Page 78 - Arabian Studies (II)

68 Arabain Studies //

loyalties persist, any personal squabble in a town could easily
develop into an affray. The potentiality of disorder and insecurity
greatly increases as compared with desert life. This would be so even
if a town were homogeneous in a tribal sense. But it is also a
characteristic of towns to attract accretions of population. The
recruitment to bedouin tribes is a very gradual process, but in towns
recruitment from outside is constantly going on and the town
population contains many disparate elements living at close quarters
with each other.
It is to this mixture of population that ibn Rushaid, writing in the
traditional circumstances of Kuwait early in the present century,
attributed the need for rulers and people’s preparedness to accept
them. When the A1 as-Sabah and their ‘brothers’ first came to
Kuwait, he says, government was a matter of no importance. The
people were few, and they were all like one family, sharing each
other’s joys and sorrows and seeing no need to set up any
government through which to enforce their rules. The need for
government, says Ibn Rushaid, only arose with the influx of
foreigners, who came in large numbers from all sorts of different
places. It was then that the people of Kuwait began to feel the need
to entrust authority to one person who, with their support, ‘would
put fear into wrongdoers and oppressors of others’. i i
The idea that the shaykhs held their power in order to do a job for
the people, keeping order and managing defence, and were not there
either by any absolute right or by brute force, is one which Ibn
Rushaid shared with many people in the Gulf, and it would appear to
be a traditional rather than a modernist view. The view he held on
the traditional relations between shaykhs and people were also
widespread, though such constitutionalist interpretations are not
always supported by the historical evidence.
Ibn Rushaid believed that, until the time of Shaykh Mubarak, who
had seized power at the end of the nineteenth century and was not
long dead when Ibn Rushaid was writing, the form of government in
Kuwait was consultative. The rulers would ask the advice of the
leading citizens, who would give their opinions about what was to be
done to guard Kuwait against misfortunes and enemies. Once the
leading citizens had agreed on what was necessary, says Ibn Rushaid,
the ruler had no right to reject or depart from their views, because, as
he says, ‘the true sovereignty rested with them’.12
If there were reasons to convince people in towns that someone
had to be invested with authority, as Ibn Rushaid says, the towns
certainly provided the means whereby that authority could be
supported. Town occupations produced wealth that could be taxed,