Jassim the Leader: Founder of Qatar

by Mohamed Althani

  Once the Turkish gunboat Zuhaf had arrived, Pelly called for reinforcements. HMS Pigeon and the Plassey duly arrived. He had even requested a battalion of infantry from Bombay, but soon decided against landing troops. In the meantime, Jassim had called on Nasir bin Mubarak to bring his men and ships, and brought his own fleet to Zubara too. All the Qatari boats were flying Ottoman pennants and stationed themselves off the coast, from Ras Laffan to Fasht al-Dibal. Jassim was confident the British would not attack ships under the Sublime Porte’s protection. Additionally, large numbers of tribal reserves, in the pay of the administration at Hasa, were also brought up to camp at Bir Jejim, in case any British marines attempted to land.

  On 19 August, Ibrahim Fawzi Pasha issued an ultimatum giving Bahrain seventeen days to return the seventeen stolen boats, or else he would ‘no longer restrain any Qatari tribe from attacking Bahrain’. This phrase has been dismissed as careless wording, but it is more likely that it was crafted deliberately. Arab Effendi had already told Pelly that Bahrain belonged to Qatar, something the Porte and Jassim had never claimed. But Ibrahim’s ultimatum was interpreted as proof of Qatar’s intention to invade, and the mischievous officer Effendi further sent a note to Pelly advising him to evacuate British citizens from Bahrain. Sheikh Isa needed little more convincing, certain that Jassim would move against Manama, Sultan and the Al bin Ali on Muharraq, Nasir and the Banu Hajir near Ras al-Barr and the Turkish military on Bahrain’s west coast. This was manifest nonsense, albeit calculated nonsense. The government of India’s resolve stiffened. Isa’s predictions of imminent doom certainly had the intended effect in Bushire and London.

  Under the command of Lieutenant Commander Cartwright, HMS Pigeon was sent to keep a strict watch on the movements of all the boats anchored off the eastern Qatari coast and report the slightest indication that tribesmen were boarding. The ship had inspected close to two hundred of Jassim’s vessels, anchored off Ras Umm al-Hasa, when the Ottoman officer Arab Effendi stepped in to prevent the inspection, ordering the Zuhaf to facilitate Pigeon’s egression. Effendi’s order indicated to Cartwright that something untoward was under way; an invasion force might well be preparing to board. Pelly sent Jassim a note, giving him one hour’s warning of his intention to destroy the entire Qatari fleet.

  At the same instant, the Ottoman gunboat Zuhaf left harbour. Arab Effendi took down the Ottoman flag and left for Hasa with his soldiers. Jassim was abandoned, left to watch as the harbour became a sea of fire. Forty-four of his boats were blown out of the water. Jassim applied for a truce to end the destruction, and asked that the owners of the surviving boats might be granted permission to take them back home to the ports on the west coast. Pelly replied he would consider ceasing hostilities if the Al bin Ali evacuated Zubara, the nine boats confiscated by the Ottoman Arab Effendi were returned and that the whole of Jassim’s fleet be handed over as ‘part security of any indemnity the Political Resident may levy upon you’.

  By the end of September, Zubara was once again deserted. Sultan bin Muhammad couldn’t face returning to Bahrain and thought to head for Basra. But there was no escaping Sheikh Isa. Sultan was shot by Majid bin Muhammad al-Dayaya, an Amamara sheikh, who boarded his ship at Ras Tanura in the night. Jassim attempted to appease the British, claiming he had assembled his fleet at the request of the Mutasarrif and had had no intention of invading Bahrain. Pelly wasn’t convinced by the explanation, but observed: ‘The Turks secretly desired that Jassim, whose effective subjection they have been unable to compass, and who inflicted a most disastrous reverse on their troops in 1893, should be crushed by being driven into a collision with British power.’ The Ottomans had had their revenge. Jassim was without a fleet and without a means of generating revenue. His boats, over 140 of them, were taken to Bahrain. Pelly ordered they be returned only on payment of 50,000 rupees, which was later lowered by officials in Delhi to 30,000. Jassim didn’t have such a sum of money and failed to meet the 17 February 1896 deadline stipulated. In any case, Jassim had never been the kind of man who responded to ultimatums. The boats were torched in Muharraq’s harbour in May. It may well have been more merciful for the British to shoot the poor sailors whose livelihoods depended on the sea.

  But the defeat held unexpected gains. The British government realised how close they had come to an armed conflict with the Ottomans, and wanted to make sure there would be no repetition of events. The Resident was consequently instructed to warn the ruler of Bahrain against interfering in the affairs of Qatar. This was, of course, an implicit recognition of the rights of the Al Thani in Zubara. At almost the same time, and with no more ships to lose, Jassim was determined to take control of Zubara and at least satisfy himself of the smallest of victories in what had proved a very bitter experience. The sheikh convinced those members of the Naim tribe who still lived near Zubara to move in and transfer their allegiance from the Al Khalifa to the Al Thani. This was no victory, but Jassim now controlled every town on the Qatari peninsula without exception.

  A year after the incident, at the end of November 1896, the Ottoman embassy in London finally raised the issue of the destruction of Qatar’s pearling and fishing fleet at Zubara. The insincere and half-hearted attempt at compensation was the final insult in the whole incident. The request received the briefest of responses from London: ‘Her Majesty’s Government consider that the measures in question were necessary for the defence of Bahrain which is under the protection of Great Britain.’ Back in his youth, Jassim had expected that the Ottoman Empire, the Caliphate with over half a millennium of experience in protecting the Muslim world, would easily have offered the same kind of protection that Bahrain enjoyed under British treaty. He had been sorely disappointed and would never again accept their word as meaningful or honourable.

  Ottoman incompetence was demonstrated again two years later, following a cattle raid by the new Kuwaiti sheikh Mubarak Al Sabah (who was about to sign a secret pact with the British). Mubarak had taken power in Kuwait after killing his half-brother, Muhammad, in cold blood in the early hours of 17 May 1896. After spending a lot of money on legitimising his usurpation, he looked to build up his wealth by any means whatsoever, including a raid on the Banu Hajir, who were under Jassim’s protection. The Ottomans at Hasa refused to intervene in the dispute between two Qayamaqams, though they had a clear duty to mediate. Jassim once again offered his resignation following an abortive attempt to retaliate. Istanbul refused it once more; Jassim quite simply ruled Qatar. To release him from his formal ties to the state would be to acknowledge his right to act as he pleased, and possibly deal with the British. But the decision not to accept the resignation was just as extraordinary, for Jassim encouraged the Banu Hajir to attack Ottoman troops in Bida in September 1899. A few people were shot on both sides. When HMS Sphinx anchored off Bida that winter, Sheikh Ahmad told her captain that Qatar desired to ‘turn out the Turks and enter into agreement with the British government’. The Ottomans felt the growing pressure keenly, and sent an additional three battalions to Bida and kept the ship Zuhaf on coast patrols. But there was no coming back for the Ottomans as far as Jassim was concerned; their days were numbered. The question now was how to swap their ‘protection’ for a treaty with the British that recognised Qatari sovereignty.

  10

  SIBLING RIVALRY

  THE POSTERS and advertisements of today date back only as far as 1870, the year printers finally perfected colour lithography and embraced what Sir Leo Chiozza Money would come to christen ‘mass production’. Coincidentally, it was also the year Bovril was invented (which came within a whisker of being named ‘Johnston’s Fluid Beef’). Advertising would never be the same again. Graphic artists had the power to convince Joe Public they should buy Bovril for breakfast or get shot for Lord Kitchener. Oddly enough, however, it is not Alfred Leete’s ‘Your Country Needs You’ and its multitude of spin-offs which can claim to be the world’s most printed poster. The honour of designing an image instantly recognisable around the globe,
and by far the most widely printed, goes to a rather studious Dutchman. Dr Herman Snellen was the professor of ophthalmology at Utrecht. His poster design is still the most sold in the USA today, 150 years after he drafted it with meticulous precision. It is displayed, along with its electronic descendants, in optometrists’ offices, doctors’ surgeries and various school sanatoria. It is, of course, the humble eye chart. Snellen’s eponymous design became the global standard, providing a physical measure that could separate the normal from the myopic. The professor helped push back the frontiers of ignorance which surrounded poor vision and its treatment. Unfortunately, his work would not benefit a certain sheikh over three thousand miles away in eastern Arabia.

  Jassim’s eyesight was deteriorating quickly at the turn of the century. Age had been good to him on the whole, but all of his 75 years were beginning to take their toll. His friends blamed his myopia on his love of reading the Quran. As the condition worsened, he took to spending much more of his time with family and friends, in addition to keeping a beautiful farm at Lusail. He was relishing the far simpler existence after which he’d always yearned. At least, this was the image he projected to his occasional British visitors between 1898 and 1905, and there was much else to make his retreat into the country appear genuine. Though the Ottomans continued to refer to Jassim as the Qayamaqam, everyone knew their relationship was clearly at an end. The venerable sheikh must have sensed the impending doom of the Ottoman Empire and directed his attention instead to the future.

  Thus it would be unwise to describe the first five years of the twentieth century as Jassim’s retirement, or even semi-retirement. It was more a deliberate and disdainful divorce from all things Turkish. He viewed their presence as superfluous and enjoyed keeping Ottoman soldiers on their toes. The German adventurer Hermann Burchardt, who took the first-ever photographs of Qatar, observed in 1904 that local tribesmen levied taxes on Turkish officers for safe passage through Qatar’s interior. At night, Turkish troops, he wrote, were living in a state of apprehension verging on terror. Sentries would man machine-gun posts rather than patrol the town they were supposed to be guarding. Even the Ottoman administrators seemed incapable of making the smallest decisions independently. When Burchardt asked for permission to use his camera around Bida, the mudir referred him to the Bin Thani.

  Jassim could not run the day-to-day affairs of Qatar from Lusail, however, and deputed the task to a brother who was 35 years his junior. Sheikh Ahmad bin Muhammad Bin Thani based himself in the capital, and worked hard to see Qatar become part of the Trucial system. In the absence of formal relations between London and Bida, this task was all the more difficult. It fell to Ahmad’s political ingenuity to engineer an Ottoman exodus and enrol his country in the expanding British protectorate system sweeping up the coast of eastern Arabia. Both Jassim and he had flirted with the idea of pledging their allegiance to the British as early as 1895, so long as it was along the same lines as the allegiance of the other signatories – Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaima, Umm al-Qawain, Bahrain and soon Kuwait.

  Ahmad was a great man in his own right, though he lived in his brother’s shadow, providing immeasurable support to the Al Thani cause over seven years. His relationship with Jassim would come under strain a little in the last three years over policy and diplomacy, as we shall see. Sheikh Ahmad never resented keeping Turkish officials away from his brother’s affairs, however, happy to act as a buffer between the two. The last British diplomat to see him alive described Ahmad as ‘a somewhat extraordinary character and at the same time an extremely astute man … who enjoyed much popularity and influence over his subjects’. He needed to be strong; the political situation that he inherited in 1898 verged on the untenable. He was ‘in charge’, but held no official position. He was neither the Sheikh of Qatar nor the Qayamaqam. The tribes looked to his brother; the Turks didn’t trust any Al Thani and the British didn’t want to change the status quo. In fact, the government of India was happy to see the Ottomans stay at Bida so long as they didn’t try to do anything in any other part of the peninsula. It speaks volumes about Ahmad’s personal abilities, therefore, that the Mutasarrif of Najd considered his authority ‘sufficiently stable in nature’ that he could be relied upon ‘for controlling the Bedouins living in Qatar’.

  Internal control was one thing, but external affairs were far more complicated. In the absence of a strong and authoritative Ottoman personality or naval presence, virtually all the maritime policing of Qatar’s coast had come under de facto British control. For example, some of the Al bin Ali had moved back to Wakra and were pearl diving a few miles off the Qatari coast in June 1900 when five Amamara boats were suddenly blown into their midst by an adverse wind. Unable to believe their luck, the Al bin Ali gave the customary signal of battle by shooting at them. The Amamara boats replied with a fusillade of their own. Further action was prevented by the intervention of a nephew of Jassim. No one was hurt and the hapless intruders were allowed to leave without their weapons. Though Qatari justice had been served, the British political agent in Bahrain, John Gaskin, still saw fit to investigate the matter for himself, and ruled that the Al bin Ali must be fined 1,000 rupees, which was seized from their clansmen in Bahrain. The following year the Banu Hajir, headed by Salman bin Yetama, clashed with Abd ul-Hadi bin Mirait’s ships off the shores at Dhakhira on Qatar’s north-east coast. Again it was the British agent in Bahrain, John Gaskin, who resolved to deal with the case, and not the Mutasarrif of Najd. Gaskin would later refer the case to Sheikh Ahmad, which was convenient since Ahmad was keen to be communicated with.

  Throughout 1902, Ahmad repeatedly pressed Gaskin to admit Qatar into the Trucial system. Unfortunately, his timing was most inopportune. For the previous eighteen months, Britain had pushed the Sublime Porte very hard over Kuwait, accepting Mubarak Al Sabah‘s desire for an alliance similar to the one sought by Qatar. In January 1899, Mubarak had secretly signed, pledging that Kuwait would never cede territory nor receive representatives of any foreign power without the British government’s consent. In essence, London and Delhi now controlled Kuwait’s foreign policy despite its status as an Ottoman territory under the control of the Wilayet of Basra. In total disregard of this fact, the treaty signed gave Britain responsibility for Kuwait’s national security in return for a mere 15,000 Indian rupees a year – to be paid to the ruling family. That agreement led to what has since been termed the First Kuwaiti Crisis, a heated political struggle between Istanbul and London, the Porte demanding London stop interfering and London concerned it had weakened the Ottoman Empire irrevocably in the face of greater colonial competition from Germany.

  Gaskin was loath to reply to Ahmad’s request, though he and his immediate superiors were both keen to accede to it. Despite their best representations, London required that the status quo around the Gulf be maintained for the time being. Ahmad misinterpreted the silence, however, and on 27 March proposed that Qatar not only come under Trucial patronage but that men and equipment be provided to ensure the swift removal of all Ottoman forces from the old fort at Bida. It is a singularly incredible fact that not one Turkish officer or administrator had thought to strengthen their position in the town. Ahmad revealed that they had neither stockpiled supplies nor ensured their own independent control of drinking water. It hadn’t occurred to a single decision-maker, over the course of 30 years, that their base should be redesigned, reconstructed or just moved so as to include a well within its confines. The fort, as Jassim had proved ten years earlier, was incapable of holding out for more than a couple of days. It seems Turkish officers and their men banked solely on the gunboat anchored at Bida harbour for their security. Despite their weakness, it was only by June that Ahmad came to appreciate that the British were not wary of the Ottoman garrison at Bida, they were wary of the fallout from yet another Turkish defeat. Gaskin dissuaded Ahmad from moving against the fort unless Britain went to war formally with the empire. He also made it clear that London would not extend i
ts protection to Qatar, or even consider it, until after Jassim’s death.

  Following the loss of Kuwait, and nursing its wounded pride, the Porte made one last desperate attempt at strengthening its position throughout all of its territories in Arabia. In November 1902, the Mutasarrif was instructed once more to establish small administrative units at Zubara, Khor al-Udaid and Wakra. These repeated attempts to expand the area claimable as Ottoman, by appointing administrators to disputed settlements, were notable not only for their endurance but also for their total lack of effect. The state named mudirs to all three towns, intending or trying to install them for the next ten years. Since the British disputed Ottoman claims to sovereignty over the peninsula, they objected to the appointments, and no mudir remained at his post for long. Istanbul maintained its right of appointment, however, by continuing to name the officials (four to Zubara, six to Udaid and two to Wakra) even if they had to stay in Hufuf instead of at their posts. In at least one instance they tried to avoid British objection by assigning to Wakra a local notable, Jassim’s son Abd ul-Rahman, first as mudir, then, when Britain objected, as a stipendiary of ‘long standing’. But without Jassim’s support, the plan was never likely to work.