Jassim the Leader: Founder of Qatar

by Mohamed Althani

  Still, in Jassim’s time, Qatari boat-makers modified their boat designs in the face of European transport competition. Boats had traditionally been made with teak planks connected with coir rope bindings and heavily greased. This had given them literally flexible craft, better suited to dealing with the sandbanks and reefs of the Gulf. But they came to incorporate the nailed oak planks of the British navy, and dhow boat construction developed, using wrought-iron nails driven through bow-drilled holes packed with hemp soaked in an oil and tar mix. The new designs were strong enough to carry heavier cargoes. Regretfully, no dhow or boom has been laid down in Qatar since 1970; no shipbuilding of any kind has survived. The few retired Qatari shipwrights who remain describe how natural and organic their constructions had been. Traditionally, for example, the ribs of the ship were left more or less as the imported trunks and branches arrived, trimmed only at their junctions with the planks of the boat.

  In the West, where sailors are married to their jobs, ships are all female. But the Gulf’s dhows were a more equitable mix of male and female, though I’m not sure feminists would be overly pleased with the result. Ladies had short, fat prows, while the gentlemen enjoyed fine, long ones. Be that as it may, such ships were rarely anchored at Doha, but rather beached. It was easier to unload cargo or fish, and access to the hulls of the craft for maintenance was more easily afforded. One of the few photographs of Qatar taken during Jassim’s lifetime in 1904 shows how the bateel and baqaara craft were beached and propped up with wooden poles, in upright positions, on the foreshore.

  But what of the significant minority of men who wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the sea? There were many men who preferred the ships of the desert. It’s estimated that the Emirate had a thousand boats by the end of the nineteenth century, but many more dromedaries. London’s representative in Bahrain at the time, Lorimer, reckoned there were around one and a half thousand camels in Qatar. Milk-producing camels were livestock that, together with dates and fish, enriched the local diet. As you might expect, however, there are many types of camel, bred for a variety of tasks ranging from porterage to racing, as well as for meat and milk. They were an extremely valuable resource and the traditional way of measuring wealth and value. Since few roads existed, the camel was also used for local transport, to carry passengers and goods to and from various places around the peninsula and to operate the wells. Women would ride them too, assuming they were correctly seated in a hawdaj. Those Bedouin communities that bred camels would also have kept sheep, and we know there was a small trade exporting these to Bahrain.

  There was little time for any luxury for the local population. Imports were restricted to the pearling industry’s bare necessities; wood was brought in to build boats, ropes for diving and foodstuffs to supplement the home-grown diet. Dates were imported from Hasa, and cloth, mostly cotton bales, was imported from India, usually by way of Bahrain. But despite the hard work necessary for survival, the pace of day-to-day living was slow. No global shipping line ever made regular stops; communication with the outside world was entirely dependent on the local vessels of towns and villages. Before describing how this was to change between 1850 and 1913, we need to describe the political world Jassim found himself in as a young man and the tribal organisation of the peninsula, as well as the policies of his father.

  4

  TRIBES AND STATE FORMATION

  I WONDER WHAT QATARIS of old would make of the lettuces and tomatoes harvested in the desert today, thanks to the marvel of hydroponics and its sister sciences. In Jassim’s time, Qatar had scant agriculture to boast of. The little it did produce was often pilfered. There were just a handful of productive date groves in Laqta, Markhiya, Mushairib, Nu’aijah, Sikak, Sakhama and Wakra. The small but excellent dates they provided, however, were good enough to warrant harvest-time raids by opportunistic Bedouin tribesmen. Much of neighbouring Hasa suffered similar devastation, or worse. Land there was far more productive, enough to stimulate Ottoman reinvasion of the region in 1870. But farmers frequently abandoned their plantations owing to almost continuous conflict and unreasonable taxation.

  With no central authority in Qatar, the weak were at the mercy of the strong and the labourers’ exertions could be reduced to mere drudgery in a matter of minutes. Imagine a farming family’s panic as the womenfolk hid and the men saw the fruits of their labours carried off. The following lines of verse were written in 1844, and could almost describe the situation of date farmers in the same year.

  A stifled gasp! A dreamy noise, ‘The roof is in a flame!’

  From out their beds, and to their doors, rush maid and sire and dame.

  And meet, upon the threshold stone, the gleaming sabres’ fall,

  And over each black and bearded face the white and crimson shawl.

  The yell of ‘Allah’ breaks above the prayer and shriek and roar

  Oh, blessed God! The Algerine is Lord of Baltimore.

  Of course, the later lines betray the fact that Thomas Osborne Davis, the Young Irelander, was not describing a British troop raid on an Irish farm in 1844, but rather an extraordinary Algerian slave raid on an unsuspecting Irish village some two hundred years earlier!

  Raiding and continual political instability meant that Jassim’s childhood was shorter than most. In the 1840s, neither he nor his father, Muhammad, was in a position of power over any part of the peninsula, with the exception of Fuwairit. But any power Muhammad bin Thani may have held was tenuous. Thousands of Bahraini and Qatari tribesmen frequented his town in the 1840s, not to fight him, but to lay siege against each other one month and engage in battle the next. Despite the difficulties, Muhammad’s fortunes endured. To understand why, we must consider the political and tribal make-up of the region, and the contemporary power struggles that kept life there anything but boring.

  Tribes and political structure

  The coastal, revenue-generating communities were relatively easy to manage, but the Bedouin who roamed inland, with their camels, sheep and goats, were a different matter. Two-thirds of their number would only winter in Qatar, attracted by the sparse scrub that the short rainy season provided. For the rest of the year, they would keep to the mainland, Hasa and Najd. This was a pattern established over centuries. Every armed clan had its own area in which to wander, a place where it held grazing rights and access to stone-rimmed wells. This was their dira. How Bedouin knew which sections of identical desert belonged to whom is remarkable, and pays tribute to their relationship with an environment they inhabited but never dominated or controlled absolutely.

  Each clan was led by a sheikh, whose role it was to resolve disputes and make the important decisions that ensured the welfare of his people. He was not a despot, nor did he enjoy a position in which he could sit back. His right to rule could be challenged by any tribesman, so long as a clan was confident in the challenger’s ability. It’s important to remember that, in Gulf society, the right to rule was not inherited by the eldest son, but the most capable, so succession was a difficult time for the sheikh’s family. Brothers could, and did, end up fighting each other, as happened in the Al Saud family in the 1860s. Often, the ruler needed to placate kinsmen, confident that his siblings would seize on any weakness to dethrone him, as happened in Bahrain to Muhammad bin Khalifa Al Khalifa (with surprising regularity between the 1830s and 1860s). By and large, however, the sheikh’s authority was respected and his opinion authoritative. For his part, any leader would always consult before taking major decisions and pay regular stipends to family members out of his income.

  Ibn Khaldoun, the great historian and sociologist from Tunis, had observed the dichotomy of sedentary and nomadic life and described the inevitable loss of power that occurred when tribesmen came into regular contact with townsfolk. His fourteenth-century observations on North Africa remained applicable to nineteenth-century Qatar. Two tribes tended to stay in the peninsula’s interior throughout the year. The greater threat to security was posed by the Banu Hajir, whose men we
re not to be dismissed lightly by any potential ruler. Even Ottoman troops stationed in Doha had to pay tribesmen for safe passage through the peninsula’s interior. The lack of central authority grew to such an extent that towns would give ‘gifts’ to the Banu Hajir, who were themselves paying zakah to the Wahhabi state in the Najd.

  The second clan that remained throughout the year, the Kaban, posed much less of a threat to the stronger coastal communities. The Kaban could not be dominated either, however, as they maintained good relations with their kinsfolk in Hasa and could increase their number quickly if need be. Both Muhammad bin Thani and Jassim, therefore, faced a monumental challenge. The extent of a tribe’s dira was only as great as its men’s ability to defend it. A sheikh who claimed control but couldn’t enforce collection of the zakah tax from those who roamed within the dira was a fraud. And each winter, Qatar was visited by tribes that openly gave their allegiance and tax to the Wahhabi state in the Najd. To tax such tribes twice, if it were possible at all, was to invite war. Local, indigenous sheikhs were in a precarious situation, whereby their power depended on it not being winter.

  Of the winter visitors, the Murra and the Ajman proved the biggest, and worst, headaches. Neither tribe remotely felt a need to ‘tug a forelock’ in the general direction of anyone in Qatar. But there were many other problematic clans too; the Manasir hailed from Trucial Oman and the Naim from both Bahrain and south towards the Trucial coast. Their arrival in October coincided with the end of the pearl season and the date harvest, when more money than usual was hidden under the proverbial mattress. A lot of people in Fuwairit would have been very cautious in their dealings with the tribes that winter drove towards them.

  The hadar, or settled peoples of Ibn Khaldoun’s theory, were made up of around twenty sedentary tribes in the 1840s. The premier division was made up of such clans as the Sultan, the Al Musallam, the Mahandah, the Sudan, the Al bu Kawara, the Hamaydat, the Huwalah, the Al bu Aynain, the Al bin Ali and of course Jassim’s own Mi’daad. There were also a Shia Arab tribe known as the Bahraina in Doha. We can have a good guess at their numbers in each town thanks to a British geographic survey completed, oddly enough, in the year of Jassim’s birth. Lieutenants Brucks and Guy, whose health suffered terribly on their mission round the Gulf aboard the Psyche, made descriptions of tribal strength in most of the villages dotted around the coast. To give a taster, this is what they wrote about Bida: ‘This place contains about four hundred Arabs of the Naim, Dawasir and Al bu Kuwara, and is frequented by the Manasir and other wandering tribes.’ It is noticeable that no one tried to stop the two British officers from gathering such information, as their research eventually led to the plotting of accurate charts which, in turn, led to the Royal Navy’s Euphrates steaming up into Iraq in 1836. The steamer’s captain, Colonel Chesney, was even told by King William IV: ‘Remember, Sir, that the success of England mainly depends upon commerce … I do not desire war, but if you should be molested, due support shall not be wanting.’

  The survey also proved of great use to historians, as it gave the names of other villages with permanent populations. It shows, for example, that Huwaila was a much bigger town than Bida, with more people and more profitable trade. It was able to build its own ghuri, or fort, and was protected by 450 fighting men from the Al bu Kuwara. Clearly, Huwaila was not going to be raided very easily, but many of the other settlements were not so fortunate. The survey suggests that such settlements as Lusail, Hadiya, Sumaysma, Dhaayn and Ruwais had barely two hundred men, women and children each. In the absence of any central authority, such towns and villages were governed by local elders who could do little to mount a serious defence against determined opposition.

  Conspicuous by its absence, Doha didn’t get a mention in Brucks and Guy’s survey, possibly because Britain had razed the town to the ground just a few years before they began. In fact, Doha didn’t get a decent, written mention by anyone until 1857, when it is lumped in with a description of the natural harbourage offered at Ras Abu Abboud: ‘Doha is a town partly walled round, with several towers. It extends eight hundred yards along the beach. The sheikh’s house is at a large round tower (with the flagstaff) on the beach, about the centre of the town; to the west of this tower is a small bight, where boats are hauled up to repair.’ Such a description suggests that Qatar’s east coast had enjoyed substantial growth in the 1830s and 1840s. The same cannot be said for the west coast, where large areas were coming under the authority of Bahraini representatives.

  Politicised youth

  Life in Qatar in the early 1840s was tense. Key towns on the peninsula were home to political and piratical fugitives attempting to escape British ‘justice’ or Bahraini jails. The romantic tales of Rahma bin Jabir may have awed a child, but the young Jassim was now confronted in his own town of Fuwairit with a dynastic struggle between the local Isa bin Turaif and the Khalifa of Bahrain. Their dispute would pit thousands of Qatari and Bahraini fighters against each other in some of the bloodiest encounters seen on the peninsula for many centuries. It is a story that would have affected Jassim’s political thinking in the years that followed. While it is a complicated story, it needs to be told.

  To do justice to bin Turaif’s tragic odyssey requires picking up Bahrain’s story where we left it in Chapter 1. Following Rahma bin Jabir’s spectacular demise in 1826, the embargo on Bahrain had ended. The island’s co-rulers, Sheikh Abdullah and his nephew, Sheikh Khalifa, were now in a position to project their power on to neighbouring Qatif, Dammam and the Qatari peninsula. As their strength grew, so did the number of their enemies, and many sought refuge from the duo in the remoter parts of the Qatari peninsula. The historian Habibur Rahman writes: ‘Qatar became a breeding ground for their political ambitions and a base for dissident factions of the Al Khalifa family.’

  The first of these dissidents to hit British and Persian headlines was Muhammad bin Khamis, a brother-in-law to the head of the Al bu Aynain tribe in Bida. Muhammad had stabbed a Bahraini and fled the country to seek the protection of his relatives, particularly their chief, Ali bin Nasir. Bahrain used the incident to send a naval force in 1828 to destroy the Al bu Aynain fort. But the sheikh didn’t stop there. Abdullah decided that he would also split the whole tribe up across Fuwairit and Ruwais in the north-east and Zubara in the north-west. The ultimate shame was saved for Ali bin Nasir himself, who was exiled to Wakra without his kinsmen.

  Bahrain was all powerful, it seemed. But many of its neighbours were keen to see its destruction, particularly Oman. Fortunately for the island, disease was to prove an ally. It is amazing how little things can have such dramatic consequences. Clouds protected Kokura from an American atomic bomb in 1945. Painful kidney stones tortured Judge Jeffreys into ordering the execution of 144 Englishmen in two days. But something even smaller would save Bahrain from invasion. The cholera bacterium prevented Sultan Sayyid Said’s invasion fleet from landing the Omani army on Bahrain’s shores in 1828.

  Similarly concerned at the apparent growth in Bahraini strength, the Najd’s Wahhabi emir, Turki bin Abdullah, decided to pose the island a greater challenge than Oman’s abortive attack. He demanded an annual tribute of 40,000 German crowns and the fort at Dammam, which was to be handed over to Rahma bin Jabir’s son, Bashir. Sheikh Abdullah temporarily agreed to the terms as he built up local support, before reneging on the deal, along with the Amamara clan in Hasa, and blockading the Wahhabi ports of Qatif and Uqair. What the news of this setback did for Turki’s health is anyone’s guess, but he died shortly after, leaving his son Faisal to attempt recovery of Dammam in 1835. Bahrain now controlled the Hasa coast, it had seen off Omani and Wahhabi attacks, and now it could turn its attention to Qatar.

  In September 1835, Sheikh Abdullah ordered his nephew’s sons, Ali and Muhammad, to raid Huwaila and destroy the power and prestige of his son-in-law, Sheikh Isa bin Turaif, who led the Al bin Ali. Bahrain’s elite were unconvinced the attack was justified, and two of Sheikh Abdullah’s sons even sailed f
rom Muharraq with hundreds of warriors to aid Huwaila’s defence against their father. In the town itself, Isa’s deputy, Sultan bin Salama, had managed to recruit 2,000 fighters and receive support from the Wahhabi state, including three dozen horsemen and 200 soldiers, as well as dates and rice. Undeterred, Sheikh Abdullah arrived in a deserted Zubara on 3 October 1835 with a thousand men, camels and horses. Marching to Fuwairit, an event Jassim would have personally witnessed as a young ten-year-old boy, Abdullah immediately announced a blockade on Huwaila’s harbour and cut off all roads out of town, threatening its people with terrible punishment if they refused to join him.

  But Isa bin Turaif delayed fighting a pitched battle, despite his superior numbers. Instead, he put his faith in Sheikh Abdullah’s rebellious son Ahmad to negotiate a settlement through the offices of the Sultan of Muscat. To his credit, Ahmad did manage to run the naval blockade on Huwaila, along with bin Salama, on a dark, moonless night on 12 December. The pair arrived at Muscat three days later, however, to discover that the sultan wanted very little to do with the stand-off, though he did send his son to help bring about a political settlement.

  There are many occasions when a historian might give his right arm to listen in on a conversation. What did Pope Leo I say to Attila the Hun to prevent his sacking of Rome? Did Ibn Khaldoun really attempt to play the role of brain to Timur’s brawn in a bold bid to reunite the fragmented Muslim world? In a more localised, Gulf context, I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the peace talks between Abdullah and Isa bin Turaif, for the simple reason that the terms are so monumentally one-sided. Isa accepted that Huwaila should not just be evacuated, but actually knocked down, with the entire town’s population transferred to Bahrain. Whether any of these terms would have been implemented is doubtful, but the problem is hypothetical, as Abdullah’s nephews encouraged the Al bu Kuwara tribe from Fuwairit to attack Huwaila, killing a dependant of bin Turaif and prematurely ending negotiations.