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Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Middle-Eastern political stage and even in the larger theatre of international
affairs.
It is precisely these qualities and aspirations that have made Zayid highly
vulnerable to the carpet-baggers and mountebanks who now infest Abu Dhabi
and the other oil shaikhdoms. Of the hundreds or even thousands of emigre

Egyptians, Palestinians, Syrians and Iraqis who reside in Abu Dhabi only a
minority are men of ability and integrity whose presence confers a positive
benefit upon the shaikhdom. The rest are mostly self-seekers who conspire and
compete among themselves for position, money, preferment or advantage,
constantly warring over the spoils which have so easily come their way, and

ceaselessly intriguing to supplant their rivals with nominees or placemen of
their own - Egyptians wrangling with Iraqis, Iraqis with Syrians, Syrians with
Palestinians, Palestinians with Egyptians. They are particularly numerous in
the local and federal bureaucracies, where they have to all intents and purposes
taken over the running of the shaikhdom’s and the federation’s affairs.
Towards the ministers who are their nominal masters they exhibit both servil­

ity and disdain, their manner outwardly fawning but inwardly mocking.
Zayid’s court is packed with a host of impostors, intriguers, sycophants and
flaneurs (most of them northern Arabs), who ceaselessly jostle with one another
for his attention and favour. Flattering, wheedling, shamelessly soliciting for
personal ends, they swarm about the person of the ruler like so many flies,

constantly striving to gain his ear and deny it to others not of their number,
shutting him off more and more from his own people, and even from reality
itself.
It is the wealth of Abu Dhabi that lures and binds these creatures, whether as
a means of lining their own pockets or in order to divert it into political and
financial enterprises abroad. The shaikhdom itself interests them not at all.

They display a remarkable ignorance of its past, its traditions, its very geo­
graphy - indeed, not merely of Abu Dhabi but of the Arabian peninsula as a
whole. Towards the native inhabitants of Abu Dhabi they act with arrogance
and condescension - which makes a mockery of their effusive professions of
loyalty to the shaikhdom and their endless cant about Arab brotherhood. To

these sophisticates the spectacle of so much wealth, and consequently so much
power, in the hands of backward Bedouin is an affront, especially as they feel
that they themselves could put-it to better use elsewhere. Some of them
harbour darker thoughts: they find the very existence of hereditary and
shaikhly rule an anachronism and would like to sweep it away, replacing it with
a form of government more akin to those to be found in Cairo, Damascus,

Baghdad or even Aden. . .
lust how secure the shaikhly family’s position is in Abu Dhabi is unclear,

particularly because of divisions within it and uncertainty over the succession.
Of Zayid’s three brothers only Shakhbut, now aged over seventy, is still alive.
Hazza^ the youngest of the four, died in the late 1950s; Khalid, the secon