Page 462 - Truncal States to UAE_Neat

Notes to Chapter Four

tribesmen and of impoverished town dwellers snatched people from
their homes or elsewhere and look them to Hamasah village, from where
they were sold into slavery. They usually picked on Baluchis, but also
black people and slaves who were not yet freed were taken; there were
some incidents where even tribal people were the unfortunate victims.
See also Thesiger, Arabian Sands, pp. 263ff.
53 Dibah, Kalba, and Falaj al 'Ali were all governed at some period in
recent history by slaves.
54 In the more remote communities it was not uncommon to use the
shoulder blade of dead domestic animals to write on.
55 The kutlabs were still used for the girls when early this century the al
Ahmadlyah School was opened in Dubai; this school survived all
economic problems of the following decades and had in 1935 about 250
boys. When the girls graduated from their Koran course they would go
together with their mothers and the teacher round the town chanting
and calling on merchants and homes collecting funds; the celebration
was called tamlmah. For details of the beginnings of more formal edu­
cation see, Abdullah, Muhammad Morsy, The United Arab Emirates. A
Modern History, London, 1978, pp. 107ff.
56 Such purpose-built kuttabs were quite common throughout Oman; they
were usually simple buildings with a few low windows and one of the
short walls was partly or completely open to admit enough light. There
is one such kuttab in the seasonally inhabited capital of the Jannabah at
'Izz.
57 Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1961, “Shari'a", p. 525 (pp. 524-9).
Compare also the useful definitions of Islam and sharl’ah in Bernard
Lewis The Arabs in History', 4th edn., 1968, pp. 133f.
58 The sunnah comprise the Prophet Muhammad’s deeds, utterances,
judgements and implied approvals which were recorded and help to
make God’s law intelligible—and therefore obligatory—for man.
59 See also above, 122ff.
60 The first qadhi who was officially appointed by Shaikh Sa'Id bin
Maktum some time before 1911 was Shaikh Muhammad bin 'Abdul
Salam from Morocco. After his death in the 1940s he was succeeded by
Shaikh 'Abdul Rahman bin Hafidh, an Arab from Lingah, and Shaikh
Mubarak bin 'Ali bin Bashlt. a native of Dubai. They were succeeded by
Shaikh Ahmad bin Hasan from Bukha in Ru’us al Jibal, who was
trained in a Sunni madrasah for religious studies on Qishim Island.
Shaikh Saif Muhammad Shanghai was brought from Morocco as a
second qadi. In Abu Dhabi one of the qadis appointed by Shaikh
Shakhbut, Shaikh Badr bin Yusuf, was a Bahraini; earlier, during the
first decade of the 20th century a man from Tunis, Muhammad bin 'Ali
Buzainah had been qadi in Abu Dhabi. At that same time the qudah of
R’as al Khaimah and Sharjah both came from Najd. the former was

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