Page 91 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

88 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Sharjah, and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs as dependencies of the shaikhdom
of Ras al-Khaimah. The impediment, however, in the shah’s view, could easih!
be overcome, since Persia was able to show proper legal and historical title to
the islands - as she could indeed, if required, to nearly all the islands in the
Gulf.

Was this actually the case? Abu Musa and the Tunbs had for two centuries
been in the possession of the Qawasim (‘Qasimi’ in the singular), a tribe
which had established itself in a paramount position at Sharjah and Ras
al-Khaimah in the first half of the eighteenth century. From there their
power had spread across the Gulf to Lingah on the Persian coast (which

they occupied in 1747) and to the intervening islands, Abu Musa, the
Tunbs and Sirri, a few miles west of Abu Musa. Twenty years later the
Qawasim were expelled from Lingah, only to return and reoccupy it about
1780. Thereafter they remained in control of the port for a century, periodi­
cally paying tribute to the Persian court whenever it was thought judicious to
do so or when, which was less frequent, the Persian authorities were strong

enough to exact it. Much the same situation prevailed in the other ports along
the Persian littoral where the inhabitants were predominantly of Arab descent.
(Bandar Abbas, for instance, was ruled by the sultan of Oman until the second
half of the nineteenth century.) The Persian government ultimately exerted its
authority over Lingah in 1880, and seven years later it expelled the Qasimi

shaikh from the port and occupied the island of Sirri. Abu Musa and the
Tunbs, however, remained in the hands of the Qasimi shaikhs of Sharjah and
Ras al-Khaimah respectively.
The Persians made no serious attempt to annex Abu Musa or the Tunbs until
the 1930s. It was a time when the shah’s father, Reza Shah, was seeking to
make his country’s weight felt in the politics of the Gulf by the creation of a

Persian navy. The assertion of Persian sovereignty over Abu Musa and the
Tunbs, so Reza Shah reasoned, would serve to promote this object and at the
same time challenge Britain’s naval supremacy in the Gulf. While the Foreign
Office was inclined at the time to humour his pretensions, under the plea of
advancing Britain’s wider Middle-Eastern interests, the India Office was not.

So he was told that, although Sirri was acknowledged to be a Persian island,
Abu Musa and the Tunbs had since the previous century been considered by
the British government to be attached to Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah. There
the matter more or less rested until the announcement in January 1968 0
Britain’s impending withdrawal from the Gulf. Muhammad Reza Shah lost no
time in demanding the transfer (or, as he would have it, the reversion) of the

islands to Persian control, so as to safeguard the passage of oil tankers and other
shipping through the Straits of Hormuz. Why or how the passage of shipping
would be endangered by the islands remaining in Arab hands - or, <'°^ve^se
be safeguarded by their being transferred to Persia’s-was not, for a t es a

dark references to potential guerrilla activity, immediately self-evi ent.