Page 69 - The Origins of the United Arab Emirates_Neat

The Challenge to Power: Brother, Nephew and Son 45

remained in charge of Abu Dhabi for almost forty years, contrary
to the expectations of the Political Resident at the time, who,
because of the adverse conditions that marked the beginning of
Shakhbut’s reign, expected it to be short. The opposition of the
sons of Saqr, the dangers posed by the ‘stronger and more brutal
character’ of Hazza', and the displeasure of the Bani Yas, who
resented the role played by the Manasir in the last stage of the
struggle for power all seemed to bode ill for Shakhbut. But he
was able to eliminate all of these dangers. Almost immediately
after he became ruler, his mother, Shaykhah Salamah bint Butti,
made her sons swear never to resort to fratricide; this enabled !
Shakhbut to attain a degree of internal security in Abu Dhabi
that his father and uncles had never known. When, for example,
his exiled cousins in Dubai tried to wrest control of the shaykhdom
from him in 1930, he was in a sufficiently strong position to foil
their plans without endangering his hold on Abu Dhabi in any
way.34 Likewise, his authority began to extend itself to the tribes
whose loyalty to Zayid bin Khalifah had been unquestioned, and
before long the Bani Yas found little to complain about.
The resurgence of the Bani Yas following the accession of Shakhbut
in Abu Dhabi was in strong contrast to the continued decline
of the Qawasim in Sharjah. After Saqr bin Khalid had deposed
his uncle Salim bin Sultan, in 1883, he governed the shaykhdom
weakly, and by the time of his death, in 1914, the prestige of
the Qawasim had reached a very low ebb indeed. Just before
his death, he had named his first cousin Khalid bin Ahmad (the
fathers of Saqr and Khalid had been brothers—see Figure 3) as
his successor, since all of his own sons were infants. Khalid, who
ruled for ten years, was unpopular with the people of Sharjah,
and did little to strengthen the shaykhdom internally, though in
later years he was to show considerably more skill when, as regent
of Kalba, he extended his authority over a large segment of Qasimi
territory. The period from 1914 to 1924, however, was marked
by a number of challenges, internal and external, that he was
clearly unable to withstand, and his failure in this weakened not
only his personal prestige but that of Sharjah as well. The most
striking of these challenges was that posed by British recognition
(granted in 1921) of Ras al-Khaimah as an independent shaykhdom,
although it had enjoyed defacto independence for some years; Khalid’s
failure to protest at British recognition of the secession strongly
underlined his weakness. His impotence regarding Ras al-Khaimah
was in large part owing to mismanagement by his predecessors,
but in the course of his own reign he had done little to put
matters right.
At the time when the British recognised the secession, however,