Page 182 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices I79

from the nomads and fishermen of Qatar, descended on Bahrain and put its
garrison to flight.
Having conquered Bahrain the Al Khalifah had to struggle hard for the next
few decades to keep it. Soon after the conquest they quarrelled with the Al
Jalahimah, who retired to Qatar and from there waged unrelenting warfare
upon Bahrain’s trade and shipping. The Persians, unreconciled to the loss of
the island, constantly threatened to recover it by force. They lacked the naval
means, however, to make good their threats. The ruler of Muscat, Saiyid

Sultan ibn Ahmad, invaded and took the island in 1800 and again a year later,
though he held it only for a further year before being compelled, after the Al
Khalifah shaikhs had appealed for help to the Wahhabis of Najd, to give it up.
Wahhabi intervention was bought at a high price: the Al Khalifah were forced
to acknowledge allegiance to the Saudi amir and to pay him an annual tribute.
After a time the Al Khalifah ceased to pay the tribute, a dereliction which was
not taken kindly by the Al Saud. For more than half a century thereafter

successive Saudi amirs were to attempt, by menaces and a variety of underhand
means, to compel obedience and the payment of tribute from the Al Khalifah.
Saiyid Said ibn Sultan of Muscat tried in 1828, with the aid of the shaikh of Abu
Dhabi, to repeat his father’s feat of capturing Bahrain, only to be bloodily
repulsed. Mehemet AH of Egypt, after his occupation of central Arabia in
1838-9, demanded the submission of Bahrain, and the Al Khalifah obliged
him. At the same time, however, they made a vague gesture of acknowledging
the suzerainty of Persia, reckoning that one submission would cancel out the

other. The ruse seemed to work, and twenty years later they tried it again,
submitting in rapid succession to the Turkish vali of Baghdad and the Persian
prince-governor of Fars.
All these manoeuvres had been watched by the British authorities in the Gulf
with some amusement, not unmixed with a certain exasperation. The conflict­
ing claims to sovereignty over Bahrain had been the principal reason why no
attempt had been made to bring Bahrain into the trucial system along with the

maritime shaikhdoms of the lower Gulf. Yet the very existence of these claims
posed a latent threat to the maritime peace of the Gulf, since the claimants,
whether Turks, Persians or Saudis, might at any time have tried to enforce
them. Since they lacked the naval resources to do so, there was every chance
that they would make good the deficiency by erdisting the aid of the maritime
tribes of the Arabian shore. On several occasions the British had intervened to
prevent such an occurrence, not so much for the Al Khalifah’s sake as to keep
the peace at sea. The rufing shaikh’s dual submission to the Turks and Persians

m 1859, however, proved too much for British patience; and when in the next
eighteen months he proceeded to harry shipping in the waters around Bahrain
and to oppress British Indian traders on the island, confident that his alleged
status as an Ottoman/Persian vassal would shield him from retribution, the
British government in India decided that the time had come to disabuse him of