Jassim the Leader: Founder of Qatar

by Mohamed Althani

  The admission showed publicly that the British recognised the justice of his cause, and privately that it was impossible to stop him even if they had wanted to. But no one could catch Rahma, least of all the Bahrainis, and not for want of trying. Britain’s Captain Wainwright of HMS Psyche told the Admiralty on 30 January 1820 that getting Rahma out of Khor Hasan was ‘full of danger, if not impracticable’. And even when he appeared to have gone too far, Rahma always seemed to have an escape route. He made an alliance with the Wahhabi state and based his fleet at Dammam until his host tired of his war on Bahrain and blew up his home, only to see Rahma escape to his ship and seek out new bases and alliances to continue his private war.

  Jabir moved his entire clan to Bushire on the northern Gulf coast and made friends with the local governor, Sheikh Muhammad. He even cheekily dropped into the British Political Resident’s office to pay his respects, offering to help His Majesty’s navy in its war against Ras al-Khaimah. True to his word, he destroyed eight Qawasim ships, seized four as prizes and even assisted in the piloting of the East India Company ship Vestal into the harbour of Qatif when it got into trouble.

  Having failed at every turn in its bid to have Rahma killed, Bahrain now decided to pay its way out of trouble, offering an annual tribute of four thousand German crowns to him in April 1820. Jabir took the money, but continued to terrify Bahraini sailors for the next six years. In 1826, however, when Jassim was just one year old, Rahma’s luck finally ran out. His death was just as dramatic as his life, and the story was recorded for posterity by the British official Samuel Hennell. We’ll take it up as Rahma saw grapnel hooks hurled into his ship by the enemy he so despised.

  [Rahma] took his youngest son, a fine boy about eight years old, in his arms, and seizing a lighted match, directed his attendants to lead him down to the magazine … his commands were instantly obeyed, and in a few seconds the sea was covered with the scattered timbers of the exploded vessel and the miserable remains of Rahma bin Jabir and his devoted followers. The explosion set fire to the enemy’s baghla, which soon afterwards blew up. … Thus ended Rahma bin Jabir, for so many years the scourge and terror of this part of the world, and whose death was felt as a blessing in every part of the Gulf. Equally ferocious and determined in all situations, the closing scene of his existence displayed the same stern and indomitable spirit which had characterized him all his life.

  Despite Hennell’s opinion, Rahma had shown that it was possible for a determined man to inspire devotion in his followers and fight injustice to the extent that even the strongest enemy could be beaten or bypassed. Stories such as these would not have been lost on someone with Jassim’s intellect. Everyone was aware of the strength of foreign forces. By the time Jassim was fifteen, Doha had already been razed to the ground twice, and it would be again in the 1860s. I expect these stories did nothing to counter the impatience of youth, either. As a young man, Jassim found it hard to hide his feelings and demonstrate the thoughtful diplomacy of his later years. When his father chose to receive a British soldier-spy as a guest in Doha, Jassim left town to go hunting rather than meet him. And even when the British explorer and author William Gifford Palgrave insisted on travelling to meet Jassim, their instant dislike of each other was obvious. (Though it must be said Palgrave seemed intent on disliking everything he found in Qatar, describing its towns as dingy, its coffee as unpalatable and its children as brats.)

  ‘Jassim is a more dashing character than his father, but equally close-fisted,’ he wrote in 1863.

  He is even less amiable than his father [who had just put him up for eight days]; narrow-minded and less well informed than the old man, while at the same time he was more pretentious and haughty. He affects the Najdean [tribesman] in dress and manner, but has far more devotion at heart for the diva pecunia than for the precepts of the Quran. His men, like those of Justice Shallow, had a ‘semblable coherence with their master’s spirits’, which rendered their society dry and unprofitable.

  Adolescence

  But Jassim’s society was anything but dry. On a lightning tour of Arabia to garner information for imperial France and Britain, Palgrave had failed to understand what was in front of his very eyes as he travelled into the desert to meet Jassim. He saw everything, but observed nothing. The desert has a number of features that deeply influence those who live in it. To the Western eye it is featureless and harsh, but to Jassim and his people it had an infinite and various range of elements that must be understood in order to survive. Consequently, even to this day, Gulf Arabs are extremely observant both of the physical as well as the psychological environment in which they live, and can tell a lot about each other just by the clothes that are worn, and how they are worn. This is hard to explain to a Western audience, but there is a scene in the 1962 epic film Lawrence of Arabia when a suntanned Lawrence has been given Bedouin clothes and is caught admiring his own sartorial elegance by Auda Abu Tayi and his young, revolver-wielding son.

  ‘Son, what fashion is this?’ Auda asks, pointing at Lawrence.

  ‘Harif, Father.’

  ‘And what manner of Harif?’

  ‘A Beni Wadji Sherif.’

  ‘And is he Harif?’

  ‘No, Father. English!’

  Still, we shouldn’t judge Palgrave too harshly, as very few Westerners ever learn such skills. To understand Jassim, however, we need to appreciate that he keenly pursued such talents. We know he enjoyed falconry, and would often, in the late evening, groom and prepare his hawks for the hunting season, accustoming his birds to the company of others. The young prince was also fond of his saluki hunting dogs, and kept a couple for many years. The breed has been used for millennia, and dogs were usually trained to retrieve from the age of three months and accustomed to accept a fairly harsh diet, as they were expected to eat anything that came their way.

  In October, at the beginning of the hunting season, Jassim could at last spend days on end out in the desert, the approaching winter making the occasion that much more enjoyable. The Saker falcon, or Falco cherrug, was the preferred species, rather than the peregrine, as it was considered to have more intelligence and aggression, and a greater tolerance to stress. Jassim would have used the female of the species, which is still the practice to this day. Further training would have been carried out with pigeons, and it was a common sight at that time of the year to see birds flown to keep them fit and effective. The bustard, or hubara, was the traditional quarry, as well as the desert hare. Both made for good sport, as the hubara, though a slow, large bird, goes to ground readily, making it difficult for the falcon to follow. Sakers were usually taken as young from their nests or trapped abroad as mature birds, but Jassim would still have needed to personally spend time with them, as it is only when trust and understanding have developed that the sport can really take place.

  Jassim and his friends would have spent much of their time at the start of the season handling the birds and talking about them with friends. In the evenings, they would have sat near a campfire, the curve-spouted della al qahwa (coffee pot) kept warm by the flames. He and his guests would have drunk coffee made from ground green beans, and brewed with cardamom, which was served in small cups – the staple drink in all social settings. The Bedouin tradition has always been one of extreme hospitality, and the Al Thani were no exception. As his humble home at the end of his life suggests, Jassim did not seek out luxury and was happy to live in the manner of the guards who protected him. He would have sat on the ground and shared food from the same dish as his friends and guards.

  These desert outings were no self-indulgence but rather an opportunity to learn and develop many skills. Most important of these was knowledge of how to navigate round a featureless desert. There are few places that easily betray their location in Qatar’s interior, though in very dry years near Mesaieed there are dunes that are said to ‘sing’ when the wind blows, a most eerie sound that was usually ascribed to evil jinn spirits. More normally, the sun, the shape of dunes, the b
reeze and the stars were the tools required to appreciate position. Even to this day, old men will tell anyone willing to listen how it is possible to ‘taste’ the wind and listen for different types of ‘silence’. The thing is that such stories can’t be dismissed out of hand, because the simple truth is that these men did get around the desert without a compass or GPS system.

  We know Jassim was keen to enhance such skills, and loved keeping the company of men who had performed amazing feats of endurance. He often went hunting with two Bedouins in particular – one from the Menasir clan and one from the Murra – because they had successfully crossed the great Empty Quarter, the Rub’ al-Khali, making it to Yemen and back again. There were still people being smuggled from Yemen to Kuwait in the 1950s who didn’t survive a similar journey, despite travelling in specially adapted desert vehicles. For these two tribesmen to have survived the return trip as well, without getting killed, lost or dying of thirst, was remarkable. Journeys such as these have brought fame and fortune to many a Western traveller who has published accounts of their privations, and such tribesmen were also honoured in their own societies.

  His desert outings would also have afforded Jassim opportunities to hone other skills. He would have learned how to handle a rifle, ride bareback and fight with sword and lance. Arabian horses have been famous for thousands of years, and their bloodline is still used to bring speed, endurance and strong bones to other breeds. With their distinctive head shape and high tail carriage, they are probably the most easily recognisable horse breed in the world. But they are also one of the oldest, and have been bred in Qatar for over four thousand years, exported only in recent decades. Although Westerners tend to think of the Bedouin association with camels, in Qatar it was the horse which the tribesman prized more, especially for its mobility and manoeuvrability in battle. This was in sharp contrast to the heavy European cavalry, as deployed by soldiers such as Prince Rupert of the Rhine. At the Battle of Edgehill, for example, it took his cavalry a whole hour to re-form for a second charge, by which time the fighting was over. Jassim loved his horses fast, strong and intelligent, much as young Qataris love their fast cars today.

  Oddly enough, these equestrian skills have remained with the Al Thani to this day. I don’t know whether you can imagine riding up a wet, narrow, thirty-degree ramp over a hundred yards high in front of tens of thousands of people, while holding aloft a burning torch. The great-great-great-grandson of Jassim performed such a feat at the opening of the 2006 Asian Games in Doha. In a radio interview the next day, it was noticeable how Muhammad bin Hamad referred to his horse as if it were not only a human being, but a friend and companion, constantly using the word ‘we’ to describe his and his horse’s exploits the day before.

  Jassim’s respect for the Bedouin lifestyle was also made clear from the clothes he chose to wear. His father, Muhammad, preferred the dress of the seafaring Trucial coast – such as you might see in Oman today. But the son preferred the dress of the Najd Bedouin from a very young age. Jassim was one of them, and was shortly to prove he had acquired their bravery and skills. For in 1849, at the age of 23, Jassim led his tribesmen at the Battle of Mesaimeer against one of the most famed desert warriors of the age – Musa’id. No written account of the battle survives, but we know from oral tradition that Jassim charged directly, brought down Musa’id with his lance and led his men to a successful defence of the town. Jassim’s childhood was over.

  3

  AN INDUSTRY IN NEED OF A GOVERNMENT

  The Pearl that the Prince full well might prize

  so surely set in shining gold!

  The pearl of Orient with her vies

  to prove her peerless I make bold:

  So round, so radiant to mine eyes,

  smooth she seemed, so small to hold

  Among all jewels judges wise

  would count her best an hundred fold

  Alas! I lost the pearl of old!

  I pine with heart-pain unforgot;

  Down through my arbour grass it rolled,

  the pearl, precious, without spot.

  THE WONDROUS PEARL has kept poet and painter employed for centuries, as this adaptation of a fourteenth-century Lancastrian poem proves. It has been a metaphor for all that is rare, beautiful and admirable since biblical times, used even to describe the adornments on the gates of paradise and, in the Quran, the clothes of those fortunate enough to be there. The West’s fascination for the perfectly spherical little globules of concentrically coated, crystalline calcium carbonate has remained constant over the years. Could Johannes Vermeer have placed anything else at the very centre of his portrait Girl with a Pearl Earring? With such a title, presumably not, though Holland’s answer to the Mona Lisa is admittedly quite pretty too. And what else could Jack Sparrow, fictional captain of the Hollywood film Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequels, have named his beloved ship? The Pearl certainly trumps Queen Anne’s Revenge in my book.

  Pearls were craved by the West’s wealthiest and most attractive women for hundreds of years. The Austrian beauty Marie Antoinette, whose mother’s face was stamped on to the Maria Theresa dollars used to pay for many of these pearls, was seldom painted without them. Empress Maria Fiodorovna, mother of the last tsar of Russia and a society-shocking swimmer, was positively dripping with pearls in her 1880s portrait by Ivan Kramskoi. Margharita of Savoy, Queen of Italy and mother of Victor Emmanuel III, had one of the longest pearl necklaces of the twentieth century. She was often photographed proudly wearing it too, despite suffering the dubious honour of having had a pizza named after her in 1889. In short, the clamour for pearls had never been so loud, and it was the Gulf which was required to provide them. For until the settlement of the Americas and the West’s domination of trade with China and Japan, there was only one place for Europe to slake its thirst for these exotic jewels – the Arabian Gulf.

  Thus it was that towards the end of his life, Jassim ruled over a twenty-thousand-strong nation, half of whom dedicated the best years of their lives to searching out Pinctada margaritifera and Pinctada radiata. Jassim’s father, Muhammad bin Thani, described Qatar’s social and economic dependence on the gems best to William Palgrave in 1863: ‘We are all from the highest to the lowest slaves of one master … the pearl.’ But Palgrave didn’t need to be told. The Arabic-speaking spy, who would often pretend to be Muslim, made extensive notes on everything he saw and thought. He observed the dramatic health effects pearl hunting had wrought on Muhammad bin Thani’s closest friends and advisers, describing them as ‘sallow-faced … their skins soddened by frequent sea-diving and their faces wrinkled’. One thought that didn’t occur to him, however, was that these very same jewels would eventually help provide for Qatar’s independence.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the demand that drove the expansion of pearling was truly global. The British Empire was a prodigious consumer, as were Europe and the United States. London’s political agent in the Gulf observed in 1910 that ‘the demand for pearls is more than equal to the supply … and revival in the prosperity of Europe and America is immediately followed by a corresponding rise in the value of pearls’. Another British official noted in 1915, two years after Jassim’s death, that should the supply of pearls fail, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the ports of Trucial Oman ‘would practically cease to exist’.

  All the more incredible, then, that a trade which had begun some seven millennia earlier, and which employed most of the men and boys on the peninsula, should have suffered such a swift demise. The Great Depression of 1929 choked off any excess wealth that might otherwise have been spent on adorning the necks of the West’s wealthiest women. But depressions had come and gone before. In 1907, the market collapsed and Jassim had to sell the nation’s pearl harvest at half the price he had paid for it – losing some six million Indian rupees in the process. After sending his son to Bombay to investigate, the sheikh was forced to establish Doha’s first customs house. Clearly, then, Qatar’s fortunes were tied to the price o
f the pearl, and fluctuations in the market had dramatic consequences for everyone involved. The Depression was not enough to end pearl hunting, however. The Gulf’s main industry was instead eventually brought to its knees by a couple of researchers thousands of miles away in Japan.

  Should you really wish to point a finger of blame, then point it at biologist Tokishi Nishikawa and his carpenter friend Tatsuhei Mise, who discovered a technique for inducing the creation of a round pearl within the gonad of an oyster at the beginning of the twentieth century. Entrepreneur Mikimoto Kokichi shortly thereafter patented an industrialised version of the technique, and the first successful harvest was produced in 1916. By 1935 there were three hundred and fifty pearl farms in Japan producing ten million cultured pearls annually. Traditional pearl hunting in the Gulf was all but dead. Qatar’s final boom, or large seagoing boat, was built in the early 1970s, and all signs of a once proud industry were erased by the year 2000, with the official closure of the Gulf’s last pearl-oyster market in Kuwait. Occasionally, you can still read of businessmen in the Gulf who dream of getting their hands on the pearls that have not been harvested in the Gulf for so many years, only to discover that the skills for finding them have gone for ever. The nakhoda, or ship’s captain, was an expert in finding the pearl banks, guided by the sun, the stars, the colours and depth of the sea. The divers knew to leave younger oysters, and which ones were likely to contain a pearl. These were skills and knowledge gained over centuries, but lost overnight.