Page 61 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

56 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

large proportion of which was educated, technically skilled and politically
alert, simply could not be equated with a Trucial Shaikhdom like Ajman, for
example, with a population of 5,000 illiterate fishermen and goatherds.
Notional parity might be conceded in principle among the rulers of the nine
Gulf shaikhdoms, but if, as seemed inescapable, representation in any federal
legislature was to be based upon population, then the Bahrainis would inevit­
ably predominate - a situation which the other shaikhdoms were not prepared
to tolerate.
Old quarrels and antipathies also divided one shaikhdom from another and
made the chances of political union, however rudimentary, seem exceedingly
remote. The Al Khalifah rulers of Bahrain had once exerted supremacy over
the Qatar peninsula and over its principal clan, the Al Thani, as tributaries.
Although the tributary relationship had been terminated a hundred years
earlier (since which time the Al Thani had ruled Qatar more or less uninterrup­
tedly), the two ruling families were still on bad terms. Much of their hostility
derived from conflicting claims to ownership of the Hawar Islands, a cluster of
islets between Qatar and Bahrain, and to Zubara, on the north-western coast of
Qatar, the site of a former Al Khalifah settlement, built when the latter
migrated to Qatar from Kuwait in 1766. It had been retained by them after
their conquest of Bahrain from the Persians in 1783 until the 1870s, when it
was captured and razed to the ground by the Al Thani. The passage of time,
however, had not operated to diminish the Al Khalifah’s sense of grievance
over its loss.
Dynastic animosities, tribal feuds and territorial disputes also divided many
of the other Gulf shaikhdoms. The Al Thani of Qatar had been at odds with the
ruling family of Abu Dhabi, the Al Nihayan, for a century at least, and one of
the principal objects of their rivalry was a winding inlet at the base of the Qatar
peninsula, on its eastern side, known as Khaur al-Udaid. The dispute over
ownership of the khaur (inlet) was complicated by the presence of a third
contender for its possession, Saudi Arabia, which had originally put forward a
claim to the inlet, and to a considerable slice of the hinterland behind it, in
1935. After the Second World War the Saudi claim had been enlarged to take in
the greater part of Abu Dhabi shaikhdom, along with a portion of the adjoining
sultanate of Oman; and although the claim had been rejected by the British
government as having no valid foundation, the Saudis were still persisting in it.
More will be said about the origins and development of this frontier dispute
shortly. What needs to be remarked at this point is that its presence in the
wings exerted the same deadening influence upon the desultory negotiations
going on among the shaikhdoms to establish a federation as did the shah’s claim
to Bahrain. For none of the rulers concerned was anxious to place himself in a
position where, as a member of a Gulf federation, he would be obliged to
support Abu Dhabi in resisting Saudi Arabia’s territorial claims. The reluc­
tance was particularly strong in the case of the rulers of Bahrain and Qatar,