Page 192 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers' Apprentices 189

Shaikh Ahmad ibn Ali, like his father Shaikh Ali ibn Abdullah before him,
ruled largely by a policy of indifference, interspersed with occasional displays
of severity. He spent the greater part of his time out of the shaikhdom,

preferring to hunt bustard in Persia or Pakistan to shooting snipe in Qatar. His
lengthy absences abroad - he often stayed for months on end at his villa near
Geneva - led in April 1970 to his being compelled, under pressure from both
his relatives and the British authorities in the Gulf, to transfer authority for the
conduct of Qatar’s affairs to his younger cousin, Shaikh Khalifah ibn Hamad,
another grandson of the former ruler, Abdullah ibn Jasim. The change was

made by the promulgation on 2 April 1970 of a ‘provisional fundamental law’, a
long-winded document of seventy-seven articles which was apparently
designed to serve as the shaikhdom’s constitution pro tempore. It declared Qatar
to be an independent, sovereign, Arab state, with Islam as the state religion and

the sharia as the fundamental source of legislation. Executive power was vested
in the ruler, assisted by the deputy ruler and a council of ministers appointed
by the ruler. An advisory council was also to be created, consisting of the
council of ministers and twenty-three members appointed by the ruler, twenty
of them from a panel of forty candidates to be elected by the adult, male citizens

of Qatar.
Shaikh Khalifah ibn Hamad, a much more forceful and energetic character
than his cousin, Shaikh Ahmad, had been deputy ruler of Qatar for the better
part of a decade. It had long been common knowledge in Dauhah that he
aspired to become ruler, without necessarily waiting upon the intervention of

mortality to remove his cousin. He had been restrained from gratifying his
ambition primarily by factional rivalry within the manifold ranks of the Al
Thani. Confirmed as de facto ruler by the demarche of April 1970, he had only to
await a suitable opportunity to transform his position into a permanent one.
Shaikh Ahmad unwittingly paved the way for him by failing to return to Qatar

for the celebration of the shaikhdom’s independence on 3 September 1971,
electing instead to issue a formal announcement of the occasion from his villa
near Geneva. Six months later, while Ahmad was happily hunting with his
falcons in Persia in the last week of February 1972, Khalifah ibn Hamad

declared him deposed and proclaimed himself ruler in his place. Shaikh
Ahmad, not wholly disconsolate at the turn events had taken, took up resi­
dence with his father-in-law, Shaikh Rashid ibn Said of Dubai. Thereafter he
divided his time contentedly between Dubai and his villa beside Lake Leman,
where at length he died in 1977.
Under Shaikh Khalifah ibn Hamad the shaikhdom has made the familiar

strides in construction, education, medical services, housing and the provision
of the other amenities characteristic of the system of social welfare now
obtaining in the minor oil-rich states of the Gulf. There is no doubt that the lot
of the ordinary Qatari has improved considerably in the past half-a-dozen years,

an improvement which owes its origin more to the greatly augmented oil