). Assessments of Curzon’s role are to be found in Michael Edwardes, High Noon of Empire: India Under Curzon and Hugh Tinker, Viceroy: Curzon to Mountbatten amongst others. A very useful exposition of Indian organization is contained in H. Verney Lovett, ‘The Home Government, 1858–1918’, in H.H. Dodwell, The Cambridge History of India, Vol. 6, The Indian Empire 1858–1918. Theoretical underpinnings of the concept of always expanding frontiers have been explored in Owen Lattimore, ‘The Frontier in History’. Imperialism in the Gulf. There are two essential works produced by the British Government of India that have deep relevance today. One is J.G. Lorimer, comp.,

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Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ʿOmân, and Central Arabia (see Introduction). This exhaustive work consists of detailed histories of each of the Gulf political entities, a gazetteer of settlements, geographical points, tribes, and ethnic and religious communities, and an extensive series of appendices on subjects ranging from slavery to postal services and telegraphs. British India’s ‘informal empire’ in Arabia resulted in a vast multiplicity of treaties and other legal agreements. These were collected in C.U. Aitchison, comp., A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries; Vol.  11 covers Arabia, the Gulf and the North-West Frontier Province. A classic history of the Gulf by a British official and oil company executive – Arnold T. Wilson, The Persian Gulf: An Historical Sketch from the Earliest to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century – covers British (and other) imperialism in the Gulf. Willem Floor has written a more general compendium, The Persian Gulf: The Economic and Political History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730. A more recent scholarly interpretation of the British role is James Onley’s The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj. J.B. Kelly and Briton Cooper Busch were two of the first scholars to write on British imperialism in the Gulf. Kelly’s major contribution was Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 but his much more compact outline of ‘The Legal and Historical Basis of the British Position in the Persian Gulf ’ is equally valuable. Busch’s initial work was Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914, which was followed by his Britain, India and the Arabs, 1914–1921. Representative of recent scholarly works on British policy in the Gulf are Simon S. Smith’s Kuwait, 1950–1965: Britain, the al-Sabah, and Oil

Figure 4.3 Telegraph Island in Elphinstone Inlet of Oman’s Musandam Peninsula. The name comes from the establishment of a station of the Indo-European Telegraph on the island in 1864.

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and his Britain’s Revival and Fall in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1950–71. The Ottoman role in the Gulf only recently has received thorough scholarly attention. Most comprehensive is Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar while Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and Reşat Kasaba investigate ‘The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy’. A broader view of Ottoman activities and accomplishments is provided by Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Other relevant works include Ravinder Kumar, ‘Anglo-Turkish Antagonism in the Persian Gulf ’ and Salih Özbaran, ‘The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, 1543–1581’. An early article by A.H. Lybyer, ‘The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental trade’ is essential reading. Finally, this essay would be remiss if it did not mention Charles Boxer again and his article, ‘Anglo Portuguese Rivalry in the Gulf, 1615–1635’, in Edgar Prestage, ed., Chapters in Anglo-Portuguese Relations.

Notes 1 The term ‘gunpowder empire’ seems to have originated with Marshall G.S. Hodgson in his monumental work, The Venture of Islam. His emphasis was on the Safavid, Timurid and Ottoman empires but the term was later broadened to encompass European empires as well. 2 There is bountiful discussion on the contention that European states established external empires in the Americas, Africa and Asia because they were prevented from forming viable empires at home due to the emergence of state competition and the nation state. Even more, it has been theorized that consequences of changes in Europe in the first half of the second millennium ce produced effects particularly in the continent’s western tier where the types of government, military innovations, and the opportunity for and beckoning of overseas conquest simultaneously encouraged the emergence of nationhood at home and the acquisition of empire overseas. 3 Michael Doyle elucidates three approaches. A pericentric interpretation seems more suitable than metrocentric, a metropolitan model dependent on the perquisites of industrialism or domestic driving factors, or systemic, with its emphasis on a natural drive or propensity for stronger states to dominate weaker ones. 4 When asked what had brought them to India, Vasco da Gama’s men replied, ‘Christians and spices’. 5 This view is contested by Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Filipe F.R. Thomaz (‘Evolution of Empire’, pp. 327–8, in Tracey’s The Political Economy of Merchant Empires): It is argued by [Steensgaard] that the Dutch, for instance, were truly rational profit-maximizers, whereas the Portuguese were essentially medieval seekers after power . . . [T]he Dutch Company – we know – was far from being a profit-maximizer in fact, even bearing in mind that it worked with a fragmented and highly imperfect information set. The VOC maintained factories long after they had lost their utility, because of factional infighting, because the factors themselves found the ‘lodges’ useful to pursue their

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ostensibly illegal private trade, and for a host of other reasons. Even as modern theorists of the ‘firm’ abandon the simplistic shorthand of the single-minded profit-maximizer, it would be strange if historians were to insist on the appositeness of this axiom in the context of quasi-state entities like the chartered trading companies 6 It is more proper to use the term English for activities in the region before 1707 than British, since the two separate realms of England and Scotland were not united until the Acts of Union of 1707 brought the Kingdom of Great Britain into existence. This chapter deviates slightly from that practice by employing the term English for the duration of the East India Company and British for the period following the 1857 mutiny and the 1858 replacement of the company by British government control over India. 7 By the late nineteenth century, there had emerged a deep-seated belief in la mission civilisatrice or racial superiority, that European nations excelled at empires because of a natural process of selection that put, as J.A. Hobson summarizes it (‘The Scientific Basis of Imperialism’, p. 466), ‘an ever larger and intenser control over the government and the economic exploitation of the world into the hands of the nation or nations representing the highest standard of civilization or social efficiency, and which, by the elimination or subjugation of the inefficient, shall raise the standard of the government of humanity’. This Darwinian view was widely expressed in the British Empire, as the above words of Lord Curzon demonstrate. 8 It is useful to make a distinction between port cities, which served as entrepôts for the redistribution of trade without much reference to their hinterland, and cities with ports, which serve as extensions of inland activities and political entities. The latter may include city states such as Singapore for which ports provide only one of many functions. Most of the key ports in the Gulf until the modern period – including Muscat, Suhar, Julfar, Hormuz, Siraf and Qays – were essentially entrepôts without significant hinterlands. 9 It might also be noted that remnants of Portuguese words remain in Gulf usage, such as kurtaz (cartaz) for piece of paper in Kuwait and bandera (flag) and mesa (table) in Muscat.

Bibliography Aitchison, C.U., comp. A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries. Revised ed.; Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1933. Anscombe, Frederick F. The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bose, Sugata. ‘Space and Time on the Indian Ocean Rim’. In Leila Fawaz and C.A. Bayly, eds, with the collaboration of Robert Ilbert, Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 365–88. Bowen, H.V., Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby, eds. The Worlds of the East India Company. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Boxer, Charles R. Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825: A Succinct Survey. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1961.

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Boxer, Charles R. Portuguese Conquest and Commerce in Southern Asia, 1500–1750. London: Variorum Reprints, 1985. Boxer, Charles R. Portuguese India in the Mid-Seventeenth Century. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980. Boxer, Charles R. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1969. Boxer, Charles R. ‘Anglo Portuguese Rivalry in the Gulf, 1615–1635’. In Edgar Prestage, ed., Chapters in Anglo-Portuguese Relations (Watford: Voss & Michael, 1935; reprinted Westport: Greenwood Press, 1971), pp. 46–129. Busch, Briton Cooper. Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1967. Busch, Briton Cooper. Britain, India and the Arabs, 1914–1921. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Cain, P.J. Economic Foundations of British Overseas Expansion, 1815–1914. London: Macmillan, 1980. Cain, P.J. Hobson and Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism, and Finance 1887–1938. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Cain, P.J. and A.G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990. London: Longman, 1993. Cain, P.J. and A.G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914. London: Longman, 1993. Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cawston, George, and A.H. Keane. The Early Chartered Companies, A.D. 1296–1858. London, 1896; reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. Chaudhuri, K.N. Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean From the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Chaudhuri, K.N. The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640. New York: Reprints of Economic Classics, 1965. Chaudhuri, K.N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Chaudhury, Sushil, and Michel Morineau, eds. Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Curzon of Kedleston, Marquis. British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys and Government Houses. 2 vols; London: Cassell and Company, 1925. Curzon, George N. Persia and the Persian Question. 2 vols; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892. Doyle, Michael. Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Edwardes, Michael. High Noon of Empire: India Under Curzon. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965. Floor, Willem. The Persian Gulf: The Economic and Political History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730. Washington, DC : Mage Publishers, 2006. Foster, William. England’s Quest of Eastern Trade. London: A & C Black, 1933. Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Furber, Holden. Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. Gallagher, John, and Ronald Robinson. ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’. Economic History Review, 2nd Series, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1953), pp. 1–15 Hobson, J.A. Imperialism (various editions since 1902).

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Hobson, J.A. ‘The Scientific Basis of Imperialism’. Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3 (September 1902), pp. 460–89. Hobson, John M. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Hodgson, Marshall G.S. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Israel, Jonathan I. Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Jones, Stephanie. ‘British India Steamers and the Trade of the Persian Gulf, 1862–1914’. The Great Circle (Australian Association for Maritime History), Vol. 7, No. 1 (April 1985), pp. 23–44. Kelly, J.B. Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Kelly, J.B. ‘The Legal and Historical Basis of the British Position in the Persian Gulf ’. In St. Antony’s Papers No. 4, Middle Eastern Affairs No. 1 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958; New York: Praeger, 1959), pp. 119–40. King, Robert D. and Robin W. Kilson, eds. The Statecraft of British Imperialism: Essays in Honour of Wm. Roger Louis. London: Frank Cass, 1999. Kumar, Ravinder. ‘Anglo-Turkish Antagonism in the Persian Gulf ’. Islamic Culture, Vol. 37, No. 2 (1963), pp. 100–11. Lattimore, Owen. ‘The Frontier in History’. In Relazioni del X Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche (Firenze, 1956; reprinted in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1929–1958, Paris: Mouton, 1962; London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 479–91. Lombard, Denys and Jean Aubin, eds. Asian Merchants and Businessmen in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Louis, Wm. Roger, ed. Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy. New York: New Viewpoints, 1976. Lovett, H. Verney. ‘The Home Government, 1858–1918’. In H.H. Dodwell, ed., The Cambridge History of India, Vol. 6, The Indian Empire 1858–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 206–25. Lybyer, A.H. ‘The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade’. English Historical Review, Vol. 30, No. 120 (October 1915), pp. 577–88. Macris, Jeffrey R. and Saul Kelly, eds. Imperial Crossroads: The Great Powers and the Persian Gulf. Annapolis, MD : Naval Institute Press, 2012. Especially the chapters by Rudi Matthee, ‘The Portuguese Presence in the Persian Gulf: An Overview’, pp. 1–11; and Virginia Lunsford, ‘The Dutch in the Persian Gulf ’, pp. 13–30. McNeill, William H. The Age of Gunpowder Empires, 1450–1800. Washington, DC : American Historical Association, 1989. Onley, James. The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj. London: Oxford University Press, 2007. Özbaran, Salih. ‘The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf, 1543–1581’. Journal of Asian History, Vol. 6 (1972), pp. 45–87. Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pearson, M.N. The Indian Ocean. London: Routledge, 2003. Peterson, J.E. Defending Arabia. London: Croom Helm; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Robinson, Ronald. ‘Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire’. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1984), pp. 42–54. Seal, Anil, ed. The Decline, Revival, and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

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Smith, Simon S. Kuwait, 1950–1965: Britain, the al-Sabah, and Oil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Smith, Simon S. Britain’s Revival and Fall in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1950–71. London: Routledge, 2004. Steensgaard, Niels. The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Steensgaard, Niels. ‘Violence and the Rise of Capitalism: Frederic C. Lane’s Theory of Protection and Tribute’. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 1981), pp. 247–73. Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. London: Oxford University Press, 2011. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History. London: Longman, 1993. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. ‘Of Imârat and Tijârat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750’. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (October 1995), pp. 750–80. Tinker, Hugh. Viceroy: Curzon to Mountbatten. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Tracey, James D., ed. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Especially the chapters by Thomas A. Brady, ‘The Rise of Merchant Empires, 1400–1700’, pp. 117–60; Geoffrey Parker, ‘Europe and the Wider World, 1500–1700: The Military Balance’, pp. 161–95; Anne Pérotin-Dumon, ‘The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and the Law on the Seas, 1450–1850’, pp. 196–227; and Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Luís Filipe F.R. Thomaz, ‘Evolution of Empire: The Portuguese in the Indian Ocean During the Sixteenth Century’, pp. 298–331. Tracey, James D., ed. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Especially the chapters by Niels Steensgaard, ‘The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic Before 1750’, pp. 102–152; and Larry Neal, ‘The Dutch and English East India Companies Compared: Evidence From the Stock and Foreign Exchange Markets’, pp. 195–223. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Wallerstein, Immanuel. Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974–89; vol. 3 in San Diego. Wallerstein, Immanuel, Hale Decdeli and Reşat Kasaba. ‘The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World-Economy’. In Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 88–97. Wills, John E., Jr. ‘Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination’. American Historical Review, Vol. 98, No. 1 (February 1993), pp. 83–105. Wilson, Arnold T. The Persian Gulf: An Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928; reprinted 1959. Winius, George D. and Marcus P.M. Vink. The Merchant-Warrior Pacified: The VOC (The Dutch East India Company) and Its Changing Political Economy in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.

5

The Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the Arab World Fahad Ahmad Bishara and Patricia Risso

For most of the past four centuries, inhabitants of the Gulf looked across the water to forge political and economic linkages much more than they looked across the land. Although we often think of the Gulf as forming a part of the Arab world, for most of modern history this world stretched beyond the boundaries of the Middle East as we know it today. People in Kuwait, Bahrain, Muscat and other Gulf port cities enjoyed much stronger connections to Arab, African and Asian communities in India, Zanzibar and Aden than they did to historical Arab centres like Cairo, Baghdad or Damascus. This is not to suggest that the Gulf did not enjoy any ties to major Arab centres and empires at all, but rather that these ties were historically contingent, their strength varying at different historical junctures. For example, the history of Saudi Arabia – or, more specifically, that of Najd – can scarcely be explained against the backdrop of the western Indian Ocean. The rise and fall of the first two Saudi states, for example, owed far more to the designs of neighbouring Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire than they did to India, Persia or Africa. The Hijaz, too, was shaped by centuries of migrations from other regions of the Arab world, be it for trade or pilgrimage, as well as ongoing tensions between the Ottomans, the Al Saʿud and the local Hashimite rulers. While Najd and the Hijaz formed the main stages for the Gulf ’s engagement with the Middle East, they were not the only ones. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ottoman intrigues in Kuwait, Qatar and al-Ahsaʾ had a tremendous impact on political and economic trajectories there: in the latter, Medhat Pasha’s brief tenure saw the revitalization of date agriculture in new proportions, while in Kuwait and Qatar his overtures to local rulers set in motion processes that reconfigured the intra-familial dynamics of rule in both emirates and ultimately resulted in the establishment of British protectorates. These episodes, however, form the exception rather than the rule. Until the second half of the twentieth century, when the Gulf States became swept up in the broader geopolitics of the Middle East (a discussion that we take up towards the end of this chapter), the Gulf ’s linkages to Arab centres beyond Najd and southern Iraq were minimal. If Baghdad and Istanbul loomed in the backgrounds of the history of the Gulf, so too did Tehran, Bombay and Zanzibar, to name but a few regional centres of economic and political power. Indeed, in each of the examples above the Gulf ’s connections with Persia, India and Africa were just as significant to shaping historical outcomes as the Arab world – or rather, the Ottoman Empire – was. 159

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It is with these dimensions in mind that this chapter aims to elucidate the Gulf ’s connections to its broader world: the Arab world to be sure, but to a much greater extent, the Indian Ocean. In bridging the Gulf to the Indian Ocean, the discussion here aims at drawing the history of the region out of the resolutely local dimensions in which it has been studied and into a more dynamic arena – one in which historical processes unfold across seascapes, bringing together communities and landmasses that scholars would assume have little to do with one another into a coherent framework. It is to emphasize the connectedness of these communities and their fates – the natural, economic and political phenomena that bound them together across space and time, enduring empires, and commercial transformations. It is to lump, rather than to split – and in doing so, to illuminate histories that would have otherwise escaped our attention.

Monsoons, markets and networks in Gulf history Historians have asserted since the 1980s that the Indian Ocean serves as coherent a unit of historical analysis as does the Middle East, Africa or South Asia – area studies units that owe their provenance more to Cold War politics than they do to any organic conception of space. They have argued that connections between these different areas, the processes that bound them into a common history, and the people who traversed the ocean to make new lives for themselves formed more interesting subjects of historical study. But how does one conceive of a history that inhabits an oceanic space – a seascape rather than a more familiar landscape? A central element in how historians have viewed the coherence of Indian Ocean history has been the monsoon wind system. If economic actors in the Gulf, South Arabia, East Africa, India and South-East Asia looked to the sea more than they did to the land as a source of bounty, the monsoons structured the pace and scope of oceanic travel, creating opportunities for mobility but also placing constraints on it. Indeed, travel by sea was intimately bound up in the monsoon system, which determined what direction a ship could sail in at different times of the year, how long it could stay at a particular port before having to move on, and how long it took to get from one port to another. Still, the costs compared to overland travel were minimal: those who travelled by sea ameliorated the protection costs, harsh landscapes and long durations that characterized overland travel. As the monsoon wind system connected different littoral communities together, regional market cities emerged that further confirmed the shared commercial fates of Indian Ocean societies. As the Indian Ocean trade system developed, certain port cities emerged as central nodes in regional exchange because of their placement at key locations: where sea routes met caravan trails, at the mouths of different straits, or near a particularly favourable natural harbour. At the same time, cities like Hormuz, Aden, Surat and later Muscat, Bombay and Zanzibar all play a vivid role in the historian’s imagination because of the markets they housed and the services they offered to merchants trading there. These market conditions, coupled with the natural endowments that the cities enjoyed, further shaped the geography of commerce throughout the Indian Ocean.

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But a history of the Gulf that aspires to place it within the broader narrative of Indian Ocean history must move beyond monsoons and markets. The most important step in reorienting the history of the Gulf towards the ocean would be to follow the actors themselves – to recreate the geographies that they imagined themselves as inhabiting, and to erect an analytic framework that takes those geographies and the processes that characterized them seriously. The relationships that actors formed with one another that cut across wind systems and market forces – relationships of commercial mutualism, but also friendship, kinship, religious affinity, intellectual exchange and sometimes military alliance – thus must form one dimension of how we conceive of a Gulf history that reaches out to East Africa, South Arabia and western India.

Trade and politics in the Gulf, Middle East and Indian Ocean, c.1600–1820 As prologue to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the two preceding long centuries offer many useful considerations. Three observations presented here tend to employ large temporal and geographic scales. One is the readjustment of political and commercial patterns due to the diminished position of the Portuguese. Another is the imperial perspective held by the so-called gunpowder empires. Finally, there is a coastal shift that encompasses the rise of coastal enclaves and networks that carried both political and commercial power, with Oman providing the strongest example. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European politics and conflicts were played out increasingly in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean arenas. An odd example was Portugal ceding Bombay to England in 1668 as part of a royal dowry. The recipient, Charles II , not wanting direct responsibility for an island colony considered then to be unhealthy and commercially poor, leased it to the English trading company for a nominal fee. The relatively weak position of Portugal in this transaction points to a broader history of the Estado da Índia’s decline in the region. In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, Ottoman naval forces had already attacked Portuguese targets, though not with the intended effect of eviction. By the turn of the seventeenth century, the growing possibilities of East–West trade attracted Dutch, French, Danish and, in particular, English competitors, all wishing for an end to a Portuguese hold over East– West and some regional trade – a hold the Iberians exerted partly through their control of the strategically located island of Hurmuz as well as some Persian and Omani ports. By 1600, the Ottomans had sufficiently weakened Portuguese control over some of those ports to allow Omanis themselves briefly to retake Suhar. In 1614–15, the Persians retook the port they called Gombroon; the ruler, ʿAbbas, improved the harbour facilities and renamed the port Bandar ʿAbbas, after himself. More famously if not more importantly, in 1622, Persia, with some assistance from the English trading company, ended Portuguese control of Hurmuz. Two years later, a man from the Yaʿaribah clan in Oman, Nasir ibn Murshid, became ruler and pulled much of his state together under the banner of Ibadi Islam, and with an avowed purpose to evict the Portuguese from the coast.1 This incremental reversal of advantage continued: Suhar was retaken more

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permanently in 1643, and Nasir’s cousin and successor, Sultan ibn Sayf, took Muscat in 1650. From then on, well into the first third of the eighteenth century, maritime Omanis and the Portuguese continued their battles at sea. Usually it was the former chasing the latter along the southern coast of Arabia, the western coast of India, and the eastern coast of Africa, where the Yaʿaribah and two other Omani tribes, the Mazruʿi and the Nabhani, had commercial export interests on mainland Pate, and Mombasa and Pemba islands. The core of the Omani naval force consisted of vessels taken from the Portuguese in 1650 at Muscat, an undetermined but probably small number of wellarmed ships of European build. There is also conjecture that the Yaʿaribah had ships built in Indian ports. Many coastal Omanis had served on these ships under Portuguese command and knew how to sail them. Omani Arab and Indian merchants used these same ships for exporting ivory to the Malabar Coast and to Surat for the carving industry; some was re-exported to China. Slaves were exported to the Red Sea and Gulf regions, and to Oman itself. Sometimes the Omanis attacked regional vessels in order to replenish their coffers, and this happened often enough to prompt a reputation for them as pirates, incongruously juxtaposed with positive regard for their commercial and political agency. A Yemeni chronicler described Omani ‘rabble’ or ‘scoundrels’ (awbash in Arabic), who attacked Indian vessels at the entrance to Mocha’s harbour, thus damaging Yemen’s economy. Omanis enthusiastically asserted this power shift away from the Portuguese in their own favour, taking from them even their prized Fort Jesus on Mombasa Island in 1698, about a century after its construction. All that remained of any importance for the Iberians in the Arabian Sea were a few establishments on the African mainland and those at Diu, Bassein (modern Vasai) and Goa on the Indian shore. In the Gulf, the last useful Portuguese outpost was Kung, which provided a stopover between western India and Basra. It was in this context of retrenchment that Portugal ceded Bombay to Charles II , presaging one of the significant realignments of political and commercial patterns in the region. The drawn-out and multifaceted campaign against the Portuguese drew the attention of the three so-called gunpowder empires that all had strategic interests in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Ottoman Empire had made sixteenth-century territorial gains that put the Red Sea and the Gulf within their purview. The Mughals, who had controlled the port of Surat in western India since 1573, now had increasingly unsatisfactory dealings with the beleaguered Portuguese and were concerned by the collateral maritime damage that occurred during the Omani war of pursuit. The Safavids of Persia had their newly enlarged Bandar ʿAbbas, and that port’s eponym had an interest in using revenue from maritime trade to the detriment of both his internal and Ottoman foes. What follows are three sketches of each empire’s regional maritime concerns in the Gulf and western Indian Ocean. In the years 1516 and 1517, the Ottoman Empire had annexed Mamluk Syria and Egypt and inherited from the Mamluks responsibility for the Hijaz province and the pilgrimage to the holy cities of Makkah (Mecca) and al-Madinah (Medina). In the 1520s, the Ottomans took direct control of the Hijazi port, Jiddah, and also Yemen. The following decade saw a campaign for then-Persian-controlled Iraq, and the Gulf ’s

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significant inland port of Basra soon came under Ottoman control. Persian–Ottoman competition for Basra continued sporadically, with Ottoman efforts more resilient. Basra continued to be a trade entrepôt over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exporting mainly dates and importing and re-exporting in several directions all manner of commodities including slaves, timber, textiles, pepper and other spices, some with provenance in South-East Asia. The Ottomans also exerted some influence along the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, in al-Ahsaʾ, in the sixteenth century and again in the nineteenth, less for trade purposes than to guard their south-eastern frontier, first from the Portuguese, and in the last third of the nineteenth century, from the British. In between, for the sixteenth century, Giancarlo Casale has made an argument that some Ottoman officials maintained a strong interest in East African and particularly Indian trade, and therefore maintained a distant concern for the relatively barren frontier in the Gulf that would provide access to that trade. India – self-sufficient and with many exports to sell, including textiles, timber, coir, grains and spices – needed nothing from Europe, but the Mughal ruler Jahangir (r. 1605– 27) expressed curiosity about the oil paintings and fur hats that European envoys sent him as gifts in order to predispose him to trade agreements, generally without success. In this imperial regard, the empress at his side, Nur Jahan, was an interesting player because she increased her official allowance by investing in both maritime and land-based trade. The major Mughal port of Surat attracted inland vendors of cloth and grain as well as regional maritime merchants. Its resident merchants included Turks, Persians and Arabs, as well as Indians representing several different communities. Newly arrived northern Europeans were restricted to sell their wares only at Surat, where the Mughal administrator in charge of trade tended to give them a difficult time, possibly because their merchandise had little or no demand. The political and commercial news of Surat reached court regularly, and that information functioned for Nur Jahan as an open window on the rest of the region. At the same time, the Dutch, English and French approached the Mughal court with proverbial hats in hand, seeking a modest market on a favoured-nation basis. Nur Jahan ‘favoured’ the first official English envoy only with a letter of protection for Englishmen and their trade at Surat – an attempt to curb the administrator’s surly behaviour. The envoy, Sir Thomas Roe, was deeply disappointed not to receive a substantive trade agreement with the Mughal court that included access to more ports and a better deal on export duties. He soon advocated to the English government that it should instil fear of violence as a means to achieve trade objectives. While warning against emulating the Portuguese and Dutch practice of building expensive fortified coastal enclaves and against potentially even more expensive war, he specifically suggested periodic attacks on Mughal ships heading to or from the Red Sea. In other words, he advocated targeted acts of what might easily be called piracy calculated to implant in the Mughal administration some degree of awe at English power. In 1688, the first governor of the English colony of Bombay decided on his own authority to do just that, though his target Mughal vessels were trading in the Gulf rather than the Red Sea.2 Using piracy as a strategy for securing the East India Company’s interests served only to sour relationships with Mughal merchants and officials and led to a regional assumption that nearly all European pirates were English. The piracy tactic

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also motivated the then-ruler and last effective Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb (r. 1658– 1707), to demand help from European companies to protect the famous ‘Mocha fleet’ – that sailed annually from Surat to Mocha and Jiddah – from both regional and European marauders. The Mocha fleet was a heavy responsibility for the ruler, not only due to the value of merchandise on both the outbound and returning sail, but also because pilgrims to Makkah and al-Madinah often took passage with the fleet.3 The other Muslim empire that took a direct interest in the affairs of the Gulf and the Arabian Sea was Safavid Persia. Shah ʿAbbas (r. 1588–1629) came to the throne under precarious circumstances: the Qizilbash, the state’s tribally organized military force, had just ousted his father. The young shah was determined to keep his political position by enlarging a regular standing army and he hoped to finance that endeavour by controlling the export of silk. How deliberately he planned for this is a matter of some dispute: Rudolph P. Matthee argues that many of the shah’s decisions may have been the result of both the usual practices of a tributary state and the seizure of haphazard opportunities rather than the outcome of a coherent business plan or economic theory. Clearly the shah focused on the monopoly of silk export in order to compete with the Ottomans, who controlled the resale of Persian silk at Izmir and Aleppo to Europeans, with the assistance of Armenian merchants based in those two Ottoman cities as well as in multiple European locations. Shah ʿAbbas negotiated with envoys from European states to buy some of their silk at Bandar ʿAbbas and transport it home by ship around the Cape of Good Hope, thus bypassing Ottoman territory and charges. This new practice affected the significantly large and well-connected trade network of Armenians. In 1603, at the end of a conflict with Ottomans in which the Persians were retreating, Shah ʿAbbas had ordered the deportation of an Armenian merchant community from a town named Julfa in traditional Armenia to the outskirts of Isfahan, where New Julfa was established as the hub of a far-flung network that extended to Europe, Russia and South Asia. When Shah ʿAbbas began to attract Western Europeans to his main port, the recently relocated Armenian merchants found themselves offering to pay for the privilege of carrying as much silk as possible to their colleagues in Izmir and Aleppo, providing yet another source of revenue for the ruler. These same merchants thus provided a useful extension to the maritime frontiers of Persian trade by establishing merchant houses in Basra and Surat and later also in Calcutta. The head of one prominent New Julfan family, the Minasians, relocated to Surat and used his Persian connections to develop a lucrative interregional trade.4 While silk was being produced in parts of India, notably Bengal and Multan, other regions, such as Gujarat, apparently preferred Persian silk for ceremonial saris. The rest of the century was less productive, as Matthee and Willem Floor describe. None of ʿAbbas’s successors were as successful as he had been. They allowed the monopoly on silk export to lapse and the prices of silk at Bandar ʿAbbas became prohibitive. While the English East India Company gave up on this market in the 1640s, the Dutch continued to avail themselves of Persian silk into the early eighteenth century, but in quantities that generally decreased from the height of their demand in the 1630s. The Dutch deeply resented what had become high fixed prices for silk; they sent ships to blockade Persian ports twice during the seventeenth century in a failed effort to compel the shah to lower the price.

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Merchants at Bandar ʿAbbas learned that cheaper, good-quality silk was available in India, and Persian-made silk increasingly found its market to the north in Russia. Merchants at Izmir began to buy silk produced in Ottoman Bursa. After the decline of the Safavid regime, punctuated by an Afghani invasion in 1722, a ruthless and talented man of the Turkmen Afshar tribe who styled himself Nadir Shah established – briefly – a military empire. As Sebouh David Aslanian has demonstrated from Armenian and other underused sources, the combination of Isfahan losing its position as a capital city and Nadir Shah’s harsh treatment of some residents of New Julfa convinced many Armenians to leave, re-emerging later in Baghdad, Basra, Bandar Rig, Madras, Calcutta and Tbilisi in modern Georgia. Nadir Shah was followed by the Zand family, the most notable of which was Karim Khan, who was faced with both a turbulent local reality and devastating commercial competition from the Ottoman port of Basra. Karim managed to blockade Basra and held the city between 1776 and 1779, the year of his death. This military campaign intersects the story of the Omani Ahmad ibn Saʿid, told below. The Ottomans lost their large province of Hungary in 1699, Aurangzeb died in 1707 and an Afghani tribal prince briefly seized the Safavid capital of Isfahan in 1722. Taken together, these events suggest a theme of retrenchment and reconfiguration for the three gunpowder empires during the eighteenth century, but some crucial socio-economic factors remained stable: mobility and the willingness of merchants to resettle in distant ports; the use of local agents to provide market information and translation services when needed; and well-established, pre-modern banking mechanisms for credit over time and space. In the last twenty years or so, historians have demonstrated convincingly that merchant capitalism, political intervention and artisan entrepreneurship throughout the early modern period provided India and the Ottoman Empire with new areas of economic growth that continued to remain effective even into the colonial era. But there was also change: the Mughal port of Surat had been Queen Nur Jahan’s window on the region if not the world; British Bombay would slowly replace it. The third early modern consideration that functions as prologue to the modern period is the increasing shift of political and economic activity to coastal areas in the eighteenth century. This shift entailed new maritime polities and trade networks and is therefore crucial to understanding changes in the narratives of contact within and between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.5 In western India, for example, the mercenary navies of both the Maratha confederation and the Mughals increasingly enacted the contest between the two retrenching powers. These were the navies of the Angre family and of the Habshis (or Sidis), respectively, that contested the west central coast of India, most heatedly during the 1730s, after which Sidi power waned. In 1690, the Marathas gave the scion of the Angre family, Kanhoji (d. 1729), the Persian title sarkhil, roughly equivalent to ‘admiral’, and paid him a portion of state revenues to which he himself contributed through trade and plunder. To the numerous but small vessels of the Mughal fleet, he added his own fewer but larger and more heavily armed ships, and with this naval force he controlled the Konkan coast and its maritime approaches, making the Maratha state a rising maritime power. Kanhoji and members of his family after him were instrumental in the British decision to turn an ad

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Figure 5.1 Maritime view of Bombay with a number of East Indiamen in the foreground (c.1750).

hoc Bombay Marine into a permanent navy in 1754 – a force established to stop what the British labelled piracy in western India and later in the Gulf as well. Kanhoji’s rise to power had a negative impact on Omani depredations along the western coast of India. The admiral’s ability to protect and participate in Marathi trade discouraged the Omanis from seeking Indian targets and the availability of Portuguese-owned plunder in India was quickly diminishing anyway. The Omanis retreated north, into the Gulf, where their depredations against Persian vessels, islands and coastal ports increased notably in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The Habshis – who supplied a mercenary naval force for the Mughals – had ancestral roots in East Africa, where there had long been Persian, Arab and Muslim influences. Their name points to Abyssinia, but groups came from a wider swath of the coast, in different centuries; some were slaves and others were free, but most were Muslim. Habshi communities spread over much of western India, but the specific group of mercenary sailors mentioned here – estimated at 250 in the 1660s – stayed south of Bombay on an island they called Janjira, from the Arabic, al-jazirah, as well as at strongholds on the nearby coast. Whoever commanded this agile fleet of small vessels was often an important figure at court, as was the case for one Sidi Yaqut Khan, who had political influence with Aurangzeb. It was only after the Habshis failed to stop European pirates that Aurangzeb turned to European companies, particularly to that of

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the English, to demand convoy for the Mocha fleet. The relatively limited Habshi manpower, the small size of the fleet, its inability to chase European ships into open sea, and finally warfare with the Angre fleet, all combined to limit any political ambition that Yaqut Khan or his successors might have harboured. Perhaps the most impressive example of coastal shift was Oman. The Al Bu Saʿid, a clan that took power in the mid-eighteenth century, increasingly left behind tribal interior strongholds for the economic opportunities of ports. This new regime then built a regional trade empire served by monsoonal winds and forming a rough triangle between the Gulf, East Africa and western India. They took over Ibadi leadership after a long period of civil strife had destroyed the Yaʿaribah regime. The first in this line was Ahmad ibn Saʿid (r. 1749–83). During the second half of the century, trade patterns in the Gulf and Arabian Sea changed rather dramatically to Oman’s advantage, and the reasons for this circumstance were complexly interrelated. Oman enjoyed a natural geographic advantage just outside the narrow entrance to the Gulf. Omani merchants were buying an increasingly large share of grain and timber in Bombay, as well as South-East Asian products from the Dutch factory at Cochin and coffee from Mocha, and carrying these commodities first to Muscat or, in the case of coffee, to Sur and collecting revenues before forwarding them on to Basra, Kuwait or Persian ports. Beginning in 1786 and lasting into the 1790s, Tipu Sultan of Mysore had a tariff agreement with the Omani ruler, providing mutual discounts for trade at Mangalore and Muscat. Omani rulers and merchants had regional types of vessels built or repaired in the shipyards of Surat or Bombay. The inland port of Basra was the upper Gulf destination of choice, where even Tipu Sultan hired an agent. While the coastal Omanis owned some large ships, including one or two capable of trading to the ports of Bengal, they also had a significant number of dhows, perhaps fifty, that could profitably handle the smaller consignments typical of Gulf trade. European and many Indian merchants sailed only larger ships with larger crews that could not make a profit on limited cargoes. Another advantage Omani merchant vessels enjoyed was that they sailed in a protective convoy, especially in the Gulf, to avoid attracting depredation.6 The Omanis carried pearls, dates, silk and cash out of the Gulf ’s ports. The growth of Basra and Muscat was at the direct expense of Persian ports, some of which were now under the authority of Karim Khan Zand, introduced above. Persia and Oman had for centuries been interested in and sometimes able to impose control over each other’s ports. Karim Khan, now facing relative economic difficulty because of the Muscat–Basra trade, wanted to take the valuable prize of Muscat for himself but lacked the ships to transport a sufficiently large army to do so. He turned his attention to Basra, as mentioned earlier, timing his efforts just after the city had suffered an outbreak of plague (1773) and the Ottomans had been defeated by Russia (1774). During the Persian blockade and siege of Basra, an Omani convoy tried to resupply the inland port; although it only enjoyed limited success, the effort was an indication of how important Basra’s markets were to Muscat. Just before taking the city in 1776, Karim reportedly asked the Ottoman governor to allow a Zand army unmolested passage through Ottoman Mesopotamia and al-Ahsaʾ province of Arabia so that he could attack Oman by land, an unlikely scenario that says more about perceptions of

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Karim’s determination than about the realm of possibility. In any case, the governor is said to have refused. Baghdad never managed to send a promised Ottoman relief force, but an Arab chieftain of the Muntafiq tribe displaced a large number of Persians north of Basra in 1778. Karim Khan’s death in the following year and the ensuing succession struggle in Persia ended the ill-fated campaign. The Muntafiq briefly seized Basra for themselves in the late 1780s, but the city was left struggling to regain its former commercial significance. When Oman was just beginning to experience success in western India and the Gulf – that is, in mid-century – Ahmad ibn Saʿid’s attempt at expansion of merchant infrastructure in East Africa was resisted by two Omani clans who were already established there, the Mazruʿi clan in Mombasa and the Nabhani clan at Pate. Soon, Ahmad was able to appoint a governor at Zanzibar, the major coastal outlet for slaves, though he was unable to hold Kilwa against the resistance of local rulers who sought commercial alliances with French slave traders. In the 1770s, Ahmad became preoccupied by the challenge of Karim Khan Zand to Basra (and indirectly, to Muscat), leaving further East African expansion to his sons. After dealing with two rebellious half-brothers, Saʿid ibn Ahmad became the next Al Bu Saʿidi ruler. He was able to take and keep Kilwa, though Zanzibar was still the main locale of slave export. Coincidentally, the French demand for slaves to work on the islands of Bourbon (now la Réunion) and Île de France (now Mauritius), as well as in the West Indies, greatly increased, and only Zanzibar could handle the volume. In 1786, Saʿid granted the French permission to establish a trade factory at Muscat, where they redistributed cane sugar grown on the slave plantations of Île de France. Thus, new opportunities in East Africa contributed to coastal Oman’s overall commercial success and also cushioned some of the loss caused by Basra’s difficulties. A possible measure of this commercial success was the ascension to power in 1793 of another Al Bu Saʿidi, Sultan ibn Ahmad, who did not expend time, energy or resources to secure the religiously sanctioned position of Ibadi ruler or imam. Another member of the family tenuously held that honour in the interior. Sultan ibn Ahmad was satisfied to run the coastal commercial state. Sultan also extended influence to islands in the Gulf, and tried three times – albeit unsuccessfully – to take Bahrain from the Al Khalifah (between 1799 and 1803), in hopes of controlling its port, al-Manamah, and nearby pearl banks. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the British described Sultan’s fleet as one square-rigged ship of 1,000 tons and thirty-two guns; three squarerigged ships of about twenty guns each; fifteen unspecified vessels of between 400 and 700 tons; three brigs; approximately fifty dhows and fifty dinghies. But not all was going Oman’s way. By at least 1807, the Saudi Wahhabis of Najd had exerted a degree of political control over al-Sir province, roughly now the United Arab Emirates, sharing a long border with Oman. A prominent local tribal group, the Qawasim (sing. Qasimi), was hostile to the Omanis, having long-standing territorial issues as well as concern over the latter’s seemingly disproportionate control over Gulf maritime trade. Hostilities between al-Sir and Oman often took the shape of maritime depredation, which the Qawasim and Omanis viewed as legitimate warfare to defend their interests. The British, watching from India, saw the Qasimi side of the conflict as piracy that disrupted the lawful trade by Oman and others. Further complicating the

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matter, the Saudis were in a position to select a Qasimi governor loyal to their ideology and expansionist cause. This threat to Oman demonstrates a serious interest on the part of the Wahhabis in territory giving them access to the Arabian Sea, another example of potential political and economic shift to a coastal region. The early years of the nineteenth century also saw a rise in the nearly continual competition for island and coastal port towns, as political and commercial power shifted. Two newly installed regimes – the Qajars of Persia and the Al Khalifah of the Bahrain islands, as well as the Wahhabis through the Qawasim, who had established strongholds in Sharjah, Raʾs al-Khaymah and the port of Lingah on the Persian littoral – and Omanis were all involved. Omani naval forces tried three times, unsuccessfully, to take Bahrain between 1799 and 1802. The larger picture was also especially active: the Wahhabis took the Hijaz province in 1803, just after the French were being driven out of southern Syria and Egypt by the combined Ottoman and British forces. Muhammad ʿAli, the new Ottoman governor of Egypt, sent his son Ibrahim Pasha to expel the Wahhabis from the Holy Cities of Makkah and al-Madinah, a task that took several years. Ibrahim Pasha marched his forces all the way to the Saudi stronghold of al-Dirʿiyyah, which he razed before returning to Egypt. The successful coastal Omanis believed it was in their best interests to have law and order in the region, so that trade would flourish. The British agreed and wanted to help but were preoccupied in India with various matters, including uprisings by Marathas. These long-standing competitors of the Mughals were in a position in the early nineteenth century to renew resistance to expanding British territorial control in central India. In 1818, however, the British mustered their resources and brought them to final defeat, thereby freeing imperial military resources and political will that could now turn to the ‘piratical’ activities in the Gulf. In late 1819, the British launched a naval expedition against the main Qasimi port of Raʾs al-Khaymah, winning a decisive victory. The peace settlement of 1820 transformed what the British had called the ‘pirate coast’ into the Trucial Coast. It is easy to view this moment as an extension of British imperialism from India to the Gulf, but perhaps it is too easy to allow the British unwarranted centre stage. If the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were marked by modest European impact, formation of merchant capital within various regional networks, and increased littoral political and economic activity, the nineteenth century is characterized by an unprecedented degree of political change and expansions in capital formation and commerce.

Commercial expansions and transformations, c.1820–1914 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Omani sultan had firmly established himself as sovereign of the East African coast: Zanzibar had fallen firmly under the control of the sultan of Muscat, at this time Saʿid ibn Sultan Al Bu Saʿidi; the port of Mombasa was still in the hands of the Mazruʿi clan, who eventually ceded official control to the Al Bu Saʿidi sultan; and Lamu, a key dhow port further north, had invited the sultan to send troops and a governor there to protect them from neighbouring citystates. The sultan even stationed a governor at the port of Barawa, on the Benadir Coast

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of Somalia, where he exercised admittedly only limited jurisdiction. Thus, the most important cities on the East African coast, from the horn of Somalia to Cape Delgado, had nominally fallen under Omani suzerainty – although the reality of day-to-day authority usually fell to leading merchants and local clans more than it did to the sultan’s governors. The timing could not have been more felicitous for Omani merchants in East Africa were about to witness the largest commercial bonanza in the region’s history. Abdul Sheriff has already outlined the expansions in the ivory market during the early to mid-nineteenth century, due in large part to the rise in English demand for ivory. Although East African merchants had been exporting ivory to India and China for centuries, the emergence of England as a market for ivory, in Sheriff ’s words (Slaves, Spices and Ivory, p. 90), ‘rejuvenated East Africa’s trade with India and broadened the arteries without altering the direction of trade as far as East Africa was concerned’. By the middle of the nineteenth century, merchants witnessed the development of an international commodity chain between the interior of East Africa, the productive hinterland; Zanzibar, the regional ivory entrepôt; Bombay, the processing station; and London, the main market. Sheriff also points to the advent of an American mercantile presence in Zanzibar, and the infusion of American cloth into the market, as having stimulated mercantile expansion into the interior of East Africa. Sheriff and Frederick Cooper detail similar expansions in the clove market at the time. Their figures show that while clove exports were low during the early 1800s, they enjoyed an enormous boom during the middle of the century. Early-nineteenth century European travellers to Zanzibar found that large portions of the island were uncultivated, and that merchants only considered land in the immediate vicinity of the port to be of value. Indeed, before 1820, cloves were mostly grown in South-East Asia in the Moluccas. Even two decades after the first clove trees were introduced to Zanzibar sometime around 1819 (accounts of their introduction vary), most clove plantations belonged to the sultan, who was reputed to be an imaginative businessman who experimented with sugar and indigo as well. It was only during the 1840s that many Indian merchants began to invest capital in clove plantations, giving rise to what Sheriff termed the ‘clove mania’ of Zanzibar. The emergence of clove plantations (as well as rice, millet, coconut and other types of plantations) on the east coast of Africa was not simply an economic phenomenon: it was a social one as well, and one that firmly linked the fates of Oman and East Africa together. For as the plantation economy and ivory trade took off in East Africa, hundreds of Omanis began migrating there in search of fortune and fame, pawning what land they had in Oman to finance a new life across the ocean. In a sense, East Africa was to Oman (and also to Yemen, where large numbers of shopkeepers, traders and scholars came from) what America was to Northern Europeans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a place where one could escape from hardships at home and hope to reinvent oneself as a person of economic, social and political consequence. Those who managed to generate some wealth in the ivory trade often invested in land on the coast and elsewhere, using their landholdings as a source of prestige and economic power. An excellent illustration of this comes from the career of the famous

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ivory and slave trader Hamad ibn Muhammad al-Marjibi – better known as Tippu Tip, the uncrowned king of East Africa in the nineteenth century. Tippu Tip’s greatgrandfather Rajab ibn Muhammad had first come to the Swahili Coast in the company of his friend, Muhammad ibn Jumʿah al-Nabhani, whose father had gone off to the interior of East Africa and returned to Muscat a rich man. After arriving in East Africa, Rajab married his friend’s sister and fathered a boy, whom he name Jumʿah, after his friend. The young Jumʿah went on to lead daring caravan expeditions as far into the interior as Lake Tanganyika. He later married the daughter of the then-sultan of Tabora, and his son, Muhammad, proved to be as adept as his father at leading caravans. Muhammad, however, often moved back and forth between the East African coast and Muscat, where he married the daughter of a prosperous and well-respected Arab family, Binti Habib ibn Bushir al-Wardi – Tippu Tip’s mother. Tippu Tip, who came from a long line of successful caravan leaders, could fall back on his family’s reputation, but it was not enough to generate the amount of credit he needed. At first, he could only raise enough to finance small undertakings, growing bolder only as his accumulated experience and reputation – and corresponding access to credit – allowed. Both his biography and the loan contracts he entered into in 1869 suggest that he had little to offer as collateral against the loans he took to finance his expedition. His gamble paid off, and by 1895, after more than twenty-five years of trade and diplomacy in the interior, he had amassed a fortune from his trade in ivory and slaves, and reportedly owned seven plantations (shambas). While his career might have been exceptional, his trajectory from landless trader to landed planter was one that many others also experienced. The French Captain Loarer noted in the 1840s that many caravan traders, after three or four journeys, acquired enough capital to invest in plantations in Zanzibar. The ivory boom, however, did more than just fuel the growth of a plantation society on the East African coast. Through successive generations of Arab ivory traders like Tippu Tip, Omani merchants were able to establish themselves in key towns in the interior of East Africa. The town of Tabora, a principal ivory trading station in the interior of presentday Tanzania, was almost wholly populated by Arabs from Oman who chose to stay in the interior rather than return to the coast, carving for themselves positions as middlemen in the ivory trade. Others established plantations in the interior rather than the coast, reaching as far upcountry as the Congo. Indeed, one region near the Congo produced so much rice that observers took to calling it ‘New Bengal’. Alongside developments in the clove and ivory markets (and indeed, fuelling those developments) were enormous transformations in the region’s infrastructure – changes that would ultimately seal the rise of modern capitalism in the region, prompted in part by growing industrialization in Northern Europe. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed two key developments: first, the arrival of steamship navigation; and second, the laying of submarine and overland telegraph cables. Although various forms of steam shipping had appeared in the Indian Ocean during the first decades of the nineteenth century, by the 1860s large steamships had begun regularly calling at different ports, defying the monsoon winds and changing the pulse of Indian Ocean commerce into a less seasonal rhythm. Soon afterwards, British-sponsored companies laid down the foundations of a trans-Oceanic telegraph infrastructure, and by the

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1890s, merchants in Aden or London could easily access market information from as far away as Bombay, Zanzibar or Bahrain. Together, these connected the key ports in the western Indian Ocean to the major commercial centres of Europe such that goods, people and market information moved between continents with regularity. The effect of all of these developments on Indian Ocean commerce was predictable: by the middle of the nineteenth century, ports around the region witnessed an unprecedented boom in the scale and scope of commercial activity, with regional commodities commanding prices that merchants could have never imagined before. Concomitant with the rise of steamship navigation and telegraph communication was perhaps an even more important development: the emergence of Western financial institutions in India. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the Indian Ocean financial sector witnessed the arrival of a number of large financial institutions, including: the Chartered Banks of India, Australia and China; the National Bank of India; Lloyds Bank; and a number of other Dutch, French and American institutions. These banks provided the bulk of the credit that fuelled Indian Ocean commerce, lending to Bombay and Gujarat’s established Indian mercantile houses, all of whom had branches in East Africa, South Arabia and the Gulf. By acting as what Rajat Kanta Ray has termed ‘intermediary capitalists’, these Indian merchant houses were able to exploit the difference between the interest rates at which they borrowed from banks and those at which they lent out money and goods to commercial aspirants and entrepreneurs in the western Indian Ocean, and did so much to their own advantage. In doing so, they extended the reach of Western capital into the ports of East Africa and the western Indian Ocean while also ensuring a steady return of key commodities. In short, they did the work of integrating the western Indian Ocean into the modern world economy. The commercial bonanza was not limited to East Africa: by the second half of the nineteenth century, merchants in the Gulf were reaping the rewards of the transformations that had taken place around the western Indian Ocean. In the Gulf, booms in the pearl and date markets depended on the advent of these infrastructural changes. Matthew Hopper outlines how the markets for dates expanded in important ways during the 1880s, reaching consumers in Europe and America. Drawing his figures from British intelligence reports, Hopper argues that the Gulf began to export dates in much greater quantities following the establishment of markets abroad – markets whose supply depended largely on the sinews forged by steamships and telegraph. Between 1899 and 1906, the earliest years for which there are published figures, Muscat’s date exports nearly doubled; Bahrain’s comparatively small exports (primarily re-exports from al-Ahsaʾ) also grew exponentially. Both Hopper and Calvin Allen assert that the boom in dates from Oman was prompted by a rise in demand for Omani fard. dates among American consumers. This trade, Allen states, would not have been possible had it not been for the introduction of steamships to the Indian Ocean. ‘Steam navigation’, Allen writes (‘Sayyids, Shets and Sultans’, p.  168), ‘cut down on the importance of this characteristic [i.e. the Omani date’s ability to survive long sailing voyages to the United States] and the fard [sic] might have disappeared from the American market to be replaced by North African varieties had not the cheaper freight rates kept it competitive’. While the North American date trade never supplanted the privileged position of the Indian market

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(on which there are no detailed records) it is clear that the export of dates to the United States formed an important part of Muscat’s commerce, and that it relied heavily on steamship transportation. As the date trade with the United States began to solidify, new markets for Gulf pearls also developed and the value of pearl exports skyrocketed. These changes owed a great deal to a boom in the demand for pearls in Europe and North America during the late-nineteenth century. The boom prompted vigorous entry by European pearl merchants into the industry – either indirectly via Bombay, an established market for pearls and home to a large number of Gulf pearl merchants, or directly through Bahrain, considered the largest market for pearls in the Gulf. External demand for pearls had existed since at least the sixteenth century; although it waned following the mid-seventeenth century upheavals in Europe, it persisted ‘in muted form’ until it was revived in the mid-nineteenth century by European royalty and aristocrats. This demand was only bolstered by the post-Industrial Revolution emergence of the European and American nouveau riche – commercial magnates, agricultural landowners, and professionals – who Hopper explains (‘The African Presence in Arabia’, p. 182) ‘joined the ranks of high society and eventually overtook it in dictating fashion trends in both Europe and North America’. Although the boom in demand for pearls encouraged the direct participation of European merchants in this market, any attempt at involvement in the pearl trade would have been extremely difficult without the regularization of steamship traffic in the Gulf and Indian Ocean and the laying of submarine telegraph cables, which allowed European merchants to contact their home markets and make better-informed local purchases. This strategy would have been unavailable if they had to rely on sailing ships and the monsoon winds to bring news of the European markets. The boom in the market for pearls and the appearance of European competitors to the Indian market had a predictable effect on the price that Gulf pearls commanded. One 1877 observer noted that the price of pearls was said to have doubled since the middle of the century. During the decade between the early 1890s and early 1900s, for which we have solid figures, the total value of pearls exported from the Gulf tripled; in Bahrain the value of pearl exports rose by nearly 600 per cent between 1873 and 1906. Although the Indians who financed growing commercial activity in East Africa were equally present in South Arabia and the Gulf, there was a similarly large presence of Gulf merchant families in India who likewise channelled goods and credit back to their home ports. One historian of Kuwait notes that during the late eighteenth century there were a number of Kuwaiti merchant families operating out of Surat – once the principal commercial and financial centre of western India; however, by the mid-nineteenth century, after Surat’s decline, many more had moved to Bombay, Karachi, Calicut, Mangalore and other ports on the west coast of India. Another historian of Kuwait’s pearl trade highlights the presence of a number of Kuwaiti pearl merchants who resided in Bombay. Merchants from Bahrain and Oman also established trading offices in port cities like Calicut and Karachi, and the Saudi al-Bassam family maintained a long presence in Bombay, trading extensively with other Indian Ocean ports. Gulf merchants in Bombay and other Indian ports primarily dealt in pearls, the Gulf ’s most valuable export, but also sold dates, either directly or through local brokers.

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Dhow captains would pick up shipments of dates from farms the merchants owned in Basra and would transport them to brokers’ offices along the entire coast. Although the goods they imported from the Gulf were limited in their variety, the range of goods they sent back to their home ports was dizzying: lists from Kuwaiti merchants in Bombay and Karachi during the 1920s include prices for different legumes, sugar, tea, wheat flour, cloth, shoes and even matches. These would have been sold to merchants in different Gulf ports on credit, where they would have then been further sold on credit to ship captains, divers and their households for everyday consumption. Their presence in India, coupled with a substantial Indian presence in the Gulf, effectively tied the two regions together in a reciprocal commerce in food, commodities and credit. In addition to dealing in a range of different foodstuffs and sundries on credit, Gulf merchants residing in western India actively traded in teak and other types of wood used in the Gulf ’s growing dhow-building industry. Indeed, shipbuilding lumber formed the main export for those living in the more southern ports such as Calicut and Mangalore; the al-Saqr family of Kuwait, for example, maintained a successful business selling teak and other woods to buyers and shipwrights throughout the Gulf. By ensuring a steady supply of lumber, Gulf merchants in India’s more secondary ports carved a niche for themselves in a changing regional economy while ensuring the viability of a key industry based in their home ports.

Figure 5.2 View of the boat harbour in Kuwait as seen from the British Political Agency (1911).

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But what of the dhows themselves? What was their place in this world of steamships, telegraphs, banks and modern capitalism? Far from being a relic of the past, dhows established themselves as active participants in the burgeoning commercial arena. Dhows were among the key protagonists during the changing commercial world of East Africa and South Arabia. They played an active role in shipping East African cloves and other plantation products to nearby ports, but also transported the slave labour that worked East Africa and Oman’s growing plantations. If we consider labour to form one of the main building blocks of agrarian capitalism, then we would have to concede that Gulf dhows were among the key constitutive elements of the commercial transformation of East Africa. At the same time, dhows carved for themselves a niche market in a growing East African economy – namely in the mangrove pole trade to the Gulf, in which they participated from at least the mid-nineteenth century onward (though likely much earlier as well). The Africa–Gulf trade in mangrove poles (called chandal in the Gulf Arabic dialect, and used as roofing material) continued unabated until the 1960s. Writing on the Gulf preference for mangrove poles in construction, Erik Gilbert notes that they were used long after concrete and reinforced steel became available, since concrete roofs tended to crack in the extreme heat of the summer and so required more maintenance than a mud and mangrove roof. And at least by the early-twentieth century, the trade in mangrove poles had become the exclusive preserve of Arab dhow crews, who would invest their freightage earnings into cargoes of mangrove poles that they would then sell in different Gulf ports. The dhows’ role in the India trade had hardly diminished either. N. Benjamin has noted that Arab dhows frequently called at Bombay and Surat during the first few decades of the nineteenth century; and over the course of the next hundred years or so, the scope of their commercial activities grew to include a range of different Indian ports in which Gulf merchants resided. Indeed, even well after the advent of steam shipping, merchants in India and the Gulf demonstrated a marked preference for dhows when it came to shipping bulk cargo like dates, rice, sugar or lumber. Freightage on a steamship for these goods would have been prohibitively expensive unless they were shipping goods to Europe or the United States, for which steamships would have been an obvious choice. Gulf dhows were thus able to adapt to the commercial transformations that reshaped the Indian Ocean with remarkable flexibility. Even in Bombay, arguably the epicentre of modern capitalism in the Indian Ocean, Gulf dhows continued to jostle with steamers for harbour space until well into the mid-twentieth century.

Bombay, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean world, c.1850–1950 There are few places that shaped the Gulf – and indeed, the wider western Indian Ocean world – as much as Bombay did. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the mid-1950s, Bombay was the region’s metropolis: the bulk of the western Indian Ocean’s goods, credit and legislation passed through Bombay. The large-scale industrialization that characterized the city during the mid-nineteenth century, the laying of railroads that linked it to India’s productive hinterlands and the establishment

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of Western banks there all confirmed Bombay’s place as the principal commercial destination for any aspiring entrepreneur. From the late eighteenth century and for the duration of the nineteenth century, Bombay served as the administrative hub of the British Empire in the western Indian Ocean, including the Gulf, South Arabia and East Africa. Between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, British Political Agents in the Gulf were appointed by the Bombay Presidency – an administrative district that remained distinct from yet subservient to the Government of India, then based in Delhi. All political decisions concerning the Gulf, including the controversial early-1800s question of how to deal with the Qasimi ‘pirates’ operating out of Raʾs al-Khaymah and Sharjah, emanated from Bombay rather than Calcutta, and any captured dhow suspected of piracy was sent to Bombay to be dealt with. In addition to dealing with suspected Gulf ‘pirates’, Bombay increasingly became the place to which a number of Gulf-based merchants looked for justice in their commercial dealings with one another and with Indian merchants trading in the Gulf. Prosperous Indian, Arab and Persian merchants, many of whom were able to claim British protection, appealed to the Government of Bombay to adjudicate their disputes and to collect debts owed to them. Over time, as the Government of India established British courts in different Gulf port cities, the Bombay court reserved its privileged place: British courts ruled according to Indian law, and operated on the basis of the Indian Civil Procedure Code and Criminal Procedure Code. Indeed, with the passage of the Foreign Jurisdiction Acts starting in 1890, the entire Gulf was considered to be, for the purposes of legal administration, a district of Bombay. And while the right to appeal to the High Court of Bombay was severed with the establishment of a regional High Court in Bushihr, the legal linkages between Bombay and the Gulf continued unabated: until the 1940s, key legal personnel in Bahrain cut their teeth in the law offices of Bombay. The legal requirements of emerging modern capitalism, it seemed, paved the way for the Gulf ’s integration into a regional Indian court system. Beyond its prominent role as the western Indian Ocean’s political, legal and commercial centre, Bombay was also the principal node in Gulf intellectual networks throughout the ocean’s basin. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bombay’s nascent printing houses began publishing a range of books, pamphlets, and newspapers in Arabic, Persian, English and Swahili. If printing technology was initially concentrated in the hands of Christian missionaries and then later Muslim reformers, it quickly proliferated into the hands of many different groups, all of whom began making their own texts cheaply available through the recently invented lithographic process. By the mid-nineteenth century, an Indian Ocean-wide vernacular press had come into being. The advent of the Bombay press, coupled with the establishment of an Arabiclanguage printing press in Zanzibar in the early 1870s (an English-language press had been operating on the island since 1865), prompted an intellectual renaissance of sorts. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, different Arab jurists in Oman and East Africa, as well as Ibadi jurists from northern Algeria, began publishing their works in print, making them available to a much broader audience than had previously been the case. Oman’s jurists participated in meaningful intellectual exchanges with their Ibadi counterparts in Algeria’s Mzab region, and the latter were

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able to publish multivolume texts and commentaries in Zanzibar. Leading Omani jurists further engaged with the emerging pan-Islamic and anti-colonial Salafi discourse in Egypt, and the editors of leading newspapers in Cairo sought financial assistance from the Omani sultans of Zanzibar. The anti-colonial, nationalist discourse that found its expression through the new printing presses was not limited to the Indian Ocean’s jurists. During the 1920s, Arabs in Zanzibar began publishing in at least two regular newspapers, al-Falaq and alNahd.ah, in which they expressed their views on a range of different political, economic and social issues. In their process of engaging with the island’s changing sociopolitical climate, Zanzibar’s Arabs also began developing a racialized political discourse – one which saw increasingly rigid notions of Arab and African racial identity while criticizing the support the British colonial administration had lent to Indians in Zanzibar’s recent history. By the 1940s, Arabs and Africans were exchanging daily blows in the island’s burgeoning media sphere over the right to interpret the island’s historical past and determine its political future. Across the Indian Ocean, in Bahrain, newspapers published in Bombay provided a platform for the exchange of similar views among the island’s intelligentsia. In the early 1950s, a series of weekly presses were established on the island by political activists, many of whom came from established merchant families. By the midtwentieth century, the Arab nationalist discourse had reached its zenith: anti-British and anti-Zionist struggles unfolding in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine fuelled growing discontent among the island’s students and merchants alike. And those at the forefront of both the Bahraini and Zanzibari renaissance in political thought were not mutually exclusive groups: at least one of the Bahraini newspaper editors, ʿAbd al-Rahman alBakir, had given speeches in Zanzibar on the subject of Arab nationalism and anticolonialism. All told, the era of print capitalism in the Gulf and western Indian Ocean was marked by the emergence of increasingly rigid modes of racial and ethnic identification – a process that was only further reinforced by Egyptian President and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdul Nasser’s particular brand of nationalism that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, by the late 1940s (though in some places as early as the 1930s) the Gulf was undergoing yet another watershed moment in its history as a new resource frontier emerged: oil.

The Gulf, the Arab world and the Indian Ocean in the age of oil Oil work, it is clear enough, is hardly a sea-based economic activity requiring mobility; it is quintessentially sedentary, oil being found under the ground and requiring stationary machinery to extract it. And as those who had once looked to the sea to make their fortunes now turned to the land, the oceanic connections that once bound the Gulf to places like India and East Africa were bound to change. The emergence of oil as the definitive characteristic of the Gulf ’s new economy, however, did not tear the Gulf ’s transoceanic ties asunder; it merely reconfigured them into an arrangement that better reflected the contemporary situation. In the age of oil, the Gulf – much like East

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Africa and India had been before – emerged as a destination for migrants from around the Indian Ocean. The shift away from maritime trade and towards oil work did not come abruptly. As is detailed in a later chapter, the maritime economy of the Gulf – pearling, dhow shipping, and exchange with India and East Africa – continued for at least a decade after oil was exported in commercial quantities. Dhows from Kuwait continued to sail to India and East Africa until the mid-1950s; those from Sur in Oman continued until the Zanzibari revolution of 1964. Indeed, it was only after many former mariners chose to work in the fields and captains could no longer find the crews necessary to man their dhows that many of them gave in. There were still goods to be brought from and sold to India and East Africa; but the manpower necessary to transport had been enticed by more regular, predictable wage work elsewhere. The advent of the oil industry in the Gulf also opened the region up as a destination for migrants from India – not as merchants, as historians know them to have been, nor as the labourers that cloud so much of the imagination today, but as middle management in the nascent oil companies. Moreover, the opportunities that oil opened up for the Gulf ’s overseas business communities were lucrative: those who returned found their families saddled with government contracts to supply a range of different goods and services. Others were able to establish themselves as local agents for the scores of Western corporations seeking to establish footholds in the region. Many of those who established their new family businesses in the Gulf continued to look to India, though now as a source of managerial personnel and expertise. But not everyone returned: many of the India-based business families maintained family branches and property holdings overseas. Other traders are still there to this day: the first Kuwaiti consul in Bombay, Faysal ibn ʿIsa, continues to reside in Bombay, where he manages his own business and looks after properties left behind by other Kuwaiti merchant families. And the Arabic school established by Kuwaiti merchants in Churchgate, near the High Court of Bombay, now serves as the headquarters for Kuwait’s consulate in the city. In Oman, the advent of oil and the emergence of a state bureaucracy, coupled with the violent revolution that took place in Zanzibar in 1964, reversed the dynamic that had existed between south-east Arabia and East Africa for centuries. East Africa was now a source of migrants to Oman rather than a destination of migrants from Oman; the latter, historically the poor cousin, had by the 1970s become a place of wealth and mobility for East Africans who could effectively claim Arab ancestry. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, East Africans migrated in increasing numbers to Oman, where they propped up the shaky state bureaucracy with expertise they had gleaned from decades under British colonial rule in their hometowns. In other parts of the Gulf, rulers looked to the historical centres of the Arab world to help give shape to their fledgling bureaucracies, even as British expatriates continued to hold key posts in technical departments. Concomitantly, the region witnessed an influx of refugees from Palestine who had been displaced by the Arab–Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967, and the Palestinian cause quickly moved from the sidelines to centre stage in political debates around the Gulf. Egypt too played an instrumental role in shaping the modern Gulf States: the famous Egyptian jurist ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri,

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who played a prominent role in shaping the Egyptian civil code during the first quarter of the twentieth century, acted as a consultant to both Iraq and Kuwait as they paved the way for similar legislation; and Egyptian teachers and bureaucrats steadily streamed into the region taking up posts in nascent ministries and schools. Their presence, however, was as much a threat to the ruling regimes as it was a boon: their connections to revolutionary regimes in the Levant suggested a possible fifth column in a region marked by monarchies with close ties to imperial powers and foreign oil companies. Indeed, during the zenith of Arab nationalism, Egypt loomed so large in the backgrounds of the educated class in Bahrain that from the late 1960s its national anthem was played in the cinemas of Manama before film screenings; moreover, schools were closed in 1970 to mourn Nasser’s death. By the 1970s, the Gulf, it seemed, had almost completed its turn away from its transoceanic past and had oriented itself towards what we now consider to be the Middle East.

Conclusion Where we consider the Gulf to belong, whether to the Middle East or Indian Ocean, must be historically contingent. If today we consider the Gulf States (including Iraq, Iran and the Arab littoral states) to operate almost fully within the sphere of what we know as ‘the Middle East’ – itself a Cold War construct that has effectively produced its own realities – that cannot be the case for the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as we have demonstrated here. For most of its history, the Gulf enjoyed deep and meaningful connections to the Indian subcontinent and the East African coast – ties that looked across the sea rather than across the desert. Indeed, this is no distant, foreign, past: it is a history that retains some meaning today, a history that echoes through the trans-regional flows of finance and labour that characterize the Gulf to this day. For the historian, then, there is nothing surprising about finding communities of Indians throughout the Gulf and East African businessmen in Dubai, nor even the boats from coastal Gujarat that line the creeks of Dubai and Sharjah. For these are not relics of some past, but enduring testaments to the fact that despite all of the late twentieth century transformations, the Gulf continues to hold a place as a regional crossroads of cultures, capital and history.

Bibliographic essay The early modern period in this chapter is indirectly served by many crucial primary sources used in a long line of scholarly tradition. Such sources include local chronicles and histories; travel literature and merchant manuals and reports; Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid archives; institutional archives (such as those of Armenian churches); collections of letters (those of Alamgir Shah and Tipu Sultan come to mind); and the archives of European trading companies, all of this far too vast to catalogue here. Notable among Arabic primary sources is the anonymous Kashf al-ghumma (disclosure of veiled affliction), covering Omani history until about 1728, and the extension of that

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history, under the same title, into the 1790s. Notable among Indo-Persian primary sources is the Muntakhab-i labab (quintessential selections) of Muhammad Hashim Khafi Khan, which he apparently wrote independently of patronage from its contemporary central figure, Alamgir Shah. Khafi Khan includes valuable information about the ports of Surat and Bombay and conflicts between the Mughals and Marathas. Abdul Qadir’s Waqaʾiʾ-i manazil-i Rum (events of a journey to Anatolia) recounts the often harrowing trip of an entourage sent by Tipu Sultan of Mysore to the Ottoman court in the 1780s. This sampling is meant only to entice the reader who is unfamiliar with these works. The paragraphs that follow provide references to secondary works that also informed the early modern portion of this chapter in a more direct way. For regional changes that took place in the wake of Portuguese withdrawal as a player in the Gulf and western Indian, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500 – 1700: A Political and Economic History, especially Chapter  6, ‘Empire in Retreat, 1610–65’, and Chapter 7, ‘Niches and Networks: Staying on, 1665–1700’. Also see João Teles e Cunha, ‘The Portuguese Presence in the Persian Gulf ’. A detailed source for the European companies is R.J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century, impressive for the author’s use of virtually all the relevant European archives. Several publications of R.B. Serjeant are also helpful, among them The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast and ‘Omani Naval Activities off the Southern Arabian Coast in the Late 11th/17th Century, from Yemeni Chronicles’. For the gunpowder empires in general, see Stephen Frederic Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Mughal views about maritime issues have been examined by a large number of scholars, including publications of Ashin Das Gupta, K.N. Chaudhuri, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, as mentioned throughout this volume (and in the bibliography). A less expected source is Ellison Banks Findly, Nur Jahan, Empress of Mughal India, especially Chapter 6, ‘The English Embassy’, dealing with Sir Thomas Roe. On the gunboat diplomacy that Roe advocated, see Ian Bruce Watson, ‘Fortification and the “Idea” of Force in Early English East India Company Relations with India’, in Douglas M. Peers, ed., Warfare and Empires. Willem Floor has important publications on Persia for this period, among them The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730. See also Rudolph P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730. For the Armenian connections in Persia and well beyond, see Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants From New Julfa. Ottoman maritime interests in the Gulf and western Indian Ocean find a champion in Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration. The rise of coastal enclaves and networks that linked political and commercial power included the naval conflicts of the Mughals and Marathas; for a starting point on that, see Patricia Risso, ‘Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region During a Long Eighteenth Century’, particularly references to Stewart Gordon, Manohar Malgonkar, D.R. Banaji and C.R. Low. On Oman, an important source is an unpublished Oxford thesis by R.D. Bathurst, ‘The Yaʿrubi Dynasty of Oman’. A concise version is available as a book chapter: ‘Maritime Trade and the Imamate Government: Two Principal Themes in the History of Oman to 1728’. Also see Risso, Oman & Muscat: An Early Modern

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History. For Muscat’s trading partner of Basra, see Thabit Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth Century Basra and Rudolph P. Matthee, ‘Between Arabs, Turks and Iranians: The Town of Basra, 1600–1700’. Although the literature on the Gulf and Indian Ocean during the modern period is limited, there are a few key texts for the interested reader. The bulk of the work on the Gulf ’s oceanic connections has been on Muscat: John Wilkinson’s The Imamate Tradition of Oman, and M. Reda Bhacker’s Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: The Roots of British Domination, beautifully detail the relations between Muscat, East Africa and western India and their implications for local and regional history. Other works have followed, but none have achieved the same breadth and attention to detail as those two have. Amal Ghazal’s recent book, Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (1880s–1930s), has opened up possibilities for exploring intellectual connections between the regions, expanding further outwards to North Africa as well. There has been considerably less scholarship on other Gulf ports and their connections across the sea. James Onley’s The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Rulers, Merchants, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf, as well as his chapter on ‘Transnational Merchants in the Nineteenth Century Gulf: The Case of the Safar Family’, admirably chart Bahrain’s political and commercial linkages to India, while Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 explores the history of that island’s Persian mercantile community. Both, however, are exceptions in a historiography that has been far too local in its approach. More recently, an English translation of maritime historian Yacoub Al-Hijji’s work has been made available, published as Kuwait and the Sea: A Brief Economic and Social History. The book involves less analysis than it does description, but it is incredibly suggestive of the potential fruit that a trans-regional approach to Gulf history might yield. In addition to Al-Hijji’s work, there exists a small but useful body of literature on the Gulf ’s dhow trading communities. An excellent starting point would be Alan Villiers’s Sons of Sinbad, a travel narrative written by an Australian who spent several months sharply observing life on board a Kuwaiti dhow. Other contributions, like Dionysius Agius’s In the Wake of the Dhow and Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman, as well as E.B. and C.P. Martin’s Cargoes of the East, give more detailed overviews of activities and material culture in the Gulf ’s maritime economy, though they offer less by way of historical context. Erik Gilbert’s Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1800– 1970 offers a useful entry point into the history of dhows, and although Gilbert focuses primarily on Zanzibar, he devotes an entire chapter to discussing dhows coming to East Africa from the Gulf. Surprisingly, the literature on historical connections between the Gulf and the Arab world prior to the Second World War is even slimmer than that on the Gulf ’s overseas connections. Recent works by Neha Vora (Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora) and Andrew Gardner (City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain) have examined the experiences of migrant labourers in the Gulf, placing them in an historical context, but none have looked at the experiences of Arab migrants in any detail.

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More broadly, this chapter required its authors to think big in terms of scale and allow themselves the freedom to see patterns and trajectories over space and time. The chapter, therefore, benefits from the growing number of books that tackle the Indian Ocean as coherent historical space. Beginning with Auguste Toussaint’s History of the Indian Ocean and including K.N. Chaudhuri (Asia Before Europe, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, and The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760) and others who have looked to Braudel for inspiration, to Michael N. Pearson’s attention to the details of sailors’ lives in The Indian Ocean, as well as his Port Cities and Intruders, to East Africa expert Edward Alpers’ The Indian Ocean in World History, this literature both challenges and rewards the historian’s concept of scope.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

The early modern Ibadiyyah was anchored in tribal organization and was close to Sunni Islam in doctrine and law. Ideally, leading ʿulamaʾ elected the ruler, called imam, who them received the oath of allegiance from tribal shaykhs. When that governor, John Child, took office in Bombay, he was faced with a large company debt – perhaps close to £280,000 – owed to Surat merchants. By literally pirating assets and exerting pressure on Mughal merchants, he hoped to bully his way out of the obligation. To their credit, many of his English contemporaries in the region criticized his tactics, and he died in India before he could be banished on Aurangzeb’s demand. The fleet depended on the monsoonal pattern, so it did not often line up with the lunar calendar hajj. Pilgrims would bring with them goods to sell to offset the expenses of staying in the Hijaz until the pilgrimage occurred or else would hire agents to sell their goods when the market was advantageous. Other cross-regional, early modern groups based on familial, ethnic or religious identities were Jews, Multanis and Khatris. This was not an unprecedented process. For example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam provides a brief overview of western India’s coastal merchant states from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some that were subject to the ebb and flow of Vijayanagara’s control. Two prominent individuals who were feared in this regard were Mir Muhanna (d. 1769) of Bandar Rig and Rahma ibn Jabar (d. 1826) of Kuwait and Qatar.

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6

The Economic Transformation of the Gulf Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Bernard Haykel, Steffen Hertog, Clive Holes and James Onley

The economy of the Gulf over the last two centuries can be understood by taking into account the specific geography of the Gulf, the products that transited through its ports, its social hierarchies and the commodities that were produced locally and then exported to the rest of the world. Consisting of several entrepôt towns of varying size and importance and being an area of transshipment, the Gulf has always played the vital role of connecting the Indian Ocean world to the rest of Arabia, Mesopotamia, Iran and beyond. The intensity with which it was connected to wider trade patterns depended on a variety of factors: the monsoon winds, the global demand for local commodities (e.g. pearls, dates, petroleum and gas), the migration of labour back and forth and, finally, local, regional and international political and economic conditions. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the British Empire became the dominant external power in the region and its policy, guided principally from India, was to secure trade on the high seas and generally not to interfere in the internal affairs of Gulf societies. The presence and influence of the United States began to be keenly felt in the Gulf after the Second World War because of the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia and the increasing strategic importance of the region during the Cold War. The US finally displaced Great Britain as the dominant power by the early 1970s. Two crucial developments punctuate the modern history of the Gulf: (1) the collapse of the pearl industry in the 1930s as a result of the development of the cultured pearl in Japan and the Great Depression, resulting in the sharp decline in global demand for pearls; and (2) the discovery of oil, first in Iran in 1908 and later on the Arab side of the Gulf in the 1930s. This commodity radically transformed the Gulf ’s social, economic and political structures by, among other things, transforming the state’s central government into the dominant force in society and attenuating its other sectors. Tribes as well as merchants, for example, lost their autonomy and became subjugated to the will of the state. Oil, however, also intensified and broadened the connections between the Gulf and the rest of the world, but in ways radically different from the effects of the earlier export commodities.

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The traditional economy of Eastern Arabia, 1700s to the 1950s The arid environment of Eastern Arabia concentrated economic activity in coastal and oasis towns, where trade was dependent on the export of what few local products there were, as well as specie, and the import of virtually everything needed for daily life, from shawls to sugar. The lifeline of the oasis towns was the caravan trade, through which the towns’ merchants exported their most valuable commodities: dates, horses and camels. Their trade was largely with the port towns of Eastern Arabia and Basra, which served as entrepôts for the region, and was dependent on the paid protection of the tribes whose territories the caravans travelled through. Just as the desert dominated the economic life of the oasis towns, seafaring dominated the economies of the Gulf ’s ports – mainly pearling, fishing, import/export wholesale shipping, and shipbuilding. The old port towns of Eastern Arabia existing today emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the exception of Manama, Muharraq, Julfar (Raʾs al-Khaymah), Dibba, Suhar, Muscat and Sur, which

Figure 6.1 Pearl dealer in Kuwait (1946).

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had been long-established by the eighteenth century. The only major port town of the last three hundred years that was subsequently abandoned is al-Zubarah in Qatar. Many of these ports towns exported dates, horses, specie and pearls, the last being the backbone of their economies – as important then as oil and gas are today – with the sole exception of Oman, which had virtually no pearling industry (Omani waters are too deep). These port towns faced seaward, protected from desert raiders by walls and watchtowers, but nonetheless intimately connected with the desert, giving them a desert flavour: they were simultaneously bedouin and maritime. While there was a symbiotic relationship between the desert and coastal peoples, towns and economies, the desert also cut the coastal Arabs off from the wider Arab world: the Levant, Egypt and North Africa. The sea, in contrast, connected the coastal Arabs with the Indian Ocean world: southern Iraq and coastal Iran, Africa and India. For several centuries and up to the 1930s, the pearling industry completely dominated Eastern Arabia. During the pearling season of May to September, it employed most of the adult male population of Eastern Arabia, as Table  6.1 shows, ranked by pearling fleet size. Qatar was the most dependent on pearling, as famously put by Shaykh Muhammad ibn Thani (Governor of Doha) to explorer William Palgrave in 1863 (Narrative of a Year’s Journey, Vol 2, p. 232): ‘We are all, from the highest to the lowest, slaves of one master, Pearl’. Even bedouin were to be found amongst the crew of pearling dhows, showing how this dependency was not limited to the coast. If one assumes that 25 per cent of the population was male and of diving age (on average, between fifteen and fifty), and adjustments are made for migrant male bedouin coming to the coast to dive for pearls, we see that pearling was the single largest employer in Eastern Arabia – in the case of Qatar, it must have employed the entire adult male population. Aside from employment, pearling accounted for the bulk of the shaykhdoms’ gross domestic product (GDP ) and provided the rulers with a large share of their revenue through taxes. The majority of the pearls were bought by merchants in one of two ports: Bahrain for the upper and middle Gulf and Lingah for the lower Gulf (later succeeded by Dubai in 1903). From these ports, the pearls were exported to Bombay, where they were sold on the world market.

Table 6.1 The pearling industry in the Gulf, 1907 Region

Boats

Men

Percentage of Population

Trucial Coast Bahrain Qatar Iranian Coast Kuwait al-Ahsaʾ Coast Totals

1,215 917 817 960 461 167 4,537

22,045 17,633 12,890 9,230 9,200 3,444 74,442

31% 18% 48% 0.3% 25% 10% 26% average for Eastern Arabia

Source: Robert Carter, ‘The History and Prehistory of Pearling in the Persian Gulf ’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2005), p. 199. Carter based his calculations on Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf.

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After pearling, regional and long-distance shipping and the import/export sector were next in economic importance – the most profitable export being, of course, pearls, followed by specie (usually silver Maria Theresa thalers/dollars from Europe during the period from the 1800s to the 1940s), dates and horses. The major shipping centres were Basra, Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, Sharjah and Muscat – all of which had large fleets of ocean-going dhows. On the Iranian shore of the Gulf, the main ports were Muhammarah (now Khurramshahr), Bushihr (Bushire/Bushehr), Lingah and Bandar ʿAbbas, where large numbers of Gulf Arab merchants were also based until the early twentieth century. Each of these ports had its own cycle of prosperity and decline during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Between the eighteenth century and the dawn of the oil era, the Gulf ’s largest and most important port was Basra, followed by Bandar ʿAbbas until the mid-eighteenth century, then Bushihr and Lingah until the early twentieth century, and then finally Bahrain until the mid-twentieth century. Eastern Arabia’s most active and prosperous port before the oil era was Muscat and neighbouring Matrah until the early 1870s, when they were surpassed by the economic might of Manama. Bahrain remained Eastern Arabia’s wealthiest state for seventy years, until vast oil revenues enabled Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to surpass it in the 1950s, followed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE ) in the 1970s and finally Qatar in the 2000s.

The monsoon winds and the Indian Ocean The ‘sailing season’ in the Gulf was during the North-East Monsoon between September and April. With a favourable wind during this time, a dhow sailing from Kuwait to Bombay (1,700 nautical miles, following the coast, as most captains did) could take three to four weeks, the journey from Muscat to Bombay (1,000 nautical miles, following the coast) could take about two weeks, and the journey from Muscat to Zanzibar (2,300 nautical miles, following the coast) might take five weeks. Sailing times also varied by ship size and type. Without a favourable wind, these sailing times could double; during the South-West Monsoon, the sailing times were longer still. The sailing season conveniently dovetailed with the pearling season of May to September. The two sectors of the economy were, in fact, interdependent in several ways. First, pearls were the Gulf shaykhdoms’ main export and the bulk of their imports were purchased from the resulting profits. Second, pearl divers and rope-men (pullers) with the necessary skills at the end of the pearling season joined the crews of dhows engaged in regional and long-distance trade. Third, some ocean-going cargo dhows returning from long-distance journeys at the start of the pearling season were redeployed as pearling vessels – even the large ocean-going dhows, such as baghlahs and bums, could be used for pearling, since diving could be done from their longboats. The British India Steam Navigation Company’s introduction of a regular service between India and the Gulf every two weeks in the 1860s strengthened the links between the region and India, shortening the sailing time from weeks to days, but dhows continued to dominate Gulf shipping until the 1950s when Eastern Arabia’s rapid economic development, fuelled by new-found oil revenue, necessitated larger shipments from farther afield, particularly the West, and as mariners left dhow work for the oil fields.

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Until the 1950s and the dawn of the oil era, the Gulf ’s maritime merchants regarded the Indian Ocean ports as closer in terms of travel time and more important economically than any Arab city outside of Basra. For them, it was Basra, Bushihr and Bombay they knew, not Beirut; Calicut and Cochin, not Cairo; Muhammarah, Mombasa and Mangalore, not Mosul; and Zanzibar, not Suez. Before the advent of modern air travel in the mid-twentieth century, therefore, the port towns of Eastern Arabia belonged as much, if not more, to the Indian Ocean world than to the Arab world. Consider, for instance, the sample survey of Eastern Arabian trade with India in Table 6.2. Before the 1930s and the collapse of the pearling industry, the vast majority of Bahrain’s exports to India were pearls, as were Dubai’s after 1902.1 The customs dues charged by the rulers, together with the taxes levied on pearling, provided the rulers with most of their revenue. The economic importance of the Indian Ocean region – Iraq, Iran, India and Africa – for Eastern Arabia is easily ascertained through British trade reports. From the vague reports of the early nineteenth century to the detailed reports of the twentieth, the numbers reveal a gradually increasing economic dependence on India as its economy came to dominate the Indian Ocean by the early 1900s. After the advent of oil and the resulting economic reorientation of Eastern Arabia towards the Arab world and the West in the 1950s–60s, their economic ties with India withered. The era of economic dependence on India is best dated and symbolized by the rise and fall of the rupee: in the 1890s, it rivalled or surpassed the Maria Theresa thaler/dollar as the principal currency of trade in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States and coastal Oman, and remained in use until the establishment of national currencies in the 1960s. Even today, older Khalijis refer to their national dirham, dinar, or riyal as the rubbiyah. In Muscat, the sultan also minted Omani rupee denominations – 1 paisa and ⅓ paisa coins – tied to the Indian rupee, but the Indian rupee was still the most commonly used currency on the Omani coast. A legacy of this is the continued use of the paisa (known as the baysah) as a denomination of the Omani riyal. The economic connection with the Indian Ocean not only sustained Eastern Arabia, it left a visible imprint on its culture in everything from clothing to cuisine.

Table 6.2 Gulf trade with India, 1904 (as a percentage of overall trade) Exports to India Bahrain Muscat Trucial States Kuwait

Imports From India 75.3% 74.0% 71.3% 34.8%

Bahrain Muscat Trucial States Kuwait

59.7% 57.2% 55.0% 49.4%

Source: Government of India, Foreign Department, Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agency for the Years 1904–05 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906; reprinted by Archive Editions, 1986), pp. 23, 34, 56, 65, 78, 86, 91, 96, 104, 108, 116, 123, 128–31, 135, 139, 145, 147, 153, 155. The earliest statistics available for Kuwait come from S.G. Knox (Political Agent in Kuwait), ‘Trade Report for Kuwait, 1905–06’, 12 April 1906, in ibid., 1905–06, pp. 5, 8.

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After shipping, Eastern Arabia’s third most important economic sector was date cultivation. The major centres of date production were the Shatt al-ʿArab region of southern Iraq, al-Ahsaʾ (Hasa) and Qatif Oases in what is now the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, the island of Bahrain, various oases in the Trucial States (al-Buraymi/ al-ʿAyn and Liwa being the largest), and the Batinah Coast of Oman. Dates from alAhsaʾ Oasis were regarded as the best. Kuwait and Qatar had barely any date farms and were date importers, not exporters. The date farms in Iran, Bahrain, al-Ahsaʾ, the Trucial States and Oman were maintained through an ancient system of underground aqueducts known as the qanāt system in Bahrain, al-Ahsaʾ and Iran and the falaj system in the Trucial States and Oman. Eastern Arabian dates were exported mainly to India and Africa, while Omani fard dates were exported to the USA . The largest date-exporting port in the Gulf was Basra, followed distantly by Muscat. Muscat’s exports were double the rest of Eastern Arabia’s date exports put together. The rulers of Kuwait, Bahrain and Muscat owned vast date plantations, the profits from which were their second largest revenue source after customs duties and pearling taxes.

Merchants before oil, 1700s to the 1950s Three classes of merchants controlled the trade of Eastern Arabia before the oil era: retail merchants, pearl merchants and wholesale merchants, with the last class often including members of the ruling families and even the rulers themselves. Retail merchants were naturally the most numerous and the least wealthy, occupying the bottom level of the mercantile hierarchy. They mostly sold locally or regionally produced food and goods imported from abroad or made by local craftsmen from imported materials. Consider the snapshot from 1904 of Kuwait’s retail merchant community in Table 6.3, showing the extent of the retail trade there. This community of 606 retail merchants serviced a population of 35,000: one for every fifty-eight people. Next up the mercantile hierarchy came the pearl dealers, the tawawish (sing. tawwash). They could distinguish a pearl’s type and relative value at a glance, while experienced tawawish claimed the ability to tell which region and even what depth of water a pearl came from. They were equally accomplished at mental arithmetic, able to calculate the value of a pearl using a complex formula based on a pearl’s ‘class’ (qism,

Table 6.3 Kuwait’s retail merchant community, 1904 Grocers Dealers in bedouin wares Brokers Dealers in piece goods Butchers Date merchants Fruit sellers Rice merchants Druggists

147 132 67 36 36 32 28 24 16

Wheat merchants Tobacconists Tea shops Confectioners Fish sellers Grass sellers Ghee sellers Cafes Total

15 14 12 11 11 9 9 7 606

Source: Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Vol. 1: Historical, Part 2: Appendices (1915), Appendix C, pp. 2235–40.

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pl. aqsam), weight (chau), and fineness, correlated with the latest market rates from Bombay. They purchased pearls directly from self-employed pearling captains who were free to sell their pearl catch. Negotiations for the sale price (always paid in cash) were conducted in secret out of sight of the diving teams, enabling the captain to under-report the sale price and thus underpay his crew, since the crew received a percentage of the sale price. After buying his pearls, a tawwash then contacted a broker (dallal) who found a wholesale merchant willing to buy them. The merchants, in turn, resold the pearls in Bombay, where they fetched an even higher price. Large pearls were sold individually, while smaller pearls were sold in parcels grouped by class, as Lorimer reported. At the top of the mercantile hierarchy were the wholesale merchants, the tujjar (sing. tajir). Their wealth, holdings and importance ranged considerably. In Kuwait in 1904, for instance, Lorimer reports about fourteen well-to-do merchants: twelve Arabs (ten Muslim, two Jewish) and two Persians. The tujjar owned cargo dhows, warehouses and date plantations. The wealthiest, at the peak of the mercantile hierarchy, maintained fleets of pearling dhows and were, in fact, pearl merchants themselves, albeit of a higher class and different type than the others since they were employers, not buyers, and their profession was not limited to the pearl trade. The tujjar dominated the import/export sector and usually maintained offices overseas in Iraq, Iran, India and Africa run by relatives, who handled the overseas side of the family’s import/export business. Many local rulers were themselves tujjar, while in twentieth-century Doha and Umm al-Qaywayn, they were the most powerful tujjar, controlling the local economy. The merchants were a very diverse group: each of the three classes was composed of Arabs, Persians and Indians, while wholesale merchants also counted a few Europeans among their number. Each group was further subdivided by religion, sect, ethnicity and homeland (region, district and town, which often determined culture and language), as Table 6.4 shows. Few Gulf ports had all four groups before the First World War and no port had all twenty-one subgroups. Each subgroup tended to concentrate in some ports and avoid others. In some ports, Arab merchants dominated while in others, Persians or Indians did. The highest concentration of Indian merchants was to be found in Muscat and Matrah. Some of the wealthiest Indian merchants were also bankers (sayarifah, sing. sayraf), lending money and providing credit to Arab and Persian Muslims. They connected the Gulf to India’s financial centres, dominating the credit market in Bahrain, the Trucial States, Oman and many Iranian ports as a result. Arab and Persian debtors typically used property as security and those unable to repay their Indian creditors lost their land – a common occurrence due to the high rates of interest. As a result, Indians became one of the largest landholding groups in some Gulf ports, especially Oman. Arab, Persian and Indian wholesale merchant firms were generally run as family businesses, with a large firm typically having family members in two or more Gulf ports. Members of the firm would circulate from port to port and from the Gulf to their hometown every few years. Banyans2 in towns and ports deemed unsafe kept their families with their parents back in India and returned to visit them from time to time. Before the late nineteenth century, there were occasional religiously motivated

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Table 6.4 Merchant groups in Eastern Arabia Group

Subgroup

Origins

Sect

Subsect

Arabs

1. Hawalah (Huwli Arabs) 2. Tribal Arabs 3. Tribal Arabs 4. Baharnah (Bahrani Arabs) 5. Iraqi Arabs 6. Jews 7. Behbehanis 8. Bushiris 9. Shiʿi Hormuzganis 10. Sunni Hormuzganis 11. Ithnaʿashari Khojas

Eastern Arabia

Sunni Muslim

Maliki

Central Arabia Central Arabia Eastern Arabia

Sunni Muslim Sunni Muslim Shiʿi Muslim

Maliki Hanbali Ithnaʿashari

Southern Iraq Baghdad Behbehan Bushihr Hormuzgan Hormuzgan Sindh, Kutch & Gujarat Sindh, Kutch & Gujarat Sindh & Kutch, but Arabized and Omanized since the 1870s Gujarat Kutch Sindh & Kutch Sindh & Kutch Gujarat & Konkan Coast Konkan Coast Britain Germany

Shiʿi Muslim Jewish Shiʿi Muslim Shiʿi Muslim Shiʿi Muslim Sunni Muslim Shiʿi Muslim

Ithnaʿashari

Shiʿi Muslim Shiʿi Muslim

Nizari Ismaʿili, aka: Agha Khani Ithnaʿashari

Shiʿi Muslim Sunni Muslim Vaishnava Hindu Vaishnava Hindu Catholic Christian

Mustaʿli Ismaʿili Hanafi Pushti Marg Pushti Marg Portuguese

Protestant Christian Protestant Christian Protestant Christian

Anglican Anglican Lutheran

Persians

Indians

12. Ismaʿili Khojas 13. Lawatiyyah (Lawati Khojas)

14. Dawudi Bohras 15. Memons 16. Bhattia Banyans 17. Lohana Banyans 18. Indian Catholics 19. Indian Protestants Europeans 20. British 21. German (1900–14 & 1930s)

Ithnaʿashari Ithnaʿashari Ithnaʿashari Maliki Ithnaʿashari

attacks on Banyan communities in Bahrain, al-Ahsaʾ and Oman, forcing the communities there to flee. In some cases, these departures were permanent, as happened in Bahrain in 1833, in Sur in 1865 and in Qatif in 1900. Before the oil era, the tujjar exercised considerable influence with the rulers of Eastern Arabia through financial dependency: the payment of tax, loans, financial gifts and the general economic prosperity their trade brought to the ports. Beyond this, tujjar owning pearl fleets had direct control over large portions of the adult male population that was indentured to them. If a ruler abused his authority or otherwise created unfavourable economic conditions in his port (such as confiscating property or raising taxes), his tujjar could migrate to a neighbouring rival port, taking their fleets and crews with them. The tujjar’s ships provided their businesses and employees with the same mobility that the camel gave to the bedouin, enabling them to migrate from one emirate to another to escape an abusive ruler. The loss of a port’s most important tujjar could plunge a port into recession – it therefore served as a check on

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a ruler’s power. For this reason, those rulers who were heavily dependent on their tujjar were responsive to their tujjar’s interests, opinions and requests, and permitted them a say in political decision-making. Although a ruler’s financial dependency on his tujjar constrained his political authority, he could mitigate this by allying with some tujjar against others to avoid an undesirable concession or political crisis.

The Gulf date and pearl booms of the nineteenth century During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Gulf economy underwent important structural changes that transformed the nature of commerce. During this time, the region began its integration into the world economy, as different commodities from the Gulf began to make their way to markets in South Asia, Europe and the United States. And as old goods began to find their way to new markets, the structures of finance that propelled goods around the Indian Ocean shifted in response to the changing opportunities and constraints that the new commercial order established. What emerged during the nineteenth century was a new economic world order – one characterized by greatly increased scale and scope of commercial activity and, more importantly, of widespread credit. By the 1860s, the first steamers began to ply the Indian Ocean’s waters, defying the monsoon winds and shifting the seasonal rhythms of trade towards a more regular pulse, as M.N. Pearson and Stephanie Jones have explained. Soon afterwards, Britishsponsored companies established a transoceanic telegraph network, and by the 1890s, as J.C. Parkinson and Daniel Headrick have shown, merchants in Aden or London could easily access market information from as far away as Bombay, Zanzibar or Bahrain. More importantly, the concomitant advent of a British banking system based in India transformed the nature of large-scale trade finance, moving it from the realm of merchants and moneylenders to that of formal banks with links to metropolitan European capital.

A boom in the pearl market In the Gulf, this new infrastructure underpinned a late-nineteenth-century boom in the pearl market, which owed a great deal to a boom in the demand for pearls in Europe and North America during this period, bolstered by the emergence of European and American nouveau riche elites and their demand for luxury goods. This boom prompted vigorous entry by European pearl merchants into the industry – either indirectly via Bombay, an established market for pearls and home to a large number of Gulf pearl merchants, or directly through Bahrain, which by the nineteenth century had already established itself as the largest market for pearls in the Gulf, as discussed by Matthew S. Hopper. European involvement in the pearl trade would have been extremely difficult without the regularization of steamship traffic in the Gulf and Indian Ocean and the laying of submarine telegraph cables, which allowed European merchants to contact their home markets and make better-informed local purchases.

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The boom in the market for pearls and the appearance of European competitors on the Indian market had a predictable effect on the price that Gulf pearls commanded. The 1877–8 Persian Gulf Administration Report (Government of India) noted that the price of pearls was said to have doubled since the middle of the century. During the decade between the early 1890s and early 1900s, for which we have better figures, the total value of pearls exported from the Gulf tripled. This growth was particularly remarkable in Bahrain, where Lorimer’s Gazetteer notes that the value of pearl exports rose by nearly 600 per cent between 1873 and 1906.

Dates Hopper notes that the market for Gulf dates also expanded in important ways during the 1880s, reaching consumers in Europe and America. Between 1899 and 1906, the earliest years for which there are published figures, Lorimer’s statistics showed that Muscat’s date exports nearly doubled, peaking at over £103,000 in 1902–3. Bahrain’s comparatively small exports also grew, nearly trebling from over £10,500 in 1899–1900 to almost £26,000 six years later. The boom, prompted by a rise in demand for dates among American and European consumers, would not have been possible in the view of Calvin Allen had it not been for the introduction of steamships to the Indian Ocean, which cut down transport time and thus enhanced the likelihood that the dates would survive long sailing voyages to the United States. As important as it was, the date trade to Europe and the United States never supplanted the privileged position of the Indian market. While the lack of detailed records on date exports to India obscures the precise magnitude of that trade and makes it impossible to chart any changes, it is amply clear that the subcontinent formed the principal market for Gulf dates. British reports from around 1900, reflected in Lorimer, outline the broad contours of the al-Ahsaʾ–Bahrain–India date connection, suggesting that at least some of the dates imported from al-Ahsaʾ into Bahrain made their way to Karachi and Kathiawar. During the seven years from 1899 to 1906, for example, over half of the dates imported into Bahrain from al-Ahsaʾ were re-exported to India. In Muscat, the bulk of date exports for those same years went to India. Moreover, Yacoub Y. Al-Hijji shows that dhows setting out from Kuwait and the port of Sur in Oman survived principally on the transport of Basra dates to ports in Western India, and the trade remained a brisk one until well into the 1950s. By contrast, the export of dates to the United States formed an important part of Omani commerce alone and relied principally on steamship transportation.

Credit networks To capture the emerging commercial opportunities offered by an expanding commercial arena, merchants required capital in amounts that were simply unavailable locally. As an alternative to cash, merchants relied on credit arrangements, which spurred on economic activity and facilitated the flow of goods around and across the Indian Ocean. Rajat Kanta Ray has explained that merchants from India, Arabia and

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Persia who enjoyed access to a ready supply of goods and access to European banks established themselves as important financiers, extending this capital into markets in the Gulf and South Arabia that larger financial institutions would not service because of the risks involved. At the centre of the credit networks that ran throughout the Gulf ’s agricultural and maritime economies stood the Indian Hindu merchant. From the shores of Western India, they fanned outwards into all of the region’s major ports: Muscat, Bahrain, Bandar ʿAbbas, Lingah and Bushihr. By the mid-nineteenth century, these merchants had already developed a reputation as the principal financiers in the western Indian Ocean. Records in the Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai) show that British officials in Bahrain noted in the mid-1860s that Indians were highly active in providing credit to pearling dhows, and that they linked the Bahraini pearl market to that of Bombay. On the Persian coast, Indians played an important role in financing the upcountry caravan trade in cotton and textiles. Bahrain was also home to an active community of Persian financiers. Persians comprised the island’s principal shopkeepers – no less prosperous than the Banyans, but often lending and trading on a comparatively smaller scale. Of course, not all of the Persians were small-scale merchants; Nelida Fuccaro relates that some members of the Persian mercantile community in Bahrain wielded enormous influence. The advances that Indian and Persian financiers supplied and the goods they received in return tied the Gulf ’s trade into a larger regional and world economy, while infusing the Gulf with the credit that it so desperately needed. Finance was not simply a coastal phenomenon. In the date plantations in Eastern and South Arabia, a number of Indian merchants set up shop, lending out money and goods to local date farmers via local intermediaries in exchange for their produce. British official reports referenced by Lorimer point to the existence of ‘a small trading colony consisting of Hindu subjects of the British government’ (Gazetteer, Vol.  1 Historical, p. 965) at Qatif, the principal agricultural centre of Eastern Arabia, dating back to 1864. The colony consisted of three Indian firms, all of which were Kutchi, ‘engaged chiefly in the importation of general merchandise and in the exportation of boiled dates to India’ (ibid.). The dates of Qatif, and of the al-Ahsaʾ region more broadly,

Figure 6.2 Suq al-Khamis (Friday market) in al-Hufuf, al-Ahsaʾ (1905).

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were considered the best variety, the khlās. In al-Ahsaʾ, Indian merchants financed date production through Arab middlemen, who supplied date farmers locally and farther inland with the necessary agricultural implements and other inputs in exchange for payments in dates, which they then forwarded to their creditors on the coast. Soraya Altorki and Donald P. Cole, in their study of ʿUnayzah in Najd do not mention Indian traders in their study but the patterns of indebtedness and agriculture they observe in ʿUnayzah are identical to those mentioned elsewhere, and one can easily imagine the creditors of ʿUnayzah as part of this broader geography of credit and trade. In Muscat, the mercantile firms of Ratansi Purshottam, a native of Kutch, and W.J. Towell, an American firm with a local Khoja partner, Mohammed Fadl, featured prominently in the trade in dates from the villages surrounding Muscat to India and America, as Allen shows. Purshottam’s papers suggest long-standing credit relationships between the Banyan merchants and Omani middlemen, who would go into the surrounding villages and pay date-growers deposits for their orders after negotiating the price, quantity and quality of the dates, as detailed by M. Redha Bhacker. In smaller Arabian towns close to the coast, Indian merchants established shops from which they supplied the townsfolk with their daily needs in exchange for the pearls the latter fished from nearby banks or the dates that the inhabitants farmed. Frauke Heard-Bey observes that small groups of Indian traders established themselves in towns like Abu Dhabi, Sharjah and Doha, where they advanced goods on credit to merchants as the towns’ principal shopkeepers. The portfolios of Indian financiers in Eastern and South Arabia illustrate clearly how the Gulf ’s maritime and agricultural economies, rather than forming discrete sectors, were integrated into a coherent system of credit, production and distribution. As one descends further down the socio-economic ladder, the differences between the sectors become less distinct. Those who dived for pearls during the summer months finished their work just in time for the September date harvest or the beginning of the dhow-trading season. If diving, date harvesting and work on board a dhow’s deck each required specialized knowledge, the three sectors drew on a singular Gulf-wide labour force. Only pearling was temporary and lucrative enough to attract an additional body of seasonal labourers from the Persian coast, Arabia’s interior and South Arabia. Given the economic and social importance of pearling in the pre-oil age, a look at the mechanics of pearl-diving and the way the industry was structured provides an important view of what Gulf society and occupations were like in the past.

The pearl-diving season The main pearl-diving season (il-ghōs il-ʿōd) ran from mid-May until roughly the autumnal equinox in late September. In early April, before the main season began, there were three to four weeks of ‘pre-season’ diving (il-khānchiyyah or il-ghōs il-bard, ‘cold diving’), and after that, in October, a similar short period of ‘late season’ diving (ir-raddah, ‘the return’). In Kuwait, there was a fourth period in November, l-irdēdah (‘the lesser return’). The beginning of the season proper was known as ir-rakbah (‘the

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Figure 6.3 A pearling boat on the Bahrain pearling banks (1926).

setting out’), or id-dashshah (‘the entering’), and il-guffāl (‘the closure’) was its end. In Bahrain, up until the pearling reforms of the mid-1920s, the exact times for the beginning and end of the season were not fixed, but from that point on the government issued a yearly proclamation specifying the dates of the various stages of the season. For example, in the 1353/1934 season, the government proclamation, issued on 8 Muharram (= 23 April) decreed the end of the khānchiyyah as 25 Muharram, with the rakbah ten days later on 5 Safar (= 18 May). The main season was to end on 15 Jumada II (= 25 September). It was split into halves: after completing sixty nights at sea, the divers were allowed a five- or six-day furlough back on land before embarking on the second. Each sixty-day period was known as a tarshah (‘journey’, ‘trip’).

Preparations for the season At the end of the season, every pearling boat was pulled up onto the shore. Its masts, rigging, oars and other movable equipment were removed, it was propped up on sheerlegs, and left like this over the winter. At the beginning of the new season, the boats were dragged down to the edge of the water by groups of ‘helpers’ (masbinah or fazʿah) summoned by the bo’suns (imjaddimi, pl. imjaddimiyyah) from the various ‘diving houses’ (dār, pl. dūr) which organized the industry. The boats were then pushed out into the sea until they entered deep water, where the helpers deliberately capsized

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them on their sides and left them to float on the tide for two or three days. The point of this was to allow the water to cause the wooden planking of the hull to expand, and to kill the rats and other vermin which would have been attracted to the boat while it was laid up over the winter. While each boat was capsized, its equipment – sails, oars, masts, rigging, lateen yards, bowsprit, the fresh water tank, the anchor and anchor rope – and food supplies and other consumables such as firewood were being got ready or bought from the chandler’s store. After two or three days, the boat was righted, brought back into shallow water, beached and bailed out. The hull was cleaned of barnacles and recaulked by specialist shipwrights (gallāf, pl. galālīf). The crew (jazwah/yazwah) painted the upper hull with preservative shark-oil and the keel-area with lime, and refloated her, now clean and seaworthy. A lighter-vessel was used to ferry the heavy equipment from shore to ship. Wooden wedges for securing the masts were put in place, and the crew erected the masts and attached and tightened the rigging to the masthead – first the main mast then the mizzen. Next they brought and attached the two lateen yards. The sails were stored in a special storage area below decks. Provisions – tea, coffee, sugar, dates, rice, molasses, salt and fat, and firewood for cooking – were brought from the captain’s house and the ships’ chandlers to the shore by donkey-drivers, and stowed in various storage areas. Food and cooking and eating utensils were put in special store amid-ships (il-wānis). The quantities of consumables needed for a sixty-day tarshah on a large-sized boat, where the ship’s complement might number over a hundred men were considerable: thirty rafʿah (seven tonnes) of firewood, the same of rice, and 100 yālūg (roughly 2¼ tonnes) of dates were quoted by one diver as typical. The crew’s diet was supplemented by the fish they caught at sea. When the ship was completely ready, the captain (nōkhadha) sent for the crew and paid them their beginning-of-season loans (salaf), and informed them of the day they would sail (yōm id-dashshah). The salaf was largely spent by the crew on provisioning their homes and families during their absence. The divers and rope-men were responsible for buying their own equipment. In the diver’s case this was a specially made knitted basket (dayyīn) for collecting clams which could be attached round his neck, the rope by which he was attached to the boat (yida), leather finger gloves to protect his hands (khubat), oil (jift/yift) to soften the leather, a nose-clip (ftām), a diving weight (hajar/hayar), a bag (chamtah) for keeping his personal belongings together, and a special type of loin-cloth for diving (shimlūl or shimshūl). The rope-man was responsible for buying the rope (zēbal) to which the diver’s weight was attached, and the sarong-like garment (wzār) that was normal wear for all working on deck. On the opening day of the main season, the boats left on the evening tide. This was a great communal occasion, with the captains of the boats leading their crews from the dūr through the streets to the rhythmic chanting of the boats’ ‘singers’ and the dancing of the womenfolk. The crew initially rowed the boat out into deeper water, and there the sails were hoisted and set. At sundown the crew stopped for dinner, and went to bed early. On this first day, they slept until midnight, and then sailed on to the pearling-beds (hēr, pl. hērāt), reaching them in the early morning to begin work.

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The crew and their tasks The following description is based on the oral testament of several divers from Bahrain who were in their sixties when recorded in 1977.

The captain (in-nōkhadha) The captain was in charge of the boat. Before departure, arrangements for boat preparation and provisioning were the responsibility of his right-hand man, the bo’sun, but once at sea, the captain was all powerful, navigating, directing the use of sails or oars, deciding which pearl-bed his boat would fish and for how long before moving on to the next, giving directions to the crew as to when to begin and end the day’s work, overseeing the opening of the clams, deciding when breaks for coffee and snacks were to be taken, etc.

The diver (ghēs pl. ghāsah, or ghawwās pl. ghawāwīs) Divers began diving in their mid-teens and a few continued to about sixty. The diver’s task was to descend to the seabed and collect clams in the basket he wore round his neck. Divers operated in ‘shifts’ (zām, pl. azwām), performing a number of dives (tabbāt) in a ‘set’ (ghamah, pl. ghāyim), the number depending on the time of the season: basically, the warmer the sea, the larger the number of dives per set, and the shorter the rest period allowed up on deck. As one shift of divers went down, another came up, in a continuous rotation. In the ‘cold season’ diving, there were normally three shifts of divers each doing six dives per set, and, having done their six dives, each shift rested on deck, warming themselves by the fire in the cooking box, for the duration of the twelve dives done by the other two shifts. In the early part of the main season, the divers were divided into two shifts only, and the number of dives per set increased to ten, with the rest period also ten. In the mid-season, when the sea was at its warmest, there were again three shifts, with each shift of divers doing twelve dives in two sets of six, and resting for a period of six. Aside from their diving, the divers were not required to engage in any of the physically demanding activities on the boat – such as hauling in the anchor rope, rowing, or raising and lowering sails – all of these jobs fell to the rope-men. The largest boats had a complement of a hundred divers, but the average was nearer thirty or forty. There were always more rope-men than divers in case of illness – thirty-six rope-men to thirty divers was typical – as a diver could not dive without a rope-man.

The rope-man (sēb, pl. syūb) The rope-man was responsible for all the heavy work. He pulled up the diver’s weight once the diver had reached the seabed, and hauled him back up once the diver had signalled by tugging on the descending rope that his bag was full. This was a job that demanded great concentration as well as strength, as failure to detect the diver’s pull on the rope when he was diving in deep water could quickly result in death by drowning.

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The singer (nahhām, pl. nahāhīm) The singer had the job of encouraging the crew – rope-men or divers – at every stage of their work: when pulling the boats out of the sea and putting them on sheerlegs at the season’s end; when pushing them into the sea and rowing them back into port out of deep water during the preparations for launching; when the crew were rowing; when pulling in the anchor rope; when attaching the sails to the yard and raising them and setting sail; and, last but not least, in the evening, the singer entertained the crew at the end of the day’s work. There were a large number of types of song, virtually one for every type of activity, with the crew following the lead of the nahhām with their singing and (in the case of those not using their hands) rhythmic clapping. The most well-known type of song was the yāmāl. This song was even used as a measure of the work that accompanied it, as in the phrase yisfah yāmāltēn ‘(the captain) rowed on for (the duration of) a couple of yāmāls’. Some singers doubled as rope-men, and were called sēb nahhām ‘singing rope-men’.

The apprentice (radīf) The apprentice was a boy of about twelve or thirteen who was learning the job of ghēs or sēb and undertook minor jobs on the boat. He received the smallest share (glātah, pl. glāyit) of the profits from the catch.

The serving-boy (tabbāb, pl. tabbābah, tabābīb) There were a number of boys on most pearling boats, often aged no more than ten. The phrase was tabbāb wara abūh ‘a serving-boy following his father’, meaning that he would eventually become a diver or rope-man too. His job was to serve coffee and tea, bring drinks of water, and wash cooking and eating utensils. He received no share of the profit from the sale of the pearls fished by the crew, but was allowed to keep, and eventually sell, any very small pearls (sihtīt) which he found had been overlooked in the discarded opened clams.

Loans and payments The most common system of payment was of three loans spaced over the year given against the eventual profits of the catch. This system, the most widely used, was known as is-salafiyyah. At the end of the season in September, the captain paid the crew the tisgām (a word with general sense of ‘feeding’), a loan which was meant to tide them over the winter months until the beginning of the next season the following May. This had the effect of tying them to a particular captain from one season to the next. Just before the beginning of the new season, they received the second loan, the salaf (or salfah) to enable them to buy provisions for their household while they were away on the first tarshah of sixty nights. These tisgām and salaf payments were equal in amount. At the end of the first tarshah, when the boats returned to land for a few days before departing again, the crew received the smallest of the three loans, the kharjiyyah

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(‘pocket-money’). In Bahrain, from the pearling reforms of the mid-1920s onwards, the amounts paid in all three cases were fixed annually by the government. The diver always received larger loans than the rope-man/singer, the apprentice less than the rope-man, and serving-boy received no loan at all. For example, the amounts announced by government proclamation for the 1935 season on 10 Shawwal 1353 / 15 January 1935 were as follows: tisgām and salaf: diver, twenty rupees (two Bahraini dinars in modern currency) for each; rope-man, fifteen rupees for each; kharjiyyah: diver and rope-man, both ten rupees. These paltry amounts reflect the fact that in 1934 and 1935 the industry was facing a severe crisis – only a few years before the amounts for the tisgām and salaf payments to the diver and rope-man had been a hundred and eighty rupees respectively. The captain paid these loans from the proceeds of the sale of the previous year’s catch. At the end of the season, after the catch had been sold, the accounts were calculated as follows. If the captain was also the boat-owner, he first deducted the costs of equipping, provisioning and licensing the boat. From what remained, one-fifth, known as khums il-mahmal (‘the boat fifth’) went straight to the captain and his bos’un between them. The remaining four-fifths were distributed as follows: each diver, three shares (thalāth glāyit), sometimes termed thalāthat athlāth (‘three one-thirds’); each rope-man, two shares; each apprentice, one share. The captain and bo’sun also received an additional three shares each. The singer and the cook received two shares each, like the rope-man, plus a small ‘honorarium’ (ikrāmiyyah). The basic idea is that there are three categories of profit-share: a ‘1 × ⅓’ share (the apprentices), a ‘2 × ⅓’ share (the rope-men/singers), and a full ‘3 × ⅓’ share (the divers and the captain). So on an average-size boat where there were thirty divers, thirty-six rope-men/singers and five apprentices, the divers would get ninety shares between them, the rope-men/singers seventy-two, the cook two, and the apprentices five between them, with three extra shares each for the captain and bo’sun. Thus if the catch sold for 20,000 rupees, the captain might deduct 5,000 for his expenditure (equipment, boat licence, food, tea, coffee, firewood, etc.), and his and the bo’sun’s fifth, 3,000, from what remained, leaving 12,000 to be divided between the crew. There would be a total of 90 + 72 + 2 + 5 + 6 (for the captain and bo’sun as ‘crew’) = 175 shares, so ‘one share’ would be 12,000 ÷ 175 = just over 68.5 rupees. Each diver (and the captain, on top of his ‘fifth’) would thus get 3 × 68.5 = 205.5; each rope-man/singer 2 × 68.5 = 137; and each apprentice 68.5. If, as sometimes happened in years when the catch was poor, the proceeds of the catch minus the expenses and the captain’s entitlement yielded, in specific cases, less than a crewman’s accrued debt (the advances were often deliberately inflated by the captains, and this, added to the improvidence of many of the divers, left many of them permanently in debt), that crewman got nothing of the profit and his debt was simply reduced and carried forward to the following year, often with exorbitant rates of interest, effectively tying him to his captain forever. It was only possible for a diver to obtain a written quittance (barwa) from one captain in order to move to another if he (or more likely his new captain) paid off any accrued debt. The crew had no right to witness the sale of the pearls to the pearl merchants (tawāwīsh) and the amount disclosed to the crewmen was often less than the price actually received. Accounting

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procedures were extremely lax, and generally worked in the direction of fraudulently inflating the crewmen’s debts. In the period before the reforms of the 1920s, when corruption and cheating of the usually illiterate crewmen by unscrupulous captains was rife, it was not uncommon for divers to run up very large debts which, when they died, were inherited by their sons. If the diver died without a son to take over his debts, the captain had the right to recover his loss by sequestering the dead diver’s property. The pre-reform system of salafiyyah has been accurately described as one of bonded slavery. The two other systems of payment were known as khammās (pl. khamāmīs, ‘those who pay one-fifth’) and ʿazzāl/ʿāzil (‘lone, isolated’). Under the khammās system, there were no advance payments. Either the captain financed the equipping and provisioning of the boat, or the crewmen and captain themselves jointly borrowed the requisite sum of money from a financier (mumawwil). At the end of the tarshah the crew returned to port and witnessed the sale of the catch. If the captain had financed the boat, he received his expenses plus one-fifth (khums) of the proceeds of the sale, and the rest was split in the same way as in the salafiyyah system; if the money had been borrowed from a financier, the loan plus interest was repaid, and what remained was again shared out in the normal way, with the captain receiving the same share as a diver. An ʿazzāl diver worked on a regular boat on which the salafiyyah system operated, but he worked independently, with his own rope-man, keeping and opening his own clam catch separately from that of the other divers. He and his rope-man shared in the communal food and paid their share of the cost of this and other communal expenses directly to the captain. In addition, the captain received one-half of a fifth of the proceeds of the sale of the diver’s catch (i.e. one tenth). What remained was again split in the normal way: the diver got three shares, the rope-man two. The khammās system was common on the coast of mainland Arabia, and the ʿazzāl system limited to a few expert divers.

The long decline of the twentieth century The booms of the late nineteenth century that infused the share scheme described above with profits did not last long. Barely a few decades of prosperity would pass before the boom yielded to an extended period of economic downturn, beginning with the agricultural crises of the 1920s and not ending until after the emergence of the oil era. As the First World War ended and its chief antagonists demobilized, agricultural prices worldwide experienced a dramatic collapse because farmers collectively produced far more than demand could sustain. Even though the core problem of global overproduction involved grains, the crisis reverberated in the Gulf ’s agrarian and maritime economies, which by the twentieth century had long been firmly integrated into the world economy. In Oman, Hopper reports, date exports by the 1920s already faced stiff competition from larger-scale farms in Basra, and by the emergence of domestic date production in the United States (which earlier in the century had accounted for a sizeable portion of Oman’s date exports). Robert Landen notes that the total value of Omani date exports dropped by almost 40 per cent between 1925 and 1934.

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The onset of the worldwide Depression in 1929 also effectively decimated the pearling industry. In Kuwait, the catch of 1930 was worth half that of the previous year, and in Bahrain the total value of exported pearls that year came to but a quarter of the 1929 value, according to Heard-Bey. In 1932, the value of Bahrain’s pearl exports to the United States alone dropped to almost 5 per cent of what it had been three years earlier.3 Fuccaro notes that between 1929 and 1931, Bahrain’s merchants lost two-thirds of their capital as a result of the market collapse. When the reputable pearl dealer Victor Rosenthal – a man whose purchases had once set the tone for the demand for Gulf pearls – visited Bahrain in September 1930, along with other Paris dealers, he left having purchased nothing according to Sugata Bose. By 1935, Yusuf ibn Ahmad Kanoo, one of Bahrain’s richest merchants, had no choice but to declare bankruptcy, as Fuccaro points out. However, despite dwindling profits and shrinking advances, Gulf merchants, captains and mariners continued to participate in the dive season after season, until well after the Depression had taken its toll. In Bahrain, an average of 238 boats sailed out for the pearl dive every year between 1935 and 1945 – a far cry from the 500-plus boats that went out prior to 1930, but a sizeable figure nonetheless. Even as late as 1945, more than 120 boats sailed out.4 In the UAE , some merchant families continued to trade in pearls into the 1940s, and pearl diving remained a cornerstone of economic life until well into the 1950s.5 The only sector to have survived the Depression relatively unscathed was the longdistance dhow trade, which Erik Gilbert points out depended less on the price of dates than it did on the demand for transport and the ongoing need for East African mangrove poles in construction. Alan Villiers informed us that dhows from Kuwait continued to ply the routes between coastal Arabia, India and East Africa throughout the 1930s, and he briefly mentions Omani dhows. Unfortunately, no secondary sources exist on the maritime history of Sur, from where most Omani dhows sailed. Indeed, there is little evidence to suggest that changing economic circumstances had slowed down the dhows’ activity very much; and if they did, the recall of British steamers for the war effort during the Second World War left a wide margin for the resurgence of dhows in the Indian Ocean transport business, as Al-Hijji notes. At the same time, however, the emergence of a new resource sector dramatically curtailed incentives to remain in the pearling and dhow trades, particularly for labourers. In late 1931, a team of surveyors discovered oil in Jabal al-Dukhkhan, a hill in the southern part of Bahrain. Within a year, the newly-founded Bahrain Petroleum Company began exporting oil in commercial quantities, at an initial rate of 9,000 barrels per day. Although the discovery of oil did not instantaneously do away with the pearling industry, the emergence of well-paid wage work in the oil fields, coupled with the steady decline in the market value of pearls during the 1930s, made diving for pearls seem far less attractive than it had been a decade earlier. For those looking for economic stability in hard times, there was no comparison between the certainty of a monthly wage and the volatility of the pearling industry’s continually falling advance payments. The possibilities that wage work in the oil fields posed to mariners on board longdistance trading dhows also seemed too much for nokhadhas to compete with. The dhow trade required several months’ absence and unpredictable pay, calculated as shares of profits, based mostly on a combination of freightage fees and profits from the

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sale of mangrove poles. By comparison, oil work was stable, predictable and local. If the markets for Gulf dates around the western Indian Ocean continued relatively unhindered, by the mid-1950s long-distance dhow nokhadhas could no longer find the crews necessary to transport them. As labourers who had previously found employment on pearling dhows began hiring themselves out to the oil company, the ties of debt that had once bound them to their nokhadhas came under strain. Their movement to the oil companies did not strike their names from the ledger books, and nokhadhas quickly asserted their rights to the fruits of their debtors’ labour. From the mid-1930s to the 1940s and especially in Bahrain, nokhadhas looking to collect on what was owed to them turned up in court in growing numbers, sometimes several times a day: the agent of the nokhadha Salman ibn Motar, for example, appeared in court over fifty times in 1941 alone to claim debts from former divers. The nokhadhas demanded that either their former divers continue to fulfil their outstanding diving obligations or repay the amount they owed and end the relationship altogether. British court officials played a key role in coordinating settlements between creditors, debtors and other claimants to smooth the transition to the new economic order. In Bahrain, for which we have detailed court records, courts mediated among the nokhadhas, the former divers, local tribunals and the nascent oil companies to assist the shift from the pearling economy to the new, wage-based, oil economy. At stake here was the debt the diver owed to his former nokhadha and the amount that it would take to effectively void his obligation to dive – a monthly payment that the parties took to calling the fasl (literally, the separation or sundering). Completion of repayment effectively dissolved the bonds that had once tied divers to their captains, freeing the divers to hire themselves out to whomever they pleased. For the erstwhile divers who worked for the oil companies, the fasl usually meant monthly instalments of five rupees garnished from their wage. By the late 1940s, cases between former divers and nokhadhas had all but completely disappeared from the dockets. Those who continued to dive did so on their own, often without a nokhadha, and certainly without the debts that had once bound them to a dhow. The overwhelming majority of Bahrain’s male workforce, however, had by 1950 taken up employment with the oil company. The bonds of debt that had once shaped the island’s pearling industry increasingly existed only in ever more distant memories. Al-Hijji notes that as greater numbers of captains made the transition from the sea to the oil field or into the burgeoning state bureaucracies, they sold off their dhows to buyers in Iran and India, where they were fitted with motors and used for local transport or fishing. The Gulf ’s agricultural economy was also hard pressed to survive the pressures placed upon it by the twin forces of the worldwide economic Depression and the concomitant ascent of wage work in the oil fields, though it managed to hold on for longer than the pearling sector did. By the second half of the twentieth century, the region’s agricultural sector began to give way to cheaper imported foodstuffs from Europe and the subcontinent, even though some key industries – namely date production – continued unabated. The pre-oil economy, it seemed, had seen its last days.

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The role of the oil sector in national development The discovery and production of oil on the Arabian Peninsula beginning in the early 1930s rang the death knell for traditional economic sectors. Its implications were far more wide-reaching, however. Oil brought about new migration patterns, the emergence of a modern state apparatus, new sectors of production and employment, a new stratification in increasingly urbanized societies and a fundamental shift in the relationship between rulers and merchants.

Concessions and oil finds All oil concessions on the Arabian Peninsula with the exception of those in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain involved at least one British partner, albeit British companies were generally slow to realize the potential of the region. US companies like Gulf or Standard Oil of California approached local rulers with more attractive offers, creating consternation among British diplomats who exerted pressure on the shaykhs to sign with British partners, sometimes in return for improved security guarantees. Oil in commercial quantities was found in Bahrain in 1931, in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1938, in Qatar in 1939, in Abu Dhabi in 1958 and in Oman in 1962. Apart from Bahrain, exports only started after the Second World War, when international shipping lines had been restored. Oil companies remained fully foreign-owned until the 1970s. Before oil exports, rulers merely received a modest annual rent on their concession (£5,000 in the Saudi case); when commercial production started, a small fee per barrel was added. In the 1950s, in line with developments in the international oil business, companies were compelled to shift to 50:50 profit-sharing agreements. For the first time, oil revenues were truly substantial: the Bahraini ruler received annual oil revenues of about £2.5 million in the mid-1950s. In Kuwait, the 50:50 agreement of 1950 generated £60 million for the Al Sabah in the mid-1950s, while the Qatari rulers received about £5 million per year. The Saudi oil income had reached about £20 million in 1950, but rose faster than that of any other country in the region. The new income was an order of magnitude above what rulers could previously derive from taxing the pearl, date and foreign trade sectors. It also dwarfed the resources available to the local merchant class, whose political stature and autonomy soon declined as a result. All the same, it remained tiny in comparison to advanced countries’ budgets and relative to the oil income of later decades. All countries bar Bahrain and Kuwait remained rather poor and underdeveloped until the 1970s oil boom. Oil companies impacted the local economy not only through the revenues provided to rulers. They also became the main formal employer in most shaykhdoms, thereby reshaping local labour market and migration patterns, became a major purchaser of goods and services from the local merchant class, and built important parts of the shaykhdoms’ modern infrastructure (sometimes under government pressure and against their own will, as in the case of US concessionaire Aramco in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s).

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Figure 6.4 ʿAbdullah al-Sulayman, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Finance, and Aramco Vice-President J. MacPherson approving the Saudi Arabian Railways agreement in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (1947).

Decline of traditional sectors, emergence of new sectors As we have seen, traditional sectors had already started their decline before the oil age due to the international Depression and, in the case of pearling, the invention of cultured pearls. The decline accelerated rapidly with the onset of oil production: nonmechanized agriculture, pastoralism, fishing, pearling and sailing dhows all soon lost their attractiveness to the local workforce and their competitiveness with international imports that the new oil income financed. Pre-oil industries like the boat-building sectors in relatively more developed Bahrain and Kuwait disappeared in the 1940s. Local pottery, textile, mat and basket products all quickly lost their market value. Traditional sectors of production had no way of competing with the modern oil and administration sectors as employers. The pearling sector in particular left its workers indebted, with no secure income, idle for much of the year but exposed to mortal dangers at worst and sharks, jellyfish and chronic illnesses at best during the diving season – a distinctly unattractive proposition compared to salaried urban work. Similarly, petty trade with imported goods became more attractive for small entrepreneurs than traditional industry or agriculture. In lieu of old crafts, governments

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and large merchant families started to invest in modern industries like cement or steel, although the scale remained modest until the 1970s. An additional factor leading to the decline of agriculture in some areas was the increasing value of land due to urban expansion and oil companies’ exploration activities and infrastructural needs. Bahrain’s palm gardens were left untended in the 1930s and 1940s in the expectation of urban construction – with good justification: Fuad Khuri notes that the price of one square metre of land in the outskirts of Manama increased from US $2 in 1946 to $100 in 1975. Due to import competition and rising prices of land and labour, palm cultivation became a luxury of elite families rather than a commercial venture. The precipitous decline of agriculture had social consequences: the decline of the falaj system of collective irrigation canal management in the Omani interior for example led to a fraying of social bonds, decay and abandonment of villages. The limited number of landowners with enough capital to buy modern equipment started individual drilling, hence overexploiting finite underground water resources and creating a previously unknown degree of social stratification. In Saudi Arabia in particular, commercial agriculture would later on become the preserve of a limited number of well-connected Najdi (central Arabian) merchant families who embarked on world-scale, capital-intensive cereal production in the Najdi desert from the 1970s on, fed by depleting fossil aquifers. Built on the back of state purchase guarantees, input subsidies and mostly foreign labour, this was in almost every regard the complete opposite of traditional Saudi agriculture, which was mostly concentrated in the politically peripheral south-west and around the oases of the Eastern Province rather than Najd. The decline of pastoralism and the related trade in animal products ushered in the enduring social marginalization of the Arabian Peninsula’s bedouin population, who joined city life late, typically with lower educational achievement and limited capacity or will to adapt to urban lifestyles. Tribes, already deprived of their opportunity to conduct raids in the course of nineteenth and early twentieth century state building, lost their corporate coherence as autonomous political actors, even if they retained their social importance.

Impact of oil on migration The most immediate social impact of foreign oil companies happened through the importation of foreign workers. In the mid-1950s, Bapco in Bahrain employed 1,150 Westerners, several hundred Indians and Pakistanis and about 5,000 local Arabs, the latter mostly in semi-skilled and unskilled jobs. Kuwait Oil Company employed 700 Westerners, a few hundred Indians and Pakistanis and about 5,000 Kuwaitis (compared to a total local population of about 100,000). Typically living in segregated residential compounds, the foreigners’ presence nonetheless created social and cultural tensions, not least due to their privileged treatment by the companies. The importation of Indian oil workers to Bahrain in 1938 sparked off an anti-government movement and general strike. Arab migrant oil workers also introduced modern political ideas to the growing local working class, leading to repeated crackdowns and expulsions.

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Given low levels of education among the local population, Western and Arab foreigners were also imported as government advisers, a tradition that continues to the present day particularly in the smaller shaykhdoms, even if the highest-level positions are now always held by locals. Foreigners also started to be employed in the growing private sector, which could not satisfy growing local demand with the limited local labour force, thereby contributing to rapid population growth. Migrant workers came to dominate private employment with the 1970s oil boom, a situation that remains essentially unchanged. The uneven timing of oil exploration across the region also led to migration within it. As the Trucial States (later the UAE ) remained poor and underdeveloped until the 1960s, many of its male workers migrated to other oil-producing shaykhdoms. Similarly, before Qatar started oil exports, its nationals migrated to Bahrain, a pattern that was to be reversed during Qatar’s later boom. As the oil age progressed, the hierarchy of nationalities was gradually reversed. As nationals acquired education, Western expatriates were removed from the highest levels of hierarchy, and with the independence of the smaller Gulf monarchies in the 1960s and 1970s British citizens lost their judicial privileges. While Indian, Pakistani, Persian and expatriate Arab workers were economically privileged over unskilled local labour in the early oil era, they now usually occupy lower, or lowest, rungs of the pecking order. The reversal for Indians has been perhaps the most dramatic. In pre-oil times, Indian merchants for example enjoyed legal privileges as subjects of the British Empire that led to some tension with locals. Large Indian family businesses remain in the region, but with the partial exception of a few naturalized families they are clearly second tier to native Arab families, both socially and in legal terms. Indian workers now are among the worst-paid and -treated across the region.

Urbanization and class structures With increasing wealth, the stratification of Arabian societies increased. While the image of a classless pre-oil Arabia is largely a myth – in both pearling sector and non-subsistence agriculture, ownership of the means of production was strongly concentrated – inequalities of wealth grew with oil. The global Depression had led already to further concentration in land ownership as indebted labourers had to sell off their modest properties. With increasing land speculation, the basing of most trade on imports, and government contracting in the oil age, a small number of merchants grew vastly richer in a short time. At the same time, the economic conditions of bedouin often remained deplorable, as most growth and development was concentrated in urban areas and required skills that nomads did not possess. That being said, as government and oil companies expanded, an urban salariat came into being that together with the growing number of petty merchants formed a new urban middle class. This process started in Bahrain in the 1930s and after the Second World War in the other shaykhdoms. In combination with increasing education levels, it led to Westernized consumption patterns – but not necessarily a Westernization of social attitudes; in fact, settlement in urban areas could lead to a more pronounced segregation of women. Different from other developing countries, large parts of the

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new, state-dependent middle class remained politically docile, with Kuwait and Bahrain only partial exceptions.

Impact on state building and regulation As the lion’s share of the shaykhdoms’ economic resources was suddenly concentrated in the hands of the rulers, government power – already bolstered through centralized taxation of pearling and trade before the Second World War – grew rapidly, and ruling families became socially differentiated from the rest of society. Their political autonomy increased and a third or more of oil income could be appropriated for a ruler’s ‘civil list’, perhaps most famously in the case of King Saʿud of Saudi Arabia in the late 1950s, whose loose fiscal management contributed to his replacement by his more austere brother Faysal in 1964. All rulers however also poured considerable resources into the build-up of modern administration, albeit with notable delays in Oman and the UAE . Western advisers and expatriate staff played a pivotal role in this process, particularly in the coastal shaykhdoms, where figures like Charles Belgrave in Bahrain were important powers behind the throne. More complex economies required increasing regulation. Commercial codes were often imported from other jurisdictions, sometimes together with foreign judicial personnel, often from Egypt – which in some cases, notably the UAE , continues to dominate parts of the court system. New inspection, licensing and arbitration regimes increased the state’s control over commerce. Government’s regulatory ambition was often far ahead of actual capacity, and corruption in some areas – notably land registration – was considerable. In all cases, the most senior, shaykhly level of government stayed informal in nature. While bureaucracies became functionally differentiated and formalized on lower levels, public and private remain fused on the top level to this day.

Modern budgets and public services Before the Second World War, Saudi King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz reportedly had the national treasury hauled across his realm in the trunk of a car, while the ruler of Qatar at one point had to mortgage his house to avoid the collapse of his proto-government. Oil production dramatically increased state revenue and, all waste and patronage notwithstanding, also brought a formalization of budget procedures, even if the separation of privy purse and public budget remains incomplete across the region. Modern budgets in turn allowed a gradual roll-out of modern public services in education and health as well as the building of national infrastructure. To the extent that education, health, water and electricity services existed at all before oil, these were typically provided by Islamic endowments (awqaf) or local merchants. The state swiftly marginalized these players in urban areas and more slowly in remote areas (it took until the 1970s for Saudi oil concessionaire Aramco to consolidate twenty-six small, private electricity providers in the kingdom’s Eastern Province into the Saudi Consolidated Electricity Company). Planning and implementation on the ground was

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typically undertaken by foreign agencies and contractors, including the US Army Corps of Engineers and military-style South Korean construction companies.

Oil and the merchant class The merchants constituted the social stratum that was perhaps the most drastically affected by oil. Many of them availed themselves of the unprecedented economic opportunities offered by state and oil company contracting, growing import trade, and money exchange and banking services. ‘Agencies’ to represent the local government and/or foreign companies were probably the most important source of income, multiplying the fortunes of families like Darwish in Qatar or Kanoo in Bahrain. To prosper, a merchant needed close connections to the ruling elites, however. This led to the marginalization of some venerable families, the emergence of upstarts who often started as go-betweens for shaykhs, and a political fragmentation of a previously rather cohesive class that became enmeshed in patron–client networks. With the emergence of the oil rent, merchants had lost their most important bargaining chip: the provision of loans and tax revenue, which they could credibly threaten to withdraw through migration to a different principality. While merchants formerly settled disputes among themselves in order to avoid the shaykhs and were at the forefront of pre-oil opposition movements, they became a rich but subordinate and politically docile class with oil. Levels of merchant solidarity in the oil age differed from country to country – with Kuwait retaining the most cohesive networks – but nowhere has this solidarity been used to stake out political claims or challenge the rulers in the way it happened in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Conclusion This chapter has traced the economic development of the Gulf countries over the last two centuries, highlighting the Gulf ’s increasing integration into the world economy over this period. Several trends in this respect are worth noting. The Gulf has throughout its history been engaged in commercial exchange with the wider Indian Ocean world. However, this intensified from the second half of the nineteenth century as world demand for dates and pearls grew and the influence of the steamship, the telegraph and British political and military power increased. The Indian subcontinent became central to the Gulf ’s economy. The demand for the Gulf ’s dates and pearls was only sustained for a few decades, and effectively came to an end with the Great Depression of 1929 and the discovery of cultured pearls. From the start of the twentieth century the power of the state, led by shaykhly families, gradually increased and eventually came to dominate all sectors of society with the discovery of oil and the increasing rents that this commodity provided the state’s coffers. And while the transformation of the Gulf ’s societies was already ongoing with the region’s integration into the global economy, oil accelerated and altered the process considerably. So, for example, whereas the Gulf had exported labour and

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people to the outside world, now migration patterns reversed as labour from overseas flooded into the Gulf. The Indian subcontinent and East Africa, once major regions of influence over the Gulf, receded in importance. These dynamics disrupted established hierarchies and new ones were formed. The rulers were now at the apex of the social pyramid and local Gulf nationals, as well as foreign labour, became stratified according to a new political and economic logic. Merchant families and bedouin tribes that once enjoyed a measure of autonomy became wholly dependent on the state’s largesse. They sought employment and business opportunities that only the oil companies and the nascent bureaucracy provided, and lost most of the leverage they once enjoyed over the ruling families. The state’s influence was further increased when it effectively seized ownership of most of the communally owned lands – in effect everything outside the villages and towns – and in so doing arrogated to itself the power to distribute property, the other major source of wealth after oil.6 This example of ever-increasing centralization of power in the hands of the state highlights one aspect of the dramatic economic, social and political transformations that this chapter has sought to illustrate.

Bibliographic essay The literature on the economic history of the pre-oil Gulf is sparse. While scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the histories of local politics and inter-imperial jostling in the region, work on economic life in the Gulf during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – to say nothing of the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries – is comparatively slim. The historiographical debate on the pre-oil Gulf economy has suffered from this dearth of research: with the exception of some notable studies, the bulk of the literature has continued to focus on the three pillars of the pre-oil Gulf economy: pearl diving, long-distance trade and date farming. Seafaring and trade. There exists a reasonably voluminous literature on long-distance trade in the Gulf – namely, the dhow trade that connected Gulf ports to South Arabia, East Africa, India and beyond. These fall into two broad categories: works that deal with long-distance trade from the perspective of particular port cities, and those that give a more general overview of trade in the Gulf. The first port of call for anyone interested in the history of Gulf seafaring should be Dionisius Agius’ two superb works on the subject: In the Wake of the Dhow: The Arabian Gulf and Oman, about the dhows themselves, and Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The People of the Dhow, about the crews, captains and shipbuilders. After this, one should consult Yacoub Yousef Al-Hijji’s works on Kuwait’s dhow economy – particularly his overview, translated into English as Kuwait and the Sea: A Brief Economic and Social History. When paired with the more ethnographic detail available in Alan Villiers’s Sons of Sinbad, an account of life on board a Kuwaiti dhow during the 1930s, one gets a holistic picture of the region’s dhow trade. For an account of long-distance trade in the southern Gulf during the mid-twentieth century, one might consult relevant chapters in Peter Lienhardt’s excellent anthropological

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study of Gulf seafaring in the 1950s, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia. The best-known eyewitness account of Gulf seafaring, covering the 1930s, is of course Villiers’ Sons of Sinbad. As far as more general histories of trade in the Gulf go, the touchstone work continues to be Hala Fattah’s The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf, 1750–1900; few other works have approximated its breadth and depth. Works that involve the Gulf from the perspective of the Indian Ocean (particularly East Africa) include: C.S. Nicholls’s The Swahili Coast: Politics, Diplomacy, and Trade on the East African Littoral, 1798–1856; Abdul Sheriff ’s Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873; M. Redha Bhacker’s Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar; and Erik Gilbert’s Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860–1970. Among notable treatments of other aspects of pre-oil economic history, Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 explores the pre-oil urban history of Manama, highlighting how the booms of the nineteenth century economy and the concomitant migration of merchants and labourers from Persia to Bahrain resulted in a particular path of development that shaped the city well into the age of oil. John Wilkinson’s The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa places Oman and Zanzibar at the centre of the nineteenth-century imperial contests for colonies in Africa. Mention should be made as well of Mark Speece’s ‘Aspects of Economic Dualism in Oman, 1830–1930’. For British shipping in the Gulf, one should consult Anne Bulley’s The Bombay Country Ships, 1790–1833, Michael Morton’s ‘The British India Line in the Arabian Gulf ’, and three short studies by Stephanie Jones: ‘British Indian Steamers and the Trade of the Persian Gulf, 1862–1914’, ‘The Management of British India Steamers in the Gulf 1862–1945’, and Two Centuries of Overseas Trading: The Origins and Growth of the Inchcape Group. Merchants and long-distance trade. Merchants are an understudied subject, which is surprising, given their great historical importance in Gulf society. The most extensive study is still Michael Field’s famous book, The Merchants: The Big Business Families of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Its successor has yet to be written. For the most up-todate study, readers should consult Fahad Bishara’s ‘Mapping the Indian Ocean World of Gulf Merchants, c.1870–1960’. For family case studies, see Field’s book as well as John Carter’s two encyclopaedic collections on Saudi and Kuwaiti merchants, which cover dozens of families (one to three pages each), and James Onley’s work on the Safar and Kanoo families of Bahrain. For studies of merchant communities in the Gulf, readers should see: Thabit Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra; Fatma Al-Sayegh, ‘Merchants’ Role in a Changing Society: The Case of Dubai, 1900–90’; Calvin Allen, ‘The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat’; Chhaya Goswami, The Call of the Sea: Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar, c.1800–1880; and Indian Trade Diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula edited by Prakash Jain and Kundan Kumar. Key works on the involvement of merchants in politics are James Onley’s The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and

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the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf and ‘Britain’s Native Agents in Arabia and Persia in the Nineteenth Century’, which examine nineteenth-century imperial politics, and Jill Crystal’s Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar, which examines twentieth-century domestic politics. For the caravan trade of Eastern Arabia, see Hala Fattah’s book as well as Anthony Toth’s Oxford doctoral thesis, ‘The Transformation of a Pastoral Economy: Bedouin and States in Northern Arabia, 1850–1950’. Anyone looking for published historical records on Gulf long-distance trade should consult the Précis on Commerce and Communications in the Persian Gulf, 1801–1905, compiled by J.A. Saldanha, and The Persian Gulf Trade Reports, 1905–1940, compiled by Penelope Tuson. Pearling. Of all of the sectors of the pre-oil Gulf economy, nothing has received more attention than the pearl dive. As an economic mainstay, the annual pearl dive attracted the attention of local chroniclers and outside observers alike. Notes on the pearl dive and the contests surrounding it fill the pages of reports from the Government of India, and the histories of the pearl diving written by historians like Saif al-Shamlan (Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Kuwaiti Memoir) and Rashid al-Zayyani still enjoy widespread popularity amongst those who study the region. For English-language histories of the pearl dive, however, one can do no better than Robert Carter’s in-depth account, Sea of Pearls: Seven Thousand Years of the Industry that Shaped the Gulf, based on an earlier much-cited article, which are together regarded as the definitive works on the subject. Sea of Pearls covers nearly 5,000 years of the pearl dive in exacting detail. Carter’s is the only monograph on Gulf pearl diving; all prior studies have been confined to singular articles or book chapters. Beyond this, there is Mustafa Habrah’s Mawsuʿat al-ghaws․ wa-al-luʾluʾ fī mujtamaʿ al-Imarat wa-al-Khalij al-ʿArabi qabla al-naf․t (Encyclopaedia of Pearl Diving in UAE Society and the Arabian Gulf before Oil), two relevant chapters in Dionisius Agius’ Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman, Villiers’ chapter on pearling in his Sons of Sindbad, and a chapter in Yacoub Al-Hijji’s Kuwait and the Sea. Lienhardt also gives a good study of the twilight years of pearling in the UAE in the 1950s. For those looking for published historical records on pearling, the key works to consult are The Records of the Persian Gulf Pearl Fisheries 1857–1962, compiled and edited by Anita Burdett, as well as J.G. Lorimer’s appendix on pearling in his famous Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf. Date and slave trades. The date industry in Eastern Arabia and the date trade has been little examined by historians. Students interested in this should start with the appendix on ‘Date Production and the Date Trade in the Persian Gulf Region’ in Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf as well as Feast of Dates by Daniel Potts. Beyond this, there is ‘Date Culture in the Oasis of Al-Hasa’ by F.S. Vidal and the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research’s edited collection, Date Palm. Historians of Kuwait may also be interested in Eran Segal’s study of date palm politics: ‘Rulers and Merchants in Pre-oil Kuwait: The Significance of Palm Dates’. In stark contrast to the date trade, there is a reasonably extensive literature on the slave trade in the Gulf and the Indian Ocean (the two regions obviously being interlinked). Matthew Hopper’s Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in

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Arabia in the Age of Empire links the Gulf date and pearl trades to shifts in the global economy in order to account for transformations in slavery within the region. Those interested in the subject should also start with Abdul Sheriff ’s Slaves, Spices, and Ivory in Zanzibar. Jerzy Zdanowski’s three books on the subject should also be consulted: Slavery in the Gulf in the First Half of the 20th Century: A Study Based on Records from the British Archives; Slavery and Manumission, British Policy in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in the First Half of the 20th Century; and Speaking With Their Own Voices: The Stories of Slaves in the Persian Gulf in the 20th Century. See also the edited collection on slavery by David Harms et  al., Indian Ocean Slavery in the Age of Abolition, particularly the chapters by Hopper and Alpers. Beyond this, there are some good articles by Hopper, Sheriff and Thomas Ricks. For primary accounts of slavery in the Gulf, see the appendix on ‘The Slave Trade in the Persian Gulf Region’ (about the early twentieth century) in Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Saldanha’s edited collection of reports, Précis on Slave Trade in the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, 1873–1905, and Anita Burdett’s edited collection of records, Slave Trade into Arabia 1820–1973. Money and credit. Surprisingly little has been written on the Gulf ’s financial past. The most extensive study of the Maria Theresa thaler is Clara Semple’s A Silver Legend: The Story of the Maria Theresa Thaler. For the Indian rupee, see Shailendra Bhandare’s ‘Money on the Move: The Rupee and the Indian Ocean Region’ and Abdulla Elmadani’s ‘India’s Impact on the Gulf ’s Economic and Socio-Cultural Life during the British Era’. On the role of Indian sarrafin (bankers) and the money and credit markets in the Gulf and wider Indian Ocean, see Rajat Kanta Ray’s much-cited ‘Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914’, Lakshmi Subramanian’s ‘Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’ and his ‘Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795’, Om Prakash’s ‘English Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 1720–1740’, and Marina Martin’s ‘Hundi/Hawala: The Problem of Definition’. The impact of oil. There is very limited dedicated literature on the historical impact of oil on economies in the GCC . Most relevant research is contained in broader studies of state formation and social change in the twentieth century or, conversely, narrower histories of the oil sectors in various countries. Works discussing social and economic change in the wake of oil include Tim Niblock’s edited work, Social and Economic Development in the Arab Gulf, which focuses particularly on the post-Second World War era; Lienhardt’s Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, which takes a more anthropological approach to social change in the oil era; and Khaldoun al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective, which focuses particularly on post-discovery relations. Particularly useful country studies are Fuad I. Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain: The Transition of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State, and Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf. More titles analysing the impact of oil on modern state consolidation

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are reviewed in the bibliographic essay at the end of Steffen Hertog’s chapter in this volume. More specific literature on oil companies and sectors on the Arabian Peninsula that also discusses their broader social and economic impact includes Tom Lippman’s Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, David Heard’s From Pearls to Oil: How The Oil Industry Came to the United Arab Emirates, and the first four chapters of Mary Ann Tetreault’s Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the New World Order. Robert Vitalis’ America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier is a contrarian account questioning the benign impact of foreign oil majors. Rupert Hay’s article, ‘The Impact of the Oil Industry on the Persian Gulf Shaykhdoms’ contains useful contemporary detail on oil operations, employment and social change. Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power provides a global history of the oil industry with a strong focus on the Gulf region.

Notes 1 ‘Review of the Persian Gulf Trade Reports from 1873 to 1905’ in J.A. Saldanha, Précis on Commerce and Communications in the Persian Gulf, 1801–1905 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), pp. 54–6. 2 Banyans are Indian Hindu traders that are often referred to as Banias in the English sources. Their name derives from the Sanskrit-origin word Vaniya, which denotes a caste of merchants. These Hindu merchants once monopolized the credit market in the Western Indian Ocean, especially the Hindu Khatri merchants from Multan in the Punjab (known as ‘Multanis’). These later moved to Shikarpur in Sindh in the late eighteenth century, and to Bombay in the mid-nineteenth century. 3 United Kingdom, National Archives, Foreign Office Records (FO ), FO 371/16838, ‘The Pearl Industry’. FO 371/16838, Bahrain State Budget and Annual Report (1933). 4 FO 371/45177, C.D. Belgrave, ‘The Diving Industry’ (c. 1945), p. 11. 5 Anita L.P. Burdett, ed., Records of the Persian Gulf Pearl Fisheries 1857–1962, Vol. 3: 1930–62, Miss C. Waterlow, Middle East Secretariat, Foreign Office, London to The Political Residency, Bharain [sic], 17 May 1949 (p. 666), and W.R. Hay to the Right Honourable Anthony Eden, 5 May 1952, p. 700. Thanks to Victoria Hightower for these references. 6 The processes by which the state took effective possession of most property in the Gulf and the ways it has distributed some of these requires study. This has yet to be undertaken in any detailed manner and is a desideratum for the field of Gulf studies.

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republished in William Clarence-Smith, ed., The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Frank Cass, 1989), pp. 60–70. Said Zahlan, Rosemary. The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. 2nd edn; Reading: Garnet, 1998. Saldanha, J.A., ed. Précis on Commerce and Communications in the Persian Gulf, 1801–1905. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906; reprinted by Archive Editions, 1986. Saldanha, J.A., ed. Précis on Slave Trade in the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf, 1873–1905, With a Retrospective into Previous History From 1858. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906; reprinted by Archive Editions, 1986. Sayegh, Fatma Al-. ‘Merchants’ Role in a Changing Society: The Case of Dubai, 1900–90’. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1998), pp. 87–102. Segal, Eran. ‘Rulers and Merchants in Pre-oil Kuwait: The Significance of Palm Dates’. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2014), pp. 167–82. Semple, Clara. A Silver Legend: The Story of the Maria Theresa Thaler. N.p.: Barzan Publishing, 2005. Shamlan, Saif Marzouk al-. Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Kuwaiti Memoir. Trans. Peter Clark. London: The London Centre of Arab Studies, 2001. Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873. London: James Currey, 1987. Sheriff, Abdul. ‘The Slave Trade and Its Fallout in the Persian Gulf ’. In Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 103–19. Speece, Mark. ‘Aspects of Economic Dualism in Oman, 1830–1930’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Nov. 1989), pp. 495–515. Subramanian, Lakshmi. ‘Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’. Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 21 (1987), pp. 473–510. Subramanian, Lakshmi. ‘Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795’. Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19 (1985), pp. 205–37. Tetreault, Mary Ann. The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the New World Order. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1995. Toth, Anthony B. ‘The Transformation of a Pastoral Economy: Bedouin and States in Northern Arabia, 1850–1950’. DP hil thesis, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 2001. Tuson, Penelope, ed. The Persian Gulf Trade Reports, 1905–1940. 8 vols; Gerrards Cross: Archive Editions, 1987. Vidal, F.S. ‘Date Culture in the Oasis of Al-Hasa’. Middle East Journal, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Autumn 1954), pp. 417–28. Villiers, Alan. Sons of Sindbad: An Account of Sailing with the Arabs in Their Dhows, in the Red Sea, Round the Coasts of Arabia, and to Zanzibar and Tanganyika; Pearling in the Persian Gulf; and the Life of the Shipmasters and the Mariners of Kuwait. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940; reprinted London: Arabian Publishing, 2006. Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Wilkinson, John C. The Arabs and the Scramble for Africa. Sheffield: Equinox, 2015. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. New York: Free Press, 2009. Zayyani, Rashid al-. Al-ghaws wal-tawashah. Manama: al-Ayyam lil-nashr, 1998.

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7

Tribes and Tribal Identity in the Arab Gulf States Dale F. Eickelman

In Arabic and English, ‘tribe’ (qabilah) is an essentially contested concept, about which there are irreconcilable arguments about the right usage. In Arabic, the term has a pedigree going back to pre-Islamic poetry, where the term is used only in the plural. The Egyptian historian al-Nuwayri (d. 1333) glosses the trilateral root q-b-l as meaning to meet face to face. The term occurs only once in the Qurʾan in Sura 49: ‘We made you into peoples (shuʿub) and tribes (qabaʾil) that ye may know one another’. This verse is often cited at the beginning of contemporary compendia of published collections of genealogies in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and graces the lintel of the front gate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Riyadh. The idea of ‘tribe’ remains central to contemporary societies because it forms an integral part of the social imagination and binds many of those claiming tribal descent to the state. In seventh-century Arabia as in other historical periods, the terms ‘peoples’ and ‘tribes’ suggested changing relationships as tribal leaders and others competed for influence and domination and sought to legitimize their roles in society. Thus in the middle of the sixth century ce the Quraysh, which became primarily identified with the Prophet Muhammad, were part of the Kinanah tribe. Several decades later the Quraysh were considered a powerful tribe in their own right, indicating the plasticity of the notion of tribe and the difficulty of envisioning a tribal hierarchy with its component elements encapsulated in a fixed, nested order. Tribes in sixth and seventh century Arabia, as at later times, existed in a complex and fluctuating situation. The Arabian Peninsula was surrounded by formidable empires – the Persian, Byzantine and Abyssinian – and buffer entities. None of these wanted a rival political or economic power to coalesce in the Arabian Peninsula. Hence the social and political situation was never one of tribes versus tribes alone, but a complex relation to a wider and known social and political order. Tribal historians and genealogists often claim deep historical roots to eponymous tribes, and some begin genealogical accounts by tracing their provenance in genealogies that begin with Adam. As one approaches the present, however, there is a blurring of connections with the seemingly fixed distant past and an ambiguity of how specific contemporary groups relate to one another. The absence in most cases of information on alliances through marriage, matrilineal ties and matrilateral ties facilitates the process of collective and individual remembering and forgetting. The ambiguities of oral traditions and the ease with which they can be refashioned 223

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facilitates reimagining the collective and individual past to accommodate the social and political present. This chapter assesses how ideas and practice about tribe shape, and are shaped by, the societies and states of the region. As late as 1980, anthropologist Fuad Khuri wrote that each of the Gulf States was a single tribal domain. Contrary to Khuri and assumptions of the region’s states as being ‘tribes with flags’, the political relations and social ties of the tribes was considerably more complex and imbricated in complex ways with the Ottoman Empire (1517–1918), European colonial powers and worldwide economic currents. Even in the pre-oil era, the rulers of the region were not just tribal, although some were and all claimed legitimacy for royal authority through patrilineal genealogies. There is no hard and fast demarcation line in social or historical geopolitical terms between the contemporary Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC ) states and the wider Gulf, including Iraq and Iran, or the present-day Republic of Yemen. For example, some tribes, such as the ʿAnazah, extend from the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia through Jordan and Syria. The Shammar tribe has had a similar reach, expanding and contracting with varied political and economic conditions. Political and economic ruptures cause an ebb and flow of population movements, but such ruptures and realignments are not unique to Arabia. The difference is that the movements today come into conflict with often-arbitrary political borders that regulate and at times render difficult seasonal migrations, commerce and other economic activities. Yet both tribal and local notions of legitimacy make significant appeals to the distant past. In the distinctly non-tribal Waldorf Astoria in New York, a minister of one of the GCC states explained to me in 1982 how his country was ‘tribal and proud of it’. His private cabinet at the time was composed entirely of people from his tribe, yet the political, military and economic leadership of his country consisted of an elite linked by multiple ties of marriage and interests. At the very top, as in the other GCC countries, political leadership is confined to members of a royal lineage, and competition for rule is circumscribed. Thus in Kuwait, the Al Sabah lineage has ruled Kuwait since the eighteenth century. Under the Kuwaiti constitution of 1962, the amir, or ruler, must be chosen from among the male descendants of Mubarak Al Sabah (r. 1896–1915). Senior members of the Al Sabah lineage nominate the amir and the crown prince, and the Kuwait National Assembly approves candidates for both offices. Leading Al Sabah members meet weekly in Kuwait among themselves. There is a separate meeting of senior Al Sabah with the ‘tribal leaders’, as one of the senior Al Sabah described to me in 2015 without further elaboration. Not all Kuwaitis claim tribal origins. Those from merchant backgrounds as well as Shiʿah-origin extended families have close working ties with the Al Sabah and can trace these ties back over several generations. Ibrahim al-Shurayji’s Guide to Kuwaiti Families only lists tribes and extended families alphabetically, indicating prominent past or contemporary individuals in the listing, including government or administrative offices, not according to their rise and decline in influence or their relation to the Al Sabah. By listing extended families, al-Shurayji avoids of course the necessity of distinguishing tribal from non-tribal.

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There are several points of accord in contemporary discussions of tribes in this region. First, tribes are composed of people who claim descent from a common male ancestor. As Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) wrote, tribal relationships, like dynastic ones, depend on ‘group feeling’ (ʿasabiyah), of groups acting as if compelling ties of obligation bind them together. These are often expressed in terms of kinship or ‘blood’ ties although these often are used as metaphors to justify acting together in a common interest over long periods of time. Ties based on patrilineal genealogies can exclude as much as they include, and beyond a depth of three generations become blurred in usage and what is asserted. Matrilateral and matrilineal ties also have major significance for practical alliances. Second, although the accounts of major tribal groupings and confederations or major groups are relatively stable, the groupings and nomenclature of lineages and other groups, as well as of subordinate groups associated with major tribes, are often blurred and in flux. This is one of the reasons why there is such strong resistance to fixing genealogies or the relations among tribes and lineages in print, whether in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE ) or elsewhere. Those who dominate the present are in a position to rewrite the past. In Saudi Arabia, as in Kuwait, the UAE and elsewhere, efforts to set the genealogical past to writing have met stiff resistance. Claimed descent is almost inevitably asserted from a patrilineal ancestor, but in the search for prestigious or politically advantageous connections, there is often a studied

Figure 7.1 Gathering of tribal leaders at a majlis of a tribal shaykh, near Kuwait (1911).

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ambiguity over the specifics of these asserted claims. In understanding the significance of tribes in the Arabian Peninsula, the older anthropological notion of tribe as part of an evolutionary hierarchy situated between ‘bands’ and ‘states’ is irrelevant. As both an ideology of belonging and as shaping social and political relations, tribes coexist with other forms of social organization and are codependent. Tribes can be both pastoral and sedentary, and more often than not codependent with different forms of livelihood. Seen from a distance, for example, Saudi Arabia is sometimes asserted to have ‘tribal’ or ‘bedouin’ origins. Yet it was the ability of the Wahhabi movement, in alliance with the Al Saʿud, not political tribalism, that allowed the Saudi state to expand and consolidate its rule until the Ottomans defeated the movement and levelled its capital, al-Dirʿiyyah, in 1818. Both the Wahhabi movement and the Al Saʿud survived, however, in the settlements of the remote Najd region. Finally – in stark contrast to the use of ‘tribe’ as represented in anthropological and historical literature elsewhere – tribes in the GCC region have always coexisted with states and empires. Even if the Arabian Peninsula receded from the historical imagination after the initial Islamic conquests, focus on it re-emerged by the eighteenth century with the rise of the Wahhabi movement – a concern both to the Ottoman Empire and to the British, with subsequent British concern with limiting ‘piracy’ along the Gulf coast and to curtail the slave trade. The British signed agreements with the various rulers of the Trucial States of Coastal Oman beginning in 1820, who entered into ‘exclusivity agreements’ with the British in 1892 in return for their ‘protection’ against attack by sea and support against land aggression. Fearing Wahhabi aggression, the Al Bu Saʿid ruler of Muscat, Ahmad ibn Saʿid (r. 1792–1804), entered into a treaty with the East India Company to assure a British presence in Muscat. When the Al Bu Saʿid were threatened with being overrun by imamate forces from the inner Oman interior, the British mediated a truce that left the imam to rule in the northern interior and the sultan to rule the coast and the southern province of Dhufar. In practice, at least during the reign of Sultan Saʿid ibn Taymur (r. 1932–70), the imam and sultan maintained correct relations and both shared many officials until the 1950s, when the imamate was absorbed into the sultanate. Agreements with the British benefited the various rulers and to some extent stabilized their rule. The British thus became a significant force in local and regional politics, one that altered local political calculations but did not irrevocably transform them. On declaring their intent to unite the Trucial States plus Bahrain and Qatar into a single federated entity in 1968, Bahrain and Qatar quickly exited from discussions, although by 1972 the remaining seven shaykhdoms formed the seven component states of the UAE .

Arabian Peninsula tribes in the historical imagination The explorer John Lewis Burckhardt (1784–1817) offers an example of how travel accounts both informed and shaped ideas about the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. His Notes on the Bedouins and the Wahábys is divided between an ethnographic description of bedouin society in Arabia and a detailed chronicle of the Wahhabi movement from

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its origins in mid-eighteenth century Arabia to the early nineteenth century when the movement reached its greatest territorial extent. Burckhardt’s descriptive account of bedouin society resembles a panoramic tableau, filled with ethnographic details but lacking a sociological account of how the parts work together. Thus he describes bedouin society in terms of the layout of tents, gender separation, tribal organization, marriage, feuds and warfare. One of Burckhardt’s themes is a concern with bedouin ‘independence’, ‘uncorrupted manners’, and their code of honour. One key element of his account permeated later accounts of bedouin society. He asked how it is possible to have an ordered society such as that of the bedouin with a code of law and conventions of conduct but no written codes of law or formal legislation. Like other observers of his time, Burckhardt is silent on the role that women played in securing alliances and consolidating shaykhly authority. Burckhardt’s conclusion on the power of balanced organized coercion, or its threat, to create social order without formal leaders resonated with key questions in European political philosophy concerning the nature of authority in supposedly elementary societies, but deflected attention from the workings of Arabian Peninsula societies. Nonetheless, to invoke a term later popularized by French anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss, bedouin society was ‘good to think with’ (bon à penser) for both the European and Arab (including Ibn Khaldun) social imagination. Similarly, the polymath Biblical scholar W. Robertson Smith (1846–94) represents an especially important blend of social inquiry in the nineteenth century with interest in contemporary and historically known Semitic tribes. Nonetheless, his primary goal was to explore past social forms from the present. He was strongly interested in the historical criticism of the Bible. Fluent in Arabic, he made numerous voyages to Arab countries between 1878 and 1890, and in 1878–9 made several camelback tours of the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine and Syria. In spite of lapses into the stereotyped wisdom of his age, Smith advocated the systematic study of contemporary Arab society – at least what he referred to as that of the ‘pure’ bedouin – as crucial to understand how a people’s experience in society relates to their religious and ethical conceptions. Like many of his contemporaries, he accepted the concept of the evolutionary progress of human society. Societies could thus be arranged in a ladder of progress. For Smith, the study of the bedouin was key to understanding kinship in ancient Semitic society. In his view, the stage of development of a social group was linked to the nature of its intellectual, religious and moral life. Thus each prophet could speak only for his or her own time. The ideas of prophets could be ahead of those prevalent in their own society but not too far. Smith saw bedouin society as relatively unchanged from the time of the Old Testament. Through his experience with contemporary tribes and what was known of bedouin society just prior to and immediately after the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Smith sought through analogy and comparison to ‘reconstruct’ the social forms at the time of the Patriarchs. The part of his argument concerning Arab society as evolving from matriarchy to patriarchy is simply wrong. Yet the first part of his Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia is an enduring classic, presenting the first systematic account of the social structure of the feud and the basic principles of kinship and political organization among such

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‘acephalous’ societies, or societies in which all male members are in principle equal – the ‘first among equals’ image projected by many shaykhly leaders of the region. Robertson Smith’s argument was a direct inspiration for generations of anthropologists concerned with ‘elementary’ societies and an inspiration for the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). The representation of tribal societies as primarily pastoral and independent from their village and urban counterparts continues to pervade many ethnographic and travel accounts, and some tribes claim higher status by asserting ‘pure’ nomadic origins in a distant, often mythical past. In practice, the situation was significantly more complicated. Primarily pastoral and nomadic tribes often owned land in settlements and their leaders had residences in them; settled tribal leaders and even merchants often dominated pastoral groups, and in some settings merchants had strong tribal ties. By the mid-nineteenth century, British influence along the coast of the Arabian Gulf meant that accounts by British administrators began to predominate. There are exceptions, such as the writings of Charles Doughty (1843–1926) and, for the midtwentieth century, Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003), but for the most part, the region lacks the rich mixture of scholarly, travel and administrative accounts available for India, the ‘jewel’ in the crown of the British Empire, and Morocco, which in the early twentieth century had become India’s equivalent for the French. For this reason, J.G. Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ʿOmân, and Central Arabia (see Introduction), a document intended initially for the use of British officials and marked ‘confidential’, is useful as an indication of what was administratively known and how it was organized. The Gazetteer is organized primarily by geography, so that an administrator called on to operate in a given region could obtain a compact overview of its peoples, places and political organization. In general, the Gazetteer delineates tribal names and leaders, but does not provide much understanding of the fluidity of tribal and political systems, as can be seen in many of the twentieth-century histories of tribal relations.

Tribes and governance in Oman The shifting relationships among tribes and religious and secular leaders in the sultanate of Oman, and particularly in its northern interior, suggest the changing historical dynamics of tribal politics and economics. Even in terms of its citizen population, Oman is religiously, ethnically and geographically one of the more complex nations of the Arabian Peninsula. Slightly over half of its citizen population is Ibadi Muslim, the third and numerically the smallest of the three major doctrinal divisions in Islam. Sunni Muslims, predominantly in Oman’s northern coastal regions and the southern province of Dhufar, constitute over 40 per cent of the population, and less than 2 per cent are Shiʿah, settled primarily in the capital city of Muscat and on the Batinah coast. Oman stands out among the Gulf States in having a distinct communal and political identity. Since 730 ce Oman has had, at least in principle, an ‘elected’ Ibadi imam, a spiritual leader with secular authority selected on the basis of religious knowledge and leadership, with no preference given for descendants of the Prophet or hierarchical distinctions. Since the mid-eighteenth century, Oman, or at least the coastal regions

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(and Zanzibar and the East African littoral until 1856) has been ruled by the Al Bu Saʿid dynasty. Until the mid-twentieth century, the Al Bu Saʿid rulers focused on maritime expansion, including Zanzibar and Africa’s Swahili coast, leaving interior governance in northern Oman to a succession of Ibadi imams, customarily selected from among the tribes of the region. In formal terms, selection for the imamate by Ibadi religious scholars and tribal leaders had nothing to do with lineage and tribal affiliation, just the individual qualifications for the title for the post, although in practice it played a significant role. The tribes of the northern Oman interior are grouped into two major confederations or moieties, the Hinawi and Ghafiri, which coalesced during a series of civil wars over the imamate that were fought during the first half of the eighteenth century. Many of the settlements of the region, including Nizwa, the former capital of the imamate, were divided into upper (ʿalayah) and lower (sifalah) components, each associated with one of the major confederations. The paramount leaders (tamimahs) often mediated disputes. Any effort to enumerate the leading tribes indicates the flexibility of the tribal system. John Peterson lists six major tribal groups, many of which have significant transregional ties. One of the six is the Hirth, whose key settlement is al-Qabil, in Oman’s Sharqiyyah region, where Swahili remains a common language due to the ties of the region with Zanzibar. Peterson describes the Bani Riyam, long the leading Ghafiri tribe, as a loose grouping of a number of subtribal units located on the al-Jabal al-Akhdar plateau, Nizwa and Izki. At various times the leaders of this tribe reached out for support to ruling elites in Dubai, Muscat, the imamate in Nizwa and the Saudis. The Bani Hina, whose name also is related to the Hinawi confederation, dominated much of the northern Oman interior from their traditional tribal capital, Ghafat. The other major tribal groupings include the Bani Bu ʿAli, whose major settlement in the Jaʿlan region has the same name, as well as the town of Sur. This tribe is predominantly Sunni and historically primarily allied with the Ghafiri moiety. Historically their leaders have at various times been with the sultan, against the imam in Nizwa and briefly flew the Saudi flag in 1928. Like other tribal groups, the Bani Bu ʿAli were fluid in allegiances. The same holds for the Bani Rawahah of the Wadi Samaʾil region. Finally, the major nomadic pastoral group is the Duruʿ, together with the Janabah and the Yal Wahibah tribes. The Duruʿ were important in facilitating oil exploration, and for a time their tribal shaykhs became the equivalent of ‘shop stewards’. Such delineation of tribes is necessarily arbitrary because of the fluctuation of tribal politics and loyalties. For example, the ʿAbriyin tribe, with its tribal capital of alHamraʾ, located between Nizwa and Bahla in the northern Oman interior, played a pivotal role between Oman’s twentieth-century imamate, centred in Nizwa, and the sultanate, centred in Muscat and Salalah. The ʿAbriyin tribal leaders balanced loyalties between imam and sultan. One of the tribal leaders, Ibrahim Saʿid al-ʿAbri (d. 1975), was also a leading religious scholar, and became Oman’s first mufti, or official interpreter of Islamic jurisprudence in 1970, when Qabus ibn Saʿid succeeded his father, Saʿid ibn Taymur, as sultan. Shaykh Ibrahim played a role in persuading Muhammad ibn ʿAbdullah al-Khalili to accept the title of imam in 1920, and in 1937, in addition to his role as tribal leader and qadi (Islamic judge) among the ʿAbriyin, he was appointed a judge by the sultan in Muscat.

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In a manuscript tribal history that from internal evidence was composed between 1956 and 1959, Shaykh Ibrahim narrated four hundred years of tribal history, including descent from Adam and early tribal migrations. From the nineteenth century onward, the narrative incorporates other letters and documents, not always in chronological order, suggesting that they were incorporated as they became available. This history, like other tribal histories, consisted of long genealogies of assumed patrilineal ancestors of groups that cover many centuries. For the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries there are lists of the tribal leaders as governors for the imam of neighbouring towns, directing tribal levies, the construction of mosques, poetry, lists of distinguished students who studied under the tribe’s men of learning, and the sale of pious foundation land (waqf) to finance the imamate administration. Some of the accounts of earlier tribal leaders border on the hagiographic, recording that ‘some say’ that after the death of a predecessor, a light and two green birds, ‘perhaps angels’, appeared over his grave. Absent in tribal histories is an account of the interlocking relationships among tribal leaders, in which marriages cemented unity among the tribal elite, among dependent groups and with elite families from other tribes. Such relationships formed the sinews of tribal politics. Moreover, from the 1930s onward it is clear that tribal leaders and religious scholars crossed political and economic lines. With the intensification of oil company explorations in the late 1940s, the al-Buraymi crisis (1952–61) and the progressive formal demarcation of informal frontiers between the Trucial States and Oman, and other neighbouring states, formal geographical and maritime boundaries became increasingly important. In the period immediately preceding the al-Buraymi crisis, Saudi emissaries sought to deal directly with key tribal leaders of the northern Oman interior. Petroleum Development Oman (PDO ) explorers similarly tread a fine line between direct negotiations with tribal leaders and the sultan of Muscat and Oman. The sultan was acutely aware that direct agreements with tribal leaders or the imamate constituted a challenge to his legitimacy. Likewise, the imamate rebellion of 1954 and again in 1957– 59 engaged several tribes of the northern Oman interior, with leadership operating with support from Saudi Arabia. On the sultan’s side, support came from a British-officered Muscat and Oman Field Force (financed by the oil company), troops from the (also British-officered) Trucial Scouts and the British Special Air Service (SAS ). Some tribal leaders from the imamate, including the ʿAbriyin, played a delicate balancing act between the two sides in this dispute. Since the accession of Qabus ibn Saʿid to the throne in July 1970, tribal leadership has played a lesser formal role in Oman, although a close examination of the 1981 State Consultative Council (al-majlis al-istishari) indicates that its appointed members included all major tribal groupings, as well as the country’s other non-tribal ethnic groups including the Shiʿi Lawatiyyah. The 1991 State Consultative Council (majlis al-shura) follows much the same lines as the predecessor council, although in practice neither the 1981 nor the 1991 organization explicitly represented tribes. As in Jordan and elsewhere, efforts to fix Omani tribal organization in writing for administrative purposes have met with stiff resistance from the tribal elite and officials of tribal origin because such publication would ‘fix’ tribal relationships and hierarchies that work better when left fluid in practice. Thus in 1986, the Ministry of the Interior issued a

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guide to tribal and place names. Following strong protests, the volume was quickly withdrawn from circulation even within the government. It is important to remember for Oman (or the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, as the country was known prior to 1970) that maritime trade and overseas dominions, notably control over Zanzibar and the East African littoral, provided economic, political and social links for even the most seemingly remote tribes with external, nontribal, societies, or with tribal and state leaders external to the pre-1970 Sultanate of Muscat and Oman. From the 1950s onward, Omanis from all parts of the country, and not just the coastal regions, emigrated to other countries, including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the Trucial States, in search of wage labour and education. Omani scholars of tribal origin portray the relationship among tribes in terms of patrilineal genealogies, but the most stable elements of these claimed genealogies are the most removed from the present. The default assumption is that a male will marry his patrilateral parallel cousin, thus preserving group unity. In practice, however, the exceptions to this formal understanding are many, especially when a tribal leader marries a woman from an elite family from another tribe in order to cement relations between the two groups. Over time, the sons and daughters of such a union are assimilated into the dominant patrilateral grouping. Women are intensely interested in and knowledgeable about such alliances. Both among the tribal elite and ruling lineages, their role is largely non-public, affording them room to manoeuvre. As the author of one of the rare ethnographies dealing with women’s knowledge of genealogies writes: ‘I did not meet even one woman from a shaykhly family who could not specifically pinpoint the exact kinship of her husband in relation to herself, even if this meant indicating relations through ancestors three or four generations removed from herself ’ (C. Eickelman, Women and Community, p. 88). The notion of common descent from an eponymous ancestor is a genealogical rationalization of all the factors – spatial, economic, political, as well as kinship – that give rise to tribal organizations and allow for the assimilation of client groupings. Tribal leadership in Oman, like the leadership of the imamate and sultanate, relied on a small number of wealthy and politically powerful elites who essentially dominated tribal politics and the election of imams, seeking out mutual pragmatic partnerships to further their interests. Tribes and tribal leadership in contemporary Oman, as elsewhere among the GCC states, are not as foregrounded in modern Oman as they were in the past, but neither are they ignored in conducting domestic and regional affairs, and in understanding many economic, political and social opportunities. Like other forms of networking and association, tribal belonging remains important and does not detract from a strong national identity. Even minority groups, such as the Shiʿi Lawatiyyah, centred until the 1970s in the Sur al-Lawatiyyah quarter in Matrah and still primarily located in the capital area, have at least one equivalent of an origin myth making them the equivalent of a tribe. Although tribal identity remains important in Oman, the central role of tribal leaders as intermediaries with the government has gradually eroded since 1970. Tribal identity is now one of many identities, and in many cases individuals alter their presentation of self to omit information related to their tribe. Tribal leadership now is determined by a formal appointment by the Minister of the Interior and is a salaried post.

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The traditional and contemporary ecology of tribes In the pre-modern era and in the present, an inherent tension is assumed between the tribal social organization and the principles of leadership and authority associated with state organizations or non-tribal societies. In practice, however, this essential tension is mitigated by many factors, the most important of which is that tribal ‘belonging’, based on the metaphor of patrilineal descent. Some parts of this idea of descent are more carefully regulated than others in the sense of public acknowledgement (or acquiescence) and in some cases formal affirmation, as in the case of entitlements due to closeness to a royal lineage. The strength of tribal belonging is that it has the ability to adapt to shifting resources and opportunities. At least ideally, there is a tendency to represent relationships among individuals as egalitarian. However, there is considerable flexibility in tribal ‘belonging’, and one of the strengths of tribal affiliation is the ability to incorporate followers in some circumstances, and in contemporary conditions, to create a basis for hierarchy, privilege and support for hereditary political authority. A de facto inequality in control over resources and people can be widely tolerated, especially when associated with widespread entitlements and allowances. In economically undifferentiated settings, a tribal leader possessed only a limited form of domination over fellow tribesmen, relying primarily upon informal persuasion. Ideologically, tribal leaders were (and still are) considered only a first among equals, although in practice dominant shaykhs possessed a greater control over resources than their followers, enabling them to entertain more lavishly and to weave webs of relations with non-tribal people, including foreigners. As some observers note, displays of hospitality often required the tacit cooperation of other tribal members to project the common good through performance. To cite the aphorism of John Lewis Burckhardt (Notes, p. 117), ‘A shaykh’s orders are never obeyed but his example is generally followed’. A practical limitation of the control of the tribal leaders of pastoral nomads was that ecological exigencies required pastoral groups to break up into small units for large parts of the year and to move quickly to take advantage of available rainfall and vegetation. Pastoral groups coalesced into intertribal raiding parties, especially during the winter months when the search for water and pastures was less demanding than in other seasons. Pastoral nomads sometimes had an advantage over the militias of settlements in certain irregular encounters, escaping taxation and carrying out sporadic raids against outlying oases or agricultural settlements. Often the mere threat of a raid sufficed to persuade a village, oasis or weaker pastoral group to pay for protection in cash or kind. Often such payments were euphemistically known as ‘brotherhood’ (khuwwa) obligations. Even the Ottoman government found it expedient to pay regular subsidies to pastoral nomadic leaders to ensure the safe passage of caravans, including those associated with the annual pilgrimage to Makkah and after 1908, to ensure the safety of the Damascus–al-Madinah railroad. The extent of subsidy depended on assessing the rapidly fluctuating strength of competing tribal groups. Given the dependence of pastoral nomadic tribes on the produce and economic goods of settlements, oases and maritime ports, the dominance of oases over pastoral nomadic tribes was a more common occurrence than the reverse. In self-representation,

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however, tribes favoured the idea of portraying themselves primarily as nomadic pastoralists, at least in the distant past. The control of settlements and oases was an essential element of tribal dominance. Oases often controlled access to the only perennial sources of water, needed by pastoralists for the summer months. The leaders of oasis communities commonly sought to create rivalry among nomadic groups through subsidies and other tactics, which eventually included alliances with imperial authorities. Also common, however, was a situation of uneasy peace between nontribal oasis dwellers and nomadic tribes, in which pastoral groups exchanged their animals and animal products (and services as transporters of goods and protectors of persons) for dates, grains, coffee, salt, cloth, guns and ammunition, and established ties with cultivators (leaders of pastoral tribes could also be landowners) that enabled them to forage their herds on harvested fields. Some tribal pastoralists owned date palm trees and land in settlements and oases or had settled kin on whom they depended to facilitate their economic transactions. Ambitious tribal leaders sometimes sought opportunities to acquire firmer control over trade and oases with the support of a tribally based militia, but gradually replaced it with mercenaries and slaves whose livelihood depended directly upon their obedience to and support of the ruler. Such a shift in type of authority usually was marked by the settlement of a tribal leader in a key town or oasis and a growing identity of his interests with those of leading merchants and key tribal leaders. A ruler with such a militia sought to oblige nomadic tribesmen and settlements to accept their authority usually through persuasion, the threat of raids, and co-option. The result is what some observers have called a rudimentary state organization in which tribal groups are incorporated into a state so long as their interests coincide with the ruler and his associates. Thus the amir of Bahrain had nominal sovereignty over Qatar, but from 1852 until 1866 the population accepted Wahhabi rule, although the Bahraini amir paid a tribute to secure the good treatment of his subjects. At some later point in the nineteenth century the Al Thani lineage, claiming links to both the ʿUtub and the Al Saʿud and with strong ties in business and pearling, emerged as the leading lineage. The history of the seven component shaykhdoms of the present-day UAE in the nineteenth century is extremely complex, but certain patterns prevailed from at least the early nineteenth century, such as the rivalry between the more maritimeoriented Qawasim (sing. Qasimi) on one side and the more landward-oriented Bani Yas on the other, with paramount chiefs from the Al Bu Falah, centred in Liwa, al-ʿAyn and subsequently coastal Abu Dhabi. Both the Qawasim and the Bani Yas linked to opposite sides of the Omani Hinawi–Ghafiri divide. Over time, for example, the Al Bu Falah lineage of the Bani Yas became the Al Nahayan, the ruling lineage of Abu Dhabi. Similarly some members of the Al Bu Falasah section of the Bani Yas left Abu Dhabi in 1833, refusing to accept the choice of a ruler in Abu Dhabi and to compensate the British for attacks on their ships. By the mid-nineteenth century, Dubai’s chief, Maktum (d. 1852), exploited rivalries between Abu Dhabi and the Qasimi shaykhs, but also consolidated his authority within Dubai itself and by fulfilling commitments to the British. As several observers note, the official genealogies on display in the National Archives in Abu Dhabi and related national sites are as important for what they include as what

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they do not. Showing no female members, nor linkages through marriage, the official genealogies leave large gaps in the hard surfaces of social and political realities. Another example is the Wahhabi, or ‘Unitarian’, movement in Arabia, associated with the ruling Saudi dynasty. Wahhabi expansion began in the mid-eighteenth century with a raid that involved only seven men, although the movement grew until it encompassed most of the Arabian Peninsula by the end of the century. With each successful expedition, more tribesmen and others adhered to the Wahhabi state. Participants in successful expeditions were allowed to distribute four-fifths of the booty among themselves, with the remaining fifth going to the central treasury. The claim that the Prophet Muhammad established the practice legitimated this division of booty. Both in the early phase of the Wahhabi movement and after its revival in the late nineteenth century, there were repeated difficulties in securing the loyalty of pastoral nomadic groups. After 1912, for instance, the Saudi dynasty sought with mixed success to settle nomads in about two hundred military and agricultural encampments. These encampments also served as points from which punitive raids could be undertaken against recalcitrant groups. The basic tension between authority in tribal societies and that exercised by state rulers and allies almost inevitably has involved shaded areas of authority. A common pattern prior to the 1950s was to have coastal rulers whose interests were closely tied to maritime commerce and who had only nominal rule over tribal leaders in their hinterland. Oman’s sultan, Saʿid ibn Taymur, for example, carefully maintained correct

Figure 7.2 Bedouin of the ʿAjman tribe on the march near Thaj, now in Saudi Arabia (1911).

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relations with the tribes of the northern Oman interior and the imam in Nizwa, just as rulers elsewhere used combinations of subsidies, political intermarriages and associated strategies. But it was only after 1952 that he had an updated military force of his own: the Batinah Force, followed in 1954 by the Muscat and Oman Field Force (financed by PDO ) – although in response to the Saudi occupation of al-Buraymi in 1952, he raised a tribal levy composed of tribes from both the sultanate and imamate regions. Madawi Al-Rasheed’s account (Politics in an Arabian Oasis) of the al-Rashidi tribal dynasty in the Najd, in present-day Saudi Arabia, suggests the factors involved in the rise and fall of tribal leaders. The al-Rashidi dynasty traces its origins to the Shammar tribe, and by the nineteenth century included pastoral nomads, merchants and agriculturalists. These economic activities in themselves did not determine the hierarchy in the tribe itself. Struggles for leadership were legitimized by claims to patrilineal genealogies of descent, even though such claims were often vague and contradictory. In essence, the dominant genealogical narrative belonged to the leading lineage. Internal struggles were endemic, although as tribal leaders gained more influence and enhanced their ability to distribute patronage, their ability to transform themselves from tribal leaders into rulers (amirs) increased. Marriages with women from other strategically important groups were also means of solidifying authority.

Genealogical tradition, society and the state The genealogical claims of state lineages form an important element in assertions of legitimacy. A common form of asserting leadership is the strategic manipulation of custom. In tribal guest houses in Kuwait as in Oman, the tribal leader sits in a central place, and each time someone enters the sablah as the guest room is called in Oman, or the diwaniyyah (Kuwait), everyone rises and there is a polite jockeying for precedence in seating, so that a hierarchy is established that can include visiting military or diplomatic representatives, and can change almost incrementally, or at times dramatically. Such visiting etiquette is a means of displaying influence and signalling the elevation of some groups or persons over others. In tribal settings, the most concrete way of indicating precedence is by expressing genealogies. Notwithstanding the formal claims of royal genealogies as well as tribal ones, the projection of contemporary relationships into the past is inherently tenuous. Thus the Al Nahayan lineage of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven constituent shaykhdoms of the UAE (established 1971), is part of the Al Bu Falah lineage, which in turn is part of the Bani Yas confederation. Yet since there is no information in official genealogies on the sons of different mothers or of marriage links through daughters, the patrilineal genealogy in itself is an ineffective guide to seeing how leading shaykhs brought allies closer into their orbit or distanced themselves from others. The same is the case elsewhere. Kuwait was founded in the early eighteenth century by clans of the ʿAnazah, a tribe from the Najd who left for Qatar and subsequently went to Kuwait with its good natural port. By the late seventeenth century, different tribal groups came together to form a new tribe, known collectively as the Bani ʿUtub, with the Al Sabah as the dominant lineage. Combining a tribal origin with political and

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Figure 7.3 A reception following the opening of a Qurʾanic school near Nizwa, Oman (1978). Guest house (sablah) etiquette offers a key index of notions of person and social value.

mercantile skills, the Al Sabah became the dominant lineage and controlled both maritime trade and trade to the interior. In addition to controlling the caravan and maritime trade, the Al Sabah made their peace with the Ottomans to the north. The control over both maritime and caravan commerce plus a port gave the Al Sabah a secure economic and political base. Al Sabah rule in the nineteenth century required a balancing among the Ottomans, the Al Saʿud and Britain. The rising economic levels of those claiming tribal descent have fuelled a desire to document their social standing through genealogical research, a situation most thoroughly documented by Nadav Samin in his discussion of the life and career of genealogist and editor Shaykh Hamid al-Jasir (1907–2000) of Saudi Arabia, who through his objectifying of the oral traditions of genealogies – fixing them in writing so that genealogies became, in Samin’s words (Of Sand or Soil, p. 15), ‘coveted objects of modern Saudi identity’. The efforts to fix genealogies through writing objectifies them, eliminating the flexibility inherent in the oral transmission and the ability incrementally to shift emphasis, adding and dropping lineages or assimilating them into others. The focus on genealogical certification may be more pronounced in Saudi Arabia than in other countries, but it prevails throughout the region. Another major factor transforming the meaning of genealogies is the spread of higher education, particularly mass higher education, throughout the region. The curriculum of most secondary schools and universities is standardized and fails to integrate genealogical or ‘origins’ data for groups other than the royal family.

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The result is a significant decline in the ‘local knowledge’ needed for many young adults to manipulate the specifics of their genealogical ties, but a rise in an ‘invented’ tradition of genealogical heritage that ties many citizens to the modern state. Put another way, there has been a recalibration of what constitutes valued social and economic knowledge. Claims of ‘noble’ tribal descent, like citizenship in a country in which the majority of inhabitants are non-citizens, is a marker of prestige and higher social status that does not necessarily replicate the ability to link the wider claims to heritage, hierarchy and ‘tradition’ with local knowledge or contemporaries. Tribes in the GCC states are an enduring and transformative part of the modern social and political landscape. In a prescient 1953 essay, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une “tribu” nordafricaine?’ (What is a North African Tribe?), Jacques Berque subtly invoked Ernst Renan’s 1887 ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ (What is a Nation?). By setting the term tribu in quotation marks, he also distinguished his own argument from the view that denied complex social identities to North Africans in the waning days of French empire. Tribes in the GCC states can be remarkably urban, educated and transnational. Tribes may not always have official standing, but they remain strong in the social imagination and often are the only tolerated civic associations. Tribes and genealogies work and have a powerful resonance in linking the noble imagined past to the present, and make social life civil and predictable.

Bibliographic essay Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner’s Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East provides a useful overview of issues of tribal identity, including essays on the GCC states, and my The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach, pp. 115–39, provides an extended essay on the topic. Fuad Khuri’s Tribe and State in Bahrain is a classic account of how tribes and states can articulate. Andrew Shryock, in Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan, deals primarily with Jordan but raises issues that are central to understanding the uses of genealogies and tribes in the GCC states. Another highly useful and detailed overview of the history and tribes of the region is Frauke HeardBey’s From Tribe to State: The Transformation of Political Structure in Five States of the GCC. For Francophone discussions of tribes, Hosham Dawod’s edited Tribus et pouvoirs en terre d’Islam is essential reading even though it does not specifically discuss the Arabian Peninsula. Nadav Samin’s Of Sand or Soil: Genealogy and Tribal Belonging in Saudi Arabia is a ‘breakthrough’ book in understanding the contemporary social and political uses of genealogy in Saudi Arabia. Henry Rosenfeld’s ‘The Social Composition of the Military in the Process of State Formation in the Arabian Desert’ is overly schematic in its views of tribe and state, but remains a useful point of departure and also offers a useful overview of the relationship between tribal authority and material resources. Madawi Al-Rasheed’s Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidi Tribal Dynasty is an outstanding ethnographic history of a tribal ‘dynasty’ in Saudi Arabia, and Abdulaziz Al-Fahad’s ‘The ʿImama vs. the ʿIqal: Hadari–Bedouin Conflict and the Formation of the Saudi

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State’ is a useful corrective to attributing too much importance to pastoral nomads as opposed to settled tribal and non-tribal communities in elaborating state or religions authority. William Lancaster’s The Rwala Bedouin Today is a useful account of a single transnational tribe, especially in assessing the importance of landscape and ecology in an earlier era. Jill Crystal’s Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar provides a useful account of how tribes, merchants and others interacted in Kuwait and Qatar over the last two centuries, a subject also covered in Anie Montigny-Kozlowska’s ‘Histoire et changements sociaux au Qatar’. For Oman, J.E. Peterson’s Oman in the Twentieth Century remains the premier concise account of the relations between tribes and state for the last two centuries. My ‘From Theocracy to Monarchy: Authority and Legitimacy in Inner Oman, 1937–1957’ focuses on how the imamate of the northern Oman interior became assimilated into territories effectively controlled by the sultanate in the 1950s. My ‘Religious Tradition, Economic Domination and Political Legitimacy: Morocco and Oman’ deals with how the tribal order in the Oman interior related to religious legitimacy, and my ‘Traditional Islamic Learning and Ideas of the Person in the Twentieth Century’ relates the tribal imagination to inter- and intra-tribal contests over the mantle of authority. For the United Arab Emirates, in addition to Heard-Bey, Andrea Rugh’s The Political Culture of Leadership in the United Arab Emirates deals with the history and genealogical and social identities of the component states of the UAE, soon to be complemented by Samin’s ‘Daʿwa, Dynasty, and Destiny in the Arab Gulf ’, currently in manuscript form. Both Rugh, for ruling lineages, and Christine Eickelman, for shaykhly lineages, offer valuable insight on the role of women in securing alliances and why it is difficult to pin down in writing their important role. The growing impact of mass higher education in the region, in which tribal identities are generally attenuated, are discussed indirectly in my ‘Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies’ and in Miriam Cooke’s Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf.

Bibliography Berque, Jacques. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une “tribu” nord-africaine?’ In Eventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage à Lucien Febvre, ed. Lucien Paul Victor, Vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1953), pp. 261–71. Burckhardt, John Lewis. Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967 (orig. 1831). Cooke, Miriam. Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Crystal, Jill. Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990. Dawod, Hosham, ed. Tribus et pouvoirs en terre d’Islam. Paris: Armand Colin, 2004. Doughty, Charles Montagu. Travels in Arabia Deserta. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923 (orig. 1888). Eickelman, Christine. Women and Community in Oman. New York: New York University Press, 1984.

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Eickelman, Dale F. The Middle East and Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach. 4th edn; Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2002. Eickelman, Dale F. ‘Religious Tradition, Economic Domination and Political Legitimacy: Morocco and Oman’. Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, Vol. 29 (1980), pp. 17–30. Eickelman, Dale F. ‘Kings and People: Oman’s State Consultative Council’. Middle East Journal, Vol. 38 (1984), pp. 51–71. Eickelman, Dale F. ‘From Theocracy to Monarchy: Authority and Legitimacy in Inner Oman, 1935–1957’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1985), pp. 3–24. Eickelman, Dale F. ‘Traditional Islamic Learning and Ideas of the Person in the Twentieth Century’. In Martin Kramer, ed., Middle Eastern Lives: The Practice of Biography and Self-Narrative (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 48–55. Eickelman, Dale F. ‘Mass Higher Education and the Religious Imagination in Contemporary Arab Societies’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 19, No. 4 (1992), pp. 643–55. Fahad, Abdulaziz H. Al-. ‘The ʿImama vs. the ʿIqal: Hadari–Bedouin Conflict and the Formation of the Saudi State’. In Madawi Al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis, eds, CounterNarratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 35–76. Heard-Bey, Frauke. From Tribe to State: The Transformation of Political Structure in Five States of the GCC. Milan: Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 2008. Khoury, Philip S. and Joseph Kostiner, eds. Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Khuri, Fuad I. Tents and Pyramids: Games and Ideology in Arab Culture from Backgammon to Autocratic Rule. London: Saqi Books, 1990. Khuri, Fuad I. Tribe and State in Bahrain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lancaster, William. The Rwala Bedouin Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Montigny-Kozlowska, Anie. ‘Histoire et changements sociaux au Qatar’. In Paul Bonnenfant, ed., La Péninsule arabique d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1982), Vol. 2, pp. 475–522. Oman, Sultanate of. Ministry of the Interior. Al-murshid al-ʿam li-l-wilayat wa-l-qabaʾil fi-Saltanat ʿUman [A General Guide to the Provinces and Tribes in the Sultanate of Oman], ed. ʿAdil al-Hariri. Muscat: Ministry of the Interior, 1986. Peterson, J.E. Oman in the Twentieth Century. London: Croom Helm, 1978; new edn, New York: Routledge, 2015. Rasheed, Madawi Al-. Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidi Tribal Dynasty. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991. Rosenfeld, Henry. ‘The Social Composition of the Military in the Process of State Formation in the Arabian Desert’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 95 (1965), pp. 75–86, 174–94. Rugh, Andrea B. The Political Culture of Leadership in the United Arab Emirates. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. (My comments on the genealogies at the National Documentation Centre in Abu Dhabi, now the National Archives, are based on Rugh, p. 23, as well as an extensive study of the political uses of genealogy shared with me in manuscript form by Nadav Samin.) Samin, Nadav. Of Sand or Soil: Genealogy and Tribal Belonging in Saudi Arabia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

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Samin, Nadav. ‘Daʿwa, Dynasty, and Destiny in the Arab Gulf ’. Unpublished manuscript cited with permission of the author. Shryock, Andrew. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Shurayji, Ibrahim Jarallah Al Dukhna al-. Dalil ila al-usar al-Kuwaytiyah [Guide to Kuwaiti Families]. Kuwait: Maktabat al-Ujayri, 2012. Smith, W. Robertson. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (orig. 1885). For an overview of Smith’s contributions to anthropology and Semitic studies, see Thomas O. Beidelman. W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Thesiger, Wilfred. Arabian Sands. New York: Dutton, 1959.

8

Social Structures and Transformation in the Gulf and Arabia Until 1971 Hala Fattah

Any study of the history of social groups in Arabia and the Gulf must look at the environmental, economic, social and political contexts that influenced and determined the interactions of the people in the region. While there are certain similarities in the structures of the Gulf nations, there are also fundamental differences. These relate chiefly to the way that geography, religious movements and economic resources – for example, the lack of, or the corresponding abundance of, oil in some emerging polities in the twentieth century – have affected the distribution of power in the region. Before 1971, perhaps there were more similarities than differences, chiefly because significant sectors of Gulf and Arabian societies – merchants, rulers and tribal confederations – adapted their lives in similar ways to the resources available to them in the difficult Gulf and Indian Ocean economic environment. Their strategies centred on the routing or rerouting of long-distance trade networks joining Eastern Arabia to East Africa, or Kuwait and Oman to India. From the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth there was a concomitant expansion of Najdi tribes into Iraq and Kuwait as a result of drought and scarce natural resources in Najd. During the same period, the Wahhabi Islamist reformist movement relentlessly sought to control both the interior and exterior parameters of the Arabian Peninsula. All of these developments occurred because many different groups attempted to manipulate geographic, environmental, economic and political factors in a harsh milieu where absolutely nothing could be taken for granted. Social structures have changed in the Gulf and Arabia in manifold ways over time and in a complex manner. It is necessary to understand the internal histories of various groups in society and their interactions with each other, as well as the formation of the states and the role of ‘strangers’ in their midst – i.e. the colonial powers that had an important role in the shaping of Gulf and Arabian societies. In addition, the impact of the immigrant or expatriate communities that came later in the twentieth century should not be forgotten. Externally introduced changes had profound influence on Gulf societies up to 1971 and their social, economic and demographic transformation. Undoubtedly, the merchant class was, until very recently, the most visible and fluid category but it should be stressed that society was not rigidly stratified. The principal, and perhaps the only truly significant, distinction was between ruler and ruled. But the 241

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precise nature of even that relationship fluctuated as rulers in the past depended to a large extent on merchants for their income and influence. Nelida Fuccaro has gone so far as to claim that the connection between merchants and rulers was a symbiotic one.

The rise of the risk-taking badawi and hadari in Arabian and Gulf societies The fluidity of social and occupational classes that emerged in recent centuries created a rapid turnover in economic opportunities, and a jack-of-all-trades mentality that went with it. Nonetheless, the momentum generated by a freewheeling Indian Ocean economy translated into unprecedented economic prospects for some social groups. Although there were groups that specialized in certain professions to the exclusion of others, such as very rich merchants, moneylenders or ship’s captains, economic exigencies created a special social category: the risk-taking badu (sing. badawi; bedouin) or hadar (sing. hadari; townsman). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a massive migration of peoples, often referred to as a tribal breakout, occurred in parts of Asia. The Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and other parts of the Gulf saw large-scale movement of tribes from areas hit by catastrophic climatological changes resulting in scarcity, disease and war in search of areas that were relatively well-watered and more prosperous. Part of this mobile population consisted of disenfranchised tribesmen who had been deprived of their support infrastructure because of a host of factors, chief of which was the insecurity engendered by rapid tribal movement and dispersion in new territories where the parent tribes had either broken up as a unified structure or been subsumed into other, larger tribal confederations as clients. Products of the tumultuous eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these deracinated tribesmen often drifted to the towns of the region to eke out a tenuous living. Over a period of time, they became part of the detribalized hadar. But when opportunity beckoned, they were transformed almost overnight into trainee muleteers, camp guards and caravan guides if they joined overland merchant convoys, or assistant shipwrights and apprentice sailors if they survived their first sea voyage. Transport ‘corporations’ such as the Najdi-origin ʿUqaylat had long monopolized land passage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fanning out across the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Syria to carry goods and guard caravans. After the tribal breakout, looser tribal ties led to different groups taking advantage of new challenges in the towns. In essence, the dearth of food, water, building materials or clothing created urgent basic needs that had to be met. The predominance of highly mobile groups of pastoralists, traders, roving preachers, sailors and soldiers criss-crossing the region, as well as the seasonal sailings to India, East Africa, Malaysia and Indonesia by contingents of the Gulf ’s population, resulted in occupational flexibility and a fluidity of identities and affiliations. Skilled mariners as well as amateurs of all kinds embarked on frequently perilous sea journeys and overland trips to bring back provisions to where they commanded the best price. In these long, arduous and frequently epic journeys, undertaken both by professional sea captains and ordinary tribesmen, multitasking became the order of the day.

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Hence a Shammari in the employ of one of the powerful Rashidi shaykhs in Najd could contract with his shaykh to take several horses to market, and receive a small pittance, enough with which to invest in animals of his own. Yacoub Al-Hijji relates how a pearl diver in Kuwait or Bahrain could invest his meagre earnings in commodities to sell in India after the pearling season had ended and might make enough not only to repay his debt to the nokhadha (boat captain) but to put something away to build a house. And my earlier work demonstrates how a travelling ʿalim (religious scholar) from the Bani Tamim tribe in Najd could find steady employment as a court historian in Mamluk Iraq. Of course, the rapidly shifting landscape of opportunity affected only a small proportion of the population. But the exception to the rule does not invalidate the rule itself, or the deeply rooted entrepreneurial traditions that were an important feature of these societies in the first place. Thus the ‘versatile tribesman’ made famous by Frauke Heard-Bey’s study remained a characteristic feature of the Gulf and Arabia until the early twentieth century. Heard-Bey’s conclusion (From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, p. 26) is that, Before the advent of oil, the population [of what was to become the United Arab Emirates] could generally not afford to segregate as settled inhabitants into merchants, fishermen and pearlers on the coast, agriculturists in the fertile oases and wadis, and other groups exclusively tending their animals. Because such specialization was for most families throughout the ages impracticable, social separation into occupational groups did not take place either

The fluidity of social standing in the Gulf and Arabia prior to the early twentieth century One of the most striking features of the region was, and still is, the mobility of the peoples of the Gulf. Because of both the trans-regional impulse that drove men to seek their livelihoods abroad through trade or employment, as well as the nomadic traditions that saw tribesmen looking for forage for their animals in other districts on a seasonal basis, it can be argued that mobility and population movements had long been important facets of this region. This flexibility and fluidity caused societies in the Gulf to become partially autonomous and yet internally diversified communities. Thus most of the badu and the hadar – nomads and townsmen alike – retained links to each other through tribally ascribed status while maintaining clear spatial boundaries. Eventually, they also accepted other ethnic, sectarian, religious and economic communities in their midst, some of whose members came from other towns or other regions to conduct business. Although tribalism – as a mythic past, an enduring family connection, and a cultural value – still informs much of Gulf and Arabian society, tribal links and identity have frayed over time. In some instances, genealogical ties based on tribal origin withered away altogether, leaving motley, shifting, urban populations that were always ready to follow new masters. In the past, as Abdulaziz Al-Fahd has noted, these masters may have been as diverse as Wahhabi amirs or long-distance traders in search of protection.

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Figure 8.1 King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and his son Saʿud returning from prayers on a Friday in Riyadh (1939).

But it may be that these same anonymous semi-tribalized, or even detribalized, individuals brought about major structural changes in Gulf society. Over the last two hundred years, the Gulf witnessed the emergence of more specialized groups and professional associations. Their formation was set into motion by turbulent events revolving around climate change that produced a period of social, economic and political transition. Endemic insecurity in Arabia and along its desert fringes created momentum for tribal dispersion and expulsion even before the start of the long wars pitting the Wahhabi movement intent on Islamic revival against what were considered to be ‘lapsed’ communities throughout the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf and south-central Iraq. It can be contended that this tribal breakout provided the impetus for one of the most radical changes in the region: the creation of occupational specialists and entrepreneurs who forged opportunity out of chaos and began the process of class formation that continues today. Thus, before the advent of the oil era, often desperate men in search of a livelihood in an insecure climate spearheaded a revolution of professional diversification that continued all the way into the twentieth century. Even though class differentiation was still a process in gestation, occupational specialization had already begun to separate sailors from camel herders, and both of them from government clerks. A small group of native entrepreneurs were now identifiable in society but socially they still traced their roots to a tribal structure fractured by new socio-economic realities.

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Nonetheless, even though identities were not fixed and occupational specialization had not yet made its mark on Gulf societies, there were certain groups that stood out from others in the pre-oil era. Rich merchants, effective rulers, shaykhs with strong religious credentials, or tribal chiefs with a numerous following were accorded recognition due to their rank, power or wealth. At the same time, underprivileged or deprived groups were somewhat invisible to society at large, in the sense that they neither had the power nor visibility to compete with merchants and rulers. Until recently they received less attention by scholars than the political or commercial elites, despite their equally long presence in the region. In order to understand the complexities and challenges brought on by rapid change before and after the advent of oil, it is necessary to discuss these groups, delineate their respective histories and their relations with other groups in Gulf society, and analyse their transformed status in the wake of the introduction of the oil economy.

The rich and the powerful Merchants The age-old activities of buying, selling, bartering, and shipping commodities over short and long distances have always been in the hands of local merchants and traders who also had connections to distant markets. It has become commonplace in the literature to acknowledge that even before the installation of the Al Sabah, Al Saʿud, Al Thani, Al Khalifah, Al Bu Falah (today’s Al Nahayan), Al Bu Falasah (today’s Al Maktum), al-Qawasim or Al Bu Saʿid dynasties in the Gulf, merchant families were the principal agents for change in the region. While some were of tribal origin, Indian, Persian, East African and South Asian merchants dominated trade in most ports of the Gulf and often even lived in distinct enclaves of the towns. Prior to the boom in the trade of dates, pearls and slaves in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, and for a long time after that, transregional merchants were instrumental in financing long sea voyages to India and East Africa and lending money to everyone, including the rulers. In districts which had little by way of formal governments (such as the early ʿUtubi outpost in Kuwait, for example), merchants were the element that held urban coastal society together. The appearance of manifold commercial opportunities enabled a fluidity of occupation to the point that, on some level, it is tempting to ask who was not a merchant in the Gulf prior to the early twentieth century. It is known that almost everyone dabbled in commerce if given the chance, from ordinary deckhands on boats sailing to India to hajjis on their way to pilgrimage. But my focus here is on important tribal leaders to whom the literature assigns purely political positions. In an era when occupational specialization was still fluid, it makes little sense to cast them in unidimensional roles, as the following examples show. The activities of two famous shaykhs of the Arabian Peninsula can be illustrative: Muhammad ibn Saʿud (in 1745) and Talal al-Rashid (in 1864) purportedly were at one time a date merchant and a horse trader respectively; in fact, the latter built a special

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market compound in his capital to house foreign merchants. Meanwhile, Shaykh Mubarak Al Sabah, whose family had been chosen to be the governors of Kuwait in the mid-eighteenth century, traded in horses as well and owned date plantations in Basra. Consequently, assigning strict professional affiliations to economic and social groups in the Gulf and Arabia is inaccurate. Prior to the early nineteenth century, people in the Gulf and Arabia assumed multidimensional roles contingent on the opportunities presented them; only a select few were able to specialize in one profession over another. Certain cultural, ethnic and sectarian characteristics of large transnational merchant families were and are still shared by other groups in the region. It was natural for large merchant families in Bahrain or the Trucial Coast to view the entire region as part of their trading domain, and while the paterfamilias continued to reside in Manama or Dubai, the brothers and sons fanned out to Iran, Iraq, Oman, Yemen, India, Arabia, the Trucial Coast and Britain. Even in the twenty-first century, the incidence of merchants residing in three different countries, marrying three different women and setting up house in separate countries, has been noted by William Beeman, as has the strategic bilingualism or trilingualism of trans-local trading houses. Moreover, transformations in cultural identities must take into account fascinating reverse migrations, among them the hawalah Arabs from the Iranian side of the Gulf to the Arab littoral, especially Bahrain where they played such an important role in the nineteenth century. Similarly, note can be made of the difficult re-entry of Indonesian Hadramis in Yemen as Engseng Ho has shown, as well as the equally traumatic journeys of Omanis returning from Zanzibar as described by Amal Ghazal. All these physical but also mental transmigrations have become a subgenre of memory and diasporic studies. Before the establishment of national borders, the widespread networks of local trading houses could hold their own in the face of rapid inroads made by British firms in Iraq after 1840. Fuccaro contrasts the latter with the resilience of Bahraini merchant houses in the pearl trade. While some Bahraini merchants did become agents for British shipping in the early decades of the twentieth century, Fuccaro (Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, p. 59) notes that ‘local shipping maintained a solid profile sustained by the pearl trade with India and by the exchange of goods for local consumption with Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula’. All over the Gulf and Arabia, substantial merchants were being called upon to support local governments. Local governments in turn had to be very careful how they treated trans-local merchants in the region because excessive taxation might drive them away to rival regional centres. Fuccaro (Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, p. 57) adds that during the civil war in Bahrain in 1842–3, ‘Manama’s merchants fled en masse to Kuwait and Lingah, reducing the commercial fleet of the islands to a quarter of its size’. A reverse exodus took place in 1911 when three ʿUtubi merchants in Kuwait relocated to Bahrain because of excessive taxes, only to be cajoled to return by Shaykh Mubarak, then the ruler of Kuwait. The crash of the pearl, date and clove markets in the 1930s created a significant dent in the wealth of merchant firms at nearly the same time when concession payments from oil companies strengthened the authority and independence of Gulf rulers to the detriment of large merchants. These developments proved irreversible. Eventually oil revenues created new employment

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opportunities for many former divers, rope-men and even impoverished merchants, who closed their shops and sold their dhows to seek out work in the oil industry.

Rulers The story of government in the Gulf begins with a combination of events that over several decades gave rise to the first essentially formal political administrations in the Gulf and Arabia, those accorded recognition by tribes and rulers in neighbouring jurisdictions. The first of these were the tribal movements from Arabia into the northern Gulf. Mass movements began as early as the fifteenth century when the ʿAnazah and Dhafir tribes migrated to the coast from central Arabia. They were followed by equally important tribes such as the Shammar, Mutayr and Bani Khalid. As my work has shown, some of these tribal sections settled in northern as well as southcentral Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar (and some, such as the Kaʿb or the Bani Lam tribes even reached the Persian coast). Driven out of Arabia by famine, scarcity of resources, hunger, and war, the more compact tribal confederations gathered on the northern coast of the Arabian Peninsula where they established frontier settlements, some of which subsequently grew into more permanent city states. The emergence of new settlements was most often successful when the larger powers in the Gulf were distracted by wars and rebellions. The rise of the revivalist movement led by the followers of Imam Muhammad ibn Saʿud Al Saʿud, under the spiritual and even political direction of Shaykh Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, had a major impact on this process. The second reason for the progress of these settlements was their leaders’ business acumen. For instance, the merchant families of Kuwait – some of whom had migrated from Arabia along with the Al Sabah family, as well as from Iran and southern Iraq – were instrumental in backing the Al Sabah family’s bid to become governors of Kuwait and simultaneously influenced the Al Sabah to continue operating the new town as a tax-free haven. Similar entities, combining the rudimentary administration of frontier settlements with minimal commercial duties, proliferated around the Gulf. Thus, Kuwait dates its existence to 1745, with the migration of the ʿUtub Arabs from northern Arabia. The Al Khalifah, also a sub-section of the ʿUtub, migrated first to Zubarah in what is now north-western Qatar in 1766 and ultimately came to rule over Bahrain in 1782. In Oman, the Al Bu Saʿid family came to power in 1749 under somewhat different circumstances. In Najd, the phenomenal rise of the First Saudi State (1745–1818) brought about a reorientation in trade and politics that was to have far-reaching consequences for the whole of the Gulf littoral. To a certain extent, this could only have happened in the Gulf and Arabia at that specific moment when the long-distance trade in the region was still not unduly hampered by the imposition of political boundaries. No state had a monopoly of coercion for very long, which rendered frontiers inherently permeable. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the First Saudi State waged a succession of concerted military campaigns across the Arabian Peninsula from 1745 to 1818 but it was defeated by an Egyptian–O ttoman army led by Ibrahim Pasha, son of the governor of Egypt. Kuwait’s openness to both the desert and the sea assured its success. Its intentionally

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low profile, coupled with the business acumen of its merchant class, ensured that it survived even before a strong leader, Shaykh Mubarak Al Sabah, and his British benefactors were able to consolidate the gains made by the early ʿUtubi leadership in the mid-eighteenth century. Kuwait’s free port status – echoed almost universally among the smaller Gulf shaykhdoms on the Arab coast as well as part of the Persian coast (Muhammarah, for instance) – served to reinforce the openness and flexibility of regional commerce, as well as the autonomy of various communities across the region. The Wahhabis’ Qasimi (pl. al-Qawasim) allies in Raʾs al-Khaymah attempted to monopolize the trade of the Gulf by means of their strong commercial fleet. The British called them as ‘pirates’ but, according to William O. Beeman (‘Gulf Society’, p. 151), they could more correctly be labelled ‘a polity engaged in territorial and trade protection’. Naturally they resisted European encroachment on their sphere of operations. In 1818–20, the British defeated the Qawasim and burned their fleet, and so established a presence in the Gulf as a consequence of their anti-piratical policies. Through a series of peace treaties with the Gulf shaykhs, the British were able to transform the Gulf into what was sometimes termed a ‘British lake’. Thus, as James Onley has concluded (‘Britain and the Gulf Shaykhdoms’, p. 104), Britain eventually assumed responsibility for the defence of Oman in 1829, the Trucial States. . . in 1835, Bahrain in 1861, Kuwait in 1899 and Qatar in 1916 . . . [and] after the second expedition [against the Qawasim], the British were able to impose an anti-piracy treaty – known as the General Treaty in 1820 – on the Qawasim and all the other rulers and governors of what is now the UAE

Later, the discovery of oil in the early twentieth century, as Onley puts it (‘Britain and the Gulf Shaykhdoms’, p. 11), further ‘contributed to Britain’s decision to stay on in the Gulf after its withdrawal from India in 1947’.

The ʿulamaʾ (sing. ʿalim) These religious scholars, interpreters and administrators could also be included among the elite of earlier Gulf society. Their command of Islamic precepts and knowledge gave them both respect and protection. Their utterances legitimized political decisions and their interpretations guided society as a whole. Their existence as a social class was reinforced by their ability to relocate to where opportunities lay and to emphasize their displeasure with unsatisfactory rulers.

The marginalized In contrast to the powerful associations formed by merchants and rulers in the Gulf and Arabia, other groups had difficulty climbing up the social ladder. Not much has been written about the groups on the margins of society but they have been of historical importance nevertheless. Women, slaves, sectarian ‘others’ and disenfranchised tribesmen formed peripheral social groups whose positions improved in the post-

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independence twentieth century, but only very slowly. In this respect, there remains a conundrum in Gulf societies: even though national borders began to inhibit the movement of people, some social mobility remained within each state. This situation fostered a hybrid and tolerant culture but economic fluidity continued to coexist with rigid social structures. Certain lateral divisions, such as ethnic and sectarian differences, remained important until the early twentieth century. While official censure on the part of twentieth-century governments has forced these divisions underground, they persist in the social memory of peoples of the Gulf as persistent communal symbols.

Women: from sub-status to token progress Rural women had always worked to supplement the incomes generated by men, whether the latter were involved in land or sea trade or were farmers who harvested the date crop. Not only did they manage the households but they also worked in agricultural pursuits or tended sheep or goats. Nonetheless, women were subordinate to men even if they did most of the work. They were not recognized as significant breadwinners even though they kept their families together when the men were at sea. In Kuwait and Bahrain, educated urban women first came to notice in the 1950s, when for the first time, they took to the streets to demand political reform alongside their male colleagues, as May Seikaly has remarked. While popular unrest brought about some reforms, it was not to last. In the 1970s, despite their enormous strides, civil and personal rights still eluded Bahraini women, especially in the rural areas where women had not participated in the more urban and middle class social movements. Even so, despite this urban activism, Seikaly writes (‘Women and Social Change in Bahrain’, p. 421) that in the 1970s ‘women were unable to gain support for legislation on behalf of personal and family status law nor were they able to translate their zealous enthusiasm into practical sociocultural rights for all women, regardless of class’. Largely because they found few supporters among the male populace, women’s groups had to continue their struggle throughout the rest of the twentieth century. In Kuwait, Haya al-Mughni has shown that women’s societies emerged in the 1960s as the result of deliberate government policies to undercut the appeal of liberals by encouraging conservative Islamic women’s organizations. Women’s education was slow to emerge throughout the Gulf and became widespread only with the gradual imposition of government schools during the oil era. As in Saudi Arabia, such educational opportunities were often imposed against conservative opinion. It may also be noted that the intersection of gender and class created a kind of double marginalization for lower-class and uneducated women.

Slaves, ex-slaves and their descendants Slavery has long been a feature of Gulf society but it has only received more sustained analysis in recent years. The issue is complex, and tied to overlapping economic, social and political factors. On one level, the plight of the most downtrodden groups in the Gulf and Arabia was the consequence of the practice of slavery. On another level, the institution became deeply imbedded in local society, so much so that various forms of

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slavery coexisted side by side. Thus agricultural slaves and pearl divers were distinct from household slaves. Jerzy Zdanowski describes how the former suffered under very harsh conditions; as a result of this, many of them began fleeing to British agencies to seek manumission papers as soon as conditions were propitious. According to Zdanowski, the first of these certificates were issued in 1852 and the last in the 1930s. The latter, on the other hand, were more often than not treated decently by their employers. Even after manumission, some preferred to return to work in the households in which they had grown up rather than face the hardships of seeking an independent livelihood. Nonetheless, the statistics of the slave trade are sobering: Matthew S. Hopper has estimated that more than one and a half million enslaved Africans were taken overseas in the nineteenth century, with at least half of them ending up in the Gulf and Arabia. This number peaked around the 1870s, although the market for the major commodities – dates, pearls and cloves – for which slaves provided the crucial manpower continued to expand at least until the early 1930s. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, al-Batinah region in Oman, with its extensive date plantations, ‘was home to the largest population of Africans and their descendants’ according to Hopper (‘Globalization, Slavery and East African Poverty’, p. 13). Iraqi date gardens, especially those in and around Basra, were well served by slaves as well. Slaves also worked in the pearl industry in Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, and they were much needed in the clove plantations of Arab-controlled East Africa. The slave trade in East Africa was disrupted by British anti-slavery efforts, which stopped the flow to the Gulf and Arabia as well as elsewhere. In the words of Hopper (‘Globalization, Slavery and East African Poverty’, p. 19), ‘antislavery became the justification for colonialism’ and the entry of and subsequent spread of British influence in the region. Although slavery was, and is, an abhorrent practice, by making the trade illegal and thus dismantling the structure of the slave trade, the British not only hit at the interests of slave owners (whether merchants, moneylenders or rulers) but created a pool of disenfranchised labour which had to fend for itself when the economy collapsed in the 1930s. Hopper observes (‘Globalization, Slavery and East African Poverty’, p. 17) that, because there was no work to be had in the Gulf and Arabia, ‘many poor Arabs moved to East Africa seeking even menial work in Zanzibar to escape the poverty of mid-century Arabia’. But the social impact of slavery continued to mark Gulf societies for a very long time. Thus Zdanowski concludes that because slavery was essential in the Gulf and provided a steady stream of workers for Gulf economies perennially short of labour, it became a necessary institution, an economic lynchpin that sustained the Gulf and Arabia in periods of boom or bust. In this respect, Zdanowski cites evidence to show that even as late as 1947, and despite the ban on slavery imposed on the Gulf by the British from as early as the 1820s, Baluchis, Yemenis and even inhabitants of the Trucial States, as well as populations of districts neighbouring Arabia and the Gulf, were still being captured and sold to Arab and Persian households. Slavery was only formally abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962 and not in Oman until 1970. In particular, the emotional wounds of slavery continued to resonate until the very present. As Aisha Bilkhair Khalifa, herself a descendant of African slaves, states (‘AfroEmirati’, p. 22),

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It is evident that tribal ideology had the strongest impact on the African slave community. Although slaves lived in close proximity to their masters, they continued to be viewed as racially inferior, as suggested by the naming patterns and idiomatic use [of special terms reserved for] African slaves and their descendants. Yet in an effort to assimilate, slaves appropriated tribal traditions which they contributed and passed on to their children. To encourage their children to integrate, African slaves advocated their participation in tribal activities rather than involving them in African-rooted expressions . . . The forging of a national identity failed to take into consideration the historical role of the African slave in the creation and development of the UAE . There has been no recognition of the African slaves that had assimilated by way of language and religion with the tribal ruling families.

Disenfranchised tribesmen or bidun As has been emphasized elsewhere in this chapter, the movement of tribal sections and groups into districts of southern Iraq, Kuwait and what was to become (after 1932) Saudi Arabia, had been an economic necessity for many and therefore an entirely natural and traditional social phenomenon. Even after the establishment of state borders, the seasonal migration of tribes across new state borders was tolerated more often than not by nascent states. Gradually, however, as friction between neighbouring states over jurisdiction and sovereign borders erupted into conflicts of varying intensity, nomadic populations were obliged to choose sides and to assume the nationalities of the states they resided in. In the best-known incident, large, frequently amorphous, tribal sections flocked to Kuwait in search of work in the oilfields or army in the 1960s. When these people – whom Claire Beaugrand reports as being variously estimated at between 122,000 and 300,000 – sought to regularize their status, they were rebuffed under the Kuwaiti Nationality Law of December 1959. Many of these stateless bidun (‘without’ in Arabic) were left out of the nationalization process, and the granting of citizenship by ‘extra-legal incorporation of tribesmen at the turn of the 1970s’ subsequently stopped altogether, as Beaugrand outlines (‘Statelessness and Administrative Violence’, p. 234). The loyalties of the bidun have been widely questioned by Kuwaiti politicians and non-politicians alike, especially in the years beyond the scope of this chapter and most notably because of their purported roles in the Iran–Iraq war of 1980, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990–91, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As a result of these suspicions, there is evidence that the Kuwaiti government in 1986 went on the offensive, targeting the bidun in the army and police force for gradual replacement by citizens. As a result of selective application of the Law of the Residence of Aliens, Beaugrand notes (‘Statelessness and Administrative Violence’, p. 235) that ‘bidun were given six months to regularize their situation i.e. to provide the Kuwaiti authorities with the same documents as those required from foreigners who had entered the country in full compliance with the provisions of the Law on the Residence of Aliens for the past twenty-seven years’. Other discriminatory measures followed, including forbidding the award of scholarships to bidun children and barring health benefits and further

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education. As it stands today, these people who are in society and yet not of it are still in limbo, awaiting some sort of regularization of their fate. While the bidun of Kuwait have received the most attention, other Gulf States have bidun as well. The bidun of Saudi Arabia are composed of nomadic tribespeople who have crossed the northern border with Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait. Perhaps as many as 30,000 to 50,000 bidun live in Bahrain, mostly consisting of Persians or hawalah (Arabs from the Persian coast of the Gulf who migrated to the Arab coast), many of whom emigrated to Bahrain in the 1930s and 1940s to work in the oilfields. About 10,000 bidun are present in the United Arab Emirates, mostly of Persian, other Asian, or Zanzibari origin.

Lateral divisions: sects and ethnicities There were other divisions of a sectarian, ethnic and/or religious nature that figured prominently throughout the region. The question of sectarian identity has only recently enjoyed academic examination, as shown by Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, edited by Lawrence Potter. In southern Iraq, Yitzhaq Nakash’s studies concluded that southern tribesmen (but not their shaykhs) became Shiʿah over time because of proximity and interaction with the holy cities. However, these new conversions may not have caused a major fissure in the dealings of the new converts with their mostly Sunni shaykhs because it took time to assimilate these new affiliations: the tribesmen who became Shiʿah needed further instruction in the history of their new confession in order to understand the nuances of their new relationship with their shaykhs. Moreover, nothing essentially changed for the newly converted southern tribesman: their obligations to the tribe remained the same, as did their geographical location. Overt sectarianism in Iraq only came about with the migration of Shiʿi tribesmen and fallahin (peasants) to Baghdad and points beyond. There, faced with discrimination generated by the north–south divide, sectarian sentiments developed rapidly. In the Gulf, however, Shiʿah and Sunni communities seem to have developed a different trajectory. A general consensus among scholars who study the phenomenon of sectarianism in the Gulf is that the Shiʿah do not form a united bloc or constituency. The Gulf’s Shiʿah are ethnically diverse, even as nearly all belong to the Ithnaʿashari or Twelver division of Shiʿah. Their numbers include the Arab Baharinah of Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia, Persian communities in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai and elsewhere, and the Lawatiyyah of Oman and the Trucial States, thought to be of Indian origin. Moreover, despite their reportedly strong historical associations with Iran, the Shiʿah living in the Arab states of the Gulf have been and remain divided over their allegiance to the former, so much so that Laurence Louër’s description for a more recent time is even more apt (Transnational Shia Politics, p. 218): ‘the time is over when the Islamic republic could claim unconditional allegiance from all the Shia Islamic movements [and]. . . when one could analyze them as mere proxies of Iranian foreign policy’. Note should also be made of ties of Gulf Shiʿah to Iraqi Shiʿi centres, including pilgrimages to Iraq and the employment of Iraqi Shiʿi religious leaders in various Gulf countries.

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There are further distinctions in this regard. For instance, the differences between the Shiʿah in the Gulf is such that it is difficult to generalize about the development of sectarian communities as a whole; the origins and trajectories of local Shiʿi associations and groups must be studied individually. Thus, while a number of studies have focused on the historical and contemporary reasons for Shiʿi entanglements with an often obdurate government in Bahrain, the acid test of sectarian identity politics and government repression is Saudi Arabia, which seems to have followed more overtly discriminatory policies with regard to its Shiʿi inhabitants since the early twentieth century when the Saudi state first exerted authority over the Eastern Province where most of the kingdom’s Shiʿah live. And yet, sectarian identities, and the clash between politicized Shiʿi groups and local governments all over the Arab Gulf, cannot be the only focus here. There was, and still is today, an element of Gulf national politics that draws in constituencies from all socio-economic sectors or groups. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Shiʿah of Bahrain (as well as of Kuwait) participated in broader opposition and anti-government movements as concerned citizens and nationals. They manned the barricades, calling for equality and the curtailment of gender discrimination, as Bahrainis or Kuwaitis, not as Shiʿis pursuing a particularist sectarian agenda. Ethnic origins have also been seen as problematic in the Gulf. Thus the Baluch community, originally from the Baluchistan homeland that was later to be incorporated into Pakistan and Iran, has had long-standing ties with many shaykhdoms and principalities in the Gulf, going so far as to man the first regular army of Oman in the early twentieth century, as shown by J.E. Peterson. Although the Baluch population in Oman and other Gulf countries was relatively stable and well-assimilated, it still encountered difficulties related to its minority status. Thus, like other more politicized ethnic and sectarian communities in the region, Baluch charities set up to assist coreligionists and co-ethnics in Baluchistan came under suspicion by local authorities, despite the community’s generally quietist attitude. The Baluch may not be even the largest non-Arab element along the Arab littoral. Just as it seems natural that Baluch migrated over the centuries to the Arabian Peninsula, so have Persians made their home on the Arab side of the Gulf while much of the Iranian littoral is ethnically Arab. While the preponderance of foreign labour during the oil era has come to the Gulf from the Indian subcontinent, there is also a very long history of Indian merchants of various ethnic, religious and regional origins resident in various Gulf ports.

Continuities in the oil era In the first decades of the twentieth century, the region witnessed important changes when oil companies began exploration in Arabia and the Gulf region. Their success, beginning in the 1930s, initiated changes that impacted local societies differently and also not simultaneously. At the same time, some developments were consistent throughout the Gulf States. For example, in all the new oil-producing states, two changes stood out clearly. First, ruling families were empowered by virtue of their monopoly on force (in some cases, a tribal army) as well as on revenues generated by

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the new resource, petroleum. The second change consisted of the concomitant disarray of the merchant class, already weakened by the crash in the pearl and dates markets earlier in the twentieth century. Rulers, who in the past were so often in need of immediate cash and therefore indebted to merchants, now became financially independent because of oil revenues. As a result of these fortuitous circumstances and the growing need for unimpeded operation of emerging governments, ruling shaykhs began to reorganize dynastic succession. For instance, Madawi Al-Rasheed notes (A History of Saudi Arabia, p. 72) that ‘the consolidation of a Saudi royal lineage was achieved as a result of two parallel processes [when] first Ibn Saud marginalised members of his own generation (his brothers and nephews) and second, he consolidated his own line of descent (his sons) which eventually developed into a distinct royal group’. In the process, the new states, now flush with oil (or at least on the verge of production) became identified with one predominant branch of the ruling house to the detriment of others, thus reversing the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century trend of shaykhs seizing power (and land) through perennial raids and counter-raids. Making alliances with Western governments or oil companies also served to strengthen the rulers’ grips on power. Thus Ibn Saʿud allied himself with the Americans after the Second World War (and especially with Aramco, the giant oil company that ran the eastern region of Saudi Arabia almost as if it were its own fiefdom), even as the smaller Gulf States stayed firmly wedded to Britain’s guidance and counsel until 1971. In both cases, the newly ascendant Gulf rulers calculated that a strong outside protector had both the advantage of warding off enemies, local or foreign, while possessing the technological know-how and advanced management techniques to lift their societies out of poverty. While losing the position they once had at the pinnacle of their power (i.e. mideighteenth to early twentieth century), not all merchant houses were impoverished as a result of the economic blows of the early twentieth century. Indeed, some ploughed back their pre-oil earnings into heavy construction and auto dealerships in the middle of the century, thus increasing their fortunes. But the most interesting changes by far occurred within the labour sector as disenfranchised and transient workers, slaves or freeborn men, who were almost always of tribal origin, flocked to the new oil camps and towns to rent out their labour. This revolutionary process created the first working classes of the Gulf, and later on, a select few even made the transition into middle-class status as career professionals staffing embryonic Gulf bureaucracies. While Aramco in Saudi Arabia and other Western oil companies in the Gulf, Iraq and Iran, created the spur for this development, older and more traditional commercial centres such as Bahrain also witnessed the emergence of new social classes. Poor rural workers and the urban proletariat flocked to the oil fields, infusing the new oil camps with the older and more distinct traditions of Bahrain. Thus the influx of outsiders, once the cornerstone of the Gulf ’s economy, again became a determining feature in the mid-twentieth century as Persians, Iraqis, Indians, Omanis, Yemenis and others moved to Bahrain or Dhahran, Kuwait or Kirkuk, to work in the oil fields. An oral testimony related by Madawi Al-Rasheed explains the situation (A History of Saudi Arabia, p. 98) with pathos and humour:

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During the second [world] war, we almost starved in Qasim [northern Najd]. Members of my family were poor peasants who looked after the palm groves of a wealthy local. We had already heard from people that some nasranis (Christians) were offering jobs in Hasa for cash. My father decided that I should go and try my luck. I travelled with a Bedouin caravan to ‘American camp’ and was offered a job to carry goods and material. I did all sorts of jobs. For the first time in my life, I found myself with other tribesmen from ʿUtayba, Shammar and Qahtan; each had their stories and dialects. We worked together . . . it was amazing. We had a communal kitchen, it was our ‘restaurant’. We called it matʿam abu rubʿ because they charged a quarter of a riyal for the meal. The food was awful. But the Najdis would not say anything. They were shy; they would not complain. They would not ask for more money or food. . . . When al-lujna al-ʿummaliyya [the Worker’s Committee] told us to ask for more cash and better food, we did not respond. People were not beggars. But when they told us to ask for political rights, we all responded and joined the strikes in 1953. . . . All I wanted to buy for myself was a radio. I wanted to hear what was going on in Palestine and Egypt. Palestinian workers told us about their problems. We listened to the news together.

But this rosy picture was not always the norm. From the beginning, conflicts simmered between local and guest workers, often driven by British political considerations. For instance, Ian J. Seccombe has shown that because Bahraini workers did not possess the technical skills of Iranian skilled and semi-skilled labourers, the (American-owned) Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco) preferred to employ the latter, in the process angering both the shaykh of Bahrain and the British Political Agent, who suspected the Iranians of being the advance guard for a later Persian annexation of the country. Generally, the British much preferred to import Indians because they were a less threatening mix. Their fears were realized in 1938 when a strike at Bapco was attributed to the instigation of Persian workers. Even here, when workers were staging a strike against a major oil company, they were not completely united: a British dispatch intimated that the Iranians had not only incurred the resentment of the government and the British, but of Bahraini co-workers as well. In Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States, the heavy-handed policies of Western oil companies were instrumental in uniting hundreds of oil workers in large demonstrations against maladministration and lack of proper facilities. Robert Vitalis shows that the Aramco administration, for example, was sometimes openly racist and anti-Arab. Aramco eventually moderated its policies and began sending Saudis abroad for training, upgraded the facilities in ‘Arab Camp’, and began works-and-benefits job schemes that would create a more literate and professional working class. Even though some of these education schemes backfired, producing disaffection including from the fiercely nationalistic ʿAbdullah al-Turayqi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister under King Faysal and himself a former oil worker in ‘Arab camp’, the company played a huge role in developing the infrastructure of the country. Even as all this socio-economic turmoil was taking place, urbanization was proceeding apace. Legislation was being revised to accommodate British legal codes and schools and hospitals were being built. Beyond the growth of new social classes

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and the emergence of anti-foreign sentiment (galvanized by Arab nationalist currents in the 1950s and 1960s but also originating within local groups fighting to gain indigenous platforms), there was the unstoppable advance of the distributive state, with its ever-expanding bureaucracy and its intensifying social and economic agendas. In all the Gulf States, there was a consensus that the state had to share a respectable portion of its oil revenues with its citizens. Although social policies espousing the building of schools, dispensaries, power plants and desalination projects became a fact of life in the Gulf, reaping new constituencies for the governments that adopted them, it was also undeniable that a substantial portion of these oil revenues went to shore up the rulers in power as well as their families. The trend towards appointing members of the ruling families to top posts in government ministries became such a deeply entrenched tradition that certain ministries tended to be closely associated with their chief (for example, the Saudi foreign ministry with Saʿud al-Faysal). Michael Herb’s work is particularly instructive in this regard. He argues that there have been roughly two patterns of governance in rentier states. On the one level, Kuwait’s activist parliamentary system ensured that deputies could question government ministers and even demand their recall. However, deputies often choose to avoid challenging the ruling family. This is in large part due to the fact that parliament cannot easily muster the votes to dislodge government ministers who are also representatives of the ruling family (although this has happened on occasion), but it is also due to the tacit understanding that the Al Sabah family are traditionally in charge. On the other hand, for a long time the UAE and Saudi Arabia made no pretence at elected parliamentary representation. From the beginning of the oil era, all the Gulf States have faced the responsibility for distributing oil largesse to their citizenry. While many Gulf States provided public sector jobs to new graduates as a way to help secure a good future for new generations, problems arose in the private sector. Staffed for the most part by foreign nationals, private companies were loath to employ Gulf nationals without the requisite technological skills and were wary of bringing aboard locals whom they could not fire.

Conclusion By 1971, the social stratification that had begun in the eighteenth century with the emergence of detribalized or semi-tribalized migrants and labourers working as seafarers, divers, rope-men and freelance journeymen had produced a complex mix of inhabitants in the Gulf States. No longer did princes and merchants enjoy a nearmonopoly in initiative and control. Instead, the region slowly began to develop a cadre of specialists and professionals, both local and expatriate. This process was engendered and deepened by the sudden discovery of petroleum, the influx of oil enterprises and the growth of company towns where economic opportunities not only attracted local workers but also migrant labour from as far afield as Italy and India and as close as Iran. Concomitant with the expansion of oil production and the huge infrastructure that went with it, the growth of the state created demand for specialized professionals in all sorts of fields. In turn, the expansion of state bureaucracies buttressed the notion

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of civic entitlement and the idea that citizens were eligible for government services by birth right. Although tribal ties and identities are still powerful, they are no longer the only measure for social ranking and belonging among the citizens in any of the Gulf States today.

Bibliographic essay Merchants and rulers. In the literature on the Gulf and Arabia, merchants are considered a dynamic social group who, in some cases, have been behind the rise of the first merchant principalities in the region. The ruling classes in the Gulf sometimes worked in tandem with local merchant groups until the discovery of oil gave the state financial autonomy, making it somewhat independent of merchant concerns. One of the first books written on Bahrain and Kuwait (and its merchants) was by the Palestinian scholar, Ahmad Mustafa Abu-Hakima. Entitled The History of Eastern Arabia, 1750– 1800: The Rise of Bahrain and Kuwait, it was notable for its use of British consular dispatches as well as oral sources. The author followed it with the more detailed The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965. Rosemarie Said Zahlan’s later book, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, was a comprehensive history of all the major Gulf States. At about the same time, Jill Crystal and Jacqueline Ismael released tightly argued studies on the merchant–ruler relationship in key Gulf States. Influenced by issues then prevalent in development studies, Ismael’s earlier book, Kuwait: Social Change in Historical Perspective was revised and updated, appearing in 1993 as Kuwait: Dependency and Class in a Rentier State. Meanwhile, Jill Crystal published Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar. Finally, Khaldoun al-Naqeeb’s pioneering study, released in Arabic in the 1960s, was translated into English as Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective. As the literature on Gulf States and societies grew, several important new interpretations were published of the always-evolving relationship between the two. One of these was Frederick Anscombe’s The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Using Ottoman sources to research the tenuous hold of the Ottoman Empire on Eastern Arabia and other significant Gulf players, he added depth to the conversation on Imperial connections with the Arabian ‘hinterland’. Zakariya Kursun’s The Ottomans in Qatar: A History of Anglo-Ottoman Conflicts in the Persian Gulf further reinforced the importance of using Ottoman sources in writing the history of the Gulf and Arabia. The latest work on the region is that of David Commins, whose The Gulf States: A Modern History is very important in attaching the forgotten neighbours, Iraq and Iran, to the Gulf ’s historical development. Tribes. Perhaps no social group has attracted as much scholarly investigation as the tribes of Arabia, Iraq and the Gulf. While the literature is large and growing rapidly, it is important to lay stress on the fact that most of the earlier work on tribes (i.e. before the 1950s) was written either by explorer-adventurers in search of ‘undiscovered’ districts or regions, or Political Officers in the service of Colonial-era states. Frequently,

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as in the case of Harry St. John (later Abdullah) Philby, Bertram Thomas and John Glubb, they were one and the same. No researcher on the Gulf can afford to pass up Philby’s Arabia of the Wahhabis or his Arabian Days: An Autobiography; Thomas’s Alarms and Excursions in Arabia and Arabia Felix: Across the Empty Quarter; or Glubb’s War in the Desert: An RAF Frontier Campaign and Arabian Adventures: Ten Years of Joyful Service. While Philby and Thomas are very good on Arabian tribes, Glubb’s books are particularly rich on the difficulties of creating an Iraqi army based on tribal recruits. An earlier book was written on Arab tribes in the Arabian Peninsula by the indefatigable traveller Charles M. Doughty; originally published in 1888, the two volumes of Travels in Arabia Deserta detail, among other things, the routes of trade, pilgrimage and tribal migration tying Iraq to Arabia and the Gulf. Since 1950, a steady stream of works has appeared on tribes in the Gulf, the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq. Both general as well as particularist histories, they have raised questions on everything from theory (‘what is a tribe?’) to the marginalization of tribal traditions in the postcolonial Gulf state. Notable examples are books authored by J.E. Peterson such as Oman in the Twentieth Century: Political Foundations of an Emerging State; J.C. Wilkinson on The Imamate Tradition of Oman; Paul Dresch’s Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen and A History of Modern Yemen; Frauke Heard-Bey’s From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, and Madawi Al-Rasheed’s Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidis of Saudi Arabia. Al-Rasheed also co-edited with Robert Vitalis, Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Finally, Alexei Vassiliev’s monumental The History of Saudi Arabia takes pride of place as the one of the most comprehensive books on the changing role of tribes in a pivotal Gulf state. The disenfranchised: women, slaves and sectarian others. Since the 1970s, interest has grown in the status of disenfranchised groups in the Gulf and Arabia. Studies of women in the Gulf and Arabia, and their slow advance towards social and economic equality, have become a staple of women’s journals and other specialist literature. Most studies of women in the Gulf, Iraq and Arabia have been undertaken by UN agencies such as UNESCO or have appeared in the Human Development Report. But there are exceptions. Of particular sociological importance are May Seikaly’s articles on women in Bahrain and the rest of the Gulf, for example, ‘Women and Social Change in Bahrain’. Meanwhile, Nadje Sadig Al-Ali’s Iraqi Women: Untold Stories From 1948 to the Present used oral sources to rewrite the history of Iraq from a women’s perspective. In the last decade, the question of slavery has moved from being a peripheral issue to the centre of debates on social groups in the Gulf and Arabia. While the issue has been studied for a long time by historians of Africa and the Indian Ocean, culminating in edited collections by such notable scholars as Gwynn Campbell, Edward Alpers and Michael Salman in their Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia, the question of slavery and all its potential ramifications for present-day Gulf societies has only lately taken on a dynamic of its own. The two principal authors who have written on slavery in the Gulf and Arabia are Jerzy Zdanowski and Matthew S. Hopper. Zdanowski’s book, Slavery and Manumission: British Policy in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in the First Half of the 20th Century was published after the author brought

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out several articles on the subject. Making intelligent use of a vast trove of manumission documents, he has written a vivid chronicle of slavery, freedom and continued social and economic dependence in the region. Hopper’s revised doctoral dissertation has been published as Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in the Age of Empire; it too relies on manumission documents as well as statistical studies to explain the rise and apparent decline of slavery in the Gulf and Arabia. Finally, and in a similar fashion, the question of ethnicity and sectarianism has all too often been forgotten or been swept under the carpet in histories of the region. Often only discreetly referred to in previous studies of state and society, the issue has now taken on primary significance in any discussion of the Gulf. Two books have been recently published that explicate the theoretical and political questions at the centre of the debate. Fanar Haddad’s Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity is a controversial treatment of Iraq’s long-obscured sectarian history. Lawrence G. Potter edited Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf with important chapters by Justin Gengler and Lois Beck, as well as the other contributors to the volume, that make a number of trenchant and complex arguments that belie the superficiality of the sweeping points made by other, less impartial observers.

Bibliography Abu-Hakima, Ahmad Mustafa. The History of Eastern Arabia, 1750–1800: The Rise of Bahrain and Kuwait. Beirut: Khayats, 1965. Abu-Hakima, Ahmad Mustafa. The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965. London: Luzac, 1983. Ali, Nadje Sadig Al-. Iraqi Women: Untold Stories From 1948 to the Present. London: Zed, 2007. Anscombe, Frederick F. The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Beaugrand, Claire. ‘Statelessness and Administrative Violence: Bidun’s Survival Strategies in Kuwait’. Muslim World, Vol. 101, No. 2 (April 2011), pp. 228–50. Beck, Lois. ‘Iran’s Ethnic, Religious and Tribal Minorities’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (London: C. Hurst, 2013; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 245–324. Beeman, William O. ‘Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis – Their Evolution and Way of Life’. In Lawrence G. Potter, The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 147–59. Campbell, Gwynn, Edward Alpers and Michael Salman. Resisting Bondage in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015. Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. Islam and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Commins, David. The Gulf States: A Modern History. London: I.B Tauris, 2012. Crystal, Jill. Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Doughty, Charles M. Travels in Arabia Deserta. London, 1888. Dresch, Paul. Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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Dresch, Paul. A History of Modern Yemen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Fahd, Abdulaziz H. Al-. ‘The ʿImama vs. the ʿIqal: Hadari–Bedouin Conflict and the Formation of the Saudi State’. In Madawi Al-Rasheed and Robert Vitalis, eds, CounterNarratives: History, Contemporary Society and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 35–75. Fattah, Hala. The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Fuccaro, Nelida. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Ghazal, Amal. ‘Zanzibar: Re-searching the ‘Other Andalus’, Al-Akhbar English, 13 January 2012. Glubb, John Bagot. Arabian Adventures: Ten Years of Joyful Service. London: Cassell, 1978. Glubb, John Bagot. War in the Desert: An R.A.F. Frontier Campaign. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1960. Haddad, Fanar. Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity. London: C. Hurst, 2011. Heard-Bey, Frauke. From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates. London: Longman, 1983; new edn, 1993. Herb, Michael. All in the Family: Absolutism, Revolution and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Herb, Michael. ‘A Nation of Bureaucrats: Political Participation and Economic Diversification in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3 (August 2009), pp. 375–95. Herb, Michael. ‘Princes and Parliaments in the Arab World’. Middle East Journal, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Summer 20014), pp. 367–384. Hijji, Yacoub Yusuf Al-. Kuwait and the Sea: A Brief Social and Economic History. Trans. Fahad Ahmad Isa Bishara. London: Arabian Publishing, 2010. Ho, Engseng. ‘Hadhramis Abroad in Hadhramaut’. In Ulrike Freitag and William ClarenceSmith, eds, Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 131–46. Hopper, Matthew S. Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Hopper, Matthew S. ‘Globalization, Slavery and East African Poverty in the Longue Duree’. Unpublished paper presented to the Conference on Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée, held at the International Institute for the Advanced Studies of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise (ILAS ), Accra, Ghana, 15 July 2010. Ismael, Jacqueline S. Kuwait: Social Change in Historical Perspective. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982. Rev. and updated as Kuwait: Dependency and Class in a Rentier State. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993. Khalifa, Aisha Bilkhair. ‘Afro-Emirati: Historical Community and Identity in Transformation’. Unpublished paper presented at the Gulf/2000 Gulf history conference, American University of Sharjah, 2009. Kursun, Zakariya. The Ottomans in Qatar: A History of Anglo-Ottoman Conflicts in the Persian Gulf. Istanbul: Isis Press, 2002. Louër, Laurence. Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Louër, Laurence. ‘The State and Sectarian Identities in the Persian Gulf Monarchies: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in Comparative Perspective’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (London: C. Hurst, 2013; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 117–42.

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Mughni, Haya al-. Women in Kuwait: The Politics of Gender. London: Saqi Books, 1993; 2nd edn, 2001. Nakash, Yitzhak. The Shiʿis of Iraq. Rev. ed.; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Naqeeb, Khaldoun Hasan al-. Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective. Trans. L.M. Kenny. London: Routledge; Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies, 1990. Onley, James. ‘Britain and the Gulf Shaykhdoms, 1820–1971: The Politics of Protection’. Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University of Foreign Service in Qatar, 2009. Occasional Paper No. 4. Onley, James. ‘Transnational Merchants in the Nineteenth Century Gulf: The Case of the Safar Family’. In Madawi Al-Rasheed, ed., Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), pp. 59–89. Peterson, J.E. Oman in the Twentieth Century: Political Foundations of an Emerging State. London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1978. Peterson, J.E. ‘The Baluch Presence in the Persian Gulf ’. In Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 229–44. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabia of the Wahhabis. London: Constable, 1928. Reprinted London: Frank Cass, 1977. Philby, H. St. John B. Arabian Days: An Autobiography. London: Robert Hale, 1948. Potter, Lawrence G., ed. Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf. London: C. Hurst, 2013; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Rasheed, Madawi Al-. A History of Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Rasheed, Madawi Al-. Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidis of Saudi Arabia. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991. Said Zahlan, Rosemarie. The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Rev. ed.; Reading: Ithaca Press, 1998. Seccombe, Ian J. ‘Labor Migration to the Arabian Gulf: Evolution and Characteristics, 1920–1950’. Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1983), pp. 6–14. Seikaly, May. ‘Women and Social Change in Bahrain’. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (August 1994), pp. 415–26. Thomas, Bertram S. Alarms and Excursions in Arabia. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931. Thomas, Bertram S. Arabia Felix: Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932. Vassiliev, Alexei. The History of Saudi Arabia. London: Al Saqi Books, 2000. Vitalis, Robert. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Rev. ed.; London: Verso Press, 2009. Vitalis, Robert and Madawi al-Rasheed, eds. Counter-Narratives: History, Contemporary Society, and Politics in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Wilkinson, John C. The Imamate Tradition of Oman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Zdanowski, Jerzy. Slavery and Manumission: British Policy in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in the First Half of the 20th Century. Reading: Ithaca Press, 2013.

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Language, Culture and Identity Clive Holes

This chapter primarily explores the social significance of language in the Gulf, in particular in relation to its role as a marker of identity, whether national, ethnic or religious. It further examines salient shared aspects of traditional Gulf culture: verbal art, especially poetry and the narrating of local histories, popular customs, and dress. All of these facets bear witness to the significance of the Gulf ’s geopolitical position, as an area long open to external influences, both from its hinterland and from the sea, and to its history as a region of agriculture, trade and other settled occupations. The details of how these common influences impacted on different areas of the Gulf differ somewhat, in part because of original historical demographic, geographic and ethnic differences. Oman, for example, had a different demographic (and linguistic) history from Kuwait, and this is still reflected in its modern culture, whether in how its people dress, how they speak, even what they look like. There are specificities of this kind in every modern Gulf State. Given space constraints, it will not be possible to treat any of these specificities in great detail; rather, this chapter concentrates on commonalities, which are largely the result of shared historical experiences and influences, in so far as these have impacted on language and culture.

Language and dialect Introduction The dialects of a language can be rich repositories of the cultural and social histories of their speakers, and the Gulf is such a repository. Dialect differences in pronunciation and grammar generally start out as differences of geographical origin, though may later become social signifiers. They are relatively slow to change. Vocabularies change more quickly and are more susceptible to external influences. Both these linguistic phenomena, of long-term structural conservatism on the one hand and frequent lexical innovation on the other, have characterized the speech of the Arabian Gulf. Recent research shows that in several states – Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE ) and Oman – there are still marked structural differences between the dialects of recently (around the last two centuries) sedentarized tribal bedouin on the one hand, and those of more ancient communities of sedentaries on the other. In 263

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the case of Bahrain and eastern Saudi Arabia, these ancient dialect distinctions were, over time, re-invented as markers of sectarian affiliation, Sunni versus Shīʿi. On the other hand, the Arabian side of the Gulf ’s history of contact over many centuries with non-Arab powers and their cultures – India, Persia, Turkey, Portugal, East Africa, Great Britain and the USA – whether as a result of commerce, conquest or political alliance, is reflected in a shared dialectal vocabulary which ignores social boundaries and the borders of the modern nation states. These external influences have produced different strata of borrowings, shared throughout the Gulf, reflecting the nature of the contact with each of them. So, for example, many basic food, cooking, clothing and furniture terms reflect contact with India and Persia; Portugal contributed terms associated with seamanship; Turkey (mediated through Iraqi Arabic) is the source of some military and administrative terminology; and Great Britain and the USA have bequeathed a large vocabulary of loan words associated with twentiethcentury technology, the industrial workplace and consumer goods.

Community and dialect The academic study of Gulf Arabic began only in the late 1950s, the first survey of the dialects being published by Tom Johnstone in 1967, based on field data he collected in 1958–9. In the half-century since then, a more nuanced picture of spoken Gulf Arabic has emerged which takes account of factors like lifestyle and sectarian affiliation. Evidence of what it was like at earlier periods exists in two main forms: government archives, which contain handwritten correspondence between Gulf rulers and other important personages dating back to the early/mid-nineteenth century, well before the advent of mass literacy, and manuscripts of nabatī poetry, that is, poems written in an artistic form of the colloquial language, a few of which date back to the late eighteenth century. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, letters, personal or official, appear to have been little more than written-down versions of the signatories’ normal dialectal speech. Although the nature of the Arabic script obscures many details of pronunciation, spelling errors reveal systemic ‘interference’ from the dialect of the writer, and abundant divergences from the grammar of the standard language, not dissimilar to those of today. From around 1920, when typewritten letters first start to appear, the language becomes more standardized, no doubt due to the employment of professional secretaries who could write correct Literary Arabic. It is more difficult to draw reliable inferences about the everyday colloquial language of the time from nabatī poetry, which, like poetry in many languages, uses a more elevated diction different from everyday speech. In many areas of the Gulf, the way one speaks, like the way one dresses, has long been a marker of identity of one kind or another. In the Kuwait of the 1950s, for example, intertribal differences were clearly apparent in the speech of its inhabitants. Different bedouin dialects existed side by side as a result of migration and settlement of tribes from other parts of Arabia, and were ranked by their speakers as more or less ‘pure’ (and therefore prestigious). In Bahrain and the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, two different types of Arabic dialect have long existed side by side, one spoken by the Bahārnah – a term which is essentially ethnic, not religious or national (though all

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Bahārnah, whichever Gulf country they live in are Arabic-speaking Twelver Shiʿah) – and the other by the so-called ʿArab (all of them Sunnis), a term which is used by all to designate the Bahrainis of tribal bedouin descent. The two groups live in separate villages and neighbourhoods in the main towns, and, until recently, pursued different occupations and lifestyles. In northern Oman, a major ‘ecological’ dialect split still divides the country: on the one hand, there are the village-based, river-valley farming populations of the mountains, and on the other, the still semi-nomadic bedouin tribes of the deserts and steppe. Special tradesmen’s languages used to exist in the Gulf that crossed borders. One such was boatbuilders’ lingo, attested as late as the 1970s for Bahrain, with the same terminology having also been recorded for boatbuilders in Kuwait. Its purpose seems to have been to prevent anyone overhearing understanding what was being said. The words of this lingo were not confined to technical terms to do with boatbuilding (which were highly specialized anyway) but everyday words like ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘to come’, ‘to go’.

Linguistic minorities In Oman and neighbouring regions of Yemen, there are several speech communities whose languages are not Arabic, though they have absorbed much Arabic vocabulary. These are known as the Modern South Arabian Languages: Mehrī (c.140,000 speakers), Jibbālī (or Sherī) (c.30,000 speakers), Harsūsī (c.2,000 speakers), Hobyōt (c.