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BRITISH-SAUDI CONTROVERSY OVER BURAIMI 217
6. Wilfred Thesiger gives his account of the Buraimi villages which
he visited in 1948, as follows:
Buraimi village belongs to Saqr bin Sultan Shaikh of the Naim, and
Hamasa to the Shuamis. The other villages arc ruled from Muwaiqih by
Zaid bin Sultan of A1 Bu Falah, Shakbut’s representative.1

(c) Extent of control by Saudi Arabia
1. The Wahhabis who lost Hasa to the Turks in 1871 continued to
rule Najd until about the year 1890. From 1890 to 1902, Najd became
subject to the rule of the House of al-Rashid, who, with the indirect
backing of the Turks, forced the Saudi Amir, fAbd al-Rahman ibn
Faisal, to retire at Kuwait. This brought an end to the rule of the
Wahhabi House of Sa‘ud in the nineteenth century.2
2. In 1902, the Wahhabi Amir, who since 1890 had taken refuge
in Kuwait, fought and overthrew the rule of the al-Rashid House
in Najd, thereby re-establishing his authority over it. In the spring of
1913, his son Amir fAbd al-Aziz, who later became the first King of
the present Saudi Arabian Kingdom, conquered the province of Hasa
from the Turks.3 At the end of 1913, Amir fAbd-al-Aziz had his first
official contact with Britain by meeting in the port of rUqair both
the British Political Agents for Bahrain and Kuwait.1
3. The establishment of Saudi authority in Hasa had not affected
Buraimi itself which seemed to have remained outside Saudi control.
However, British travellers and explorers who visited the district
between 1920 and 1946 appear to refer in their accounts of these
visits to some evidence of Saudi influence among the tribes of the
district. Thus, for example, Captain Eccles says that in or about 1924
‘the Wahhabi governor of al-Hasa sent messengers to all the northern
tribes of Oman’, who, he says, ‘are Wahhabi in sentiment’, demanding
‘in the name of his master, Ibn Saud, the payment of zakat or tithes’.
These tribes, he continues, ‘would probably prefer Wahhabi domina­
tion to that of Oman confederacy’.5 Bertram Thomas, a former British
Finance Minister and Wazir of Muscat, says that when he wanted to
visit Buraimi in May 1927 in his official capacity, he was told by the
‘Naim shaikh of Baraimi’ that ‘these places belong to Al-Hamuda,
and after them they belong to Ibn Saud’. Further, the writer describes
the presence in the district, during that year, of a Saudi tax-collector
by saying:
The Dhahirah rang with news of the visit of a tax-collector from Ibn

1 Thesiger, op cit., p. 163.
2Lorimer, pp. 1132-8. And sec Amin al-Rihani, Tarikh Najd Al-Hadith, 2nd
ed. (1954), pp. 104-5.
3 Aitchison, p. 188. 4 Ibid. 6 Ecclcs, op cit., pp. 23-4, 36.