Page 168 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers' Apprentices 165

element of cohesiveness, any basic concept of order and balance, even any valid
principle of authority. Masses of money and hordes of migrants have poured

into the Gulf states, and with the money and the migrants have come not only
novelties and gadgets of a material kind but also political, intellectual and
cultural ideas and influences, most of them strange, many of them seductive and
some of them eminently disturbing. Altogether these forces have debauched
the peoples of the Gulf as severely as they were ravaged by periodic outbreaks

of plague and cholera in previous centuries, and to an extent as alarming
as the span of time in which the contagion has occurred has been brief.
The process has been going on longest, naturally, in the states which were
the first to benefit from oil revenues - Kuwait and Bahrain. Over the past thirty
years Kuwait has been a byword for what happens to a small desert shaikhdom
when it is inundated by waves of oil money. What has gone less remarked,
amid the superlatives and statistics which have become the standard argot for
describing the Kuwait phenomenon, is the social and cultural transformation
that has overtaken its people. Before the oil boom the population of Kuwait,

the bulk of which was Arab, though with a distinct Persian minority, consisted
predominantly of Bedouin, fishermen, sailors, craftsmen and labourers, with a
small number of merchant families, including the ruling house of Al Sabah, in
the ascendant. Within a decade, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the
population doubled - from over 100,000 to over 200,000 - as foreigners poured
in to build and work in the new Kuwait rising by the waters of the Gulf -

Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Jordanians, Omanis, Hadramis, Persians,
Indians, Pakistanis, Baluchis and Europeans. Over the next decade the popu­
lation doubled again, and it went on growing until by 1976-7 it was reckoned to
be in the vicinity of a million - of which 55 per cent at least were foreigners. (In
1970 the proportion was 63 per cent.)
With untrammelled access to the oil revenues and the pick of opportunities
for mercantile ventures at home and investment abroad, the Al Sabah and the
leading merchant families, some two dozen in number, became the richest

oligarchy the Gulf has ever known. A good proportion of the oil revenues was
spent by the Al Sabah in keeping their subjects happy, the native Kuwaitis
becoming, to all intents and purposes, a privileged class of state pensioners.
Money was channelled to them by various devices, such as the donation of land
which was subsequently purchased by the state at inflated prices; free school­
ing and medical services were provided on a lavish scale, and housing was made

available on terms that amounted to an outright gift. Kuwaiti schools were the
wonder of the Arab world for their imaginative architecture and costly equip­
ment, while the Kuwaiti welfare system was ritually extolled by Western
newspapermen as the very perfection of enlightenment. As with most of these
latter-day wonders, however, and welfare systems in general, there were strong
indications that the quality of the education and medical services purveyed was
in inverse proportion to the splendour of the surroundings.