Jassim the Leader: Founder of Qatar

by Mohamed Althani

  Lest one feel the pang of nostalgia too keenly, it should be noted that pearling was a desperately hard life for almost every Qatari involved. The financial and physical strains were harsh and the rewards barely worth the effort. If a market collapse was tough on the ruling Al Thani, you can be sure it was truly dismal farther down the economy. Financial regulation was well defined, and debt was as soul-destroying as any prison sentence. Ship’s captains usually borrowed money from a specific kind of businessman, the musaqqam, at the beginning of the season. Out of this loan, they would pay for provisions and cash advances to divers, whose wives would have to make do without them for four to five months of every year. If the captain could not in turn repay his debt by season’s end in September, he sold his entire crop to the musaqqam at around 20 per cent below market price, losing the whole season’s profit. To avoid this, captains charged the divers very high commissions for the advance on their pay. Admittedly they allowed for repayment in instalments, but divers owing money to captains often became so mired in debt that they were obliged to work off their loans or pass them down to their sons as an inheritance. In effect, some sailors were born for the privilege of working to pay off a loan they had never taken out.

  Ironically, it was often the case that many of the peninsula’s black slaves were in a better situation than their ‘free’ shipmates. Slavery in Qatar wasn’t officially banned until 1952, but before gasping too loudly, know that Doha was ahead of the game. Indeed, it abolished the practice before Saudi Arabia, the Trucial States and Yemen. Oman didn’t even get round to ending slavery until 1970. But the word slavery should not evoke the cotton plantations of the Deep South, where the foreman’s whip was law and the segregation of races sacrosanct. It is true that half of the pearling population of Qatar were slaves or former slaves, but it is equally true that many of them had become part of the families they had originally worked for. Intermarriage was not a taboo and, on these pearling expeditions, slave and freeman ate the same food, slept on the same deck and used the same zuli to answer the call of nature. And as with diamond and gold mining today, those Westerners in the market for pearls didn’t ask many questions about working conditions at the time.

  True, once Britain became actively involved in the Gulf, it made a number of agreements with the rulers of Bahrain, the Trucial States and Muscat that bound them to suppressing and abstaining from the slave trade. Some British naval officers even stopped ships to set blacks free. But in Jassim’s time, Qatar had no understanding with Bombay or London and kept its slave workforce at their duties, be they fishing, pearling, guarding or even acting as the scimitar-wielding emiri bodyguard. When Doha finally signed a treaty with imperial Britain in 1916, however, Jassim’s son undertook to enforce the same anti-slavery regulations as other Trucial coast rulers. He and his people were allowed to retain slaves already in their possession on the condition, as the British put it, that ‘they treated them well’. But Britain was often frustrated to find that the domestic slaves it was now so keen to liberate preferred the economic stability of a guaranteed roof over their heads, especially during the 1930s, when financial hardship was at its highest. Tellingly, the British promised to issue certificates of manumission to any slave who wished to be freed; yet in the 1920s and 1930s the annual number of manumitted slaves rarely exceeded two dozen for the entire Gulf region.

  Whether slave or freeman, however, if either could cope with the financial hardship, pearling itself was just as desperate a business. Forty years ago, the Kuwaiti film director Khalid al-Saddiq produced a feature film that resonated with many of his grandparents’ generation. Bas ya Bahar, which has been roughly translated as ‘The Cruel Sea’, is set in the 1930s and tells the tragic story of a young man’s struggle to earn enough money to marry his childhood sweetheart and pay off his father’s debts. Surviving the heat, discomfort, sharks and jellyfish, he at last finds a wondrous pearl that might pay for his modest dreams to come true. But fate decrees he must perish beneath the waves after his hand becomes stuck in an oyster bank. When his grief-stricken mother is given the pearl, she hurls it back into the very sea that has caused her family so much pain.

  The conditions under which divers worked were abominable. Men – any male over the age of about twelve – would leave their families for months on end during the height of summer. Boats that were meant to carry six or seven were more likely to carry 26 or 27. Just five years before Jassim’s birth, the British made every effort to limit the size of native boats still further, and it was quite common for them to be so overcrowded with equipment, food and water that there was hardly any room for the crew to sit, let alone sleep at night. During the day, the men could expect to work in temperatures of 45 degrees or more. One can only assume that, if there was no breeze, the heat and humidity must have made pearling a living hell.

  The days were long and arduous. Divers were in the water just after dawn and often stayed there until dusk, stopping only to literally catch their breath. A diver’s equipment included a string bag in which to gather the oysters, a goat-horn clip for his nose and a rope tied around his waist by which a partner on the boat pulled him up at the end of each dive. A typical swim would last about two minutes – time enough for an experienced man to grab about thirty oysters from the sandbanks some twenty metres below – followed by a rest of only a minute, although most captains would give their pearlers a longer rest after every ten dives.

  At times, a strong wind might prevent diving or, occasionally, the crew would have to row their becalmed boats from one location to another. It was exhausting work that would wear down even the toughest. But then they could not afford to slow down, fall ill or ask for rest – not so much in fear of a captain’s punishment, but because they might have their share of the season’s income reduced. Sailors were paid only when the season was over and the pearls had been sold or traded to the merchants who would export them to India. A tenth of the profit went to the shipowner, 20 per cent for the provisions. The remaining monies were divided between crew and captain – who received three shares to a crew member’s one. In later years, Sheikh Jassim would also receive one share from each boat in the fleet for the protection he provided their villages while they were away. Later he would introduce a tax as well. Ultimately, crews would have been able to provide food for their families, but little else.

  Working around twelve hours a day in the sea had serious consequences for health, and not just in terms of such obvious dangers as predatory sharks! By the age of about twenty-five, most men would already have begun to suffer painful skin and eye afflictions that could be treated only with herbs. If a diver surfaced too quickly, he risked damaging his ears; too slowly and he might just drown. Diving ended once the light had begun to fade, affording a rare opportunity for these men to eat a proper meal, as diving on a full stomach was impossible. As a result of months of malnourishment, many of the men would lose their teeth. The only types of food to be had would have been dates, salted fish and possibly a little rice. Fresh water was in fact often brackish, and would have had rather a unique taste – being drawn from rusty iron barrels on supply boats that serviced the pearling fleet. After they had caught a few hours’ sleep, the real work would begin at first light. The previous day’s oysters were waiting to be opened. They would have been piled high on deck and left overnight to weaken or die before being prised open and checked. Although the crew were eager to find pearls, they would also keep back any shells that had particularly beautiful mother-of-pearl. The best nacre came from a third species of oyster native to the Gulf, the Pteria macroptera.

  Despite their lot, the crew no doubt put a brave face on things, and a whole musical genre evolved over the decades that helped make the best out of it. Sea shanties, or fijeeri songs, were common throughout the Arab Gulf. A lead singer, or nahham, would be backed by a chorus of accompanying voices. As opposed to the Ladies-of-Spain-type songs of the British navy, these shanties were invariably about Allah, the ship, the wind and the sea. Ev
ery job had its accompanying rhythmic motion, and the ‘pull and haul’ songs of the Gulf are truly beautiful. Author and adventurer Alan Villiers wrote up his impressions in 1939 on seeing one such expedition leave port. (Unknowingly, Villiers was himself about to join Britain’s Royal Navy and play a part in Operation Dynamo at Dunkirk.) His description of a Gulf sea shanty is almost as hypnotically captivating as the song itself.

  With sufficient volume of menacing growls, the soloist, striking a higher note, suddenly quickened his pace and all hands fell at once upon the halyards. The deep growling stopped and the sailors took up the song … the sweat poured from them; the song swelled; the taut yellow-line stood rigid as steel as those great muscled arms brought it down, down. The blocks creaked, protestingly; the loosened parrals groaned; the yard trembled and quivered along its length. Up, up it went! The blazing sun beat down and there was no shade; the very sea burned with the sun’s fierce light, and the sweat ran in streams. This was brutal work. It was difficult to keep foothold as they stamped and stamped again their great, calloused feet on the wooden decks and hauled and sang.

  Unfortunately, Villiers didn’t get to hear Qatari women singing their cycle of songs, or at least he didn’t note it, for wives, sisters, mothers and daughters would also gather on the shores to sing out to sea for the safety of their husbands on their voyages. And what long voyages they were.

  In Jassim’s time, the season was divided into three parts. The first part was called the ghaws al-barid, a forty-day expedition in mid-April. The main event, the ghaws al-kabir, commenced in mid to late May and ended some time in September, or even early October. Lastly, for those desperately poor enough to need it, the rudaida was an additional possibility. There was a week’s leave between the three stages, when the sailors could return to their home ports to rest and reprovision. After October, no ships could be used to hunt pearl, but in the winter men were allowed to wade out on to some of the extensive shallow banks to try their luck. The practice, known as the mujannah, was great for the lucky few who found anything because such pearls could be collected tax free.

  Once safely home, after five months at sea, it would usually take the men three months to recover from their exertions – not just because of undernourishment, but also the early signs of scurvy and the like. Some of the younger teenagers would also have to cope with complications to their still-developing lungs and respiratory systems. One can only imagine the desperation when the oyster harvest had largely failed – as occasionally happened – and ships had little to show for their efforts. Nevertheless, it is a tribute to these men’s strength of mind and body that no one else seemed capable of farming the pearls for themselves, and not for want of trying. The Dutch attempted as early as 1757 to cut out the Gulf Arabs altogether and harvest oysters directly. They didn’t even last one season. And even though the British were well acquainted with the more advanced technologies used in the Sea of Japan and the Far East, and stationed steam-powered vessels in the Gulf region from the 1860s, yet still they were of the opinion that the effort and sacrifice needed to obtain the pearl did not justify the reward.

  Jassim would have had to protect not only these men’s families but also the industry itself. As early as 1790, Qataris were noticing that the oyster banks around the western shores were furnishing declining numbers of pearls, and there was discussion of the environmental impact of the industry on the sea, well before it became the trendy, ‘green’ topic of recent decades. Nakhodas, or ships’ captains, were worried an increasing demand for mother-of-pearl meant that fewer shells were being returned to ‘fertilise’ the bed. Even the British noticed it, with one Hartford Jones reporting that the sea ‘has latterly not proved so productive as in former times’. Some nakhodas were sent to find new beds, locating hairaat, or underwater mounds surrounded by deep water, so as not to over-farm the traditional najwaat, or ordinary, eight-fathom-deep banks. But the growing demand meant the market would not be denied, and regular boosts in production saw a 350 per cent increase under Jassim’s rule. With declining numbers of quality pearls, demand outstripped supply and prices went through the roof.

  Comparing values of money is not straightforward because figures can be calculated in many different ways. Items that might be expensive today (boats and labour, for example) were often comparatively cheap then, and vice versa. So, depending on which economic historian you ask, £500 sterling in 1850 might be just £40,000 in today’s money, using retail price indices as the basis for comparison. But if a measure of gross domestic product is used, that same £500 might be worth a cool million. Secondly, of course, the pearl merchant, the tawwash, never obtained the true value of the pearl, and, in descending order down to the divers, the proceeds compared to the perfection of the pearls were low. The general point is: figures are guesstimates at best. I’ll put £500, then, at £200,000 today and tell you that Qatar’s pearling industry in 1850 was probably bringing in about £40 million in today’s terms, and three and a half times as much by 1905. Not bad for a country whose total population was less than 22,000. Of this money, the ruling Jassim would have received about 1 per cent. Indeed, the historian Rosemarie Zahlan reports that Jassim collected £750 in 1908, about £350,000 today.

  No one in their right mind would have begrudged him the revenue. The task of protecting the coastal settlements from Bedouin raiders was probably one of the easier of his many duties. What made Muhammad and Jassim’s lives more difficult was the constant threat of Ottoman domination, and poor relations with British Indian merchants, who, when the opportunity arose, would call on the government in Bombay to regulate the market in Doha, if not actually invade. And then, of course, there was the possibility that a European recession or war might lead to a market collapse, inducing social upheaval or starvation. Worst of all, the British still had a habit of burning significant sections of Qatar’s pearling fleet, as last happened in 1896.

  More money matters

  Anyone visiting Qatar today can’t fail to notice the large number of foreign workers from Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran and the Philippines. But only those of the last ethnicity are in fact recent arrivals. In the nineteenth century, many men from the Indian subcontinent earned their living in the Gulf. Qatar was no different from its neighbours in this respect. Indeed, the Indian rupee was as widely accepted as a Maria Theresa dollar, an Iranian kran or a British gold sovereign. The German mark was also accepted later in the 1870s. Qatar didn’t print its own currency, the riyal, until 1966. The Maria Theresa thaler was a silver coin that had become stuck in a fiscal time-warp. All coins had to be dated 1780 as far as Arab traders were concerned – even though they were being minted right up until the early twentieth century. And though the coin had started life in 1751 during the reign of Empress Maria Theresa, who ruled Austria, Hungary and Bohemia until 1780, the coin was so popular that the buxom Maria was stamped on to 39 million thalers in the noticeably un-Austrian cities of Birmingham, Bombay, London, Paris and Rome, never once to jingle in a Habsburg pocket. (The kran was accepted in Qatar until Persia ceased minting it in 1932. It could be subdivided into shahis or dinars, and was worth one tenth of a toman.)

  With a fair few nationalities working in Doha, it is small wonder that problems occasionally reared their ugly head. One such instance was to have serious consequences with the Indian pearl merchants in the early 1880s, and Jassim’s relations with these British subjects proved especially problematic once the industry started to bring in serious money from around 1875. The unhappy upshot, as will be explained in detail later, was that by the beginning of the twentieth century, there was only one resident Indian in the whole country. This very fact alone was enough to distinguish Qatar from all other Gulf societies at the time. But India’s loss was Persia’s gain, and the percentage of Qataris with Iranian origins is significant.

  There were other major changes too. Jassim was the first ruler to be able to levy a tax on all pearling ships from around the entire Qatari peninsula, which formed the basis of
his revenue. His father had been able to levy tax only on boats from Doha and Wakra. The new emir ended his father’s practice of imposing different rates of tax on different tribes. For example, Muhammad had never been able to get a single rupee out of the Al Sudan tribe in Doha. It took Jassim a few years, but we know that by 1908 they were paying the ship captain’s tax, at the same flat rate as everyone else. The tariff on every nakhoda, hauler and diver was four Maria Theresa dollars, two for each apprentice. And with a genuine state income came genuine state institutions. By the 1890s, Qatar had its first proper roads and ten of the nation’s first ever schools were opened.

  The pearling season largely determined the fortunes of the state but there were also attempts to diversify and generate greater revenue from other industries. The sea, already giving so much, provided Qatari shipping with a further two money-making enterprises: fishing and transport. Fish of all kinds were plentiful and a staple part of the region’s diet; the fishing fleet was around a quarter the size of its pearling one. Hamour, or grouper, makes for a popular meal today, but there were literally scores of species to choose from then, including red mullet, sea bass, red snapper, red tuna, red-banded sea bream, mackerel and the small but mouth-wateringly delicious rabbitfish or Siganidae siganus, known to locals as safi. Catches were sold in Bahrain, and as far north as Iraq.

  Similarly, lateen-sailed transport ships, the aforementioned booms, carried goods to the ports of Bahrain and Lingeh and their design was modified as ships were once again used for purposes other than pearling. Despite a romantic image, the lateen sail already had a particular advantage over its European rivals before the industrial age. Its fore-and-aft rig could be used to sail closer to the wind than the West’s square ones. They used smaller sails than those of the equivalent European craft but, with their long keel, shallower draught and lighter weight, they tended to be faster. This combined with easier manoeuvrability, with craft often sailing around a head-on wind rather than tacking, to say nothing of a sailor’s local marine knowledge, giving him significant advantages over rivals.