Page 181 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

178 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

of popular support, a ‘street’, a task which may prove more difficult than

surface appearances in the shaikhdom would suggest. For instance, the Per­
sians who form the greater part of the labour force would probably be’reluctant

for religious and racial reasons to join in a revolt led by Sunni Arabs, especially
as there is no guarantee, but rather the opposite, that a revolutionary regime
would make their lives any more tolerable. On the other hand, they and their
fellow Arab labourers (most of them Omanis, Dhufaris, Hadramis or Yemenis)

are politically inexperienced and may be fair game for Palestinian or Kuwaiti
agitators. Some PFLO cells have been uncovered in Kuwait since the early
months of 1973, and a number of South Yemenis and Dhufaris have been
deported from the shaikhdom. Doubtless other cells of a similar kind still exist,
sustained and encouraged by the South Yemeni embassy in Kuwait, and
probably by the Iraqis as well. Yet although the Kuwaiti authorities will
occasionally act with dispatch and scant ceremony to expel some

troublemakers, they hesitate to undertake a thorough rooting out of all the
conspirators, terrorists and other riff-raff that nest in the shaikhdom lest they
compromise Kuwait’s reputation for ‘radicalism’ in pan-Arab affairs. The
assiduous cultivation of this reputation over the years may prove before long to
have been a costly, even fatal, indulgence on the part of the Al Sabah and their

fellow oligarchs.

The Gulf state which most resembles Kuwait, although there are great
differences between them in wealth and size of population, is Bahrain. Both are
city-states with a strong seafaring tradition, both are ruled by merchant
dynasties, both in the past achieved consequence and prosperity as trading

entrepots and by mercantile enterprise abroad, and both are today, by the
standards obtaining along the Arabian shore, comparatively advanced in
political and economic terms. The similarity is by no means coincidental, for
the ruling family of Bahrain, the Al Khalifah, is related by blood and common
historical traditions to the Al Sabah of Kuwait. Both families belonged to the
Utubi clan - a subsection of the far-flung and amorphous Anaiza tribal confe

eration of north-central Arabia - which migrated to the Gulf coast at some time
in the seventeenth century. After settling for a time in the vicinity of the Shatt
al-Arab, the Utub moved to Kuwait in the second decade of the eighteen
century and made it their home. Half a century later, in 1766, the Al,Kha
uprooted itself, and accompanied by a third Utubi clan, the Al Jalanim , 1
migrated to Qatar. The two families settled in the north-western corner ° e

peninsula, at Zubara, where they laid the foundations of what was later to e a
town of some substance, the ruins of which are still visible today. From u a
they began trading with Bahrain, which was then under the contro o
governor of Bushire on the Persian coast. As time went by the Persian n

the island progressively weakened, until in 1783 it was broken altoge er
die Al Khalifah and Al Jalahimah, backed by a force of tribesmen