Page 203 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

200 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

also occurred in Kuwait and Qatar.) Since only the native inhabitants of the
shaikhdoms were allowed to own land, almost unlimited opportunities opened
up to them, as immigrants flooded in in their thousands, to make rapid
fortunes from property speculation. The activity was fully encouraged by the
local rulers; for not only did it afford them a convenient means of distributing a
share of the oil wealth to their subjects in the form of land grants and building

loans but it was also an activity closely attuned to the limited skills and talents
possessed by the latter. Moreover, since the native tribesmen had, or were
quickly acquiring, a strong sense of their own privileged position vis-a-vis the
Uitlanders, it was a comparatively simple matter, with the money and the

opportunities that were thrust upon them, to transform themselves overnight
into a rentier class.
Having given their subjects a surfeit of bread, the rulers of the three
wealthier shaikhdoms are also indulging them with circuses on a grand scale.
Again, as might be expected, fantasy reigns unchecked. At Abu Dhabi a
sporting complex is being built at a cost of $225 million, capable, so the local

Barnums proclaim, of accommodating the Olympic games. Another sports
palace being constructed at Dubai at a cost of $120 million includes a tra­
ditional feature of the Arabian scene — an ice-skating rink. At Sharjah the ruler
has had two grass football fields laid, at a cost that does not bear contemplation.

Hundreds of tons of soil were brought across the mountains from Kalba, on the
Gulf of Oman, to make the pitches, and 20,000 gallons of water a day are
required to keep the grass alive - all this in a part of the world where cultivable
land is in desperately short supply and water is still a precious commodity. A
similar profligacy in the use of water from the Abu Dhabi villages in the

Buraimi oasis has reduced the water table there - which depends upon the
run-off from the nearby Hajar mountains of Oman - to such a level that water
has had to be pumped back to the oasis by pipeline from the desalination plant

in Abu Dhabi.

Politically, the U A E presents a scene no less disorderly than the economic one.
For the better part of two centuries the tribes of the coast and hinterland have
either been at one another’s throats or have co-existed in a state of uneasy
peace. The consequences of their numerous feuds and conflicts are V1V^
illustrated by the boundaries of the seven shaikhdoms, which were define or

the first time by the British authorities in the Gulf in the 1950s for the purpose
of oil exploration, and which on a map resemble the pieces of a singu ar y

perverse jigsaw puzzle. nf rhe
Throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century the politics

coast was dominated by a contest for supremacy between the Qasimi s ai
doms of Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah and the Bani Yas tribal con e er
Abu Dhabi. Though the Qawasim themselves were a comparative y
tribe, they united under their leadership nearly all the tribes inh