Page 45 - Protestant Missionary Activity in the Arabian Gulf

30

some of the profits to the Gulf Arabs. Thus all the Arabs

had to do was sit back, let the foreigners do the work, and

then collect their share of the profits. With such an ar­

rangement, who could resist? Even staunchly Wahhabi Saudi

Arabia was soon caught up in the "black gold rush." Where

before all foreigners had been categorically banned, a policy

of laissez-passer was quickly instituted to expedite the

oil development.

Oil was first discovered at Bahrain in 1933. A con­

sortium of foreign oil companies quickly formed the Bahrain

Petroleum Company and signed a contract with the local officials

to ensure a continual flow of the precious crude oil. In

the following year the Kuwait Oil Company signed a seventy-

five year contract with the Kuwaiti government for explora­

tion and development rights. The Anglo-American Iraqi Pet­

roleum Company secured development rights in Iraq while the

Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) obtained a monopoly in

Saudi Arabia. Muscat, alone of the countries in which the

Arabian Mission had stations was untouched by the oil boom,

not by choice, but rather as a simple result of the failure

to find oil there.

The exploitation of the oil itself did not have a major

impact on the Gulf, Most of the oil, after all, was not re­

fined in the Middle East, but was rather carried off to

Ireland, the Netherlands or the United States for direct use

or refinement into some sort of petrochemical product. But

the avalanche of material wealth that descended on the Gulf