Page 74 - Arabian Studies (II)

64 Arabian Studies II

would enhance a shaykh’s personal status. Moreover, various of the
shaykhs would have intimate connections with particular segments of
the community and be concerned with their interests. As well as
marrying within the ruling family, shaykhs sought to strengthen the
position of the family as a whole, and even more the position of their
part of the family, by marrying their sons to the daughters of
prominent members of the community. Through their maternal kin,
the children of such marriages were elaborately linked to many
interests and factions within the state, and these were of course in
addition to the affinal links that their own marriages would create.
So, for all the local insistence, in general theory, on the primacy of
agnation, a variety of bonds through mothers, wives and aunts knit
the ruling family into the community and at the same time
differentiated it internally. Thus the danger of being overthrown, one
of the two main checks on a ruler’s authority, arose very much in
connection with the state of the people as well as with the state of
the ruling family.
The second major check on the ruler’s authority that I have
mentioned was the danger of being abandoned by a substantial part
of the population. Here the particular ecology of the Gulf states has
had a most important influence on politics, and I think it would not
be going too far to say that the shortage of water for irrigation made
the essential contribution to freedom. The population was made up
of either bedouin or seafarers and merchants; there were very few
agriculturalists. Like bedouin everywhere, those of the coastal
regions moved regularly in search of pasture for their herds, and from
time to time groups of them took their herds to other territories,
driven by strife or hardship, or attracted by some promise of greater
opportunity. But in addition, the lack of water for irrigation made
the settled people in some ways more like bedouin than like those
peasant populations so easily exploited and tyrannised over by
landlords and potentates throughout most of Middle Eastern history.
The settled people were mostly seafarers. Their most important
assets were mobile like the herds of the bedouin. Their property was
in the form of boats. The shaykhdoms had no agricultural assets
extensive enough to attach people to the places they lived in through
all vicissitudes.7 They could leave home without abandoning their
means of livelihood, and the boats in which they sailed away could
carry their household goods besides assuring them a living. People
did move away from circumstances they disliked, both as tiny units
made up of individuals or little families, and as substantial tribal
segments.