Page 8 - Arabian Gulf Intellegence

Sea with its shoals, reefs and storms has always been difficult for navigation. From
ancient times it was safer and probably not slower to send goods northwards from
Aden by camel rather than by ship and, reading the accounts of early travellers in
Arabia, one is struck by how few of them managed a safe, let alone an agreeable
passage, to Jeddah or Mocha. Far better was the route from Iskanderun to Basra or
Kuwait and thence down the Gulf. Heavy goods travelled in caravans of up to 5000
camels, often escorted by 250 armed men as guards against marauding beduins, and
took about eighty days. A faster service, known from the end of the eighteenth
century as the Desert Mail, could do the journey in several days less than three
weeks. It was by this means that Bombay learned that Nelson had destroyed the
French fleet at the Battle of the Nile and that the threat of an invasion by Bonaparte
had receded. However the previous year there had been a challenge to the security of
this route when a British merchant ship was captured and subsequently a warship
attacked by Arab sailors.
About 1745 a religious scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab whose admini­
stration of the Holy Law, the Shariah, had proved too rigorous for a loose-living
community, sought refuge with the ruler of Daraiyyah, Muhammad ibn Sa’ud, and
this alliance of religious enthusiasm and tribal muscle led to the movement which its
adherents called the Muwahhidun (Unitarians), its opponents the Wahhabis and the
British sailors the Warbees. Preaching the absolute unity and uniqueness of God, and
that salvation could be found only in a complete return to the kind of Islamic society
that had existed in the time of the Prophet, they attacked all those who did not share
these views. Ibn Khaldun remarked that few practices are more gratifying than
despoiling the enemies of God and taking their possessions for the use of the faithfuL
They raided from the Yemen to Aleppo and from the Shia shrines of Iraq to the Gulf
of Oman. While on the coast they converted the Qawasim (Joasmee to the British)
tribe of Ras al-Khaymah which proceeded to conduct the ‘holy war’ by sea, sharing
some of the proceeds with the head of the House of Sa’ud, whom they regarded as
their Imam.
The effort of the Qawasim was on an astonishing scale, unless British figures were
wildly exaggerated. It was reported that at their peak the Qawasim had at sea
between 18,000 and 25,000 men in about 900 boats. In 1805 they attempted to seize
a large East India Company cruiser and were only just driven off but two merchant­
men owned by the British Resident at Basra were takea Repression of piracy was
complicated by the fact that all Arab vessels went armed and none had any official
documents. A pirate ship could thus exchange courteous greetings with a warship too
powerful to attack and, the moment that it had dropped below the horizon, proceed
to capture a poorly-armed trader. When a strong naval flotilla passed their shores, the
Qawasim simply hid their fleet in the numerous creeks along the uncharted coast; the
entrances to these Khawrs were unknown to the British and invisible in the misty
conditions that usually prevailed. Their area of operations was widened by the fact
that the Persian shore of the Gulf was occupied by Arab tribes related or allied to the
Qawasim.
In 1808 Arab ships were raiding off the Indian coast and a British cruiser was
captured and her crew massacred. In 1810 an expedition from India captured Ras
al-Khaymah and destroyed some pirate vessels but the majority of the Qawasim ships
remained undetected and raiding continued. Attacks were also made by the Qawasim
on the fleet owned by Sayyid Said of Muscat, whose Ibadhi faith they regarded as
particularly obnoxious.
In 1818 a British ship was captured less than 70 miles from Bombay and this was
probably the final blow that spurred the Government into action. It was decided to
repress piracy once and for all, and a force of three thousand men was equipped lor
the task. A handbook was prepared for the use of the expeditionary force and that.