Page 182 - The Origins of the United Arab Emirates_Neat

1 48 The Origins oj the United Arab Emirates
outbreak of World War u put an end, for the time being, to
any further thought of exploring Jabal Fa’iyah, and all plans for
negotiations were suspended.
The arrival of the oil company thus underlined the difficulty
I
of attempting to define inter-state boundaries on the Coast and
reach firm conclusions about which tribes controlled the areas to
the cast and south-east of the shaykhdoms. Naturally enough, Petro­
leum Concessions Limited wanted to know exactly how much land
it was buying in the concessions; also naturally, each ruler wanted
to claim as much territory as possible, in case oil were discovered.
Previously, none of the Trucial Coast shaykhs had ever attempted
to establish accurately the extent of his shaykhdom; only the bedouin
tribes and the few, scattered people actually living on the edge
of the shaykhdoms knew exactly what the borders were. Furthermore,
there were large areas of desert land that, for obvious reasons,
no ruler had ever been particularly anxious to claim as his own,
but that suddenly became important in terms of potential oil. The
first attempt to define the rulers’ territorial claims was made in
the summer of 1937, when the Residency Agent was sent around
the Coast to gather the necessary information from them.
In his report, the Agent said that the rulers had admitted that
they had no fixed frontiers with their neighbours, but that they
had given him instead the details of what they considered their
ihram (sacred possession, and therefore inviolable). The only ruler
who was absolutely sure of the extent of his territory was Sa‘id
of Dubai. Sultan of Sharjah, by contrast, was the only one who
refused to state which territory he claimed. Obviously aware of
his weak position, he proudly declared that his father’s realm was
well known to everyone and needed no elaboration. He did add,
however, that only when he had finally settled his boundaries with
his neighbours would he be able to commit himself about them.30
It is ciear from the report that, with the exception of Umm al-Qaiw-
ain and Dubai, both small in area, the shaykhdoms were all of
uncertain extent; the coastal rulers had gradually lost command
of inland areas that had once been an integral part of their territories
but had since come under the largely independent rule of bedouin
tribes. The most extreme case of this was, of course, Sharjah,
and in 1937 the Political Agent at Bahrain remarked of Sultan,
‘he knows that his de facto control at the moment only extends
:
a few miles inland from Sharjah. He has not been to Dhayd
for seventeen years. He remains on the coast in the summer not
because he likes it but because he dares not go inland.’31
Most of Sultan’s territory was by then controlled by the Bam
Qitab, who proved their independence and authority when Petroleum
Concessions wanted to explore Jabal Fa’iyah. The other inland