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172 The Origins of the lfoiled Arab Emirates

l)y British officers. He realised that his role would be diminished
by the existence of air stations, which would provide the means
for closer control; and, during the negotiations for an airport in
Sharjah, he did not give all the support expected of him by his
superiors in Bushire. But Dickson, the Political Agent in Kuwait,
who voiced his suspicions about ‘Isa, did not regard his obstruction
of the negotiations as serious: ‘After all, it is only natural that
he also should suspect our future intentions, living as he does
entirely with narrow-minded and ignorant Shaikhs who genuinely
believe they have every ground to fear us.’27
‘Isa’s generally obstructive attitude towards the air stations did,
however, result in his being taken severely to task—one of the
few occasions on which this happened. The British Government
had entrusted to him the first advance payment of 10,000 rupees
for the building of the rest-house that Shaykh Sultan had formally
agreed to provide at Sharjah; but, when the engineer entrusted
with supervising the construction, Captain K. Mackay, went to
Sharjah in August 1932, he found, to his dismay, that little progress
had been made, one of the reasons being that Sultan had had
no control over the money: ‘Isa had been spending from it without
any authority for doing so and without accounting for what he
spent, and was deliberately forcing up the price of labour. Mackay
discovered the existence at Sharjah of a lorry syndicate, of which
Shaykh Sultan had at first been the principal shareholder; the
importance of the syndicate to the construction was central, since
the lorry was the only vehicle by which the stones to be used
for the building of the rest-house were transported. ‘Isa, however,
had gradually insinuated himself into the syndicate and acquired
what was virtually a monopoly; this in turn made it impossible
for Mackay to lower the cost of labour, and he described the
monopoly held by the Residency Agent as ‘a pistol held at my
head’.28 Fowle went to Sharjah immediately and reprimanded ‘Isa
so severely that the Agent’s attitude to the air-route improved
noticeably.
‘Isa died in September 1935. Although one of his relatives, K.
S. Husayn bin Hasan ‘Imad, was appointed interim Agent, it was
finally decided that ‘Isa’s permanent successor should be a man
who had been head munshi (clerk) at the Agency in Bahrain. So
in 1936, with the appointment of K. S. Sayyid ‘Abd al-Razzaq
Al-Mahmud as Residency Agent, ‘Isa’s family’s reign of almost
seventy years came to an end. ‘Abd al-Razzaq played a much
less important role than ‘Isa had, especially as his powers were
curtailed by the appointment of a Political Officer in 1939- Ten
years later, the post of Residency Agent at Sharjah ceased to
exist.

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