Page 206 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 203

century and a half ago, when one of the principal sections, the Al Bu Falasah,
renounced its allegiance to the Al Bu Falah and in 1833 migrated to Dubai,
then part of the Qasimi domains. Within a few years the Al Bu Falasah had
succeeded both in becoming masters of Dubai and in freeing themselves from

the overlordship of the Qawasim, though they continued to side with the latter
in their contests with Abu Dhabi. For the rest of the century Dubai had an
uneventful history. It remained more or less free from Wahhabi influence, and
the Al Maktum family, despite their continuing animosity towards the Al
Nihayan, cultivated good relations with the Al Nihayan’s allies, the Al Bu Said

sultans of Muscat, mainly for commercial reasons. It was commerce which
most occupied the Al Maktum, and their energy and application made Dubai
the foremost port and market of the Trucial Coast, so that it weathered the
economic stresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries better
than any of the other sheikhdoms. The Al Maktum played no significant part in
the politics of Trucial Oman in this century, possessing little if any influence
among the tribes of the interior, although Dubai often afforded a refuge to

tribes from neighbouring territories disaffected with their rulers or disposses­
sed of their lands. Dubai itself experienced some upheavals in the 1930s,
brought on by disputes within the Al Maktum which degenerated into
bloodshed on occasions. These were largely resolved on the eve of the Second
World War when the present ruler, Rashid ibn Said, took over the effective

government of the shaikhdom as regent for his father, Said ibn Maktum. When
Shaikh Said (who had ruled since 1912) died in 1958, Rashid succeeded him.
Throughout these years the Al Maktum’s feud with the Al Nihayan of Abu
Dhabi continued undiminished, although the two combined in the 1920s to
resist attempts by the Saudis to return to Trucial Oman. The enmity between
the two families reached its height in 1945, when it erupted into open warfare

which continued at spasmodic intervals until 1948. Thereafter the Al Maktum
continued to snipe at the Al Nihayan whenever they could, affording refuge
and comfort to the latter’s renegade subjects and ostentatiously aligning them­
selves with opponents of the Al Nihayan, such as the Al Thani of Qatar. Not
until negotiations had begun for the formation of the UAE did the Al Maktum

see fit to moderate their spite, and even then Rashid ibn Said Al Maktum was
the most vehement of the rulers in his insistence that the incipient federation
should lend no support to Abu Dhabi in its frontier dispute with Saudi Arabia.
Such, in brief, were the historical legacies which the principal members of
the UAE brought to its inauguration, and which still dog its existence today.
The federation possesses no innate cohesion, just as it possesses no sound basic

economy. The provisional constitution of the U A E is (despite its length and its
elaborate provisions) essentially a treaty of alliance among the rulers of the

seven shaikhdoms, designed to regulate formal relations among them and to
preserve their position as the ultimate sources of authority within their shaikh-
oms. It is also constructed to underline the primacy within the federation of