Jassim the Leader: Founder of Qatar Page 11

  At nearly seventy years of age, Sheikh Muhammad bin Thani was finally recognised by the Gulf’s predominant power as ruler of Qatar for the first time. Pelly said little to explain his motives for drawing up the agreement, but Bahrain’s Political Agent in 1905, Captain Francis Beville Prideaux, explained the status of Qatar under this agreement decades later.

  At some time between 1851 and 1866, Sheikh Muhammad bin Thani was enabled to consolidate for himself – no doubt with the good offices of the Wahhabis, to whom Sheikh Muhammad of Bahrain had made himself so very objectionable – a compact little dominion containing the towns of Wakra, Doha and Bida, the independence of which from Bahrain was practically established and ratified by the Government of India in 1868, when a formal agreement was first taken from Sheikh Muhammad bin Thani.

  His explanation clearly indicates that Britain viewed Qatar as an independent state with the Al Thani at its head, a landmark agreement in Qatar’s history.

  The following year, just as the pearling season was about to begin, Muhammad’s deputy, Khamis bin Juma Al bu Kuwara, arrived at the British residency in Bushire to arrange the payments stipulated in the 1868 agreement. Qatar was still to pay 9,000 krans, equivalent to about forty pounds, of which 4,000 would be paid to Rashid bin Jabir, chief of the Naim tribe, and 5,000 to the chief of Bahrain for ultimate payment to the Wahhabi government. This Naim payment was still tough for Muhammad to bear, and led to one of the few occasions on which he lost his temper in front of a foreign representative. Visiting him in Doha, Major Sidney Smith observed how Muhammad ‘got greatly excited’ and flatly refused to pay Rashid bin Jabir anything, saying: ‘I have employed others to protect me, and have paid them four thousand krans and more, why should I pay the Naim anything, who have done nothing?’

  In a letter to Muhammad, Pelly explained why:

  It is understood that this payment of tribute does not affect the independence of Qatar in relation to Bahrain. But is to be considered as a fixed contribution by Qatar towards a total sum payable by Bahrain and Qatar combined, in view to securing their frontiers from molestation by the Naim and Wahhabi Bedouins, more particularly during the pearl diving season, when the tribes of Qatar and Bahrain occupied at sea, leave their homesteads comparatively unprotected.

  Thus the payment of tribute by Qatar was intended to ensure the security of a newly emerging independent state, and was not a tribute paid by a client state to its suzerain.

  Within a few years, the stipulation of payment to the Naim was being ignored and was officially removed in 1880. More than five decades later, the unknown British civil servant who had actually calculated how much Qatar should pay, its 9,000 krans, had his sums revealed in a book published in Delhi in 1933. It appears he arbitrarily assessed Muhammad bin Thani as good for 2,500 krans, with the Mahandah, Al bu Aynain, Naim, Al bu Kuwara, Keleb, Sudan and Amamara paying the rest in amounts varying between 500 and 1,700 krans.

  Jassim soon took effective steps to establish tribal harmony round much of the peninsula, though Khor Hasan was mostly beyond his reach, along with much of the north-west. But even this situation was resolving itself in Qatar’s favour. Muhammad bin Khalifa had begun to plot against his brother Ali from his exile in Kuwait and then Qatif. Ali was dead by 1870. Bahrain had a three-month interregnum before Isa bin Ali was installed at Pelly’s insistence. As Bahraini power faded, some Qatari tribesmen were enticed to leave the west coast and settle in Wakra, a development noted by Captain Sidney Smith when he came to Qatar in April 1869 on a review of the post-treaty situation in Qatar. Smith also noted that British Indian subjects who had come to settle in Wakra were prospering. Pelly was also pleased that Muhammad did not enter a dispute without first referring to the British agent at Bushire. Thus when the Bahrain half of the Al bin Ali began helping themselves to vessels from the Qatari pearling fleet, the Sheikh of Qatar referred the whole matter to Pelly, as he felt it his responsibility ‘as the independent ruler of Qatar’ to inform the Resident ‘before anything has taken place because you understand matters’. Pelly appreciated Muhammad’s cooperation, particularly when he opposed Abdullah bin Faisal’s plan to send troops to Oman. But Jassim was not so pleased with the way things were developing, and his time had arrived. By 1870, Muhammad bin Thani was over seventy, effective power rested solely in the hands of Jassim, and he wanted British influence removed.

  7

  OTTOMAN QATAR

  NAPOLEON once described Europe as a molehill; all the world’s greatest military leaders, he felt, had made their reputations in the East. This was why he really took 40,000 soldiers to Egypt in 1798 (an invasion originally considered by Louis XIV more than a century earlier). The three-year occupation of Alexandria and Cairo was nothing to do with ‘menacing British trade’ or ‘bringing scientific enlightenment’, as is so often claimed. Sadly, Napoleon was disappointed with both cities, and this disdain rubbed off on his men, who grew increasingly indifferent to the local sensibilities. Some troops would convert mosques into cafés, others would fly tricolours from minarets. The French military police chief, Barthelemy, was said to feel cheated if he hadn’t lopped off daily at least half a dozen rebellious heads. But there was a uniquely positive feature of the invasion too, and that was its large contingent of civilian administrators, scientists and engineers. Two of them concern us: Jacques-Marie Le Père and Mathieu de Lesseps.

  Le Père was there to build roads and bridges, but his wide range of civil engineering interests led him to investigate ancient attempts at constructing canals between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The military implications of linking the two would not have been lost on Napoleon. The 35-year-old Jacques-Marie was packed off to excavate Necho II’s canal works between the River Nile and the Suez Gulf. Unfortunately his surveying skills let him down on this occasion, and he reported to Le Petit Caporal that such a canal was impossible since the difference in water levels was as much as nine metres. Nevertheless, his work fascinated a fellow colleague, Mathieu de Lesseps, who would become the French consul-general in Alexandria after Napoleon withdrew and Paris re-established diplomatic relations with Egypt in 1803.

  While there, Mathieu would also make friends with a promising young Ottoman army officer called Muhammad Ali, whom he recommended for promotion in a letter to the Sublime Porte before returning to France in 1804. The following year, he probably choked on his morning coffee as he read that Muhammad Ali was now Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt, after leading a successful palace coup. Their friendship would prove most fortunate. In the meantime, Mathieu told the young sons he bounced on his knee of Egyptian adventures and the Canal of the Pharaohs. Mathieu de Lesseps must have told enthralling stories, for half a century later his son Ferdinand travelled to Egypt intent on building the Suez Canal.

  Ferdinand was fortunate that Said Pasha, Muhammad Ali’s fourth son, not only knew of him and his father, but could speak French fluently. In fact, Said had been educated in Paris, and his Francophile inclinations were partly responsible for Britain attempting to delay the whole Suez project. Nevertheless, 30,000 slave labourers began work on 25 April 1859 and a similar number kept working every day for another ten years. On 17 November 1869, the first person to enter the lockless canal was the French Empress Eugénie in the imperial yacht, followed swiftly by England’s Peninsula and Oriental Navigation Steam Ship Delta, of the same P&O company bought by Dubai well over a century later in 2006. For the first twelve months of operations, it seemed as if the Suez project would fail. But the initial trickle of ships soon turned into an almighty torrent and the Arabian peninsula was suddenly a few thousand miles closer than it had ever been.

  The Suez Canal promised all sorts of trade benefits for the Ottoman Empire too, though the Porte was concerned about an increase in European shipping in the Red Sea. Istanbul had good reason to fear this development. It had failed to put down the Greek revolt and proved itself hard pressed to fend off Austria. France had begun to prise Algeria from its grasp after 1830. The Turkish governm
ent would have to redouble its efforts in order to prevent a similar fate for its eastern provinces, but early indications didn’t bode well. The Royal Navy had helped lay a telegraphic cable linking India to the southern tip of Ottoman Iraq in the 1860s, with scant explanation. The suspicion, of course, was that the cable was meant to go all the way to London. And while land was being lost in the west, Britain seemed to be making a pile of money in the Ottoman east. The Lynch Company, for example, enjoyed a virtual monopoly on all steamer traffic on the Tigris and Euphrates, and had done for 30 years, despite repeated attempts to set up a rival service. Baghdad’s disquiet was almost palpable between 1867 and 1872. Some very rich British entrepreneurs were openly discussing plans to invest in a rail line between the Mediterranean and the Gulf – as if the project had nothing to do with the government that actually controlled the land. The train service was never realised, but the talk of it helped convince the Porte that London was intent on forging a land link from Egypt to India.

  The year 1869, therefore, was received more as a portent of doom than of opportunity. The loss of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz was unconscionable. The response was an expedition into western Arabia and Yemen in 1870. It went well; northern Yemen fell quickly (or at least the towns did). The shell that blasted through the capital’s city gates brought instant surrender. (The hole it made was never repaired and can still be seen at Bab al-Yemen to this day.) Military success, and relative inexpense, encouraged Istanbul to continue the campaign. Their timing was impeccable; it was the perfect moment to establish authority in eastern Arabia too. In 1870, the Second Wahhabi State was on the verge of collapse. An intense rivalry between Abdullah and his brother, Saud, had weakened the whole structure which their father, Faisal, had so carefully built up. Control of eastern Arabia would also support Turkish authority in Yemen, since it would end the use of Najd as a hinterland that could offer refuge to tribes beyond the lengthening arm of Ottoman law. Istanbul would also benefit from direct land links between Iraq and the Hijaz when it came to collecting zakah and escorting pilgrims on the haj. The capture of Hasa would permit troops to neutralise any Wahhabi threat to Iraq. Finally, the conquest of the eastern seaboard would help secure the shipping lanes between Basra and Jidda. Iraqi farmers were transporting ever more wheat to the Red Sea port after contracts were signed in 1864. The trade had to be protected from attack; controlling Qatif, Hasa and Qatar would allow for this protection.

  Ever since the Russian tsar Nicholas I supposedly described the Ottoman Empire as the ‘sick man of Europe’, European governments were certain its collapse was imminent. The knowledge that Islam’s last caliph was exiled in 1924 – ironically seven years after Nicholas II was executed – has also led many a historian to see Turkish failure in all its nineteenth-century undertakings. This is a mistake. As its soldiers demonstrated at Gallipoli in 1916, the Ottoman army was no joke. And Istanbul still had very capable leaders. The Sublime Porte was fortunate to have one of its best in Baghdad. Midhat Pasha was ready, willing and able to execute the invasion of Najd and the eastern coast of Arabia by the end of 1870. His expedition would give significant strategic depth to Ottoman Iraq.

  Midhat was exceptional. His long career first saw him as a governor of the Ottoman provinces of Bulgaria, Danube and Syria. On return to central government, he was appointed chief director of confidential reports and second secretary of the Grand Council, a reward for his honesty. He twice served as Grand Vizier, the second most important position in the whole empire. He had a natural talent for rooting out corruption, and was always thorough in his planning. Unfortunately for the empire, his abilities provoked jealousy among the very people who should have supported him. He was often given every rotten task going, though more often than not he would succeed at it anyway. Nevertheless, his rivals managed to have him banished from Istanbul by 1876. Tellingly, though, and for most of his career, whenever he submitted his resignation, it was refused. Later on in his life, he was caught up in the intrigues of the Young Ottomans reform movement, and left Turkey for London, studying the methods of a government he was so often attempting to thwart. Midhat’s loyalty to the state was, rather insultingly, questioned in the last three years of his life. Escaping a hastily passed down death sentence for treason, and settling at Taif in Arabia, he was probably assassinated in 1884. (Turkey eventually brought his body back to Istanbul for burial 80 years later.) But in 1870, when his interest in Jassim bin Muhammad began, Midhat Pasha was governor of Baghdad, planning the invasion of eastern Arabia.

  Ottoman invasion

  The gossip in Doha in October 1870 was different from the usual ‘can you believe what he did’ variety. Something quite out of the ordinary had captured the public imagination. The steamship Asur had docked and a couple of strangers of Turkish appearance had disembarked. The captain of the ship introduced them as traders, though they showed no interest in buying or selling anything. In fact, they were spies, probably the worst-ever spies in history. The duo could only have been more obvious if they’d stuck false moustaches on top of their bushy Ottoman moustaches. The pair had been sent by Midhat to get a feel for the land. Their idea of a pleasant conversation was not one about the pearl harvest that year, or the high price of rice. These spies were special and would ask questions more along the lines of: ‘What would you think if the Ottoman army marched into town?’ No doubt the agents did their best, but on their return to Baghdad, Midhat Pasha probably felt something was not quite right and sent the following note to his general, Nafiz Pasha. ‘Instead of heading straight for Qatar, it would be more advisable to contact the people of Qatar yourself and give them guarantees. By winning over the former Bahrain sheikhs as well, persuade the Qatari people to appeal to the [Ottoman] State before going there.’

  Midhat Pasha wanted to delay the occupation of Qatar until 1871; he needed to move against Najd first. The long-running dynastic rivalry provided the perfect opportunity to fulfil all the objectives of his detailed plan. Abdullah bin Faisal had been pushed out of power by Saud in 1869, and Midhat had sought him out, through the offices of the Kuwaiti Sheikh Abdullah bin Sabah, to offer his assistance and subdue Najd. Abdullah was pleased to accept the help, though he proved a most unreliable ally. The governor of Baghdad could now move decisively, for he had already obtained authority from the Grand Vizier Ali Pasha for the campaign in June of that year. General Nafiz mobilised and Abdullah bin Sabah accompanied him and his 300 vessels, glad to accept Ottoman suzerainty over Wahhabi intimidation. Nafiz made quick work of defeating Saud’s forces. Hasa province, including Qatif and Uqair, were under Ottoman authority before winter had begun. The only fly in the ointment was the inability to continue to the Najd, and its capital Riyadh, but that was achieved the following year by proxy through Muhammad bin Rashid of Jabal Shammar. Only Qatar remained; and Midhat was hoping for a swift intervention as Wahhabi remnants were using the peninsula’s south as a base from which to take potshots at the Ottoman army.

  In a report written in December 1871, Midhat Pasha claimed an invitation to invade was sent by Jassim and his father. Both had apparently ‘reiterated the necessity of despatching troops to Qatar’. The details in Midhat’s reports suggest Jassim had done just that, though his father’s role is less certain. ‘The rebels who have taken up arms are backed up by Bahrain which supplies them with food and ammunition. As the distance between Qatar and Bahrain is negligible, goods shipped from there are easily shipped to the coast of Qatar.’ The clearest evidence that Jassim was supplying important information to the Ottomans was that Midhat knew the names of the ‘troublemakers’ from the tribes of Ajman and Murra who would most likely resist.

  Jassim’s father would remain quite vague about his role in the following years, but in the meantime Sheikh Abdullah bin Sabah arrived at Bida before any Turkish soldier had set foot in Qatar. He had with him four Ottoman flags. Jassim took one and hoisted it above his own house immediately. The second flag was given to his father, Sheikh Muhammad, who later claimed
he had not taken it, preferring to keep his own red one. (It ended up in Wakra.) The third was presented to Ali bin Abd ul-Aziz, a leading figure at al-Khor, a town north of Bida. The last flag was sent to Khor al-Udaid, on the border with Abu Dhabi. Ottoman rule in eastern Qatar was established by cloth rather than lead.

  In no time at all the flag-raising frenzy attracted the Royal Navy gunboat Hugh Rose, which anchored off Bida on 19 July. Major Sidney Smith, the Assistant Political Resident, was most unpleasantly surprised. No report of Ottoman troop movements had reached him. Going ashore, he decided to ask Muhammad bin Thani, rather than his son, for some short, sharp facts as to what was going on. He had chosen the wrong Al Thani. Muhammad may have been old, but he was a seasoned diplomat who knew how to avoid awkward questions. The sheikh began by explaining how he was personally unhappy about the situation and had hoped for a treaty of protection similar to Bahrain’s. Specifically, he told the major: ‘Colonel Pelly placed me here and made me what I am, while I live I will do what seems right to him.’ Smith probably tried to tell the veteran leader that Pelly was going to be apoplectic, but Muhammad continued. The Ottoman flag had been hoisted at Bida, he informed the young officer, on the orders of the Ottoman commander at al-Hasa, and not his orders, of course. It was just that Nafiz Pasha was not a man to be refused. Smith’s temples were probably beginning to throb. He knew that there was not a single Ottoman official in town. Muhammad continued, considering aloud how technically, and traditionally, ‘the Ottomans had supremacy on the land of Qatar’. Smith was wondering by now whether this was geriatric contradiction or plain old mockery. Muhammad was certainly weaving a rich tapestry of fact and fiction. He had just one more weft to add. The word was that Sulaiman bin Zahar, the chief of Basra, was of the opinion that the Ottomans would bring all the land between Basra and Muscat under their jurisdiction and that any chief desiring the Ottoman flag would receive it, together with Ottoman protection. By the time the venerable sheikh had finished, I’m sure Smith would have reached for whatever they took for headaches in 1871, certainly not the yet-to-be-marketed aspirin.