Page 81 - Arabian Studies (II)

The A uthority ofShaykhs in the Gulf: 71
into a council to ask them what he ought to do about Muslim b.
Rashid. (There was nothing to prevent him from having a private
word with one or two of them beforehand.) The brother had
proposed that Muslim be put to death. The rest had agreed. The
British Agent had heard that the arguments advanced were that if the
shaykh executed Muslim his subjects would fear him, and the Ruler
of Muscat would believe that Muslim had committed his crimes on
his own initiative. On the other hand, if he were allowed to live, his
great eloquence would allow him to make out a case against the
Shaykh before the other rulers. The result would be to bring the
British and the Ruler of Muscat out against him (and between them
they had destroyed his other town, Ras al-Khaimah, nine years
before), and the Shaykh was not strong enough to oppose them.
Those summoned to the council had also said that if the Ruler of
Muscat were to demand blood compensation for all those Muslim
had killed, the Shaykh would be quite unable to pay it, and that the
death of one man was preferable to the ruin of all Shaykh Sultan’s
subjects. Supported by this consensus that identified the public
interest with his own, the Shaykh was able to have the prisoner put to
death in his cell.
The pressures which acted towards enabling, encouraging and even
obliging the shaykhs of the towns in the Gulf to add authority to
leadership did nothing whatever towards increasing the authority of
the shaykhs of tribal sections. Among the bedouin, the shaykh of a
tribe can truly be described as primus inter pares in relation to the
shaykhs of the tribe’s sections. He is the shaykh of his own section,
as they are of theirs, in the same spirit as that in which he is shaykh
of the tribe as a whole. But settlement radically alters the balance. In
the Gulf, it was the rulers who received the taxes and they and
members of their families who employed the guards. And since
members of the ruling family were always on the spot, there was no
scope for sectional shaykhs to exercise authority. In material terms, a
town would have one fortress only, which would be in the Ruler’s
hands, whereas sectional shaykhs would have only their own houses.
In economic terms, sectional shaykhs had no income from the state
unless the Ruler gave them presents. Thus the role of the sectional
shaykhs was firmly limited to leadership. But it was this role of
leadership, with its attendant solidarity, that at times enabled some
of them to lead away whole tribal sections out of the jurisdiction of
particular rulers.
Town life also produced leaders of a different sort, men whose
position was based on economic power and the organisation of
production. These were the pearl merchants and boat owners: the

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