The Creation of Qatar

Rosemarie Said Zahlan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317292418
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios regionales

This book, first published in 1979, was the first political and social history of Qatar. Its main thrust is to provide the reader with a description and identification of the processes and forces that have contributed to change and continuity in Qatari society. A concise and relevant history of the country from the latter part of the eighteenth century when the Utub settled Zubarah to the present day is provided. Emphasis is placed not only on Qatar's internal development, but also on its critical relationship with Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, its closest neighbours, and with Britain. The study then proceeds to determine the inner logic of the Qatari political and social structure, and how it has evolved over the years. It is shown how the same society that exhibited great fortitude in the face of economic and political hardship could have an equally great capacity to adapt to new levels of prosperity.

1 Introduction

1. Geography and Physical Characteristics

The location and geographical features of Qatar have played a predominant role in the shaping of its political and social characteristics. A narrow limestone peninsula around 22,000 square kilometres in area, Qatar juts out midway onto the Arab (western) coast of the Gulf, around 30 kilometres south of the Bahrain islands. The peninsula is largely desert with undulating rock rising out of it, making the soil generally unfit for anything but nomadic pastoralism; in fact, until the discovery of oil enabled limited agricultural activity to be financed, the only natural vegetation in Qatar, apart from a few date gardens, was coarse grass and occasional stunted brushwood. To the north, east and west, Qatar is bounded by the sea. The southern boundary, by contrast, remained undefined until the 1930s; it was closely connected with prevailing political conditions in the central and eastern part of Arabia until the delimitation of boundaries became an imperative adjunct to the acquisition of concessions by the oil companies. At the base of the eastern side of Qatar is Khawr al-Udayd, a creek that forms the boundary with the neighbouring shaykhdom of Abu Dhabi, and at its western base is Dohat al-Salwa, a bay that divides Qatar from the Hasa province of Saudi Arabia.

Qatar has generally been regarded in European literature as desolate and forbidding. Palgrave, for example, saw it as 'a miserable province' and was depressed by what he described as 'miles on miles of low barren hills, bleak and sun-scorched, with hardly a single tree to vary their dry monotonous outline'.¹ This attitude was reflected by many others, and has persisted because of the long isolation of Qatar which has only recently started to be lifted.

Placed in the context of the Arab shaykhdoms of the Gulf, however, Qatar is only strikingly different in one respect: it has never had any permanent inland settlements. All towns and villages have been coastal, with pearling, fishing and sailing the only occupations of the inhabitants. In the Trucial States, by contrast, the large inland oases — such as Buraimi (Al-Ain) in Abu Dhabi, and Dhayd in Sharjah — have provided an added dimension to the political, social and economic structure of the states in which they exist. The tribes living there have often had a powerful impact on those of the coast; the agricultural community, rudimentary though its methods might be, differs substantially from the seafaring people of the coast, providing them with necessary products they would otherwise have to import. The only Trucial State with no such oases or inland towns is Dubai. Although Dubai is much smaller than Qatar, consisting primarily of Dubai town, a strong affinity between the two places has grown up over the years. Marriage between their ruling families and a unified currency, the Qatar-Dubai riyal,² are but two recent examples of this.

The absence of inland settlements has made Qatar dependent commercially and politically on its neighbours. Most food has always had to be imported, together with such essential materials as wood for ships. Pearls, its main commodity until the advent of oil, were exported to Bahrain and Lingeh across the Gulf on the Persian coast where many Arabs were engaged in trade. The fact that its southern border was continguous with the Arabian mainland made it susceptible to the political ramifications that accompanied the bedouin tribes in their inland wanderings to the various wells that dot the desert. Above all, its central location on the Arabian coast of the Gulf very often made it an outpost and a convenient place of shelter in the rather stormy political life of the Gulf states.

An examination of the map of Qatar will reveal much of its political and economic evolution during the past two hundred years. Largely because of geographic proximity, its longest and most historic links have been with Bahrain. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Al-Khalifah, emigrants of the Utub tribe from Nejd, migrated from Kuwait and settled in the town of Zubarah, on the west coast of the peninsula. Until then, the only settled places were the villages of Huwaylah, Fuwayrat and Doha on the east coast.³ After the founding of Zubarah, a number of villages sprang up along the west coast.

In 1783, the Utub conquered Bahrain, thus establishing the rule of Al-Khalifah which continues until today. During the next century, events in Qatar became closely tied to the affairs of Bahrain, and the shaykh of Bahrain became the accepted suzerain of Qatar. Throughout that time, the villages on the eastern and western coasts of the peninsula developed in different directions. The west coast remained linked to events in Bahrain: around 1842, for example, an exiled member of the Al-Khalifah rebuilt Zubarah, which had gone into decline, in order to launch an expedition against Bahrain. The east coast, by contrast, developed away from Bahrain.

The eastern towns and villages were practically the only inhabited parts of Qatar by the mid-nineteenth century. The largest and most important of these was Doha (often referred to as al-Bida) which grew from a tiny fishing village in the eighteenth century into a town of around 12,000 in the late nineteenth century: although there is no evidence of any population growth until the middle of the present century, it has remained the largest town of Qatar. Today it is the capital of Qatar and has a population of around 180,000. The second most important town until the contemporary age was Wakrah, 15 kilometres south-east of Doha. Other towns on the eastern coast were Ruways, almost at the tip of the promontory, Fuwayrat, Dhakhirah and Khawr Shaqiq. The latter, around 40 kilometres north of Doha, is today the second city of Qatar, known simply as Al-Khawr.

Once the tribal leaders of Qatar began to question the authority of Bahrain in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pattern was already established. There were only three towns, apart from Zubarah, on the west coast by the end of the nineteenth century: Abu Dhaluf, Hadiyah and Khawr Hassan (the latter town known as Khuwayr today). It was estimated that in 1908 the total population of these three villages did not exceed eight hundred people; by then, Zubarah was practically deserted, making the population of the west coast roughly 3 per cent of the total estimate of 27,000 in Qatar.

The location of the villages was determined by the existence of water. By and large, the settlements were made in a coastal area that was closest to a water well — usually up to four kilometres away. Until recently, the towns and villages were simple and poor, and resembled all the towns along the shores of the Gulf. Narrow and uneven winding lanes separated the houses; those of the wealthy were made of stone, the poor contenting themselves with mud. Most of the towns had a square fort with towers, the symbol of the most powerful man whose responsibility it was to protect the townspeople from marauding bedouin. The harshness of the geographic features is reinforced by the severe weather conditions: long, oppressively hot and humid summers where the temperature can reach 50°C; and short, dry, but pleasant winters. Furthermore, a strong north-west wind, the shamal, made sailing dangerous along the uneven coast of Qatar before the construction of modern harbours. In the last few years the geography of Qatar has changed yet again. Helped largely by the income derived from petroleum resources and the accompanying wave of imported manpower, towns and cities have mushroomed all around Qatar, east and west.

2. Population

The social structure of the population of Qatar, similar to that elsewhere in the Gulf, was made up of bedouin (badu) and the settled people (hadar), both tribally constructed. The bedouin roamed the inland regions, with their camels, sheep and goats, occasionally tending those of the settled population. They usually only entered Qatar from the Arabian mainland during the winter months, when the rainfall, although slight, permitted the growth of scrub; the rest of the time they remained in Nejd and Hasa.

As a rule, every tribe has its dirah, the area its members roam together as a collective body in search of grazing. The fact that a dirah was a well-defined place in the seemingly unending sea of sand that constitutes all desert areas, particularly those of Qatar, is an indication of the highly developed sense of geography of the different tribal groupings. They had a very sophisticated understanding of weather conditions and could generally gauge the time and distance between the desert wells. A special feature of the wells in Qatar was that, by and large, they were lined with stone in order to resist the sand. Although the bedouins' migratory habits were dominated by the landscape and the weather, their way of life was ideal for the strengthening of tribal ties.

The shaykh was the leader of the tribe, responsible for the welfare of his people. Although his position of authority could be challenged by a member of his tribe, that member would have to prove his strength and abilities if he wanted to claim the role of shaykh; otherwise, the tribe depended on the shaykh for guidance, and respected his authority. In the Trucial States, the friendship of the shaykh of a bedouin tribe, who was regarded as an independent leader, was usually sought after by the rulers of the different shaykhdoms; since he controlled a section of the hinterland, together with its people, this fact placed him in a special position of strength. Furthermore, his standing was enhanced by the competition of the neighbouring countries of Muscat and Saudi Arabia for his allegiance.

In Qatar, the situation was strikingly different. The bedouin tribes that came to graze in considerable numbers in the peninsula during the winter months were, by and large, not indigenous to the peninsula. Only one major tribe with fairly large numbers, the Bani Hajir, and another smaller and relatively unimportant tribe, the Kaban, could be regarded as belonging to Qatar proper; both tribes, however, had branches elsewhere, the former in Hasa, the latter in Bahrain. The others came from Trucial Oman and Hasa.

The significance of this for the ruler of Qatar is obvious. In Arabian society, the ultimate gauge of a ruler's authority is his ability to command the tribes who live in the land he claims; the extent of his land was thus determined by his ability to rally the tribes that roamed the area. According to desert law, a ruler's territory extended as far as he could enforce the payment of zakat.⁴ This tax was paid by the tribes whose dirah the ruler claimed as his own, in return for which he ensured their protection. However, many of the tribes that came to Qatar during the winter owed allegiance to the Wahhabis. The ruler of Qatar consequently had to contend with a precarious political situation whereby he had little control over the interior, particularly when the strength of the Wahhabis culminated in the establishment of Saudi Arabia. The fact that the migratory tribes were practically transients — the winter never lasted more than three to four months — did little to bolster the authority of Qatar.

The principal bedouin tribes that migrated to Qatar from Hasa were the Murrah and the Ajman. Those that came from Trucial Oman were the Manasir; and the Naim, the other important tribe, fluctuated between Bahrain and Trucial Oman. The pattern of the migratory population of Qatar could thus be seen as almost mosaical in the power structure of the peninsula; their vicissitudes caused considerable apprehension in the coastal towns and villages, Doha being the most prominent. The Bani Hajir, for example, who were allied by religion to the Wahhabis, paid the latter zakat, and at the same time received gifts from the ruler of Qatar. The role of the bedouin in the political evolution of Qatar cannot be underestimated, since they could hold most of the settled places at their mercy. The Murrah were perhaps the most feared of all the tribes, with the Bani Hajir coming a close second. It is interesting to note here how the sociological observations of Ibn Khaldun regarding the encroachment of the desert on settled communities, were still reflected in the society of the Arabian peninsula four and five hundred years later.⁵

The hadar lived in the towns and villages where their principal activities consisted of pearl-diving and trading, fishing and sea transportation. Until very re...