Page 172 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 169

opposed, however, to any actual manifestation of Turkish authority in Kuwait,
or to allowing their freedom of action to be inhibited by their status as
dependants of the Sublime Porte. Their situation, in short, was very much as
the British political resident in the Gulf in 1863 described it: ‘The Arabs
acknowledge the Turks as we do the 39 Articles, which all accept and none

remember.’
Occasionally, however, the Kuwaitis were tripped up by their own clever­
ness, as in the case of the seaborne slave trade, one of the staples of Kuwait’s
commerce. At the request of the British government the Ottoman sultan in
January 1847 issued a firman, or imperial decree, forbidding the transport of
slaves by sea into Turkish ports on the gulf. Seeking to evade the prohibition,
Kuwait dhows stopped flying the Turkish flag and flew instead their own

scarlet ensigns. They discovered, however, when they called to trade at British
ports in India, that, since they were not flying the Turkish flag, they were no
longer eligible for lower rates of entry duty on the goods they were carrying.
Hurriedly, therefore, they ran up the Turkish flag, which at once made them
vulnerable to search and detention at sea by British cruisers on anti-slave-trade
patrol. Wryly the Kuwaitis acknowledged defeat and thenceforth conducted
their slave-trading by clandestine means, after the fashion of the other seafarers
of the Gulf.

Kuwait’s relations with the Turks and the British continued in much the
same fashion for the rest of the century. When the Turks in 1871 occupied the
province of al-Hasa, to the south of Kuwait, wresting control of it from the Al
Saud, the bulk of the Turkish expeditionary force was transported in Kuwaiti
vessels. Later in that year the shaikh of Kuwait, Abdullah ibn Sabah, under­
took a mission on behalf of the commander of the expeditionary force to try to

persuade the aged ruler of Qatar to acknowledge Ottoman authority. Abdullah
ibn Sabah’s successor, Muhammad ibn Sabah, was murdered by his half­
brother, Mubarak, in May 1896. Immediately on his accession Mubarak ibn
Sabah petitioned the Ottoman sultan for recognition as ruler of Kuwait, and
investiture, like his predecessors, with the rank of qaim maqam, or governor,
and the title of pasha. The Porte prevaricated, thinking the time might have
come to establish its authority more directly in Kuwait; but in the end, through

the judicious application of bribes at Constantinople and Baghdad, Mubarak
got his way. At the end of 1897 an imperial trade (decree) was issued, appoint­
ing him qaim maqam andpasha of Kuwait, the shaikhdom itself being officially
classified as a qaza (lesser district) of th&sanjaq (district) of Najd in the vilayet
(province) of Basra.
Still fearful that the Turks might try to unseat him, Mubarak made over­
tures to the British political resident in the Gulf for Kuwait to be placed under
ritish protection. The British themselves were becoming worried by signs of

ussian interest in the upper Gulf, by French activities at Muscat, and by the
schemes then being put to the Porte by German and Russian entrepreneurs for