Jassim the Leader: Founder of Qatar

by Mohamed Althani

  But in vain. The Qawasim were soon to discover they were no longer a match for British sea power, especially after Napoleon’s failed effort to restore his empire in 1815. By 1820, after yet another devastating siege of Ras al-Khaimah by British forces, the entire Qasimi fleet was destroyed, as were the towns deemed to have aided their cause. Even the mud-brick Doha, which had had nothing whatsoever to do with the conflict, was destroyed by an over-jubilant East India Company ship administering a solid helping of victor’s justice.

  The Trucial Gulf

  With Dutch and French sea power on the wane, Britain had gained undisputed control of the Gulf’s entire coastline. Now it would demand that every region sign pacts which obliged towns and villages to abstain from ‘piracy’ on land and at sea in return for an understanding that London would rein in its territorial and political ambitions. This system of truces was drawn up in 1820 under the title of a General Treaty of Peace and lasted for well over a century. The seven emirates that today form the United Arab Emirates capitulated immediately. Although it delayed signing, Bahrain became part of the Trucial system in 1861, undertaking to abstain from all forms of maritime hostilities. In exchange, Britain promised to protect the island from attack by sea and, more often than not, to take Bahrain’s side in any dispute with Qatar. Neither Muhammad bin Thani nor his son Jassim signed any such truce, however, even in the decades that followed. Indeed, no arrangement was made with the UK until 1916. This was to prove a mixed blessing when Qatar pushed for its independence to be recognised internationally. In Jassim’s time, however, the only Arab ships that didn’t sail the Gulf flying a flag of truce on their masts were Qatari.

  Once these truces were signed, the obvious question immediately posed itself. Which sheikh was responsible for which bit of coast? There were no permanent borders, no maps, no written agreements. Division of authority in Arabia had been in a perpetual tide of change for centuries. Clans were continually on the move, emigrating from island to oasis. But Britain’s Trucial system assumed there were clearly defined political units, an issue that would start to resolve itself only once international oil companies established themselves from the 1930s onward. Thus, no sooner was the ink dry on the General Treaty of Peace than all manner of territorial disputes popped up. The 1820 treaty might well have protected British vessels from attack, but it said nothing about preventing coastal wars between tribes. Aware of the issue, the British officials based in Bombay assembled the chief men of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah and Ajman once again in 1835, and pressed them to agree, for one year, not to undertake any kind of aggression against a neighbour without first referring the issue to the British. How this sat with the tacit agreement not to get involved in local issues was a moot point. The new truce came to be renewed each year, until Bombay drew up a permanent agreement – the Perpetual Maritime Truce – in 1853. From now on, the term ‘piracy’ was transformed by British Indian officials into ‘maritime irregularity’.

  2

  THE AL THANI ARRIVE

  I lifted injustice for no personal gain

  but to see the weaker freed again

  POETRY RARELY TRANSLATES well from Arabic, but the above fragment, written by Jassim towards the end of his life, seems a fitting place to begin. As his thirty-five-year rule came to an end, the last Ottoman detachment was marching out of Qatar, never to return. All tribes recognised his authority. The British were preparing a treaty that acknowledged Qatar’s sovereignty, and Bahrain’s demand for tribute and territory had been scornfully dismissed.

  It is a tragedy that no photograph or portrait of the Emir has ever been found, but then it would also be wrong if we only had an image of Jassim at the end of his long life. The young British officials who came to visit the Emir in 1905 and 1911 saw only a venerable octogenarian, a man who lived in a modest, mud-brick house and enjoyed the simple pleasures of playing with his grandchildren and tending his gardens. They didn’t see him as the young warrior who, at the age of just twenty-three, had fought a horseback duel against one the most feared Bedouin warriors of eastern Arabia. Nor would they have understood the passions and adventures of his youth, when he had been hunter and horseman, poet and ambassador, statesman, merchant and even political prisoner.

  The twists and turns of Qatar’s journey to statehood are absorbing, but no more so than the story of the man so intimately connected to it. Jassim was himself on a journey that began with his birth in 1825 and witnessed his maturing from a brave but rash young man into the grand statesmen and strategist that he surely became. As one British diplomat put it after returning from Lusail, Sheikh Jassim was truly ‘a patriarch of the ancient time’.

  The diplomat in question was Captain Francis Beville Prideaux, who travelled from Bahrain to Qatar specifically to meet Jassim in 1905. His diary account of the journey is intriguing. Arriving at Bida, which has since been swallowed up by the capital, Doha, he found that Jassim’s fort was quite empty of soldiers. The sheikh was in fact a dozen miles away, and Prideaux sent one of the fort’s caretakers to ask for transport. The next day, camels and donkeys arrived to escort Prideaux and his entourage. On the journey, he noticed the black camel-hair tents of the locals, pitched just yards from the shore, and would no doubt have observed the women washing clothes in the sea and carrying water from the wells, while the men prepared their nets and saw to their boats following a long but poor pearling season.

  As Prideaux pushed into the interior, he would have travelled across rocky mounds where no tree could grow and precious little vegetation either. His diary notes suggest that he was beginning to wonder what sort of palace this Emir of Qatar was living in. He was soon to have his answer, once he looked down on the oasis of Sakhama.

  We surmounted a low ridge and came upon a most refreshing and unexpected sight – a garden enclosed by a neat and low mud wall, a hundred by two hundred yards in area, and bordered by a line of tamarisk trees on all sides. Within were three masonry Persian wells of the largest size, worked by donkeys, and irrigating large plots of lucerne grass as well as a number of pomegranate trees and some 300 hundred date palms … [within] a small double-storied rest-house and a narrow veranda-like mosque.

  A dozen tents surrounded the garden, where the sheikh’s bodyguard stayed, as well as the servants who tended his mares, camels, sheep, goats and chickens.

  A second visit by a newly appointed British political agent, David Lorimer, was undertaken in much the same manner six years later. Lorimer’s wife Emily, a great scholar and linguist in her own right, described her husband’s meeting with a severely shortsighted, 86-year-old Jassim in a letter to her parents in September 1911. She wrote, bemused, that Jassim had offered her husband two sheep, some hens and a goat, which he’d declined owing to the size of his launch. It must have all seemed very quaint. Yet impressions were deceptive. While Jassim played the part of the old, retired leader, there was nothing that happened on the peninsula that he didn’t know about or ultimately control. To understand how he had created a unified Qatar, we must go back to the arrival of the Al Thani on the peninsula, examining how they had come to prominence and something of Jassim’s childhood.

  The Al Thani were a clan of the Ma’adid, itself part of a very large tribal confederation, the Banu Tamim. In a Bedouin society, most history is passed on by word of mouth, rather than by written record, but such is the fame of the Banu Tamim that we have records going back as far as the sixth century. Among its number are such names as Abu Bakr, the closest friend of the Prophet Muhammad and the Muslim nation’s first caliph, as well as two of the Arab world’s most famous poets, Farazdaq and Jarir.

  The Al Thani

  Nomadic by nature, the Al Thani were not settled in any one place, but would wander vast distances over the years, with a few sparse records having them turn up here and there. What is known for sure is that in the seventeenth century they lived around Ushayqir, north-east of Riyadh, in the former province of al-Washm in the Najd. At the beginning of the eighteenth, they mo
ved to the oasis of Jabrin, south-east of the Qatari peninsula. No sources are available describing the motives for their migrations, but it is reasonable to assume drought, pasturage and local trouble all played their part. By the time the Al Thani clan arrived in Qatar in the 1740s, the Banu Tamim to which they belonged had already taken control of the Najd as well as parts of Bahrain and the Yamama. The first Al Thani settlement in Qatar was at Sikak in the south, and from there they moved to Ruwais and Zubara in the north-west.

  At that time, authority in the peninsula rested in the hands of the Al Musallam of Huwaila, especially in the north-east. The Al Musallam were part of the Banu Khalid, another tribal confederacy who had driven the Ottomans out of eastern Arabia a hundred years earlier. The Al Musallam claimed the right to collect taxes on behalf of the whole Banu Khalid, so we can probably assume that this was a time of tension, disquiet and confrontation. But the trouble was only just beginning. In the second half of the eighteenth century another two major tribal confederations arrived, the Aniza and Banu Hajir. The former, represented by the Al Khalifa, moved into Qatar in 1766. They had migrated from Kuwait to Zubara, but unlike the Al Thani, quickly constructed the fort of Murair, a short distance from Zubara. From their new fort, the Al Khalifa went on to conquer the nearby island of Bahrain in 1783 – where the family remains to this day. At the same time, the tribe maintained its claim to Zubara and the adjacent Hawar islands – an issue that was not to be resolved until Judge Guillaume issued a ruling on behalf of the International Court of Justice in 2001 granting the Hawar islands to Bahrain, but retaining Zubara as Qatari. Last to enter the volatile mix, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Al bu Sumayt settled in the Khawr region while maintaining their strong links to the Najd.

  The Al Thani, now led by Thani bin Muhammad, along with the other newly arrived tribes, weren’t interested in paying any taxes to the Al Musallam, who effectively lost control. Little is known about the manner in which it happened. All we do know for sure is that Thani was born in Zubara, became a prominent pearl trader and eventually moved his family to the east coast and a village called Fuwairit, where his son Muhammad and his grandson Jassim were both raised.

  Jassim’s childhood

  Jassim grew up in a time of great change. The north of the peninsula, where much of the population was settled, had often fallen under Bahraini influence, if not direct control. The Al Khalifa were fiercely resisted too, however, and had virtually no power in Qatar in the 1820s. As a result of violent conflict, no coastal settlement was guaranteed absolute safety from attack. The minor settlements in the south-east tended to drift under the influence of what had just become Trucial Oman. The barren central and southern parts of Qatar were incorporated into the lands of the mainland camel herders, and every other year might see one clan triumph over another. There was no concept of a Qatari nation or even a regional state-in-waiting.

  But Jassim’s childhood was different from that of his forebears. Both his grandfather and father had interests in the pearl industry, which necessitated protecting and managing seafaring communities. These communities, by the very nature of their work, were far more settled and vulnerable. This shift in Al Thani business away from pastoralism was to change the peninsula’s political set-up. It would lead to the eventual emergence of Doha as the new principal settlement under the Al Thani’s aegis. There was a clear model for statehood in Bahrain, which was the centre of the Gulf’s international pearl market and a frequent port of call for Jassim’s father, who often travelled there on business.

  Muhammad was a pious man and saw to his son’s education. Jassim was taught to read, write, perform arithmetic confidently and memorise large sections from the Quran by heart. There were no educational institutions at the time, but the quality of Jassim’s poetry shows his education was anything but basic. Yet boys will be boys, and we can also be sure he spent many happy hours with his friends on the elevated shores of Fuwairit. It may be that some of the marks scratched by children on to the rocks overlooking the sea – and still to be seen to this day – were created by his hand. The children’s carvings consist of double rows of holes that were used for the game called haluwsah, in which the holes are filled with pebbles. (It is thought that the pebbles represented the number of ships on the horizon.) The young Jassim would probably have played this game in September, when the children were waiting to spot the pearling fleets coming in at the end of the season. An exciting time, as many of the young boys would not have seen their fathers, uncles and brothers for around four months and each child hoped to be the first to mark their return. But the game could be played all year round, and perhaps with a more serious purpose, such as keeping a weather eye out for a second British attack or warning the town of potential pirates and unknown vessels.

  With the sun setting, Jassim and his friends would have been called in to eat the staple meal of fish and dates. In times of hardship, they might even have consumed the date stones that were sometimes crushed for food. Khubz or bread, hot from the stone ovens that can still be found in some parts of Qatar, would most likely have been his favourite part of the meal. And on the hottest days, Jassim would have been grateful for the well water, even though it could prove a little brackish. If it tasted too bitter, tribesmen had a habit of drinking it directly through a cloth filter, most often the gutra, the traditional headscarf. And at night, a dampened gutra would have been placed across an open doorway to help induce a cooler feel for the children as they slept through the intense summer heat. Jassim enjoyed good health throughout his long life, and this was just as well as there were only three treatments for any sickness at the time: bleeding, cauterising or herbs.

  Occasionally, Jassim would have attended a razeef, the tribal get-together. The experience would have been invaluable, affording him a thorough knowledge of tribal customs, including fun aspects such as learning to perform the archa – originally a war dance – in which two lines of men would chant at each other in a competitive and challenging fashion. The Al Thani would welcome guests for days and the prestige of the whole family would have been enhanced, news passed, decisions made and great stories told. And there is one such story, which I shall relate now, that must have had a great effect on Jassim. It showed that one man, in the face of great injustice and overwhelming odds, was capable of bringing an enemy to his knees, through sheer determination and strength of character. Today Rahma bin Jabir is dismissed as a pirate, but he was a pirate in much the same way that the legendary Robin Hood was a thief, or William Tell an assassin.

  Rahma bin Jabir

  In most parts of the Arab world in the late 1820s, the big news was the rise to power of Muhammad Ali, an Albanian officer who led a palace coup to take control of Egypt. He had established a new dynasty and was successfully projecting Egyptian power into what was to become Saudi Arabia. But his was not the story most often told round any Qatari campfire at the time. The name on everyone’s lips was Rahma bin Jabir. To appreciate his story, and why he chose to spend his life making every Bahraini life miserable, requires a few historical steps backwards.

  Rahma’s father, Jabir bin Utub, had led his people successfully in Zubara when the Qatari town had become a favourite transit point for merchants carrying goods from India to Syria and other Ottoman territories. He had realised that by turning the harbour into a free-trade port he would actually increase revenues into the town. But the Al Khalifa refused to share the economic gains with their kinsman Jabir, and actually forced him to leave the town to settle in Ruwais before having him killed. The Al Khalifa then went on to monopolise the pearl banks around the coast of Qatar. The young Rahma was not to forget what had happened to his father, vowing to make them pay for their greed. And even when he put aside his grievances to aid the Al Khalifa in the face of an imminent Persian invasion, Bahrain’s ruling family still refused to share any territorial or political gain with the very family that had helped them to succeed. Thus he returned to Qatar, along with the Qatari tribes of Al bu
Kuwara, al-Sulaithi and al-Musallam, determined to take back what was his.

  Rahma repeatedly hit the Al Khalifa where it hurt – in their merchant fleet. With the moral support of five hundred dependants, the Wahhabi state and even the Omani leadership, Rahma maintained an embargo on Bahrain from his base at Khor Hasan – which was to become a gathering place for all those who had suffered Al Khalifa injustice. Soon he was seizing, sinking or burning Bahraini ships by the dozen. At that time, Khor Hasan was a dilapidated village whose redeeming feature was that it was protected from the sea by two coral reefs. Only a man with local sea knowledge could navigate through it. Rahma was no fool, and kept himself on good terms with the British – who were keen to keep the Gulf free of all warships save their own. Writing one hundred years later, the British diplomat Lorimer conceded: ‘The exploits of Rahma, though in some cases piratical, were performed as a rule under pretext of lawful warfare … his conduct was scrupulously correct.’