Page 71 - Arabian Studies (II)

THE AUTHORITY OF SHAYKHS IN
THE GULF: AN ESSAY IN

NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY
by PETER LIENHA RDT

In 1855, Shaykh SaTd bin Tahnun of Abu Dhabi was confronted
with a difficult decision. A tribal elder had killed his own brother.
Was Shaykh SaTd to punish him? People in Abu Dhabi urged against
it. The shaykh may, however, have been personally sensitive on the
subject of fratricide, his own father, Tahnun, having been
assassinated by two brothers in 1833. Whatever the reason, he
disregarded the advice he had been offered and killed the offender.
This so outraged people in Abu Dhabi that the whole population rose
up against SaTd, who had to flee the country and was killed the next
year while trying to regain control.
The incident is only one of very many cases illustrating the
precariousness of authority among the shaykhs in the Gulf during the
last century, and the death of SaTd’s father Shaykh Tahnun, is
enough to show that' something less extreme than the killing of one
of the citizens might lead to a shaykh’s downfall. Reporting
Tahnun’s assassination in 1833, the British Assistant Political Agent
in Shaijah, Mullah Husayn, said that Shaykh TahnQn, having
discovered two of his brothers to be conspiring with some of the
powerful men of the tribe to murder him, had thrown the powerful
men (but not the brothers) into prison. ‘This proceeding’, continued
Mullah Husayn, ‘offended the BanI Yas [the main tribe of Abu
Dhabi], who became alarmed lest he should serve others in the same
way. They therefore secretly entered into a conspiracy with the
shaykh’s two brothers to put him to death’.1 In that they succeeded.
To take another example: after killing Tahnun, his two brothers
Khallfah and Sultan assumed control of the state. In the same year,
some of the Abu Dhabi people plotted to overthrow Khallfah, but
they were betrayed by the shaykh with whom they wished to replace
him. Khallfah had the plotters seized and put three of them to death.
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