Page 72 - Arabian Studies (II)

62 Arabian Studies II

He threatened also to kill two more, who were merchants, and when
dissuaded from doing so he confiscated the property of one of them
and sent him into exile. Mullah Husayn commented: These
proceedings have created the greatest possible discontent in Abu
Dhabi, most of the inhabitants of which place are preparing to
leave’.2 ‘Most’ proved to be an exaggeration; nevertheless Abu Dhabi
lost nearly 1000 men when the A1 Bu Falasah and Rumaythat
sections of the Ban! Yas, of which Khallfah was paramount shaykh,
left Abu Dhabi for Dubai. There they seized control from Khallfah’s
governor and asserted their independence under the sectional
shaykhs of the Al Bu Falasah. This time, the people had not
overthrown the shaykh, but many of them had removed themselves
from his jurisdiction and so achieved the same object, in that he was
not their shaykh any more. Dubai has continued to be ruled by the
Al Bu Falasah shaykhs up to the present day.
Examples such as these make one doubt the appropriateness of the
vocabulary used every so often in nineteenth-century corre­
spondence, and even more recently,3 when tribal groups that seceded
from one shaykhdom or another are spoken of as ‘renouncing
their allegiance’. What did the idea of allegiance amount to? Lord
Lytton, the Viceroy of India, used the word with its full force in the
1870s when he expressed himself in favour of lending firm British
support to the authority of the Shaykh of Abu Dhabi over the
Qubaisat section of the Ban! Yas. ‘It appears but equitable’, he said,
‘that the Government which prohibits the Chief of Abu Dhabi from
bringing his refractory tribesmen into order, should secure him their
submission and allegiance, either by peaceful, or, if need be, by
coercive measures’.4 Col. Stannus, the British Resident in the Gulf in
1824, was less pontifical. When the Sudan tribe left the Shaykh of
Shaijah and asserted their independence of him at Dairah, on the
opposite side of the creek to Dubai, the Shaykh of Sharjah wanted
the Resident to make them go back to him. The Resident demurred.
‘I am by no means satisfied, however’, he said, ‘as to the right of the
Sudan tribe to withdraw from his authority after residing at Shaijah
as his acknowledged subjects ... but’, he added, ‘the patriarchal
form of Arab government may perhaps justify a body of people in
transferring their allegiance from their immediate sovereign to the
head of their own tribe .. .’.s The Resident noted that the Shaykh of
Shaijah seemed tacitly to have admitted this right by claiming that
the Sudan had been obliged to go to Dairah and had not gone
voluntarily. This they denied, and Stannus refused to comply with
the Shaykh of Shaijah’s request.
The mass of historical evidence suggests that during the nineteenth