Page 188 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 185

mcnts in Bahraini society - and they include the peasantry as well as the
merchant oligarchy and the religious notables - do not want any departure
from shaikhly rule, other perhaps than an enlargement of the ruler’s diwan or

council into a wider consultative body. Many of the island’s self-styled ‘pro­
gressives’ would probably settle for a broadening of the representative and
elective component in the present system of government, and for correspond­
ingly greater opportunities for them to display their talents and incidentally
add to their store of this world’s goods. For the mass of Bahrainis the attain­
ment of the latter goal would probably suffice. The wilder fringe of Bahrain’s
political life, the putative enrages who preach the gospel of Marxist-Leninist

salvation, have little hope of acquiring anything more than a nuisance value
unless they can raise a ‘street’ from the urban proletariat. A network for the
organization of sedition certainly exists in the trade unions and the miscellany
of recreational clubs, and there is equally no lack of demagogues, especially
among the soi-disant students, some of whom have made the condition into a
permanent career. Yet the bulk of the urban proletariat consists of immigrants,

mostly Omanis, Baluchis and Persians; while, on the reverse side of the coin, a
good proportion of the immigrant community is made up of respectable and
law-abiding merchants, clerks and craftsmen - Persians, Indians, Pakistanis
and others. To lure any of them to the barricades in an uprising designed to set
up a radical regime composed of Marxist-Leninist Arab nationalists would be
a fairly tough undertaking.

Few of the political tremors which have disturbed Kuwait and Bahrain have
been felt in Qatar. There has always been a certain formlessness about Qatar as
a political entity, which might almost be taken as a reflexion of its geographical
drabness. It is a barren, featureless peninsula, without even a wadi to break its
desolate monotony. Until the coming of oil a generation ago its inhabitants led

the meanest and harshest existence of any in the Gulf, surviving by fishing,
pearling and the raising of goats and camels. For much of the nineteenth
century (and for at least three decades before then) Qatar lay under the
authority of the Al Khalifah rulers of Bahrain, who, it will be recalled, had
migrated from Kuwait to Zubara in the north-western corner of Qatar in 1766.
The Al Khalifah’s hold on the peninsula was first challenged by the Saudis of
Najd in the first decade of the century. At irregular intervals thereafter,

whenever the Al Saud were strong enough to compel compliance with their
demands, they exacted tribute from the Al Khalifah in return for an under­
taking to refrain from molesting the latter’s possessions in Qatar. The Al
Khalifah in their turn exacted tribute from the Al Thani shaikhs of Dauhah, on
the east coast of the peninsula, then as now the principal town of Qatar. Part of
the tribute went to subsidize the Naim, the leading nomadic tribe of Qatar
who were loyal to the Al Khalifah.

Encouraged by the Saudis, the Al Thani attempted in 1851 to throw off their