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The Persian Gulf in Modern Times This page intentionally left blank The Persian Gulf in Modern Times People, Ports, and History

Edited by Lawrence G. Potter THE PERSIAN GULF IN MODERN TIMES Copyright © Lawrence G. Potter, 2014. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-48576-2 All rights reserved. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-50380-3 ISBN 978-1-137-48577-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137485779 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Persian Gulf in modern times : people, ports, and history / edited by Lawrence G. Potter. pages cm Includes index.

1. Persian Gulf Region—History. 2. Persian Gulf Region— Historiography. 3. Persian Gulf Region—Social conditions. I. Potter, Lawrence G. DS326.P746 2014 953.6—dc23 2014026563 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book was made possible (in part) by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors. Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration xi

Introduction 1 Lawrence G. Potter

Part I The Historiography of the Persian Gulf Chapter 1 Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf 23 Nelida Fuccaro Chapter 2 Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf 47 Fahad Ahmad Bishara Chapter 3 The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: A Survey of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Persian Sources 73 Gholam Reza Vatandoust Chapter 4 Narrating the Gulf: Literary Evidence for History 103 Muhsin al-Musawi

Part II Port Cities and Littoral Society Chapter 5 The Rise and Fall of Port Cities in the Persian Gulf 131 Lawrence G. Potter Chapter 6 Muscat as a Port City 153 J. E. Peterson vi M Contents

Chapter 7 Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran 173 Willem Floor Chapter 8 Inside a Gulf Port: The Dynamics of Urban Life in Pre-Oil Kuwait 199 Farah Al-Nakib

Part III Peoples of the Gulf Chapter 9 Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf, c. 1500–1947 231 James Onley Chapter 10 The Baloch as an Ethnic Group in the Persian Gulf Region 267 Carina Jahani Chapter 11 “Purity and Confusion”: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf 299 Ahmed al-Dailami Chapter 12 The African Presence in Eastern Arabia 327 Matthew S. Hopper Chapter 13 Identity Transformations of African Communities in Iran 351 Behnaz A. Mirzai

Notes on Contributors 377 Index 383 Illustrations

Tables 3.1 Archived Documents on the Persian Gulf at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ah 1263–1340/ad 1847–1921 93 3.2 Documents on the Persian Gulf at the National Archives of Iran 1260–1368 Sh./ad 1881–1989 94 3.3 Articles on the Persian Gulf in the newspaper Ittela’at 1306–1380 Sh./ad 1927–2001 95 7.1 Commercial routes from the Persian Gulf (1910) 178 7.2 Distribution of imported goods at Bushehr (1912–1913) 189 9.1 Principal Indian ports and towns trading with the Gulf, c.1500–1947 234 9.2 Indian merchant groups and communities in the Persian Gulf, 1500–1947 237 9.3 Portuguese colonies in western India 246 9.4 Indians under British protection in southern Iran, 1869 249 9.5 Indians in the Gulf, c.1905 v. 1948 252 9.6 Gulf trade with India (as a % of overall trade), 1904 254

Maps 5.1 Port Cities in the Persian Gulf 133 10.1 Distribution of the Baloch in the Persian Gulf Basin 268 13.1 Slave trade routes in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, ca. 1900 354 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments

his book is based on a conference held at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates from March 17 to 19, 2009. TIt was sponsored by Gulf/2000, a major international research and documentation project on the Persian Gulf states based at Columbia University (http://gulf2000.columbia.edu). Additional sponsors were The Middle East Institute at Columbia University, the American University of Sharjah, and the Dr. Sultan Al-Qasimi Centre of Gulf Studies. The conference could not have taken place without the support of Peter Heath, then Chancellor of AUS, and Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, at the time Assistant to the Chancellor for Development and Alumni Affairs, whose ability to get things done was critical to its success. It was held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the ruler of Sharjah and president of AUS, who also attended. All participants were most grateful for their gracious hospitality and for providing a magnificent venue at the Al-Qasimi Centre. The conference was one year in the making, and during this time my colleague, Dr. James Onley of the University of Exeter, provided invaluable advice and help at every step. Without his active collaboration, it could not have taken place. I also appreciate the patience and wise counsel of Haideh Sahim throughout the extended publication process. Prof. Michael R. Izady obliged as before by providing several outstanding maps. I would also like to thank our longtime indexer, Lisa Rivero, for an excellent job. Above all thanks goes to Gary Sick, the executive director of Gulf/2000, for supporting what was the eleventh major international conference sponsored by the project. This truly has been a collaborative international project, and it has been a pleasure to work with so many talented and dedicated scholars as this book moved to completion. We believe we have an outstanding volume that greatly advances our understanding of the ports and peoples of the Persian Gulf. Lawrence G. Potter This page intentionally left blank Note on Transliteration

ince this book is aimed at a wide readership we have tried to simplify the spelling of Arabic and Persian words, and have forgone diacriti- Scal marks in the text. The system of transliteration employed will leave some, especially Iranists, unsatisfied, as it does not make allowance for pronunciation. In this book the initial ain has been dropped (thus Shah Abbas not ‘Abbas), diphthongs have been rendered as -ai (Husain) and -aw (Faw), the izafa (ezafeh) is rendered by -i, short vowels are rendered as u (not o) and i (not e), and Persian words take a final -a and not -eh (thus Shahnama). In the case of proper names, those already familiar in an angli- cized version have been retained (e.g., Tehran, Reza Shah, Saddam Hussein). Since there is no universally accepted system of transliteration some compromise has been necessary. Introduction

Lawrence G. Potter

his book seeks to contribute to rethinking and reorienting the history of the Persian Gulf from approximately the late eighteenth to Tthe mid-twentieth century.1 As such, it highlights long-term regional trends that are often obscured in treatments of the modern era focusing on new nation-states. The important role the Gulf plays in connecting the Arab and Persian shores is emphasized, as is the region’s maritime orientation toward the Indian Ocean rather than the land-based empires of the Middle East. The Persian Gulf and its littoral constitute a distinct region that deserves to be studied over a long period of time to better understand the evolution of present-day states and societies. The chapters of this book fall under three general themes: historiography, port cities, and peoples. The volume first considers how the modern history of the Gulf has been written, particularly by local historians, and which actors and what information have been included or excluded from standard narratives. Although the study of modern Gulf urbanism is flourishing, the historical study of individual Gulf ports and their dynamics has just begun. It was in these ports, the locus of the mercantile elites, tribal amirs, and various religious and ethnic groups that migrated or took refuge there, that the history of the Gulf as a whole played out. After discussing neglected aspects of regional history, some of the gaps begin to be filled in with studies of the ports and their peoples. In doing so, the authors of this book propose alternative ways of writing the history of the Gulf. The treatment here goes beyond previous approaches that have stressed imperial history, the role of the British, tribes, the oil industry, and the rentier state. It also seeks to deflect the narrative of regional states that tries to enhance their own legitimacy. Through their funding of research, control of visas, and access to historical sources, governments may encourage or hinder research on specific topics. In recent times, Gulf history has become highly 2 M Lawrence G. Potter politicized, and the historic hybridity of its port cities has been obscured. In the Arab states, this has led to an emphasis on a Najdi heritage to the exclusion of the many minority groups—such as the Persians, Indians, Baluch, Hawala, and Africans—that played a key role in local history. On the Iranian side, it has led to an insistence on the historically Persian nature of the Gulf, disregarding Arab and other elements. This has led to tension as reflected in recent struggles over the name itself: is it the Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf? This issue, which is a product of political competition that tries to “Arabize” or “Persianize” the history of the region, will probably never be resolved.

A View from the Sea The region’s location on the periphery of empires, its role as a key trade route, and the bounty of the sea for which it was known—pearls—played a key role in shaping Gulf society and lifestyle. As part of the Indian Ocean world, the ambiguity of borders and ease of circulation before the twentieth century was notable, especially in light of the contemporary obsession with control of migrant workers and restriction on citizenship by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.2 The perspective of many of the authors in this volume is a “view from the sea” that is lacking in other treatments. As historian Thomas Ricks has pointed out, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, there were many continuities in the trade, politics, society, culture, and religion of the region, and the Gulf saw itself more in terms of its favorable geographical and commercial position within a “borderless sea” than with its supposed “overlords” in its hinterland.3 Historical treatment of the Persian Gulf is increasingly being included in a larger picture of the history of the Indian Ocean and its littoral societies, as pioneered by scholars such as K. N. Chaudhuri, Michael Pearson, and Abdul Sheriff.4 Connections between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean have been explored by, among others, Jean Aubin, Redha Bhacker, Patricia Risso, and now younger scholars such as Fahad Bishara.5 For discussions of the frontier as it applies in the Gulf region, see the work of Hala Fattah and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet.6 Another familiar theme, that of center and periphery, is also relevant. Writing history that is centered in the Gulf and not the metropole is history “from the edge,” which has received increasing attention lately.7 As the Gulf became more integrated into the modern world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European powers insisted on establishing formal borders as an expression of state power and also to verify who owned oil resources. The Gulf is therefore a natural place to study the history of Introduction M 3 borderlands, which are the unintended consequences of border delimitations but are never shown on maps: “Despite attempts by central states to control their borderlanders and to impose a ‘national’ culture on them, a fascinating aspect of many borderlands is the development of a ‘creole’ or ‘syncretic’ border culture,” according to Baud and Van Schendel.8 This is very true in the Gulf, where many ethnic groups are in close proximity. A historic lack of borders, a multiplicity of identities, and the considerable autonomy that Gulf ports enjoyed until recent times led to a hybrid society that was different from other parts of the Middle East. However, the Gulf is often ignored by historians who focus on major empires such as the Qajars, Ottomans, and Mughals. Most works on the Gulf also focus on either the Arab or the Persian side, and many deal with only one country. A common problem is that Arab and Iranian scholars have a limited awareness of each other’s work and rely on Western sources to a large extent. Western scholars still habitually focus on only one side of the Gulf (a land-based approach) and often do not make use of works in local languages.9 Fortunately, this is changing, and despite the paucity of local sources, the region’s history is increasingly being revealed and new methodologies employed, as reflected in this volume.

Western Historiography Older works on the history of the Gulf were based mainly on British travelogues and political reports, which reflected imperial concerns and a presumption that British control was beneficial. The period of British suzerainty did, however, lead to important studies by political officers such as Colonel S. B. Miles10 and Sir Arnold T. Wilson,11 as well as the great Gazetteer of J. G. Lorimer, the most extensive description of the Gulf ever attempted.12 A century later, it is still an invaluable reference, although as Robin Bidwell comments, “this is a British official book, based on official sources and everything is seen through British official eyes . . . there is never any attempt to see things from any other point of view.”13 Generations of historians have mined it and the Foreign Office and India Office documents to write important histories, such as J. B. Kelly’s Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 and Briton Cooper Busch’s Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914.14 Although diplomatic documents play an important role in reconstructing the local history, they have drawbacks as they were written for official purposes and habitually employed a “tone of condescension and superiority.”15 In addition, there are studies of imperial powers in the Gulf, including the Portuguese and the Dutch. Recent work also has sought to reintegrate the Ottomans back into the history of the Gulf and challenge the British historical tradition.16 4 M Lawrence G. Potter

The Indian Connection One popular theme of treatments of the Gulf, based on copious British records, is its connection with India. Trade links were established in ancient times and Indian merchants have always played an important role there, especially since the nineteenth century. (This pertains especially to the lower Gulf, since the Banians [Hindu Indian merchants] were a minor factor in Kuwait and Bushehr.) As James Onley finds in his groundbreaking study,17 Indians in the Gulf were mostly merchants who were highly regarded and occupied a much different role than today. There was never a single “Indian community”; rather they comprised about three dozen communities of different religions and origins who mostly resisted assimilation with Gulf Arabs. This led to such a complicated picture that no one has previously attempted to study it.18 However, while a staple for historians, the British connection with India perhaps has been overemphasized. There is a question of how important it really was for the Khalijis, or residents of the Gulf, who were usually preoc- cupied with a tenuous survival and local political struggles. For example, Fattah found that eighteenth and nineteenth century historians of Basra typically mentioned events in Najd, Kuwait, and Muhammara—which they considered to form a natural region—but rarely mentioned India. Although India exported a great deal of essential goods to the Gulf, the littoral itself was knit closely together socially, economically, and religiously. The local or “country trade” was marked by the mutual dependence of ports and ecological zones, with certain areas supplying food, water, firewood, and trade goods to others.19 In reading local histories (mostly written in Kuwait), Bishara found that “what distinguishes the Arabic historiography of the Gulf, however, is that the region is not seen as being within the political orbit of India—a notion that comes across strongly when one consults western archival material, but is scarcely mentioned in this literature—but is rather seen as being socially and economically integrated with the western Indian Ocean (i.e., western India, South Arabia, and Eastern Africa).”20 Additional work in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish sources may help further clarify the ways in which India influenced the lives of the Khalijis.

Local Approaches to History With the rise of national states and the end of British control in the Gulf by the 1970s, a new historiography by indigenous historians arose on the Arab side of the Gulf that was critical of the British legacy in the region. It sought rather to emphasize the legitimacy of ruling dynasties and foster new national identities. As Determann finds, unlike in the republics, “mon- archist historians were keen to stress the agency of rulers rather than the Introduction M 5 people or nation. In the Arab monarchies, the nation could thus well be the frame in which historical events are ordered.” Especially in Saudi Arabia this led to a tendency to conflate dynastic and national periods, and “created a periodization that situated the start of the country’s history at the onset of dynastic rule.”21 This book seeks to explore some of the consequences of this new historiography. Histories of the region presented in Arabic and Persian sources are for the first time surveyed here by Fahad Bishara and Gholam Reza Vatandoust, respectively, and provide valuable guides that will be of great help to future researchers. Not surprisingly, such histories take a different viewpoint from those typical of most Western historians, by emphasizing the local and regional situation rather than the Gulf’s strategic location and international entanglements. They often emphasize individual agency rather than underlying structural forces shaping events. Although they have barely been employed so far, the history of the region can be written primarily from such sources. In Iran, which has a long tradition of both local and dynastic histories, history was traditionally considered a branch of literature.22 There were many famous historians who wrote for and were commissioned by the court, but few with traditional training could make the transition to a more critical approach that became standard in the West. According to historian Ali Ansari, “The study of history, as we know it today, is a product of modern Western society. . . . When Iranians encountered their ‘history’ therefore, it tended to be mediated through the pens of Western historians, while their own, largely oral traditions were dismissed as fable and at best as literary artifacts, skillfully written but of little historical value.”23 Until recent times, the lack of trained historians led to widespread ignorance about history, according to historian Abbas Amanat.24 He complains, “With historians’ failure to provide any coherent and meaningful interpretation of the past, it is not surprising that increasingly intellectuals, essayists, and dissident pamphleteers took over the task of interpreting the past.”25 There are nevertheless some important modern histories of the Gulf written in Persian, as introduced in the chapter by Vatandoust, who divides his treatment into the Qajar (1779–1924), Pahlavi (1925–1979) and Islamic Republic (1979–) eras.26 As he points out, it was not until the time of Muhammad Shah (r. 1834–1848) of the Qajar dynasty that the central government began to take an interest in the Gulf. This interest grew as the Qajars, in the second half of the nineteenth century, reincorporated under the rule of Tehran the string of Arab principalities that stretched along their southern coast from Khuzistan in the north to the Indian border.27 As the central government increased control over its Gulf shoreline by the 1920s, the autonomy of small ports decreased. 6 M Lawrence G. Potter

Histories of the region written in Arabic also come from their own distinct tradition. As Madawi Al-Rasheed points out, in Saudi Arabia people acquired knowledge of the past through oral transmission, as embedded in narratives (sawalif ) and poems (qasa’id): “This history was not a master narrative, but a fragmented and contested knowledge which was constantly being defined and constructed in response to present concerns. It created a flexible social memory ready to be altered and changed according to the prevalent social and political relations between groups.”28 In his chapter, Bishara notes that in the Arabian peninsula histories were often written by amateur rather than trained historians, and their approach to historical narration is more anecdotal than causal. He emphasizes the importance of oral sources to an earlier generation of historians, especially as reflected in the “Safhat” [Pages] literature. “From these books,” he finds, “a particular view of history emerges in which the historical actor takes center stage, dictating historical processes, and eclipsing political and economic structures while forging organic linkages between the Gulf, the Indian Ocean and the broader world.”29 A new major study by Determann finds that the most important feature of Saudi historiography in the twentieth century is its plurality.30 Despite the authoritarian nature of the state and the number of dynastic histories dedicated to the Al Saud, since the 1960s there has been a strong trend of local, tribal, and Shi‘i histories, as well as social and economic treatments. (For example, the author mentions an important trilogy on change in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia between 1933 and 1960 by Abdullah Al-Subaiy.31) An official state narrative has provoked these alternative versions of history, which go beyond a Wahhabi paradigm and do not accept that there was an “age of ignorance” or jahaliyyah before the rise of the Al Saud. Storytelling can also be a source for history, as shown in the chapter by Muhsin al-Musawi, who examines a number of short stories on the contemporary Gulf written in Arabic.32 While stories may not be relied upon for historical “facts,” they provide the context for understanding the rapid pace of transition the Gulf has been experiencing since the 1970s. They focus on the social and cultural dimensions of the changes brought about by the rise of an oil society—the passing of an economy based on pearls to that of oil— and the feeling of nostalgia and sense of loss as the Gulf becomes integrated into a global society.

The Use and Abuse of History In the present-day Gulf, political imperatives can make it difficult to write sound history. State control over which scholars are permitted to work with historical materials in their archives is problematic and may lead to Introduction M 7 self-censorship. “Even today, studying countries in the Arabian Peninsula remains mediated by gatekeepers whose interest lies in maintaining the image of stability, affluence, and security,” according to Al-Rasheed.33 She adds that patronage of research centers may be more for public relations than serious academic research.34 Under the Islamic Republic, the politicization of Persian Gulf studies has reached unprecedented levels, with the government funding research centers, conferences, and academic study that promotes its political interests. Many conference papers and publications reflect the government’s obsession with validating the name Persian rather than Arabian Gulf or “proving” that the Gulf was always controlled by Persia. In such an atmosphere, the work of independent scholars, even if not professionally trained, takes on a greater role. Iranian archives do exist and have been used by fortunate scholars. The holdings on the Persian Gulf in the National Archives and Ministry of Foreign Affairs are conveniently summarized here by Vatandoust. All the Persian Gulf states have prioritized rewriting their history. And with good reason: as George Orwell has observed, “He who controls the past controls the future . . . and he who controls the present controls the past.”35 In common with other parts of the Middle East, history is usually written by the majority or those in political control. As suggested by Benjamin White in reference to Mandate Syria, “By writing ‘national’ history they affirm the majority’s existence in the present and project it back into the past; in doing so, they also assimilate the history of the state to that of the nation.”36 In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the state engaged in “the rewriting of history on a scale never seen before in Iraq or anywhere else in the Arab world.”37 In Oman, the contemporary nation “is built on the negation of the country’s pre-1970 history, any reference to which remains taboo,” according to Marc Valeri.38 In Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, Shi‘i communities cherish the memory of a “golden age” before their conquest by Sunni or Wahhabi outsiders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since Shi‘is have been written out of official accounts, they have now written their own.39 Saudi Arabia, which was recognized as independent in 1932, has since that time sought to create a sense of Saudi nationality where none existed before. An intense focus on the Wahhabi version of Islam and its partnership with the Al Saud family has overshadowed a more nuanced view of the past.40 As Al-Rasheed explains, “Saudi historical narratives create a memory of a population riven by warfare, instability, and rivalry as a prelude to the paramount role of the call to Wahhabism. . . . more importantly, the narrative asserts the leading role of the Najdi population. . . . ”41 Ignoring the unique identity and historical roles played by regions such as Hijaz, Asir, and al-Ahsa, Saudi texts speak of “unification” rather than “conquest.”42 Al-Rasheed finds that this interpretation of history has become widely accepted, but is now being challenged by other accounts as described by Determann. 8 M Lawrence G. Potter

The result of state-sponsored history, as presented in school textbooks and tourism brochures, as well as museum exhibits, is a skewed portrayal of the pre-oil Gulf, with a loss of the diversity and ambiguity that characterized it. Thus the Bedouin heritage is emphasized to the exclusion of other elements. For example, in the Dubai Museum, mannequins depicting shopkeepers in the suq are clearly Arab, whereas we know from eyewitnesses that in the 1950s in Dubai and Abu Dhabi they were mainly Indians and Persians.43 Museum exhibits and displays in most Gulf cities feature images of distinctly non-African individuals performing tasks that historically were performed by Africans.44 The issue of slavery and the African legacy is one of the subthemes of Gulf history and is examined here in groundbreaking chapters by Matthew Hopper (for the Arab littoral) and Behnaz Mirzai (for the Iranian littoral). Slavery was at its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when there was strong demand for labor in the pearling and date industries. Around 1900, according to Lorimer, Africans were estimated to constitute 17 percent of the coastal population from Oman to Kuwait.45 Slavery’s obvious legacy is the presence today of many people of African ancestry on both sides of the Gulf. Aside from hard work, they have contributed much to the popular culture of the Gulf in terms of sports, African-influenced music, and spiritual practices such as zar. This African heritage, however, has been obscured as they have been assimilated into local societies. Today they do not identify as Africans, but as Arabs or Iranians, and speak Arabic or Persian.46 Up to around the 1970s the transnational aspect of Gulf society was much more evident than at present. Today in Dubai, for example, due to political tensions authorities “play down the contribution of Iranians to their development and the immigrants themselves often attempt to cover up their Iranian origins.”47 As Onley explains, “In contrast to Gulf merchant families today, a nineteenth-century transnational family did not have to Arabize to gain acceptance and become influential . . . The result was a blending of cultures into a complex transnational family identity.”48 Major merchant families had members throughout the greater Gulf region: the family studied by Onley had outposts in Basra, Bushehr, Shiraz, Manama, Muscat, Mocha, Hudaydah, and Bombay.49 A similar Kuwaiti merchant network is portrayed in the famous memoir of the seaman Alan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad, in which he journeyed in a Kuwaiti dhow to East Africa just before World War II.50 Since the exploitation of oil began in earnest after World War II and especially since independence, states have increasingly differentiated between citizens and outsiders with the aim of strengthening national identity and reserving benefits for citizens. It is true that some Gulf cities today, Dubai, for example, may be predominantly South Asian in terms of people, but this is misleading as it obscures their lack of citizenship, integration, and Introduction M 9 meaningful participation in society. Today there is an official emphasis on Arabism and political control, as opposed to the hybridity and loose control over movement that was the case historically. In the 1970s as Bahrain benefited from the oil boom, many of the historic communities such as the Baharna (Arab Shi‘is), Persians, and Indians left Manama, and the previous cosmopolitan traditions were lost, according to Fuccaro.51 All around the Gulf, the pre-oil history and architecture of Gulf cities is being obscured and destroyed, although there now are movements afoot, such as in Sharjah, to restore historic buildings. This has been accompanied by a “name game” in the urge to Arabize. In Doha, the traditional shopping area that used to be called Souk al-Farsi [Persian Souk] was renamed Souk al-Waqif [Standing Souk] after renovations were completed in 2008, thus removing its association with Iran. In Dubai, the historic Bastakiyya quarter where Persians lived became rundown and was partly demolished and rebuilt in the 1980s, and now has been recreated as a tourist site.52 Although the name Bastakiyya (after an Iranian town) is well established, the Dubai government has recently sought to change it to the “Al Fahidi Historical Neighborhood,” after the nearby eighteenth-century fort of the ruling family.53

Alternative Histories of the Gulf How can the shortcomings in historical representation outlined above be redressed? As suggested by this volume, new approaches focusing on port cities, the many understudied minority or communal groups living there, and links with the greater Indian Ocean area would make a good start. The rise and fall of ports in the Gulf has been a recurring feature throughout its history, and has been affected by political, economic, and geographical conditions.54 There were many similarities between port cities, such as a maritime orientation, hybrid populations including diaspora communities, mixed ethnicities, multilingual people, mercantile activities, and relative tolerance.55 Challenging environmental conditions, geographic barriers between the coastal and interior towns, and lack of water made these cities dependent on the sea for their prosperity and livelihood.56 This suggests the importance of bringing the sea back into the picture. For example, Samia Rab, an expert on Gulf architecture and historic preservation, emphasizes the centrality of the ocean as a unifying geographic entity and has proposed the concept of “seascape urbanism.” This includes an analytical framework to study the ways the landscape connects to the ocean, a mapping technique to identify urban continuities in port cities, as well as design strategies and urban planning for the future to manage connections between the cities and the sea.57 10 M Lawrence G. Potter

Speaking of the settlements that arose in eastern Arabia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Fuccaro notes, “It is their evolution as towns which seems crucial to understand the Gulf as an imperial frontline, periphery and littoral society.”58 Fuccaro’s pathbreaking book, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800, offers a detailed look at the evolution of Manama, Bahrain, over the past two centuries, and at the same time situates the subject of Gulf urbanism in comparative perspective. She aims to shift away from studying cities through external factors such as British imperialism and tribal elites, and focus instead on the cosmopolitan nature of the urban milieu, its neighborhoods and the people who live there—notables, merchants, pearl divers, immigrants, peasants, oil workers and, ultimately, national activists. Such an approach of focusing on urban history and the influence of the ports is also followed by Farah Al-Nakib in her important study of how Kuwait’s maritime economy shaped internal dynamics and structures of urban life before oil.59 Excavations are currently underway to help illuminate everyday life in historical Doha, Qatar. A major three-year project on the “Origins of Doha” directed by Dr. Robert Carter of University College London and UCL Qatar has unearthed a fascinating collection of materials from the center of the modern city, and the project is also conducting an oral history project to record the memories of older Qataris. The team will seek continued funding from the Qatar National Research Fund once the current grant runs out in late 2015.60 A recent collection of studies edited by Fuccaro takes another look at oil urbanism, especially the new company towns such as Abadan (Iran), Ahmadi (Kuwait), and Awali (Bahrain) from the interwar years until the nationalization of the petroleum industries in the 1970s and 1980s, and highlights the transformative power of oil.61 These interdisciplinary and comparative studies seek to build on studies of urban history and urban social theory in other disciplines, and use a variety of documentary, visual, and oral sources. Also notable is a special issue of Arab Humanities on “Cities and Urban Dynamics in the Arabian Peninsula.”62 A new generation of scholars has set out their agenda in publications such as the online magazine Jadaliyya’s Arabian Peninsula Page, founded in 2012 and Cities Page, launched in 2013. They come from many disciplines and some of their work is avowedly political, focusing on topics such as the relationship between oil and politics, revising rentier state theory, Gulf urbanism, migrant labor, and “ethnocratic” societies, and the deleterious effects of US imperialism. Such scholars are producing some of the most theoretically interesting work, although they may be faulted in restricting themselves to the Arabian Peninsula and not expanding their horizons to include Iran, Iraq, and the Indian Ocean basin.63 Introduction M 11

A good example of the new historical writing is a book on the Dhofar uprising in Oman (1965–1976) by Abdel Razzaq Takriti.64 In the book, aside from retrieving the history of the failed revolt and placing it in its proper regional context, the author seeks to show how the British decisively influenced its outcome, leading to the imposition of a powerful sultan in Oman who practiced a form of sovereignty alien to regional traditions, with implications for monarchy throughout the Gulf.

Peoples of the Gulf Although books on the Gulf routinely mention the presence of minority and outside groups, there has been almost no academic study of them. Even if they are considered a “minority” in terms of citizenship, such groups now form a majority of the population in some of the GCC states. As al-Dailami notes in his chapter, “The publication of such histories depends on how little political controversy they will stir; they rarely challenge the dominant narratives of the state. Although innocuous to more dominant groups in society, such histories encode messages that demand inclusion by fusing historical empiricism with current idioms of authenticity and orthodoxy.”65 One aim of this volume is to highlight and recover the history of groups who played an important role historically, but have been excluded in the national narratives promulgated by ruling dynasties. This includes, to name only those covered here, those who came voluntarily—Indians, Baluch, and Hawala on the Arab side—and those who came involuntarily, the Africans on both sides of the Gulf. Not included are the Arabs on the Iranian side of the Gulf66 and Persians on the Arab side.67 There is also a literature on smaller subgroups, such as the Swahili in Oman.68 The history of the Gulf, including its social and religious networks, trading activities and diasporas, cannot be written or understood without mention of these people. This means expanding horizons outward, emphasizing the region’s maritime connections and the hybridity of its port cities. Also not addressed in this volume are the bidoons, the stateless people who make up large minorities in places such as Kuwait, who often are longtime residents to whom governments refuse to grant full citizenship.69

Gulf Identity70 One of the characteristics of the Gulf is that it has always been a creole area, an arena of mixed descent, where the line between Arab and Persian was not clearly drawn, with many people bilingual and related to those on the other side. People in the region, as elsewhere, had multiple identities, any of which could be activated depending upon the circumstances. Aside from Arabs, 12 M Lawrence G. Potter the most important historic ethnicity was the ‘Ajam, the generic term in the Gulf for Persians or Persian speakers.71 Beeman makes the case that today, as opposed to a constructed and “imagined” community typical of many states, “the Gulf is an unimagined community—a community in fact, but not in name and not in its social identification.”72 He notes the similarity in lifestyle of communities all around the Gulf littoral, and the tradition of unfettered movement, and invokes the concept of an inclusive Khaliji identity (from khalij, gulf) that separates them from others living inland. This is perhaps more relevant historically than today, where in Iran coastal people identify as Iranians and do not embrace a Gulf-wide identity. (In cities on the Iranian coast such as Gavbandi the term khaliji refers to Iranian migrant workers in the GCC states.)73 Jahani finds, however, that the Baloch in the southern parts of Balochistan have “a strong feeling of belonging to a common Khaliji [Gulf] culture,” with extended families living on both sides of the Gulf.74 In the past, identity in the Middle East was local and typically derived from tribe, place, and religion, although since the twentieth century state citizenship has increasingly become the most important identity. Since the founding of the GCC in 1981, another broader regional identity with political resonance, referred to as “Khaliji,” has developed in the Arab states of the Gulf.75 This is a realignment of the term as traditionally understood (and reflected in Beeman’s formulation) that is meant to offer a counter identity that excludes Iran. It reflects a common heritage and lifestyle as well as a political bond, and is an alternative to identities states try to discourage, such as radical Islamism or Arab nationalism.76 Today in the GCC states there is an emphasis on national borders and the privileges of citizenship, with few rights for the majority of the population—hapless and disenfranchised migrant workers. These states seek to instill a strong sense of national identity that disregards the historic ambiguity and results in dividing rather than uniting people. Except in the case of Oman, this draws mainly on the Najdi heritage, which has played an important role in the Gulf since the eighteenth century, but only became a political imperative since the rise of the oil state. For example, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the significant role played by Africans (both slaves and free), especially in the pearl trade, has been ignored in forging a new national identity.77 In the case of Iran, because of its ancient history and well-established cultural heritage, there was no need to promote an Iranian identity in the same way as the new Gulf states.78 However, under the Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–1979) a strong effort was made to centralize the rule of Tehran and get people to identify with and support the Persian-dominated and Shi‘i-controlled government, which often downplayed minority, tribal, and regional identities.79 Introduction M 13

All regional states manipulate the politics of identity, which has led to serious sectarian tensions in the present day. As recent research shows, ethnic and sectarian strife is not inevitable but results from political strategies of states to divide and rule.80 The idea that identities are immutable is part of the problem. As anthropologist Lois Beck notes, “Identity is fluid and malleable for the individual and changes over a lifetime and according to context. Certain aspects of identity rise in importance and expression over time while others recede.”81 Identity issues are dealt with especially in the chapters by al-Dailami, Mirzai, and Jahani. In the first treatment in English of the Hawala, a mysterious group of Arabs who migrated from Arabia to Iran starting around the eighteenth century and later returned to play important roles in places like Bahrain and the UAE, al-Dailami questions the cohesion and historicity of this group and charts their identity transformation. He finds that despite their past connection with Persia today they identify as Arabs, so they are not suspect in the eyes of strongly nationalistic Arab governments.82 In another chapter based on fieldwork in southern Iran and oral history, Mirzai studies identity transformations of Africans who arrived in Iran and eventually became Iranians, who she refers to as Afro-Iranians.83 Identity among the Baluch is discussed in the chapter by Jahani.84 Although predominant demographically in parts of southwest Asia, they are dominated politically by Punjabis in Pakistan, Persians in Iran, and Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula states. The Baluch do not constitute a homogeneous group and in many cases tribal loyalty may be stronger than a Baluch ethnic identity. However, they have generally resisted assimilation and cherish their own history, culture and literature. The Baluch have succeeded in preserving a separate identity in spite of state efforts to obliterate it, and political manifestations of Baluch nationalism and efforts to form their own state have for decades disrupted the greater Persian Gulf region. A broader and more critical approach to thinking about ethnicity and identity will certainly be on the agenda of future Gulf historians.

Conclusion Historians of the Persian Gulf, both from the region and outside it, today are developing new research directions to provide a fuller and more complete history in light of new sources and insights from comparative work. This book contains a wealth of new information derived from such research, and includes studies by some younger historians from the region who seek to provide a more critical interpretation of its past. It aims to provide a corrective by focusing not only on the land and the modern states, but the sea, littoral society, and the connections and networks that joined the port cities to the 14 M Lawrence G. Potter greater Indian Ocean area. At the same time, it seeks to restore the history of groups living in these cities whose past has been silenced in an attempt to present an “official version” of history. In contrast to current nationalist projects that valorize the ruling dynasties and the Najdi legacy, the commercial success of the Gulf historically derived from its being a transnational space, where many tribal, ethnic, and religious groups coexisted. The book helps to show how the modern Gulf, in which states try to maintain sharp disparities between citizens and outsiders, differs from the historical Gulf. The new Gulf forces people to take sides and has led to a rise in sectarian clashes and anxiety over identity. Overall these studies help to restore some of the missing pieces of the puzzle and reclaim the history of the Gulf for all its residents.

Notes

For very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, I am most grateful to Fahad Bishara, Nelida Fuccaro, Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, Samia Rab, Farah Al-Nakib, Rudi Matthee, and Haideh Sahim. Of course, I am solely responsible for the interpretation and any errors. 1. This volume extends to modern times the treatment in a previous volume I edited, The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 2. Nelida Fuccaro, “Pearl Towns and Early Oil Cities: Migration and Integration in the Arab Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, ed. Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi, and Florian Riedler (London: Routledge, 2011), 99–116. 3. Thomas M. Ricks, “Bandar Abbas and the Gulf Ports, 1750 to 1920: Perspectives on Littoral Cultures, Transoceanic Migrations and Diaspora Communities,” Paper presented at conference on “The Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports and History,” American University of Sharjah, March 18, 2009, 7. 4. K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean, Seas in History (London: Routledge, 2003), and his article, “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems,” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–54. Also Abdul Sheriff, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, New Oxford World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Abdul Sheriff and Engseng Ho, ed., The Indian Ocean: Oceanic Connections and the Creation of New Societies (London: Hurst, 2014). 5. Jean Aubin, “Les princes d’Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle” in Journal Asiatique 241 (1953): 77–137 and “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle” in Mare Luso-Indicum II (1973): 77–179; M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992); Patricia Risso, Merchants and Faith: Muslim Commerce and Culture in the Indian Ocean, New Perspectives on Asian History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995) and Introduction M 15

Fahad Bishara, “A Sea of Debt: Histories of Commerce and Obligation in the Western Indian Ocean, 1850–1940” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2012). 6. Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745– 1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Firoozeh Kashani- Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and “Baluchistan: Nature, Ethnicity, and Empire in Iran’s Borderlands,” The Journal of the Middle East and Africa, vol. 4 no. 2 (2013): 187–204. 7. This approach was pioneered for Iran by Richard Bulliet in Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Arash Khazeni has written a book on the Bakhtiari tribe in Iran, which seeks to de-center a historiography that has emphasized the urban, political, and religious elite. See his Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 8. Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History vol. 8 no. 2 (1997): 211–42; quote here is on 234. 9. This is increasingly changing. For example, the indefatigable historian Willem Floor has extensively utilized Persian and Arabic sources in his numerous works on the modern history of the Gulf. These include six volumes so far in The Persian Gulf series from Mage Publishers in Washington, DC: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (2006); The Rise of the Gulf Arabs: The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792 (2007); The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, The Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930 (2010); Bandar Abbas–The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran (2011); Links with the Hinterland–Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka‘b & Bandar Abbas (2011); and The Hula Arabs of the Shibkuh Coast of Iran (2014). 10. S. B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf, 2 vols. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919; repr. Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994). 11. Arnold T. Wilson, The Persian Gulf: A Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928). 12. J. G. Lorimer, ed., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ’Oman and Central Arabia, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908 and 1915; reprint Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England: Archive Editions, 1986) in 9 volumes. See the critical evaluation by Nelida Fuccaro, “Knowledge at the Service of the British Empire: The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia,” in I. Brandell, M. Carlson and Ö. Cetrez, ed., Borders and the Changing Boundaries of Knowledge (Visby, Sweden: Eddy, forthcoming). 13. Robin Bidwell, “A British Official Guide to the Gulf: A Review,” The Geographical Journal, vol. 138, no. 2 (1972): 233–35, quote is on page 234. 14. J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Briton Cooper Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 15. Stephanie Cronin, “Writing the History of Modern Iran: A Comment on Approaches and Sources,” Iran 36 (1998): 177. 16. Peter C. Valenti, “Creating a New Historiography of the Persian Gulf: The Case of Qatar,” New Middle Eastern Studies 1 (2011): 1–23. See especially Frederick F. 16 M Lawrence G. Potter

Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 17. James Onley, “Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf, c. 1500s–1947,” this volume, and his The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also John M. Willis, “Making Yemen Indian: Rewriting the Boundaries of Imperial Arabia,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41 no. 1 (2009): 23–38. 18. The best-studied group so far is the Indian community of Muscat, with the classic study by Calvin H. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 44/1 (1981): 39–53, and more recent treatment by Chhaya Goswami, The Call of the Sea: Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar, c.1800–1880 (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2012). 19. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Rise and Fall of Port Cities in the Persian Gulf,” this volume, 136–38. 20. Fahad Bishara, “Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf,” chapter 2, this volume, 65. 21. Jörg Matthias Determann, “Dynastic Periodization and Its Limits: Historiography in Contemporary Arab Monarchies,” Der Islam 91/1 (2014): 97–98. 22. Ehsan Yarshater, ed., A History of Persian Literature, vol. X, Persian Historiography, ed. Charles Melville (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012) is a recent comprehensive treatment, although the Persian Gulf is barely mentioned. 23. Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran: The Pahlavis and After, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007), 1. 24. Abbas Amanat, “The Study of History in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Nostalgia, Illusion, or Historical Awareness?,” Iranian Studies 22, no. 4 (1989): 6. See the collection of articles in Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture, ed. Touraj Atabaki (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009). 25. Amanat, “The Study of History in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” 5. Amanat criticizes some well-regarded Iranian historians of the twentieth century, including Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946) and Faridun Adamiyyat (1919–2008). He also skewers two of the most popular interpreters of Iranian history, Jalal Al-e Ahmad (author of Gharbzadegi [Occidentosis]) and Ali Shari‘ati, whose interpretation of Shi‘ism was “often myopic and distorted.” (Amanat, “The Study of History in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” 5). 26. See Gholam Reza Vatandoust, “The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: A Critical Survey of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Persian Sources,” chapter 3, this volume. 27. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–48. 28. Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Political Legitimacy and the Production of History: The Case of Saudi Arabia,” in New Frontiers in Middle East Security, ed. Lenore G. Martin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 28. 29. Fahad Bishara, “Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf,” chapter 2, this volume, 49. Introduction M 17

30. Jörg Matthias Determann, Historiography in Saudi Arabia: Globalization and the State in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014). 31. Ibid., 189–90, with full publication details in the bibliography. The initial volume was ‘Abd Allah Nasir Al-Subay‘i, Iktishaf al-naft wa athruha ‘ala al-hayat al-ijtima’iyyah fi al-mintaqah al-sharqiyah 1352–1380h/1933–1960m: dirasah fi al-tarikh alijtima’i (Riyadh: privately published, 1987). 32. Muhsin al-Musawi, “Narrating the Gulf: Literary Evidence for History,” chapter 4, this volume. 33. Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Knowledge in the Time of Oil,” in Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula, ed. Rosie Bsheer and John Warner, Jadmag Pedagogy Publications, Issue 1.1 (Fall 2013), 12. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 2. 36. Benjamin Thomas White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 211. 37. Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 3. 38. Marc Valeri, “Identity Politics and Nation-Building under Sultan Qaboos,” in Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (London: Hurst, 2013), 185. 39. For more on Shi‘i histories, see Determann, Historiography in Saudi Arabia, 89–94 and 167–74. Also Laurence Louër, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 11–44. 40. Al-Rasheed, “Political Legitimacy and the Production of History,” 25–46. 41. Ibid., 34. 42. Ibid., 35. For more on the history of localities such as Mecca, Madina, Najd, Hijaz, Qatif, al-Ahsa, Asir, etc., see the chapter on local history in Determann, Historiography in Saudi Arabia, 63–100. 43. Peter Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001), 119–20, 123–24. 44. Matthew S. Hopper, “The African Presence in Eastern Arabia,” chapter 12, this volume, 344. 45. Ibid, this volume, 329. 46. Willem Floor, “The Trade in and Position of Slaves in Southern Iran, 1825– 1925,” Studia Iranica 41 no. 2 (2012): 255–94; Jerzy Zdanowski, Slavery and Manumission: British Policy in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in the first half of the 20th Century (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2013); Vanessa Martin, “Slavery and Black Slaves in Iran in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in Nineteenth-Century Persia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 150–69 and Thomas M. Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” Slavery and Abolition 9, no. 3 (1988): 60–70. 47. Amin Moghadam, “The Other Shore: Iranians in the United Arab Emirates between Visibility and Invisibility,” in Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary 18 M Lawrence G. Potter

Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic, ed. Annabelle Sreberny and Massoumeh Torfeh (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 253. 48. James Onley, “Transnational merchants in the nineteenth-century Gulf: the case of the Safar family,” in Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf, ed. Madawi Al-Rasheed (London: Routledge, 2005): 59–89; quote is on 79. 49. Ibid., 60. 50. Alan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad (New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, 1940; reprint 1969). 51. Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 229–31. 52. This process is described in Anne Coles and Peter Jackson, Windtower (London: Stacey International, 2007), 174–85. 53. http://gulfartguide.com/dubai/bastakiyya-heritage-village/ 54. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Rise and Fall of Port Cities in the Persian Gulf,” chapter 5, this volume. 55. These cities need to be studied comparatively, and can benefit from work done on nearby regions. See especially Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th-20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Kensington, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1989) and Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C.A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 56. Potter, “Introduction,” in The Persian Gulf in History, 4–5; Lawrence G. Potter, “The Rise and Fall of Port Cities in the Persian Gulf,” chapter 5, this volume. 57. Samia Rab, “Sharjah: Seascape Urbanism in a Khaliji Port City,” in Proceedings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) (Montreal, Canada: ACSA, 2011). Additional details in letter, December 13, 2013. 58. Nelida Fuccaro, “Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf,” chapter 1, this volume, 30. See also her “Pearl Towns and Early Oil Cities.” 59. Farah Al-Nakib, “Inside a Gulf Port: The Dynamics of Urban Life in Pre-Oil Kuwait,” chapter 8, this volume. Al-Nakib, who in her chapter relies on oral history to recreate the life of the quarters (farij) in Kuwait, has recently established an Oral History and Documentation Project as part of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait. See further, “Kuwait City: Urbanisation, the Built Environment, and the Urban Experience Before and After Oil (1716–1986)” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2011). 60. “Bringing Doha’s Past to Life,” The Foundation: The Monthly Magazine of Qatar Foundation, Issue 68, August 2014, 20–22. See http://originsofdoha.wordpress. com/ 61. Special section on “Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East,” ed. Nelida Fuccaro, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East vol. 33 no.1 (2013). See also the editor’s interview at: http://www.jadaliyya. com/pages/index/14713/new-texts-out-now_nelida-fuccaro-histories-of-oil- 62. Arab Humanities 2 (2013), Issue on “Cities and Urban Dynamics in the Arabian Peninsula,” ed. Claire Beaugrand, Amélie Le Reynard and Roman Stadnicki (online journal in French and English, at http://cy.revues.org/2460). Introduction M 19

63. For a roundtable summing up their first year, with links to key articles, see http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/11300/theorizing-the-arabian-penin- sula_introduction-to-t Some of this work is distilled in Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula. The Cities Page is located at cities.jadaliyya.com 64. Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See the interview with the author at www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/15521/new-texts-out-now. However, note the critical review by J. E. Peterson in The Middle East Journal 68, no. 2 (2014): 328–30. 65. Ahmed al-Dailami, “‘Purity and Confusion’: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf,” chapter 11, this volume, 315. He analyzes two histories written by Hawala historians. 66. See Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, “The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf in History, 129–45. 67. See further Mohammad Taghi Razavian, “Iranian Communities in the Persian Gulf: A Geographical Analysis” (PhD diss., University of London, 1975); Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, “Diaspora VI. In the Persian Gulf States,” Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 7 (1996): 379–80; Nelida Fuccaro, “Mapping the transnational community: Persians and the space of the city in Bahrain, c. 1869–1937,” in Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf, 39–58; Moghadam, “The Other Shore: Iranians in the United Arab Emirates,” 247–65; and Eric Andrew McCoy, Iranians in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates: Migration, Minorities, and Identities in the Persian Gulf Arab States (ProQuest, UMI Dissertation Publishing, Sep. 1, 2011). 68. Marc Valeri, “Nation-Building and Communities in Oman Since 1970: The Swahili-speaking Omani in Search of Identity,” African Affairs vol. 106 no. 424 (2007): 479–96; Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Transnational Connections and National Identity: Zanzibari Omanis in Muscat,” in Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, ed. Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 96–113; and Mandana E. Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 134–63. 69. The bidoons are increasingly a subject of research. See, for example, Claire Beaugrand, “Statelessness & Administrative Violence: Biduns’ Survival Strategies in Kuwait,” The Muslim World 101, issue 2 (2011): 228–50. 70. For an interesting historical take see Timothy Insoll, “Changing Identities in the Arabian Gulf: Archaeology, Religion, and Ethnicity in Context,” in The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities, ed. Eleanor Conlin Casella and Chris Fowler (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2005), 191–209. 71. “‘Ajam” by C. E. Bosworth, in Encyclopædia Iranica I (1985): 700–01. The term was often used in a pejorative sense in medieval Arabic literature to refer to non-Arabs of the Islamic empire, particularly the Persians. 72. William O. Beeman, “Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis– Their Evolution and Way of Life,” in The Persian Gulf in History, 148. 73. Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, letter, March 11, 2014. 74. Carina Jahani, “The Baloch as an Ethnic Group in the Persian Gulf Region,” chapter 10, this book, 288. 20 M Lawrence G. Potter

75. Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Introduction: Localizing the transnational and transna- tionalizing the local,” in Transnational Connections and the Arab Gulf, ed. Madawi Al-Rasheed (London: Routledge, 2005), 4. Also Fred H. Lawson, “From Here We Begin: A Survey of Scholarship on the International Relations of the Gulf,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 36 no. 3 (December 2009): 351. 76. Neil Partrick, “Nationalism in the Gulf States,” in The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order, ed. David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen (London: Routledge, 2012), 61. 77. Aisha Bilkhair Khalifa, “Afro-Emirati: Historical Community and Identity in Transformation,” paper presented at conference, “The Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports and History,” American University of Sharjah, March 19, 2009. 78. See here Ahmad Ashraf, “Iranian Identity IV: In the 19th and 20th Centuries,” Encyclopædia Iranica 13 (2006): 522–30. For a thoughtful discussion see Abbas Amanat, “Iranian Identity Boundaries: A Historical Overview,” in Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, ed. Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–33. 79. Lois Beck, “Iran’s Ethnic, Religious, and Tribal Minorities,” in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, 245–326. 80. Justin Gengler, “Understanding Sectarianism in the Persian Gulf,” in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, 31–66. Also Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) and Toby Matthiesen, “A ‘Saudi Spring?’: The Shi‘a Protest Movement in the Eastern Province, 2011–2012,” Middle East Journal 66 no. 4 (2012): 628–59. 81. Beck, “Iran’s Ethnic, Religious, and Tribal Minorities,” 247. 82. Al-Dailami, “‘Purity and Confusion’: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf,” chapter 11, this volume. A recent volume by Willem Floor, The Hula Arabs of the Shibkuh Coast of Iran (cited above), treats the Hawala on the Persian side of the Gulf from the sixteenth to nineteenth century. 83. She has also produced a documentary, filmed on location in southern Iran: Afro-Iranian Lives, Executive Producer Behnaz A. Mirzai, 2007. 84. Carina Jahani, “The Baloch as an Ethnic Group in the Persian Gulf Region,” chapter 10, this volume. PART I

The Historiography of the Persian Gulf CHAPTER 1

Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf

Nelida Fuccaro

decade or so ago while literature on the history of pre-oil port towns was very scanty, the interest in modern and contemporary Arab Gulf cities was sufficiently advanced to attract the attention A 1 of regional and urban studies specialists. In reviewing the field today one notes that cities on the Arab side of the Gulf are increasingly monopolizing the research agendas of urban planners, architects, and social scientists.2 Yet, and in spite of the recent publication of a number of studies, the historiography of Gulf ports on both the Iranian and Arab side is still lagging behind.3 In the absence of a substantive body of academic work that can illustrate historical trends across the region, this chapter is suggestive rather than definitive–suggestive in the sense that it is not meant to provide either the last word on Gulf ports or a historical excursus of their development. Many of their histories as towns have yet to be written. Instead, this chapter wishes to draw attention to trends, approaches, comparative contexts, and problems as a contribution to a future research agenda.

The Limits of Port Historiography The little attention devoted to port towns in the historiography of the Persian Gulf dealing with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is partly the result of the predominance of particular themes and approaches to the writing of regional history. Until fairly recently, the vicissitudes of ruling families, tribes, British imperial policy, and the “Indian connection” have 24 M Nelida Fuccaro been the most popular subjects of investigation. The theme of the port city has an obvious historical resonance for the region. For much of the nineteenth century, Gulf ports such as Kuwait, Lingeh, Bandar Abbas, and Dubai functioned as independent or semiautonomous political units, which exercised commercial functions and different degrees of control over their hinterlands. Particularly on the Arab side, urban development, political culture, and trade were essential to indigenous processes of state building.4 And it is this particular perspective that is often missing from the literature. For instance, the development of ports as commercial emporia has been generally relegated to a mere background for British economic expansion, rather than being studied from the viewpoint of regional trade, littoral societies, and urban development. The predominantly ethno- and empire-centric nature of historical writing on the region is also to blame. Not only have Arab and Iranian specialists rarely crossed paths in the Gulf but they have also tended to stigmatize it as a periphery of the Safavid, Qajar, and Ottoman Empires. In other words the Gulf (and by association its ports) has been construed as a somewhat “primi- tive” universe, a counterpoint to the centers of imperial civilization located in central and northern Iran and in the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire. In this respect academic biases seem to have replicated popular preconcep- tions, which continue to resonate in public discourse. As suggested by the work of the author Ghulam Husain Sa‘idi, the Gulf coast has occupied a particular place in the Iranian literary imagination as a remote, superstition- ridden, and distant region. Along similar lines, the image of the Gulf Arab as a Bedouin suddenly (and somewhat undeservedly) blessed with oil wealth resonates in the trope of “the oil-well state,” which dominated Arab discourse in the 1980s.5 With some notable exceptions the ethnic and political fault lines that demarcate the region today have also contributed to limit constructive academic debate.6 The fluid urban tradition of the Gulf stands in contrast with the rigid national politics and cultures imposed by the development of modern states after World War I. As a result of the dichotomy between the Arab and Iranian worlds historical debates have often attempted to impose “border fictions”7 over a past that was undoubtedly more fluid and culturally diverse than the present would lead us to believe. For instance, the historiography of southern Iran in the interwar period was subservient to the project of centralization and nation-building pursued by the Pahlavi dynasty. In the case of the Arab side of the Gulf, governments have tended to nationalize and Arabize their capital cities, thus effacing traces and memories of their cosmopolitan past.8 Conceptually, the imposition of these “border fictions” has limited our understanding of the Gulf as an interconnected regional world. Politically, it has created contention over particular places, spaces, Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 25 and urban actors, particularly when it comes to the influence of commercial elites and ruling families and to the importance of particular settlements over others.

Littorals, Margins, and Peripheries: A New Perspective Gulf ports have been virtually absent from the thriving comparative literature dealing with port cities in the context of littoral societies and continental and world “peripheries.” The advantages of these approaches for the Gulf context are obvious. In critiquing states and rigid civilizational divisions as units of analysis, this literature has addressed the inadequacies of area studies and state-centered paradigms of historical development, which are implicit in the biases discussed above. In fact, the integration of Gulf ports into the ebb and flow of cross-regional and maritime history is a project that deserves attention in its own right in order to broaden the geographical and intellectual horizons of regional historiography. Studies on the Indian Ocean are an obvious starting point.9 With the premise that waters are con- nective spaces or “continents,” some of this literature has already started to tackle the issue of the unity between the Gulf littoral and the Indian Ocean rim throughout the centuries. This has resulted in interesting reflections on trade, hinterlands, family networks, and material culture, all of which are closely connected to coastal urbanization.10 The Red Sea is a peripheral region offering plenty of comparative vistas. In the nineteenth century some of its ports were similar in size, geographical proximity, and economic functions to their Gulf counterparts as suggested by a study of the Eritrean port of Massawa by Jonathan Miran.11 The size and importance of Gulf ports in the nineteenth century has undoubtedly contributed to their relative academic obscurity. If compared with leading Indian Ocean and Mediterranean ports, they were relatively small and remained largely peripheral to global trade, particularly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Political and economic power was concentrated far away from the Gulf littoral: in Bombay, the powerhouse of British Raj and the main emporium of Gulf trade, and in Tehran and Istanbul, the capitals of the Qajar and Ottoman Empires, which vied for control of portions of the Gulf littoral. Yet a new historiography of the margins and borderlands is very useful to challenge normative economies of scale. This historiography has convincingly shown how the “edges” can bridge local and global histories, providing vital methodological and epistemological connections across space and time.12 What is crucial in this context is not to measure hierarchies of settlement but to capture the relational aspects of historical processes. In an urban context this is illustrated by recent literature on nonmetropolitan urban centers in the Indian Ocean 26 M Nelida Fuccaro in the premodern and early modern periods. The emphasis here is on the interactive nature of urban networks and on the importance of small cities as windows into regional dynamics and larger urban systems.13 In this relational setting, size and importance become relative concepts challenging the preeminence accorded to central places in traditional historiography. Further, sheer numbers do not make up the essence of “citiness.” As microsystems of social and political organization towns are characterized by a diversity of services, activities, and institutions and by asymmetrical relations with their hinterlands. Along the Gulf littoral, port functions were a determinant in the evolution of towns as social and political entities. In the first instance, it was their establishment as trade and entrepôt centers that molded their political, institutional, and legal infrastructure. Urban elites were often recruited from the merchant class, and rulers and local governors were dependent on merchant capital and mixed legal regimes that included customary, Islamic, and British Indian law, which regulated socioeconomic and political life. To put it differently, the histories of ports as commercial emporia, urban societies, and administrative centers were representative of the Gulf coast as a littoral society, a concept that has had considerable currency in Indian Ocean studies. Michael Pearson’s work, for instance, over 40 years has straddled East Africa, the western Indian Ocean, and the shores of the Indian subcontinent. Pearson’s is a hinterland-centered vision of the coast that approaches cities as “hinges” between land and sea with an emphasis on regional settings. The abundant evidence available on the Indian Ocean rim can offer Gulf scholars new terms of comparison and analytical tools. The case of the conurbations of East Africa, a region linked to the Gulf by close historical ties, prompts key questions on forms of urbanization, socioeconomic stratification, and the influence of regional production and trade.14 Along the Swahili coast, the predominant urban system was not that of the seaport alone but included a conglomeration of settlements around the main coastal centers that were organized along strict social, ethnic, and productive lines.15 Such closely knit conurbations were unknown to the Gulf coast in the pre-oil era in spite of many Iranian ports having more or less extensive hinterlands.16 Besides the harsh climatic and geographical conditions of the coast the absence of conurbation systems of the East African type can be considered as an indication of the relations between Gulf ports and their interiors, undoubtedly far less economically productive and diversified than in the African littoral. This cursory discussion of the East African case elicits a few preliminary reflections on the nature of Gulf urbanism. Coastal towns were the exclusive sites of khaliji and bandari identity, places offering protection and economic opportunities to inland and coastal populations seeking refuge from a hostile environment. Further, a comparison with Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 27

East Africa also points to the relative egalitarian nature of Gulf urbanism in terms of class given that the spatial separation between patricians and com- moners was a distinguishing feature of the Swahili conurbations.17

Of Ports and Empires in the Gulf Alongside the thriving historiography of margins and littoral societies new perspectives on the old theme of empire can reshape the writing of port histories. First and foremost, the classic British imperial paradigm of the “Indian connection” is cast in a new mold by shifting attention from diplomacy and high politics to new maritime, social, and cultural histories of empire. One of the main contexts for understanding the development of Gulf ports in the nineteenth century is provided by British political and commercial expansion in the western Indian Ocean. The suggestion by Thomas Metcalf that “The Raj comprehended the sea as well as the land” follows many of the premises that have guided the study of the Indian Ocean world before 1800 by eminent scholars such as Kirti Chaudhuri. It envisions its port cities and hinterlands as “the imperial-centered web of the nineteenth century,” opening new and exciting vistas for urban historians.18 As India became the metropolitan center of Britain’s seaborne empire in the Gulf, Arabian Peninsula, and East Africa, port settlements became part of the political and trade world centered on Bombay and Karachi. Coastal societies partook of this world differently. As suggested by Metcalf in Aden and East Africa, the British transplanted political and legal institutions that were created in India for Indians after the establishment of British protectorates. British and Indian personnel started to populate these new imperial possessions: sepoy soldiers, Sikh troopers, indentured laborers, and a disciplined army of loyal Indian traders.19 In the Gulf the demographic and political impact of the British Raj was less pronounced than in other areas of the western Indian Ocean. Built upon indirect rule, British influence relied on a style of colonial government borrowed from the princely Indian states. Military protection, advice, and assistance were offered to rulers and local governors as British-protected subjects. Port towns were thus the centers of British informal empire, which rested on a mixture of diplomacy, coercion, and the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction. Indian traders and British-protected merchants were the tangible sign of the imperial presence. While pursuing the commercial interests of the Government of India, they also acted as its political representatives. In Lingeh, Muscat, Manama, and Sharjah, Indian, Persian, and Arab merchants served as British native agents and brokers throughout much of the nineteenth century.20 This age of British overseas expansion supported by military power, tech- nological innovation, and a communication revolution epitomized by the 28 M Nelida Fuccaro opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 exposed the historical vulnerability of Gulf ports as major transcontinental emporia. Historically, major regional ports could shift between the Gulf and the Red Sea due to political reasons. This vulnerability had already become apparent in the early Islamic era with the Zanj revolt, the collapse of Siraf, and in the thirteenth century with the arrival of the Mongol hordes.21 A combination of location, production, resources, and politics determined the peripheral position of Gulf ports in the global map of empire which emerged in the late nineteenth century. The Indian and East African coasts experienced seismic transformations under the influence of an aggressive European capitalism, which transformed ports such as Bombay, Aden and Mombasa into the bridgeheads of expanding colonial economies. 22 In contrast, Gulf ports developed increasingly close links with their metropole primarily as transhipment centers of goods and information to and from the Indian subcontinent. The inauguration of the British India Steam Navigation Company in 1856 and the completion of the Indo- European Telegraph in Iran in 1865 inaugurated a new era of imperial trade and communication. The largest proportion of commerce of Bushehr and Manama, the two lynchpins of Indian influence in the region, was conducted with Bombay and Karachi. Reflecting accelerated British expansion, the volume of trade of Bushehr rose dramatically in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, doubling between 1875 and 1883. By 1889 some 95 per cent of goods (which in monetary terms represented a quarter of Gulf trade) came either from India or from Great Britain. In the case of Manama, the exponential growth of the Gulf’s pearl industry in the same period contributed to cement political and commercial ties with India and with Bombay in particular as the center of the world pearl market. 23 As in the case of the Red Sea, many Gulf ports experienced the entrepôt effect and developed as redistribution centers for the regional market. Lingeh, on the Iranian side, for instance traded primarily with Arab ports while the majority of imports from India were redistributed regionally. In the case of Kuwait, long distance trade with India was overshadowed by the town’s thriving boat building industry.24 The regionalization of trade in Red Sea ports such as Massawa and Suakin followed the rise to prominence of Aden and Suez as transcontinental emporia and the decline of gold and ivory as export goods.25 Gulf pearls, the only local commodity with an international demand, did not enter directly the orbit of global empire. Pearl production remained in the hands of local entrepreneurs who operated in symbiosis with rulers while marketing was controlled by both Indian and indigenous merchants. It can be argued that the Government of India actively supported the status quo in the pearling industry in order to consolidate the position of local rulers as British vassals.26 Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 29

The peripheral position of Gulf ports in relation to the world economy undoubtedly limited their integration into a new global system of trade, politics, and ideas, which developed under the shadow of empire, a process that has been termed “imperial globalisation.”27 To view the history of Gulf ports merely in terms of the encroachment of global empire is not only unrealistic but also replicates centric biases that have been so aptly critiqued by the new historiography of the margins. A more nuanced imperial perspective is provided by a focus on the Gulf littoral as the site of interconnections between different imperial systems. As such, port towns can be approached as the nodes of different political and strategic front- lines, which demarcated larger areas of imperial influence. As part of the western frontier of British India, for instance, they functioned as buffer zones guarding the often turbulent tribal and imperial hinterlands of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Iran under Ottoman and Qajar control. As is well documented, the Gulf coast also featured prominently in European rivalries for the control of the Middle East in the context of the Great Game and the Eastern Question.28 Turning to the regional context, a key imperial relationship was that between ports and their hinterlands. While firmly in the orbit of British India, many Gulf ports remained part of the peripheries of land-based imperial systems. Bushehr, Basra, and Bandar Abbas did not lose their position as points of entry for the Qajar, Ottoman, and Omani empires, which ruled the region before the establishment of the Pax Britannica. British influence was certainly more pronounced in the ports of the Arab coast such as Kuwait, Manama, and Dubai, which rose to commercial prominence as the seats of independent tribal principalities. Yet it is no coincidence that renewed Ottoman expansionism toward the Gulf in the last quarter of the nineteenth century prompted the Government of India to negotiate exclusive agreements with the independent rulers of Bahrain, Trucial Oman, and Kuwait. Reform and state centralization in the Ottoman Empire and in Qajar Iran provide the general context to understand how the imperial histories of Western Asia and the Middle East shaped Gulf ports and littoral societies as interdependent political and economic spaces. The reforms undertaken by the Ottoman and Qajar governments in the second half of the nineteenth century were in fact closely connected to the influence exercised by Great Britain in Iran and the Ottoman Empire. Crucially, these reforms sought to reestablish direct Ottoman and Qajar rule along the Gulf coast to counterbalance growing British influence. In the Iranian ports the Qajar government implemented state centralization by discontinuing the system of tax-farming, which regulated relations between Tehran and the independent overlords who controlled the ports of the coast. These were mostly 30 M Nelida Fuccaro

Arab shaikhs who paid regular tribute (maliyat) to the central government in exchange for the rights to levy taxes and to collect customs dues. After 1900 Lingeh, Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas were placed under the newly formed Imperial Customs Administration. As between 1850 and 1887 Tehran progressively reasserted its control over Bushehr, Bandar Abbas, and Lingeh, the influence of inland centers, particularly Shiraz as the capital of Fars province, became more pronounced.29 In southern Iraq, Ottoman centralization had started in the early 1830s with the imposition of direct rule over Baghdad and the transformation of Basra into the capital of a new province in 1850. It seems that Ottoman governors continued to administer the customs as their personal tax-farm and faced the increasingly fierce competition of British traders and their local intermediaries. This competition became particularly pronounced after the enforcement of the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman convention, which legalized free trade throughout the Ottoman Empire. By the 1860s Basra had become the center of a market-oriented agricultural economy based on cereal production, the only region of the Gulf littoral to experience partial integration into the world market.30 Increased trade restrictions and onerous taxation resulting from Ottoman and Qajar centralization favored the relocation of merchants and merchant capital to the Arab ports that had remained under the control of independent tribal dynasties. Alongside the pearl boom, this was the crucial factor that determined the economic success of Kuwait, Manama, and Dubai as free ports. After 1838, for instance, the enforcement of the Anglo-Ottoman convention forced horse dealers trading with Bombay to move from Basra to Kuwait and Muhammara in order to circumvent Ottoman port duties.31 After 1900 the establishment of the Imperial Customs Administration in Iran triggered the large-scale migration of major Arab and Persian mercantile communities to the Arab coast, in particular to Dubai and Manama. This was the continuation of a process of “internationalization” of the Iranian mercantile class, which developed apace in the nineteenth century under the economic renaissance of Persian Gulf trade promoted by the British and the Omani rulers of Gulf ports.32

Approaching Ports as Towns The relatively well-researched history of British and European expansion in the Indian Ocean and in the Mediterranean, and of power politics in the Middle East and Western Asia, provide useful frames of reference for the study of Gulf ports in the regional and global contexts of empire. Yet it is their evolution as towns that seems crucial to understand the Gulf as an imperial frontline, periphery, and littoral society. In this respect urban Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 31 history should feature prominently as an interdisciplinary platform of analysis combining the tools of empirically based historical research with approaches from human geography, social anthropology, and economics. For instance, studies on Asian port cities offer plenty of comparative vistas, particularly when considering the pioneering work of Rhoads Murphey, Frank Broeze, and Dilip Basu.33 Since the 1970s their research has treated ports and cities as related concepts placing emphasis on the relevance of economic and social history to understand the interconnections between port functions and urban milieus.34 A focus on space also fits in with this interdisciplinary agenda bringing in more recent trends in urban studies. In the last two decades, the concept of space and place has been extremely influential in the historiography of cities and urban societies inspired by social science theorists such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Edward W. Soja, and Dolores Hayden. The central argument of this literature is that urban spaces not only shape the identities and experiences of residents but they are also “produced” as an integral part of political, social, and economic relationships.35 Following this premise— and taking the regional setting as the main referent—the evolution of urban landscapes in the Gulf can be interpreted as the manifestation of wider processes such as tribalism, imperial expansion, and state centralization. Some examples of pre-oil urbanization illustrate the relevance of this approach and suggest how urban development can be used to connect the local, regional, and global scales. The proliferation of barasti settlements as shanty towns in the vicinity of Arab ports is evidence of the region’s booming pearl industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Populated by destitute immigrants employed in the pearl banks, the history of barasti urbanization help us to understand how new urban spaces mediated the entry of marginal communities into the regional (and world) economy. Similarly, the appearance of Persian upper class neighborhoods such as al-Bastakiyyah in Dubai and al-Awadhiyyah in Manama is evidence of the accumulation of merchant capital on the Arab coast as a result of the centralization of custom facilities in Qajar ports at the turn of the twentieth century.36 We do not have as yet a critical mass of historical ethnographies of urban space and societies to make a comparative research agenda feasible. With the exception of Manama and Kuwait little is known about the development of ports, markets, urban neighborhoods, informal communities, and political and social institutions that supported urban life across the region.37 Even Muscat, the only port settlement that rose to prominence as an imperial metropolis, has received relatively little attention.38 The publication of a historical gazetteer compiled by John Peterson represents a very welcome step in the right direction as it gathers precious evidence of places and spaces inside old Muscat.39 Peterson’s gazetteer is valuable precisely because 32 M Nelida Fuccaro it undertakes what is the most arduous task for any urban historian interested in the Gulf: locating, preserving, and recording local sources, both oral and documentary. It is archaeology of knowledge of some sort that fits the Arab coast particularly well. Here the challenge for the urban historian is that of uncovering the material and immaterial remains of a not-so- distant past, which are often hidden by (or buried under) hypermodern oil cities. Hopefully some of the oral history projects sponsored by Kuwaiti and Emirati research institutions will become increasingly relevant to urban historians in the near future.40 Given the ephemeral nature of traditional Gulf architecture, archaeology can also offer important insights into the region’s recent urban past. Yet historical archaeology, unlike in coastal Africa, is still the preserve of scholars dealing with the ancient, Islamic, and medieval periods. As recently suggested in a study of Zubara, the urban archaeology of the post-medieval period has been noticeably neglected.41 At the most basic level, the absence of a tradition of state bureaucracy (in most cases until the discovery of oil) has deprived historians of the Arab coast of vital documentation on urban life and development, which has been so central to the writing of the social, cultural, and spatial history of towns and cities across the Middle East and India.42 As in the case of East Africa, local written sources are virtually absent for much of the nineteenth century and scarce for the first decades of the twentieth. The very few preserved dating back to the pre-oil era are often difficult to access in bulk either as a result of political sensitivities or the absence of national archives. While sharing with their counterparts working on the Arab side problems of access, historians of southern Iran and Iraq have at their disposal a richer repertoire of source materials. Most crucially these include the documentation produced by the Ottoman and Qajar administrations as well as regional and local histories often sponsored by imperial governments. The Qajar court in Tehran, for instance, took a keen interest in the south at least since 1834 as a result of growing British influence in the Gulf ports. The shah commissioned court officials to produce a number of historical and geographical reports on the coastal regions. The most famous of these officials was Muhammad Ali Khan Sadid al-Saltana (Kababi) Bandar Abbasi, whose works became standard references in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods.43 The records of the Government of India are an obvious and readily available resource but quite limited when it comes to urban life and sociopolitical organization. These records are extremely useful to analyze the relationship between trade and imperial politics as the most conspicuous projec- tion of British power on Gulf coastal societies. It is no coincidence that the best documented elements of pre-oil coastal urbanization in British official records are defensive systems such as forts, town walls, and watch towers. Since the early nineteenth century these attracted the consistent attention Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 33 of cartographers and surveyors of the British Indian Navy as part of intelligence-gathering efforts.44 Accounts by travelers and British officials provide the bulk of the information on urban landscapes. Yet they contain sketchy and often casual descriptions of harbors and warehouse districts, and only occasionally offer glimpses beyond seafronts.45

Patterns of Urbanization Although the literature on Gulf ports is patchy we can identify some trends of regional urbanization in the nineteenth century and establish basic similarities and differences between coastal settlements. The first distinction is between old and new coastal towns. Basra and the ports of the Iranian coast had a longer history than the settlements on the Arab side. For instance, Bandar Abbas (on the mainland opposite the Portuguese Hormuz) had been a renowned international trade emporium and center of imperial politics since the medieval period. With the exception of Muscat and Basra, the ports of the Arab coast could not boast such an illustrious pedigree. Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Muharraq were established as commercial outposts in the eighteenth century by Bedouin tribes from Arabia. Mainly as a result of their proximity to the richest pearl banks of the Gulf, these young tribal settlements experienced more sustained population growth than their Iranian counterparts in the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century Bushehr had 15,000 to 18,000 inhabitants, Lingeh 8,000 to 10,000, and Bandar Abbas 5,000 to 8,000 while Basra and Muscat had approximately 40,000 and 8,000, respectively.46 On the Arab side the population of Kuwait reached 35,000 and that of Manama and Muharraq 25,000 and 20,000 respectively. The most spectacular development in relative terms was that of Dubai, whose population increased from 800 in 1833 to approximately 10,000 in 1904. Population figures on both sides of the Gulf are approximate as they are not based on census records and are subject to considerable variation following the seasonal cycle of trade and pearl production. Yet they reveal that the young ports of the Arab coast, including Manama, expanded as colonies of settlement as a result of the pearl boom and the consolidation of free port economies. Manama and Dubai in particular developed as cosmopolitan port towns, in contrast with Kuwait, which had a large tribal population.47 The ports on the Iranian side, and Bushehr in particular, remained primarily commercial hubs with a merchant, shop- keeper, and coolie population that serviced their harbors. This role was also enhanced by their position as redistribution centers that served the hinterlands. In the mid-nineteenth century Bushehr had large warehouses and caravanserais while the retail bazaar was relatively small. After the 1880s the volume of trade passing through the port as the main import center for 34 M Nelida Fuccaro southern Iran was larger than that of any Arab ports. In spite of this trade boom, many urban and rural Bushehris left the town and its hinterland for the Arab ports in search of new economic opportunities.48 As colonies of settlement and entrepôt centers Gulf coastal towns developed as maritime trade emporia. Given their sociopolitical and economic structure and imperial relationships they can be discussed following two urban models that have been very influential in the study of Asian and African ports: city-states and native towns.

City-States Although not all Gulf ports were city-states, they shared a history of self- government under the shadow of different imperial administrations. The ports of the Arab coast were the seat of independent principalities whose tribal rulers were vassals of the Government of India. As tributaries of a European seaborne empire they were not dissimilar from Hormuz, Calicut, Aden, and Melaka (Malacca) under Portuguese rule in the seventeenth century.49 The authority of the Al Sabah in Kuwait and Al Bu Falasah in Dubai did not extend much beyond the precincts of the towns they controlled. The absence of productive hinterlands along the Arab coast was a key factor in their development as free ports given the necessity of maximizing profit from maritime activities. In this respect they resembled the Swahili city- states of the East African littoral in the early modern period.50 Iranian ports were located on the far-away littoral of a loosely organized land-based imperial system that centered on Qajar provincial courts dependent on Tehran. This was also the case of Basra under Ottoman control. The case of Gujarati ports, and of Surat in particular, under nominal Mughal rule comes to mind as a fitting historical parallel.51 Ottoman Basra and Qajar coastal towns shared a semiautonomous tradition of government dating back to the eighteenth century. Yet, even before Qajar centralization, the rulers of the Iranian coast routinely faced the military, fiscal, and political encroachment of inland centers such as Shiraz, Lar, and Kirman. Often they were forced to seek accommodation with their officials in order to preserve their autonomous status. The argument by Vissar that in the early twentieth century Basra could have followed the model of Kuwait as the center of a pro-British ministate is further testimony to the independent mercantile tradition of these port settlements.52 Turning to aspects of urban organization, evidence from some Arab ports suggests that they developed as segmentary systems in the same way as the majority of premodern city-states living off the sea. Interesting parallels can be drawn between Manama in the age of the pearl boom and Madras before the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Both were open towns with limited central Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 35 authority and evolved out of a patchwork of immigrant and rural communities. Such a diverse population came together as a town under the umbrella of diverse political traditions and commercial institutions: in Manama the harbor and the customs house (gumruk) were controlled by the Al Khalifah, and in Madras trade practices were introduced by the East India Company. In both cases urban political and economic infrastructure relied on a contract between powerful brokers: in Manama between Hindu and Persian merchants who acted as British native agents and the ruler of Bahrain, and in Madras between the representatives of the East Indian Company and local Telegu notables.53 Legal pluralism was another key feature of port towns. Before the nineteenth century the imposition of port treaty systems under different forms of extraterritoriality was a trademark of European commercial penetration in Asia. In the age of empire the enforcement of what Lauren Benton has called “colonial legal regimes” was part of the process of integration of colonial possessions into imperial metropoles.54 Extraterritorial legal systems had been in force across the Indian Ocean rim since the arrival of the Portuguese. After the 1860s the application of Indian Law progressively placed ports in the common legal arena of empire, from Rangoon to Zanzibar and Aden.55 The enforcement of capitulary rights upon foreign residents in the Gulf ports was limited partly because few foreigners lived there, especially if compared to major Indian Ocean ports. With the notable exception of Bahrain at the turn of the twentieth century, British extraterritorial jurisdiction was in fact imposed only on British-protected subjects who served the interest of European trade. After the 1860s the main concern of the Qajar government in the ports of the Iranian littoral was to appoint special agents (kargozars) who monitored the activities of foreign (that is, mostly British-protected) merchants and arbitrated commercial disputes involving Iranians.56An understanding of how different legal regimes (Islamic, British Indian, and tribal law) regulated the life of port towns is crucial to disclose how different sources of power and authority affected relations between urban groups and local and imperial administrations.

Native Towns While the paradigm of city-state provides analytical tools to explore coastal towns as open urban systems with a tradition of political autonomy, that of native town highlights the indigenous (as opposed to colonial) nature of their development.57 In fact, nineteenth-century Gulf coastal societies cannot be read through European expansion, that is, through the prism of what Broeze has termed the “blindly homogenizing, Eurocentric and often profoundly racist concept of ‘Asia’.”58 The indigenous context had a paramount 36 M Nelida Fuccaro influence on urbanization, particularly the combination of imperial/local politics and trade with the migrations of tribes, merchant families, and laborers across the Gulf waters. Politically, this process was rooted in eighteenth- century developments: the tribalization of the Gulf coast, military conflict, and the waning power of European joint-stock trading companies. In this period the rise of new regional powers such as the Omani Empire and the Qawasim in the eastern Gulf paralleled the consolidation of al-Utub Bedouin groups from Central Arabia to the west, and particularly the Al Khalifah and the Al Sabah families, which established the new commercial outposts of Kuwait (1760s) and Muharraq (1809).59 The resurgence of tribal power also affected southern Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula where tribes were able to take advantage of the multiple threats faced by the Ottoman Empire: the establishment of local rule by Georgian Mamluks in Basra and Baghdad and the emergence of the first Sa‘udi state in Central Arabia between 1744 and 1818. The influx of Arab tribes from Central Arabia to the Gulf shores also affected Khuzistan, whose main port Muhammara came under the control of the Banu Ka‘b.60 In the nineteenth century the destiny of Gulf towns was ultimately shaped by regional and tribal rivalries rather than by colonial wars. The history of Bandar Abbas is a case in point. In the mid-eighteenth century this Iranian port developed as the largest cross-continental trade emporium in the Gulf as a result of the presence of the English and Dutch East India Companies. Its local rulers entered a fierce economic and political competition with neighboring ports such as Lingeh and Ras al-Khaimah and with inland centers such as Lar. In the 1790s Bandar Abbas was leased to the Al Bu Sa‘id family of Muscat and was governed as part of the Omani empire until 1868 when it reverted to Qajar rule.61 The comparison with the maritime city-states of the Swahili coast could not be starker. The last independent settlement of Witu (in today’s Kenya) was destroyed by the British in October 1890 soon after the establishment of the East Africa protectorate. According to Middleton and Horton this inauspicious event sanctioned the end of “an independent and indigenous Swahili identity” and effectively completed the establishment of colonial authority over the Swahili coastal strip.62 Demography also offers an indication of the peripheral position of the Gulf in relation to the multitude of European colonies and protectorates that dotted the globe in the nineteenth century. Very few Europeans resided in Gulf ports. With the largest concentration of foreign firms and political establishments, Basra and Bushehr had less than a hundred European settlers combined by 1914. At the turn of the twentieth century only the British Political Agent and a small number of American missionaries lived in Kuwait. By 1929 only 11 Westerners resided there on a Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 37 permanent basis.63 The ethnic and religious background of merchants tells a similar story of regional and Indian Ocean (as opposed to European) connections: Iranian and Indian on the Arab coast and Arab, Indian, Jewish, and Armenian on the Iranian side, the last two belonging to Iran’s historical communities. Given the connections with British India it was the degree of “Indianization” of Gulf ports that defined their credentials as native towns. As noted above, large swathes of the western Indian Ocean coast turned into British imperial outposts as a result of the import of British and Indian personnel, institutions, and architectural styles. Lord Northbrook famously described Aden in 1875 as “practically an Indian town.” In contrast, some 25 years later Lord Curzon, visiting a number of Gulf ports, noted their diverse human and architectural landscapes where the influences of Arabia, Iran, India, and Africa blended.64 Only Basra was effectively transformed (albeit briefly) into a station of British India after the military occupation of Mesopotamia in 1914. The establishment of a colonial style administration, the enforcement of Indian legal codes, and the recruitment of Indian civil servants and police forces transformed Basra into the first (and only) colonial port city of the region.65

Political Economy The distribution of key resources and its influence on political/social actors and institutions is central to understanding patterns of both urban organization and growth. Rulers and merchants, undoubtedly the main indigenous protagonists in the regional economy before oil, are rarely investigated as urban elites in spite of the obvious fact that their relationship molded the political economy of port towns. This relationship is better studied on the Arab side, suggesting patterns of accommodation rather than conflict. In fact, the survival of the ruling elites of the free ports depended upon their ability to attract and retain merchants and merchant capital.66 The situation appears to have been more fluid in those ports whose governors were forced to maintain a delicate balance of power with inland imperial administrations. Little is known about the relationship between merchants and local governors along the Iranian coast before the reimposition of Qajar rule in the late nineteenth century. The extent to which the encroachment of a distant imperial government affected this relationship is yet to be investigated but seems to be crucial to understand the dynamics of urban sociopolitical stratification and growth, and the links between coastal centers and their hinterlands. In towns such as Basra and Muhammara that had sizeable agricultural hinterlands and whose economy was less dependent on seaborne trade, merchants had opportunities to diversify their portfolios as 38 M Nelida Fuccaro rural landlords, tax-farmers, or collectors of tribute in the countryside. As such it can be assumed that they were less dependent on urban rulers. A portion of the merchant class of Basra, for instance, benefited a great deal from the competition between Ottoman governors, tribes, and British traders for the control of the agricultural hinterland of the town, particularly after the application of the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman commercial convention.67 To be sure, the study of the urban political economy of the Gulf coast requires a far more nuanced understanding of merchants, commercial institutions, and capital accumulation and investment than we have at present. The role of merchants should be studied more systematically in the context of both regional and international trade, especially in light of the diversification of their profiles and portfolios in the nineteenth century. To date there are for instance no comprehensive studies on Indian or India-based merchants as financiers of trade and connec- tors between the Gulf and the metropolitan economy of Bombay. The vast literature on Indian Ocean merchants can be a useful starting point, particularly the main distinction outlined by Das Gupta for Surat: ship- pers, merchants, brokers (dallals in Arabic), and sarrafs (money lenders and exchangers).68 A focus on brokers and institutions of brokerage seems particularly appropriate given the importance of mediation in the segmented urban societies of premodern port cities. Das Gupta, Pearson, and others have shown how brokers constituted the core of the commercial system that linked the coast to the Indian interior in the medieval and early modern periods.69 We can assume that Gulf dallals working as agents of foreign merchants and local entrepreneurs were equally important in providing connections with hinterlands and forelands. Crucially for urban historians, these dallals regulated the entry and marketing of commodities in the town and often controlled markets and regulated prices in conjunction with Islamic judges. Evidence from late nineteenth-century Manama suggests that this type of dalalah was instrumental in the rise of a powerful cohort of Shi‘i merchants as urban notables and landowners.70 The acquisition of urban property seems to have been an important factor that allowed Gulf merchants to increase their political and social influence in town and to consolidate their profile as urban developers. In young Asian and African trading towns with mobile populations it was often ownership of real estate that crystallized the position of traders as urban elites. Miran has sketched these developments for nineteenth-century Massawa, emphasizing the influence of Arab entrepreneurs who had recently migrated to the African coast of the Red Sea.71 In the Gulf we have evidence only for Manama and Kuwait at the climax of the pearl boom. In both towns the acquisition of land seems to have been a key factor in the rise to political Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 39 prominence of Arab and Persian merchants involved in shipping, transit trade, and pearling. By building and renting houses in the inner city these merchants were able to acquire large networks of clients while promoting urban growth.72 Work in progress on Oman in the second half of the nineteenth century is investigating how the land market was used by Arab entrepreneurs to finance business ventures in Zanzibar. Although it has no specific urban focus, this approach offers an example of the relevance of real estate to understand coastal societies.73

Conclusion After a preliminary discussion of some of the biases that transpire from the historiography and academic debates on the Gulf region, this chapter has put forward a number of suggestions for a research agenda on Gulf ports in the age of the Pax Britannica and on the eve of the discovery of oil. On the one hand, it has argued that a new historiography of empire, margins, and littoral societies combined with an Indian Ocean perspective is essential to any understanding of Gulf settlements as the urban nodes of a regional and transcontinental port system. On the other, building on examples provided by comparable trade emporia in Asia and Africa, this chapter has emphasized the importance of studying ports as towns using as analytical tools the urban models of the city-state and native town. The underlying argument is that given the little direct influence of British colonial penetration in processes of urban expansion Gulf settlements should be approached primarily as indigenous urban systems. The historiography of the port city in the Indian Ocean and more generally in Asia and Africa offers a blueprint for the study of different political, social, and spatial orders inside port towns and across the region. The making of these urban orders is an expression of key power relations and institutions that sustained the process of city making: the association between merchants and urban rulers, the development of private property, trajectories of capital accumulation, and the enforcement of taxation and legislation that regulated trade, communal relations, and the urban political sphere. It is an understanding of these relations and institutions that ultimately will allow scholars to draw a composite picture of urban life as it unfolded in the age of empire. Yet in order to follow this line of inquiry we need to investigate urban processes at a micro level and make these processes relevant to the regional and cross-regional contexts. In this respect, this particular research agenda advocates the production of new ethnographies of urban space and life that require a diligent (and often thankless) mining of local and imperial sources. This undertaking is not easy task but it is hoped that it will not remain wishful thinking in the years to come. 40 M Nelida Fuccaro

Notes

I wish to thank Lawrence Potter and Thomas Ricks for much appreciated comments and bibliographical suggestions, and the participants at the Gulf/2000 conference, “The Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports and History,” held at the American University of Sharjah from March 17 to 19, 2009, where this chapter was first presented as two separate papers. Their comments were extremely helpful in furthering my understanding of ongoing debates and tensions in Gulf historiography.

1. Nelida Fuccaro, “Visions of the City: Urban Studies on the Gulf,” Bulletin of the Middle East Studies Association of North America 35, no. 2 (2001): 175–87. 2. See, for instance, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Dubai: Behind an Urban Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2010); Christopher M. Davidson, Dubai: the Vulnerability of Success (London: Hurst, 2008); idem, Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond (London: Hurst, 2009); Ahmed Kanna, Dubai: the City as Corporation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011); special section on “Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East,” ed. Nelida Fuccaro, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East vol. 33, no. 1 (2013); Kaveh Ehsani, “Social Engineering and the Contradictions of Modernization in Khuzestan’s Company Towns: a Look at Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman,” International Review of Social History 48 (2003): 361–99. 3. For recent studies of Gulf ports in history see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: a Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2006); idem, The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh: the Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2010); Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Farah Al-Nakib, “Kuwait City: Urbanisation, the Built Environment, and the Urban Experience Before and After Oil (1716–1986)” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2011); J. E. Peterson, Historical Muscat: an Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (Leiden: Brill, 2006). For the history of trade and port towns in the medieval Gulf, see Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), Chapter 3. 4. This is one of the premises that underpin my study of Manama. (Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 8–13.) 5. Lawrence G. Potter, “Introduction,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 12; Nazih M. N. Ayyubi, Over-Stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: IB Tauris, 1995), 133. 6. As an exception see Potter, The Persian Gulf in History. 7. I borrow this expression from Thomas M. Ricks in “Bandar Abbas and the Gulf Ports, 1750 to 1920: Perspectives on Littoral Cultures, Transoceanic Migrations and Diaspora Communities,” p. 10, paper presented at the conference “The Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports and History.” 8. Gholam R. Vatandoust, “The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: a Critical Survey of the 19th and 20th century Persian Sources,” this volume. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 2–4. Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 41

9. Literature on the Indian Ocean is vast. See as seminal contributions Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Michael N. Pearson, The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of the People and the Sea (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For a cogent review of oceanic history see Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 8–9 and Kären Wigen, “AHR Forum: Oceans of History,”American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 717–21. 10. As an example see M. Redha Bhacker, “The Cultural Unity of the Gulf and the Indian Ocean: A Longue Durée Historical Perspective,” in Potter, The Persian Gulf in History, 163–71. 11. Jonathan Miran, Red Sea Citizens: Cosmopolitan Society and Cultural Change in Massawa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 12. This point is cogently made by Miran for Massawa in Red Sea Citizens, 9–14. For a discussion of definitions of borders and borderlands see Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 213–16. 13. Kenneth R. Hall, “Introduction,” in Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in the Indian Ocean Realm, c. 1400–1800, ed. Kenneth R. Hall (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008), 1–7. 14. For a review of the notion of littoral in the Indian Ocean context see Michael N. Pearson, “Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast,” The Great Circle 7 (1985): 1–8 and idem, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 38–44. 15. Abdul Sheriff, “The Persian Gulf and the Swahili Coast: a History of Acculturation over the Longue Durée,” esp. 179–82 in Potter, The Persian Gulf in History. On conurbation see Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: the Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 123–27 and 136–37. For the application of this concept to Massawa see Miran, Red Sea Citizens, particularly 112–65. 16. For a recent study of some of these hinterlands see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland–Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka‘b and Bandar Abbas (Washington: Mage Publishers, 2011). 17. As a marker of regional identity the notion of khaliji is discussed in Potter, “Introduction,” in The Persian Gulf in History, 2. 18. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 8–13, quotes from p. 9. 19. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 1–2 and 32–45. 20. The native agency system in the Gulf has been analyzed by James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), see particularly 63, Table 7, “British India’s Native Agency System in South West Asia.” 42 M Nelida Fuccaro

21. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Port of Siraf: Historical Memory and Iran’s Role in the Persian Gulf,” Proceedings of the International Congress of Siraf Port, Nov. 14–16, 2005 (Bushehr, Iran: Bushehr Branch of Iranology Foundation, 2005), 28–49. 22. The pioneering work by Rhoads Murphey and Dilip Basu in particular is key to an understanding of the development of port cities in the colonial context, that is, as gateways to European influence and as lynchpins of regional integration into the world system in the nineteenth century. Rhoads Murphey, “Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing Urban Roles in Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 29 (1969): 67–84; idem, Shanghai: The Key to Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); Dilip K. Basu, The Rise and Growth of the Colonial Port Cities in Asia (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985). More recent literature on the colonial port city in South Asia includes Indu Banga, ed., Ports and Their Hinterlands in India (1700–1950) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992). 23. Xavier de Planhol, “Bushehr i. The City” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 4 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1990), 570. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 73–75. 24. Lewis Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 34 (1864): 252; F. Broeze, “Kuwait before Oil: The Dynamics and Morphology of an Arab Port City,” in Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–20th Centuries, ed. F. Broeze (London: Kegan Paul, 1997), 150. 25. Miran, Red Sea Citizens, 90–93; Jay Spaulding, “Suakin: A Port City in Early Modern Sudan,” in Hall, Secondary Cities and Urban Networking, 47. An excellent study on the Suez Canal and Port Suez as lynchpins of global mobility is Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 26. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 58–60. It is interesting to note that Massawa’s pearl industry in the Dahlak archipelago remained in the hands of local entrepreneurs in the period of the Italian occupation after an attempt on the part of the colonial authorities to monopolize it (Miran, Red Sea Citizens, 106–10). 27. For this approach see Bose, A Hundred Horizons and Christopher A. Bayly and Leila Tarazi Fawaz, ed., Modernity and Culture: from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). See Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, 101–28 for a review of the applicability of world-systems theory to the study of East African ports in the early modern period. 28. That Bushehr played a very visible role as “hostage” in British/Qajar relations is suggested by the attention devoted to imperialist maneuverings in the town by Marx and Engels. (See Sayyid Ghasem Yahosseini, Marx va Ingils va Hujum-i artish-i Britania bih Bushihr va junub-i Iran [Marx and Engels and the Invasion of Bushehr and Southern Iran by the British Army] (Tehran: Intisharat-i Dirin, 1386/2007). 29. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 128 and 132–41. Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 43

30. “al-Basra” in The Encyclopædia of Islam, 2nd edition, www.brillonline.nl; Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 96–113 and 139–57. 31. Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, 68 and 113–14. On the establishment of free ports in the eighteenth century, see 25–28. 32. Thomas M. Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” in The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William G. Clarence-Smith (London: Cass, 1989), 63. 33. Frank Broeze ed., Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1989) and idem, Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–20th Centuries (London: Kegan Paul, 1997). See also endnote no. 22. 34. Peter Reeves, Frank Broeze and Kenneth McPherson, “Studying the Asian Port City,” in Broeze, Brides of the Sea, 29–30; Atiya H. Kidwai, “Conceptual and Methodological Issues: Ports, Port Cities and Port Hinterlands,” in Banga, Ports and Their Hinterlands in India, 10–12, 25–26. 35. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1995). 36. On barasti urbanization in Manama see Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 9, 35–36. See also Sandra Piesik, Arish: Palm-Leaf Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). 37. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 73–111; Al-Nakib, “Kuwait City: Urbanisation, the Built Environment and the Urban Experience,” 74–166; Frank Broeze, “Kuwait before Oil: The Dynamics and Morphology of an Arab Port City,” in Broeze, Gateways of Asia, 160–78. For eighteenth-century Basra see Thabit Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 20–37. 38. See J. E. Peterson, “Muscat as a Port City,” chapter 6, this volume, and Fred Scholz, Muscat, Sultanat Oman: Geographische Skizze einer Einmaligen Arabischen Stadt (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 1990), 48–96. 39. Peterson, Historical Muscat. 40. These projects are promoted in Abu Dhabi by the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage and the National Centre for Documentation and Research and in al-‘Ayn by the Zayed Centre for Heritage and History. An oral history project has also been set up at the American University of Kuwait. 41. Tobias Richter, Paul Wordsworth and Alan Walmsley, “Pearlfishers, Townsfolk, Bedouin and Shaykhs: Economic and Social Relations in Islamic Al-Zubarah,” in Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 41 (2011): 371–72. The “Origins of Doha” project coordinated by Dr. Robert Carter at University College London in Qatar is a notable exception and combines archaeology, history, and ethnography. See http://originsofdoha.wordpress.com/ 44 M Nelida Fuccaro

42. The use of records from the Islamic courts for early modern and modern Middle Eastern cities is discussed in Peter Sluglett, ed., The Urban Social History of the Middle East, 1750–1950 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 25–28. 43. See G. R. Vatandoust, “The Historiography of the Persian Gulf,” chapter 3, this volume. For a list of documents archived at the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1847–1921) and in the National Archives of Iran (1881–1989), see Tables 3.1 and 3.2. 44. See as major published collections of documents Arab Gulf Cities, 4 vols., ed. Richard Trench (Slough: Archive Editions, 1996); Historic Maps of Bahrain, 1817–1970, 3 vols., ed. Robert L. Jarman (Slough: Archive Editions, 1996). 45. Good examples of this are the accounts of British officials published by the Royal Geographical Society between 1863 and 1900. See articles on Persian Gulf ports by Pelly, Colvill and Stiffe in Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London vols. 8 and 11 and in The Geographical Journal vols 6, 7, 8, 10, and 16. 46. Reidar Visser, Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (Münster: Lit, 2005), 14–15; articles “Maskat” and “Linga” in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (www.brillonline.nl); “Bandar-e ‘Abbas(i)” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1989), 686–87; George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans Green & Co., 1892), 231, 338, 409, and 425. 47. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 54–55. 48. “Bushehr” in Encyclopædia Iranica, 571. On migrations to Bahrain in the nineteenth century see Nelida Fuccaro, “Mapping the Transnational Community: Persians and the Space of the City in Bahrain, c.1869–1937,” in Transnational Connections in the Arab Gulf, ed. Madawi al-Rasheed (London: Routledge, 2005), 39–58. 49. Michael N. Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders: The Swahili Coast, India, and Portugal in the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 66. 50. On Swahili ports see Michael N. Pearson, “The East African Coast in 1498: a Synchronic Study” in The World of the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, Studies in Economic, Social and Cultural History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 116–30. 51. For Surat see the classic by Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1994) and Shireen Mosvi, “The Gujarat Ports and Their Hinterland: The Economic Relationship,” in Banga, Ports and Their Hinterlands in India, 121–29. 52. That Basra could have evolved in the early 20th century like Kuwait as the center of a pro-British mini-mercantile state is testimony to its strong independent civic and political tradition as a port city. See Vissar, Basra, the Failed Gulf State. 53. On Manama see Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 73–111; on Madras see Robert E. Frykenberg, “The Morphology of Madras as a City-State,” in Basu, The Rise and Growth of Colonial Port Cities in Asia, 111–14. 54. Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Culture: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 55. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 17–32. For an original discussion of the role played by lawyers in the expansion and consolidation of the British imperial legal project across the Indian Ocean and in Bahrain in particular see Fahad Bishara, Rethinking the History of Port Cities in the Gulf M 45

“The Arabian Frontiers of British Indian Law: Empire and the Legal Imaginary in the Writings of Salem Al-’Arayyedh,” paper presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, San Diego, CA, November 18–21, 2010. 56. Husain M. Al Baharna, British Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction in the Gulf, 1913– 1971 (Slough: Archive Editions, 1998), 10–12, 19–20; Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf,” 133. 57. For a discussion of Gulf ports as native towns see Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 44–47. 58. Broeze, Gateways of Asia, 6–9, quote from p. 8. 59. On the Utbi states see Ahmad M. Abu-Hakima, History of Eastern Arabia, 1750– 1800: The Rise and Development of Bahrain, Kuwait and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia (Beirut: Khayats, 1965), 45–90; 165–80. 60. Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, 28–61, 197–201. See also Willem Floor, “The Rise and Fall of the Banu Ka‘b: A Borderer State in Southern Khuzestan,” Iran 44 (2006): 277–315. 61. For an account of Bandar Abbas as a native port see Ricks, “Bandar Abbas and the Gulf Ports, 1750 to 1920,” 11–21. 62. Horton and Middleton, The Swahili, 205–208, quote from p. 205–08. 63. Violet Dickson, Forty Years in Kuwait (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), p. 89. 64. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 29. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 397–468. 65. Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 89–101 and Visser, Basra, the Failed Gulf State, 59–61. The study of Basra as an emerging colonial city in this period can shed light on the transformation of Gulf native towns in the twentieth century while drawing interesting parallels with other ports of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. 66. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 55–60. Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), particularly 36–61, 112–18. 67. Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade, 141–44. 68. Michael N. Pearson, “Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities: their Role in Servicing Foreign Merchants,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 457. On Indian merchants in the Indian Ocean see Claude Markovitz, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders from Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); idem, “Indian Merchant Networks outside India in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Preliminary Survey,” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 4 (1999): 883–911; William G. Clarence-Smith, “Indian Business Communities in the Western Indian Ocean in the Nineteenth Century,” Indian Ocean Review 2, no. 4 (1989): 18–21. 69. Pearson, “Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities,” 455–72; Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 84–85. 70. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 88–90. For the institution of brokerage in Massawa see Miran, Red Sea Citizens, 114–17. 71. Miran, Red Sea Citizens, 148–49. 72. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State, 89–90, 99–104; Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ’Oman and Central Arabia, 2 vols. ed. J. G. Lorimer (Calcutta: Superintendent 46 M Nelida Fuccaro

Government Printing, 1908; republished by Gregg International, Farnborough, 1970), vol. 2, 1058. 73. Thomas McDow, “Paths of Lease Resistance: Controlling Property across the Indian Ocean, Renegotiating Law, Custom, and Lineage in Oman, 1861–1920,” paper presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, San Diego, CA, November 18–21, 2010. CHAPTER 2

Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf

Fahad Ahmad Bishara

n June 1953 Abdulwahhab Muhammad, a Kuwaiti student on scholarship in Cairo, published an article in the Kuwaiti journal Al-Be‘tha in Iwhich he outlined the history of Anglo-Kuwaiti relations prior to the reign of Shaikh Mubarak al-Sabah. Muhammad placed the subject within the broader context of British interests in India and their relations with the Ottomans. He affirmed Mubarak’s pro-British stance, which he attributed to his general dissatisfaction with the Ottomans, and noted Britain’s initial reluctance to establish a protectorate over Kuwait. Muhammad made a number of minor related points in the article, including a comment calling into question the efficacy of Ibn Sa‘ud’s blockade of Kuwait and a note on Yousef al-Ibrahim’s failed attempt to dislodge Mubarak, which he said enjoyed Persian support.1 Muhammad’s article caused an immediate uproar among Kuwaiti historians, prompting rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, comments, and more. His critics, the most vocal of whom were Saif al-Shamlan and Khaled Muhammad al-Faraj, took issue with a number of points in the article, including his assessment of Mubarak’s pro-British stance and his assertions on Ibn Sa‘ud’s blockade and Al-Ibrahim’s failed coup. The critiques all boiled down to two related points: Muhammad’s overreliance on British sources and his ignorance of local histories of the region. In his first criticism of Muhammad’s article, Al-Faraj wrote that he found errors “which indicate that the writer derived [his analysis] from British sources not acquainted [ghayr mulimma] with the history of Kuwait,” adding that most Kuwaitis would not be 48 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara susceptible to such errors.2 To this, Muhammad replied that he had to use British sources because there were no other sources for the history of Kuwait and that Abdul-Aziz al-Reshaid’s famous history of Kuwait, which Al-Faraj referred to in his critique, “examines these events from a narrow local perspective, overlooking the currents in international relations” in which they took place.3 Replying to Muhammad’s rebuttal, Al-Faraj said that the author committed an egregious scholarly error when he accepted the British viewpoint without scrutiny or thoroughness in examination (biduna naqd wa tamhidh). This was especially true in view of the fact that there existed “men in Kuwait versed in narrating the details of these important events . . . who [Muhammad] should have checked with and understood from at the outset,” adding that British sources could not be taken at face value.4 In their critiques and rebuttals, the authors were debating the finer points of what was (and to some degree still is) a contested moment in Kuwaiti history. Who Mubarak’s allegiances were to, why he signed an accord with the British, and the nature of the events surrounding that moment are questions that scholars have pondered for some time.5 The finer points of the issue, however, are to some degree irrelevant, for the debate between the authors points to much more fundamental questions in historical writing: what constitutes a legitimate source of historical truth? How does one put together a history using different, and often contradictory, accounts, and what are the potential pitfalls in this process? These are particularly acute questions for the history of the Gulf, where the paucity of local historical documents has made it necessary for the historian of the region to rely on foreign—mostly British, but also Dutch, Portuguese, and Ottoman—materials. Even the most cursory review of English-language histories of the Gulf region will indicate that these materials dominate the source base of this literature, leading one to believe that any history of the Gulf must out of necessity rely on these materials alone. However, as the scholars above indicated, there exists another cache of sources that could guide the historian of the Gulf toward what they deemed to be a more “true” history. These were not simple assertions: a review of the Arabic-language histories of the region illustrates that not only do local sources exist, but that one can write a history of the Gulf based primarily— or even entirely—on local sources, particularly oral ones. The discussion in this chapter reviews the Arabic-language histories of the region, primarily Kuwait, highlighting major trends in key works. I argue that the one common denominator in all of these works is their almost total reliance on oral informants as sources on the region’s history. What is just as clear, however, is that while these early historians were eager to use oral sources, they were not entirely comfortable doing so: they were keenly aware of the pitfalls of this sort of historical research and were struggling Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 49 with how to verify the often conflicting accounts of their informants. I explore how they derived information on history, how they grappled with and verified their sources, and how their research methodology impacted their view of historical events and processes. In short, this chapter examines how these historians crafted a broad history (tarikh) out of a series of narratives (riwayat). From these books, a particular view of history emerges in which the historical actor takes center stage, dictating historical processes, and eclipsing political and economic structures while forging organic linkages between the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the broader world. This view of history, I argue, emerges from the nature of the sources used by local historians and the latter’s distinctly local approach to historical research. In examining the Gulf historian’s craft, this discussion aims to provoke reflection on how historians have uncritically used these texts thus far, happily mining narratives of historical events with little concern as to how these narratives were produced, why they were produced, and what this might mean for how we make use of them. Two important caveats, however, are needed: first, not all of the Arabic literature on the history of the Gulf fits into the mold elaborated here. There is a growing corpus of historical writing, most of it fairly recent, that accords much more with the conventions of Western historical discipline. These rely on archival sources and secondary texts, follow the conventions of historical analysis, and organize their work into chapters comprehensible to the Western-trained scholar. The literature discussed here, however, either departs completely from this trend, following a logic of its own, or falls somewhere in between. Second, because of limitations of space, I have mainly limited myself to a discussion of Kuwaiti histories. The argument I make, however, is equally applicable to other parts of the Gulf—that it is in this literature that one sees a local tradition of historical writing that is both unique and dynamic. It continues a tradition of historical research and writing that extends back at least two centuries, while incorporating and react- ing to changing academic conventions and the emergence of a growing body of primary sources. Thus, what I review here comprises a coherent body of scholarship that illustrates the broader point but begs further exploration.6

Oral Sources and Scholarship in Gulf History Among the Arabic histories of the Gulf, one encounters a wide variety of works, ranging from the recognized canons of the field to more focused discussions of particular individuals or groups within a particular society, and the more complex safhat literature. To adequately treat the Arabic literature on Gulf history, one must take all of these works into account, as each 50 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara genre makes important contributions and signals important phenomena in its own right. A striking characteristic of all such Arabic-language histories, irrespec- tive of the genre, is the predominance of oral sources in their evidentiary bases. Indeed, save for a handful of exceptions this literature is dominated by oral sources. This in itself is perhaps unsurprising when considering the oral tradition that dominates storytelling in the Gulf region. In a largely illiterate pre-oil (and to some degree post-oil) society, written works would have enjoyed limited circulation. Far more common was the oral transmission of knowledge. This applies equally to history as it does to technical exper- tise, as in the case of maritime knowledge among nakhodas or commercial savvy among merchants. As Gulf societies moved more definitively toward textual expressions of knowledge, the oral culture’s legacy reflected itself in the texts. It is thus natural that oral sources would comprise the foundation of historical writing; information on historical events was not often stored in documents—although it was sometimes stored in books—but rather in memories and narratives preserved by those who witnessed the events or heard of them from their friends and relatives. The tendency to rely on oral narratives or eyewitnesses is nothing unique to the Gulf. Indeed, similar inclinations are clearly evident in early Islamic histories, many of which reflect the hadith practice of identifying the chain of transmission all the way back to eyewitnesses. Although the chains of transmission involved in early Islamic histories were, of course, much shorter, it still reflected a desire among the historians to infuse their work with a degree of legitimacy that only a direct link to the event itself could furnish, “because they were truly lived experiences of fully identified, flesh and blood individuals rather than the exploits of distant historical personalities.”7 While the differences between early Islamic historians and modern Gulf historians are obvious, the debate outlined at the beginning of this chapter suggests that Gulf historians viewed oral sources in very much the same light.8 This is not only reflected in their privileging of oral sources, but also in how they went to painstaking lengths to weigh different narratives of the same event against one another and corroborate them as best they could. Over time, those considered to have “lived” history pass away, and establishing contacts and conducting interviews becomes increasingly difficult, so historians gradually supplement their meager oral sources with documentary sources (i.e., books and other documents). As noted earlier, in one branch of the Arabic-language literature on Gulf history, the oral tradition has completely withered away and has been replaced with a more “profes- sionalized” Western style of historical writing—emanating mainly from Beirut, Baghdad, and Cairo—that valorizes archival research supplemented with secondary literature. Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 51

The oral research tradition, however, has yet to completely recede in the face of text-based history; indeed, one recently published monograph devotes itself entirely to the exploration of oral history methodologies in writing Kuwaiti history.9 Moreover, within the branch of histories of the region that fall squarely within the local tradition of historical writing, what one sees emerging over time is an increasing reliance on established history texts (the “canons” of the field) supplemented with further evidence from other secondary sources, but also a robust oral primary source base. In this sizeable pool of scholarship, the increasing availability of history texts and archival sources has done little to dislodge the central place that oral sources hold in telling the history of the Gulf.

The “Canons” of Gulf History Perhaps the most prominent and widely cited histories of the Gulf are the “canons” of the field—quasi-chronologies that discuss in minute detail the proceedings of rulers, diplomats, scholars, and other notables. These works generally shy away from region-wide narratives, preferring instead to detail the history of a particular area or community, although they often include references to relevant developments in other areas. I consider these works as canonical for a number of reasons. For one, having been written during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they are among the first works on the history of the region.10 Moreover, they are regularly cited by local and Western historians, attaining a degree of authority status that few other works enjoy. More importantly, these works set the standard for how both to under- take and present historical research based on largely oral sources, establishing models that later generations of local historians continued to follow. Perhaps the most recognizable Arabic work on the history of the region is Shaikh Uthman b. Bishr al-Basri’s nineteenth-century Unwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd (The Epitome/Symbol of Victory in the History of Najd), a detailed study of the history of the Arabian Peninsula that has only received attention by a handful of historians writing for English-speaking audiences.11 In his book, Ibn Bishr describes the rise and fall of the first and second Saudi- Wahhabi emirates, drawing in narratives on Egyptian intrigues in the area and the emergence of smaller Gulf emirates such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. Ibn Bishr’s ability to tie the histories of all of Najd’s neighbors into a narrative on the fortunes of the Saudis, as well as his detailed knowledge of the relationships between the Al Saud and the myriad tribal leaders, military commanders, petty rulers, amirs, and sultans of the region render his work canonical in the Arabic literature on the history of the region. Historians of almost any country, community, or subject in the region have made use of it to either frame their own narratives or mine it for information. 52 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Another canonical text is Kuwaiti historian Abdul-Aziz Al-Reshaid’s Tarikh al-Kuwayt (The History of Kuwait), a political, economic, and intellectual history of Kuwait from its establishment until the time of publication in the early 1930s, that is regularly cited by all historians of the region.12 Al-Reshaid’s work encompasses a range of subjects, including the political and economic development of the emirate, the development of a literary movement in Kuwait during the early twentieth century, and Kuwait’s international relations. Although it is ostensibly on the history of Kuwait itself, it includes information on the activities of Kuwaitis in India, Iraq, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Moreover, Kuwaiti historians widely recognize it as the first history of the emirate, and consider it to be a foundational work—so much so that one prominent Kuwaiti historian wrote a 650-page biography of Al-Reshaid.13 Similar works exist for the history of other Gulf states and port cities, including Basra and Bahrain. Key among these is Shaikh Khalifa b. Muhammad al-Nabhani’s Al-Tuhfah al-Nabhaniyyah fi Tarikh al-Jazirah al- Arabiyyah (The Nabhani Masterwork in the History of the Arabian Peninsula), a three-volume history of Bahrain, Basra, and the Muntafiq tribal confederation from the rise of Islam until the book’s publication in the 1930s.14 Why Al-Nabhani chose the three areas he did is unclear,though he does tell his readers that he spent a great deal of time in Bahrain and southern Iraq and became well-acquainted with both the people and their history. His work presents a detailed political history in the vein of Ibn Bishr, in which political alliances and counteralliances, military encounters, and power struggles take center stage. While his history of Basra is clearly eclipsed by the writings of other Basrawi historians such as Shaikh Uthman b. Sanad al-Basri (whose work I have not had access to), his history of Bahrain is held in high esteem among local historians, many of whom refer to it in their studies.15 Save for a handful of references they make to previous histories of the Arabian Peninsula, the authors of these texts derive their information almost entirely from oral narratives supplied by knowledgeable members of the authors’ communities, most of whom either experienced the historical events firsthand or learned about them through relatives and friends. Ibn Bishr, for example, is frank when it comes to identifying his sources. Describing the arduous task of historical research, he tells his readers that he could not find a reliable source for historical events until he read a series of historical manuscripts written by one Muhammad b. Ali b. Salloum al- Fardhi al-Hanbali, although he lamented that the author did not verify his narrative and was prone to exaggeration. To evaluate these manuscripts and others that he located, Ibn Bishr writes that he weighed them against oral descriptions “of events and situations from the mouths of men who witnessed them.”16 Al-Nabhani is similarly perspicacious when it comes to his Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 53 history of Bahrain, in which he states that his research combined written histories of the region with oral narratives furnished by local merchants and notables (he specifically names Muhammad al-Khalifah and Abdullah b. Sa‘d al-Shamlan).17 Other canonical works are not nearly as explicit in revealing their sources. Al-Nabhani, for example, does not tell readers where his information on the histories of Basra and the Muntafiq comes from. We are thus left to assume that he combines textual and oral research in the same manner as he did for Bahrain. Al-Reshaid also never reveals where he gleans his knowledge of historical events from. It is only from the prominent Kuwaiti historian Saif al-Shamlan that we learn about Al-Reshaid’s sources; Al-Shamlan writes that he learned from a source close to Al-Reshaid that the historian derived almost all of his information from two men: Muhammad al-Khalid al-Khudhayr and Mullah Saleh b. Muhammad al-Mullah.18 In all of these works, the centrality of the oral source as the foundation for the historical narrative replicates itself in the organization of the text itself—in how historical narratives are framed and chapters are structured. In almost all of the texts historical narratives are organized around rulers and other personalities, each of whom (usually) gets his own chapter. While this gives the initial impression that these works are nothing but biographies of the rulers, nothing could be farther from the truth. A closer look at these works reveals that within the chapters on particular personalities one finds lengthy accounts of noteworthy events that took place within that ruler’s reign. Ibn Bishr’s history of Najd, for example, is organized into two broad parts: one that frames the narrative around the rise and death of Muhammad b. Abdulwahhab, and the other around the rise of Faisal b. Turki. Within these, however, one gets a comprehensive political, social, and economic history of Najd, complete with references to famous battles, market shifts, and the like. In his treatment of the political history of Kuwait (which takes up the majority of his multifaceted work), Al-Reshaid also displays the organizational logic one sees in Ibn Bishr’s histories. While his discussion is organized around different rulers of Kuwait, within his chapters on each one finds descriptions of major events in the emirate’s history: famous battles, the arrival and departure of certain families, the laying of the first telegraph cable, and much more. This organizational logic is readily apparent in other canonical works. What is clear is that in all of these texts the rulers are not the subjects of the narratives themselves, but rather devices around which the authors organize their histories. The rulers supply a chronological underpinning for the histories—a timeline along which the historians can plot events, processes, and other personalities so that their readers can more easily follow them. 54 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara

Where this organizational logic comes from is unclear: while it seems likely that there would be Islamic historiographical influences that inform these works, far more research would need to be done to confirm this. Another possibility is that the organization replicates the structure of an oral transmission of history in which personalities that the listener can easily identify form the backbone, offering clear markers for the narration of historical events and processes.

Pages and Snapshots of the History of the Gulf: The Safhat Literature Occupying a halfway house between the canons and the more recent second-generation histories of the Gulf (discussed below) the “safhat” (literally, “pages”) literature comprises a particularly intriguing subgenre. This vari- ant of historical writing follows no strict organizational logic— that is, one will rarely find an introduction, a chronologically ordered set of chapters, and a conclusion. Rather, as the name suggests, the chapters are organized around particular incidents, the only unifying element in the book being the community within which these events or incidents take place. The non- linear nature of these histories, however, does not detract from their appeal. Despite the scattered nature of their narratives, a number of these histories have achieved canon-like status among local historians. A good example of this genre is the often-cited Safhat min Tarikh al- Kuwayt (Pages from the History of Kuwait), a grab bag discussion of events, personalities, and urban legends in Kuwaiti history, written by the renowned historian and former qadi Yousef b. Isa al-Qina‘i in the early twentieth century.19 While all of the events Al-Qina‘i treats in his work took place in pre-oil Kuwait, it is difficult to label the book a standard “history.” To be sure, he does detail historical events such as the migration of the Utub from Zubara to Kuwait, the election of the first amir, the numerous battles that dot the emirate’s history, and more. However, he sandwiches his history “section” (which he structures in the same manner as Ibn Bishr, organizing the narrative around the lives and times of Kuwait’s rulers) between discussions of famous merchants, descriptions of houses, and an analysis of changes in the Kuwaiti national dress. Thus, his book is at once far more and far less than a history, typical of the safhat literature. Another already-cited Kuwaiti text that falls into this subgenre is Saif al-Shamlan’s Min Tarikh al-Kuwayt (From the History of Kuwait), a work that covers a wide variety of aspects of Kuwaiti history: geographical features, distinguishing linguistic characteristics, reprints of historiographic debates, descriptions of major political and economic events, reprints of treaties and other documents, and general musings by the author all make their way into this text. Despite some similarities between his work and Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 55 other, more standard historical genres, Al-Shamlan is hesitant to compare himself to historians like Ibn Bishr, precisely because his work is comprised of a hodgepodge of topics. The author himself acknowledges this when he admits from the outset that he “titled the book Min Tarikh al-Kuwayt because it is not so comprehensive and complete that [he] could justifiably title it Tarikh al-Kuwayt [The History of Kuwait].”20 Al-Qina‘i and Al-Shamlan’s works are among the most popular titles in the safhat subgenre of locally written Gulf histories, but are certainly not the only ones. Nor is this subgenre limited to the time period in which those two works, both of which are at least three decades old, were penned. Since the publication of these works a number of safhat histories have been produced, including the popular and more recent Ya Zaman al-Khalij (O, Gulf’s Past) by the Bahraini historian Khaled al-Bassam.21 Al-Bassam’s book departs from the other safhat works in that it tells the history of the Gulf as a whole, as opposed to that of one country, but very closely follows the conventions of the subgenre. In it, he gives accounts of various events in the history of the Gulf, including a narrative of Carsten Niebuhr’s first visit to the region, the Sultan of Zanzibar’s trip to Europe, the opening of the first cinema in Bahrain, and much more. The author begins the book with the admission that he consciously decided to follow a particular style of writing. He writes that “[these histories] will not cover one subject or a specific history, but are distributed across the map of the Gulf in different stories and tales that illuminate the innocence of the people, the sorrows of humanity, the trickery of politics, the shots of battleships, the sights of travels and the first signs of progress.”22 While they rely on a variety of sources, the evidentiary base of the safhat histories of the Gulf seems to be primarily oral—which is no surprise when considering the local conventions of historical writing. Al-Qina‘i, for example, relies partly on the canons of the field in writing his history, but clearly privileges oral sources. He notes from the outset that his research is primarily based on what he saw and what the elders (aba’) told him.23 Al-Shamlan also seems to have relied on a mix of oral and written sources in writing his book, but gives primacy to oral sources. These, he says, “are the most important sources” and are “more useful and of greater utility” than written sources, for the people whom he interviewed—and he lists them all—“have valuable information on Kuwait and the events in its history.”24 Oral influences are also visible in the very structure of the safhat genre of historical writing. In all of the works, the impressionism built into the oral tradition of narrating is replicated in the texts themselves. The writers choose to illuminate different aspects of history—to narrate history through episodes—rather than weave a conventional narrative. The structure of the prose, the almost desultory chapter layout, and the topics themselves all 56 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara convey an approach to historical narration that is more anecdotal than causal, reflecting convention that is very different from what trained historians are accustomed to but is perhaps far more familiar to local audiences. This approach to history is not unique to the Gulf: safhat histories can be found in the historical literature of many parts of the Arab world, including Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere—places with long-standing traditions of scholarship.25 This points to a much broader historiographic phenomenon that begs further analysis; safhat histories await their dedicated analyst.

Second-Generation Histories of the Gulf What I label the “second-generation” histories of the region are organized along more conventional lines and are written by scholars who rely heavily on the canons of the field but who supplement them with additional data from oral sources and the written works of their peers. It is this genre of historical writing that occupies most of the shelf space in Gulf bookstores. While Western-trained historians are more likely to identify it as historical literature of the more conventional sort, it still belongs squarely within the field of Gulf historiography that I outline here in that archival materials only make cameo appearances among the cited sources. Generational considerations aside, the usage of secondary sources in these studies distinguishes this genre of historical writing from the first- generation histories, which were crafted almost exclusively from oral narratives. A brief glimpse at the bibliography of any of these works reveals a marked reliance (though not an overreliance) on relevant secondary works of both a specialized and general nature, as would be the case in any conventional history. However, in addition to their usage of secondary sources, the authors also rely heavily on the canonical works in Gulf history. Indeed, it is rare that one reads a modern work on the history of the Gulf without seeing full-length quotations from the works of Ibn Bishr, Al-Reshaid, Al-Nabhani, and others like them. This should come as no surprise when considering the prominence of these works in the historical tradition in the region but also the source bases of the canons, which render them closer to primary sources than secondary ones. It is thus natural that contemporary historians of the Gulf would rely on these works, contextualizing them with secondary sources. Despite their tendency to utilize secondary sources and draw from different canonical texts, second-generation Gulf historians have continued the established tradition of prioritizing oral sources in their accounts. Even the most cursory review of these books reveals an inclination to rely on interviews with research subjects. This is especially true of the recent history of Kuwait’s maritime economy written by the leading historian of the country, Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 57

Yacoub al-Hijji. In his masterful overview, Al-Hijji relies on a hodgepodge of sources ranging from British archival material, local histories, safhat literature, and even images.26 None of these, however, rival Al-Hijji’s most privileged source base: interviews with local nakhodas and merchants conducted over the course of several years. These comprise well over two-thirds of all references cited by the historian, whose book rivals even the most astute analyses of Gulf history in its breadth and attention to detail. Al-Hijji’s two monographs on the history of the nakhodas of Kuwait (the second of which is an extended version of the first) also exhibit an almost-exclusive reliance on interview materials, a trend that he readily admits. Even before his introduction to the first book Al-Hijji extends “thanks to the foundational sources for this book, the nakhodas and mariners of Kuwait, without whom the writing of this book would have been impossible.”27 He repeats the acknowledgment in his introduction, in which he details his meetings with various nakhodas, describing how each interview subject introduced him to another so that he could collect the material necessary for his book.28 This, of course, is no less true for his work on the history of dhow-building in Kuwait.29 The phenomenon of privileging oral sources in telling the history of the Gulf is hardly limited to Al-Hijji’s work. Examples abound of similar approaches in the modern Arabic literature on Gulf history, particularly when they feature prominent personalities or families.30 That oral sources are privileged when locals write the histories of their own families or tribes is perhaps self-evident, and there are enough examples of these works to fill an entire library.31 However, even when the historian is not a member of the family, oral sources, most of which are culled from the cultivation of close personal relationships with members of those families, eclipse all others. In his history of the Al-Othman merchant family, for example, Abdulmohsen al-Khorafi describes how he spent a great deal of time in the family’s diwaniyya (a building meant to house family gatherings both formal and informal) acquainting himself with members of the family, their relatives, and their friends.32 In all of these works, oral sources predominate, with interviews and personal reflections by the authors comprising the majority of the research.

A Note on Memoirs and Biographies Memoirs written by notable members of Gulf societies are perhaps less common than family histories, but are of equal or greater importance to the historian. This genre includes memoirs by famous diplomats, prominent merchants, businessmen, and travelers—all of which, perhaps unsur- prisingly, are based on oral sources and personal memories. One Kuwaiti 58 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara historian, Jassim al-Salamah, goes so far as to assert that these memoirs are part and parcel of an oral source base, and are in many ways far more complete, detailed and textured than any written document could ever be.33 His conflation of the two types of sources—that is, orally transmitted narratives and personal memoirs—is, of course, problematic in that it overlooks the fixity of the memoir as opposed to the oral source and the question of intended audience. It does, however, reflect a much broader imaginary in which these memoirs, being the testimonies of notables, comprise “histories” in and of themselves. Save for travel writings, the authors of the memoirs hardly ever present them as being narratives of personal experiences. These works are given titles that signal a much broader significance or subject matter. In this vein, it is not uncommon for the memoir of a pearl merchant to bear a title that would indicate that the subject was the history of the broader pearling industry, a phenomenon which signals a general reluctance to decouple “narrative” and “history.” The content, however, is hardly ever limited to the author’s own experiences. Rather, the authors of these works often discuss various aspects of their subject matter using evidence that is almost entirely anecdotal. This phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated in the Kuwaiti pearl merchant (and also prominent historian) Saif al-Shamlan’s two-volume memoir (perhaps predictably titled Tarikh al-Ghaws Ala al-lu’lu’ fi al-Kuwayt wal- Khalij al-Arabi [The History of Pearl Diving in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf ]), which discusses a wide range of subjects: the organization of the pearling fleet and profit-sharing arrangements, the various health hazards that pearl divers encounter when at sea, and the decline of the industry prompted by the Great Depression and the Japanese cultured pearl.34 Al-Shamlan’s discussion of these events, however, is entirely informed by his own experiences, and personal anecdotes frequently appear alongside narratives and analyses. The same is also true of Bahraini pearl merchant Rashid al-Zayyani’s memoir, which he gave the decidedly less grandiose title, Al-Ghaws Wal- Tawashah (literally, Pearl Diving and Trading). In that memoir, Al-Zayyani discusses the broader history of the Bahraini pearling industry, including its inception, the institutions that characterized it, and its decline, almost exclusively through the medium of personal anecdotes and interviews with those involved in the trade.35 While his work features a number of written documents issued by the Bahraini government, written by local merchants (among which he includes many fascinating contracts) or penned by the British Political Agent, these are only sometimes distilled for the historical information they contain; most of Al-Zayyani’s book is based on his own experiences, with anecdotes peppering the narrative from beginning to end. His autobiography, which he entitles Dhikrayat wa Tarikh (Memories and Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 59

History), further reflects the collapsing of the boundary between memoir and history.36

Articulating an Oral History Research Methodology What is striking about the authors here is that none of them had any training as historians. Their familiarity with other histories of the region is evident from their references to these works, but most of them had never before written anything that even approximated history. Although they are happy to dive headlong into the process of researching and writing history, they display a general discomfort with their methods, and are keenly aware of the pitfalls that they face in writing a history based on oral sources. In their writings, they go to great pains to establish the veracity of their informants, and in doing so they slowly—and very hesitatingly—articulate the foundations of a research methodology that combines different types of sources, but privileges oral ones. In discussing how he conducted his oral research, Ibn Bishr assures his reader that he did not take their narratives at face value, but checked them against those supplied by other oral sources. Thus, he asserts that “[he] did not write down but what [he] thought to be the truth, from trusted narratives (riwayat) that prevail over guesswork (ghalabu ala al-dhann).” His goal, he says, was to put together enough information for a book worth writing.37 Al-Reshaid identifies similar issues in historical research, noting that while most of his informants agreed on the general outlines of Kuwait’s history, they disagreed on the details of events—which, he recognizes, is natural, as “an event can have many faces.” To tackle this problem, he writes, he would rely on a narrative supplied by one person if it was plausible and was not contradicted by others; otherwise, he would relay all of the narratives supplied to him and choose the one he thought was the most correct.38 In some cases, this meant weighing them against written histories whose accuracy had been verified; in other cases, it meant choosing the one that made the most sense to him.39 For Al-Shamlan, however, Al-Reshaid’s nondisclosure of his oral sources was problematic in itself, calling into question the veracity of his scholarship. While he does not attack Al-Reshaid for using oral sources—a critique that would undoubtedly have fallen flat in Gulf scholarly circles— he does criticize him for relying on a limited source base. In this regard, he notes that the historian “must take facts from this person and that person and, after that, extract the truth as would an investigator.”40 Al-Shamlan’s framework for using oral sources is similar to Ibn Bishr’s. Whether or not other writers took the same approach, however, is unclear: Al-Qina‘i, for example, appears comfortable in privileging his oral sources 60 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara over written ones. In a discussion of how Kuwaiti ruler Abdullah b. Sabah assisted the Ottomans in repelling a Bani Ka‘b attack on Basra, for example, he details conflicting accounts given by local historians but very quickly throws his support behind the account supported by one of his interview subjects, one Jabr al-Ghanim. Jabr’s account of the event was deemed the most accurate because he was the closest to it. Al-Qina‘i writes that although Jabr did not participate in the attack, he was in Kuwait when preparations were underway.41 Jassim Al-Salamah’s spirited defense of the primacy of oral sources in writing Kuwaiti history is where one finds the most clearly articulated, albeit less organic, methodology. Although the writer’s zeal for oral history leads him to downplay the difficulties in producing it, his anticipation of criticism from the masses of “document fetishizers” that he claims to have dominated the historical profession does prompt him to address some of the more con- tentious issues in oral research, particularly the verification of oral accounts. For Al-Salamah, an account’s veracity depended largely on the length of its chain of transmission; that is, “as this happens more [i.e. as the number of narrators increases], this is an indicator of the truth of the narrative, and as the numbers decrease, this is an indicator of its weakness. Thus, in the first case, the narrative becomes a source that cannot be dispensed with in the writing of history; however, in the latter case, doubt as to its accuracy will prevail.”42 In his reflections, however, he relies on the established English literature on oral history, quoting at length from the works of oral historians John Tosh and Paul Thompson.43 While he fits into the local tradition of historiography in that he acknowledges the primacy of oral accounts and is mainly concerned with how to utilize them, he departs slightly from Ibn Bishr and others in the region by infusing their fledgling methodology with an imported toolkit. In his work, Al-Salamah is keen to downplay or deny altogether the utility of historical documents, largely to achieve his objective of highlighting oral history as a historical research methodology. The tradition of Gulf historiography that preceded him, however, was less dogmatic in its embrace of oral sources. A number of local historians claim to have used at least some documents; only Al-Shamlan, however, reflects on what their utility is, stating clearly that they are useful, although not nearly as much as oral sources.44 Still, in reading these works one often finds a number of primary documents—usually letters—reprinted in full, alongside the prose. In this regard, it seems that in the local tradition of historical scholarship, the document is an illustration of history rather than the foundation of the narrative itself. The building blocks of history are the oral narratives; documents only serve to further strengthen a narrative that is seen as conclusive in and of itself. Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 61

Even after weighing different oral narratives and sprinkling them with documents, the Gulf historian’s work is not complete. Indeed, none of these historians were bold enough to claim that what they wrote was the final word. What comes across clearly in their writing is their recognition of the difficulties inherent in trying to approximate the truth, and their limitations as historians. Ibn Bishr, for example, humbly asked his readers to forgive any errors he makes, while Al-Reshaid admits to his readers that his work is far from a comprehensive history of Kuwait.45 Moreover, they were open to the idea of revising their scholarship. At a number of junctures, Al-Nabhani asks his readers (among whom he specifically counts local historians) to send him corrections and comments so that he can correct his narratives for later editions.46 Both Al-Shamlan and Al-Qina‘i also express a desire to update and expand their works.47 Thus, what emerges is not only a keen cognizance of the pitfalls of research, but also the beginnings of a methodology for dealing with them. Save for Al-Salamah, who writes from an altogether different background, Al-Shamlan is the only one of the writers discussed here who outlines a historical research methodology, and even his articulation of it comes across as being crude at best. Still, what readers see is a degree of awareness of the possibilities and limitations of the historian’s craft—one that not only helps the historians grapple with their own predominantly oral sources, but also furnishes them with tools to critique other scholars. While this is by no means a full methodological tool kit, it does give us some insight into the production of these histories and the obstacles encountered in writing them—an issue that has clear implications for how they articulate historical events and processes, and how they craft broader historical narratives.

Narrative, Process, and the Historical Imaginary How did these historians move from isolated oral narratives to a full-fledged history? That is, how did they take a series of accounts of different events and weave them into a broader historical narrative? For some, this was a straightforward process of using different oral accounts to highlight various aspects of a particular event, as with Al-Reshaid, or to use them to highlight different themes or processes in the region’s history, as in the safhat literature. In neither of these is there any explicit articulation of a historical narrative—and while Al-Reshaid’s work arranges events within a loose chronological framework, he never suggests anything along the lines of process or even causality. For others, like Al-Salamah, and to a lesser degree Ibn Bishr, crafting a narrative is a far more vexing science in which different accounts of different events have to be linked together chronologically. For Al-Salamah, 62 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara

“each one of them [the accounts] holds on to the edges of that which came before it, and also holds on to the edges of what comes after it. Each of them, then, is a cause and effect at the same time.” Thus, verified oral accounts can be linked together in a chain that, when completed, forms the chronological basis of a historical narrative. Al-Salamah writes that “if it happens that an episode is forgotten from these interlinked historical episodes of the stages that any human community passes through, then intelligent scientific analysis of the known stages allows the retrieval of what is lost from those episodes,” adding that it is up to the historian to fasten them into the overall chain in an acceptable manner.48 Ibn Bishr is far less explicit about his methodology; however, his page-by-page alternation between two different chronologies of Saudi-Wahhabi expansion, separated by roughly 100 years, suggests an approach to historical narration that is both complex and imaginative.49 Although they might disagree on the finer points in how to craft historical narratives, all of the historians discussed here are unanimous in their privileging of individual experiences, as opposed to broader processes, as the substance of history. In this regard, they tend toward historical narratives that blur the line between events and processes on the one hand, and the actors who experienced them on the other. Indeed, historical events and processes in the Gulf are so intimately associated with people that the reader is almost at a loss in trying to dissociate the actor from the event—the event is, in many ways, ascribed to the actor him/herself. Even Al-Salamah, who is well acquainted with broader historiographical debates, appears unapolo- getic in his foregrounding of individual experiences when he asks his readers: “Which is closer to historical truth: is it the human who lived it, with all of its hardships and blessings, and its sweetness or bitterness, or that which is read about in a document bound in a dusty file at an old archive?”50 The actor-centered historical imaginary I describe here, but also the more minute methodological differences between historians, is plainly evident in traditions surrounding one of the earliest events in these communities’ histories, the Utbi migration from Najd to the coast. In local traditions, the establishment of Zubara, Kuwait, and Bahrain was not the result of broad shifts in the political and economic structures of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula that allowed for these tribes to establish themselves on the coasts. Rather, it was a result of their own initiatives: members of tribes made conscious decisions to move to the coast and from Zubara onward to Kuwait. Nowhere is this more striking than in Al-Shamlan and Al-Reshaid’s narratives of the migration of the Bani Utub from Najd to the coast. Instead of attributing it to a drought, as many Western-trained historians have done, these writers note that the migration was largely prompted by a quarrel that took place between members of the Utub and their cousins, who then forced Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 63 them out of Najd and into the protection of the Al-Dawasir tribe, whom they eventually left for the coast. The migration from Zubara to Kuwait, Al-Shamlan recounts, was the result of a blood feud that emerged out of a heated argument between Sabah I, the first ruler of Kuwait, and a local inhabitant.51 In his reflections on Al-Shamlan and Al-Reshaid’s narrative of Utbi migration, Al-Salamah notes how it has gained widespread currency among historians despite the fact that it ostensibly diverges from the more scientific explanation—the onset of drought in central Arabia. Confronted with this potential dilemma, Al-Salamah does not reject one explanation in favor of another, but deftly reconciles the two while still privileging the Utbi experience. Although the details of the two accounts may differ from narrator to narrator, he says, there is the common denominator of conflict over resources—that is to say, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.52 He recalls how Ibn Bishr noted that droughts often led to conflicts between tribes over resources, and reasons that if we take the disputes between the Utub and their cousins to be one iteration of this, then both the scientific explanation and the oral traditions surrounding the migration are reconcilable.53 While the explanations may vary from one historian to another, the fram- ing of this event within a narrative that privileges actors, their social relations, and a conscious decision-making process is representative of the broader phenomenon discussed here. This is evident in narratives about particular events, as noted above, but also in other areas. Ibn Bishr’s discussion of the rise and fall of the Saudi emirates, for example, is almost entirely related through narratives surrounding the local tribes of the areas, the ties of kinship and religion that the Al Saud formed with them, and decisions taken by different tribes to either cooperate with or confront the growing polity. Al-Reshaid’s discussion of Kuwait’s late nineteenth-century economic boom attributes it all to trade-friendly policies that Shaikh Mubarak adopted, leaving no room for broader structural shifts taking place in the Gulf and world economy.54 The author of one book on the old suq of Kuwait is careful to describe the different sections of the markets (e.g., confections, cloaks, foodstuffs, etc.) not in terms of the regional commodity circuits that they were a part of, but by listing the families that were involved in that trade.55 And, as noted earlier, even personal memoirs are given titles that signal that they are not simply memoirs but broader histories of a particular trade or community.56 This view of historical events and processes is not simply limited to specific instances or sectors, but is indicative of a much broader historical imagination. In his introduction to Al-Ibrahim’s book on his family, Yahya al-Rubay‘an, the editor and publisher of a number of history books, writes that Kuwait’s inhabitants “created the past for the sake of our present, and 64 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara the present is nothing but the future of that stage of creation.”57 This view is echoed in the writings of Al-Khorafi, whose introduction to his book emphasizes how the inhabitants of the Gulf overcame environmental odds, carved for themselves an economic niche through pearling and shipping, and—with the aid of God—“created an important part of the history of the Arabian Peninsula.”58 Moreover, Al-Bassam’s work (and also other safhat histories) implicitly articulates this view of history in its presenta- tion of individuals’ experiences—travels, encounters, and their forging of relationships—as the substance of history itself. Nowhere, however, is this view more pronounced than in a 1996–1997 Kuwaiti television show, which replicated this view in its title: “Tarikh man sana‘a al-tarikh”—literally, “the history of those who created history,” a series in which interviews with Kuwaiti nakhodas, merchants, and other personalities were featured daily. In all of these instances, “history” is never understood as a disembodied process that eludes the direct influence of historical actors. Rather, history is a malleable process, shaped only by the actions of specific historical actors at specific junctures.

Gulf History between the Local, Regional, and Global Although the Gulf historians’ approach to weaving historical narratives out of oral accounts might sacrifice the broader world-historical framework that the discipline of history privileges in narrating the experiences of different communities, it is far from inward-looking. Indeed, despite their local bias, and in spite of their general lack of familiarity with the conventions of historical analysis as we understand it today, these historians display a surprisingly broad outlook when weaving their historical narratives. At the outset of Ibn Bishr’s history, the author cautions readers that in order to narrate Najd’s history more fully, he “detailed . . . some occurrences that are not specific to Najd.”59 As much is clear from the text itself, in which he describes the rising prices of foodstuffs in Jidda, falls in date prices and famines in Iraq, and road conditions in Aden—not merely for the sake of description, as it becomes clear when one reads his work, but because Najd’s fortunes are inextricably bound to them.60 Al-Shamlan’s narrative of the pearling economy of the Gulf operates in very much the same way, shifting between Kuwait, Bahrain, Bombay, and in one occasion even Paris in a manner that might beg explanation for Western historians unfamiliar with the region but which is entirely comprehensible to his local audience. Moreover, both Al-Reshaid and Al-Nabhani’s works make a number of casual references to India, which reflects that it was a regular feature of the Gulf’s economic, political, and social landscape. Interestingly, however, one sees no references to Iran in any of these works. Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 65

These broad contours of Gulf history are not altogether too revolutionary. Western historians of the Gulf have for some time implicitly seen the region as belonging within the sphere of India and, to a lesser extent, the Indian Ocean. From the pioneering works of J. B. Kelly, one gets a sense that the region fell within the radar of the East India Company and the Government of India, a point that has been most recently articulated in James Onley’s work on Bahrain.61 What distinguishes the Arabic historiography of the Gulf, however, is that the region is not seen as being within the political orbit of India—a notion that comes across strongly when one consults western archival material, but is scarcely mentioned in this literature—but is rather seen as being socially and economically integrated with the western Indian Ocean (i.e., western India, South Arabia, and Eastern Africa). But from where does this particular view of Gulf history’s broader regional, or even global, dimensions emerge? The argument that these histories are based primarily on oral sources helps shed some light on this question. Because of their reliance on oral informants for information on the past, the spatial dimensions of the networks through which these narratives are transmitted reflect themselves in how these historians situate the Gulf geographically and historically. For local historians, as for their oral informants, the Gulf did not lie within the sphere of the “Middle East” as we understand it today—nor did it lie within any administrative unit created by an imperial bureaucracy, be it India or otherwise. Rather it occupied a more organic, intermediate space between the Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean, and broader world—with its inhabitants mediating between, but also susceptible to shifts in, each. Within this literature, the linkages between the Gulf or Najd and other areas are not understood within the framework of the larger economic or social structures that help shape history, but are the direct result of actions taken by its inhabitants. Markets in Aden cannot supply goods to Najd because people cannot move them; Kuwait and Bahrain’s pearling economies are linked to India because of the Gulf and Indian merchants that bridge the two, and so on. In one case, the entire maritime history of the Gulf is reduced to a discussion of two famous mariners: the Omani navigator Ahmed b. Majid, and the Kuwaiti nakhoda Isa al-Qitami.62 Perhaps the most intriguing expression of this imagination can be seen in Al-Bassam’s work. In it, the association between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean is assumed via his inclusion of chapters on the Sultan of Zanzibar. What is more interesting, however, is how the inhabitants of the Gulf link it to the broader world: the Sultans of Zanzibar travel to London and Paris, an Omani shaikh travels to Japan and publishes a diwan of poetry there, and a Kuwaiti historian travels to the Hijaz to meet Ibn Sa‘ud. In this view, the inhabitants of the Gulf see the region as a bridge to the broader world but also—as in the case of the first cinema in Bahrain or the first music recording 66 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara in the region—as able to mediate broader world-historical phenomena. This impressionistic approach to narrating history has only recently gained currency among Western historians, and although one could argue that historians like Al-Bassam lack the theoretical lexicon to make this type of narrative meaningful, the works do betray a rich historical imagination that at once broadens the horizons of Gulf history and rebels against the determinism of chronology.63 Indeed, it seems that for these historians, the contours of Gulf history are shaped by the expansive social, political, and economic networks that bridge it with other regions. The situation of local historians as members of the societies about which they write, as well as their reliance on historical narratives supplied by oral informants, places them in a unique position to envision the history of the Gulf as developing along lines quite different from what historians who rely on archival sources might discern. Where Western-trained historians might be more attentive to broader structural changes or changing configurations of political and economic power—concerns that, to some degree, mirror those of the European officials on whom they rely for information—local historians seem far more interested in how individual actors or sets of sociopolitical and economic relationships shaped the institutions and historical trajectories of their own societies.64 As such, these historians, broadly speaking, offer unique perspectives on such phenomena as economic organization, political culture, family life, mercantile culture, and the like—most of which have eluded the scope of the official documents that Western-trained historians have come to rely on. However, what is much more important in this regard is that they provide us with explanations of the meanings and symbolism behind certain actions—a local understanding that goes far beyond the capacities of even the most astute of colonial officials. In this regard, local historians play the role of the participant observer or ethnogra- pher in local affairs.65 With the richness of this literature’s unique vantage point and historical imaginary, however, come serious drawbacks that one must consider when reading these works. Perhaps the biggest danger one faces is taking what authors say at face value, as has often been the case. That some local historians voice a wariness of the reliability of some oral sources indicates that even they recognize this as a problem. In other cases, the complaints are more explicit. Saif al-Shamlan, for example, criticizes Al-Reshaid for valorizing certain individuals (namely rulers) over others who made contributions as great as or greater than those who appeared in the latter’s book (namely members of Al-Shamlan’s own family). He implies that this was due to biases in the authors’ sources and a lack of rigor in his research.66 More broadly, critiques like this one—and it is one that scholars have leveled at many other historians, Arab or otherwise—hold that these writers are little more that Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 67

“house historians,” celebrating the rise and glory of their overlords. This critique is not without any basis; most of these historians were dependent on a ruler’s patronage to be able to sustain themselves during the research and writing process. While their links to rulers or prominent figures are usually unclear, they are sometimes expressed with uncharacteristic clarity.67 To allow these critiques to devalue these works, however, would be to miss the point entirely. If these historians are in fact trying to legitimate a particular national or political project, that is all the more reason to read them more attentively. How they imagine the rise or fall of a ruler or community, how they validate this historical narrative with sources, and how and when they present it to their audiences, and why—these are questions historians should be asking of these texts, so as to be able to fit them within a broader social, political, and intellectual landscape. We need to know how these texts are produced, why they were produced, and, more importantly, how they struck their audience. To dismiss them as dynastic chronicles, or even worse, to try and distill any historical “truth” from the different (and often conflicting) accounts of similar events would be to miss the point entirely, and to privilege a particular form of knowledge production over another.

Conclusion In the Arabic historiography of the Gulf, we are confronted with a literature that is complex in both its layers and texture—one that poses many challenges for those who wish to interact with it. In their research and production, these works blur the neat distinction between primary and secondary sources, straddling the space between the two but also oscillating back and forth depending on the book, the chapter and, indeed, the very sentence. In some cases, the writers are chroniclers, elaborating narratives about the emergence of states and fortunes of rulers. In other cases, they are amateur anthropologists, conveying to us the meanings behind forms of organization, rituals, and other symbols. In all cases, however, they are historians, struggling to elaborate a set of conventions for utilizing sources that they themselves recognize as being indispensable yet often problematic, while trying to fit them within a broader understanding of the process of history itself. However different the subject matter and local concern of each of these works might be, the underlying concern seems to be, broadly speaking, the same: how to move from individual, resolutely local, and sometimes conflicting narratives (riwayat), to a convincing historical grand narrative (tarikh). Recognizing how these historians understood the limitations of their methodology forces Western-trained historians to give pause before 68 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara mobilizing them for their own purposes. Rather than mine these works for specific pieces of information—names, dates, events, etc.—we must be aware of how these writers struggled to piece these histories together, and how comfortable (or uncomfortable) they were with their own methodologies and, by extension, with the final products themselves. As the debate recalled at the beginning of this chapter highlights—and even the most recent Arabic works on Gulf history show—there has not yet emerged a consensus on the veracity of the narratives surrounding key events in Gulf history, let alone agreement on how to deal with the pitfalls in the historian’s craft. As a step toward shedding light on these issues, this chapter has primarily concerned itself with how historians from the Gulf struggled with their sources in crafting narratives, and what this tells us about a broader historical imaginary. There is, of course, the infinitely more important question of why these histories were produced—whether to legitimate a certain ruler during his reign, to delineate a community in the context of the emergence of the nation-state, or any other reason. That, however, requires an entirely separate discussion, one that would go well beyond the spatial and thematic constraints of this chapter.68 None of this, of course, is to say that we cannot or should not use this literature as it is presented to us, mining it for information and insights. After all, our scramble for any “insider” information on the Gulf almost neces- sitates that we do so. However, any attempt to pluck seemingly relevant historical “facts” from what is still a historiographical black box is misguided at best. Indeed, without elaborating a framework that helps us understand how these works are produced, why they are produced and what that means for the information they present to us, I fear that our efforts at utilizing this literature would be at best ill-informed and, at worst, entirely blind.

Notes

1. Abdulwahhab Muhammad, “Al-Kuwayt wa al-Mamlaka al-Muttahida” (Kuwait and the United Kingdom), Al-Be‘tha, vol. 7, no. 6 (June 1953) reprinted in Saif Marzouq al-Shamlaan, Min Tarikh al-Kuwayt (From the History of Kuwait), 2nd ed. (Kuwait: That es-Salasil, 1986), 214–25. 2. Khaled Muhammad al-Faraj, “Taswiyat” (Reconciliations), Al-Be‘tha, vol. 7, no. 7 (September 1953) reprinted in Ibid., 226. 3. Abdulwahhab Muhammad, “Radd ala Radd” (Rebuttal to a Rebuttal), Al-Be‘tha, vol. 7, no. 7 (September 1953) reprinted in Ibid., 230. 4. “Hawla Maqal al-Kuwayt wa al-Mamlaka al-Muttahida” (Surrounding the Article on Kuwait and the United Kingdom), Al-Be‘tha, vol. 8, no. 1 (September 1953) reprinted in Ibid., 237–46. 5. See also Salwa Alghanim, The Reign of Mubarak Al-Sabah: Shaikh of Kuwait, 1896–1915 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998); for the Ottoman perspective, see Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 69

Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: the Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); for the most recent attempt, see B. J. Slot, Mubarak Al-Sabah: Founder of Modern Kuwait, 1896– 1915 (London: Arabian Publishing, 2005). 6. One particularly interesting text in this regard is the historian Abdul-Rahman b. Abdullah al-Khayri’s recently published manuscript Qala’id al-Nahrayn fi Tarikh al-Bahrayn (Bahrain: Al-Ayyam, 2003), written in the 1920s. The manuscript was found in Kuwait and was reprinted as-is, in the original handwriting of the author. I unfortunately did not have access to this at the time of writing. 7. Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114. 8. One Kuwaiti historian makes similar observations on the primacy of oral sources in writing Kuwaiti history, dating the tradition of oral history back to early Islam. See Jassim Muhammed Al-Salamah, Ta’seel Shahadat Al-Uyan wal-Riwaya al-Shafahiyya fi Kitabat Tarikh al-Kuwayt, 2nd ed. (Kuwait: Al-Rubay‘an, 2006) 54–55. 9. Ibid. 10. This is an important point to make, as the only other English-language analysis of Arabic histories of the Gulf to date suggests that there are no pre-oil histories of the region written by local inhabitants and situates the beginning of a historiographic tradition in the region with the rise of Arab nationalism. See Assem Dessouki, “Social and Political Dimensions of the Historiography of the Arab Gulf,” in Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture, ed. Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 92–115. While Dessouki is to be commended for his insights into 1970s Hawala historiography, his argument on changes in material life and historiography does not hold up when one brings these earlier works into the picture. 11. Shaikh Uthman b. Bishr al-Nadji al-Hanbali, Unwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Riyadh al-Haditha, n.d.), first published in ah 1288 /ad 1871. For examples of studies that use Ibn Bishr’s work, see Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf, 1750–1900 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997); Ahmad Mustafa Abu-Hakima, History of Eastern Arabia, 1750–1800: the Rise and Development of Bahrain, Kuwait and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia (Beirut: Khayats, 1965). 12. Abdul-Aziz al-Reshaid, Tarikh Al-Kuwayt (Beirut: Dar al-Hikma, 1971). 13. Yacoub Y. Al-Hijji, Shaikh Abdul-Aziz al-Reshaid: Sirat Hayatih (Shaikh Abdul- Aziz al-Reshaid: a Narrative of His Life) (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2005). 14. Khalifa b. Muhammad Al-Nabhani, Al-Tuhfa al-Nabhaniyya fi Tarikh Al-Jazira al-Arabiyya (Manama: Al-Maktaba al-Wataniyya, 2004). 15. Perhaps the most relevant of Ibn Sanad’s works to the study here is his Matali‘ al-Sa‘ud fi Akhbar al-Wali Dawud (The Al-Sa‘ud’s First Stages in the News of the Governor Dawud) (Baghdad: Dar al-Wataniyya, 1991). 16. Ibn Bishr, Unwan, 5–6. 17. Al-Nabhani, Al-Tuhfah, 10–11. 70 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara

18. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 23–24. 19. Yousef b. Isa al-Qina‘i, Safhat Min Tarikh al-Kuwayt, 5th ed. (Kuwait: That es- Salasil, 1988). 20. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 25. 21. Khaled al-Bassam, Ya Zaman al-Khalij (London: Dar al-Saqi, 2002). 22. Ibid., 7. 23. Al-Qina‘i, Safhat, 9. 24. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 7. 25. For examples, see also Fatin Ahmad Farid, Safhat Min Tarikh Misr Al-Hadith (Pages from the Modern History of Egypt) (Cairo: F.A.F. Ali, 2007); Yusuf Muhammad Amr, Safhat Min Madi al-Shi‘a wa Hadirihim fi Lubnan (Pages from the Shi‘ites Past and their Present in Lebanon) (Beirut: Dar al-Mahajjah al-Bay- dha’, 2006); Kamal Muzhar Ahmad, Safhat Min Tarikh Iraq al-Mu‘asir (Pages from the Modern History of Iraq) (Baghdad, Maktabat al-Bidlisi, 1987). 26. Yacoub Yousef Al-Hijji, Al-Nashatat al-Bahriyya al-Qadima fil-Kuwayt (The Old Maritime Activities of Kuwait) (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2007). The book was translated into English as Kuwait and the Sea: a Brief Social and Economic History by Fahad Ahmad ‘Isa Bishara (London: Arabian Publishing, 2010). 27. Yacoub Yousef al-Hijji, Nawakhithat al-Safar al-Shira‘i fi al-Kuwayt (The Deep- Sea Nakhodas of Kuwait) (Kuwait: Al-Rubay‘an, 1993), 7. 28. Ibid., 9–17. 29. Yacoub Y. al-Hijji, Sina‘at al-Sufun al-Shira‘iyya fi al-Kuwayt [Dhow-building in Kuwait], 2nd ed. (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2006); the first edition was translated as The Art of Dhow-Building in Kuwait (London: The London Centre of Arab Studies, 2001). 30. See also Ahmed Abdul-Aziz al-Muzaini, Kuwayt wa Tarikhuha al-Bahri, aw Rihlat al-Shira‘ (Kuwait and Its Maritime History, or Sailing Trip) (Kuwait: That es-Salasil, 1986); Adel Muhammad Al-Abdulmoghni, Nawakhithat al-Ghaws wa al-Safar fi al-Kuwayt (Deep Sea and Pearling Nakhodas of Kuwait) (Kuwait: privately published, 1999). 31. See also Yacoub Yousef al-Ibrahim, Min al-Shira‘ ila al-Bukhar (From Sail to Steam) (Kuwait: Al-Rubay‘an, 2003); Talal al-Rumaidhi, A’lam al-Ghaws ‘inda al-‘Awazim Khilal Qarn (1850–1950 bi-Imarat Al-Kuwayt) (A Century of Pearling Affairs among the Al-Awazim in Kuwait, 1850–1950) (Kuwait: Dar al-Kitab al-Hadith, 2001). 32. Abdulmohsen Abdullah al-Khorafi, A’ilat al-Othman: Madrasat al-Safar al-Shira‘i fil-Kuwait (The Al-Othman Family: A Kuwaiti Sailing School) (Kuwait: Privately Published, 2003). 33. Al-Salamah, Ta’seel Shahadat, 28. 34. Saif Marzouq al-Shamlan, Tarikh al-Ghaws ala al-lu’lu’ fi al-Kuwayt wal-Khalij al-Arabi (The History of Pearl Diving in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf ) (Kuwait: That es-Salasil, 1975). English version, Saif Marzooq al-Shamlan, Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Kuwaiti Memoir, trans. Peter Clark (London: London Centre of Arab Studies, 2001). 35. Rashid al-Zayyani, Al-Ghaws wal Tawashah (Pearl Diving and Trading) (Bahrain: Al-Ayyam Publishing, 1998). Narrative and the Historian’s Craft M 71

36. Rashid al-Zayyani, Dhikrayat wa Tarikh (Memories and History) (Bahrain: Al-Ayyam Publishing, 1995); the book was translated into English as Memories and History (Bahrain: Al-Ayyam Publishing, 1999). 37. Ibn Bishr, Unwan, 5–6. 38. Al-Reshaid, Tarikh, 22. 39. Ibid., 31–34. 40. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 23–24. 41. Al-Qina‘i, Safhat, 20–22. The author does not give a date for the Ka‘b attack. 42. Al-Salamah, Ta’sil, 81. 43. Ibid., 63–70. 44. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 7. 45. Ibn Bishr, Unwan, 6; Al-Reshaid, Tarikh, 22. 46. Al-Nabhani, Al-Tuhfah, 10–11, 157. 47. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 74–84; Al-Qina‘i, Safhat, 6, 9. 48. Al-Salamah, Ta’sil, 88–89. 49. Unfortunately, because of space constraints, I was unable to explore in greater depth Ibn Bishr’s organizational logic. 50. Ibid., 23. 51. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 106–07; It is noteworthy that Al-Shamlan and others’ traditions surrounding the migration have made their way into a number of western histories of the region that, despite having taken a more structuralist approach to history, have accepted these traditions at face value. Indeed, a review of the English-language histories of the Gulf that do mention the migration all refer back to local historians without taking into account the tropes or conventions of the literature they draw on. 52. Al-Salamah, Ta’sil, 81. 53. Ibid., 90–97. 54. Al-Reshaid, Tarikh, 64–65. 55. Muhammad Abdulhadi Jamal, Aswaq al-Kuwayt al-Qadima (The Old Souks of Kuwait) (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2004). 56. See also Al-Shamlan, Tarikh Al-Ghaws; Zayyani, Al-Ghaws. 57. Al-Ibrahim, Min Al-Shira‘, 2. 58. Al-Khorafi, A’ilat Al-Othman, 28. 59. Ibn Bishr, Unwan, 5. 60. Ibid., 135, 213. 61. J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 62. Al-Salamah, Ta’sil, 174–231. 63. Examples of recent English works that show similarities in their approach to narrating history include Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 72 M Fahad Ahmad Bishara

64. This view, of course, is not altogether absent in recent English-language histories of the Gulf. An excellent example of a work that bridges these two approaches to understanding historical processes, and does so in a compelling way, is Nelida Fuccaro’s Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 65. This is certainly implicit in Ibn Bishr’s work, which describes (but does not explicitly analyze) a rather unique nomadic political culture, all while discussing Saudi-Wahhabi expansion in Arabia. Al-Shamlan and Al-Zayyani’s works are similarly revealing in terms of the commercial and legal culture surrounding the pearl dive. This is not to say that Western historians have completely missed this; Peter Lienhardt’s seminal study, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia (New York: Palgrave, 2001), which was the product of several years of participation in and astute observation of local affairs, fares well in comparison. There are, however, few others that do this, and this is largely because the available archival documentation on the region restricts one’s ability to engage in this sort of analysis without making imaginative leaps. 66. Al-Shamlan, Min Tarikh, 23–24. 67. Al-Reshaid’s history, for example, includes a two page dedication to his patron, Shaikh Ahmed al-Jaber al-Sabah. At the same time, however, he asks his patron to allow him access in the future to documents and letters held in the Amiri Diwan, from which he would be able to piece together a clearer picture of Kuwait’s relationships with other states. See Al-Reshaid, Tarikh, 16–17. 68. Dessouki’s work on the subject convincingly points to a broad correlation between political agendas and historical writing, but his omission of early histories of the region, and his inattention to local methodologies, leads him to make the questionable (but admittedly secondary) claim that “no noteworthy writings were produced by local authors during the pre-oil period that served the interests of the ruling class.” His claims about nationalism and later historiographical trends, then, are based on faulty assumptions and are thus of limited use (Dessouki, “Social and Political Dimensions,” 95). CHAPTER 3

The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: A Survey of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Persian Sources

Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Introduction A brief review of the critical primary sources on the Persian Gulf written in Persian reveals a situation not very different from the general state of Persian historiography. A few years prior to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, an Iranian professor of history assessed that “too much which is published on Iranian history continues to be either shallow, narrow, cliché-littered imitations of the not-so-great historians of the past, or are official glorifications of Iran’s present [the Pahlavi regime], not always consistent with the truth. The field requires a widely extended and earnest historical inquiry into the development of modern Iranian society through the exploration of its recent past.”1 In the late nineteenth century, with the approaching modern age, the traditional narratives of historical writing experienced dire changes. New historical methodologies were being introduced in Iran, which began to gradually challenge the existing religious and other narratives then dominating the scene. For the first time Iran’s mythological concepts of the self were being questioned and replaced with new methods of historical inquiry introduced from Europe. As Iran evolved out of its isolation and rediscov- ered itself, it had to formulate new narratives of nationhood and national identity and abandon the mythological accounts. With the Constitutional Movement and the occupation of Iran by European forces during World War I, the trend continued to expand. 74 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

More often than not, politics have overshadowed scholarship in Iran. Since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 Iranians have witnessed the gradual emergence of individual historians with greater depth and insight who have created historical narratives of lasting significance, yet they were often outcasts among their own compatriots. To name just a few, one might mention Ahmad Kasravi,2 who was “hacked to death” in 1946 by the Fada’iyan-i Islam for his nonconventional views on religion, particularly Shi‘ism.3 Another historian, Dr. Faridun Adamiyyat, who passed away in 2008, was ostracized by the academic community for many years and deprived of his civil rights, particularly after the Islamic Revolution;4 and Professor Abd al-Hadi Ha’iri5 was ill-treated on numerous occasions for his views on Shaikh Fazl-Allah Nuri, the controversial cleric who opposed the Constitutional Revolution.6 This chapter seeks to demonstrate that the historiography of the Persian Gulf based on the available Persian sources is limited in scope and closely corresponds with political developments in the region.7 The British dominance and their gradual departure from the Persian Gulf and the state-building process that emerged during the Reza Shah period (1305–1320 Sh./1926–1941), in addition to the growth of Arab nationalism in the region after World War II, added further tension to the fragile relationships that existed between Arab and Ajam and Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims in the region. The continuing dispute over the ownership of several islands,8 and before that Bahrain, continue to remain a serious source of contention between Iran and her Arab neighbors, particularly the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The Persian sources on the historiography of the Persian Gulf are rather different from those of Iran’s Arab neighbors on its southern littoral. As an independent state with a language, religion, and cultural tradition all its own, Iran never had to undergo the process of state formation in modern times. While Iran was also structured along the lines of tribal confederations and tribal loyalties, and while tribes played an important role in diffusing the central authority of the state, they were never in full control of the state. Since the Constitutional Revolution Iran has gradually emerged with clear goals of statehood and the duties and responsibilities of a modern state. Iran went through the rigorous process of modernization, centralization, and further urbanization as a nation-state during the Reza Shah period.

Historians and Historiography of the Qajars (1193–1342/1779–1924) The Iranian historiography of the Persian Gulf over the past two centuries can chronologically be divided into three distinct periods. The first is that of the Qajar dynasty, which covers 145 years of Iran’s modern history. The historiography of the region becomes more significant with increasing The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 75

Western intrusion, particularly in the twentieth century. The reasons are clear. For most of the nineteenth century, Iran’s borders were relatively fluid and undefined. Iran had not evolved entirely out of its premodern, tribal structure, and the concepts of nationalism, nationhood, and territorial sovereignty were gradually emerging. Border conflicts and disputes were on the rise. The tribal situation in Iran would not change overnight. Unruly tribes could not be contained by the inept central governments whose armies often relied upon rural conscripts. Nomadic tribes traveled back and forth across any and all borders drawn foremost by joint British–Iranian and Russian– Iranian border commissions. The border settlements both to the east and the west were a tedious task undertaken by the British. On the western border, however, Iranians not only had to deal with tribes that flowed in and out but also numerous Shi‘i pilgrims visiting the holy shrines of Najaf and Karbala, who regarded Ottoman Iraq to be as much an integral part of their homeland as the religious centers of Qom and Mashhad. During the reigns of the first two Qajars, Agha Muhammad Khan (1779–1797) and Fath-Ali Shah (1797–1834), very little attention was paid to the Persian Gulf. Historians were few and they were often commissioned to write by their benefactors, including the royal court. The Persian Gulf was hardly a concern of Agha Muhammad Khan, who spent most of his short reign fighting his rivals, overthrowing the Zands, and unifying a divided Iran. When he was assassinated in 1212/1797*, his handpicked nephew, Baba Khan, later known as Fath-Ali Shah, also had to fight rivals for the throne and spent the initial part of his reign subduing unruly tribes and regions. However, Iran soon plunged into a prolonged war with its Russian neighbor in the north, which resulted in two humiliating treaties, the Treaty of Gulistan (1813) and the Treaty of Turkmanchai (1828). Iran’s attention was now focused toward Russia and the north while the south, including the Persian Gulf, remained relatively ignored. Attention to the south, particularly the Persian Gulf, begins during the reign of Muhammad Shah Qajar (1250–1265/1834–1848) because of political reasons. Muhammad Shah appointed three individuals between 1254 and 1256/1838–1840 to study the geography as well as the economics and social aspects of the south, particularly the northern shores of the Persian Gulf. One of these individuals was Bartolomew Semino, the French military officer who had lived at and served the Qajar court for many years. He

* The Islamic calendar is used in Iran, which is based on a lunar system designated ah (Anno Hegirae, or year of the Hijra) starting in ad 622. The Persian solar year (Shamsi), officially introduced in 1925, is also in use and is designated Sh. In this chapter where two sets of dates are provided, the first is the ah date and the second the Christian (ad) calendar, without abbreviation, that is, 1325/1906. However, whenever the solar hijra year is indicated, either before or after the changeover, Sh. is specified in the form 1351 Sh./1972. 76 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust traveled to the shores and islands of the Persian Gulf and according to his own account tried to determine the route that a famed admiral of Alexander the Great had ventured to travel three centuries before Christ. Semino commissioned his Persian secretaries to record his observations. These were then presented to Muhammad Shah. While the original Persian manuscript is lost, a summary of his account is available in French. This French version was again translated into Persian.9 The second source of significance is frequently referred to in the Persian sources as the “Unknown Engineer.” Apparently Muhammad Shah assigned the engineer around 1254/1838 (shortly before the British attacked the island of Kharg and the port of Bushehr in 1838) to investigate the region. The engineer was required to evaluate the southern route from Isfahan, Shiraz, and the port cities for the probable transportation of cannons and weapons. The author is obviously a military engineer and a strategist. In the group traveling with the “Unknown Engineer” was the renowned Muhammad Ibrahim Kaziruni (Nadiri) whose observations were also committed to a manuscript, which was published in more recent times. We have two recent accounts of the “Unknown Engineer.” The first is titled Safarnama-yi Banadir va Jazayir-yi Khalij-i Fars (az Muhandisi nashi- nakhta dar zaman-i Muhammad Shah Qajar) (Travelogue of the Ports and Islands of the Persian Gulf from an Unknown Engineer during the Period of Muhammad Shah Qajar).10 From the text it is evident that the Engineer is well acquainted with cartography and map making. He recounts his travels from 27 Jumadi al-Awwal 1254/18 August 1838 from Isfahan to Shiraz, and in the south, to Gavbandi and beyond. However, there is nothing documented regarding his return journey to Tehran. A year later, another book was edited and published in 318 pages under the title Du Safarnama az Junub-i Iran dar Sal-ha-yi 1256–1307 A.H./1840–1889 A.D. (Two Travel Accounts from Southern Iran during the Years AH 1256–1307/ AD 1840–1889). The text is edited by Sayyid Ali Al-i Davud and was published in 1989.11 While the first text is the account of the Unknown Engineer of the Muhammad Shah period described above, the second belongs to two engineers, Muhammad-Hasan Mirza Muhandis and Ali Khan Muhandis. Both were graduates of the Dar al-Funun and went to Fars at the end of the Nasir al-Din Shah period, documenting their journey from Tehran to Fars in the form of travel accounts. The third source is that of Mirza Ibrahim Kaziruni, whose Tarikh-i Banadir va Jazayir-i Khalij-i Fars (The History of Ports and Islands of the Persian Gulf ) was also written during the reign of Muhammad Shah. In 177 pages the author describes his journey in the south about 1253/1837, which begins around the port of Muhammara (Khurramshahr) and proceeds to Bushehr, Hormuzgan, and Minab. The author diligently describes the cities along the route from Muhammara to Minab, and since he was The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 77 commissioned by the royal court he is quite careful to be as precise as possible in his observations.12 During the second half of the nineteenth century, which corresponds approximately with the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (1264–1313/1848–96), the Persian Gulf becomes the center of attention for several reasons. The British presence there had increased and so had the quantity of trade in and out of the region. As a result the port cities of the Persian Gulf become the focal point of trade. Travel through the port cities was also on the rise and was a major and a safe route of contact with the outside world. One of the early historians of the Nasiri period who devotes part of his writings to the Persian Gulf is Mirza Muhammad-Jafar Khurmuji, better known as “Haqayiq Nigar.” Three of his major works are of great importance, namely Athar-i Ja‘ fari (Works by Ja‘ fari), Haqayiq al-Akhbar-i Nasiri (The Truth of the News of the Nasiri Period), and Nizhat al-Akhbar (Delightful News). The latter, in particular, concentrates on the Persian Gulf and the larger state of Fars, which at the time stretched down to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Khurmuji’s works are the most informative and the first of their kind during the Qajar period. We could therefore regard him as perhaps the first genuine historian of the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth century. The second native historian of the Persian Gulf was Mirza Hasan Husaini Fasa’i, author of the well-known Farsnama-yi Nasiri (completed in 1304/1887). He is a competent scholar who used Khurmuji and other sources and engaged directly in compiling information on the port cities of Fars. This monumental work has been edited and published in a new rendition.13 The third historian of the Nasir al-Din Shah period was Fursat al-Dawla Shirazi, the author of the Asar al-Ajam (Persian Writings). This source also provides significant information on the Persian Gulf. While the literary and historical approach continues to remain traditional, the attention paid to the archaeology, society, and economy of the Persian Gulf region is new and significant. There are also other works belonging to this period that provide information on the Persian Gulf. These are Nasikh al-Tavarikh (Written Histories), Mir’at al-Buldan (Mirror of Cities), Rawzat al-Safa-yi Nasiri (Delightful Gardens of the Nasiri Period), Muntazam Nasiri (Arranged [History] for the Nasiri Period), and Khalsa (Trance). During the Muzaffar al-Din Shah period (1313–1324/ 1896–1907) a limited number of historians appear that are significant, such as Mirza Ahmad Khan Daryabaigi. Since Daryabaigi was the governor of Bushehr for many years and was well acquainted with English and French, he was able to acquire significant information regarding the shoreline and islands of the Persian Gulf. His experiences were reflected in a book serialized both before and after the Constitutional Revolution in the Ruznama-i Muzaffari, a weekly newspaper of Bushehr published by Mirza Ali-Agha Shirazi from 78 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

1319 to 1330/1902–1912. Nearly a decade later, in 1339/1921 his son Abd al-Karim Muzaffari published another ten issues before it finally ceased publication. Shaikh Abd al-Karim Sa‘adat, one of the first proponents of the Sa‘adat School in Bushehr, is the author of the rare Tarikh-i Khalij-i Fars, a volume of which is available in the National Library in Tehran. His brother, Muhammad-Husain Sa‘adat, also authored two manuscripts on the Persian Gulf, Tarikh-i Khalij-i Fars (History of the Persian Gulf ) and Tarikh-i Bushihr (History of Bushehr).14 Ayatollah Sayyid Abd-Allah Biladi Bushihri also has at least three works on the Persian Gulf, which include I‘ jaz al-Habib fi Mazalim al-Salib, Lavayih va Savanih, and Zaman-i Shaikh va Darvish. These works were recently edited and published by Ghasem Yahosseini in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Biladi’s death. The most renowned Persian Gulf historian of the late Qajar and early Pahlavi period was no other than Muhammad-Ali Khan Sadid al-Saltana (Kababi) Bandar Abbasi. Sadid was born in Baghdad in 1249 Sh./1870 and died in 1320 Sh./1941 in Bandar Abbas. He was a native of the region with deep attachment to the Persian Gulf, and he shows a profound knowledge of the port cities of the south and the lives of the local inhabitants who fished and sailed its waters. Like other prolific writers of the Nasir al-Din Shah period such as the minister of press, I‘timad al-Saltana, he is engaged in introducing southern Iran, its coastal cities, and the Persian Gulf region. As a native of the region he is well acquainted with the local dialects of the south and with most of the terminologies commonly in use among the inhabitants. His profession as an officer of the Iranian government who had to communicate with the shaikhs and tribal chieftains of the southern littoral of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman made him all the more informed. There are at least 14 different manuscripts in his name, most of which have been corrected, edited, and published by Ahmad Iqtidari. A few of Sadid al-Saltana’s works are ethnological in nature and he tries to engage in field research and examine all aspects of human, social, economic, and cultural life in the region. He is indeed a dedicated and meticulous self- motivated scholar and by far the best one of his time. Toward the end of Ahmad Shah’s reign, probably around 1303 Sh./1924, Sadid traveled again around the coasts of the Persian Gulf and wrote a detailed account on the social and political conditions of the region. While Sadid’s works are numerous and varied, four of his important works on the Persian Gulf have been edited by Ahmad Iqtidari and published posthumously since the Islamic Revolution. In chronological order they include (1) Safarnama-yi Kababi (Travelogue of Kababi),15 (2) Bandar Abbas va Khalij-i Fars (Bandar Abbas and the Persian Gulf ),16 (3) Tarikh-i Masqat va Uman, Bahrain va Qatar (The History of Muscat, Oman, Bahrain and Qatar)17 and Sarzaminha-yi Shomali-yi Piramun-i Khalij-i Fars (Northern The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 79

Territories of the Persian Gulf ).18 Sadid is the Persian Gulf historiographer who breaks clearly with the past by his ethnographic description and his city history approach to the region.

Recreating Iran: Historiography under the Pahlavis (1305–1357 Sh./1925–1979) The 57 years of Pahlavi rule mark a very significant period in the development of modern Iran. While Reza Shah is credited with creating a modern Iran, the need for a powerful centralized state had already made itself felt during World War I. After the war, and prior to the coup of 1921, the government assigned Asad-Allah Yamin al-Mulk (also known as Yamin al-Mamalik Isfandiari) the responsibility of traveling to the southern coasts of Iran and preparing a full report. He had been appointed by the Majlis to oversee the southern ports of the Persian Gulf. This is the first effort of the Iranian central government to assess its coastal areas after the war and to increase its hold over the region, a trend that continued and intensified during the Pahlavi period. Only recently was Asad-Allah Yamin al-Mulk’s report fully edited and published by Muhammad-Baqir Vusuqi.19

Reza Khan’s Ascendancy (1921–1941) The coup of 1299 Sh./1921 marks the beginning of a new age for Iran. For the first time in its modern history, the government succeeded in increasing its central authority by disarming unruly tribes and forcing them to surrender their weapons. Universal conscription was enforced, the authority and jurisdiction of the clerics were reduced significantly and the task of providing for modern education was undertaken by the government. In urban centers education for children became compulsory, and school textbooks were formulated to acquaint the young with the concept of nationalism, which was centered on the glorification of Iran’s pre-Islamic past, praise for the monarchy, and secularism. Part of modern education was aimed at developing a bureaucracy that could oversee a “modern” state in the making.20 Under Reza Shah Iran became a relatively centralized and authoritarian state, highly nationalistic in its approach, and dedicated to the revival and celebration of Iran’s pre-Islamic past. Many of Iran’s policies during this period were directed toward the reincarnation of a new and modern Iran, different from the Iran of the Qajar period. Iran’s emphasis on its territorial sovereignty and integrity required that it pay more attention to all its borders, including those in the south. While the Reza Shah period does not have more than a handful of dedicated historians, the documents on the region show that the government was keen 80 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust to prevent the free flow of smuggled goods in the Persian Gulf. It is also deeply concerned with the presence of the British in the region, the issue of Bahrain, Iran’s export trade and the enforcement of the quarantine, which was to prevent communicable diseases from spreading throughout the country. In fact the sheer increase of the volume of documents in the National Archives on the Persian Gulf demonstrates the responsibility the Iranian government had assumed in overseeing developments there.21 During the Reza Shah period (1305–1320 Sh./1926–1941), because of the friction that developed between Reza Shah and Shaikh Khaz‘al of Muhammara on the one hand and the British and Iranian governments on the other, attention to the Persian Gulf increased. Reza Khan, then minister for war, moved his troops to the south and defeated Shaikh Khaz‘al in December 1925 in a lightning move. On this journey, Reza Shah also had a book published under his name called Safarnama-yi Khuzistan (Travel Diary of Khuzistan).22 It is noteworthy that he presents a critical assessment of the British presence in the Persian Gulf. Sayyid Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946), the most prolific and distinguished of all Iranian historians of the twentieth century, belongs to the late Qajar and Reza Shah periods. He has numerous noted works to his name, the most famous one being Tarikh-i Mashruta-yi Iran (The History of the Iranian Constitution). In 1302 Sh./1923 he was dispatched by the government on a mission to Khuzistan. As a great scholar and historian, his stay there resulted in the publication of a classic work entitled Tarikh-i Pansad Sala-yi Khuzistan (The Five-Hundred Year History of Khuzistan).23 The study is the first of its kind and is the definitive one on the subject. In addition, Kasravi published a series of articles on the history, anthropology and tribal structure of Khuzistan and the Persian Gulf in his well-known newspaper Payman. He also published Jang-i Iran va Inglis dar Muhammara (The Anglo-Iranian War in Muhammara), which is about the British occupation of the region in 1856.24 Another less recognized historian of the Reza Shah period is Muhammad- Husain Ruknzada-Adamiyyat, a native of Bushehr whose historical contributions need further attention. He is noted primarily for two of his works. The first, titled Daliran-i Tangistani (The Chivalrous Men of Tangistan) because of its exaggerations can almost be treated as a historical novel. The book describes in graphic and exaggerated form the invasion of Bushehr by the British forces in 1915 and the resistance of individuals such as Ra’is-Ali Dilvari and other Tangistani khans such as Zayir-Khizr Khan and Shaikh Husain Khan Chahkutahi. The book was published in Tehran in 1310 Sh./1931 and was well received by the public since it reflected the nationalistic sentiments of the period. The second work of Adamiyyat published two years later in 1312 Sh./1933 is more creditable. It is a two-volume work called Fars va Jang-i Bain al-Millal (Fars and the World War) and provides The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 81 coverage of the south including Bushehr during the final years of World War I. What further contributes to the manuscript are the documents provided at the end of the volumes. These volumes have retained their academic value for decades. Only in recent years did Sayyid Ghasem Yahosseini publish a new work on Ra’is-Ali Dilvari (Delvari), casting a more accurate light on the man and his personal and political character.25 Ruknzada-Adamiyyat also edited Adamiyyat (Humanity), a weekly newspaper in Shiraz, which first appeared in 1926. Adamiyyat published in serial form the diaries of his father, Rukn al-Tujjar Bushihri, as he traveled from Bushihr to Bandar Lingeh. This diary provides the reader with an inside view of the Persian Gulf and southern Iran. Another historian during the Reza Shah period is Ayatollah Sayyid Abd-Allah Biladi Bushihri, who between the years 1304 and 1317 Sh./1925–1938 wrote several manuscripts on the Persian Gulf. One such work is entitled Darvish-i Musafir (The Traveling Darvish). This was published in 1312 Sh./1933. The book describes in graphic detail the living conditions and prevailing poverty of the people living along the northern littoral of the Persian Gulf.26 Shaikh Muhammad Husain Sa‘adat (1242–1314 Sh./1863–1935), another Persian Gulf historian of the Reza Shah period, was a noted teacher and author as well as a member of the distinguished Sa‘adat family27 who founded and financed the famous Sa‘adat school of Bushehr. This was established in 1898 and was the first modern school in Bushehr and in Fars, and second only to the famous Rushdiyya schools of Tabriz and Tehran. Sa‘adat has authored two manuscripts on the Persian Gulf. The first is Tarikh-i Bahrain va Khalij-i Fars (History of Bahrain and the Persian Gulf ) and the other is Tarikh-i Bushihr (The History of Bushehr). Daryadar (commander of naval forces) Ghulam-Ali Bayandur was a high-ranking naval officer in the service of the Iranian navy under Reza Shah who was killed in action as he resisted the British naval occupation of Khurramshahr in 1941. In 1317 Sh./1938 he wrote a book of no more than 148 pages on the Persian Gulf and the quantity of goods that entered and left the ports of Iran. His outlook is both militaristic as well as nationalistic, for he briefly reviews the importance of the Persian Gulf from ancient times until 1935. He also lays claim to Bahrain as an integral part of Iran and believes that Iran should complain to the League of Nations regarding its territorial rights over Bahrain.

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941–1979) During the 37 years of the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, we can name nearly two dozen authors who wrote on the Persian Gulf. The available literature on the region is not only informative, but also politically motivated. 82 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Not only do we see the presence of a strong central government that grew over time, but one that gradually led to Persianization and irredentism. The works of Ali-Murad Farrashbandi (1292–1376 Sh./1913–1997) extend over the Pahlavi and Islamic period. He has numerous monographs covering such topics as Jang-i Inglis va Iran dar Sal-i 1273 A.H./1856 (The Anglo-Iranian War of AH 1273/1856),28 Khanidan-i Tangistani (The Tangestani Clan), Gusha-yi az Qiyam-i Musallahana (Accounts of an Armed Uprising), and Isti‘maran Bidanand (Let the Colonialists Know). Farrashbandi’s works are more political and his anti-British stance in most of his writings is all too obvious. He has three significant works to his name. The first is the one mentioned above on the war of 1856. The book, in 283 pages and six chapters, discusses the British troop movement to southern Iran when Herat was under siege by the Iranian forces. Eventually the British occupied Bushehr and the resistance of the Tangistanis in defending the south failed. Another work, Inglisi-ha ra bishinasid (Know the British)29 is a text of 137 pages in which the author traces British policies and treaties imposed on Iran, including oil treaties up to the Musaddiq period. The third volume, published after the Islamic Revolution, is titled Junub-i Iran dar Mubarizat-i Zidd-i Isti‘mari (Southern Iran in its Anti-Colonial Conflicts).30 In this relatively substantial work of approximately 352 pages, Farrashbandi presents the resistance against the British forces during World War I. Divided into four parts, he presents the case of Ra’is-Ali Dilvari, Qazanfar al-Saltana Burazjani, the German agent Wasmuss, and the Pulis-i Junub, known as the South Persian Rifles. A noted historian of the Persian Gulf who has written extensively both during the Pahlavi era as well as under the Islamic Republic is Ahmad Iqtidari. He is among the most prolific authors and his writing stretches over a period of nearly 50 years. Born in 1304 Sh./1925 in Lar, in the province of Fars, Iqtidari grew up in one of the notable families of the region, according to his memoirs, Karvan-i Umr: Khatirat-i Siyasi Farhangi-yi Haftad Sal (Life’s Caravan: Political-Cultural Memoirs of Seventy Years).31 In his self-portrayal, he discusses his 30 years of teaching experience and his equally extensive years as a lawyer. According to Iqtidari, the first politicized seminar on the Persian Gulf was organized shortly after the Suez Canal crisis of 1956, when Gamal Abdel Nasser referred to the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf. For a while Iran refused to accept shipments into its ports with Arabian Gulf labels, while the Arabs refused shipments with Persian Gulf labels. The conference was chaired by the distinguished scholar Sayyid Muhit-Tabataba’i, and the participants included such outstanding notables as Sa‘id Nafisi, Sayyid Muhammad-Taqi Mustafavi, and the French scholar Roman Ghirshman. The proceedings were published in two volumes and according to Iqtidari it was the best-ever seminar on the Persian Gulf.32 The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 83

Iqtidari has three volumes published to his name. He is also to be credited for introducing Sadid al-Saltana and his works to the Persian academic community. Prior to Iqtidari’s works, Sadid was a relatively unknown historian among Iranian scholars, and few recognized the originality and value of his works. He was in fact discovered and promoted by Iqtidari, and many, if not most of his works were revised and edited by him. Two of Iqtidari’s three works were published before the Islamic Revolution. His first, published in 1345/1966 is simply entiled Khalij-i Fars (The Persian Gulf ).33 In 261 pages and 15 chapters the author traces the history of the Gulf region and its islands from ancient times until the 1950s. The second work was published in 1348/1969 and is called Asar-i Shahr-ha-yi Bastani: Savahil va Jazayir-i Khalij-i Fars va Darya-yi Uman (Remains of Ancient Cities: The Coasts and Islands of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman).34 In this monumental work, each chapter is dedicated to the study of one of the ancient coastal cities of Iran, with three chapters allocated to the study of Bahrain, Kuwait, and the coasts of Najd and Arabia. The third work of Iqtidari was published in 1985 shortly after the Islamic Revolution, titled Az Darya-yi Pars ta Darya-yi Chin (From the Sea of Pars [Persian Gulf] to the Sea of China).35 In just over 200 pages and 28 parts, the author traces the seafaring of Persians and the spread of their culture and civilization via the ocean throughout the ancient world to the Sea of China. There are more than a dozen other authors who have written on the Persian Gulf and whose works are worthy of recognition. The most important of these individuals are Isma‘il Nurizada-Bushihri (1263–1347 Sh./1884–1968) who is predominantly noted for three works. The first is Iran-i Kununi va Khalij-i Fars (Present-Day Iran and the Persian Gulf ).36 In 215 pages the author presents a study of the social, economic, and historical aspects of the various cities of Iran. Approximately half the book is about the cities and ports of the Persian Gulf. Bahrain’s history is reviewed until 1936, and in the last portion of the book a brief history of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf up to 1320 Sh./1941 is presented. Nurizada’s second work of significance was published in 1327 Sh./1948 and is titled Asrar-i Nihzat-i Junub (The Secrets of the Southern Movement).37 This book is more about the interior of Iran than the Persian Gulf. It presents an account of the British involvement in Iran at the end of World War II, when they tried without much success to instigate opposition to the fledgling central government both in Kazirun and Bushehr. The movement was finally defeated and the two British consuls involved were recalled to Britain. Nurizada’s third work was published more than a decade later in 1338 Sh./1959 under the title Falat-i Qarra va Jazayir-i Khalij-i Fars: Asrar-i Siyasi-yi Naft-i Iran (The Plateau and Islands of the Persian Gulf: Political 84 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Secrets of Iranian Oil).38 This monographic work is a sketchy study of the history of oil in Iran from the D’Arcy concession to the oil consortium formed a year after the coup of 1953. In the last two chapters of the book, the author studies the history of Bahrain from the Sasanian to the Qajar period. The next individual, Muhammad-Ali Jinab, produced a monumental work entitled Khalij-i Fars va Ashina’i ba Amarat-i an (The Persian Gulf and Acquaintance with Its Emirates),39 which is a general account of the region. In over 600 pages and seven chapters the author studies Kuwait, Hasa, Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirates, Muscat, and Oman, and in the last chapter he concentrates on the pressing issues of the Persian Gulf and the history of the British presence in the region. The author also expresses his concern as to what might happen to the region upon the British departure in 1971. During the last 20 years of the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, we witness at least another nine historians whose works aim to inform as well as validate Iran’s presence and influence in the region. They are Abbas Iqbal-Ashtiyani,40 Sadiq Nishat (Mirdamad),41 Abbas Mas‘udi,42 Ahmad Faramarzi,43 Jamil Muvahhid,44 Parviz Varjavand,45 Abbas Mirian,46 and Muhammad Fathi.47

Historiography under the Islamic Republic Though short in scope, the historiography of the Persian Gulf during the Islamic Republic is the most institutionally supported, productive, ubiquitous, politicized, and irredentist compared to any other period. The reasons are obvious and in total congruence with political developments in the region. During this time, Iran was engaged in eight years of war with Iraq (1359–1367 Sh./1980–1988). She also sought to regain her former status as a regional power in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East at large. In addition, Iran sought to neutralize the impact of UN sanctions, first imposed in 2006, because of its nuclear project. In nearly all publications, seminars, and collected works published in Persian, the underlying themes follow Iran’s national interests. They are all engaged in voicing Iran’s self-proclaimed “rightful” stance in the region. For the last 35 years Iran has tried to regain its former status as a regional power, albeit without American endorsement and support. The sensitive issues regarding the Persian Gulf, including the strategic position of the region, the wars that engulfed the entire area and caused irreparable damage, the presence of the US navy, the expansion of American bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait, and the constant bickering between the Arabs and the Persians over the ownership of the three islands all helped to further sensitize both Iranians and the Arabs. The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 85

The politicization of the Persian Gulf has also involved the academic community and forced them to take a stance under the aegis of the government. In turn the government has allocated resources for the development of research centers that would actively engage in the study of the region. The outcome for the past two decades has led to a two-pronged approach, that of individual scholars and the development of archival and research institutions.

The Scholars While Ahmad Iqtidari’s major works were published before the Islamic Revolution, his writings and activities have continued to enrich the historiography of the Persian Gulf under the Islamic Republic. During this period Iqtidari has primarily engaged in correcting and editing the works of Sadid al-Saltana, as mentioned above. Among historians who have contributed significantly to the study of the Persian Gulf is Muhammad-Baqir Vusuqi, who initially concentrated on the modern history of Iran, and then decided to switch to the Persian Gulf for his PhD dissertation. This was later published as Tarikh-i Muhajirat-i Aqvam dar Khalij-i Fars: Muluk-i Hormuz (The History of Migration of Tribes in the Persian Gulf: The Kings of Hormuz).48 Further works include Tarikh-i Khalij-i Fars va Mamalik-i Hamjavar (The History of the Persian Gulf and Adjacent Lands)49 and ‘Ilal va Avamil-i Jabija’i yi Kanun-ha-yi Tijar dar Khalij-i Fars (The Persian Gulf: The Reasons and Causes for the Movement of the Commercial Centers in the Persian Gulf ).50 He also has a number of articles in Persian journals as well as in the Da’irat al-Mu‘arif-i Buzurg-i Islami (The Great Islamic Encyclopedia). He is among the few serious scholars in Iran who has concentrated entirely on the Persian Gulf at the Department of History of Tehran University. Another contributor to the field is Dr. Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh (Piruz Mujtahidzada), a political geographer who has spent most of his life in Great Britain. He writes eloquently both in English and Persian and he, too, believes that the British have tarnished Iran’s legitimate claims in the Persian Gulf. His major work on the Persian Gulf is entitled Khalij-i Fars: Kishvar-ha va Marzha (The Persian Gulf: Countries and Boundaries).51 Six of the modern researchers of the Persian Gulf belong to what can best be categorized as the Bushehri Circle. They include such figures as Ghasem Yahosseini, Abd al-Karim Mashayikhi, Hasan Zangana, Hamid Asadpur, Ghulam-Husain Nizami, and Fatima Mu’mini. With the exception of Yahosseini and Asadpur,52 both of whom live and work in Bushehr, the rest were affiliated with the Foundation for Bushehr Studies (Bunyad-i 86 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Bushihr-Shinasi). They will therefore be introduced in the next section as the Bushehri Circle. Ghasem Yahosseini is a prolific independent scholar who has to date published and edited no fewer than 50 monographs and books on the history and culture of Bushehr. His vast knowledge of the region is remarkable. His rich and yet simple style presents individual histories and historical episodes. He covers the newspapers published in Bushehr53 and relates accounts of individuals who fought both the British and the Americans valiantly and sometimes lost their lives in the process.54 He also writes on Bushehr’s heroic resistance against colonialism55 and presents political accounts of individuals such as Ayatollah Biladi.56 Yahosseini has also worked on Siraf as the city of dialogue among cultures.57 He even takes up the challenging task of presenting 5,000 years of the art of writing and the development of libraries in the port of Bushehr.58 Finally, his local monographs on Tangistan and Dashtistan are creditable works.59 Like many other figures in Iranian contemporary society, Yahosseini is a lone author, who has heroically taken up the challenge, working with immense patience and dedication to document the history of Bushehr in all its aspects. Institutional efforts to highlight the importance of the Persian Gulf and to reemphasize and “protect” its name have been vehemently pursued by research centers and academic institutions since the Islamic Revolution. When a few years ago the Cambridge Encyclopedia used the name “Arabian Gulf ”as one of its entries, outcries of protest were heard across the country.60 Numerous letters were addressed to Cambridge University Press, which eventually led the publisher to revert to the previous terminology. Because of governmental as well as institutional sponsorship of numerous seminars on the Persian Gulf, individual contributions are numerous and impressive, although quantity far exceeds originality and innovative research.61

Archival and Institutional Sources Bunyad-i Bushihr Shinasi (The Foundation for Bushehr Studies), introduced here as the Bushehri Circle, was the most serious and productive center on Persian Gulf studies in Iran. With a fraction of the budget of other institutions, it organized 12 national and international conferences during the past 20 years and published more than 50 volumes, nearly all of which relate to the Persian Gulf. The center was directed by Dr. Abd al-Karim Mashayikhi, who is responsible for the publication of at least 15 of these volumes. Hasan Zangana made significant contributions to the center by translating numerous works into Persian, and Ghulam-Husain Nizami62 edited several conference proceedings and has one book published to his The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 87 name. Iraj Nabipur, a physician by profession, has also actively engaged in the study and publication of the history of the diseases prevalent in the area. Fatima Mu’mini,63 the youngest member of the active Bushehri Circle, has one book published in her name. The Bunyad-i Bushihr Shinasi is currently inactive due to lack of funding. The National Archives of Iran was established on May 7, 1970,64 less than a decade before the Islamic Revolution. Since then it has attempted to identify, preserve and classify national documents and make them available to researchers. Among documents that are now identified, there exist more than 800 files on subjects related to the Persian Gulf, which date from the latter part of the Nasir al-Din Shah period (1260 Sh./1881) to the first decade after the Islamic Revolution (1368 Sh./1989).65 These documents do not comprise more than perhaps 10 percent of the total archival holdings on the Persian Gulf. The remaining 90 percent need to be identified, evaluated, and classified before being made accessible to the public. The majority of these are official governmental documents belonging to different agencies that have been transferred to the National Archives. A brief assessment of these documents clearly demonstrates that their content and volume closely correlates with political developments in the Persian Gulf.66 Bunyad-i Iranshinasi (The Iranology Foundation)67 was established in 1376 Sh./1997 with the simple aim of developing and encouraging Iranian studies. While the foundation has engaged in diverse activities, one of its chief concerns has been to encourage research and publications on the Persian Gulf. In recent years a significant amount of its resources have been dedicated to prepare the groundwork for this. Hasan Habibi, who headed the foundation from its inception until his death in 2013, was a former civil servant and a well-known public figure who accompanied Imam Khomeini from Paris to Iran during the formative year of the revolution. He continued to engage in public service until the end of the Rafsanjani presidency in 1997. Since 2003 the foundation has created an Information Bank for the Study of the Persian Gulf, and full-time staff and part-time students are employed to assist. Professor Vusuqi has contributed significantly in facilitating the Persian Gulf project and served as a leading authority at the foundation for a number of years. The foundation has also held several conferences on the Persian Gulf and published several books and seminar proceedings.68 Danishnama-yi Fars (The Fars Encyclopedia)69 is a research center directed by Kurush Kamali that seeks to promote research on the history, culture, and civilization of Fars. Kamali’s engagement in cultural activities dates back over 15 years to when he served as the director of the Bunyad-i Fars-Shinasi (The Foundation for Fars Studies). He has since been able to promote cultural studies extensively, to the point where he managed to have the annual commemorative days for Hafez and Sa‘di designated on the 88 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Persian calendar.70 Kamali began the encyclopedia project in 1375 Sh./1995 and was granted a permit for its activities from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1382 Sh./2003. The Danishnama aims to publish serious scholarship on Fars, and the Encyclopedia of Fars is one such project. Among works on the Persian Gulf already published by the Danishnama are Barrasi-yi Asar-i Paskarana-yi Khalij-i Fars (A Study of the Remains of the Hinterland Areas of the Persian Gulf) by Musayyib Amiri71 and Tarikh-i Muhajirat-i Aqvam dar Khalij-i Fars: Muluk-i Hormuz by Muhammad- Baqir Vusuqi, introduced earlier. With the assistance of Kurush Kamali and several academics, a valuable atlas in two volumes in English entitled Persian Gulf: Atlas of Old and Historical Maps (3000 B.C.–2000 A.D.) was published in 2005.72 The Danishnama has also allocated a special issue of the journal Fars-Shinakht73 to honor Iqtidari for his contributions to the study of the Persian Gulf. The Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS)74 in Tehran has contributed significantly to the field by holding annual seminars on the Persian Gulf and publishing its proceedings. As of March 2013, IPIS had organized a total of 21 conferences on the Persian Gulf, the last one held in Bandar Abbas. So far no fewer than eleven conference proceedings have been published. Only since the Holocaust fiasco of 2005 were the annual seminars interrupted. IPIS has also published five volumes of documents under the general title of Guzida-yi Asnad-i Khalij-i Fars (A Selection of Persian Gulf Documents), which are an important contribution to the field.75 The institute also has a number of significant publications in Persian and English on international relations and area studies. Although the activities of IPIS decreased sharply during the presidency of Ahmadinejad, the new director, Dr. Mostafa Zahrani, is now actively engaged in promoting the institute and changing its image. While its overall stance toward the study of the Persian Gulf is centrist, politically oriented, and tends to promote the official government line, the overall contributions of IPIS cannot be underestimated.

Local Studies Within recent years several dozen new publications have appeared by native authors on the local history of the Persian Gulf. The diversity of subjects is broad in scope, from local culinary arts to education, football, fisheries, and native cultures. Certain publishers, such as Navid of Shiraz76 and The Fars Encyclopedia grant priority to authors and subjects that emphasize local history and scholarship. However, because of the opacity that underlies all aspects of social and political life in contemporary Iran, it is often difficult The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 89 to ascertain to what measure policies are engineered and directed by the central government. For example, in a talk presented by Yadullah Shahibzadeh of the University of Oslo on local historiography,77 the author implied that there may be a deliberate policy of discouraging the Arabs of Khuzistan in conducting local research for fear of producing “dissensual historiographies and contradictory historical interpretations,” that might perhaps indicate a greater loyalty toward the Arab communities of the region than the Persians. Shahibzadeh lends support to this statement by comparing the publications of the Foundation for Bushehr Studies to the scanty number of publications on Khuzistan. There has been ample evidence in the past, both under the Pahlavis and during the Islamic Republic, of encouraging settlement of non-native Persians in provinces that are politically sensitive, thus “Persianizing” the region. This policy has been carried out in religiously and ethnically sensitive areas, such as Kurdistan, Baluchistan, Azerbaijan, and Khuzistan both during the Pahlavi regime as well as the Islamic Republic. Under the shah, the Azeris were banned from teaching Turkish in local schools, while there has been a deliberate effort to prevent the Kurds of Kurdistan from frater- nizing with the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey. The provincial governors have always been appointed from Tehran, which results in preferential treatment for the Shi‘i. However, while this policy has prevailed for decades and is still the general rule, it is not to be assumed that local and regional studies have necessarily followed suit. To assume that the loyalty of the Arabs of Khuzistan lies with the ethnic Arabs across the Persian Gulf is equally far-fetched. Of the 2 percent Arabic- speaking population of Iran, many live in Khuzistan Province and most are Shi‘i.78 When tested, they proved loyal to the Islamic Revolution, fighting against Saddam Hussein in the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Iran is a multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious community, although the Persians are believed to remain the majority. What makes Bushehr unique in comparison to other provinces in the south is its educational level, leading to the migration of many of its residents to the larger cities. As a result, Bushehris have displayed a greater degree of cosmopolitanism. Bushehr was the first to establish a modern school system. It supported the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) and before and during World War I it chose to take up arms against the British presence in Iran. Early on, Bushehr endorsed the rising tide of Iranian nationalism, while much of Khuzistan did not. There, many were divided in their loyalty toward the central government and the tribal chieftain Shaikh Khaz‘al, who had numerous supporters residing on both sides of the Persian Gulf.79 90 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Many of the scholarly efforts in Bushehr were endorsed and funded by individuals. A good case in point is the Danishnama-yi Ustan-i Bushihr (The Encyclopedia of Bushehr Province), developed and initially funded by Sayyid Ghasem Yahosseini,80 the dedicated Bushehri scholar introduced earlier.

Conclusion In general, the historical narratives of the Persian Gulf can be divided along chronological lines of the Qajars, the Pahlavis, and post-revolutionary Iran. In the first period, the scanty literature that is available is a reflection of the fact that control over the littoral was not particularly important. In the late Qajar period the literature was aimed at explaining the Persian Gulf, its islands, its people, and its history. In the Reza Shah period the shift is toward protecting the sovereignty of the region particularly against the British, and bringing unruly shaikhs and ethnic minorities under Iranian jurisdiction. With the consolidation of state power, protecting the motherland became a foremost priority and the emphasis is on nationalism and centralization. This trend continually increased under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, to the point that historical narratives veered into irredentism, with a continuing effort toward Persianizing the region. During the Islamic Republic, Iran has been faced with far more reaction from its Arab neighbors in the south, partly because of eight years of war with Iraq and partly because of its own behavior in the region. Undoubtedly since the Islamic Revolution Iran encountered far greater threats and challenges than it did before the revolution. Iran has since tried to regain its status as a regional power by maintaining a strong naval presence and reviving irredentism, albeit without the support of the United States. The historiography of modern Iran in general and that of the Persian Gulf in particular is highly politicized and is aimed at achieving specific goals and targets often approved or ordained by the government. In many conferences on the Persian Gulf papers are selected that sponsor or endorse a particular agenda approved by the state and the media.81 For example, not much encouragement is given to study the history of ethnic groups such as Arab residents of the northern littoral of the Persian Gulf82 or the marsh dwellers of the Shatt al-Arab.83 While there is much to be drawn from the local poetry and literary accounts of the native residents of the region, such studies are seldom encouraged. Another source that could be utilized is oral and local histories that to date remain untapped. Natives of the Persian Gulf littoral have their own local and historic accounts of their ancestors, often mixed with mythological tales of their chivalrous past in opposing the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British in the region. Even local newspapers of the past 100 years, with The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 91 the exception of Bushehr, have not been fully utilized. What needs to be achieved is to view the Iranian side of the Persian Gulf from the periphery rather than the center. The lacunae that exist are significant: while local studies have been conducted on ta‘ziya and music, for example, most of the smaller settlements on the Persian littoral—such as Jask, Lingeh, Kong, Asalu, and even Bandar Abbas—still have little recorded history. Historical- ethnographic studies such as those done by Sadid al-Saltana have not led to much follow-up, with Bushehr being the only exception. There are still no satisfactory historical accounts for any of the towns and villages on the littoral.84 In books and collected works published in Persian, most of the themes are repetitious and there is nothing significantly fresh or insightful. Often they repeat the mistakes of the past since they tend to duplicate each another. The works of those scholars who live outside Iran and who have the linguistic ability to peruse the available sources are at a distinct advantage, for they add an entirely new dimension. However, scholarship by non-Iranians on the Persian Gulf, particularly by Western scholars, is often dismissed as unreliable and funded for the promotion of the Arab cause, a case in point being the bickering over the name of the “Persian Gulf.” This attitude is very much in accordance with the conspiratorial vision that dominates many aspects of scholarship in modern Iran, to the point that scholars working on the region often hide their ongoing research from each other. Thus there tend to be few serious collective works on the Persian Gulf and the most original research is individually motivated. Despite increasing globalization, it is unlikely that the future trend in Iranian historiography will shift from extreme nationalism toward a greater degree of moderation and multilateralism. A willingness to recognize the existence of large groups of nonethnic Persians living in the proximity of the Persian Gulf is generally unacceptable, even by the academic community. The situation has deteriorated further with recent disputes over the naming of the body of water, and Iran’s position on upholding the use of “Persian Gulf” has become more tenacious than before. Iran’s domestic woes have also contributed significantly to the country’s weakened international standing. With the UN, and particularly US and EU sanctions in place followed by economic mismanagement by the Ahmadinejad government (2005–2013), the Iranian economy was on the verge of collapse. In such circumstances, the contest over the use of the “Persian Gulf” was temporarily eclipsed. Since his election in June 2013, President Rouhani has attempted to diplomatically contain the “Persian Gulf” controversy and improve relations with the other littoral states. In the meantime, the Arab League, a regional organization of 22 Arab states, and the GCC, comprising the six states on the southern shore of the 92 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Persian Gulf, are more adamant than ever on promoting the term “Arabian Gulf,” and in the present situation of heightened tension, Iran is in no position to seriously challenge their case. On this subject, Arabs have proven to be quite united and the “Arabian Gulf” is widely used in every aspect of Arab social and political life. In the ensuing media and cyber war between Iran and her neighbors, it is obvious that Iran, contrary to the Arab world, is on the defensive. Arab sym- pathizers have spent considerable amounts to make the “Arab Gulf” acceptable nomenclature in the cyber world, particularly on Google. However, in more recent years Iranian academic centers and institutions have adopted a consistent policy toward the Persian Gulf. The government has officially designated April 30 (10th of Urdibihisht) as the annual day commemorating the Persian Gulf. Historically this day corresponds to the one in the year 1622 when the Portuguese were expelled from the island of Hormuz by the forces of Shah Abbas (1588–1629).85 Despite the recent surge in the private and public sectors to emphasize the term “Persian Gulf,” research on the history of the region continues to be woefully lacking. What is known of the Portuguese, the Dutch, and later the British presence in the Persian Gulf is still limited primarily to the works of Western scholars that need to be translated and made available to Iranian students and academics. In recent years efforts have been made to update and revitalize Persian Gulf studies. For example, the Center for Diplomatic History of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Markaz-i Tarikh-i Diplumasi-yi Vizarat-i Kharija-yi Iran) has made an effort to compile several volumes of documents on the Persian Gulf. Some of these have been published in their quarterly journal while others have been made accessible to research centers on request. However, the documents need to be fully identified and indexed before they can be utilized. In addition, a biannual conference on the Persian Gulf is sponsored by Tehran University. The first one was organized in 2007 and the proceedings were edited by Muhammad-Baqir Vusuqi as Khalij-i Fars: Farhang va Tamaddun (The Persian Gulf: Culture and Civilization), published by Tehran University Press in 2008. Further conferences were held in 2009 and 2012. These conferences have been organized in an attempt to encourage research on the Persian Gulf among young promising scholars. The coordination among different sections of the government, cultural institutions, and universities has also improved in recent years, though many of these efforts have been clouded by internal economic and social problems. The Vizarat-i Irshad (Ministry of Culture and Guidance) has supported publication of books on the Persian Gulf, while Iranian television, fully under government supervision, has been encouraged to produce more films and documentaries on the subject. Khana-yi Kitab (The House of Books),

Table 3.1 Archived Documents on the Persian Gulf at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs* ah 1263–1340/ ad 1847–1921

(1) Prohibition of passage and slave trade in the Persian Gulf. (2) British occupation of Herat. 1263–1299/ The Qajar Period (3) Discussions with French representative in Tehran. (4) Bahrain’s situation. (5) Herat reoccupied. 1847–1882 Muhammad Shah Qajar (6) British interference in Bushehr. (7) Iran’s naval shipping in the Persian Gulf. (1) Bahrain incidents. (2) Opening of the Suez Canal and its Impact on Iran. (3) Ottoman activities 1299–1340/ Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar against Iran (numerous citations of the possibility of Ottoman attack against Bahrain). (4) The 1882–1921 (The first phase, before 1882) need for the development of strong shipping in the Persian Gulf. (5) Slavery in the Persian Gulf. (6) Contract for telegraphic line in the Persian Gulf. (7) Railroad contract. (8) Crop situation in Bushehr. (1) Ship building for Iran. (2) Mirza Malkum’s telegraph on trade. (3) Raising the Iranian flag in 1299–1340/ Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (The all Iranian islands of the Persian Gulf. (4) Customs and duties. (5) Lord Curzon’s voyage to Iran 1882–1921 second phase, from 1882 to (several instances). (6) US situation in the Persian Gulf. (7) Concession on pearl fishing in the assassination in 1896) Persian Gulf. (8) Quarantine in the south. (1) Pearl fishing. (2) British conflict with Iranian merchants and the Iranian Darya Baigi. (3) Listing Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar of foreigners living or stationed in southern ports. (4) Numerous cases of quarantine. (5) British (1313–1324/1896–1907) activities against Iran: 1899–1900. (6) Concern about British encouragement of Iranians to change their nationality. (7) British paper regarding the role of Britain in Iran. (8) British engagement with pirates. (9) Lord Curzon in the Persian Gulf (many citations). (10) Conflict with the British over the three islands of Greater and Lesser Tunb and Abu Musa. (1) Postal issues. (2) Contraband (especially arms). (3) Fishing for sponge. (4) Epidemics and plague 1324–1340/ The Constitutional Period to the in the Persian Gulf, in particular in Bahrain, health issues, quarantine, salary of medical staff, an 1906–1921 Coup of 1921 increase of medical services particularly for 1906–1920. (5) British-Russian conflict in the region. (6) Customs and British-German differences in the region. (7) Intensification of British presence in the Persian Gulf. (8) Theft of British goods in the Persian Gulf. (9) Effort to draw up borders. (10) Imports and Exports, the need to use Persian stamps.

* Documents archived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do not extend beyond 1299 Sh./1921, which is the year of the coup and the rise of Reza Khan.

Table 3.2 Documents on the Persian Gulf at the National Archives of Iran* 1260–1368 Sh./ad1881–1989

(1) British role vis-à-vis the port cities of the south. (2) Iranian ports and internal administration. 1260–1300 Sh./ The Qajar Period Payments of deferred salary to local administrators in the south. (3) Smuggled goods in the 1881–1921 Persian Gulf. (1) Quarantine for the prevention of contagious disease in Iran. Documents on hospitals and 1300–1320 Sh./ The Pahlavi Period medication for the sick. Documents regarding conditions of the public. Documents of students 1921–1941 (Reza Shah Pahlavi) registered in schools. (2) Documents on the prevention of smuggled goods entering into the country. (3) Lists of legal goods that can enter the country. Documents on duties. (4) Postal service and salaries of employees of custom services. (5) List of Iranian exports. (6) Purchase of ships by the government and purchase of goods necessary for development, such as cement. (7) Fishing for pearls.

(1) Issues pertaining to World War II, currency issues and the importation of essential goods. 1320–1357 Sh./ The Pahlavi Period (2) Presence of the United States in the region. (In the 1960s, the involvement of the United States 1941–1979 (Mohammad Reza Shah in the region is clearly evident in the documents.) (3) Talk of war-inflicted damages in southern Pahlavi) Iran. (4)Many documents on the construction and development projects in the Persian Gulf such as the ports of Chabahar, Bandar Shahpur, and Bushehr. (5) Significant attention is paid to fishing and proper use of fisheries in the south in the mid-1950s. (6) Articles on reasons why Iranians migrate to the southern littoral of the Persian Gulf and how this should be discouraged. (7) Cartography of the Persian Gulf. (8) Educational issues of the south. (9) Emphasis on building better roads between cities and regions in the south. (1) Most documents relate to the Iran–Iraq war. (2) Development projects in the south. 1357–1368 Sh./ The Islamic Republic (3) Significant emphasis on the use of the “Persian Gulf” in all governmental correspondences. 1979–1989

* The approximate number of documents identified and listed on the computer in the National Archives is 800 files. These are estimated to be no more than 10 percent of the total documents available. The remaining 90% have neither been identified nor made available for public use. The documents range from 1881 to 1989 and follow closely the political events and developments in Iran and the region. The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 95

Table 3.3 Articles on the Persian Gulf in the newspaper Ittela’at* 1306–1380 Sh./ad 1927–2001

(1) Smuggled goods in the Persian Gulf. Reza Shah The Pahlavi (2) British presence in the region (high (1306–1320 Sh./ Period frequency). (3) Bahrain issue, Iran’s 1927–1941) territorial claims, the role of the British in the separation of Bahrain, Iraq’s role in the issue of Bahrain. (1) The Arab League and its relations with Mohammad Reza Shah The Pahlavi Iran. (2) The dispatch of American (1320–1357 Sh./1941–1979) Period troops to the Persian Gulf. (3) The problem of southern tribes in Bushehr. (4) The role of Iraq in the region. (5) Oil. (6) Extensive presence of the British in the region. (7) In the 1960s numerous articles on the development of southern Iran. (8) British exit from the Persian Gulf region. (9) Separation of Bahrain from Iran. (10) Iran’s relations with the shaikhdoms of the Persian Gulf region. (11) Nationalization of Iraqi oil. (1) The question of the three Persian Post-Islamic Republic Period The Islamic Gulf islands and Iran’s claims. (2) The (1957 Sh.-/ 1979-) Republic Iran–Iraq war (numerous references). (3) In the mid-1980s the problem of security in the Persian Gulf is repeatedly discussed in the paper, while in the 1990s the question of stability in the Persian Gulf and Iran’s relations with her Arab neighbors are primary concerns. (4) America’s presence in the Persian Gulf a source of serious concern.

* The daily newspaper Ittela’at, published in Tehran, was reviewed for 20 years beginning with 1306 Sh./1927 (1307, 1309, 1311, 1313, 1321, 1322, 1323, 1324, 1325, 1340, 1341, 1342, 1343, 1348, 1351, 1359, 1365, 1375, 1380) and the content of the articles was listed and then categorized. The choices of the years were primarily determined by the availability of the newspaper for that year. Ittela’at’ is the oldest published newspaper that has continuously been published since 1305 Sh./1926. associated with the Ministry of Guidance, has been asked to publish books on the Persian Gulf and the periodical Kitab-i Mah-i Tarikh va Jughrafiya (The Monthly Journal on History and Geography) has dedicated special issues to the history of the Persian Gulf. Centers for the study of the Persian Gulf have already been instituted at Tehran and Isfahan universities and since March 2011 the Ministry of 96 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Guidance has agreed to hold a biannual event on the Persian Gulf, granting due recognition to those who have contributed to the promotion of Persian Gulf studies since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The first such event was held in Bandar Abbas on April 30, 2011, the annual Persian Gulf day. There are glimmers of hope and progress for the future historiography of the Persian Gulf. The reasons are clear. Young scholars are digging up untapped documentary sources and are making them available for further scholarship. One must commend both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Archives for finally investing in the classification and documentation of the primary sources. These documents are shedding new light on all aspects of the Persian Gulf. The three summary tables appended here86 portray a very clear picture of the state of the archival material. Iran’s increasing interest and involvement in the Persian Gulf closely corresponds to its growing consciousness as a nation and with its nation-building process. These documents tend to become more and more political as the region becomes further politicized and the neighboring Arab states emphasize their sovereignty and political presence in the region.

Notes

Without the gracious help of colleagues and former students, preparing this chapter while teaching abroad would have been an impossible endeavor. I am grateful foremost to Sayyid Ghasem Yahosseini (Ghasim Yahusaini) for his remarkable command of the Persian sources. To my former student Dr. Maryam Sheipari, currently assistant professor of history at the University of Zahidan, I am equally indebted for coordinating and collecting the required references on short notice. Her resourcefulness at every stage of this research has been remarkable. Others who helped me in the process were Dr. Ali-Akbar Safipur, the former director of the National Archive and Library of Fars. He was able to provide me with an index of the available documents on the Persian Gulf. My former students at Shiraz University, Raziya Rahpaima, Fatima Mu’mini, and Laila Muradi, were equally helpful while my colleague and friend, Kurush Kamali, generously made his private library at the Danishnama-yi Fars (Fars Encyclopedia) available to me. To all of them I remain eternally grateful.

1. Hafez F. Farmayan, “Observations on Sources for the Study of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Iranian History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974): 32–49; quote is on 32. 2. See Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 178, 185, 191 and Ervand Abrahamian, “Kasravi: The Integrative Nationalist of Iran,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (Oct. 1973): 271–95. 3. Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 116. The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 97

4. Adamiyyat’s brief manuscript in the early years of the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s titled Ashuftagi dar Fikr-i Tarikhi (Confusion in Historical Thinking) created great consternation among Iranian academics and bureaucrats. He was among the first to point out the myths and distortions that underlie Iranian historiography. Iranian history is often written by overzealous writers and ideologues who have little or no concept of history and have little understanding or knowledge of the documentary sources. 5. Abd al-Hadi Ha’iri (d. 23 Tir 1372/ June 23, 1993) was a major Iranian historian. He also faced significant persecution as he tried to maintain his status as a scholar in the early years of the Islamic Republic. For more information see: Gholam R. Vatandoust, “Dialectics of Cultural Imperialism, Westoxication and Social Reaction in Iranian Historiography: The Historical Writings of Abdul- Hadi Hairi,” Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, vol. 9, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 27–46; also Muhammad-Husain Manzur al-Ajdad, “Ta’ammuli bar barkhi vizhagi-ha, didgah-ha va amuza-ha-yi duktur Abd al-Hadi Ha’iri” (A Reflection on Some Specifics and Viewpoints of the Teachings of Dr. Abd al-Hadi Ha’iri), Ganjina, vols. 2 & 3, nos. 10–11 (1372/1993): 70. 6. For a study of Shaikh Fazl-Allah Nuri see A. Ha’iri, Shi’ism and Constitutionalism in Iran (Leiden: Brill, 1977). 7. All diacritical marks are omitted in this chapter. 8. The islands of Abu Musa, and Greater and Lesser Tunb. 9. See Mansura Nizam-Mafi and Sayyid Sa‘id Mir-Muhammad-Sadiq, eds., Jiniral Siminuv dar khidmat-i Iran-i asr-i Qajar va jang-i Hirat, 1236–1266 A.H./1821– 1850 (General Semino in the Service of Iran in the Qajar Period and the Herat War) (Tehran: Anjuman-i Iranshinasi-yi Faransa dar Iran va Nashr-i Tarikh-i Iran, 1375 Sh./1996), 127–28. 10. This small volume of no more than 122 pages was edited and first published by Manuchihr Sutuda (Chapkhana-yi Gilan, 1367 Sh./1988). 11. Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1368 Sh./1989. 12. Ibrahim Kaziruni, Tarikh-i Banadir va Jazayir-i Khalij-i Fars (The History of Ports and Islands of the Persian Gulf ), ed. Manuchihr Sutuda (Tehran, 1367 Sh./1988). 13. The Farsnama was edited in two volumes by Dr. Mansur Rastigar Fasa’i (Tehran: Intisharat-i Amir Kabir, 1367 Sh./1988). The new edition made this monumental primary source readily accessible to students. The work has since gone through a second edition and the index further expanded. There is also an English translation: History of Persia Under Qajar Rule, trans. Heribert Busse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972). In this outstanding work the author, Mirza Hasan Husaini Fasa’i, refers to Firdowsi’s Shahnama in his effort to determine the history and ethnology of the Persian Gulf (p. 142). He also makes references to Bahrain, identifying it as the first territory that came under Muslim control (p. 171), and introduces many of the port cities and islands of the Persian Gulf. For more information on the book and author, see “Fars-Nama-ye Naseri” by Heribert Busse in Encyclopædia Iranica IX (1999): 374–76. 14. Muhammad-Husain Sa‘adat, Tarikh-i Bushihr (History of Bushehr), ed. Abd al-Rasul Khairandish and Imad al-Din Shaikh al-Hukama’i (Tehran: Miras Maktub, 1390 Sh./2011). Another manuscript, also by Muhammad-Husain Sa‘adat, has been edited by the same authors and is titled Tarikh-i Jazayir va Banadir-i Khalij-i Fars (History of the Islands and Ports of the Persian Gulf ). 98 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

Scheduled to appear in 2015, the book is jointly published by Intisharat-i Kazeruniyyeh and Miras Maktub. 15. Edited by Ahmad Iqtidari, 1362 Sh./1983. Publisher not available. 16. Edited by Ahmad Iqtidari (Tehran: Duniya-yi Ketab, 1368 Sh./1989). 17. Edited by Ahmad Iqtidari (Tehran: Duniya-yi Ketab, 1370 Sh./1991). 18. Edited by Ahmad Iqtidari (Tehran: Jahan-i Mu‘asir, 1371 Sh./1992). 19. Asad-Allah Yamin al-Mulk, Tahavulat-i Siyasi-yi Safihat-i Junub-i Iran: Majmu‘a-yi Guzarish-ha-yi Karguzaran-i Banadir va Jazayir-i Maskuni-yi Khalij-i Fars (Political Developments of Southern Areas of Iran: Reports of the Officials of the Ports and Inhabited Islands of the Persian Gulf ), ed. Muhammad-Baqir Vusuqi (Tehran: Markaz-i Asnad va Tarikh-i Diplumasi), 1381 Sh./1992. 20. Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Iran (London: Macmillan, 1981). 21. See Tables 3.2 and 3.3. 22. The book was republished in 1971 in a limited edition on the occasion celebrating the 2500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy (Tehran: Bunyad-i Pahlavi, 1971). 23. Tehran, 1313 Sh./1934. 24. The 2nd edition of the work was published by Intisharat-i Papirus, 1357 Sh./ 1978. 25. See Sayyid Ghasem Yahosseini, Ra’is Ali Dilvari (Tehran: Nashr-i Shiraza, 1376 Sh./1997). 26. For a more recent publication on Ayatollah Sayyid Abd-Allah Biladi and the growing militarism and modernism during the early years of Reza Shah’s rule see Sayyid Ghasem Yahosseini, Chand Risala-yi Siyasi (Some Political Essays) (Bushihr: Intisharat-i Bushihr, 1382 Sh./2003), 329–444. 27. A book on the life and works of Shaikh Abdul-Karim Sa‘adat was recently published. See Ali Haqshinas, Baniyan-i Sa‘adat: Ahval va Andisha-yi Baniyan Madrasa-yi Sa‘adat-i Bushehr (Founders of Good Fortune: The Circumstances and Thoughts of the Founders of the Sa‘adat School of Bushehr) (Bushihr: Intisharat-i Shuru‘, 1386 Sh./2007), 52–55. 28. Tehran: Chapkana-yi Payam, n.d. 29. Shiraz: Chap-i Jahan-nama, 1333 Sh./1954. 30. Tehran: Shirkat Sahami-yi Intishar, 1365 Sh./1986. 31. Tehran: Shirkat Intisharat-i Ilmi va Farhangi, 1372 Sh./1993. 32. Seminar-i Khalij-i Fars, 2 vols. (Tehran: Sazman-i Sam‘i va Basari-yi Hunar-ha-yi Kishvar, 1342 Sh./1963). 33. Tehran: Intisharat-i Franklin, 1345 Sh./1966. 34. Tehran: Intisharat-i Anjuman-i Asar-i Melli, 1348 Sh./1969. 35. Tehran: Shirkat-i Tahqiq-i Haml va Nagl Iran, 1364 Sh./1985. 36. Tehran: Chapkhana-yi Ruzana-yi Umid, 1325 Sh./1946. 37. Tehran: Chapkhana-yi Tabish, 1327 Sh./1948. 38. Tehran: Chapkhana-yi Tabish, l338 Sh./1959. 39. Tehran: Chap-i Shari‘at va Sharq, 1349 Sh./1970. 40. Mutale‘ati dar Bab-i Bahrain, Jazayir va Savahil-i Khalij-i Fars (Some Studies of Bahrain, the Islands and the Shores of the Persian Gulf) (Tehran: Majlis, 1328 Sh./1949). 41. Tarikh-i Siyasi-yi Khalij-i Fars (A Political History of the Persian Gulf ) (Tehran: Shirkat Nisbi-yi Kanun-i Kitab, 1344 Sh./1965). The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 99

42. Didari az Shaikh-nishin-ha-yi Khalij-i Fars (A Visit to the Shaikhdoms of the Persian Gulf ) (Tehran: Iran Chap, 1345 Sh./1966). 43. Jazira-yi Kharg (The Island of Kharg) (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Ibn Sina, 1347 Sh./1968). 44. Bastak va Khalij-i Fars (Bastak and the Persian Gulf ) (Tehran: n.p., 1343 Sh./1964). 45. Safarnama-yi Junub: Sayr va Safari dar Kinara-ha va Jazayir-i Khalij-i Fars va Darya-yi Uman (Travels to the South: Voyages to the Shores and Islands of the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman) (Tehran: Chap-i Pakhsh, 1352 Sh./1973). 46. Jughrafiya-yi Tarikhi-yi Khalij va Darya-yi Pars (Historical Geography of the Gulf and Persian Sea) (Khurramshahr: Kitab-furushi-yi Mirian, 1352 Sh./1974). 47. Sayr dar Qalamru-yi Gumruk-i Iran: az Sistan ta Khuzistan (Overview of the Jurisdiction of Iranian Customs: From Sistan to Khuzistan) (Tehran: n.p., 1354 Sh./1975). 48. Shiraz: Danishnama-yi Fars, 1380 Sh./2001. 49. Tehran: SAMT, 1384 Sh./2005. 50. Tehran: Pazhuhishkada-yi Tarikh-i Islam, 1389 Sh./2010. 51. Tehran: Ata’i Publishing Co., 1379 Sh./2000. In this work, Mujtahidzada devotes chapter 4 to demonstrating that the British were actively engaged in the Persian Gulf to cleanse it from the influence of the “Persian Language.” 52. Hamid Asadpur teaches history at Persian Gulf University of Bushehr. His PhD dissertation was recently published in book form: Tarikh-i Iqtisadi va Siyasi-yi Khalij-i Fars dar Asr-i Afshariyya va Zandiyya (Economic and Political History of the Persian Gulf during the Afsharid and the Zand Periods) (Tehran: Intisharat-i Mu’assisa-yi Tahqiqat va Tawsi‘a-yi Ulum Insani, 1387 Sh./2008). 53. Sad Sal Matbu‘at-i Bushihr: Rukn-i Asasi dar Tarikh-i Matbu‘at-i Bushihr (One Hundred Years of the Press in Bushehr: The Essential Foundation in the History of the Press in Bushehr), (1374 Sh./1995). Also, Asnad-i Matbu‘ati-yi Junbish-i Muqavimat-i Junub-i Iran, 1333–34 (Press Documents of the Resistance Movement of Southern Iran), 1382 Sh./2003. 54. Mir Muhanna Ru-dar-ru-yi Ingilisi-ha va Hulandi-ha dar Khalij-i Fars (The Confrontation of Mir Muhanna with the British and the Dutch in the Persian Gulf ), 1374 Sh./1995; Mubarizat-i Ra’is-Ali Dilvari (The Resistance of Ra’is-Ali Dilvari), 1374 Sh./1995; Ra’is-Ali Dilvari, Tajavuz-i Nizami-yi Britania va Muqavimat-i Junub (Ra’is Ali Dilvari, the British Military Intrusion and the Southern Resistance), 1376 Sh./1997; and Shaikh Husain Khan-i Chahkutahi (Shaikh Husain Khan of Chahkutah), 1376 Sh./1997. 55. See Pishgaman-i Mubariza ba Britania dar Junub-i Iran (The Forerunners of Resistance to the British in Southern Iran), 1373 Sh./1994; and Bushihr, Du Qarn Muqavimat alayh-i Isti‘mar (Bushehr, Two Centuries of Resistance against Colonialism), 1383 Sh./2004. 56. There are at least three different volumes on Ayatollah Biladi: Nigahi bi Mubarizat va Andisha-ha-yi Ayatollah Sayyid Abd al-Aziz Biladi (A Look at the Struggles and Thoughts of Ayatollah Sayyid Abdul Aziz Biladi), 1371 Sh./1992; Lavayih va Savanih: Yaddasht-ha-yi Ayatollah Biladi az Jang-i Jahani-yi Avval dar Khalij-i Fars va Bushihr (The Writings of Ayatollah Biladi on the First World War in the Persian Gulf and Bushihr), 1373 Sh./1994 and Chand Risala-yi Siyasi az Ayatollah Biladi (A Number of Political Treatises from Ayatollah Biladi), 1382 Sh./1993. 100 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

57. Siraf, Shahr-i Guft va Gu-yi Farhang-ha (Siraf, the City of Dialogue among Cultures), 1384 Sh./2005. 58. Panj Hazar Sal Tarikh-i Nigarish va Kitabkhana-ha-yi Bandar-i Bushihr (5000 Years of the History of Writing and the Libraries of the Port of Bushehr), 1386 Sh./2007. 59. See Zuhur va Suqut-i Khandan-i Tangistani (The Rise and Fall of the Tangistani Clan), 1387 Sh./2008; Mutali‘at dar bab-i Tangistan (A Study of Tangistan), 1387 Sh./2008; and Dashtistan az Nihzat-i Milli ta Inqilab-i Islami (Dashtistan: From the National Movement to the Islamic Revolution), 1387 Sh./2008. 60. See Gholamreza Vatandoust, “In Defense of the Persian Gulf: A Response to the Cambridge Encyclopedia,” The Iranian Journal of International Affairs IX, no. IV (Winter 1997/78): 620–27. 61. See for instance the many works of Iraj Afshar-Sistani. Others worthy of mention are Husain Nurbaksh, Ali-Asghar Kazimi, and Muhammad-Riza Hafiznia. 62. Naqsh-i Basra va Banadir-i Karana-ha-yi Shumali-yi Khalij-i Fars dar Ravabit-i Iran va Usmani (1639–1847) [The Role of Basra and the Ports of the Northern Littoral of the Persian Gulf in Iranian and Ottoman Relations (1639–1847)] (Intisharat-i Bushihr, 1383 Sh./2004). 63. Siyasat-ha-yi Britania dar Khalij-i Fars (1919–1939) [British Policies in the Persian Gulf (1919–1939)] (Tehran: Mu’assisa-yi Tarikh-i Mu‘asir-i Iran, 1387 Sh./2008). 64. 17 Urdibihisht 1349/May 7, 1970, is regarded as National Archives Day in Iran and is marked as such on all Iranian calendars. 65. For the classification of these documents see Table 3.2 (Documents on the Persian Gulf at the National Archives of Iran), in which an attempt is made to group them on the basis of the Qajar, Pahlavi, and the Islamic Republic periods. 66. Ibid. For example, documents belonging to the Reza Shah period in Table 3.2 concentrate significantly on health issues, quarantine, smuggled goods, exports and goods needed for development. It shows the government in charge and responsible for centralizing and controlling the state. It also shows a nation in the making. 67. Bunyad-i Iranshinasi is a research institute affiliated with the office of the president of the Islamic Republic and is administered by a board of trustees. See www. iranology.ir 68. Books published by the Iranology Foundation include: Muhammad-Hasan Ganji, Javad Safinizhad and Muhammad-Baqir Vusuqi, Atlas-i Naqsha-ha-yi Tarikhi-yi Khalij-i Fars (Atlas of Historical Maps of the Persian Gulf) (Tehran: Bunyad-i Iran-Shinasi, 1386 Sh./2007); and Majmu‘a-yi Maqalat-i Khalij-i Fars (A Collection of Articles on the Persian Gulf ) (Tehran: Bunyad-i Iran Shinasi, 1386 Sh./2007). 69. www.fars-encyclopedia.com 70. The annual day for Hafiz is designated as Mihr 20/October 12 while the annual day for Sa‘di is the 1st of Urdibihisht/April 21. 71. Danishnama-yi Fars, 1384 Sh. /2005. 72. Tehran: Center for Documents and Diplomatic History with the cooperation of Tehran University, 2005. The atlas is supervised by an editorial board which includes Mohammad-Reza Sahab, Reza Nazarahari, Kourosh Kamali-Sarvestani, The Historiography of the Persian Gulf M 101

Javad Safinejad, Ali Akbar Mahmoudian, Gholamreza Vatandoust, Farhad F. Tehrani, and Houshang Qassemi. 73. See the collection of articles in Fars-Shinakht, the quarterly cultural research journal of the Bunyad-i Fars Shinasi, vol. 2, no. 4 (Fall 1379 Sh./2000). 74. IPIS, known in Persian as Daftar Mutali‘at-i Siyasi va Bain al-Milali, is a well- established center and is the academic face of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was established by Ali-Akbar Vilayati in September 1983 as a training center for young Iranian diplomats and a forum for international scholars to meet and exchange ideas with Iranian diplomats. Most international conferences were held at this center, and it engaged in the publication of numerous periodicals and monographs on politics and international relations. However, its relationship with other research centers and the world academic community was seriously compromised when it organized the infamous Holocaust Conference in December 2005. 75. The volumes were published from 1993 to 1996. The first covers the islands of the Persian Gulf between the years 1280 and 1320 Sh./1901–1941; Volume 2 consists of a collection of documents on the relationship of Iran with neighboring Persian Gulf countries and their internal politics. Volume 3 is a selection of Persian Gulf Documents from 1320 to 1340 Sh./1941–1961. Volume 4 is a collection of documents covering the years 1341–1357 Sh./1962–1978 and Volume 5 is a selection of Persian Gulf documents on the islands of Bahrain, Kharg, and Hormuz. 76. On numerous occasions Navid Publishers was named the best provincial (shah- ristani) publisher of the year, particularly for granting priority to local and regional publications. 77. “The Implications of Local Historiography in Iran,” presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (San Diego, California, November 18–21, 2010). 78. CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world- factbook/geos/ir.html) 79. On the eve of Reza Khan’s coup in 1921, Iran was on the verge of disintegration. In Khuzistan, Shaikh Khaz‘al, who was supported by the British, ruled the province as a virtual British protectorate. The threat and fear of the oil-rich province of Khuzistan breaking away from Iran has continued to the present. 80. A few years ago Mr. Yahosseini set forth on the monumental task of publishing a set of 110 monographs on Bushehr concentrating primarily on local history, culture, cities and personalities. In this huge project, which is not a publication of Bunyad-i Bushihr Shinasi, about 35 scholars and authors, primarily from Bushehr, contribute. To date nearly 40 volumes, all in Persian, have been published and they include such titles as Physical and Human Geography of Bushehr, Fisheries of Coastal Bushehr, Local Poets of Bushehr, Cinema in Bushehr, The Portuguese in Bushehr, History of Printing and Publishing Houses of Bushehr, History of Theatre in Bushehr, etc. The first six volumes were financed by the editor, Yahosseini, and published in 2008. Since these initial volumes were well received and underwent a second printing in less than a year, The Art Center of Bushehr agreed to publish the remaining volumes, but subsequently has been unable to keep its promise due to the financial crisis. 102 M Gholam Reza Vatandoust

81. In a 2005 conference on the Persian Gulf at Isfahan University, when a nonna- tive speaker indicated that there should not be an overwhelming reaction to the name of the Persian Gulf since after all the interest of all countries is at stake, and Muslims are after all “brothers,” and should live together in peace and harmony, there was an outcry from all quarters among the audience. At most international conferences even the “Gulf” terminology is not tolerated. 82. See Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, “The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in Lawrence G. Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 129–45. 83. Often the term Shatt al-Arab is replaced by its Persian equivalent, Arvand Rud. 84. The prolific scholar Willem Floor has written a number of studies of cities along the Persian Gulf littoral, based largely on Persian sources, including Bandar Abbas, Minab, Bander Lingeh, Bushehr, Borazjan, and Kazerun in his series, The Persian Gulf. See The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, the Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930; Bandar Abbas: The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran; and Links with the Hinterland: Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka’b and Bandar Abbas (all from Mage Publishers, Washington, DC, published in 2010, 2011, and 2011 respectively). 85. The Portuguese presence in the Persian Gulf is fully covered by João Teles e Cunha in Chapter 11 of Potter, ed., The Persian Gulf in History. 86. Table 3.1 is a listing of Archived Documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1263–1340 / 1847–1921) chronologically grouped together according to the reign of each shah. Table 3.2 is a listing of The Documents on the Persian Gulf at the National Archives of Iran (1260–1368 Sh./1881–1989). Table 3.3 consists of articles on the Persian Gulf published in the newpaper Ittila‘at (1306–1380 Sh. / 1927–2001). CHAPTER 4

Narrating the Gulf: Literary Evidence for History

Muhsin al-Musawi

The Discursive Intersection It is a given nowadays to speak of history and narrative as basically sharing the same properties and directions. Borderlines are no longer as strongly demarcated as they were in the heyday of literary writing in the last century, when “new critics” exercised close analysis of the makeup of texts without contexts. With the conspicuous rhetorical turn in the humanities and social sciences under the strident poststructuralist theories and global economic decentralization processes there is more conflation than separation. Narrative and history sound synonymously applicable to any art that has something to tell: an anecdote, a happening, even a piece of news. Hayden White’s writings were received with this understanding among generations of scholars who were told that in each work of fiction there is a blurred component of hi/story.1 Gérard Genette and the French school provide many sophisticated proposals in this context.2 The dominating postmodernist mode with a strong deconstructionist bent can no longer accept a one-sided view of reading that deprives readers from an understanding that is wider than the mechanics of a text. This may fail to account for the place of a text in knowledge formation processes; the text assumes more meaning in relation to other texts that make up an attitude or a movement. This is a dynamic that operates no less in narrative than history. Perhaps, history focuses on a past or a present to reconstruct or fabricate, whereas narrative proper cares more for the mechanics of writing and less for historicity. 104 M Muhsin al-Musawi

Politics of Modern History History is not a given, but a deliberate reordering of events and conclusions. As the Egyptian nationalist Saʻd Zaghlul (d. 1927) told the writer Taha Husayn in 1917, history is made by the powerful.3 It excludes the oppressed, as the Palestinian teacher of Saʻid Abu al-Nahs notices in Emile Habibi’s masterpiece The Secret Life, adding: “Conquerors, my son, consider as true history only what they have themselves fabricated.”4 History and narrative are one and the same in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, for the British Lord Kitchener denies the Sudanese leader the right to fight for his land. In his reported address to the captured Sudanese leader, Lord Kitchener takes it for granted that Sudan is his property as long as it is under British rule.5 Conversely, postcolonial Arab writings like these retain the history of the nation. Colonial history, for instance, depicts as piracy the native efforts in the Gulf region to protect and preserve the integrity of its waters; it is up to native intellectuals, leaders of thought, and national activists to debate the whole myth of piracy, a commitment that Shaykh Dr. Sultan Bin Muhammad Al Qasimi undertakes in his book.6

Endangered Oral Tradition No matter how valid is the concept of history as narrative that approximates fiction for the reconstruction of modern genealogies, there are scholars who still doubt the relevance of fictional works in the makeup and understanding of modern history. Despite the recent reliance on literary texts by scholars of intellectual history, recognition of literature as evidence of history is still in the making. Especially in areas where writing and formal education began to take root only in the 1950s, there is shortage of documentary evidence that is badly needed to build up a case for a history of the Gulf. Custodians of tradition, established families, and scribes of the Qasimi alliance that dominated parts of the region before the British onslaught have kept up a lively oral record passed from one generation to another, but its survival as a rich corpus trusted only to memory has already begun to suffer the ravages of time. In 2004 in a course on Gulf literature offered to Emirati and Gulf residents, I formed a team of young Emirati students to record, tape, and document the recollections of elderly people, from the desert and the sea coast. Led by an Emirati, the team gathered a significant documentary record, mostly on tape, from an elderly generation with waning and feeble voices who speak of their own times when oil was not in the picture of an otherwise harsh and challenging life. Although oil was discovered earlier, British companies began exporting Abu Dhabi’s only in 1962, to effect thereafter a structural transformation Narrating the Gulf M 105 in the economy from a traditional and impoverished one of fishing, pearl diving, and maritime transportation to a gradually affluent one tied to the regional and global economy. Under the judicious guidance of Shaikh Zayid Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi (d. 2004), the seven emirates of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al Qaiwain were brought together in 1971 in a federation run by a Supreme Council of seven amirs who maintain their sovereignty, but with a unified foreign policy, security, and law. Directing large oil revenues into education, health care, and development of infrastructure, he set the path for these emirates to grow and become affluent societies despite their small populations. A similar change was already in effect in the rest of the Gulf region. The extensive use of foreign labor compensates for this demographic scarcity. In the last five decades, commencing soon after 1971, the accelerated pace of transformation was so effective that all the emirates, even the less wealthy ones, witnessed an enormous urban and economic transformation with significant impact on geographical space, economy, transportation, lifestyles, manners, and customs. Indeed, the change is so noticeable that Dubai, for one, turned into the cosmopolitan financial hub of the whole region. The impact on manners and lifestyles is inevitable, and the first perhaps to notice it were Emirati and Gulf writers. There is a substantial literary production that tries to capture the past, not as mere nostalgia that surfaces in narratives of yearning for a lost life of ease and intimacy, but also as a complicated encounter with far-reaching consequences on life patterns, culture, and thought. Although a nostalgic strain distinguishes the recollections of the elderly who are always in the background of Gulf writings, the past assumes its complexity through juxtaposition with shocking economic transformation and change. To recall a past that rapidly departs at the advent of a merciless present, a considerable narrative of historical reconstruction has appeared that is dis- tinctively unconcerned with national heroics. The latter is usually left to the old generation of poets or the new ones who, although witnessing the emergence of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the other Gulf states, strongly retain the pulse of Arab nationalism. Narrative reconstruction entails an engagement with social life, topographical change, and human aspirations or agonies. Less concerned with postmodernist travesties, parody, truncated time, lack of sequence, and other techniques, the Emirati or Gulf short story writer or novelist takes from modernity its proneness to images and signs that evoke a new reality, which is set in sharp relief against a plateau of a recollected past. The past itself is not absent as yet from the lives of parents and grandparents. In the Omani Ahmad Bilal’s “Voice from the Earth,” for example, the past exemplifies a closely knit community of mutual care and affection where there is always succor and support for those who pass 106 M Muhsin al-Musawi through some ordeal.7 The wife Khadijah in the same story continues to take care of the paralyzed widow whom her late husband Isma‘il brings home to be supported and taken care of along with her young daughter. Another Omani writer, Ali Muhammad Rashid, writes what amounts to a reverse or counterdirection to the Emirati narrative tradition of depicting the nakhoda of a boom, the diving boat captain, as a greedy and cruel person. Rashid’s story “A Crisis at Sea” presents a captain who is more concerned with training his son, the twelve-year-old Ahmad, to take over the job one day, urging him to join an arduous journey for this purpose.8 Apprenticeship comes foremost as commitment to a profession that sustains a thriving global trade in the acquisition and marketing of pearls. The narrative gets more complicated when perceived through the son’s perspective. The son cannot confront his father with a flat rejection of the irrationality and heedlessness in embarking on this venture. His mother’s fears are justified, for the sea should be avoided on a stormy night. She makes it clear that it is reckless to pursue a mission that could end up in their deaths along with those of the divers. Soon after the drowning of his father, Ahmad has to deal with human greed, which culminates in a fight among divers over their shares in the collected pearls, unaware that they have already sunk to the bottom of the sea, a heavy load hung to the belt of the drowned captain. The pearl as a giver of joy and beauty and provider of affluence evolves into an icon of ret- ribution under these circumstances. In this story, it is not far-fetched to see vanity and greed as harbingers of death. The nakhoda’s narrative can make a case for history. As a tale that receives support from similar accounts, this narrative serves to provide historians with an impressive record of the lives of people who used to make their living from the sea.9 The past also contains a repertoire of traditional beliefs and customs that cannot be easily dislodged by material change. In the story “Al-Assadiah” by the Bahraini author, Hasan Isa al-Mahrus,10 the huge cedar tree in the middle square of al-Naʻim Quarter in Manama becomes too cumbersome for traffic. Massively blocking the square, it incites the municipality to plan its removal. As readers we need to look at the scene from the perspective of the nearby residents who associate the cedar tree with some sacred presence, as cedars were allegedly praised by the Prophet for their benevolence in providing protection and succor for the needy and worn-out wanderers or travelers. This association endows the tree with an amount of symbolism, for it stands now for a well-established tradition against an encroaching and unfathomable change signified by the approaching tractors and machines. No wonder that the onslaught on the tree has to be seen as unsanctified, unholy and sacrile- gious. The damage caused by felling and chopping machines is not ascribed to the enormous thickness and dryness of the trunk and its sprawling hard branches, but to an unseen sanctity that ensures the survival of the tree. Narrating the Gulf M 107

Oil and Change Although the main challenge to traditional beliefs and customs emanates from the discovery of oil as a transformative economic force in the makeup of social relations and the consolidation of capital, this should not blind us to other factors that have been sweeping a region known for its geopolitical and strategic significance. Caught between regional and world powers, these small countries often end up under custody of one sort or another to the chagrin of the rising labor unions and political parties that are bound to emerge as the side effects—if not the originators—of transformation. Passing through the transition from an old economy that depends mostly on the sea to a new and overwhelmingly affluent one, some families suffered the attendant tension and anxiety. There are people whose lives are suspended between traditional practice and belief and the imposing oil industry that they are doomed to witness. The moment between historical reconstruction and human feelings, fears, and trepidation transfigures into a flickering flame, uncertain and baffling beyond the reach of empirical reasoning. This is the intersection in which writers seek to capture the elusive moment in a seemingly historicized and recognizable transformation. The Omani Suʻad al-Arimi’s “Ghomran’s Oil Field” testifies to this moment when Oman was able to export oil only after 1967. A highly imaginative piece, it makes use of a common setting of oil field guards on their usual daily watch and turns it into a fantastic one whereby one guard’s mind soars in order to come to terms with the language of fire, which, after hours of watching, seems to speak with tongues of raging flames. Familiar enough with Quranic descriptions of hell and fire, his bewildered mind reads in the rising flames signs of jinn and ifrits11 and hears a language that cannot be silenced except by the mention of God: “Ghomran embraced the burning gauge. He felt as though his body and face were about to melt from the heat. The burning faces of the genies twisted and leered at him before dissolving into the fire. But Ghomran persisted, murmuring prayers to Allah, until finally he managed to shut down the gauge and quench the fire.”12 The discovery of oil, its associations with change, and also the erosion of old ways of life and ideals is so prominent as to raise the question of whether the Gulf writers have been too negative about a discovery that also brought about serious transformations in education, social services, infrastructure, and lifestyles. Their narratives tend to engage with complexity rather than shunning it. Storywriters try to uncover two things: the sudden discovery of communities that have been leading a different life and the dangers involved in radical change. Among many short narratives that focus on the oil challenge, there are two that poignantly problematize the dilemma. The Emirati Abd al-Hamid Ahmad’s classic story “Al-Ta’ir al-ghamri” (The Strange 108 M Muhsin al-Musawi

Bird), and the Bahraini Abdullah Khalifah’s “Khamis” unsettle their readers by projecting the tragic consequences of an unbalanced confrontation between individuals and oil companies as represented and emblematically dramatized in monstrous and callous machines. The discovery of oil, which led to a drastic transformation of Gulf economies, is conveyed as a complex material reality with advantages as well as losses. No writer ever touches on this issue without perceiving human loss as an inevitable consequence of rapid change. The writer’s eye identifies with the underprivileged, the sufferers in this unbalanced transaction, a point that aspiring youth may not share. In “Al-Ta’ir al-ghamri,” 13Gharib dies young since he has become addicted to inhaling fumes from a piece of cloth soaked in the fuel of cars. His body withers and Gharib ends up as a heap of rags buried in a hole dug by his companions, who briefly cherish the memory of a pleasant youth before rapid change and time invade and erode that memory. No less problematic is Abdullah Khalifah’s “Khamis.” Pointing to the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932 by the Bahrain Petroleum Company,14 the story locates its happenings at that historical point when extracting and drilling machines were very much like monstrous invaders in an otherwise pleasant land. That jolly and gallant Bahraini laborer was once a technician in an oil field before getting injured by a machine that left him crippled with no benefits or compensation. Both Gharib and Khamis evolve as human tropes for loss in an unfair transaction where power is in the hands of others. While Khamis points to oil companies as unfair exploiters of Bahrain’s wealth, the story of Gharib is less politicized for it is ignorance that defines loss and failure. Had Gharib been more reasonable and well-educated or trained he would not have fallen into his addiction. Through Gharib as the negative trope for the misuse of oil, there is also a reconstruction of space whereby the seashore takes a substantial portion, “as the only space,” to be gradually overtaken by “schools, clinics . . . and buildings.”15 People take pride in having “their offspring grow into officials, pilots and doctors.”16 Counter to this view is the one that focuses on side effects. The old generation of maritime laborers, fishermen, or divers, say: “Misfortune comes from everywhere. We used to ride donkeys, nowadays we have donkeys that run by petrol.”17 One of Gharib’s companions reports the story of his death, and leaves thereafter for the street, which “is lit and cars are rushing like arrows. He realizes that things are changing drastically and in a few years it flows like falls charged with madness that leaves no chance for Gharib to catch a breath.”18 In other words, oil brings about change at a pace that cannot be matched by remnants of the old style. Narrating the Gulf M 109

A Changing Social Life These anticipations foreshadow the negative impact of drastic transformation under the flow of petro-dollars, especially as these transformations had serious effects on the social fabric. This is illustrated in a short story titled, “Asha li-athnin” (Dinner for Two) by the renowned Dubai writer Muhammad al-Murr, who is a graduate of Syracuse University.19 In the story people go to a luxurious restaurant to see themselves well-placed among others who can be either foreigners or immigration officers. A newly married Emirati couple enjoys the fruits of recently gained affluence. Their conversation is redolent of luxury and wealth at the expense of warmth and sincere attachment. An artificial veneer functions as a shell that keeps people separate, isolated from each other despite their celebration of the new offers of material growth. The new lifestyles and the sudden gain of wealth lead all to depend on cheap labor to run not only their business but also family life. A minority in their own small emirates, local populations have to cope with change in a number of ways, including the hiring of servants and drivers from abroad, South Asia in particular, to carry out their social responsibilities and allow themselves the luxury of a new affluence. In Muhammad al- Murr’s “Jasmine,” Rashid is infatuated with a young girl about whom he knows nothing except for her charming complexion. While waiting every day for her to come to the market with her mother, he repeats to himself, “We are in a minority in this country and need a big increase in our numbers.”20 Al-Murr in particular focuses on this issue in its many ramifications. In a story titled, “Khidmat al-balad” (A Service for the Country), he touches on a rising petit bourgeois sense of nationhood that legitimizes pretentiousness to fit into Western images of a newly born Emirati society where women can pose for journalistic photography.21 As there is no young woman at hand, they dressed a young boy as one, convincing the poor mother that a sacrifice is needed as a service to the country. In a subtle ironic tone, the narrator implies that hypocrisy has sacrificed the poor mother’s feelings for a cam- ouflaged situation in keeping with the vulgar aspirations of the petit bour- geoisie. The rising classes soon apply manners that are foreign to a Bedouin society that is more attuned to valor, honor, and openness. The new materi- alistic outlook takes many directions that relate not only to domestic affairs, usually well represented in Muhammad al-Murr’s stories and the writings of Salma Mattar Sayf, and many women writers, but also to the issue of foreign labor, and its misuse by the newly enriched greedy local strata of arbab (landlords and entrepreneurs). 110 M Muhsin al-Musawi

Foreign Labor There are many ways to depict the presence of foreign labor. It may appear as evidence of exploitation. But it can also be more complicated, especially when a corrupt local stratum makes use of this labor for clandestine trafficking in prohibited merchandise. More complicated is the involvement in sinister networks of trafficking in hashish and opium run by local smugglers like Hajji Mansur in al-Murr’s daring narrative, “A Small Ad in the Newspaper.”22 The story can fit into any traditional Egyptian film or Hollywood action movie, but its locality derives from the position of foreign workers who get implicated in these networks. The sanctity of the mosque is defiled by Hajji Mansur, who attends it with one of his henchmen, to offer two prayers and wait in the car for the Pakistani worker Rawnaq who would like to quit this job. The dialogue, or interrogation, as conducted by Mansur is worth quoting. It details what he enumerates as privileges that are no more than traps and snares to control the Pakistani worker and keep him in a servitude that ends only in suicide or murder.

M “They say you want to leave us,” he said loudly and deliberately. M “I . . . I . . . ,” stammered Rawnaq. Hajji Mansur looked at him. His broad face was filled with anger. His beard shook as he spoke. Then Hajji Mansur adds: “I . . . what? Have you forgotten when you came to see me at the Aisha Restaurant in the Qadir Hotel in your filthy stinking rags, a body that is no more than a bag of bones, without a job, without a passport and with no official papers? You didn’t know how to go about doing any work. Did I not feed you?” 23

As it is impossible to let Rawnaq leave for fear of betrayal, he ends up like others, “liquid dripping from the cistern onto the ground.” 24With no trace left, he is listed as lost, a small notice in the newspaper. In this story, it is the local businessman whose dealings and methods are not only reprehensible, but also criminal. There are other sides to the depic- tion of foreign labor. Many writers in the Gulf take it as a central theme. Even when it is not so central, it emerges in the most unlikely places as an issue. However, to speak of foreign labor and Asian manpower in particular as a national concern in a seemingly binary situation between supporters and opponents is misleading. Foreign labor has been sanctioned since olden times, for the Gulf happened to be on the route to Basra and India. There was always a foreign presence. With the discovery of oil, and the rapid pace of development and open market economy, foreign labor was needed. Coming from countries where unemployment is rampant, these workers, Narrating the Gulf M 111 usually hired by their national hiring companies, suffer exploitation twice, once at the hands of their local exploiters who secure about half of their payment for themselves, and in the Gulf where the arbab, or landlords and owners, exploit them for very little pay. On the other hand, their presence is inevitable and necessary for the continuity of life and business there. As one local puts it, we live “on the sea, foreign labor, and oil.” No wonder that its actual presence and conspicuous role in economic and social life in the Arabian Gulf is bound to occupy a large narrative space. Writers deal with particular cases, and associate agency and conduct with the nature of both business and status. In other words there is no such thing as a completely negative view of foreign labor, a denial of its worth, or a categorical rejection of its presence. Muhammad al-Murr is one writer who voices this concern every now and then as an issue that is part and parcel of life in the UAE. His short story, “The Visit,” details Bouthaina’s intention to visit her girlfriend Iman who has been hospitalized for some time. But it is the mother who makes the decision to visit Iman and Bouthaina is the one to join her. The domineering, newly rich mother is portrayed as being big-mouthed and pedantic. Her Pakistani driver is three weeks late in returning from his annual leave. She speaks of him as follows:

I know that crook; when he comes back he will invent a thousand excuses: his mother will have died, his father will have been ill, one of his brothers has been struck by a car, his village has been hit with floods and a tornado and the storms have blocked all the roads to the capital. He will come up with a heap of false and conflicting excuses, one after the other, and he will presume upon the goodness of my heart.25

She adds: “All the bad behavior of the drivers and servants is my own fault for spoiling them and treating them with such great affection and civility.”26 The narrative allows many perspectives to assess this seemingly reliable account: the driver is late without a definite excuse, the woman is angry for a reason, her image of the driver is not complementary, and her view of herself as compassionate is questioned throughout the narrative. Her haughtiness is stressed. With these conflicting images in a monophonic piece of narrative, there is no certainty regarding the role of the driver. But there is at least a rich register of suggestive detail that portrays the corruption and arrogance befalling family life under the impact of uncontrollable affluence.

Is It Race or Universal Human Jealousy? In her novel Sitr [Cover/Honor/Protection],27 Raja’ Alim, a female writer from South Arabia, touches on the issue of foreign labor from a different but closely relevant angle. In her novel of young women’s aspirations, fantasies, 112 M Muhsin al-Musawi love affairs, and adventures, a common theme in South Arabian (Saudi) narratives, she touches on one of her young women’s romantic adventures, a love adventure that is seemingly challenged by her Pakistani driver Khan. In Sitr (2007) the Hijazi Tuful decides to go to her office where she has arranged for a meeting with Salman, her lover, on Friday, a weekend for Muslims. The Pakistani driver objects on religious and moral grounds: “But this is Friday, there is no office” (224). The narrative raises further questions regarding the Pakistani driver’s objections. Using internalization and a stream of consciousness technique, Alim lets us see into Tuful’s mind: “His behavior frightens her lately. For the last two months he is changed from a well-behaved polite person to a strange being with fiery eyes” (226). The implication is that he is jealous, and his passion gathers in a sharp glance that tears her face cover apart. She decides to escape this glance by using a thicker and darker face cover that makes it impossible for people to see her features, to love her, or to get interested in her as a potential wife: “ . . . this Khan puts an end to all possibilities of getting married. My family could not force me to wear this hijab and Khan is succeeding” (226). When she is on her way to take the elevator to her office, Khan parks on one side of the street, watching her: “ . . . his behavior today goes beyond limits. His looks threaten and punish me” (227). Salman is in her office, and they have been there for some time when incessant knocks at the door force her to check from the peephole (227). She is shocked to see Khan, with passionate fiery eyes, knocking as if he were in charge. He materializes in her vision as “the father and the husband” with full authority and power:

M “Who is at the door?” M “Khan.” M “Wait for me at the car” (227–28)

She notices “mockery” on his face (228), a mockery of somebody who knows what is going on. Salman has seen him through the slightly drawn curtain, standing across the street, watching her windows. What Alim cap- tures is not merely the fear that emanates from any outside challenge or external pressure, but also the attendant loss of feeling that turns her into another human being. Instead of the passionate woman whom Salman’s touch sets on fire, this Khan encapsulates authority that disenchants her and breaks down the spell of love. He is the “father” and the “tribe” (228). In other words, despite the fact that a Pakistani driver is taken for granted as an impersonal entity, somebody who is there to be paid, with no commitments or obligations other than obedience, Khan emerges from a swamp of restrictions, taboos, and threats that go beyond the divides of ethnicity and race and foreign and native. The male authority assumes different forms and Narrating the Gulf M 113 identities whenever given the chance and the right setting to exercise power. An Arab or South Arabian driver may offer obedience to serve his interests, but he may turn into an unrestrained embodiment of masculinity, whose concern goes beyond payment to share in love or else to threaten the female with shaming exposure. Foreign Arab labor is rarely brought into Saudi Arabia for these jobs when South Asians and Filipinos are more accessible and obedient. A Muslim from the Arab regions may also raise the issue of religion and family honor. These are the complications that Alim leaves in the background. Her focus now is on this juxtaposition that can turn into something explosive. The female character has already decided to use her power as the owner against the driver: “give me the car keys, collect your things and go; you are discharged” (229). Ethnicity and race take a different direction in this narrative. There is no implication that her art is based on something racial. The Pakistani driver is used in this narrative, not only as somebody who should be neutral with no expectation other than the correct payment, but also in juxtaposition to Arab drivers who may think of her as one of them, and as such bound to a shared code of honor. Hence the use of the Pakistani is designed to show ethnicity as a differential site through which there is enough space to suggest the female’s attraction, her lushness, and also her will to exercise her freedom. The last scene, discharging the driver, comes as poetic justice, not as punishment, for the narrator would like us to see that Khan has no right to expect more than his payment, not to ask for Tuful’s love or interfere in her private life. The discussion of foreign labor takes a different direction from the one we have already noticed in the Emirati short stories.

Side Effects of Luxury Both women and men concur in building up this barrier of arrogance and faith in wealth and luxury. It is up to the writer to perceive failure not only in ethics and morals but primarily in the side effects of fabulous affluence. These effects are not limited to physical damage and bodily failure, for they unseat the foundations of people’s psychic life, turning them into hollow creatures who will recall their past poor life as paradisical in comparison. The tendency to juxtapose a past life of simplicity and close communal relations with a prosperous one of affectation and lavish expenditure recurs in a number of short narratives where the female body emerges as the site of this conflict. Represented as object to a double exploitation as a sex commodity, a complementary presence to a husband’s wealth and his pretentious show of affluence, the woman undergoes a nervous breakdown in the Emirati Amina Abu Shihab’s short story of 1983, “Hayaj” (Revolt).28 Amina, from Hayy al-sayyadin (the Fishermen’s District), is married to the 114 M Muhsin al-Musawi wealthy Abd al-Rahman al-Musa because of the beauty of her figure and charming demeanor. He is a successful businessman, witty, clever, but also foxy. While her new residence brings a sense of satisfaction that makes her old district look repulsive in comparison, her routine and monotonous life of luxury among expensive pieces of furniture leads to a drastic psychic change. A nostalgic reminiscence of warmth, noise, foul language and easygoing conversation draws her toward the past. The husband thinks of taking her to a psychiatrist as a sick individual whose luxurious life should convert her into the happiest of women. The disparity in perception and understanding is conveyed subtly to enable readers to see wealth as sickness, “illth” in Thomas Carlyle’s terms, a veneer that conceals serious trouble insofar as human needs and feelings are concerned. In other words, the historicized moment of affluence is juxtaposed against the other subtle shades of troubled familial and personal lives. Short narratives can encapsulate more than one historical dimension while allowing enough space to sustain a few brush strokes of social change. In al-Murr’s “A Rainy Night,” for instance, we have a glimpse of family life in the 1950s and 1960s. When a storm in 1957 “struck Dubai with great violence and force,”29 the “small boats in the Creek were destroyed, a big ship was blown from the Creek to one of the residential areas and houses collapsed onto the heads of their occupiers and killed them.”30 The description that occurs as part of the recollections of a second generation sets an inventory of the pre-boom years, conveyed as narrative in the son’s recollections of the father, who was once a nakhoda of a boom, but is now an absentee husband for his mother Aisha.31 The husband is like many who “disappear for months, moving like a phantom between the Gulf ports and the Arabian Sea, visiting Bandar Abbas . . . Aden, Mombasa, Bahrain, Kuwait and other places.”32 Only after Aisha’s father died at the end of the 1960s did the dawn of economic boom reach every family, changing her life into one of affluence and prosperity. In other words, Aisha the wife and the mother, evolves in the narrative as an inventory of traces, a trajectory of transformation from poverty and austerity to a prosperous life like that of the Gulf itself. But the change is not mapped out casually or carelessly. Apart from the inheritance of land on the creek that was sold for millions, her sons are now part of a thriving business life. The three sons are a cement dealer, a highly respected government director who is a recipient of “presents and commissions,” and a third who has a small business but makes huge amounts of income that raises questions about possible trafficking in opium and hashish despite his solemn appearance and formal adherence to social ritual. The professions sum up the nature of business consequent to the boom period. But the narrative needs these characters, their aspirations and performance in a specific space. Everything adds up to a tableau of transformation and Narrating the Gulf M 115 change, a dynamic one where even food has a role: for prosperity shows up in a number of practices that one cannot overlook in the life of changing societies. Citing the mother as an example, the writer specifies food, jewelry, clothing, houses, and cars as signs of affluence. In other words, these items speak of consumption rather than production. Even when there is a source of capital, it shows through consumption, but exhausts itself in time as nonproductive capital. As if speaking of the period since the end of the 1960s, the narrator says:

During those twenty years, Aisha took her revenge on the poverty, deg- radation and hunger of the previous long years. She built a big house for herself in Jumairah with more than ten large rooms. She competed with the young girls in the clothing she wore, the embroidered silk dresses and golden jewelry, embellished with diamonds, sapphires, emeralds and rubies. She would sleep for long periods. She bought three cars, a Mercedes for her own use, a Toyota for the kitchen requirements and a Range Rover for desert trips.33

She ended up as emblematic of vainglorious consumerism that backfires with an increase in diseases, varicose veins, stomachache, bad liver, and “difficulties with the heart . . . ” (74). The Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla (Abd al-Khaliq Abd-Allah) sums up the period as anticultural in practice, dull, and steeped in consumerism. He argues: “The first stage that extends from the establishment of the Emirates to the end of the 1970s is one of oil boom that enforced deep changes in manners and enormous consumerist tendencies and a thorough immersion in materialist, commercial and entrepreneurial propensities accompanied with phenomenal indiffer- ence and selfishness.”34 These narrative encapsulations and representations may raise further questions regarding narrative as history. Is it the role of the writer to repeat history? Is it his profession to offer an approximate representation of reality? Is there an effort to use the real in order to fit it into a larger worldview whereby local and national life assumes greater meaning? Or is it also a narrative technique to depict the callousness that comes with prosperity? In al-Murr’s short story, the mother dies and disappears without a trace from her family as if she were never there among a family. Money and affluence displace warmth and affection.

The Damaging Change Muhammad al-Murr is perhaps foremost in his sharp and acute reflection on change. In “Just Standing There Smiling,” narrative and history exchange 116 M Muhsin al-Musawi places in an ironic way.35 There is throughout a historical background that the narrative populates not with rulers and sultans or people in authority who can effect political change, but with ordinary people who share one past but take different roads under the pressure of change. Ahmad, the mul- timillionaire, speaks to his partner of old times, Saqar, when they were gold smugglers between Bombay and Dubai. Saqar is a successful businessman who leads a “modest” life, with a Mercedes, a villa in the Hamriyya quarter, and a bank account of more than one million dirhams. Ahmad is different. He is the owner of large companies, a large villa in the center of the Rashidiyyah quarter, and has a retinue of employees, secretaries, and servants. Even his employees at home are asked by the wife to wear uniforms like hotel servants and waiters. Ahmad muses: “Her father was a fisherman and my father was a seaman and here she is trying to make aristocrats out of us” (ibid, 94). Despite all signs of prosperity and joy, Ahmad cannot hide his misgiving and ailments:

While you may have plenty of money, you do not necessarily have good health. Don’t be deceived by my fat cheeks and full figure; I suffer from all sorts of diseases. I have mild diabetes, mild gout, mild blood pressure, mild rheumatism, a mild allergy and mild problems with stomach and colon.36

These glimpses accompany a history of economic boom, a transformation from professions in the pre-boom era, primarily fishing, diving, and transportation, to new lifestyles of construction, commerce, and the consequences of unguarded prosperity. The rise in income entails social climbing, but there is still more or less one basic social structure in the Gulf region, made up of labor sponsors, owners, state officials, and government personnel. Their aspirations to rise beyond modest social roots can end up in imitation and lavish display of prosperity. Pretentiousness becomes a social problem, and along with it consumption and bad health. A soci- ologist or even a literary historian like Arnold Kettle can tell us as much. Writers of fiction cannot be different from historians in providing so many representations of social, economic, and political change. But the writer has the freedom to go beyond duplication of the real, focusing on an ironic niche, for example, that unearths what only psychologists might reach in their therapeutic sessions. In al-Murr’s “Just Standing There Smiling,” a paradoxical turn occurs in the last scene when Saqar spots in his friend’s palace his ape Umm Kamil standing smiling behind a chair after a year of absence. Lost once, Umm Kamil ends up as his friend Ahmad’s property, to die of boredom. The ape functions as surrogate for the wife whose Narrating the Gulf M 117 luxurious life cannot provide her with liveliness and warmth. Ahmad has sent the ape to Bombay to have it stuffed, a mummy, to fit among his expensive pieces of furniture, and thence to preserve “the fond memory of our dear ape.”37 Like many things, human and animal life is exchanged for relics, sites of memory and tourist shows that build not on actual heritage, but on its semblance. Narratives are not categorically negative in their representations of affluence. On the individual level, the older generation of the 1950s and 1960s is a hardworking stock. Many worked as laborers in Kuwait. In “A One-Off Encounter,” al-Murr depicts two fathers, Rashid and Khalfan, as industrious parents. “You saved more than most in Kuwait,” says Rashid to Khalfan.38 The latter works in the Ministry of Education but he has also “two tower blocks, one in Deira and one in Dubai.” This status concludes a life of devo- tion and hard work, an attitude that the writer is not always ready to ascribe to young generations.

Is It Race and Gender-Problematic? There is a noticeable reflection on the side effects of affluence on women in the Gulf region. Ranging between deserted wives, lonely mothers, and ailing spouses, women occupy a substantial space in narratives. No wonder we have more female short story writers and poets than men. In light of the fact that women devote more time to education and domestic duties than men, the conspicuous presence of women writers should alert us to other reasons that make such a presence inevitable. Perhaps more concerned with women’s issues, they find it imperative to explore domains that might fall outside male writers’ preoccupations. Salma Matar Seif’s compelling 1983 story, “Al-Nashid” (translated into English as “The Sound of Singing”),39 is unique in detailing a problematic that applies to many traditional societies not yet aware of an imminent transformation. The short story relates the death of the mother of Dahma, a slender young black woman, leading to Dahma’s revengeful singing. The story takes as its point of departure the singing that spreads fear and trepidation among the wealthy people who are living around her lonely tent. It depicts singing as a thrilling yet frightening divide that is molded in a paradoxical mix of rapture and threat. The woman servant who is enticingly charming and irresistibly attractive is a locus of opposite feelings and transactions, for she is sought as a sex object, but shunned as a black whom they cannot claim as a legitimate wife. This is not only because of color—which is not always an issue there—but primarily because she is a servant, and the daughter of a servant at a specific juncture when wealth floods the society and makes 118 M Muhsin al-Musawi her look too downtrodden and marginal to fit into the emerging category of wealth. Some of the men have already gotten married to charming women from the Fishermen’s District, but Dahma is too intriguing and tempting to be the wife of a single individual. The “masters” are desperate to seek the young woman’s love but afraid of having offspring from her—such is the overwhelming fear of exposure. The charming black woman decides to erect her tent in the middle of houses, attracting and challenging all. She has “ten” births, and each respectable family man or grandfather is suspected of being the father of one. Each lives in fear, and whenever there are births or deaths, singing erupts from the tent resonating with the trepidation of hearts that are selfishly engulfed in fear. The young child, who befriends Dahma and is the only one to visit her along with a mad poet, is the narrator of the story. She strikes a pact with the deranged poet who attends the tent and is probably a confidant of the young woman and the child. The child is the custodian of secrets, and she narrates to the mad poet a legacy of defiance, which is so powerful that it morphs into a scathing critique of the social order, the one represented by her grandfather and his companions in an evening assembly. The poet, Dahma, and the child are the outsiders, the underprivileged strata that destabilize history, tradition, and regimes of truth. They emerge in the narrative as follows: the child is the one who innocently questions her grandfather; the poet is described as mad, not responsible for actions or sayings, while Dahma is the exploited individual with whom others have a love–hate relationship. The mad poet is the only one who can make sense of what is going on. Amid a heap of lies, hypocrisy, and frustration, the poet discerns the unnoticeable, the reality behind sham appearances. Michel Foucault’s musings on madness and poetry are worth citing. He says:

The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak it [i. e. the other language], whereas the madman loads all signs with a resemblance that ultimately erases them. They share, then, on the outer edge of our culture and at the point nearest to its essential divisions, that “frontier” situation—a marginal position and a profoundly archaic silhouette—where their words unceasingly renew the power of their strangeness and the strength of their contestation.40

The woman writer situates the poet in this marginal space, the tent, with a child and an exploited beauty, where his perspective would someday matter. Space itself is no longer innocent: the tent recalls a desert setting and the singing summons its life and lore; whereas houses evolve in the child’s eye as Narrating the Gulf M 119 encampments of mixed interests, desires, obsessions, and secrets. The female writer upholds a feminine discourse that portrays women as sincere, sacrifi- cial, and truthful against a patriarchal male order of hypocrisy and double standards. Thus the child’s narrative runs as follows:

“I’ll cut your throat, you animal,” said my grandfather, “If I see you again with that awful woman.”41

The child asks her mother if her grandfather rejects the woman because “she’s black.” But the mother’s answer does not sustain a racist interpretation. She places his rejection in a different paradigm of patriarchy: “your grandfather, my girl, hates everyone who disobeys him,” said my mother. “He has the heart of a pearling ship’s captain who coldly buries his divers in the sea’s depths. I really doubt his ability to feel the pain you suffer as you lie under his foot.” She adds, “Don’t provoke the fury he has for the woman.”42

Generation Gap In dealing with a material reality with all its complexity of appearance, prodigality, charity, theft, misuse of trust, moral laxity, and competition, writers in the Gulf region have developed a variety of approaches that set the historical perspective in an ironic frame of reference where change brings about some ethical and social modalities that run counter to the ones upheld by older generations. Cynicism grows as a mode in order to touch on this sensitive issue without affronting a society that would like to believe in a sustained moral code. As narratives proper, the ones that focus on generation gaps portray parents who can give advice to their sons and daughters, advice that at times comes in response to other families that demonstrate such moral commitments. In these gestures, advice is also clothed in hypocrisy. In a short story titled “Look After Yourself” by Muhammad al-Murr, the father Ahmad al-Aryan commits every abuse against his son Khalid who has no interest other than being in the kitchen with his aunt. It is only later when Khalid opens a restaurant that has become well-known and a good source of income that the father’s “anger gradually subsides as the income increases.”43 Resistance to some changes is not a simple representation of a generation gap, but appears more as loci of complexities. Whenever a family is in actual danger or one of its members is implicated in such a situation, the blame is leveled on change. Once the mother in al-Murr’s “In the Mortuary” suspected that her son died in a car accident, a suspicion that turns out to be 120 M Muhsin al-Musawi groundless. This is the initial response of Umm Ahmad, the neighbor, by way of consolation:

Ever since they brought in cars and paved the roads, there’s not been a single day without disaster. We were much better off without these lethal things that destroy our children far more than illness or wars did in the old days.44

Documentary Records While change is blamed for troubles and disasters, a city like Dubai problematizes the whole issue of change within a complex nexus that entails different politics, a new economic order, and a substantial change in urban topography. Muhammad al-Murr’s “The Love Nest” is important in directing attention not only to these aspects of change, but also to change in judicial language that serves as an index for historical mutation. “The Love Nest” has a simple theme. Khalid bin Khalfan is in love with a young Asian woman and decides to create a “love nest” with her. He buys a small house from Salim for 40 rupees. The currency refers to an early period when, after his marriage to her and her premature death, he “went north for work to forget his sorrows!”45 That was the time when oil was discovered in Kuwait [i.e. the 1930s]. “He lived in Kuwait for more than twenty years, during which his only daughter married, Muhammad Najeeb and Jamal Abdul Nasir appeared on the scene, the Suez Canal was nationalized and the tripartite aggression on Egypt took place and the wars of independence broke out in Algeria.”46 The 20 years in Kuwait means that he was there in the late 1940s when the rupee was the currency and land was very cheap. While this historical preamble situates the narrative in a specific period of political change, a postcolonial one of significant markers insofar as the history of nation-states is concerned, significantly the bill of sale for the house he owns portrays change in terms of demarcation and urban planning. During the 1940s Dubai was not mapped as a city; its streets and houses were still uncharted, unspeci- fied and unnamed. Records detail ownership in terms of proper names of neighbors. In other words, the bill of sale presents a community of trust and reciprocity. People know each other and assume others do as well. There were no actual maps or charts that imposed a form and discipline on the place; it assumes identity through human/spatial relations. Without these it is part of a void which is imaged only in memory, especially the memory of elders, the custodians of lands and cultures. Thus the bill of sale reads:

In the name of the one God, and may prayers and peace be on him after whom there will be no other Prophet, I, Salim bin Khalifah, who have appended my name hereto in my own hand, declare that I have sold the Narrating the Gulf M 121

house which I own and over which I have the absolute right of disposal, to Khalid bin Khalfan for the sum of forty rupees which I have received at the meeting at which the sale was agreed, and that I now have no right or claim in respect of the aforementioned house, which property now belongs to the purchaser, Khalid bin Khalfan, who may do whatsoever he wishes with the house as does any owner of property and none shall prevent or object to this. The house is situated in the Daghaiyah quarter and is bounded, to the west by the road separating it from the house of Aisha bint Ali while to the east is the house of Hamdan bin Muhammad which is contiguous to it, and to the north by the road separating it from the house of Al Haj Ahmad Mustapha while to the south is open space.47

The bill of sale concludes with: “We testify before God to this, testimony before whom shall be adequate.” It is accompanied by mention of the place of record, al-Deira, on the fourth of Jamada al-Awal, 1362 [May 9, 1943 ce], with the signatures of the witnesses. Between the end of the 1940s and mid-1960s when Khalid returned things changed. There was economic growth, and the government made advances in organizing its functional departments, especially the Lands Department, which paid compensation for small houses in the amount of “one million, fifty-four thousand and eight hundred dirhams.”48 Narrative topographies play a significant role in building up both an actual physical mapping, and an imaginary that is more redolent with social and economic implications than linear or vertical histories. A land and a sea converge and get polarized under changes in routes and geological excava- tion and extraction of oil and minerals. Both lead to economic boom, social inequality, foreign intervention, loss of old ways of life, and new social problems. The Kuwaiti writer and novelist Talib al-Rifa‛i’s attention is drawn in Zill al-shams (The Shade of the Sun) to these issues as seen and perceived by one of the disadvantaged Egyptian laborers there. The Egyptian teacher gives up his job to travel to Kuwait, dreaming of a good income.49 The arduous search for a job proves to be futile, and only at a later stage is he able to teach Madame Najat’s spoiled sister Manal. The comparison between his miserable lodging in Khitan among other laborers in a poor district and the Nuzha District where Madame Najat lives problematizes the narrative, and shows how the production of space is power-informed. This Nuzha is for “Kuwaitis,” and hence it looks gorgeous, affluent, clean, and enticing.50This district invites and chases out the unwanted, the immigrant, and the laborer. The inferior social and alien status of the latter leaves him or her little space to participate in other than menial jobs. In Michel de Certeau’s words: “the immigrant worker does not have the same critical or creative elbow-room as the average citizen,” a fact that forces him or her to exercise “devious- ness, fantasy, or laughter.”51 No wonder he’ll be soon seduced by Manal, 122 M Muhsin al-Musawi to suffer punishment and imprisonment thereafter for social and moral transgression.

The Other Side of Change While sweeping change is a catalyst of narrative, a dynamic that sets forth different dimensions of time and explains its working onto space, it takes a different direction when we turn to the Indian subcontinent. In al-Murr’s “Mrs. Khawajah,” a native of Karachi speaks of the city as “afflicted with all the idleness and commotion of the historical East.”52 The educated young native of Pakistan is made to distinguish between Karachi and other cities in Pakistan which he prefers:

Even if I were to stay in Pakistan I wouldn’t live in Karachi. I would move to Islamabad, the bureaucratic capital, for I love the proximity of nature and the nearby high mountains. Or I would live in Lahore, the historical city with its magnificently built mosques. Karachi is an incomprehen- sible city in which I feel suffocated. 53

This reading of urban topography in terms of moral and psychological paradigms does not necessarily partake of the Orientalist lexicon of dor- mancy or backwardness. Written as a multivoiced narrative, this reading leans more on the fada’il (values and merits) genre in Arabic, which has grown since the ninth century. More important to the historicity of the Gulf is the voice given to the native of Pakistan. His independent voice runs counter to other stories that deal with foreign labor only as a voiceless marginal segment. To have Emirati writers engaging the foreign force as a recognizable presence with rights, privileges and aspirations sets the ground for another line of narrative that looks on expatriates from the subcontinent as actual participants in business, life, and education. Although short stories are too limited to account for such a huge topic, its engagement is important by itself, especially in Gulf writing where very few long narratives make a long-lasting impression. The case is different in Arabia where long narratives and novels are the dominant mode of production. Indeed, these narratives bring history into fiction in such a way as to make their study pivotal to any cultural history of Arabia. Such is Raja’ Alim’s Sitr.

Desert Poetics: Sitr54 Although Sitr deals with a common subject among young Hijazi writers—their love affairs, failed marriages, broken engagements, and amours of one sort or another—its language is different from other Narrating the Gulf M 123 narratives. Alim’s mastery of the condensed, brief, and loaded sentence is effective and worth attention. It is not so because of its syntactic or linguistic qualities, but primarily because it has desert poetics in its makeup. (Desert poetics derives from an old tradition of familiarity with the desert flora and fauna as perpetuated in poetry in particular.) Words get resur- rected from common usage to engage in a desert-lexical dimension. The “spear” that often appears in pre-Islamic poetry, and continued to do so in classical poetry until very recently, now assumes a personal connotation where it stands for mastery and freedom. One of these young women, for instance, Afaf, expresses her loss in marital relationships as a loss of “spear,” while her struggle to speak freely is allegorized in terms of the “spear” also. “We have lost everything except speech, let me act in it as a spear,” meaning freely and daringly (235). This desert poetics enforces itself in a moment of defiance, a show of resistance. It cannot be dissipated in an overriding narrative that blithely emanates from a masterly voice, an authorial one. Such is the one that blends into Miriam’s voice as the dominating one in this record of female fortunes and misfortunes in a prosperous society that is still obliged to abide by tribal rules of pre-Islamic times. Hence Miriam’s entrance into the room that is assigned for women in the court-house is imaged as a version of her view of this struggle within a patriarchal order owned by men, but can possibly be undermined by free women like Miriam. The room of segregation that Miriam enters evolves as a limiting space where there is an ordained negation that denies a female presence. In her interior dialogue, she derides women’s internalization of this servitude and injustice as they let themselves be covered in black, “a black female entity” that is no less than a “void” (250). When this entity is called upon by the judge, it is only to show two fingers to sign with, or one that serves to stamp the paper designed for the purpose. The desert poetic borrows from the pastoral “shepherd” role, where the male is given a leading role while the female is relegated to the status of the lamb (250). While references to female amour speak of a will to undermine scriptoria that is upheld by desert tradition, there are scattered allusions to the interference of religious authorities, and their invasion of Muhsin’s studio where he has models of women for painting and design (889). The interference of these authorities, “the commission for ordering good and preventing evil,” is subsumed into a larger trajectory where a continuous exchange takes place between an urban complexity with its ruses, amours and playfulness and a background of a desertscape that imposes limits. The desert landscape spills out its spoils into the urban center in the form of restrictive authority presided over by a shaikh who instructs the rest on normative behavior and righteous conduct. Parallel to desert spoils and juxtaposed to its exports 124 M Muhsin al-Musawi are its agents who are presented as shaikhs who still take the desert as their retreat. The auto route or the road is a transitional passage where a meeting between the shaikh and passersby strikes a different note of pleasure and playfulness. The shaikh who stands alone selling watermelons on the road flirts in his exchange with these females who ask for a sweet watermelon. The site looks more at home with a desert poetic that they have left behind, an inventory of linguistic traces that give the primary narrator’s discourse richness and diversity, which stands for the author’s pride in her wording and tone (56, 60–61, 128, 214). Desert poetics that permeate Alim’s narrative makes itself felt in juxtaposition with urban, especially metropolitan, sites and their premises or tokens and signs that challenge it. These urban signs evoke in the mind of the other female, Tuful, images of feminine beauty and softness. The premise is an outgrowth of an internal strife against a poetic that is associated in the narrator’s mind with male dominance and control. The male language instructor in London who joins her at the entrance to the language institute explains to her the reasons behind his curiosity to know more about Saudi women (108). “You are, for us, a black cover and a body subsumed in a blackness whose mission is to breed devils and global terror” (109). When she makes fun of him, playing the female duplicate of Tayeb Salih’s Mustafa Sa‘id and playfully tells him that she is there to breed devils in their metropolis, the instructor is impressed by a playfulness that makes him question his platitudes. “Are all women like you?” She continues with her playfulness: “ . . . they made copies of my body in Saudi Arabia” (109). In response the narrator inserts her own interpretation of the desert: “ . . . the Peninsula is the land of chaste love, and Bedouin women are known for the arts of love. Life in its interiority is the same, but the difference is always in its exterior cover. We are black and white only as a noticeable exterior façade” (110). She adds: “We are the night, the day, darkness and light” (110). This last image of a multilayered, multicolored, and diverse reality may apply not only to women, their gender, practice, and lifestyles, but also to societies that happen to undergo unbalanced change in urban centers in particular, belying therefore any stratified categorization or misapplication of rules. Diverse in life, identity, color, wealth, economy, and even culture, these societies are not different from others; perhaps it is only the rapid change that draws attention to their ways of life, with particular emphasis on women, long a curiosity to the colonial gaze. Literature as such, especially multivoiced narratives, leads us back into the intricacies of these ways. It leaves the exterior side of things to others while focusing on the human dimension in different periods—both the pre-oil boom and the noticeable change thereafter, that has brought foreign labor, a consumerist economy, Narrating the Gulf M 125 and other cultures into the Gulf bastion, effecting more change and also more exposure to the outside world. Narratives as such add life to what may otherwise sound merely like dry facts. In conclusion, one can argue that storytelling and narrative in the Gulf can function as a rich source for information on the region. Their significance exceeds information, however. They are able to reach into the obsessions and worries of the society and complement what is usually recorded by historians, geographers, and sociologists.

Notes

1. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 2. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 3. See Muhsin al-Musawi, The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 62–63. In his autobiography al-Ayyām, Taha Husayn, then a student in Paris, reports a meeting with Zaghlul, where the latter gives his understanding of history as made and enforced by power. The dialogue runs as follows: M What do you study in Paris? M I study history. M Do you believe in any truthfulness of history? M Yes, if well-researched, carefully investigated and released from pitfalls. M Zaghlul says: M For me, it is enough to notice this falsification and these lies circulated everywhere in the newspapers and people accepting them at face value, to affirm that it is impossible to resurrect history from fabrications. I can further affirm that no truthful account can be ridden of these. Look at what is being circulated about Egypt in Paris, and tell me how it is possible to come out with a truthful history? (489–90). (Taha Husayn, An Egyptian Childhood: The Autobiography of Taha Hussein, trans. E. H. Paxton (London: Routledge and Sons, 1932; reprint London: Heinemann, 1981). 4. Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, trans. Salma Khadra Jayussi and Trevor Le Gassick (New York: Vantage, 1982), 51. 5. As I argued in The Postcolonial Arabic Novel, when he addressed the Sudanese fighter Mahmoud Wad Ahmed, “Kitchener negates the fighter’s identity and rights in his land. He thinks of him as the outsider, the non-native of his own country Sudan: ‘Why have you come to my country to lay waste and plunder?’ ” (94; italics mine). Echoing Frantz Fanon, the narrator draws attention to the colonial desire, not only to conquer and plunder, but also to establish the incidental as a permanent fact, in spatial and historical terms. In Fanon’s words: “The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is 126 M Muhsin al-Musawi

the extension of that mother country” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 51). Kitchener repeated then what he was taught, and what he was made to believe. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1969; reprint Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1992). 6. Sultan ibn Muhammad al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London: Croom Helm, 1986). 7. Ahmad Bilal, “A Voice From the Earth,” in Oranges in the Sun: Short Stories from the Arabian Gulf, ed. and trans. Deborah A. Akers and Abubaker A. Bagader (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008), 112–17. This anthology presents 49 short stories from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait. 8. Oranges in the Sun, 106–11. 9. Yacoub Yousef al-Hijji, Nawakhidhat al-Safar al-Shira‘i fi al-Kuwayt (The Deep- Sea Nakhodas of Kuwait) (Kuwait: Al-Rubay‘an, 1993). See also Fahad Ahmad Bishara, “Narrative and the Historian’s Craft in the Arabic Historiography of the Gulf,” in this volume. 10. Oranges in the Sun, 155–59. 11. Ifrit is the singular for ifrits, sinister spirits that are not divided between good and bad like other spirits. 12. Oranges in the Sun, 120. 13. Abd al-Hamid Ahmad’s “Al-Ta’ir al-ghamri,” Qiṣaṣ qaṣīrah min al-Imārāt (Short Stories from the Emirates) (Sharjah: Writers’ Union Publications, 1986), 71. Transliteration is used for works that appear in Arabic. 14. The first American-owned company in the region. Editor’s note. 15. Abd al-Hamid Ahmad, 71. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid, 77. 19. Muhammad al-Murr, Fayadan qalb (Overflow of Feelings) (Dubai: Al-Bayan Printing House, 2000), 33–56. 20. Muhammad al-Murr, “Jasmine,” in Dubai Tales, trans. Peter Clark (London: Forest Books, 1991), 96. 21. In al-Murr, “Fayadan qalb,” 19–32. 22. Muhammad al Murr, Dubai Tales, 83–87. 23. Muhammad al-Murr, “A Small Ad in the Newspaper,” in Dubai Tales, 83–87. 24. Ibid, 87. 25. Muhammad al-Murr, “The Visit,” in The Wink of the Mona Lisa and Other Stories from the Gulf, trans. Jack Briggs (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 1994), 107. 26. Ibid. 27. Raja’ Alim, Sitr (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi, 2007). Citations are incorporated within the text. 28. Amina Abu Shihab, “Hayāj,” in Qiṣaṣ qaṣīrah min al-Imārāt (Short Stories from the Emirates) (Sharjah: Writers’ Union Publications, 1992). 29. Mohammad al-Murr, The Wink of the Mona Lisa, 75. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 72. Narrating the Gulf M 127

34. ‘Abd al-Khaliq Abd -Allah, Al-Harakah al-thaqāfiyyah fī al-Imārāt (The Cultural Movement in the Emirates) (Abu Dhabi: Cultural Foundation Publications, 2000), 14. 35. Muhammad al-Murr, “Just Standing There Smiling,” in The Wink of the Mona Lisa, 87–94. 36. Ibid., 93. 37. Ibid., 94. 38. Mohammad al-Murr, “A One-Off Encounter,” in Dubai Tales, 89–94, 91. 39. Salma Matar Seif, “Al-Nashīd” (“The Sound of Singing”), in Under the Naked Sky: Short Stories from the Arab World, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), 100–07. 40. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 50. 41. Salma Matar Seif, “Al-Nashid,” 10. 42. Ibid., 100. 43. Muhammad al-Murr, “Look after Yourself,” in Dubai Tales, 105. 44. Muhammad al-Murr, “In the Mortuary,” Dubai Tales, 114. 45. Muhammad al-Murr, “The Love Nest,” in The Wink of the Mona Lisa, 101–2. 46. Ibid., 101–2. The reference is to the Egyptian political leaders Nasser (president of Egypt, 1956–70) and his rival Nagib (president of Egypt, 1953–54). The Suez Canal was nationalized in 1956. 47. Muhammad al-Murr, “The Love Nest,” 96. 48. Ibid., 102–3. 49. Talib al-Rifa‛i, Zill al-shams (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2012). 50. Ibid., 99–92. 51. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xvii. 52. Muhammad al-Murr, “Mrs. Khawajah,” in The Wink of the Mona Lisa, 128. 53. Ibid. 54. See Raja’ Alim, Sitr. Citations are in the text. PART II

Port Cities and Littoral Society CHAPTER 5

The Rise and Fall of Port Cities in the Persian Gulf*

Lawrence G. Potter

t is striking that many port cities in the Persian Gulf have had only a temporary period of fluorescence. A number of the great ports in his- Itory have now been abandoned and forgotten, while the megaports built on oil wealth are relatively new. The port cities connected the Gulf region to the Indian Ocean and the wider world, and were central to integrating the social and economic life of the littoral.1 The rise and fall of ports there has been a feature throughout its history, having to do with both changing geographical as well as political and economic conditions. No one city ever dominated the entire Gulf, and the fall of one port city always led to the rise of another. There has invariably been a major port at the head (northern end) of the Gulf, but due to inhospitable geography it has been located far up an inland river, the Shatt al-Arab. Since early Islamic times, this city has been Basra (founded in 638 ce), 72 miles upstream. Prior to this, the main Sasanian port for ocean-going ships was nearby Ubulla, on the site of the ancient Apologos.2 In the twentieth century two Iranian ports assumed importance, Khurramshahr (formerly Muhammara), 52 miles upstream, and the newer port of Bandar Shapur (renamed Bandar Khomeini after the revolution), located 40 miles up the Khur Musa inlet. The most important port in the Gulf itself up to the twentieth century was always on the Iranian coast. Over time its location migrated eastward toward the Strait of Hormuz: from Rishahr on the Bushehr peninsula in the Umayyad period (661–750 ce) to Siraf (850–1000), Kish (1000–1300), and finally Hormuz (1300–1600). Bandar Abbas was the most important port 132 M Lawrence G. Potter from 1622 to the mid-eighteenth century, when it was replaced by Bushehr. After about 1900 Bushehr was increasingly eclipsed by Khurramshahr, which was the leading Iranian port by World War II. The relative importance of ports on the Arabian side also varied, and tended to move progressively westward throughout history.3 In Oman, Suhar (probably formerly known as Omana), was part of the Sasanian Empire and carried out a lively maritime trade with India. As described by Muqaddisi, its height was in the ninth and tenth centuries ce, and the city prospered until the invasions from Persia (then under Mongol control) in the thirteenth century.4 In the early sixteenth century Muscat became the main port of Oman. An early Islamic harbor known as Ras al-Hadd was succeeded by the city of Qalhat around 1100, which thrived from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.5 Julfar was the most important port in Southeast Arabia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and was superseded in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century by nearby Ras al-Khaimah. Abu Dhabi was developed by the Bani Yas tribal confederation in the late eighteenth century.6 Ras al-Khaimah, twice destroyed by the British in the early nineteenth century, was then eclipsed by Sharjah as the largest port on the Trucial Coast.7 In the nineteenth century, Kuwait, Manama, and Muharraq were the largest cities in the upper Gulf. Today, Dubai is the leading container port in the Persian Gulf. A number of issues arise from considering these little-studied and poorly documented polities.8 What circumstances led to the rise of these ports in the first place, and later to their demise? Why were some of the greatest ports, such as Siraf, Julfar, and Zubara, subsequently abandoned? Why were all the important ports in the Gulf located along the Persian littoral in medieval times and the Arab littoral in modern times? How were these ports tied to their hinterlands, and in what way were they related to others on or near the Gulf? How did the political life in these ports differ from that of better-known cities on the Iranian plateau and Arabian Peninsula?

The Gulf Littoral Until modern times, the littoral was a maritime setting with an economy based on pearling and the long-distance dhow trade. Tribes traveled freely back and forth across the Gulf. Some had sections on both sides, most famously the Qawasim, based in Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, who temporarily governed Bandar Lingeh. Settlements along the Persian coast often had closer relations with those on the Arab side than those in the interior, due to ease of communication.

Map 5.1 Port Cities in the Persian Gulf. Source: Michael Izady, Gulf/2000. 134 M Lawrence G. Potter

In a memoir of growing up in Bandar Lingeh in the 1920s, Mariam Behnam, who was later active as a cultural ambassador under the shah, recalls,

It is a town deep in the south of Iran, but because of its position the townspeople have always had closer ties and felt more akin to the Arabs of the Gulf region than their own compatriots in central and northern “Persia” as it was once known. The only languages commonly heard in Lengah in those days were the local Farsi dialects of Bastaki and Awazi, and Arabic.9

Iranian ports were cut off from the major cities on the plateau by the Zagros Mountains, and connections with the interior were via a few difficult passes, for example behind Bushehr. The cities on the coast thus depended extensively on imports to sustain what seem like impossibly large populations, if we accept that at its height in the tenth century Siraf was almost as large as Shiraz10 and Hormuz once held up to 40,000 people.11 There were many Arabs on the Iranian side (especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) as well as Persians on the Arab side. The second half of the eighteenth century was the heyday of the Hawala, Sunni Arabs originating on the Arabian coast who moved for a time to Persia and later returned.12 From the late eighteenth up to the late nineteenth century there was a string of small principalities on the Persian shore ruled by Arabs, with the central Tehran government not resuming control until around 1900.13 The Persian Gulf region was not like the rest of the Middle East. It was oriented outward, toward the Indian Ocean, and was part of a cosmopolitan world of mixed race, religion, and ethnicity. Most Gulf residents past and present were and are bilingual or multilingual. As Curzon put it in the 1890s, Bandar Lingeh’s population “ . . . is partly Arab, partly Persian, partly African, partly that nameless hybrid mixture that is found in every maritime town east of Port Said.”14 The port cities under discussion played a key role in forwarding goods to inland cities such as Shiraz and Kirman, and, on the Arab side, the regions of Najd and Al-Ahsa. They probably maintained more regular ties with trading partners in the Indian Ocean region than with capital cities such as Tehran or Baghdad. Until the rise of pearling revenues in the nineteenth century fueled urbanization, port cities were small. Recent archaeological research has demonstrated, however, that earlier cities such as Julfar and Zubara were capable of rapid, planned expansion.15 Compared to other parts of the Middle East, there was an absence of settled agriculturalists (except in Bahrain, Hasa, and Oman). The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 135

Whereas most people in Iran and Arabia were tied to the land, the Khalijis, or residents of the Gulf (khalij) were tied to the sea, and could easily move if dissatisfied. In a region where boats and not land constituted capital, it was easy to sail away and reestablish themselves elsewhere. The Gulf was noted for the mobility of merchant capital, and merchants frequently relocated if the terms of trade were better.16 Bad times and tribal fission could lead to large-scale population movement throughout the region. In eighteenth-century Arabia, drought pushed the ‘Utub tribe toward the coast and led to the establishment of new ruling dynasties in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait. People dissatisfied with their ruler could always migrate elsewhere, and they frequently did up until the twentieth century.

Migration of Ports and People It is clear that the prosperity of Persian Gulf ports was built on commerce. In the early Islamic period this was mainly the seaborne trade with India and China. The establishment by the Abbasids of a capital at Baghdad in the eighth century ce led to strong consumer demand for luxuries of the East that led to a reinvigorated trade between the Gulf and the Indian Ocean world. Changing political conditions, though, played a key role in the status of port cities. The raison d’être for cities such as Siraf was international trade.17 But trade and people could and did move to other locations depending on shifting political conditions and trade routes. The sudden collapse of Bushehr in the seventh/eighth century, for example, may have been linked to the Arab conquest of Iran. The transition from Rishahr to Siraf and the changes in the trade network of the upper Gulf in the late eighth century have been studied by archaeologist Seth Priestman.18 With the decline of Baghdad, Gulf trade shifted to the Red Sea route under the Fatimids (909– 1171) and Ayyubids (1169–1252). The fall of Buyids in Kirman in 1048 and in Fars and Khuzistan in 1062 led to disruption of trade and probably contributed to Siraf’s decline. The fall of Siraf, however, could be compensated for by the rise of another port, which could just as easily serve as a terminus for trade with the East. Aubin found that after the fall of the city many Sirafis migrated to the inland town of Fal, to the Omani town of Suhar, to the island of Kish and ultimately Hormuz.19 After the fall of Siraf, Kish and Hormuz became rivals for the trade with India, with Hormuz prevailing after the 1330s. Later developments that impacted Gulf ports include the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which led to increased trade via the Red Sea, and the introduction of steam navigation in the 1860s, which facilitated the 136 M Lawrence G. Potter connection to India and benefited a few large ports (Basra, Manama, and Bushehr).20 An important feature of the Gulf is that it constituted one market, and, although each port had its own inland trading networks, there was a certain interchangability of ports in terms of external trade.21 Thus when political conditions in southern Iran deteriorated after the fall of the Safavid dynasty in the eighteenth century, the East India Company moved operations from Bandar Abbas to Basra, with a subsidiary factory (trading station) temporarily established in Bushehr.22 Port cities could rise or decline based on the taxes and customs duties they charged. If they became too high in one city, trade would easily shift to another. The Persian ports, previously locally controlled, became subject to a government-run Gulf Ports Authority in 1888, which led to uniform policies imposed by Tehran, to the detriment of business.23 The imposition of high customs tariffs in Bander Lingeh by the Persian Qajar government in 1903 led to a 60 percent drop in trade. Many merchants relocated to Dubai and Bahrain, which now became the main trade emporiums in the Gulf. Lingeh, which had been the main reexport center of goods to the Arabian coast, fell into permanent decline.24 Port cities in the Persian Gulf were not like the great colonial port cities that emerged in Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century (such as Colombo, Aden, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai) that have been the subject of much research. “These colonial port cities became the transformers of Asia, the ‘beachheads of an exogenous system, planted by Westerners in a variety of Asian contexts, peripheral but nevertheless revolutionary’; they became the centres in which Asia and the West confronted each other and from which Western institutions and values moved out to reorient the traditional states and societies of Asia.”25 In contrast, because of the difficult physical environment and poor hinterlands the Gulf ports never became as big as Indian ports, nor did they welcome European colonization.

An Interactive Gulf System The Persian Gulf was an interactive region knit together by social, religious, political, and economic ties. Although most research has emphasized the connection to India, actually the “country trade” with the immediate region was at least as important. As noted by Rhoads Murphey about Asian ports, “ . . . the chief data are those for external trade, often recorded and published by foreign agencies or colonial governments. Much, probably most, of domestic trade went unrecorded or at best underrecorded, particularly in China and to an extent also in India and Southeast Asia. What evidence we The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 137 have suggests, however, that domestic trade, including transit and entrepot trade, was greater at all periods than external trade, as was and remains true for most ports everywhere.”26 Gulf ports depended on nearby cities and regions to supply them with the basic necessities of life, including food, water, and firewood. Kuwait, for example, had to import everything it needed.27 This typically led to exchanges of products produced in different climatic zones. For example, in the Ras al-Khaimah area, “ . . . there was a deficit of dry dates, tamr, and on the coasts, of grain; people inland obviously did not produce their own fish or salt fish.” A member of the Shihuh tribe living in Dibba observed, “families on the coast and in the mountains needed each other; we had dates and fish, they had grain and animals, and we gave each other presents.”28 This situation undoubtedly prevailed throughout history. For example, Whitcomb has described an interactive economic system of the Gulf in the pre-Mongol period, drawing on narrative descriptions and archaeological evidence. He points out that while “patterns of this long-distance commerce, the source of great prosperity, have often been studied . . . the intermediate trade and sociopolitical relations among nearby ports need to be considered.”29 Such exchanges were especially intense when the same political power ruled both sides of the Gulf, as under the kings of Hormuz (who controlled Bahrain and parts of Oman in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), or the Qawasim tribal confederation who ruled Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, as well as Bander Lingeh in Iran for about a century down to 1887. Also, it should be recalled that Oman controlled a large area around Bandar Abbas that it leased from Iran for about 80 years down to 1869.30 There was consistent demand throughout the Gulf for dates, which were produced mainly around the Shatt al-Arab and Minab in southern Iran, on the Batinah Coast of Oman, and in Al-Ahsa and Qatif. This was also true for fish and salt fish, much of which was exported from the Trucial Coast. Ports on the Persian side of the Gulf from Bushehr northward exported agricultural products from a rich hinterland. Bandar Dailam exported wheat and barley to Basra, Kuwait, and Lingeh, and grapes and raisins to Kuwait and Basra. It also exported wool to Bushehr and Kuwait to be sent to India. It imported dates from Basra.31 Bandar Rig exported wheat, barley, and wool.32 Bandar Mashur (a seaport of the Ka‘b or Cha‘b Arabs) exported 10,000 sheep annually to Basra and Kuwait, as well as [cooking] oil (roghan) to Kuwait and Basra and grain, mainly wheat and barley.33 Failaka Island, near the entrance to Kuwait Bay, was fortunate in having a good water supply and produced a considerable amount of wheat and barley (with a total yield of around 30 tons in the early 1900s).34 138 M Lawrence G. Potter

Although little researched, there is plenty of evidence in trade statistics from the nineteenth century illustrating the economic interdependence of the region and the importance of regional trade networks.35 For example, the tables provided by Pelly illuminate the situation in Bushehr in the early 1860s.36 We learn that Bushehr imported tobacco from Asalu and Tahiri, and firewood from Tahiri, Charek and Ghoran [Kangan?], all ports farther south on the Iranian coast.37 It sent wheat and barley to other ports on the Gulf (not including Bandar Abbas).38 Bushehr imported dry lemons from Suhar and dates and date syrup from Bahrain.39 Qatif and Lahsa [al-Ahsa] sent dates to Bushehr and in return Bushehr sent wheat and tobacco to Qatif and carpets and silk thread to Lahsa.40 Bushehr imported dates, date syrup and kidney beans from Basra.41 Besides pearls, Bahrain exported dried fruit and dates.

Effect of Climate and Geography The geography and climate of the Gulf have had a profound effect upon the pattern of settlement. The difficulty of communication with the interior before modern times—especially prior to the coming of the telegraph in the 1860s—served to isolate the Iranian littoral from major cities such as Shiraz, Isfahan, or Tehran. For example, Bushehr is 182 miles from Shiraz and in the 1890s it took from two weeks to a month by camel to travel this route.42 On the other hand, by sea Bushehr is 170 miles from Kuwait and 190 miles from Manama.43 With a good wind, the sailing time from Bushehr to Kuwait was 22 hours, and from Bushehr to Manama was 24 hours.44 A distinction needs to be made between a port and a harbor. Harbor is a physical space, a shelter for ships; port is an economic concept, a center of exchange, which requires good access to a hinterland.45 With the exception of Kuwait Bay, there are few good harbors in the Gulf. Muscat, located outside of the Gulf proper but well integrated into the Gulf world, has a good but small protected harbor. Bushehr and Bandar Abbas, the primary ports in Iran, both had anchorages far out at sea. On the Arabian coast, even in Kuwait, deep-water steamers had to anchor a mile offshore.46 Bandar Lingeh had the best sheltered harbor on the Persian coast, but never became a major port due to difficult routes to inland cities.47 The hierarchy of Gulf ports was constantly changing. This is partly because the natural features of the region are always changing, which affects the location and morphology of cities. Ports on the southern shore such as Dubai, Sharjah, and Ras al-Khaimah are located on small inlets (khors/ khawrs), known in English as creeks, and are subject to silting and shifting sands.48 The Shatt al-Arab, with a shallow entrance, was notorious for its wrecks and dangerous currents and was considered “one of the most The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 139 dangerous waterways in Asia.”49 Because of this goods bound for Basra (or other Gulf ports) were commonly offloaded at Muscat or Siraf for further transport by smaller ships. This is similar to the situation for the Red Sea, where goods would be transferred at Shihr or Aden for shipment further north.50 The shortage of fresh water has always been a serious issue on the Gulf littoral, in light of the scanty rainfall and high temperatures. Cities could not exist without it, and those with extended histories such as Basra, Bahrain, and Suhar had assured supplies from their hinterlands. The underground aqueduct known in Persian as qanat or kariz and in Arabic as falaj (pl. aflaj), constructed in the mountain foothills, made settled life possible on much of the Iranian plateau and in the piedmont of northern Oman.51 Aflaj were also built in eastern Arabia, including Hasa, Qatif, and Khobar as well as Bahrain. However, they did not work well in flat areas, including much of the Gulf littoral, as they depended on gravity. Siraf was chronically short of water, and to remedy this wells were dug and conduits supplied water from the mountains behind the city.52 At Siraf, Bandar Lingeh and other places on the Persian shore cisterns (berkeh) for collecting rainwater were in widespread use.53 Bandar Abbas had a poor water supply and was notorious among visitors as having the highest mortality rate in the Gulf.54 In the most dramatic example, in Bahrain most of the drinking water for Muharraq and ships in its harbor was obtained from nearby submarine springs: “men dived down to the source and filled leather waterskins with fresh water, holding them tightly closed as they rose through the sea to the surface.”55 In many areas, water had to be imported. In the sixteenth century, the great island emporium of Hormuz imported practically all of its water from the neighboring island of Qishm.56 Today a visitor to the Portuguese fort on Hormuz will see the remains of massive water cisterns. In the Bushehr peninsula, according to chemists employed by the Government of India, the water from any source was unfit for human consumption and drinking water for the British Residency had to be brought from Basra by a ship attached to the Residency.57 In Kuwait, there were no sources of fresh water except a few wells outside the city walls, not at all sufficient for the population. As early as 1820, a British officer reported that Kuwaitis would go to Failaka Island to obtain water.58 In the twentieth century during the time of Shaikh Mubarak a special water dhow was invented to transport it from the Shatt al-Arab. By 1910 there were 40 to 50 such dhows, each carrying 3,000 to 5,000 gallons.59 These were in use until the first desalination facility was built in 1953.60 Until the mid-twentieth century Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi imported 140 M Lawrence G. Potter drinking water from Iran.61 Lienhardt mentions that in the mid-1950s, drinking water for cafés in Abu Dhabi was imported from the Persian coast or Qatar, often in old oil drums which retained an unpleasant aroma.62 In addition to water, there was a critical need for wood. Firewood was obtained locally. The town of Laft on Qishm, for example, was entirely dependent on the trade in wood gathered around the shores of the Clarence Strait (Tang-i Khuran), which it exported around the Gulf.63 Heard-Bey con- curs, noting “ . . . most of the firewood for the entire lower Gulf was obtained from the extensive swamps to the west of Khamir.”64 Firewood was also collected in the mountains of Musandam.65 Although this was a ship-building society, the wood to build them was usually imported from India or East Africa. Teak was the preferred wood for dhows, and many fine houses in Siraf were built of teak, imported from Zanzibar. The lack of wood also affected the architecture and town structure. The ceilings of houses on both sides of the Gulf were made of mangrove poles obtained from East Africa, cut to 3.6 meters, which determined the size of the rooms.66 Any use of local mangrove has not yet been reported. Housing for most people along the Arab coast and southern Iranian littoral consisted of simple huts (Arabic, barasti) made of date sticks or palm fronds (Arabic, arish) or houses made of bamboo (Persian, kapar). These were the most effective adaptation to a hot, damp climate.67 In Dubai, many people lived in barasti houses well into the 1960s,68 and in Oman, until the mid-1970s or later.69 More substantial buildings on the coast were constructed of coral rock (Arabic farush or hasa; Persian sang-i marjan). The mining of this coral from shallow water on the Arab side was a dangerous occupation that took place mainly in the summer months.70 The recent restoration of the historic center of the city of Sharjah has been carried out with coral imported from the island of Socotra (now part of Yemen) in the Indian Ocean.

Cities and Hinterlands In considering the historic emporia in the Gulf, the great conundrum is how such poor sites could support great and prosperous cities. Physical conditions were trying in the extreme, and many towns were not self-supporting in food and water. Hormuz, the greatest of them, was completely barren. It is hard to believe that Siraf was once the leading port in the Gulf, eclipsing Basra. Muqaddasi called it “the entrepôt of Fars and Khurasan” and said he had not seen more remarkable buildings anywhere in the Islamic world.71 The site of Zubara, on the northwestern coast of Qatar, which had a very brief period of flourescence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, also was not very good for a port, unlike the eastern coast.72 Located The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 141 in a barren landscape along a shallow bay surrounded by salt flats and coral reefs, getting in and out of the harbor could be treacherous. The town of around 60 hectares (large by Gulf standards of the time) was walled and the nearest water was 1.65 km east at Qalat Murair.73 One of the key reasons for the success of Gulf ports is good connections with their hinterlands.74 As Floor reminds us, “The ports needed the communities in their hinterland for food supplies and services (e.g., pack animals) and, above all, for security against attacks from robbers on their economic lifeline, the caravan trade routes.”75 A similar situation was reflected in Indian Ocean ports before the arrival of the Europeans in the late fifteenth century, according to McPherson:

Many ports were remarkably short-lived: their prosperity was tied to that of their hinterlands over which they exerted limited political and economic influence. When they lost that influence, the ports were abandoned. This was particularly true along the coast of East Africa, but it was also not uncommon in the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, where the utility of the marketplace determined the life of the port.76

Thus due to insecurity in the surrounding area, Old Hormuz, located southwest of Minab, was abandoned in the early fourteenth century and a new town was established on the island of Jarun, now renamed Hormuz. The immediate reason for the fall of Bushehr, which had been an independent Arab shaikhdom from 1750 to 1850, was that it lost control over tribal alliances in its hinterland and could not fend off Qajar advances.77 Although Bushehr was the first city on the Gulf coast to be brought under control of Tehran, it started a historical process in which the Qajar government retook all the coastal cities by the late nineteenth century. Some of the great what- ifs of Gulf history are what would have happened had the Arab principalities along the Iranian coast not come under the control of Tehran at this time, what would have been the political configuration of the region had the British decided to create an independent amirate of Khuzistan or Basra (à la Kuwait) in the early twentieth century, and what would the present map look like had the British not prevented Saudi expansion to the coast. If for any reason a town was no longer viable for environmental or political reasons, people could simply move on, and abandoned towns are not unusual in Iran and the Gulf. A stretch of the Qatari coastline from Zubara northward, which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a thriving commercial and political center, and included the towns of Zubara, Furayhah, and Khur Hassan, is today completely abandoned. (In this case, it is beginning to yield its secrets to archaeologists.) Some towns moved when the creeks on which they were located silted up. In medieval times this 142 M Lawrence G. Potter affected old Hormuz. Silting led to the decline of Sharjah as a port, whereas the decision to dredge Dubai Creek in 1958–1959 led to the port’s runaway success.78 Successful port cities had to be able to supply passing ships with food and water, and rapid urban expansion demanded greatly increased supplies. Siraf, provisioned by valleys north of the city, only produced about 50 percent of the food needed to feed its population, estimated at 16,000 to 28,000.79 In contrast, in the early Islamic period Suhar had over 4,000 hectares of cultivated land—more than six times that of Siraf—meaning it could provision passing ships much more easily.80 In the case of Julfar, the rapid growth of a productive agricultural hinterland helped it supply Hormuz with food and led to Julfar’s becoming a major urban area in the fifteenth century.81 Zubara at its height in the late eighteenth century was no doubt highly dependent upon imported food, but did develop some agriculture, especially dates, and sheep and goats were bred in its immediate hinterland.82

City Sites There are several reasons why all the important port cities (save Julfar) were located on the northern shore of the Gulf before the twentieth century. For one thing, the water was deeper and it was therefore easier to navigate. (For the same reason, it was not so good for pearling.) The fact that the Iranian coastline always had a settled population, with the possibility to supply ships with food and water, as well as a route to inland trading and forwarding centers such as Shiraz and Kirman, made the presence of cities there more likely than on the southern shore. An obvious reason for the prominence of the Iranian ports was the lack of major towns on the Arabian shore. The ‘Utubi tribal migrations to the coast in the eighteenth century and the settlement of Kuwait, Bahrain, and Zubara led to competition with the established ports of Basra, Bushehr, and Muscat. The rapid rise of new regional emporia was a magnet for Arabian tribesmen and merchants. (For example, merchants deserted Basra and flocked to Zubara.) The key to their success was that they were free ports with no customs duties. This was a major difference with the Ottoman port of Basra or the Persian port of Bushehr, and shifted much trade to the southern part of the Gulf.83 As Fuccaro points out, the port towns that took shape in the Gulf in the second half of the nineteenth century were based on a resurgence of tribal power that began in the previous century, large revenues from pearling that spurred the urbanization process, and British informal empire. “The Government of India provided military protection to the coast against novel tribal threats and consolidated the precarious position of local ruling The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 143 dynasties. At the same time, it granted privileges of extraterritorial jurisdiction to segments of the urban populations.”84 Robert Carter has made a strong case that “ . . . the modern urban configuration of the Gulf was almost completely determined by the historic pearl fishery.”85 By using evidence from historical chronicles and archaeology, Carter concludes that the pearl industry determined the settlement pattern of the Gulf from the late eighteenth century onward. He suggests that the rapid rise of many new urban centers changed the historic pattern in which only a few ports (Bahrain, Julfar and one on the Persian coast) dominated the industry. This was possible due to the collapse of central state authority on both sides of the Gulf, and the benefit of the Pax Britannica on the Gulf waters. Using statistics indicating the rising number of boats and value of the catch, he shows a great increase in wealth that drove the process of urbanization over the nineteenth century. The argument is persuasive, although it only works for the Arab side of the Gulf and not the Persian one, where revenue from pearling was never as significant.

Conclusion The history of the Persian Gulf has been marked by the rise and fall of port cities, with the most important ones located on the Persian coast in premodern times while the present day is marked by thriving modern cities on the Arabian side. The location of these cities has been strongly affected by geography, including lack of water and creeks that silt up or move. Natural calamities, such as the earthquake that devastated Siraf in 977 ce, also have played a role.86 Political events within the wider region could also have a decisive effect on the fate of port cities. Historically there was an interchangability of ports, with traffic affected by the rate of customs duties and the political situation in the hinterland as well as regionally. The Gulf constituted one market, in which the leading port cities could alternate. Moreover, the rise and fall of ports in the Gulf was a natural process that was common elsewhere. After all, “ . . . a port is essentially a dynamic phenomenon, changing in its morphology, functions and status over time. In Asia, as in Africa and elsewhere, no port is an isolated phenomenon, for each belongs to a port complex within which individual ports are function- ally interrelated.”87 This is also true for the Persian Gulf. What of the future? For the time being, the Khalijis have transcended the limitations of geography, climate, and lack of water, and continue to excel as the businessmen that they always have been. The port cities are multina- tional, as they always were. The glitzy shopping malls of Doha and Dubai are just a modern version of what the great emporiums of Siraf, Hormuz, and Muscat must have looked like. 144 M Lawrence G. Potter

The effects of globalization on the Gulf have been profound. According to Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, professor of political science at Emirates University, “In terms of identity, Dubai is no longer what it was just a short time ago— Emirati, Gulf, Arab, Islamic or Middle Eastern. It has hurriedly become a global city that is intricately connected to the economic, financial, and commercial global network.”88 Some now speak of the Gulf as the new center of the Middle East, eclipsing great cities such as Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad. Economic strategies that worked in the past have been reinvented for the modern era. Thus free trade zones in places like Dubai or Kish Island are modern versions of free ports like Kuwait or Zubara. The Iranian government established Kish as a free trade zone in 1988, followed in 1991 by Qishm Island and the port of Chabahar. These were meant to compete with free trade zones on the Arabian side, especially Jebel Ali in Dubai, officially founded in 1985 but in progress since the 1970s. However, while Jebel Ali has been a great success, the Iranian zones have never taken off and the Iranian port cities have languished in comparison to those on the Arab shore.89 Interestingly, it is the conclusion of Keshavarzian, who studied the modern zones, that they were established more for political than economic reasons: “Just as Dubai sought to create a western border in the shifting sands of the Arabian desert, Iran sought to transform its southern frontier into a border from which to project power.”90 The Gulf cannot escape its geographical destiny, notably its hot climate and lack of water and foodstuffs. Scholars recall that great historical cities in the region such as Sultaniyya, the Ilkhanid capital in fourteenth-century Iran, and Fatehpour Sikri, the Mughal capital in sixteenth-century India, had to be abandoned for lack of water. Only the riches from pearling, which boomed in the nineteenth century, and oil and gas in the twentieth, could provide the income that enabled Arab cities in the Gulf to disregard climatic limitations and expand rapidly, importing virtually everything they needed. The lack of water is still a critical issue, especially because of its prolific use due to rapid urbanization and the absolute dependence on desalination plants that could suddenly be idled by oil spills, a nuclear accident or military conflict. As Luomi points out, “the abundance of cheap energy and the availability of desalination technologies distort the way in which water availability is perceived . . . this artificial abundance is achieved at high cost to the environment, through greenhouse gas emissions and highly saline, chemical-rich discharges.”91 There is a constant danger of earthquakes. Three quakes in southern Iran on April 9 and 16 and May 6, 2013, damaged the Iranian reactor at Bushehr, which was at first denied by Iranian authorities.92 The second quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, was felt in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah, and major The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 145 buildings in Dubai, which were shaking, had to be evacuated as residents fled in terror.93 Iranian officials said the Bushehr plant was designed to withstand a quake up to an 8 magnitude.94 The mutual need for help and cooperation in order to thrive in such difficult climatic conditions, coupled with political insecurity and the continued intervention of outside powers, has not lessened with modern times. All the regional states face similar dilemmas of how to manage climate change and design sustainable policies. Successful export of petroleum depends on political cooperation. Qatar and Iran, for example, need to work together to jointly develop the huge undersea gas field that they share. The Iranian coast at present is relatively undeveloped due to lack of funds; investment there on the part of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states would make a big difference and serve to tamp down political disputes. Likewise joint investment at the head of the Gulf, particularly in developing underwater petroleum reserves, could go far toward defusing potential conflict.

* * *

After this review of the rise and fall of port cities, a fair question might be what lies ahead. The famous Saudi Arabian novelist Abdelrahman Munif has his own answer: the glittering oil cities of today are cities of salt, which will be gone like salt in water.95 According to Munif oil is not a blessing but a curse. In a newspaper interview he said, “The tragedy is not in our having the oil, but in the way we use the wealth it has created and in the future awaiting us after it has run out . . . in twenty or thirty years’ time we shall discover that oil has been a real tragedy for the Arabs, and these giant cities built in the desert will find no-one to live in them . . . ”96 So far this has not happened. The most critical ecological stress is on the Arab side, with ever-expanding cities built with oil wealth which have, embarrasingly, the highest per capita use of water in the world. Such excess is increasingly being noticed, although it has not curtailed urban expansion by the regional states. On the Persian side, lack of money, tourism, and trade have kept cities small (there are no desalination plants) and this is not such a problem. For time being, massive revenues from petroleum resources can buy time and let states ignore the ecological warning signs. However, should oil prices fall or such revenue dry up, the situation would be dire. It can be argued that cities on the Arab side of the Gulf have been out- stripping their ecological base for many years, although some scientists have called into question the concept of a natural carrying capacity: “The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history, and most likely the 146 M Lawrence G. Potter future,” according to Erle Ellis, a professor of geography and environmental systems.97 Still, it is an open question how long huge new oil cities can outstrip their ecological bases with impunity. Certainly, were it not for massive petroleum revenues, marvels such as modern Dubai would be unsustainable. In the past the Khalijis have always overcome the environmental obstacles that have confronted them and managed to adapt. Hopefully, they can find a way to maintain themselves in the face of the political and environmental challenges ahead.

Notes

*I greatly appreciate the helpful comments and corrections of Robert A. Carter, Nelida Fuccaro, Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, Haideh Sahim, and Donald Whitcomb. Needless to say, they may not agree with all aspects of my analysis and I am responsible for any errors. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Gulf Studies Symposium, American University of Kuwait, March 22, 2013; the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Doha, Qatar, May 16, 2012; and the Fifth Biennial Convention of The Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, Hyderabad, India, January 6, 2012.

1. Material on the largest Arab port cities (Kuwait, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, Muscat, and Matrah) is collected in Richard Trench, ed., Arab Gulf Cities, 4 vols. (Slough, UK: Archive Editions, 1994). 2. Basra lay 12 miles from the Tigris and was connected by two canals (G. Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905; repr. Lahore: Al-Biruni, 1977), 44. 3. For a review of Gulf ports in the medieval period, see “Trade and Port Towns of the Classical and Medieval Islamic Period” in Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 63–108 and Donald Whitcomb, “The Gulf in the Early Islamic Period: The Contribution of Archaeology to Regional History” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 71–87. An earlier treatment is R. B. Serjeant, “Historical Sketch of the Gulf in the Islamic Era from the Seventh to the Eighteenth Century A.D.,” in Qatar Archaeological Report: Excavations 1973, ed. Beatrice de Cardi (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Qatar National Museum, 1978), 147–63. Early Arabic sources are cited in Arnold T. Wilson, The Persian Gulf: An Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), especially chapters 5–7. For the nineteenth century see Nelida Fuccaro, “The Making of Gulf Port Towns before Oil,” in Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 43–72, and chapter 1 of this book. 4. Andrew Williamson provides a nice overview in Sohar and Omani Seafaring in the Indian Ocean (Muscat: Petroleum Development (Oman), Ltd., 1973). I am The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 147

grateful to Donald Whitcomb for providing a copy. See also Monique Kervran, “Suhar,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (online). Also Al-Muqaddasi, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions: Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma‘rifat al-Aqalim, trans. Basil Collins and reviewed by Mohammad Hamid Alta’i (Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing for The Center for Muslim Contribution to Civilization, 2001), 79. For a modern treatment see Fredrik Barth, Sohar: Culture and Society in an Omani Town (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 5. Mohammed Redha Bhacker and Bernadette Bhacker, “Qalhat in Arabian History: Context and Chronicles,” The Journal of Oman Studies, vol. 13 (2004): 11–55. See a report on new excavations there in Axelle Rougeulle, “The Qalhat Project: new research at the medieval harbour site of Qalhat, Oman (2008),” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (2010): 303–20. 6. Jayanti Maitra Afra Al-Hajji, Qasr Al Hosn: The History of the Rulers of Abu Dhabi 1793–1966 (Abu Dhabi: Centre for Documentation and Research, 2001), 3–11. 7. J. G. Lorimer, comp., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ’Omân, and Central Arabia (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, vol. I (1915), vol. II (1908)); various reprints. See here vol. II, 1761–62. At this time Sharjah had a population of about 15,000. 8. Here the work of archaeologists, who in recent years have been extensively excavating the Arab side of the Gulf, has made an important contribution to understanding regional history and allows for comparative study so ports are not studied in isolation. On the Iranian side, only the city of Siraf has been excavated so far (between 1966 and 1973). Scholars are still awaiting the results of underwater archaeology on both shores. 9. Mariam Behnam, Zelzelah: A Woman Before Her Time (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 1994), 16. 10. According to Istakhri, cited in Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 258. Excavations in the 1970s revealed that the walls of Siraf enclosed an area of more than 250 hectares (see David Whitehouse, “Excavations at Siraf: Sixth Interim Report,” Iran 12 (1974): 2.) 11. Here I accept the reasoning of Floor, who suggests 40,000 as the maximum population of Hormuz in the winter season, although he feels that 25,000–30,000 was more likely. (Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2006), 16. Others commonly cite a figure of 50,000 at the beginning of the sixteenth century proposed by Jean Aubin in “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle,” Mare Luso- Indicum II (1973): 150. 12. For the Hawala on the Arab side, see chapter 11 in this book. For those on the Persian side, see Willem Floor, The Hula Arabs of the Shibkuh Coast of Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2014). 13. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–48. 14. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1892; repr. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), 409. 15. Derek Kennet, “Julfar and the Urbanisation of Southeast Arabia,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 14 (2003): 119 and Tobias Richter, Paul Wordsworth and Alan Walmsley, “Pearl Fishers, Townfolk, Bedouin, and Shaykhs: Economic 148 M Lawrence G. Potter

and Social Relations in Islamic al-Zubarah,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 41 (2011): 6. 16. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 57–58. 17. Lawrence Potter, “The Port of Siraf: Historical Memory and Iran’s Role in the Persian Gulf,” Proceedings of the International Congress of Siraf Port, November 14–16, 2005 (Bushehr, Iran: Bushehr Branch of Iranology Foundation, 2005), 28–49. 18. S. M. N. Priestman, “Bushehr, Dashtestan and Siraf: The Transformation of the Maritime Trade Network in the Middle Persian Gulf,” in St. John Simpson, ed., New Studies in Sasanian Archaeology: Economy, Industry and Material Culture (London: British Museum Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr. Priestman for providing an advance copy of this paper. 19. Jean Aubin, “La ruine de Siraf et les routes du Golfe Persique aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” in Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, Xe-XIIe Siècles, Tome II (Poitiers, 1959), 297–98. Also see his article, “La Survie de Shilau et la Route du Khunj-o- Fal,” Iran 7 (1969): 24. 20. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 50. 21. See Floor, chapter 7, this volume. 22. Malcolm Yapp, “British Policy in the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey, gen. ed. Alvin J. Cottrell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 71–72. 23. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf,” 133. 24. Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, The Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2010), 100–06. In the 1890s the trade of Lengeh amounted to £1 million, but after the new customs tariff was introduced this fell to £250,000. (Ibid., 154). 25. Peter Reeves, Frank Broeze, and Kenneth McPherson, “Studying the Asian Port City,” in Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Kensington, NSW, Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1989), 32. Internal quote is from R. Murphey, “Traditionalism and Colonialism: Changing Urban Roles in Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 29 (1969): 83. 26. Rhoads Murphey, “On the Evolution of the Port City,” in Brides of the Sea, 227. 27. Al-Nakib, “Inside a Gulf Port: The Dynamics of Urban Life in Pre-Oil Kuwait,” chapter 8, this volume. 28. William Lancaster and Fidelity Lancaster, Honour Is in Contentment: Life Before Oil in Ras al-Khaimah (UAE) and Some Neighboring Regions, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), especially chapter 6; quotes are on 239 and 243. 29. Whitcomb, “The Gulf in the Early Islamic Period,” 72–73. 30. Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Bandar Abbas–The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran (Washington, DC: Mage, 2011), 57. 31. Lewis Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources around the shore line of the Persian Gulf,” Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, vol. 17 (1865): 43. 32. Ibid., 44. 33. Ibid., 39. 34. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 513. The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 149

35. See, for example, The Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1947, 10 vols. (Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, UK: Archive Editions, 1986). 36. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes,” see charts from 81–112. 37. Ibid., 101. 38. Ibid., 102. 39. Ibid., 103 and 105. 40. Ibid., 107 and 108. 41. Ibid., 112. 42. Naval Intelligence Division, British Admiralty, Persia, Geographical Handbook Series ([Oxford: Oxford University Press?], 1945), 545. See Floor, chapter 7, this volume. 43. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 339. 44. My thanks to Dr. Iraj Nabipour for consulting old sailors in Bushehr to determine this information. 45. Murphey, “On the Evolution of the Port City,” 230–32. 46. Naval Intelligence Division, British Admiralty, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, Geographical Handbook Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 149. 47. Floor, Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, 76. 48. Peter Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 116–17. 49. R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas: The Indian Ocean World of the Seventeenth Century (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 40. 50. Michel Tuchscherer, “Trade and Port Cities in the Red Sea—Gulf of Aden Region in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century,” in Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, ed. Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 29. 51. See Hans E. Wulff, “The Qanats of Iran,” Scientific American 218 (1968): 94–105 and Dale R. Lightfoot, “The Origin and Diffusion of Qanats in Arabia: New Evidence from the Northern and Southern Peninsula,” The Geographical Journal 166, no. 3 (2000): 215–26. 52. David Whitehouse et al., Siraf: History, Topography and Environment (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2009), 23–25. 53. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, 409. 54. Floor, Bandar Abbas, 33–38, 40. 55. Charles Belgrave, The Pirate Coast (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972), 77. Also Lorimer, II, 1269. My appreciation to Robert Carter for calling this phenomenon to my attention. 56. Floor, Five Port Cities, 19–24. 57. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 347. 58. Yacoub Yusuf Al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea: A Brief Social and Economic History, trans. Fahad Ahmad ‘Isa Bishara (London: Arabian Publishing, 2010), 103. 59. Ibid., 104. 60. Yacoub Y. Al-Hijji, Old Kuwait: Memories in Photographs (Kuwait: Center for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 1997), 93–101; “Maritime Museum” (Kuwait: Kuwait Maritime Museum, n.d.), 16–17. 61. Floor, Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh, 21, note 108, citing Husain Nurbakhsh, Bandar-i Lingeh sar sahel-i Khalij-i Fars (Bandar Abbas, 1359/1979), 133–36 and 140–43. 150 M Lawrence G. Potter

62. Lienhardt, Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, 114. 63. Lewis Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, vol. 34 (1864): 255. Similar comments in G. B. Kempthorne, “Notes Made on a Survey along the Eastern Shores of the Persian Gulf in 1828,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, vol. 5 (1835): 277. 64. That is, near the Clarence Strait. See Frauke Heard-Bey, From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1996), 245. 65. William and Fidelity Lancaster, “Identities and economics: mountain and coastal Ras Al-Khaimah,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 29 (1999): 92. 66. Alan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), especially 223–46. For the standard size of the poles, see Farah Al-Nakib, “Kuwait City: Urbanisation, the Built Environment, and the Urban Experience Before and After Oil (1716–1986)” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2011), 122. 67. Belgrave, The Pirate Coast, 192. 68. Heard-Bey, From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, 247. Also Sandra Piesik, Arish: Palm-Leaf Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012). 69. Personal communication from J. E. Peterson. 70. Richard LeBaron Bowen Jr., “Marine Industries of Eastern Arabia,” The Geographical Review 41 (1951): 393–95. 71. Al-Muqaddasi, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, 347. 72. See an illustrated popular treatment: James Parry, “The Pearl Emporium of Al Zubarah,” Saudi Aramco World (November/December 2013): 33–39. Available at: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/201306/the.pearl.emporium.of.al. zubarah.htm 73. Based on survey data of Zubara and its immediate surroundings, the city size at its height at the end of the eighteenth century is estimated at about 60 ha. The nineteenth-century town encompassed by the inner town wall encompassed about 13 ha. If Murair is included, the area would be about 100 ha., which is the figure mentioned in Richter, Wordsworth and Walmsley, “Pearl Fishers, Townfolk, Bedouin, and Shaykhs,” 2. (Letter from Sandra Rosendahl, Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, who is the Data Manager for the Project, 6 September 2013.) 74. The issue of city–hinterland relations is particularly important for the ports in Persia and Oman. See Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland– Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka‘b & Bandar Abbas (Washington, DC: Mage, 2011); T.J. Wilkinson, “The Hinterland” in Siraf: History, Topography and Environment, 54–76; Gareth Rees, Tobias Richter, and Alan Walmsley, “Investigations in al-Zubarah Hinterland at Murayr and al-Furayhah, North- west Qatar,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 41 (2011): 309–16; and R.A. Carter, K. Challis, S. M. N. Priestman, and H. Tofighian, “The Bushehr Hinterland: Results of the First Season of the Iranian-British Archaeological Survey of Bushehr Province, November–December 2004,” Iran 44 (2006): 63–103. 75. Floor, Links with the Hinterland, 25. The Rise and Fall of Port Cities M 151

76. Kenneth McPherson, “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s–1920s,” in Modernity and Culture, 78. 77. Stephen R. Grummon, “The Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire: 1750–1850” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 98–99. 78. Heard-Bey, From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates, 258–59. 79. Wilkinson, “The Hinterland,” in Siraf: History, Topography and Environment, 75. 80. Ibid., 76. 81. Derek Kennet, “Julfar and the Urbanisation of Southeast Arabia,” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 14 (2003): 103–25. 82. Tobias Richter, ed., Qatar Islamic Archaeology and Heritage Project, End of Season Report: Stage 2, Season 1, 2009–2010, (n.p., n.d.), 355–56. 83. See the discussion on the establishment of free ports in the Gulf by Hala Fattah, in The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf 1745–1900 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 25–28. 84. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 43–44. See also Nelida Fuccaro, “Pearl Towns and Early Oil Cities: Migration and Integration in the Arab Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in The City in the Ottoman Empire: Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity, eds. Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Lafi and Florian Riedler (London: Routledge, 2011), 99–116. 85. Robert A. Carter, Sea of Pearls: Seven Thousand Years of the Industry that Shaped the Gulf (London: Arabian Publishing, 2012), 109. See chapters 5 (“The Rise of the Arab Pearling Powers 1700–1820”) and 6 (“The Boom Century, 1820– 1912”). He first developed this thesis in “How Pearls Made the Modern Emirates” in Proceedings of the International History Conference on New Perspectives on Recording UAE History (Abu Dhabi: National Center for Documentation and Research, 2009), 265–81. I am grateful to him for providing copies of these publications. 86. Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, 258. 87. B. S. Hoyle, “Maritime Perspectives on Ports and Port Systems: the Case of East Africa,” in Brides of the Sea, 193. 88. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, “The Arab Gulf Moment,” in The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order, ed. David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen (London: Routledge, 2012), 118. 89. Arang Keshavarzian, “Geopolitics and the Genealogy of Free Trade Zones in the Persian Gulf,” Geopolitics 15 (2010): 263–89. Also Chapter 4, “Jebel Ali,” in Stephen J. Ramos, Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2010). 90. Keshavarzian, “Geopolitics and the Genealogy of Free Trade Zones,” 278. 91. Mari Luomi, The Gulf Monarchies and Climate Change: Abu Dhabi and Qatar in an Era of Natural Unsustainability (London: Hurst, 2012), 26. 92. “Diplomats Say Earthquake Caused Long Cracks in Walls of Iran’s Bushehr Reactor,” AP, June 4, 2013 (online). 93. “Iran Quake Tremors Shake UAE, Many Buildings Evacuated,” Emirates 24/7, April 9, 2013 (online). 94. Iran Times, June 7, 2013. 95. Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux (New York: Vintage Books,1989), 38. 152 M Lawrence G. Potter

96. Al-Khalij (UAE), November 21, 1984, 10, cited in “Cities of Salt: A Literary View of the Theme of Oil and Change in the Gulf” by Rasheed El-Enany, in Arabia and the Gulf: From Traditional Society to Modern States: Essays in Honour of M.A. Shaban’s 60th Birthday (16th November 1986), ed. Ian Richard Netton (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 220. 97. Erle C. Ellis, “Overpopulation Is Not the Problem,” op-ed in New York Times, September 14, 2013. CHAPTER 6

Muscat as a Port City

J. E. Peterson

uscat, boasting one of the best natural harbors in the region, flour- ished as an important port for a comparatively short time, from Mapproximately the fifteenth until the early nineteenth century. Its historical role rested only in small measure on serving the Omani hinterland. Instead, its importance rested on such strategic criteria as its position controlling access to the Strait of Hormuz, its location as one of the few protected harbors between the Gulf and Aden, and its utility as the last place for ships to take on water and food before venturing into the Indian Ocean. Why it took so long to rise to prominence remains a mystery but its era of prosperity seems to have depended on control by a strong political authority with international connections, whether that be Portuguese or Omani. Some Gulf ports were sustained essentially by an economic hinterland. Muscat’s success was due to political factors as much or more than a hinterland. This was a significant contributing factor in its truly cosmopolitan nature. As an example of that cosmopolitanism, it was said at the beginning of the twentieth century that 14 languages were spoken regularly in the suqs of Muscat and Matrah.1 It may be surmised that just as many were spoken for centuries before that and indeed are spoken today.

Geography and Competition

The Topography of Muscat Port The harbor of Muscat is shaped like a horseshoe with its opening to the northwest. Entrance is difficult, not so much because of navigation (although 154 M J. E. Peterson it requires a precise orientation) but because sight of the entryway is easily lost among the crags of ophiolite that extend along that particular rugged section of the Oman coastline, stretching from Bandar Jissah on the east to Ra’s al-Hamra’ to the west (which marks the beginning of the sandy beaches of al-Batinah coast). Indeed, ancient geographers have noted the “hidden” nature of the port and it may well have been Ptolemy’s Kryptos Limen, or “Hidden Port,” although it does not seem to be mentioned in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea as sometimes alleged.2 The harbor is nearly completely enclosed and the only reliable navigable entrance opens to the north.3 Two small promontories extending northward guard the immediate entrance to the harbor and add to the illusion of a continuing wall of rock unless the anchorage is viewed straight on from the north. Both promontories are surmounted and protected by small forts on the east and west constructed by the Portuguese, which are now known as al-Sirah al-Sharqiyyah and al-Sirah al-Gharbiyyah, respectively. Protecting the harbor from the open sea on the east side is Muscat Island. From the seaward side, the island appears as part of the craggy coastline; the waters separating the southern tip of the island from the mainland can be traversed only by small boats at high tide. The island and the nearly adjoining mainland cradle the small bay and anchorage of Mughub inside the harbor. The southern shore of the harbor is flat and originally sandy and it is here that the settlement of Muscat was established. Imposing Portuguese forts sit on hills on either side of the beach. A small beach lies south of and under the western fort (al-Mirani) and was used until recently for beaching small craft and previously contained a cistern for loading water onto visiting ships. Nearby, a jetty for medium-sized vessels was constructed in the mid- twentieth century under the east side of the fort. Muscat’s inland perimeters are marked by other ophiolite peaks, which provide protection from the interior (enhanced by watchtowers at regular intervals). These are breached only by several narrow passes. One valley, al-Wadi al-Kabir, extends several kilometers south into the hills and is the source of Muscat’s water and, prior to 1970, its farms. Craggy ophiolite similar to that of Muscat Island is mirrored on the west side of the harbor. Mukalla bay, with a depth of three fathoms or less, is cra- dled in the shelter of the western peaks. Its shallowness restricted its utility as an anchorage to smaller local craft, although coal sheds were maintained on its shore in the nineteenth century with a pier extending to deeper water for loading and unloading coal. Muscat’s natural advantages as a harbor are its protection from both sea and land, the presence of supplies of sweet water, and the depth of its anchorage. The harbor is about one mile wide with depths of nine to 13 fathoms at Muscat as a Port City M 155 the entrance, becoming progressively more shallow until the depth is only two fathoms about 200 yards from the southern beach on which the town was built. But the harbor also exhibits some drawbacks. The opening to the north (more accurately, north-by-northwest) leaves it vulnerable to the shamal, the northerly wind that blows most of the year except in winter, which drives the sea directly into the harbor. Mughub Bay provided some protection from the shamal although anchorage was complicated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the existence of a telegraph cable along the bottom, while protective anchorage could also be obtained on the east side in the lee of Muscat Island. The harbor is also unprotected from the heavy seas generated by the nashi, the winter northeasterlies from off the Iranian and Makran coasts. Another disadvantage is that the same rocky ridges that provide its protection from overland attack also serve to cut it off from easy access to the Omani hinterland. As one moves slowly along the coast from Muscat harbor to the west, there are several small coves before a larger bay is reached at Matrah. This location provided easier access to the interior and settlement at Matrah was long established as a sister town to Muscat. Anchorage at Matrah provided protection from the shamal, although not from the nashi. Its utility as a harbor, however, was hampered by the shallow, sandy beach abutting the town.

Muscat’s Location As will be shown later, the natural setting of Muscat’s harbor was not the reason for its development as a port, since Muscat only came into prominence in about the fifteenth century. Instead, its strategic location seems to have played the defining role. The location mattered in two senses. For the first, Muscat was the last stopping point for ships from the Gulf headed into the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, bound for India or East Africa. This did not matter so much for trade since Muscat produced only a few goods and constituted a small market. Rather, it was the last source at which to top up with sweet water, vegetables, fruit, and cattle, before heading across the open seas. This was cited as early as the ninth century ad in two works detailing the sailing routes from the Gulf to China, as well as by other classical geographers.4 Al-Muqaddasi, writing slightly later, remarked that “Al-Masqat [sic] is the first place ships from al-Yaman encounter; I have seen it myself, a delightful place, with abundance of fruits.”5 Ibn al-Mujawir, writing in the thirteenth century, described it simply, writing that it “used to be an anchorage of the town of Sohar and it was here where ships coming from the ends . . . used to anchor.”6 156 M J. E. Peterson

The importance of Muscat’s location in the second sense is more geopolitical and came to the fore only with the European entry into the region. Major ports such as Siraf and Hormuz on the Iranian coast and Basra at the far end all faced the problem of being located inside the Strait of Hormuz. The strait was a chokepoint through which navigation could be controlled or harassed. Muscat lay well outside the strait but close enough that it could serve as a naval and maritime base for the Portuguese and the succeeding Omani dynasties. From this time, its uniqueness as the only significant port on the Gulf of Oman aided in its role as a transshipment port between the Gulf and India and Africa. Its closest natural competitor was Aden, which, however, was far too distant to serve the same functions (as were al-Mukalla and Salalah). The great mystery of Muscat, however, is why did it not become a significant port until approximately one century before the arrival of the Portuguese. There were two major ports along the Omani coast prior to Muscat, although they belonged to different eras. Suhar, to the west of Muscat, lacked any natural harbor whatsoever. Copper and diorite stone (particularly olivine gabbro7) were mined from the interior near Suhar from the end of the third millennium bc, for export to the kingdoms of Dilmun and Mesopotamia. However, the lack of harbor facilities at Suhar is probably the reason why they seemed to be exported overland via al-Wadi al-Jizzi and then through a Gulf harbor rather than directly from Suhar. Suhar first gained attention as a port in the first and second centuries ad when it began to prosper as a trading port with south Persia and India. This initial rationale for the town’s emergence as a port kept Suhar prominent until well into the Islamic era. The rationale for the later emergence of Qalhat, to the east of Muscat, is more difficult to explain. The settlement had only a small khawr (inlet) that may or may not have been suitable as a harbor and Qalhat was located at an extremely isolated position on a rugged coast. However, its isolation, together with the high hills immediately behind it, may have afforded some protection from landward attack and the adjacent wadi provided adequate water supplies. Furthermore, there was good anchorage just offshore, although completely unprotected.8 Qalhat was established by the kings of Hormuz as a branch from their main base at Hormuz and it later served as their principal port along the Arabian coast. But its decline began well before the arrival of the Portuguese and thus the choice of location for its founding remains a mystery. The only other natural port on Oman’s Gulf of Oman coast is Sur at the far eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Although the khawr at Sur is extensive, it was reported in the early twentieth century to have a bar at the entrance covered by only three feet of water and the narrow channel leading Muscat as a Port City M 157 into the khawr proper was only 1–2 fathoms deep. As a consequence, Sur was only served by dhows, although this made it an important port for connections between interior Oman, especially al-Sharqiyyah, and East Africa. Al-Sib, a few miles to the west of Muscat, is the closest landing place to Wadi Sama’il and thus to the interior of Oman. However, it does not give much more advantage in terms of distance than Matrah and its suitability as a port is severely hampered by its extremely shallow beach. Certainly, Muscat traded with and served as a port for the Omani hinterland. Wadi Sama’il leads to the heart of the country, which was the principal center of Ibadi learning and the imamate, especially at Nizwa, and a source of Oman’s dried fruits and famed dates. Al-Batinah coast to the west of Muscat was important for producing horses and dried fish for export. Still, the population in and the amount of trade generated by Oman’s hinterland would not justify Muscat’s emergence as a major port.

Muscat’s Emergence as a Significant Port City

The Portuguese Period Muscat’s emergence some 600 years ago then can be postulated as the result of two specific factors. The first is the decline of Qalhat in the fifteenth century. Why Qalhat declined is not clearly understood but presumably it was because of political instability associated with weakening Hormuzi power. Muscat, relatively nearby, was well-placed to take up Qalhat’s port role and the settlement prospered and took over the principal role for the Indian trade even though Hormuzi political control remained in Qalhat.9 Ahmad b. Majid, the famous Arab navigator, sometimes erroneously reputed to have piloted Vasco da Gama on his Indian Ocean crossing, wrote (with perhaps a bit of exaggeration regarding his home port) that “Maskat is a port the like of which cannot be found in the whole world. There can be found business and good things which cannot be found elsewhere. Maskat is the port of Oman where year by year the ships load up with men, fruit, and horses and they sell in it cloth, vegetable oils, new slaves and grain and all ships aim for it. It is a cape between two different routes, safe in every wind and possesses fresh water and a hospitable and sociable people who love strangers.”10 The Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque, who conquered the city, noted that Muscat was “a large and very populous city . . . it is the principal entrepôt of the Kingdom of Ormuz, into which all the ships which navigate these parts must of necessity enter. . . . It is of old a market for carriage of horses and dates; is a very elegant town, with very fine houses, and supplied from the interior with much wheat, maize, barley, and dates, for lading as 158 M J. E. Peterson many as vessels come for them.”11 The Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa, believed to have visited Muscat in the early years of the sixteenth century just after the Portuguese conquest, described it as “a large place, wherein dwell many persons of standing. It has great trade and an exceeding great fishery, where are taken fish many and great, which they salt and dry. They have dealings in this fish with many countries.”12 Other Portuguese observers described it as “Entourée de jardins, de vergers et de palmeraies, arrosés grâce à des puits dont les trueils étaient mus par des bœufs.”13 The second factor, changes in ship design, specifically the appearance of larger and deeper European vessels that required more draft in harbors, followed on the heels of the decline of Qalhat.14 When the Portuguese seized Muscat in 1507, it seemed only sensible to make sustained use of it as a port. Not only did it have a history as a long-distance port but it boasted deep and mostly well-sheltered anchorage for their larger craft. The strategic regional location—particularly important after the loss of Hormuz in 1622 and the resultant relocation of Portugal’s regional headquarters to Muscat until 1650—simply added to these advantages.15 Muscat served the Portuguese well as a center for trade, essentially transshipment with the Gulf, India, the Red Sea, and Africa, particularly since the Portuguese had established factories (i.e., trading stations) in all these regions. But it also served as a center for political and commercial control. In this sense, it anticipated the British establishment of ports and control points at Singapore, Hong Kong, Malacca, Penang, and Aden. The difference was that Muscat had existed already as a port whereas most of the others were created from nothing.16

The Ya‘aribah, the Al Bu Sa‘id, and European Trade The Portuguese occupation of Muscat lasted for more than a century until the garrison was finally forced to surrender to the Ya‘rubi (pl. al-Ya‘aribah) dynasty of Oman. This transfer did not diminish Muscat’s importance, however. While the Ya‘aribah continued to keep their capital in the interior of Oman, where their power base was located, considerable use was made of Muscat as their principal port for the maintenance of a regional maritime empire. Furthermore, the port was not closed to European traders, as Dutch and English merchants in particular made regular visits and undertook negotiations for factories. The Ya‘aribah launched their first assault on Muscat in 1640 but without success. Imam Nasir b. Murshid al-Ya‘rubi’s attack in 1648 succeeded in dislodging the Portuguese from Matrah and a third attack in 1650 eliminated the defending garrison with the survivors escaping to India. Muscat subsequently served as the controlling port for the Ya‘rubi maritime Muscat as a Port City M 159 empire, although this seemed to have little impact on the physical structure of the town. The maritime orientation of the Ya‘aribah created consternation among European competitors: “The strength of the Arabs at Muscat, in shipping and forces, was, at this time (1694–1695), so great, as to excite an alarm that they would obtain the command of the Persian Gulf.”17 The Ya‘aribah were so powerful that they ousted the Portuguese from Mombasa, pillaged Diu on the Malabar coast of India, and took possession of Zanzibar.18 More significant changes were made after the descent of the Ya‘rubi dynasty into civil war and the country’s occupation by the Persian ruler, Nadir Shah. While there was some decline in Muscat’s role with the dete- rioration of Ya‘rubi power, it continued as the major import/export port for Oman under the Al Bu Sa‘id dynasty. The dynasty’s progenitor, Ahmad b. Sa‘id, drove the Persians out of Muscat and out of Oman in the early 1740s. Little use was made of the port initially. But about 1789, the third ruler, Hamad b. Sa‘id, assumed political leadership from his father and moved the family’s seat from al-Rustaq to Muscat so that he might better conduct his maritime interests.19 Shortly after that, Sa‘id b. Sultan, the fifth ruler in the dynasty, revived Oman’s maritime expansion with Muscat as the center of operations for forays along the Persian coast and into the Gulf. Eventually, however, his attention turned to East Africa. This development marked a new stage of growth in maritime trade with Muscat at its center. A native broker of the (British) East India Company was stationed periodically in Muscat during the years 1773 to 1779. Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore (1782–1799), established a permanent trading mission and factory at Muscat, where he anchored part of his commercial fleet during the off-season. Muscat traded silkworms, sheep, saffron seed, rock salt, horses, pearls, raisins, pearl fishers, and artificers for Tipu Sultan’s navy for sandalwood, pepper, ivory, cloth, and rice.20 Al Bu Sa‘id trading activities during this period were widespread, stretching from the Makran Coast immediately opposite, down the coast of India and up the other side, into the islands of Southeast Asia and along the East African littoral.21 But the relationship between Tipu Sultan and the Al Bu Sa‘id also had its disadvantages. The anti-British attitude of the former aroused British suspicion of the Al Bu Sa‘id, already blamed for Muscati slave trading in British territories, which was not helped when a letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to Tipu Sultan via Muscat was intercepted.22 A commercial treaty was signed with the British in 1798 and ratified in 1800, although it did not include any right to establish a factory in Al Bu Sa‘id territory.23 A British Agent was represented at Muscat during the period 1800–1809 and then again in 1840.24 160 M J. E. Peterson

Zanzibar and the Decline of Muscat’s Importance Zanzibar eventually became the preeminent port in Sa‘id b. Sultan’s empire, handling the more important part of Omani trade while Muscat was reduced to a subsidiary status. The centrality of Zanzibar’s position was the result of the island’s increasingly important production of cloves, a crop introduced by Sa‘id b. Sultan, and the slave trade. Not only did this change of orientation result in Sa‘id b. Sultan’s nearly permanent residence in Zanzibar, it strengthened the Omani connection with East Africa and deeper penetration into that continent’s interior. With Sa‘id b. Sultan’s death in 1856 and the subsequent division of the Al Bu Sa‘id realm into independent Zanzibari and Omani states, Muscat declined as an êntrepot and was reduced to the status of a relatively minor port principally serving the limited Omani hinterland. In addition, strife within the family and between Muscat on the one hand and the tribes and religious leaders of the interior on the other was endemic throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.

The Historical City of Muscat

Under the Portuguese The earliest descriptions extant of Muscat are of the port at the time of the Portuguese conquest in ad 1507. The Portuguese incorporated many of the existing features of the settlement into their town, and many of their addi- tions or improvements could still be discerned into the 1970s. When the Portuguese first appeared along the Omani coast, the alarmed residents of Muscat erected an earthen sea wall, known as Sikkat al-Madfa‘. This did not prevent the Portuguese from overrunning the town’s defenses but they retained and strengthened the sea wall, as well as the existing wall around the town’s inland perimeter.25 They burned the large wooden jami‘ mosque in the center of the town and replaced it with a church. Although Albuquerque departed soon after his victory, Muscat was maintained as a garrison and factory. To protect their investment, especially from Ottoman threats, work was eventually carried out on fortifications. The first structure was located on a hill on the east side of the harbor, between the town and Muscat Island. Fort São João, later known as Fort al-Jalali, was built perhaps on existing fortifications, probably Hormuzi, as mentioned by Braz de Albuquerque in his description of Muscat, and constructed during 1582–1587.26 Work on a fort on the western side of the harbor began in 1552 and, although still in early stages of construction, served as a refuge for the Portuguese garrison when Ottoman forces attacked that same year.27 It took a later Ottoman force, Muscat as a Port City M 161 attacking by both land and sea, to shock the Portuguese into completing the fort. Fort Capitão, later known as Fort al-Mirani, was finished sometime between 1584 and 1587. The Portuguese also constructed the small fortlets on the promontories marking the entrance to the harbor, as well as a small fort in al-Wadi al- Kabir to protect the town’s water supplies. With the emergence of a landward threat from the Ya‘aribah in the early seventeenth century, the earthen wall encircling the town was strengthened and a moat added along its exterior. Watchtowers were added along the surrounding ridgelines. An Augustinian monastery was built in the town in 1597 as part of a large complex including the governor’s residence, the factory, and the garrison. This came to be known as the gharayzah, gareza, or greiza, a term undoubtedly derived from corruption of the Portuguese word for church, igreja. During the same period, a new customs house was erected with a gate bearing the date 1625, and a boat dock was extended under Fort al-Mirani.28 Improvements were also made to the canal bringing water from al-Wadi al- Kabir and to a basin to hold it under the shadow of Fort al-Mirani.

After the Portuguese to the Mid-Twentieth Century Unfortunately, the historical record of Muscat during the Ya‘rubi period is little better known than that before the Portuguese, although there are some descriptive accounts by European visitors. The Omanis expanded fortifications, particularly Fort al-Jalali, and the Imams made use of the original church as their residence when they visited Muscat and of the gharayzah as a warehouse.29 Various powers sent representatives to negotiate trade pacts with the al-Ya‘aribah in Muscat and some representatives even resided in the town. Although the Ya‘aribah made good use of the Portuguese improvements to the town—including the original church, the gharayzah, the town walls, and the two forts overlooking the harbor—there is no evidence of any truly Ya‘rubi structures in the town. Perhaps two decades after the Al Bu Sa‘id made Muscat their capital, a robust program of construction seemed to ensue. The sultan’s palace, Bayt al-‘Alam, appears to have been constructed in the early nineteenth century, built partially on the old sea wall. In addition, a number of fine, large houses seem to have been constructed during the same period, some of which survived until the 1970s.

Muscat in 1960 Even though the Al Bu Sa‘id made certain improvements to the city, its outline and organization remained remarkably similar to what it had been 162 M J. E. Peterson at the time of the ouster of the Portuguese. An aerial survey photograph of Muscat town in 1960 revealed the extent of the similarities, and this photograph was used as the basis for several maps.30 The two Portuguese forts continued to tower above the town and harbor. The original Portuguese church seemed to have survived until at least 1835 or 1843 while the ruins of the gharayzah, still visible in a photograph of 1905, were finally demolished sometime around 1920.31 The town wall with its three gates still separated the more substantial residential quarters inside from the rough barasti (reed) dwellings on the exterior. The wall’s upkeep was logical since it had defended the town from tribal attacks on various occasions in the nineteenth century. The main gate, al-Bab al-Kabir, had been widened slightly for vehicles to pass through. Fort al-Mirani was occupied by a small police unit while Fort al-Jalali served as the country’s principal prison. The waterfront was occupied by the sultan’s palace, already decaying, the adjacent harim (the women’s quarters of the palace), and the compound of the British consulate-general. Various members of the sultan’s family occupied the Al Bu Sa‘id residences, and al-Waljat quarter within the walls contained substantial houses owned largely by Indian Hindu families. A major landmark of the town was the British Consulate compound, with its imposing chancery building dating from 1890. The Al Bu Sa‘id houses were still intact, even though Bayt al-‘Alam Palace was no longer occupied by the sultan. The most notable of these were Bayt Gharayzah, built in the shadows of Fort al-Mirani not far from the site of the old gharayzah, and Bayt al-Faransi, which took its name from its occupation by a French consulate at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth centuries. Several other notable houses were constructed in the late nineteenth century, including Bayt Mughub (near the British consulate and built into the natural rock) and Bayt al-Kharajiyyah (which took its more recent name from the residence there in the 1950s and 1960s of a British “minister of foreign affairs” for the sultan). In keeping with Ibadi traditions, there was no imposing Ibadi mosque. The small mosque frequented by the ruling Al Bu Sa‘id was known as Masjid al-Khawr and was adjacent to Bayt Gharayzah. The three most prominent mosques of Muscat, however, were all Sunni and also seemed to have been constructed around the turn of the twentieth century. The impetus for this may have been the prosperity of local merchants from the arms trade that centered on Muscat at this time. This was also true of the residence of Ratansi Purshottam (one of Muscat’s most prominent merchants of the time), a red- roofed building that was second in prominence on the skyline only to Bayt al-‘Alam. The suq (market) was still in the same place it had been centuries earlier and it remained a jumble of small, ramshackle buildings. Muscat as a Port City M 163

Outside the walls, a few newish buildings had been erected, including a post office, a bank, and a school. Down the wadi from the main gate, a road led to the wells and gardens that had occasioned Muscat as a port of call for many centuries and continued to sustain the local population. The oil era had yet to hit the country and Muscat was a sleepy and well-preserved capital.

Matrah and Environs Muscat more accurately might be thought of historically as a small metropolis with two nodes: Muscat town itself and the neighboring settlement of Matrah. Throughout recorded history, Matrah generally has been considered only in passing as a suburb of Muscat. It has been almost totally neglected in descriptions of the town, consideration of its historical role, and the preservation of its significant structures. Matrah’s history before the arrival of the Portuguese is even less known than that of Muscat. As pointed out earlier, Muscat was mentioned, albeit in passing, by various classical travelers and geographers. Matrah, however, was not. Therefore, its pre-Portuguese past is totally unknown. It can be assumed that human settlement in Matrah is as ancient as Muscat but no tangible evidence of early settlement has come to light. The more than a century of Portuguese occupation produced two prominent watchtowers on a rocky crag perched above the town and overlooking the beach. Curtain walls between them were presumably added by the Ya‘aribah afterward to create Matrah fort, which still remains as the visual highlight of the town. There exists also a central rectangular agglomeration of houses arranged so as to prevent access to the quarter except through two gates. This quarter has been occupied by the Lawatiyyah community for at least several centuries. It is possible that the area was originally a fortified Portuguese garrison that was handed over to the Lawatiyyah by the Ya‘rubi imam. There is, however, no real proof for this supposition. It must be admitted, however, that most of Matrah’s buildings were of poor construction and so did not survive. Furthermore, Matrah’s existence in the shadow of Muscat was also in part due to its unsuitability as a port. Matrah depended on Muscat as its port, even though it was the immediate point of departure for goods destined for the Omani interior. Communications between the two towns depended on transfer by boat or via a steep and winding trail until a rudi- mentary road was constructed along the coastline in the 1920s. Muscat’s other suburbs, such as Sidab, Qantab, Bandar Jissah, al-Bustan, Kalbuh, Ruwi, al-Wutayyah, and Bawshar, served simply as fishing villages or irrigated gardens. An eighteenth-century fortified country palace at Bayt 164 M J. E. Peterson al-Falaj (inland behind Matrah) was transformed in the early twentieth century as the headquarters of the country’s nascent armed forces.

Population and Communities Traditionally, the Bani Wuhayb tribe were regarded as the indigenous inhabitants of Muscat while the Bani Hasan predominated in Matrah. But as a port city, Muscat’s population exhibited a complex mix of peoples from a very early date. The Omani Arabs may have been only a minority of the population even during the Portuguese occupation.32 It should not be surprising that large numbers of Baluch and Persians have resided in Muscat from an undetermined early date, since Baluchistan lies just across the Gulf of Oman and Persia straddles the northern side of the Strait of Hormuz.33 At the turn of the twentieth century, the Baluch of Muscat were considered to constitute more than half of the population and served as soldiers, sailors, porters, servants, and petty traders.34 Several prominent merchants of the early twentieth century were Baluch. Another small community, the Zadjalis, have long been intermingled with the Baluch. Because of ancient trading ties with India, it can be surmised that Indian merchants have resided in Muscat through the centuries but their presence was first documented during the Portuguese period. Banians, Hindu merchants from Sindh and Gujarat, were involved in trade with Muscat during the Portuguese period and established warehouses in Muscat.35 Various travelers in succeeding centuries remarked on the numbers and role of Hindus in Muscat and they were described at the beginning of the twentieth century as being bankers and importers of rice, piece-goods, sugar, and coffee from India. In addition, they exported dates, were silversmiths, and owned some of the best gardens in Muscat’s suburbs.36 While a number of Hindu families left Oman after 1970, a sizeable number still remain. These trace their origins to Kutch in Gujarat and maintain close relations with family in India. While Hindus tended to reside in Muscat, the Lawatiyyah community clustered in Matrah, specifically in the Sur al-Lawatiyyah community on the shore. Their origins are not clearly known but it is conclusive that they have been in Oman at least since the 1740s. They are presumed to be of Indian origin and were quite possibly originally Hindu, although the community is entirely Ja‘fari or Twelver Shi‘a now. In the past, a smaller community of Agha Khani Isma‘ilis coexisted uneasily with the Lawatiyyah. While the main Ja‘fari body of al-Lawatiyyah are thought to have arrived during the period of the Ya‘rubi dynasty (1650–1740s), the Agha Khanis probably arrived during the Al Bu Sa‘id era (from the 1740s). A number of the Agha Khanis were excommunicated by the Agha Khan in the 1860s, whereupon Muscat as a Port City M 165 they converted to Ja‘fariyah. Of the remainder, some heeded the call of the Agha Khan in the 1960s to gather in Pakistan and the rest converted to Ja‘fariyah and merged into the Lawatiyyah community.37 Two other Shi‘i communities in Oman are the ‘Ajam (or Persians) and al-Baharinah. The origins of the ‘Ajami community in Oman are undoubtedly ancient. They were described in the 1830s as being mostly merchants dealing in Indian piece-goods, coffee, hookahs, and rosewater.38 British observers early in the twentieth century divided the community into Persian traders and long-established families of Persian extraction who were occupied as shopkeepers, fishmongers, and makers of quilts and bedding.39 The term al-Baharinah, unlike in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf, is used in Muscat to simply mean Shi‘a of Arab descent. The Bahrani community is quite small, consisting of perhaps a dozen families but they are well represented in commerce and, in the post-1970 period, in politics. In addition, Oman’s long connection with East Africa resulted in a community of Swahili speakers, either pure Arab or of mixed race, as well as many Muscatis of African descent. A small Jewish community existed until well into the twentieth century but there have been few if any indigenous Christians since the Portuguese era.40

The Modern City

The Creation of an Urban Metropolis The sleepy, unchanged nature of Muscat changed drastically in the years following the coup d’état of 1970 and the accession of the modernizing sultan, Qabus b. Sa‘id Al Sa‘id, the 14th ruler in the long line of the Al Bu Sa‘id dynasty. Muscat’s role as the preeminent port of Oman continued and in addition was enhanced as socioeconomic development produced increasing demand for imports. But Muscat town itself was bypassed in this renewed port emphasis. Oil exports were onloaded from the terminal at Mina’ al-Fahl, a few miles to the west of Muscat in a secluded bay that had been selected for its isolation. General maritime facilities shifted to Matrah where a modern port was dredged and protected by a breakwater. Construction on the port was begun by the previous sultan but the present ruler took credit by naming it Mina’ Qabus. The new wealth accruing to the country as the result of oil exports and the expansion of the government’s role in the post-1970 period combined to enhance Muscat’s unprecedented role as the true capital of Oman and as the economic and political nucleus of the country. As a result, the Muscat urban area exploded in size to accommodate the steady influx of population, both indigenous and expatriate, to create a sizeable metropolis. 166 M J. E. Peterson

One area of the capital region experiencing changes before the developments of 1970 was Mina’ al-Fahl and Ra’s al-Hamra’. Mina’ al-Fahl was chosen in the 1960s as the headquarters of Petroleum Development (Oman) (PDO) and the terminus of the oil pipeline from the interior. Houses for PDO’s expatriate staff were built along the adjoining promontory of Ra’s al-Hamra’. The choice of the location of Ra’s al-Hamra’ was meant to isolate large numbers of expatriates from Omanis, thus satisfying a requirement of the sultan of the time. Among the first areas to feel the effects of post-1970 expansion were Greater Matrah and Ruwi. Greater Matrah was built up along one of the two roads leading from Matrah toward Ruwi and the interior and development gradually expanded into the adjoining Wadi Bayt al-Falaj and near the army headquarters and Muscat’s airfield. As the press for business premises, industrial sites, and residential accommodation continued, the wadi gradually filled in and the village of Ruwi, at the inland end of the valley, was transformed into a commercial center with small shops and warehouses. While some growth occurred to the east of Muscat in the villages of Sidab and Qantab, this mostly consisted of improvements for the existing population and not transformation because of cramped quarters due to the surrounding hills. The greater path of expansion was therefore westward, first enveloping the small garden village of al-Wutayyah. The country’s first “modern” housing development, Madinat Qabus, was established on low hills overlooking the sea at the beginning of al-Batinah Coast. This was gradually followed by development into al-Qurm (anchored by the Muscat Intercontinental Hotel on the beach) and al-Qurm Heights (around the Gulf Hotel on a hill overlooking the beach). At the same time, some growth followed the contours of Wadi ‘Adayy near Ruwi and into the Sayh al-Hatat basin behind the hills but this remained also limited. Creeping growth tended to follow the coastal axis to beyond al-Qurm to al-Khuwayr, where most of the country’s ministries were eventually located. ‘Udhaybah had been colonized even earlier, first by industrial plants and then by housing. Shati‘ al-Qurm along the shore gradually filled in with prosperous houses anchored by the Hyatt Regency Hotel. As the narrow coastal plain widened, expansion was experienced in the formerly country villages of Bawshar and Ghallah. While al-Sib had been an important village in the past, the relocation of the country’s principal airport there and later the construction of a new armed forces headquarters nearby spurred extensive development. Al-Sib eventually became the largest residential area of the capital region. Urban growth continued along al-Batinah beyond al-Sib and inland to al-Khawd, site of Sultan Qabus University. The residents of this new metropolis were extremely diversified. About half were Omanis drawn from all over the country to fill government Muscat as a Port City M 167 positions, establish small businesses, and seek employment of any sort. The other half of the population explosion came from a complex mix of expatriates. While northern Arabs and Westerners predominated in skilled positions, such as government officials, business managers, and teachers, the majority of expatriates came from Asia, especially India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. The expatriates of these countries also filled some skilled and semiskilled positions, with each country and sometimes regions of each country providing specialized occupations (Sikhs excelled as engineers, Keralites as clerks, and Filipinas and Sri Lankans as maids and governesses, for example).

The Transformation of Muscat and Matrah The greatest changes took place in the old precincts of Muscat and Matrah. While some initial physical development had taken place in Muscat, the town was clearly too small to accommodate larger government requirements or population growth. Early on, a decision was made to locate emerging ministries in Wadi Bayt al-Falaj along the route to Ruwi (from whence most were later transferred to al-Khuwayr). In the mid-1970s, a considerable extent of Muscat inside the walls (including the old palace) was demolished to make way for the new Qasr al-‘Alam ceremonial palace (Sultan Qabus never lived there). Over the next several decades, the suq was demolished. The town walls and gates were rebuilt with imported materials to provide more aesthetic appeal. The British embassy was moved out to the beach at al-Khuwayr, presumably in part to put an end to the symbolic presence of the imposing chancery next to the palace. The US embassy, occupying the same premises as the American consulate had at the beginning of the twentieth century in Bayt Mughub, had been relocated already. The old Al Bu Sa‘id house of Bayt Gharayzah and the nearby Khawr mosque were destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. While a few other Al Bu Sa‘id houses were preserved (most notably Bayt Faransi, which became a Franco-Omani museum), others were demolished to make room for new buildings of the Diwan of Royal Court. In the early 2000s, the remaining old quarter of Muscat was swept away to provide massive new buildings associated with the palace and an overblown ceremonial entryway to the palace was blasted through the town walls. Thus, the old port settlement of Muscat succumbed to being transformed into nothing more than palace precincts and an area for tourists to wander about while gazing up at the old Portuguese forts, which were preserved albeit with significant changes. The precincts outside the walls had been transformed even earlier. In part, modest new houses replaced barasti structures. The way from al-Bab 168 M J. E. Peterson al-Kabir up the wadi was blocked by more Diwan structures, and housing and the gardens that had sustained Muscat for centuries were unceremoni- ously bulldozed for more housing. The changes to Matrah were less dramatic although still overwhelming. The beach was transformed into a corniche that wound its way around to Muscat town and the seaside houses now looked out on the modern port. The through traffic between Muscat and the rest of the capital, as well as the heavy traffic of cargo offloaded in the port and trucked to destinations throughout the country, forced the cutting of a broad boulevard through a central part of the town. Matrah’s old suq, already picturesque, was tarted up to appeal to tourists. Nevertheless, the town retained much of its pre- 1970 character with older barasti structures giving way to modest new residences, leaving much of Matrah’s population intact. Sur al-Lawatiyyah retained its closed nature and exhibits something of a mysterious compound to passersby. In a few decades, the role of Muscat had changed far more radically than it had in the previous four and a half centuries. Instead of a thriving port catering to trade from the Gulf to India and Africa, Muscat turned its attention to the business of business, politics, and international affairs. Continued port activities were left to Matrah to handle and these were reduced to the simple importing of construction materials and consumer goods. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, two developments spelled a final end to Muscat’s role as a storied port city of the Indian Ocean. First, a gigantic new port was dredged out of the sandy beach at Suhar, part of the ambitious project to transform the town into Oman’s industrial hub. Second, Mina’ Qabus had became a popular port of call for cruise ships. In July 2011, the government decreed that Mina’ Qabus would be converted from a commercial port to a tourist port. All commercial operations, including import, export, general cargo, and container activities, were to be transferred to the Suhar Industrial Port. As a consequence, Muscat’s five-century existence as Oman’s predominant port was consigned to history. At the same time, Suhar, eclipsed as a major port for nearly 1,000 years, regained its status.

Notes

1. W. G. Grey, “Trades and Races of Oman,” Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society, vol. 2, no. 2 (January 1911): 4. 2. S. B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919; 2nd ed., London: Frank Cass, 1966), 462; G. Rex Smith, “Masqat in the Arab Lexicographers and Geographers,” Journal of Oman Studies, vol. 6, pt. 1 (1983), 146–47. The Arab navigator Ahmad b. Majid noted that “There is a rock at the head of the port, which the traveller to and from any place sees, whether Muscat as a Port City M 169

he aims for India and Sind or Hormuz or the West, and Northwest by West of it is a high red island called al-Fahl and these are landmarks sufficient for even the ignorant man when he comes across them, night and day.” G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese Being a Translation of Kitab al-Fawa’íd fi usul al-bahr wa’l-qawaíd of Ahmad b. Majid al-Najdi (London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971), 213. But Muscat served as Ahmad’s home port and he wrote in the 15th century, well after Muscat’s port use had become established. 3. Description of harbor details is drawn from the US Hydrographic Office, Persian Gulf Pilot, Comprising the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, and the Makran Coast, 1st ed. (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1923; H.O. 158), 68–76. See also the description in Arthur W. Stiffe, “Ancient Trading Centres of the Persian Gulf, IV: Maskat,” Geographical Journal, vol. 10, no. 6 (1897): 608–9. 4. ‘Ahbar as-sîn wal-Hind / Relation de la Chine et de l’Inde, Rédigée en 237/851: Texte établi, traduit et commenté par J. Sauvaget (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1948), 7. M. Redha Bhacker al-Murad, “Guide to Mirani and Jalali Forts in Muscat” (unpublished manuscript, August 1993), 3, also cites the Kitab al-Masalik wa’l- mamalik (Book of Routes and Kingdoms) compiled by the ninth-century geographer Ibn Khurradadbih. Smith, “Masqat,” 147, cites Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani in the early tenth century and Muhammad al-Muqaddasi in ad 985, respectively. Other sources briefly mentioning Muscat include Muhammad al-Idrisi (d. 1166), Ibn al-Mujawir (d. 1291), Ibn Battutah (d. 1368/1369), al-Dimashqi (thirteenth century), and Afanasij Nikitin (fifteenth century). 5. Al‐Muqaddasi, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, trans. Basil Collins (Reading, UK: Garnet, 2001), 80. 6. A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujawir’s Tarikh al-Mustabsir, trans. G. Rex Smith (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate for the Hakluyt Society, 2008), 280. Lacuna in the original. 7. “This diorite or ‘black stone’ which has been referred to many times in the Sumerian texts, is in fact the ‘gabbro olivine’ of the mountains of Oman, a part of the ophiolite complex. Its exploitation is easy because it crops up on the slopes of Jabal Hajar, sometimes breaking away from it in blocks which roll into the wadi beds.” Monik Kervran, “Sohar Fort Museum” (Muscat: Sultanate of Oman, Ministry of National Heritage and Culture, 1996), 14. 8. The waters just off Qalhat appear to have been shallower than elsewhere along the coast, thus allowing safe anchorage in bad weather for ships that otherwise would be dragged along the coast. At the same time, the anchorage just offshore was deep enough to permit the loading and unloading of cargo, especially horses exported elsewhere in the region. Mohammed Redha Bhacker and Bernadette Bhacker, “Qalhat in Arabian History: Context and Chronicles,” Journal of Oman Studies, vol. 13 (2004): 19–20. 9. J. C. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 44. 10. Tibbets, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean, 214–15. 11. Arnold T. Wilson, The Persian Gulf: An Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928, repr. 1959), 114–15; citing Albuquerque’s Commentaries. Albuquerque’s description is also mentioned in J. Theodore Bent and Mabel V. A. Bent, Southern Arabia 170 M J. E. Peterson

(London: Smith, Elder, 1900; repr. Reading: Garnet, 1994), 51. For a fuller account of the Portuguese capture of Muscat, see Frederick Charles Danvers, The Portuguese in India: Being a History of the Rise and Decline of their Eastern Empire, 2 vols. (London, 1894; repr. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992), vol. 1, 159–61. On the later period of Portuguese occupation (1622–1650), see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2006), 323–427. 12. Duarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa; An Account of the Countries Bordering on the Indian Ocean and Their Inhabitants, Written by Duarte Barbosa, and Completed about the Year 1518 A.D., 2 vols., trans. from the Portuguese by Mansel Longworth Dames (London: Hakluyt Society, 1918; repr. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1989), vol. I, 71. 13. Jean Aubin, “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle,” Mare Luso-Indicum, vol. 2 (Geneva: Droz, 1973 for Centre de Recherches d’Histoire et de Philologie, Hautes Études Islamiques et orientales d’histoire comparée), 115, citing Brás de Albuquerque, vol. 1/24, 82. 14. Aubin, “Le royaume d’Ormuz,” 112. Aubin also speculates that Qalhat’s decline may have been the result of earthquake damage. 15. Muscat was also well suited to carry out Portuguese strategy in the Indian Ocean. As has been pointed out, “Europeans brought to the balance of trade at world level the skills of the arms dealer and the military expert.” C. A. Bayly and Leila Tarazi Fawaz, “Introduction: The Connected World of Empires,” in Fawaz and Bayly, eds., Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 18, citing André G. Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Frank, Asian Age: ReOrient Historiography and Social Theory (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies, 1998). 16. It has been postulated that the weakness of the Portuguese commercial enterprise in the Indian Ocean was that they did not control the hinterlands of the areas in which they established maritime mastery. When that maritime supremacy was challenged and bested, the Portuguese position collapsed. Kenneth McPherson, “Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s–1920s,” in Fawaz and Bayly, Modernity and Culture, 78–79. 17. Wilson, Persian Gulf, 194; citing John Bruce, Annals of the Hon’ble East India Company, vol. 3 (London, 1810). 18. Wilson, Persian Gulf, 194. 19. Hamad died of smallpox at Muscat in 1792 and was interred in one of the wadis behind the town. J. G. Lorimer, comp., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ‘Omán, and Central Arabia (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, vol. I: 1915; vol. II: 1908; reprinted by various publishers in 1970, 1989, and 1998), here vol. I, 418. The tombstone (or more likely its replacement) can still be seen in the large cemetery next to the Hillat al-Shaykh suburb in Muscat’s al-Wadi al-Wusta. 20. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition, 50–51. 21. M. Reda Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: The Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992), 33. 22. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition, 50–51. 23. Bhacker, Trade and Empire, 32–33; Wilson, Persian Gulf, 189. Muscat as a Port City M 171

24. Robert G. Landen, Oman since 1856: Disruptive Modernization in a Traditional Arab Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 195. 25. Miles, Countries and Tribes, 464. Floor, relying on Portuguese sources, states that the Portuguese had started to build the earth wall only in 1625 (The Persian Gulf, 336). 26. Paolo M. Costa, “Historical Interpretation of the Territory of Muscat,” in Oman Studies (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1989; Serie Orientale Roma, vol. 63), 101. Costa speculates that the Portuguese may have used the existing fort on the site initially and then utilized the site on the western side of the harbor (Fort al-Mirani) for an entirely new fort later. In his view, it is likely that the Portuguese continued to use and improve the existing structures on the site of al-Jalali, with the only new element possibly being the gun-gallery overlooking the harbor. Costa does not consider who built the existing fort. Ibid. Braz de Albuquerque, Afonso’s son, also mentioned an existing fortress. (Al-Murad, “Guide,” 56.) 27. The Bents state that work on the forts began in 1527 but the impetus for their completion came by the order of Madrid after the union of Portugal with Spain in 1580. (Southern Arabia, 53). Donald Hawley, in Oman and Its Renaissance (London: Stacey International, 1977), 110–11, says that work began in 1522 but was destroyed in the same year by the Ottoman fleet of Piri Reis; but he gives no source for his information. Miles, Countries and Tribes, 169, gives the date as 1552. Floor, The Persian Gulf, 336, gives the original names of al-Mirani as Fort Boqueirão or Quelbúque while that of al-Jalali was Fort Santo António. 28. Miles, Countries and Tribes, 163–64 and 464. 29. G. Weisgerber, “Muscat in 1688: Engelbert Kaempfer’s Report and Engravings,” Journal of Oman Studies vol. 5 (1979): 97; and Carsten Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East (n.p., 1792; reprinted Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968), 115. See also Robin Bidwell, “Bibliographical Notes on European Accounts of Muscat 1500–1900,” Arabian Studies, vol. 4 (1978): 123–59. 30. One map was issued by a bank in the 1960s and reproduced in several publications subsequently, including W. D. Peyton, Old Oman (London: Stacey International, 1983). A newer map based on the same photograph was published in J. E. Peterson, Historical Muscat: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 31. The photograph by Percy Cox is reproduced in Peterson, Historical Muscat, figure 71. 32. See, for example, the comment about Muscat by a British naval captain who surveyed the Omani coastline in 1824: “Hindoostany appears to be the lingua franca, Arabic being only spoken by the native Arabs, who form by far the smallest portion of the inhabitants.” W. F. W. Owen, Narrative of Voyages to Explore the Shores of Africa, Arabia, and Madagascar, 2 vols., ed. H.B. Robinson (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), vol. 1, 205. 33. See J. E. Peterson, “The Baluch Presence in the Persian Gulf,” in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (London: Hurst, 2013), 229–44. For more details on the population mix of Oman, including Muscat, see J. E. Peterson, “Oman’s Diverse Society: Northern Oman,” Middle East Journal, vol. 58, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 32–51. 34. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. 2B, 1185 and 1200. 172 M J. E. Peterson

35. Calvin H. Allen Jr., “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. 44, pt. 1 (1981): 40; citing William Foster, The English Factories in India, 1634–1636 (Oxford, 1911), 127–34. 36. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol.2B, 1185. 37. Allen, “Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 49; interviews in Oman. 38. J.R. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1838; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druke, 1978), vol. 1, 17. He also remarked that other Persians from Bandar Abbas, Lar, and Menon [sic], manufactured swords and matchlocks, for which there was a great demand in the interior. Ibid. 39. Grey, “Trade and Races of Oman,” 4; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol.2B, 1185. 40. Grey, “Trade and Races of Oman,” 4, mentions that Portuguese or Goanese was spoken in Muscat by a Goanese population of about a dozen, consisting of merchants, domestic servants, etc. Another hint of the existence of this community is the documentation in British archives of the sultan’s grant of land for a Christian cemetery near the American Mission in Muscat. The list of subscribers to the cemetery, in addition to the British Political Agent, the French consul, a Scottish merchant, the staff of the American Mission and other Europeans in Muscat, included the handwritten names of J. S. de Hallo (?), P. C. Cordeiro, C. M. de Souza, P. A. de Rocha, P. S. Pereira, J. A. dos Remeoris (?), (illegible), Pinto & J. Francisco, L. A. Honterio (?), Benjamin de Souza, and A. C. Di Grastos (?). British Library, Oriental and India Collection, Records of the Political Agency, Muscat, R/15/6/67 (1900). CHAPTER 7

Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran

Willem Floor

lthough Bushehr remained the most important Iranian port in the Persian Gulf during the Qajar period (1794–1925) the reason for Athis was not obvious nor did it go unchallenged.1 Bushehr was not a better port than its competitors; in fact in some ways it was worse, while Bandar Abbas and later in the nineteenth century Muhammara tried to dislodge Bushehr from its position. However, a combination of political, demographic, logistical, and commercial factors enabled Bushehr to stave off its competitors until the 1930s, when these same factors worked to its disadvantage and resulted in the loss of its preeminent position.

Four Competing Ports During the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, four ports on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf dominated the caravan trade routes to Iran’s interior: Bandar Abbas, Bushehr, Muhammara, and Basra. Lingeh was but a minor irritant for the other ports and played a mostly local role. Of these ports Basra and Bushehr were by far the most important, but Basra was an Ottoman, not an Iranian, port. Despite this at least 65 percent of Basra’s imports around 1900 were destined for the Baghdad–Kirmanshah route.2 There are a number of reasons why Bushehr remained the most important port of southern Iran. It was not because it was better situated or more convenient than the other ports. In fact, none of the Iranian ports were very attractive. Apart from Muhammara, no other Iranian port had a harbor. “Bushire, Lingah and Bundar Abbas are merely open roadsteads, where a 174 M Willem Floor landing can sometimes be effected only with great difficulty, and for days it may be impossible to work cargo.”3 Why then had Bushehr become the most important Iranian port? Bandar Abbas had a shallow anchorage some three kilometers from shore, which was protected to some degree from the winds by the islands of Hormuz, Larak, and Qishm.4 Some, therefore, held that Bandar Abbas was the better harbor, although admitting it needed much improvement. However, as in the case of other Iranian ports, there was very little public investment in port upgrading.5 As a result, therefore, by 1900 there was only “a dilapidated stone pier at Bandar, which is left high and dry at low water.”6 The situation at Lingeh was not much better. Its roadstead was sheltered from the northwest winds, but was dangerous when winds blew from other directions. A small masonry breakwater provided some protection to small vessels.7 When Whigham visited the port in 1902 he noted that “there is a diminutive dock, which, when I visited the port, was mainly occupied by a small sailing-ship that had got inside on an abnormally high tide, but could not be removed.”8 Muhammara (now Khurramshahr), located at the confluence of the Shatt al-Arab and Karun rivers, had the advantage of a river anchorage on the Shatt al-Arab, but it lacked storage capacity, and to become more attractive would require opening up a new caravan route to the interior of Iran along a more arduous, less safe and longer road.9 Sailing to Basra and then clearing Turkish customs was another option, which entailed changing to river craft, then breaking up bulk cargo, and crossing an unsafe route between Baghdad and Kirmanshah, where Iranian duties had to be paid. Therefore, this route was only used for consumption along the Tigris, in Kirmanshah and Hamadan.10 Bushehr had two poor anchorages, which were only partly protected against the prevailing winds from the northwest. One was 4 to 4.5 km, the other 10 km distant from the shore. The approaches were narrow and shallow. 11 “Communication with shipping by boats is always slow either to and from the bandar, and is sometimes wholly cut off for days together during a strong North-wester. Boats cannot go off after sunset, nor move to land cargo until the Manifest has been seen by the governor. This is due to the fact that the landing and embarkation of goods at Bushire are a monopoly of a hammal-bashi which he farms.”12 This disadvantage also held, of course, for Bandar Abbas where lighters also had to be used and where later in the century the formal system of hammal-bashigari also operated. In fact, according to Whigham, the situation at Bushehr was better, because “cargo can be brought alongside the Custom House in boats in almost any weather, provided the boats can get to the steamers, which cannot come nearer than from 2.5–3 miles.”13 To make access to Bushehr easier a tender Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 175 was made in the mid-1870s to dredge the channel, but nothing came of it, despite the fact that the cost was not estimated to be prohibitive.14 In 1906, it was again suggested to improve the harbor of Bushehr “by dredging, at a small cost, enabling ships to anchor in a safe harbor, at a short distance from town.”15 But, once again, nothing was done to implement this harbor improvement.

Shipping and Handling Apart from the unattractiveness of its harbor, on arrival at Bushehr the reception, handling and forwarding of goods was done in an inefficient, cumbersome, and therefore unnecessarily more expensive way. First lighters had to ship goods from the roadstead to the customs wharf, during which process damage occurred, although this system was also in effect for Bandar Abbas. Heavily loaded steamers could not use Bushehr’s shallow inner anchorage. The greater distance not only involved greater risk for lighter- ing and delays due to inadequate transport capacity and overloading of the lighters; the subsequent late arrival of goods sometimes required reshipping to another port. Furthermore, the wharf at Bushehr had insufficient capacity and thus many goods could not be properly stored. Also, due to lack of roofing, goods often suffered from exposure to the sun and rain, which caused damage in addition to the increased cost of storage. “Then there are the losses from capital lying idle and from the late arrival of goods at their destination, which often means the loss of a rise in prices.”16 All this unnecessarily increased cost. The same inconveniences existed for the export of goods. At Shif, a small landing place north of Bushehr, for example, goods coming to Bushehr from up-country “had to lie on the beach, exposed to the weather, waiting, often for weeks. When the boatmen finally picked up the goods, they caused much damage through overloading and inadequate covering, and often pilfered cargo confined to their care.”17 In Bandar Abbas in the 1850s, according to Pelly, handling, landing, and processing of goods was done more efficiently and without damage to the goods. In addition, at Bandar Abbas dues were moderate and were levied without needless delay or injury to goods. Moreover, no octroi (local tax) was levied, and there was no subsequent government demand (apart from a moderate charge at Yazd), whereas with trade at Bushehr octroi was levied en route as well as a heavy demand and delay at Shiraz, while goods coming from both routes had to pay customs at Isfahan.18 Lingeh’s attraction was that goods could be dropped off more quietly than at Bushehr and with less interference and cost. They also were sometimes smuggled through the dilapidated walls of Shiraz without paying, because only the caravan from Bushehr was announced to the Shirazi authorities.19 176 M Willem Floor

Caravan Routes Once these difficulties of handling goods were overcome the real problems started, that is, that of transportation and its logistics. In 1906, a British commercial opined that “it is astonishing how Bushire ever came to surpass Bandar as a trade-distributing centre. The latter stands at the mouth of one of Persia’s natural gates, the former at the foot of a wall.”20 From Bushehr the distance to Shiraz was almost 185 miles, thence to Isfahan 280 miles, thus a total of 465 miles. Between Bushehr and Chagadak, the first stage, was a salt marsh of some five miles in breadth. During the wet season it is in large part impassable, and even during the dry season, if you leave the beaten track your horse is up to his knees in mud. From Chagadak to Borazjan the route passed over an alluvial plain, where it was so hot during the summer months that people were known to have fallen dead in traversing it. From Borazjan the road was stony and broken until Daliki, the location of the first caravanserai. The most arduous stage was that from Daliki to the plain of Khisht, a 16-mile distance. There was no road, but only steep mountain passes or kotals, which Pelly described as “a corkscrew stamped into a steeply inclined plain.” This route was so bad and steep that “camels scarcely ever attempt it, whilst it kills the best mules in from two to three years.”21 Also the do-kesh system22was used on the Bushehr-Shiraz-Yazd road. The advantages of the Bushehr–Shiraz road were that water and fodder was available everywhere along the route. There was a very fertile plain of grain producing country, and “the area of distribution from Bushire extends 100 miles to the north and 150 miles to the south near the littoral.” There were also important townships and feeders of trade on the road between Bushehr and Shiraz and Shiraz and Isfahan.23 In contrast, the Bandar Abbas–Isfahan route was a much easier and more level road than the Bushehr–Isfahan axis. There also was an abundant supply of camels instead of a limited supply of mules—each camel load being 450 lb against a mule’s 340 lb and costing one-third less, as well as avoidance of delay and the risk incident to sea passage of the Persian Gulf against the prevailing northwestern winds.24 The disadvantage of this route was that it was longer than that of Bushehr–Isfahan. Moreover, the town and road were considered less safe, although this was mitigated by the size of the caravans, which numbered from 1,000 to 2,000 camels. (In Bushehr it was rare to see 100 mules in one caravan.) Furthermore, on the stretch from Shiraz to Bandar Abbas, supplies were obtainable as far as Lar, from there onward caravans had to carry their own food and fodder, and even water.25 This was due to the fact that there was no major cultivated area apart from Minab in the hinterland of Bandar Abbas.26 Similar problems bedeviled Lingeh. The route to Shiraz was arduous, ill-supplied, and unsafe; it took ten days from Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 177

Lingeh to Lar alone.27 Although Muhammara had the advantage of being a river anchorage on the Shatt al-Arab, and there was very extensive production of grain in Arabistan province, it was only after 1880 that river transport to Ahvaz (120 km) was possible. It was only as of 1900 that caravans could travel via the Lynch-Bakhtiyari road to Isfahan, which was a distance of 310 kilometers through very mountainous terrain, and was worse than the Shiraz–Isfahan route. Moreover, unlike in the case of Bushehr, there were no towns of importance between Ahvaz and Isfahan.28 The figures in Table 7.1 are, of course, averages for normal periods. Mule caravans ordinarily took from 20 to 30 days to accomplish the journey to Shiraz, but in the grazing season (the spring months), when the animals feed as they go, doing short stages, the journey lasted 40 to 50 days.29 Even during normal times, however, it might happen that transport was scarce on the Bushehr–Shiraz road, while at the same time (after 1900) it was cheap and abundant on the Ahvaz-Isfahan route. In those instances part of the piece-goods were reshipped and diverted to Muhammara.30 Camel caravans covered the distance between Bandar and Kirman, nearly 300 miles, “in from 18 to 25 days, and work more cheaply.”31 On the road to Kirman transport was scarce, and the country was sparsely populated, while the road was frequently unsettled by marauding tribes.32 Despite the problems with the port and its handling facilities as well as the difficult road to Shiraz, there were other reasons that led Bushehr to maintain its position as the leading Iranian port in the Persian Gulf.

From Port-of-Call to Port-of-Transit Until the mid-nineteenth century Bushehr and the other Iranian ports remained ports-of-call. Such a port serves as a marketing and transit center for long-distance trade where two distinct sets of merchants (importers and exporters) met and exchanged goods. This exchange took place under market conditions, that is, prices were determined by supply and demand. Merchants came looking for buyers or sellers, and would move on to another port if they could not find a ready sale or purchase. In 1750, Plaisted reported that “Here [in Bandar Abbas] Capt. Robinson meeting with a good Market for his Cargo, was under no Necessity to go up as far as Bisheer, or Bowchier [Bushehr] to dispose of it here.”33 This situation was determined by the fact that the Persian Gulf was one single market, where goods could be landed at many ports. The availability of buyers and a positive reception (including low customs rates) by local governors determined the place where merchants would land their goods. The market was dependent on the presence of merchants, who would come from upcountry to the ports to buy what merchants calling on the port were offering. Also, merchants came to these

Table 7.1 Commercial routes from the Persian Gulf (1910)

Route Average duration–days Transport medium Weight (kg) Price (Marks) Remarks

I. Muhammara-Tehran A. Via Isfahan 60 Ship, then mule 297 144 — Stages a. Muhammara-Ahvaz 2 upstream 1 River steamer idem 1,000 12.80 Transshipment from sea to downstream river steamer b. Ahvaz-Isfahan 26 Mule, donkey 5.94 1.20–2.0 Very difficult in winter c. Isfahan-Tehran (Lynch- 20 25 Camel, mule 297 ca. 60 — Bakhtiyari road) B. via Baghdad 60 Steamer, caravan 297 160–200 — Stages a. Muhammara-Basra 2–8 hours Steamer 1,000 25 If no connection, up to 14 days delay b. Basra-Baghdad 5 upstream 3.5 Steamer 1,000 25 If no connection, up to downstream 14 days delay c. Baghdad-Qasr-i Shirin 6 Camel and mule 198.5 25–44 In exceptional cases higher d. Qasr-i Shirin- 7 Camel and mule 198.5 25–44 In exceptional cases higher Kirmanshah e. Kirmanshah-Tehran 20–25 Camel 297 144–160 — II. Bushehr-Tehran 60–90 Camel 297 144–160 — Stages a. Bushehr-Shiraz 14–16 30–35 Camel 334 334 80a 72a Yek-kash Do-kash b. Shiraz-Isfahan 14 Camel 334 60 — c. Isfahan-Tehran 20 25 Mule, camel 5.94 5.94 1.40 1 — III. Caravan routes via Bandar Abbas 1. Bandar Abbas-Kirman 30–35 20–25 Camel, donkey 297 297 64–80 In winter, longer duration and cheaper; in summer the reverse 2. Bandar Abbas-Yazd 35–40 30–35 Camel, donkey 297 297 112–180 Idem Yazd-Isfahan 18 Mule 594 16–32 — 3. Bandar Abbas- 50 Camel, donkey ca. 180 36–44 (don- Heavily traveled route; Narmashir-Seystan- key) 60–80 pasturage Birjand, 1,052 km (v.v.) 4. Bandar Abbas- 90 Camel 297 160–200 – Rafsanjan-Kirman- Mashhad

Source: Küss 1911, p. 57. a These prices concern bales. Other packing pays special rates such that, for example, one pays for the same quantity of copper 84 Mk, sugar 88 Mk, tea 84 Mk, haberdashery 88 Mk. 180 M Willem Floor ports during the trading season only, which was during the fall and winter. In summertime there was no trade to speak of.34 The governors of the ports concerned, therefore, tried to induce merchants to land goods in their port by offering competing and more attractive customs duties as well as reducing hassle and maintaining a safe and predictable environment. Trade had increased with extraordinary rapidity during the early part of the reign of Fath Ali Shah (1797–1834) because of the greater security in land and greater attention paid by the Persian government to the Persian Gulf trade, the maritime security provided by the British fleet to small vessels as well as the continued economic growth in Iran itself.35 The resort of merchants “to the sea-port of Abooshuhr or Bushire, gains daily ground, to the prejudice of Bunder Abbass, and, of consequence, Kirman.”36 Bushehr continued to hold the predominant position as the major port for Persia in the Gulf representing about 50 percent of total imports in the early 1820s. The other smaller ports absorbed the remainder of imported goods.37 As a result, contemporary travelers note that “this [Bushehr] is a place of considerable mercantile importance, the commerce of the Gulf centres here.”38 Bushehr maintained its predominant commercial position as the main port for goods destined for Iran, which it had assumed as of 1760, until the late 1820s. It was only then that Bandar Abbas again started to challenge Bushehr’s position. This phenomenon was reinforced by the fact that Bandar Abbas had been under the control of the Imam of Masqat from the early 1790s until 1869, and he, of course, wanted to get the best return on his investment.39 In addition there were internal political problems at Bushehr and the sometimes grasping hand of its governor. According to Buckingham, the situation at Bushehr was such that

the customs duties are regulated by package and quality of the goods. The governor can take merchandise for his own use or sale, and instead of paying he runs up a balance in favor to the owners to be liquidated by remitting them the duties on further imports, till the amount is made up. This has a negative influence on trade. The governor was at war with some chiefs. He needed lead; there was a ship on the roads with that article, but refused to land afraid that the governor would seize it and pay much later. He went to Basra instead.40

At Bushehr, the customs rate was basically held constant at 5 percent, while at Lingeh and Muhammara none were levied.41 In 1803 and in 1828 duties at Basra were 7.5 percent for individual merchants and 3 percent for the East India Company (EIC).42 Unfortunately, no data are available on the customs rates levied at Bandar Abbas. They were said to be low, and Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 181

Abbott in 1850 stated that they were lower than at Bushehr. However, in 1851 they were reported to hover around 5 percent.43 Even assuming that customs rates were similar in Bandar Abbas and Bushehr, the latter port was so beset with internal and external problems that this interfered with and increased the cost of trade there. Hence merchants increasingly went with their cargoes to Bandar Abbas. In 1827, Wellsted noted that trade was increasing and he thought that Bandar Abbas “would very soon recover a considerable portion of its former importance.”44 In 1831 it was observed that “Bushire has lost a considerable portion of its commercial importance of later years.”45 This observation was confirmed by Whitelock who visited Bandar Abbas a few years later. “When Bushire, a few years ago, remained for some time in a disturbed state, commerce found its way again into this channel [Bandar Abbas]; and, if Bushire had not been speedily restored to peace, Bander- ’Abbas would very soon have recovered a considerable portion of its former importance.”46 During the 1830–1840s the trade of Bushehr declined due to the increased use of the northern import route via Trabzon and Tabriz, in particular for British goods. This was during a time when there continued to be a modest growth in the overall trade in the Persian Gulf. According to British data, in the years 1845–1846 and 1846–1847, Persian merchants in India consigned goods three times as often to Bandar Abbas than to Bushehr. This shift was also to be noted in the increased role that Bandar Abbas played in supplying eastern Iran, where it sent most of the goods. This decline in trade coincided with the political problems of the shaikhs of Bushehr with the governor of Shiraz and his allies and the consequent hostilities and loss of local support.47 The competitive customs duties, greater security, and other inducements offered had indeed a positive impact on the trade of Bandar Abbas and Lingeh to the detriment of Bushehr. In 1850, Consul Abbott noted that “a portion of the Indian trade [has] latterly been diverted to the port of Bandar where the customs duties have been reduced, whilst they are maintained at Bushire at their former rate.”48 Notwithstanding its decline, Bushehr was still the principal port of Fars, Bandar Abbas having about 75 percent of Bushehr’s turnover.49 “At present [Bandar Abbas’s] trade is said to be in a partially abnormal condition, owing to its following a route which, if Bushire were less interfered with, would not fall to Abbass. For instance, Bunder Abbass in some degree supplies the Shiraz market; and this, although the road thither is twice as long as from that town to Bushire, besides being less safe. In its normal condition, perhaps the proper sphere of Bunder Abbass trade would be along the Yezd and Kerman routes.”50 All agree the trade of Bandar Abbas was thriving. “I am inclined to suppose it may be three-fourths as large as 182 M Willem Floor that of Bushire, perhaps even more.” . . . [Bandar Abbas] “is the principal port of entry for piece goods into Persia. It imports also coffee, tea, sugar, spices and miscellaneous goods. Among its exports are wool and fruit, the latter drawn from a fertile district a little inland.”51 Lingeh was next in significance. It had been rather unimportant, but in the decade or so prior to 1863, its trade had grown and in that year its annual trade was estimated to be about one-third that of Bushehr. However, most of its trade was with the Arabian coast, not with Iran.52 Apart from Bandar Abbas there also was Muhammara. Its attraction was the result of an aggressive trade policy by the Bani Ka‘b shaikhs as of the 1830s by charging no customs duties. This meant that many goods for Basra and also some destined for Bushehr were landed in Muhammara. However, since its hinterland was limited it could as yet not really challenge Bushehr. Not surprisingly, it was the Pasha of Baghdad who sacked Muhammara in 1839 for commercial reasons. However, the setback was only temporary and the port finally attained a flourishing state later in the nineteenth century.53

Political and Commercial Changes Political changes as well as new trade developments enhanced the role of Bushehr over other ports. Moreover, starting in the 1860s, the advent of steamships in the Persian Gulf, which were not dependent on the monsoon for sailing conditions, meant that the seasonal nature of trade changed to one in which trade could be carried on throughout the year. As a consequence, the itinerant behavior of merchants came to an end, while vertical integration was slowly established throughout the market chain and pre- dictability of the behavior of customs authorities increased, thus reducing commercial uncertainty. As a result of these various developments, Bushehr gradually became a port-of-transit, or a caravan terminus for the interior. This meant that henceforth Bushehr was a point of transfer between long- distance maritime trade and long-distance caravan trade. Goods bought, for example in India, were landed in Bushehr and forwarded immediately upcountry for distribution. The same owner managed all this. The shipper at Bushehr did not necessarily need to be the owner, but usually was an agent. Consequently, contemporary nineteenth-century observers note that the merchant class of Bushehr consisted mainly of forwarding agents for merchants inland (Shiraz, Isfahan, and Yazd) rather then merchants trading for their own account.54 This did not mean of course that if prices were higher in Basra than in Bushehr captains would not continue their voyage to Basra instead. However, this became a much less frequent occurrence, and was the exception rather than the rule.55 Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 183

As of 1794, with the establishment of the Qajar regime in all of Persia, the Shaikh of Bushehr remained nominally subject to the governor of Shiraz. He paid tribute to the shah, which he often withheld on the slightest pre- text if he thought he could get away with it.56 The next period can be characterized by efforts to keep the central government out of Bushehr’s affairs as well as to fend off ambitious relatives. In May 1807, Shaikh Nasir II died and a succession struggle developed between Abdul-Rasul, his son, and one of Shaikh Nasir’s brothers, Shaikh Khanum. However, despite the latter’s presence in Shiraz, the Fars governor confirmed Abdul-Rasul. Because of tax arrears and unwillingness to grant a loan to the prince-governor of Shiraz the latter then granted the governorship of Bushehr to Mohammad Nabi Khan, a merchant who was Persian ambassador at Calcutta. It was said that the latter had procured the governorship of Bushehr for 40,000 tomans.57 In November 1814 Abdol-Rasul took over as governor of Bushehr. With an absence of one year (in 1826, due to imprisonment by the Imam of Muscat) Abdol-Rasul remained in power.58 In 1824, Abdol-Rasul bought off Farmanfarma, the prince-governor of Shiraz, who wanted to come to Bushehr as a starting point for the conquest of Bahrain. However, it would seem that these schemes were repeated regularly as a means to get money out of Abdol-Rasul. In March 1832, on his return from Shiraz, Shaikh Abdol-Rasul was murdered at Borazjan by his enemies.59 Although his son, Shaikh Nasir, was after some time confirmed as governor in his father’s place, his position was soon challenged by Shiraz and he had to flee to Kuwait. Due to Farmanfarma’s failed attempt to seize the throne in 1834, the field was free again for Shaikh Nasir. He returned to Bushehr in 1835, but was ousted in 1838 after he had paid his tax arrears. The following years were quite confused with rotating governors appointed by Shiraz resulting in political instability. In 1845, Shaikh Nasir was reinstated as governor of Bushehr in the hope that stability would return to the area. He ran into serious opposition from the shaikhs in Bushehr’s hinterland as well as financial problems. To meet his fiscal obligations, Shaikh Nasir increased his grip on trade, which was resented by the merchants, who were in contact with Qavam al-Mulk in Shiraz and intrigued against the Al Madhkurs. Nasir III had been able to resist a challenge to his rule in 1849. However, he did not pay his taxes, and Shiraz summoned Shaikh Nasir in late summer of 1850. On arrival he was sent to Tehran. The governorship of Bushehr, its dependencies, and Dashtistan was given to Mirza Ali Khan, son of Qavam al-Mulk, the powerful provincial magnate of Fars, with the title of darya-begi. Bushehr had suffered much as a port from the grasping behavior of its ruling local dynasty of Al Madhkur shaikhs, and its hostilities with the governor of Shiraz and neighboring shaikhs. This situation was resolved when 184 M Willem Floor in 1850 the Al Madhkurs were ousted from their position of hereditary governor and henceforth only outsiders functioned as governors of Bushehr.60 Thus, as of 1850, the territory of Bushehr remained under a governor and local officers appointed by the central government in Tehran. Customs and revenues were either contracted for by the governor or accounted for in detail to the royal treasury. The new jurisdiction included Bushehr and some other neighboring Persian Gulf ports.61 With the change in the nature of the governorship of Bushehr there also was a change in territory. Under the Al Madhkurs, the governor’s “jurisdiction, however, is not confined to the town, which contains about five thousand souls, but extends along the coast, from Reshir to Bunder Deelum, a distance of near seventy miles.”62 After 1850, the governor of Bushehr’s jurisdiction included Bushehr (including Hayat Davud and Angali), Dashtistan, Tangistan, and Dashti.63 At about the same time (1869), Muscat’s lease of Bandar Abbas was dis- continued, which meant that a less vigorous trade policy was practiced at that port due to the fast (one-year) turnover of Iranian governors. This situation was not helped by the fact that following the fall of Zill al-Sultan as governor of southern Iran, Prime Minister Amin al-Sultan created the governorship of the Gulf Ports (mamlakat-i Banadir-i Khalij-i Fars) in 1888. The jurisdiction of the governor, who had the title of darya-begi and was based in Bushehr, included the littoral and islands from Bandar Dailam up to and including Bandar Abbas. The town of Bandar Abbas entirely as well as the three islands opposite it, the districts of Shamil, Minab, Biyaban, and Jask were under the Persian Gulf Ports governor. The Lingeh district, under a deputy-governor, was subordinate to Bushehr.64 In addition to being the seat of the governor of the Persian Gulf Ports, Bushehr also was where the customs farmer was established. For example, in 1887–1888, Malik al-Tujjar Bushiri farmed the customs of Shiraz, Bushehr, Lingeh, and Bandar Abbas. Later farmers were notables, who were merchants themselves or had close links with them, thus ensuring that customs policy favored their own business dealings and therefore the ports where they controlled the customs administration.65 Also, in 1888 a branch of the New Oriental Bank Corporation was established in Bushehr, which was replaced by the Imperial Bank of Persia one year later.66 Another important administration official who established himself in Bushehr was the karguzar, the agent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose task it was to manage the commercial conflicts between Iranian and foreign merchants in collaboration with foreign consuls.67 The latter gradually had settled in Bushehr due to its growing economic and administrative importance, which further enhanced its prominence as a trading port. In 1900 or thereabouts, the following countries had diplomats residing in Bushehr: Britain and Russia, general-consul; France, Germany, and Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 185

Norway, vice-consul; Netherlands and Turkey, consul. As a result of the Anglo-Persian war (1856–1857), during which the town had been taken by the British, the English Political Residents had gained much influence, such that foreign travelers qualified them as being, if not the king of the Persian Gulf, certainly the real governor of Bushehr in the 1870s and thereafter.68 Certain trade developments also helped bolster Bushehr’s preeminent position. By the 1860s, there was an upswing in trade of the Persian Gulf in general and Bushehr in particular. In fact, trade with India quintupled between 1845 and 1865, while between 1861 and 1865 it tripled.69 This was among other things due to the cotton crisis in Bombay which led to a 100-fold increase in the export of cotton from Persia. Also, export of opium via Batavia to China gained in importance.70 Another change was that the role of Java sugar increased significantly in the 1850s and thereafter, a trend enhanced by the export of opium by these same sugar entrepreneurs. This was due to the Armenian connection in that Armenian merchants in Java sent sugar to family members and/or co-religionists in Bushehr. This development gained such momentum that the Dutch government even established a consulate in Bushehr in 1868.71 Trade in the Persian Gulf reached the highest level in the 1860s, never to regain it again. This may have been due to the famine of 1870–1872. The southern and central provinces (except for Kirman) were the hardest hit and it took years before these recovered from its impact. After the 1880s there was a revival of trade, due, among other things, to the export of opium and the advent of steam navigation. By 1885, trade had doubled from 10 million to 20 million rupees for Bushehr, and that of Bandar Abbas had increased from 3 to 8 million rupees.72 The diversion of trade to northern Iran had come to a stop due to the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and the abolition of the exemption on goods in transit through the Caucasus.73 In 1876 British shipping in the Gulf only amounted to 1,200 tons. In 1889, some 115,000 tons landed in Bushehr alone. In 1870, only a monthly steamer visited the Persian Gulf from Bombay, and three to four sailing ships direct from Great Britain. By 1890, there were weekly and fortnightly services. This was due to greater security, the opening of the Suez Canal, and the reduction in transport cost.74 By the 1880s, Bushehr had become the uncontested “chief port for the general import trade of Persia.”75 As a result European firms, mainly English, established permanent offices there.76

Bushehr’s Commercial Community The nature and causes of the growth of the town’s economic activities as well as its political situation were reflected in both the size and composition of the mercantile community as well as of the population, which changed over 186 M Willem Floor time. From an estimated population of some 8,500 at the beginning of the nineteenth century Bushehr grew into a port with about 20,000 inhabitants by 1920, and 40,000 in 1934.77 The population’s main occupations were trade, fishing, pilotage, and the navigation of their own vessels. The city contained a rather heterogeneous group of people. Initially, the population consisted mainly of Arabs, with the remainder Persians and some Indians, but by 1880 they were mostly Persian, and there were merchants from all over Persia. In addition, there were 600 Persian Jews, 35 Armenians, 18 Iraqi Christians, some 40 Indians, and about 50 Europeans in official capacity, as well as trade and the telegraph service, around the turn of the twentieth century.78 In general, the members of the different communities lived together in harmony, although the Jewish community was sometimes attacked such as, for example, in 1838.79 As a result, the Bushehris spoke a corrupted form of Persian, which the Shirazis found to be unintelligible. Although most also understood Arabic, they pronounced this with as little elegance as they did Persian, according to contemporaries.80 The Persianization of Bushehr was due to the increased trade, which had led to an influx of Persian migrants from Behbahan, Kazerun, Dehdasht, and Shiraz. Tribesmen from Tangistan provided the labor class and fishermen, not only in Bushehr, but also elsewhere in the Persian Gulf. As a result, toward the end of the nineteenth century the language spoken was mostly Persian. One-third of the population spoke Arabic, though few spoke it habitually. English was also spoken, and was the means of commercial communication with India. Sometimes even natives used it among themselves. In addition to the permanent population there was a large floating population of traders, travelers, and temporary laborers. 81 Bushehr had no leisure class; most inhabitants were mercantile (merchants, brokers, shopkeepers), seafaring (mostly Arab) and coolie classes. Around 1828, the merchants of Bushehr were equally composed of Persian Muslims and Armenians. The latter had more connections with India, and were wealthier and thus more influential, also due to their contacts with the EIC Resident.82 The well-known and influential Armenian Malkam (Malcolm) family was the repository of much of the wealth of the Muslim population of Bushehr, probably because of their reliability and their protected British status.83 Like Bushehr’s population at large, the mercantile community was not a homogenous group either, for there were ethnic, language, and religious differences. Nevertheless, it would seem that relations between these traders from different backgrounds was no major obstacle in social and commercial relations.84 With the growth of British trade the important Bushehri merchants held agencies for Manchester firms. By 1912, the European official and mercantile community numbered some Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 187

40 persons.85 The most important foreign merchants included: H. R. Dixon, Gray Paul & Co, Imperial Bank of Persia, Livingstone Zeitun & Co (Armenian), A & T Malcolm (Armenian), Leo Malcolm (Armenian), Russian-Persian Company, Shaul Morad Hayim & Son (Jewish), Wonckhaus & Co., and Ziegler & Co. There were also some 20 Iranian merchants, of whom Hajji Abdul-Muhammad Malik al-Tujjar-i Bushehri was reputedly the richest man in Persia.86 The latter played another important role in Persian Gulf politics and acted as intermediary between the government of Iran and the Imam of Muscat during the dispute about the lease of Bandar Abbas in 1856. He was further involved in the reinforcement of Persian rule of Jask, while in 1886, shortly before his death, he became governor of the Gulf ports.87 Although in the 1860s there was not a single Banian at Bushehr,88 this was an exception to the rule. There had been Indian traders in Bushehr since the Safavid period, while they also were found there at the beginning of the nineteenth century.89 By the 1880s, there were some 40 Indian traders in Bushehr, although it seems that many of them moved thereafter to other ports in the Persian Gulf.90 This may have been due to the establishment of European agents of British firms in Bushehr, who normally financed Indian merchants to market their goods. In contrast to the situation in Bushehr, in Bandar Abbas there were no European businessmen and few Iranian merchants of standing. There were some Indian merchants, which was due to the fact that the principal merchants at Yazd were Zoroastrians, some Multani Hindus, and a few Isfahanis. The composition of the mercantile community reflects the nature of the trade of Bandar Abbas and its links with foreign capital. This situation had not really changed by 1900, when in a town of 12,000 inhabitants there were at least four European residents, the British and Russian consuls, the Agent of the British India Company, and a Belgian customs official.91 Even as late as 1912, the Iranian commercial communities at Muhammara and Bandar Abbas were not large either, although they were growing.92

Distribution Port Bushehr had not only become a port-of-transit, but it also served as a major distribution center for much of southern Iran or Fars province. This included (i) the towns along the main caravan routes (Kazerun, Abadeh), including Shiraz, which was the main upcountry distribution center, up to and including Isfahan and Fars province as well as (ii) the coast littoral, south of the mountain range towards Shiraz, for a distance of more than 150 miles in length, including Behbahan town and district. The population of Bushehr 188 M Willem Floor district was estimated at 150,000 and of Fars at 750,000, a sizeable market, which partly explains the attractiveness of Bushehr as a port-of-transit. Bushehr’s distributive role had always been larger than that of Bandar Abbas, for example. In 1863, Pelly reported that “the general opinion at Shirauz seemed to be, that the trade passing though Abbass is greater than that passing through Bushire, but that the consumption of Bushire and its neighbourhood being larger than that of Abbass, Bushire is the better known port.”93 This distributive role grew in importance, such that by the late 1890s, the role of the transit trade at Bushehr started decreasing in importance. Bushehr’s hinterland, including its neighboring minor ports (Dailam, Mashur, Rig, Hendiyan, Liravi, Taheri, Asalu, and Ganaveh) became almost as important as Shiraz as markets for its imported goods. This held in particular for consumer goods such as tea, sugar, kerosene, and rice. The latter, which traditionally had been imported from Shiraz, now came from India. The trend toward increased business ties with its hinterland was reinforced by the growing insecurity in Fars after 1906 as well as by the greater security and purchasing power on the littoral. As a result, by 1913 the distribution of goods imported into Bushehr was almost evenly shared between Bushehr’s hinterland and Shiraz.94 Although relations between Bushehr and Bahrain were strong (Bushehr had governed Bahrain from 1751 to 1783 and had tried to interfere with Bahrain until 1806) trade between the two ports was limited, despite the fact that there was and still is a sizable community of Bushihris living in Bahrain.95 Table 7.2 shows the importance of traffic between Bushehr and the outlying ports as a means of distribution. Traffic to Shiraz represents only one-third of total imports (in weight), though in value its share is higher. However, the trend was for local trade to increase. One of the reasons was the increased purchase of goods, especially sugar, by nomads who between September and March sent special caravans to the ports to purchase their needs so they visited the Shiraz bazaar less and less.96 Goods for the immediate Bushehr hinterland were sent via Shif, a small landing place with three tumble-down houses at three hours sailing from Bushehr. The Shif route was favored by muleteers: Borazjun could be reached in one stage, while via Bushehr it took two. However, the Shif route was not authorized for goods destined for places beyond Borazjun, which, of course led to smuggling.97 In 1913–1914 the pattern was the same: of total imports of 23,614 tons, 7,185 went to Shiraz, 5,367 were transshipped to other coast ports, and 2,881 tons were consumed in Bushehr’s hinterland.98 The other leading ports also played a similar distributive role, but much less so, because there were no major population centers in their hinterland. As a result of the above described developments each port supplied Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 189

Table 7.2 Distribution of imported goods at Bushehr (1912–1913)

Product Total Forwarded Transshipped (Half year Consumed import in to Shiraz to coast ports only) Sent in Bushehr tons in tons in tons inland or in stocks. via Shif March in tons 1913. Tons

Loaf sugar 6,039 2,518 1,761 326 1,431 Crystal sugar 3,704 726 723 116 2,109 Tea 220 234 — — —a Spices 145 127 63 32 —a Rice 1,405 — 213 140 1,052 Flour 183 — — — 183 Cotton piece-goods 3,085 1,780 634 48 623 Cotton yarn and 130 63 34 — 33 thread Jute tissues and yarn 80 9 — — 71 Matches 40 43 8 — — Candles 199 194 — — 5 Kerosene 772 129 77 110 456 Metals-block tin 33 254 117 4 1 132 Chinaware, 120 76 — — 44 earthenware Glassware 32 9 — — 23 Window glass 9 2 — — 7 Chemical products 64 32 — — 32 Paper 37 12 — — 25 Indigo 12 10 — — 2 Forage (military) 79 — — — 79 Coal, charcoal 302 — — — 302 Timber, wood 1,762 — — — 1,762 Miscellaneous 952 145 — 63 744 Total Tons 19,625 6,249 3,517 866 9,118

Source: Report 1912–13, p. 15. a Local consumption and large part of quantity forwarded are smuggled goods. its “own” market, the configuration of which was determined by its geographical position, that of the markets upcountry and the transaction cost of the roads linking them. This meant that each port had a certain captive market, which determined that part of the imports into the Persian Gulf which would become its share, as it would be less attractive or even uneco- nomical to import these goods for particular markets via another port. As a result there was a certain ranking of ports, the order of which changed, of 190 M Willem Floor course, over time. In 1902, for example, of the whole trade of the Persian Gulf Basra was responsible for 32 percent, Bushehr for 23 percent, Bandar Abbas for 6 percent, and Muhammara for not more than 4.5 percent.99 The Arab ports accounted for the remaining 34.5 percent. However, the ranking had totally changed 12 years later,100 when Muhammara had become the number two port. Despite its success at maintaining its position as gateway to southern Iran, Bushehr was not the most important Iranian port. In 1914–1915, for example, Bushehr was the second most important customs port in Persia, the gross receipts amounting to 5,458,508 qrans as against 7,693,982 qrans collected at Enzeli and smaller ports in Gilan.101

Ranking of the Ports Taking into account their location, we note that from the mouth of the Persian Gulf, where Bandar Abbas (population 5,000) is situated, the next major port was Lingeh (population 8,000) at 108 miles, from there it was another 301 miles to Bushehr (population 18,000), and from there 173 miles to Muhammara (population 15,000). What this means is that due to the distances between the ports there was little overlap in terms of distribution to the interior markets in Iran, mainly Yazd and Isfahan. The hinterland for Bandar Abbas was Kirman province, from which Yazd province was also partly supplied, and beyond that Mashhad. Lingeh mainly served the Arabian Coast and to a limited extent its immediate hinterland, of which Lar and Jahrom were the outer limit. Beyond these towns there were no major caravan routes and there was little commerce between Lingeh and central Iran. The Bushehr distribution area extended 100 miles to the north and 150 miles to the south near the littoral. Inland it covered Kuhgilu country and the Qashqa’i summer quarters on the west, and on the east it followed the border of Fars toward the province of Yazd. Isfahan was the main terminus of caravan traffic from Bushehr, and the town of Yazd was also partly supplied from Shiraz. The Muhammara area included Khuzistan with the towns of Ahvaz and Dizful, and to some extent Luristan; and by the Ahvaz-Isfahan road the Bakhtiyari country, and partly the town and province of Isfahan.102 Bandar Abbas and Lingeh had a special role. The former supplied the Yazd-Mashhad market (tea, piece-goods) and the latter the Arabian coast. This function came to an end due to a combination of factors. Because of the construction of the Transcaspian railway and the opening of the Batoum– Ashkabad route, Russian sugar and piece-goods flooded the market of Mashhad, thus greatly reducing the role of Bandar Abbas. This trend was further reinforced by the 1903 customs treaty, which favored Russian goods. Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 191

The little trade in British and Indian goods that still went to Khurasan as of 1906 also had to compete with similar imports from the Quetta-Nushki- Sistan road. In addition, the establishment of a uniform customs administration all over Iran as of 1903 with the application of higher tariffs meant that goods destined for the Arabian coast henceforth went directly to these markets rather than via Lingeh. These developments hardly affected the ports of Bushehr and Muhammara.103 While Lingeh did not recover from these blows, Bandar Abbas still continued to play a busy but reduced role until 1925 as a distribution center for Kirman, Yazd, Lar, and other towns in its hinterland. However, thereafter this role gradually diminished, so that in 1934 its annual trade was half that of 1925. Moreover, the trend of its dwindling trade continued due to wors- ening economic conditions in Iran as well as the increased commercial role of Muhammara, Bandar-i Shahpur, and Ahvaz. In the 1930s, it still had no wharves, the same old pier, and inadequate storage facilities, although the latter were enlarged in 1934.104 This shift in ranking, where Muhammara was increasing its role at the expense of Bushehr, was unexpected. Certainly, Messrs. Lynch had hoped that their road would attract merchants from Bushehr to Muhammara, even though many doubted that this would happen.105 What boosted the role of Muhammara, and what nobody could have planned for, was the discovery of oil in Khuzistan and the building of the refinery at Abadan, just opposite Muhammara. Its position, and that of Bandar-i Shahpur and Ahvaz, was further reinforced by the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway (1927–1938), and the construction of new roads that made lorry traffic competitive with that of Bushehr. As a result, it was soon very clear that Bushehr suffered from the rise of Muhammara, Bandar-i Shahpur, and Ahvaz, and only maintained some of its position, mainly because of its entrepot trade as a distribution center for Kazerun and Shiraz. What had not helped its position either was the fact that its landing and storage facilities remained inadequate. Muhammara had taken over the role of gateway to southern Iran at the end of the 1920s, and did not, as was initially feared, lose its ranking to Bandar-i Shahpur, situated 60 kilometers to the east on the Khur Musa. The latter due to its as yet inadequate landing and shipping facilities mainly was used for importing government material and stores, while all general cargo continued to pass through Muhammara.106 Bushehr did not regain its position when during World War II Iranian ports played a major role in supplying Russia, for then also most traffic went to Khurramshahr and other ports at the head of the Persian Gulf. Bushehr still received no major investments, for in the 1950s modern vessels calling at Bushehr still were lying some 9 kilometers offshore and discharged cargo and passengers by lighter. The once prosperous port of some 40,000 192 M Willem Floor inhabitants was reduced to 14,000 by 1958. “Ten foreign consulates were once established there, in 1957 there was one foreign resident, a Russian maid servant.”107

Conclusion Bushehr continued to maintain its predominant position despite the fact that it had to compete with three other ports for the position of gateway to southern Iran. These ports were Bandar Abbas, Muhammara, and Basra, from where many imported goods were destined for western Iran. There were several reasons why Bushehr finally won the competition with the other ports. Its negative points included a very difficult road, limited transport capacity, and inefficient clearing and handling of goods. These negative points were balanced by the fact that unlike the caravan routes connecting Bandar Abbas and Muhammara with the interior, drinkable water as well as provisions were available. Thus, through a combination of factors Bushehr was on balance preferred by most merchants. First, its hinterland constituted a very fertile plain of grain producing country for about 100 miles north and 150 miles south near the littoral. Consequently, Bushehr was a good center for the export of agricultural products. Second, its chief advantage over the other ports was its active and prosperous commercial community and their close relationship with merchants in Shiraz and Isfahan. For Bushehr’s importance rose and fell in consonance with the level of economic activity in its hinterland, in particular Isfahan and Shiraz. Third, Bushehr was not only a transit port, but it also served as a distribution center for southern Iran. This area consisted of the towns along the main caravan routes between Bushehr and Shiraz, and Shiraz and Isfahan, which meant outlets for goods and availability of pack animals, provided security prevailed and fodder was sufficient. Fourth, as of 1888 it was the seat of government for the Persian Gulf Ports,108 while the customs farmer, karguzar, and many foreign consuls and merchants also settled there, which further enhanced its central position on the littoral. Thus, the prosperity of Bushehr depended largely on the up-country markets, security of the roads and a positive business climate. Further, the availability of factors such as labor and transport affected cost and the rapidity by which the market might be served.

Notes

1. For the situation before 1800 see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs—The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral 1747–1792 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2007). Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 193

2. H. J. Whigham, The Persian Problem: An examination of the rival positions of Russia and Great Britain in Persia with Some Account of the Persian Gulf and the Bagdad Railway (New York: Scribner’s, 1903), 147. 3. Whigham, Persian Problem, 156. 4. Government of India, Report on the Trade of Bushire, in The Persian Gulf Trade Reports 1905–1940 (Bushire), 2 vols. (Gerards Cross: Archive Editions, 1987). Report 1912–13, 6. 5. A. H. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia during 1904–1905 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), 33. 6. Whigham, Persian Problem, 156. For more details, see Willem Floor, Bandar Abbas, the Natural Gateway of Southeast Iran (Washington, DC: Mage, 2010). 7. Lewis Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, vol. 34 (1864): 251. 8. Whigham, Persian Problem, 156. For more details, see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Rise and Fall of Bandar-e Lengeh—The Distribution Center for the Arabian Coast, 1750–1930 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2010). 9. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 7; Lewis Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources around the Shore Line of the Persian Gulf, ” in Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society 17 (1865): 59. For the development of Muhammara, see Shahbaz Shahnavaz, Britain and the Opening up of South-West Persia 1880–1914: a Study in Imperialism and Economic Dependence (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). 10. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 59. 11. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 49; Government of India, Report 1912–13, 7. Before steamers were used in the Persian Gulf the roadstead was more accessible, because sailing ships drew less water. 12. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 49. 13. Whigham, The Persian Problem, 156. For the text of the hammal-bashi contract at Bandar Abbas see Mohammad Ali Sadid al-Saltana, Bandar Abbas va Khalij-i Fars, ed. Ahmad Iqtidari (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1342/1963), 195–99. 14. Edward Stack, Six months in Persia, 2 vols. (London, 1882), vol. 1, 24. 15. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 33. 16. Ibid., 25, 60, 64; Government of India, Report 1910–11, 7; J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908 and 1915), vol. II, 339–40. 17. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 60, 64. 18. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 61. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 42. 21. See Willem Floor, “Borazjan: A Rural Market Town in Bushehr’s Hinterland,” in The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland, 25–63. Also Gleadowe- Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 42; Government of India, Report 1912–13, 7. Indeed, the first caravanserai was only in Daliki, until a new one was built in Borazjan in 1872. Edward Stirling, The Journals of Edward Stirling in Persia and Afganistan 1828–1829: From Manuscripts in the 194 M Willem Floor

Archives of the Royal Geographical Society, ed. Jonathan Lee (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1991). 22. “A portion of the consignment is taken forward a stage or two, and is then dumped down by the side of the road, whilst the mules return for another supply, the whole being gradually worked forward in this manner” (Gleadowe- Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 59). 23. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 6. 24. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 61. 25. Ibid., 62; Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” 153. 26. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 6. 27. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 52; Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” 153. 28. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 7. 29. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 42. 30. Government of India, Report 1913–14, 9. 31. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the British-Indian Commercial Mission, 42. 32. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 6. 33. Bartholomew Plaisted, A Journal from Calcutta in Bengal, by Sea, to Busserah (London, 1757), 7. This situation also existed upcountry for land-based trade. Conolly in the early 1830s, referring to the situation in Mashhad, reports “thus, for want of a regular understanding many [merchants] bring goods at a complete venture, and if they do not suit the market, send them east or west, to any place at which there is a chance of their selling.” Arthur Conolly, Journey to the north of India, overland from England, through Russia, Persia, and Affghaunistaun, 2 vols. (London: R. Bentley, 1834), vol. 1, 347; see also James S. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia (London, 1829; repr. Westmead, UK: Gregg International, 1971), 354–55. 34. For the same situation in the Safavid period see Willem Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000) and Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2006). 35. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1955; Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Iran 1800–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 90–91. 36. Henry Pottinger, Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde (London, 1816), 225. 37. Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 90–91; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. 2, 1955. 38. Stirling, Journals of Edward Stirling in Persia and Afganistan, 8; Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 351 (“Bushire is the best port of the Gulf apart from Basra.”) 39. Haj Mirza Hasan Husaini Fasa’i, Farsnama-yi Nasiri, 2 vols. ed. Mansur Rastgar Fasa’i (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1378/1999), partly translated into English by Heribert Busse, History of Persia under Qajar Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 134, 306–07, 310, 314, 344, 358, 377; Sadid al-Saltana, Bandar Abbas, 199–203 (text of the lease contract). For the history of Omani rule over Bandar Abbas, see Floor, Bandar Abbas. 40. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 354–55. 41. Stephen R. Grummon, “The Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire: 1750–1850” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 275–76; Willem Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 195

Floor, “The Rise and Fall of the Banu Ka‘b: A Borderer State in Southern Khuzestan,” Iran 44 (2006): 277–315. 42. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 389–90. 43. Grummon, “Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire,” 277–78; Keith Edward Abbott, Cities and Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866, ed. and introduction by Abbas Amanat (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), 86. 44. J. R. Wellsted, Travels to the City of the Caliphs, 2 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1840), vol. 1, 74. 45. J. H. Stocqueler, Fifteen Months’ Pilgrimage through Untrodden Tracts of Khuzistan and Persia, 2 vols. (London: Saunders & Otley, 1832), vol. 1, 12. 46. Lieutenant Whitelock, “Descriptive Sketch of the Islands and Coast Situated at the Entrance of the Persian Gulf,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 8 (1838): 175. 47. Grummon, “Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire,” 268. 48. Abbott, Cities and Trade, 86. 49. Abbott, Cities and Trade, 86–87; Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” 153. 50. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 53. 51. Ibid. 52. Pelly, “Visit to Lingah, Kishm, and Bunder Abbass,” 52. 53. Grummon, “Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire,” 269–71; Floor, “The Rise and Fall of the Banu Ka‘b”; Shahnavaz, Britain and the Opening up of South-West Persia. 54. Heinrich Brugsch, Reise der K. preussischen Gesandtschaft nach Persien 1860 und 1861, 2 vols. (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1862–63), vol. 2, 244. 55. Willem Floor, “Le droit d’entreposage dans Qajar Iran,” Studia Iranica 17/1 and 2 (1988): 59–77 and 179–182. 56. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 351; George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1892), vol. 2, 232–33. 57. James Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1816), 30–36; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, pp. 1911–13; Fasa’i, Farsnama-yi Nasiri, vol. 1, 702. 58. Grummon, “Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire,” 133–36. 59. Fasa’i, Farsnama-yi Nasiri, vol. 1, 749–50; Grummon, “Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire,” 125–26. 60. See Grummon, “Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire,” 120–69; Willem Floor, “The Rise and Fall of Bushehr (1560–1940),” in Floor, The Persian Gulf: Links with the Hinterland: Bushehr, Borazjan, Kazerun, Banu Ka‘b & Bandar Abbas (Washington, DC: Mage, 2011), 3–24. 61. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 33. Sometimes the governor depended directly on the governor-general of Fars. 62. John M. Kinneir, A Geographical Memoir of the Persian Empire (London: J. Murray, 1813; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1973), 70. 63. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 33; Government of India, Annual Report on the Administration of the Persian Gulf Residency for the 196 M Willem Floor

year 1875–76, in The Persian Gulf Administration Report 1873–1947,10 vols. (Gerrards Cross: Archive Editions, 1986), 8. 64. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 582; Government of India, Report 1910–11, 1; Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 401–6. Also, Kong, Assalu, Naband, Nakhilu, Shiru, and Kharg. Fasa’i trans. Busse, History of Persia under Qajar Rule, 340, 343, 352, 397, 399, 417, 419. For details, see Floor, Bandar-e Lengeh; Ibid, Bandar Abbas. 65. Government of India, Annual Report 1887–88, 33. 66. Government of India, Annual Report 1888–89, 29; Ibid, Annual Report 1889–90, 29. 67. Vanessa Martin and Morteza Nouraei, “The Role of the Karguzar in the Foreign Relations of State and Society of Iran from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1921,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 15/3 (2005): 261–77; 16/1 (2006): 29–41; and 16/2 (2006): 151–63. 68. For details on the war see Barbara English, The war for a Persian lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), Chapters 5 and 6 in particular; J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), chapter 11; Barthélemy Louis Denis de Rivoyre, Obock, Mascate, Bouchire, Bassorah (Paris, 1883), 136; Auguste Lacoin de Vilmorin, De Paris à Bombay par la Perse (Paris, 1895), 349–50. 69. Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 91. 70. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 49. 71. Floor “Le droit d’entreposage,” 59f; Willem Floor, Traditional Crafts in Qajar Iran (1800–1925) (Costa Mesa, CA.: Mazda, 2003), 333–34. 72. Government of India, Annual Report 1878–79, 29; Ibid., Annual Report 1889–90, 30. 73. Issawi, Economic History of Iran, 84, 97–104. 74. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 557. 75. W.J. Dickson, “Trade Report of Persia,” 31 October 1884, 4, in Foreign Off ice— Reports from Her Majesty’s Consuls on the Manufactures, Commerce, &C., of Their Consular Districts. Houses of Parliament (London: HMSO, 1885), 4. 76. Government of India, Annual Report 1878–79, 29. 77. G.H. Ebtehaj, Guide Book on Persia (Tehran: Parliament Press, [1931?]), 183. 78. Muhammad Hasan Khan, I‘timad al-Saltana, Mir’at al-buldan, 4 vols in 3, ed. Abd al-Husain Nava’i and Mir Hashim Muhaddis (Tehran, 1367/1989), vol. 1, 299. The Hindus lived unmolested in Bushehr, according to Edward Scott Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz (London 1807; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1973), 3; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 343–44. 79. National Archives (Kew Gardens, United Kingdom), FO 248/85, letter dated 28/11/1838 and subsequent correspondence (not paginated). 80. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 349–50. 81. Denis de Rivoyre, Obock, Mascate, Bouchire, Bassorah, 131; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 343–44; Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 233. 82. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 350. 83. Mohammad Ali Sadid al-Saltana, Safarnameh, ed. Ahmad Iqtedari (Tehran: Behnashr, 1362/1983), 6. 84. Sadid al-Saltana, Safarnameh, 2–12. 85. Government of India, Report 1913–14, 1. Bushehr: Southern Gateway to Iran M 197

86. Walther Küss, Handelsratgeber für Persien (Berlin, 1911), part III, 12. 87. For details see Floor, Bandar Abbas. 88. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 61, note. 89. Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz, 3. 90. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 343–44. 91. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 6; Wm. Perry Fogg, The Land of “The Arabian Nights” (New York: Belford, Clarke & Company, 1875), 167. There was also a na’ib-i karguzar as of 1902 (Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 14). Bandar Abbas and Lingeh had thriving communities of British-Indian traders (Banians from Shikarpur and Muslim Khojahs from Hyderabad), who dominated trade there. For details, see Floor, Bandar-e Lengeh; Ibid., Bandar Abbas. 92. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 7; for details, see Shahnavaz, Britain and the Opening up of South-West Persia; Floor, Bandar Abbas. 93. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade, and Resources,” 153. 94. Government of India, Report 1911–12, 1; Ibid., Report 1912–13, 14; Ibid., Report 1913–14, 8–9. 95. See, for example, Government of India, Report 1906–07, 24 (Tables A and B). 96. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 15. 97. Government of India, Report 1913–14, 8. 98. Ibid. 99. Whigham, The Persian Problem, 147. 100. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 6 (Bushehr 1.7 million; Muhammara 1.0 million; Bandar Abbas 0.7 million; and Lingeh 0.4 million). 101. Government of India, Report 1914–15, 3. 102. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 6. 103. Government of India, Annual Report 1901–02, 13–14; Ibid., Annual Report 1903–04, 23–24; Ibid., Annual Report 1905–06, 16; Bandar-e Lengeh (it also meant the loss as clearing house of pearls). 104. Colonel Forester, Economic Conditions in the Persian Gulf April 1929, Department of Overseas Trade (London, 1939), 14; F. H. Gamble, Economic Conditions in the Persian Gulf October 1934, Department of Overseas Trade (London: HMSO 1935), 14; F. H. Todd, Report on Economic and Commercial Conditions in the Persian Gulf 1936, Department of Overseas Trade (London: HMSO 1937), 5. 105. Whigham, Persian Problem, 148–49. 106. Forester, Economic Conditions in the Persian Gulf, 11; Gamble, Economic Conditions in the Persian Gulf, 11–13; Ebtehaj, Guide Book on Persia, 183; Naval Intelligence Division, British Admiralty, Persia, Geographical Handbook Series ([Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press?], 1945), 502–03. 107. Roger Stevens, The Land of the Great Sophy, 3rd ed. (New York: Taplinger, 1979), 284–85 (the British Resident was the last of the consuls to depart in 1947). 108. Government of India, Report 1912–13, 7. CHAPTER 8

Inside a Gulf Port: The Dynamics of Urban Life in Pre-Oil Kuwait

Farah Al-Nakib

or nearly 250 years from the time of its settlement in the early eighteenth century until the advent of oil urbanization in the 1950s, FKuwait was a thriving maritime town whose main economic activities were determined by the primacy of its port. A handful of key studies have examined the development of pre-oil Kuwait from this perspective. From them, we have a growing understanding of the role the town’s port played in determining Kuwait’s economic and political development in a regional and global context (specifically, in relation to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean trading networks, the Gulf pearling industry, international diplomacy, and the international market economy).1 Less attention, however, has been given to the ways in which Kuwait’s maritime economy shaped the internal dynamics and structures of urban life before oil. Although we have a good understanding of the many sociopolitical transformations the country experienced after the advent of oil—the beginning of state welfare in the 1950s, the democratic reforms of the early 1960s, and so on—there is still a need to explore how oil modernization impacted the practice of everyday life in Kuwait’s transition from port city to city-state. In order to be able to fully assess and understand these changes, it is necessary to take a closer look at how Kuwait Town’s principal economic functions before oil, which centered on the port, shaped its social, cultural, and political life. Frank Broeze begins this process in a study that analyzes how Kuwait’s port both determined its external relations and “provided the 200 M Farah Al-Nakib main dynamics of its internal outlook and behaviour.”2 Broeze emphasizes the fact that

it was the primacy of its port which gave Kuwait and Kuwaiti society its distinct character: its maritime economy; its occupational and social structure; the pattern of its immigration and ethnic-religious diversity; its religious and cultural life; its domestic and international politics; and, finally, its morphology—physical appearance and ambience.3

This study builds on Broeze’s analysis of how Kuwait Town’s port identity shaped the patterns and practices of urban life before oil. Specifically, it examines how Kuwait’s port economy determined its demographic and spatial growth for more than two centuries, structured the town’s social and political hierarchies, shaped the contours of the urban landscape, and fostered society’s cosmopolitan outlook while engendering a vibrant urban public life. Although focusing on the pre-oil period, the objective here is to provide a foundation for a more critical and comprehensive understanding of the impact of oil on everyday life in Kuwait.

Origins of Kuwait as a Port Town In the early eighteenth century the Najd-based Anizah tribal confederation migrated to the Arab coast of the Persian Gulf from central and southern Arabia to escape drought and famine. One group of families that migrated together, known collectively as the Bani Utub, eventually settled at the head of the Persian Gulf where they found a spacious bay and water supply near the coast. It is estimated that this settlement of Kuwait took place around 1716.4 There was no existing town or significant settled community in Kuwait when the Utub arrived. Aside from a few fishermen’s huts the only known physical structure of significance in the area was a small fort (the kūt for which Kuwait is a diminutive), built by the Bani Khalid, who had been paramount in eastern Arabia since seizing control from the Ottomans in the 1660s. In the absence of any existing settlement or community of significant size, the Utub and their followers were able to lay the groundwork for Kuwait’s growth into “a thriving commercial settlement.”5 Despite its small geographic and demographic size, within less than 100 years Kuwait Town became distinguished as an important urban center in northeastern Arabia. Its auspicious location in the northwest corner of the Gulf and its enviable natural properties were key factors that fostered its growth into a vibrant port and entrepôt hub. With a large natural harbor “capable of containing the navy of Great Britain,” its inhabitants naturally Inside a Gulf Port M 201 became drawn to seafaring much like their southern neighbors along the Arab Gulf coast.6 The maritime economy of Kuwait became based on five intrinsically linked and mutually supportive enterprises: fishing, pearling, shipping, shipbuilding, and trade.7 Carsten Niebuhr claimed that in the 1760s the Kuwaiti fleet consisted of 800 ships.8 Aside from its access to the sea, the area offered little benefit as a choice of settlement. As the British Assistant Resident observed in 1845, “The country around is a salt and sandy desert, of the most barren and inhospitable description, without a tree or shrub visible as far as the eye can reach, except a few bushes which mark the wells, of which the water is particularly salty and bad.”9 The place would have been uninhabit- able had its residents not been able to import everything they needed through their large natural harbor: grain and wheat from Basra; piece- goods, rice, sugar, spices, and teak for shipbuilding from India; mangrove poles for house-building from East Africa; coffee from the Red Sea region; tobacco and dried fruits from Iran; and freshwater from the Shatt al-Arab.10 Because of the importance of trade, Kuwait Town was established as a free port and no customs duties were levied on sea imports. Its strategic position between the Gulf and the deserts of northeastern Arabia made it an important gateway between sea and hinterland, and the town grew into a chief center of the transit trade linking the transnational Indian Ocean maritime network with the caravan trade stretching as far as Damascus.11 The town’s proximity to the Shatt al-Arab gave Kuwaitis access to the fertile river channels of Iraq, and dates from this region became the principal export cargo of Kuwait’s long-distance traders.

Political Organization in a Mercantile Economy The tribal confederation from which the Utub originated had begun a process of sedentarization well before their arrival in Kuwait.12 Most had been settled or partly settled cultivators in the towns and oases of Najd, and it was the very act of migration that forced them to temporarily adopt a nomadic lifestyle as they moved to the coastal regions to escape drought and other adverse conditions. Many studies on Kuwait tend to characterize the Utub’s settlement as a radical jump from “camel pastoralism to a maritime mode of production,” whereas in fact their progression away from nomadic pastoralism toward sedentary mercantilism was a much more gradual process.13 It is believed that the Utub became experts in maritime trade during their brief sojourn in Zubara (in modern Qatar) during the course of their migration that eventually ended (for most) in Kuwait. The establishment of the maritime town can therefore perhaps be better characterized, as Hala 202 M Farah Al-Nakib

Fattah suggests, as the completion of “the transition from camel-herders to seafarers.” 14 Their sedentary background helps explain how the Utub so effectively managed to turn their settlement into a thriving port town in such a short span of time. But, as Suhail Shuhaiber argues, “the settled life of the sea coast required a different kind of political organization from the settled life of the interior.” In Najd, the harshness of the desert and the requirement to stay in the vicinity of water had prevented the Utbi tribes from venturing too far beyond the urban centers where they lived.15 Life on the Gulf coast, by contrast, was oriented toward the sea and required the adoption of a “more mobile existence if they were to achieve the prosperity they desired.”16 This new reality influenced the kind of political organization they established in Kuwait. According to Kuwaiti historical tradition, the new Utbi settlement remained for nearly forty years without a ruler. As the town became more populous during the early eighteenth century, and as a large portion of the male population was increasingly absent from the town on trading and pearling voyages, the heads of the main families decided that a leader needed to be chosen from among themselves to settle all problems and disputes in the town and to protect it from external attack.17 In 1752 Sabah I (r. 1752–1756) was selected for this position and entered into a social pact with the urban families: he would ensure the safety and stability of the town so that its inhabitants could live and work comfortably and peacefully, while the townspeople would carry on earning their income through trading and pearling. The requirement to stay behind to settle internal disputes and protect the town meant that Sabah and his successors did not have the same freedom to participate in commercial and maritime activities and accrue the kind of personal profits that the leading families accumulated through pearling and trading.18 In the absence of taxes or customs duties, and without any source of independent revenue, the ruler was financially dependent on the local merchants to provide him with the funds needed to run the town, which he received in the form of voluntary donations.19 Financial dependence made the rulers politically accountable to the merchants. Though the Al Sabah played an important role in fostering Kuwait’s territorial expansion and autonomy throughout the ensuing two centuries,20 internally they were unable to act autonomously without the consultation (shūra) and approval of the notables who subsidized their rule, particularly when it came to economic affairs.21 When Sabah II (r. 1859–1866) tried to impose customs dues on mercantile trade, for instance, the merchants refused to pay while reassuring Sabah that their money would always be available to cover his expenses, but not in the form of a routine right.22 This balance of power between the rulers and the merchants maintained a Inside a Gulf Port M 203 high level of sociopolitical stability in Kuwait. As Sabah II told the British Political Resident Lewis Pelly in 1863:

When my father was nearly 120 years old . . . he called me and said ‘I shall soon die. I have made no fortune, and can leave you no money; but I have made many and true friends, grapple them. While other states round the Gulf have fallen off from injustice or ill-government, mine has gone on increasing. Hold to my policy, and . . . you will flourish.’23

Due to their lack of economic and political autonomy, the rulers’ relationship with the urban public until the turn of the twentieth century was more paternal than powerful. In 1792 Harford Jones Brydges of the East India Company noted: “The [Shaikh] of Grane was a most venerable old man, of commanding figure, and almost adored by the inhabitants of the town, for he was more to them as a father than a governor.”24 The ruler interacted with the townspeople by settling their trade disputes, handling day-to-day administrative issues, and protecting the rights of Kuwaiti merchants and mariners abroad.25 Aside from these functions, as Pelly put it in 1865, “there seems indeed to be little Government interference of any kind, and little need for any.”26 Mubarak I (r. 1896–1915) was the first Kuwaiti ruler to challenge the balance of power with the mercantile elite and to elevate the status of the palace “to a pitch of power never before dreamt of.”27 In 1899 he signed a secret agreement with Britain that guaranteed the ruler British protection in exchange for control over Kuwait’s foreign policy. Meanwhile, from the mid- eighteenth century onward the Al Sabah began to acquire their own private source of revenue from date plantations in southern Iraq.28 Mubarak—who came to power by assassinating his brothers Muhammed (the legitimate ruler) and Jarrah—secured all of the family’s landholdings for himself, and by 1906 the income from his date plantations amounted to 27 percent of his total annual earnings.29 A high personal income independent of the merchants coupled with political backing from the British gave Mubarak the autonomy to take the unprecedented step of imposing a series of taxes on the townspeople, most notably a 2 percent tax on mercantile imports levied in 1904. In 1906 taxes accrued from sea imports amounted to 38 percent of Mubarak’s total revenues.30 But despite his ability to successfully impose taxes (including a pearl tax), the strength of the town’s port economy during the trading and pearling booms that coincided with his rule at the turn of the twentieth century precluded Mubarak from politically alienating the merchants. Indeed, the ruler’s reliance on taxation for public revenues meant that merchant trade was still critical for the town’s socioeconomic growth and stability, and the ruler therefore remained accountable to the merchants when it came to making decisions on urban affairs.31 204 M Farah Al-Nakib

It was not until the signing of the oil concession with the Anglo- American owned Kuwait Oil Company in 1934 that the merchants began to lose their “historical sense of political entitlement, founded originally on their financial interdependence with the rulers.”32 As Jill Crystal argues, oil revenues—which went directly into the hands of the ruler, Ahmed al-Jaber (r. 1921–1950)—began to deprive the merchants “of their critical role in providing revenue, and with that cost them their power.”33 This led to the merchant-led opposition of the 1930s, which culminated in the famous Majlis (council) movement of 1938, the same year in which oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Kuwait.34 The merchants’ failure to induce the ruler to retain an elected legislative council (which he dissolved in 1939) to institutionalize their traditional role in decision making revealed that the discovery of oil and the concomitant decline of Kuwait’s maritime economy permanently readjusted the historic balance of power between the Al Sabah and the merchants in favor of the former.35

Social Organization of the Urban Population Like its political organization, Kuwait’s social structure was primarily shaped by its port identity. Kuwait’s commercial prosperity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which hinged primarily on its port economy, encouraged the immigration of many families from Najd, Zubara, Zubair, and Iran.36 By the middle of the 1800s the town’s population had reached nearly 25,000 inhabitants.37 Kuwait experienced a period of unprecedented economic and demographic growth from the late 1890s until around 1920. One catalyst for this expansion was a general increase in maritime trade, stimulated by the inclusion of Kuwait as a port-of-call for British steamships in 1904 and the opening of Kuwaiti merchant agencies in India and other regional ports like Aden and Muscat (both of which transpired after the signing of the Anglo-Kuwaiti protection agreement of 1899). The second was the pearling boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries experienced around the Gulf due to global demand for the luxury commodity coupled with particularly plentiful harvests in the local pearl fisheries. The peak of prosperity for Kuwait came between 1910 and 1912, resulting in a remarkable increase in the standard (and cost) of living.38 The rise in pearling had a “trickle-down effect” on all other maritime and commercial sectors.39 The dhow-building industry boomed, providing greater employment opportunities and higher wages for ship-builders. The increased income of the merchants, mariners, and divers was usually spent in the town markets, thereby stimulating the trading sector as well as local craft industries. Kuwait Town’s population grew substantially during this period as newcomers were attracted by the bourgeoning opportunities in construction, commerce, and of course pearl diving, which mainly drew in young Inside a Gulf Port M 205

Bedouin from the surrounding hinterland. Whereas in 1904 the town’s population was 35,000, by 1913 it had grown to 50,000.40 Though Kuwaiti urban society was not stratified into sharp socioeconomic tiers, we can distinguish between three broad social strata based on employment patterns and the distribution of wealth—a hierarchy largely born out of the functions of the town’s port economy.41 Members of each of these three “classes” (for want of a better term) were of diverse backgrounds, occupations, and, to an extent, income levels, but “shared a set of comparable social circumstances and opportunities that distinguished them from others outside their level.”42 Despite the existence of these social tiers, Suhail Shuhaiber correctly discerns that pre-oil Kuwaiti society “[functioned] not as separate classes in conflict with one another, but rather as social groups that were socially and economically linked.”43 The large merchant households that controlled the trading and pearling industries and owned the town’s fleet made up the highest social stratum, which was also the smallest.44 This mercantile elite enjoyed a position of wealth and social prestige as a “highly respected community in the town.”45 Some notable families such as the al-Sagers and al-Naqibs owned large date plantations along the Shatt al-Arab in southern Iraq, which supplied the out- bound cargo of the Kuwaiti deep-sea fleet heading to India and East Africa. During the economic boom of the turn of the twentieth century many more local merchants, including those in the pearl trade, used their increasing sur- plus capital to purchase date groves in southern Iraq, and in addition to being boat-owners Kuwait’s mercantile elite thus became a landowning class. It was not until the early twentieth century that the leading merchant families had to share their cherished social status with members of the ruling family, the only non-ashrāf group able to enter this stratum without participating in the town’s mercantile or pearling trades due to their landholdings in Iraq.46 These large wealthy families were tied to one another by marriage and shared economic interests; they were also, however, intrinsically linked to the rest of the townspeople as the proprietors of the town’s pearling and trading vessels. To understand this relationship it is necessary to briefly examine the economic structure of Kuwait’s pre-oil maritime trades. Because of the uncertainty of profits from shipping and pearling, particularly the latter, the economic organization of Kuwait’s maritime industries took the form of profit-sharing rather than direct wage labor. In both industries profits made by individual boats were highly variable and depended on a combination of external factors, as simple as weather and as complex as fluctuations in international tastes and markets, coupled with a large amount of luck in the case of pearling. Instead of wages, sailors and pearl-divers received (unequal) shares in the profits of the ship; they also, therefore, shared in the collective risks and losses. Pearling also operated on a system of advances, whereby the nakhoda (captain) paid each 206 M Farah Al-Nakib of the divers and crew members a fixed payment before the ship’s departure to tide their families over in their five-month absence. This usually came from an advance payment made to the nakhoda by the financier.47 Oftentimes the size of each laborer’s share at the end of the season proved insufficient to cover the cost of the advance, and the diver or sailor would be obligated to work for the same nakhoda in subsequent years until his debt was paid off, while nakhodas were often in debt to their financiers. This cycle of debt became more widespread during the pearl boom, as more nakhodas and divers entered the industry. In his maritime history of Kuwait, Yacoub al-Hijji points out that to be in debt in pre-oil Kuwait was normal. The entire town, even the non-maritime sectors, functioned on a system of credit and advances and only the richest merchants were not in some form of debt.48 Nonetheless, for those working on board ship being in debt meant that their labor was controlled by their creditors. The merchant financier controlled the nakhoda, and the nakhoda controlled the divers and sailors who were in debt to him. As such, the widest socioeconomic gap in Kuwait Town was between the merchants at the top of this hierarchy, and the divers and sailors at the bottom. Due to their perpetual state of indebtedness members of this lowest social stratum, primarily made up of African slaves and seminomadic Bedouin tribesmen, were generally exploited; those working on the pearling ships often had to spend the second half of the year on a trading vessel to help reduce their debts.49 However, while the practice of debt bondage was primarily a means by which both labor and production were controlled in the pre-oil maritime economy, being in debt did not necessarily mean that one was entirely penniless. When money came in it did not always go to paying off a debt and clearing one’s name from a nakhoda’s duty roster. Nor was it expected that any money a diver or sailor received separately from his share of the ship’s profits should automatically be applied toward his debt. According to Villiers: “It was hard for a sailor not to be in debt and, so far as I could see, none of them tried very much not to be. Debt was an accepted thing, and to spend a lifetime owing money was apparently usual.”50 Other laborers that worked on land accompanied the mariners and divers in the town’s lowest social stratum: domestic workers, port laborers, coolies, porters, water carriers, and construction workers. The main difference between land and ship laborers, however, was that the former were wage- earners who largely controlled their own labor. They were not subjected to nearly the same levels of physical and psychological strain as the latter, whose labor was controlled by their creditors. Construction workers, for example, were contracted and paid on a day-to-day basis by the owner of the structure being built, who also provided the builders with their daily meals.51 Occupying the wide gap between the merchant elite and the laboring poor in the town’s socioeconomic hierarchy was a broad middle stratum to which Inside a Gulf Port M 207 it is more difficult to ascribe such an encompassing trait. While there were variations in how people of different backgrounds and occupations fared, generally speaking families of this loosely defined stratum lived comfortably; they were not rich, but they were not in dire need like the laborers. Some worked as professionals: teachers, religious scholars, and qadis. Others were shopkeepers and petty traders in the town market, skilled ship-builders, and foremen in the construction industry. Also included in this layer of society were self-employed townspeople primarily engaged in subsistence-oriented activities: fishermen, butchers, and craftsmen of minor industries such as goldsmiths, lamp makers, tailors, and cloak embroiderers (to name a few).52 Social mobility between these three broad social tiers was certainly possible. However, the principal avenue for social advancement in pre-oil Kuwait Town was, as Broeze puts it, “economic success.”53 The lack of a central state administration meant that government service was unavailable as a means of upward mobility. Unlike in other parts of the Arab world, military service was nonexistent and was therefore not an option for social advancement, while the minimal role played by the town’s ‘ulema excluded religious scholarship as a means of attaining an elite social status. One’s personal skills could allow for some degree of upward mobility: Mubarak Dashti, for example, started off his career in the construction industry as a rock carrier earning only one rupee a day, but with training and dedication worked his way up to becoming a foreman (ostadh) in charge of 50 to 60 laborers.54 Ultimately, however, the principal means of climbing the social ladder in the pre-oil town was the acquisition of wealth, and the one industry that offered this chance was pearling. The most widely celebrated example of social advancement in pre-oil Kuwait was Hilal al-Mutairi, who started in the pearl trade as a diver and “with luck and financial acumen, rose to become one of the largest pearl merchants in the entire Gulf.”55 Al-Mutairi was reportedly worth 8 million rupees at the height of his career, “a fabulous amount, richer than many governments” at that time.56 It was the chance of such fortune that attracted so many Bedouin from the interior to try their luck in pearling. And sometimes luck would indeed strike. In 1929 an ex-taxi driver diving “on his own” with the Kuwaiti fleet was reported by the ruler to have found a large pearl that he sold for 81,000 rupees, a considerable amount but even more striking given the fact that the total average catch for the same year was 10,000 rupees per big pearling boat.57

Cosmopolitan Urbanism Being a prosperous port town that regularly attracted newcomers from around the region for its comparatively stable political and commercial environment, Kuwait was a fairly heterogeneous place. The majority of townspeople were Sunnis of Najdi extraction of mixed tribal background, 208 M Farah Al-Nakib but the population also included Africans (two-thirds of which were still mamluk slaves by 1904), Sunni Arabs from Iraq, Shi‘is from Iran, al-Hasa, and Bahrain (Baharna), Sunni Persians of Arab origin (known as Hawala elsewhere in the Gulf), Zubairis, Baluchis, Jews, and Armenians. Added to this by the early twentieth century was a handful of Arab and American Christian missionaries and the small number of British political agency personnel (and, after 1934, the oil company staff). The only comprehensive population breakdown we have for the pre-oil period comes from John G. Lorimer, who indicated that in 1904 Africans made up the largest minority population, at around 11 percent of the total 35,000 townspeople, followed by Persians, making up 3 percent. In the same year the Utub, the town’s social elite, numbered less than 1 percent. In some cases the number of a particular group was extremely small: Jews made up half a percent while Lorimer counted only two Armenians.58 A mild sectarian division of labor emerged within the population: pearl divers tended to be of African or Bedouin origin, most ship-builders were Baharna, the suq guards were Baluchi, and the majority of Kuwaiti Jews were cloth-sellers and goldsmiths (as well as liquor distillers). Most of the town’s water-carriers and port laborers, meanwhile, were Shi‘i, though not all Shi‘i were “penniless labourers” and they included well-to-do merchants and middle-class shopkeepers and artisans.59 Notwithstanding these occupational patterns, one’s ethnic or religious background did not entirely dictate a townsperson’s circumstances or status within society; again, social identities and hierarchies were largely determined by trade and level of wealth. The social classes mentioned above were all culturally mixed. The wealthy merchant class, for instance, was not restricted to any single religious or ethnic group.60 There were very rich and influential Shi‘i families like the Ma‘rafis and Behbehanis that stood as important pillars of the mercantile oligarchy, and at least two Jewish merchants whose capital matched that of the Sunni Utbi elite.61 It should be noted, however, that Indian merchants were explicitly barred from establishing trade operations in Kuwait, unlike in other port towns in the southern Gulf like Manama where Indian merchants grew to dominate the local trading sectors.62 In 1845 the British Assistant Resident in the Persian Gulf, A. B. Kemball, described the townspeople as “closely united, and free from feuds and factions.”63 Similarly, the Kuwaiti activist Ahmed al-Khatib—born in 1928 to what at the time was a lower-middle class urban family of African origin—recalls in his recently published memoirs that in the old town “social ties were based on intimate friendship and brotherhood, without conscious divisions or discrimination.”64 The general absence of conscious factions or explicit discrimination between members of the urban population on religious or ethnic grounds may have stemmed from the fact that juridical distinctions between members of Kuwaiti society did not exist. Ethnic and Inside a Gulf Port M 209 religious minority groups did not have to pay separate or additional taxes as they did in Arab cities under Ottoman administration, and all had the right to own property. Members of the Shi‘i community reported to the Political Agent in 1918 that they had always received impartial treatment and justice by the authorities, and were considered equal to Sunnis in the eyes of the law.65 It is conceivable that the absence of both legal distinctions and sectarian strife stemmed from the small size of the diverse minority groups permanently residing within Kuwait Town. The relatively small number of Shi‘is, Jews, Africans, Armenians, and so on, was unthreatening to the Sunni Najdi majority, making it easier for such groups to be accepted and integrated into the urban population (in contrast to what transpired after the advent of oil). Indeed, the first signs of discrimination against the Shi‘a only began to emerge once their community grew substantially in size. In 1904 the Shi‘i population constituted only 1,000 of the 35,000 townspeople.66 From around 1910 onward, however, Kuwait Town witnessed a large influx of “Persians of the artisan and labouring classes,” who were attracted to Kuwait by the high wages prevalent during the economic boom.67 By 1918 the Shi‘a numbered 15,000 out of a total town population of 50,000.68 It was during this population upsurge that the Shi‘a first expressed signs of discontent at the way they were being treated in Kuwait.69 For instance, the community was explicitly barred from participation in the short-lived Majlis of 1938.70 The cultural cohesion of the townspeople is sometimes attributed to their experiences on board ship. The crews of the trading and particularly the pearling vessels were of mixed social backgrounds: in 1904 around 1,500 to 2,000 of the 9,200 men on board the Kuwaiti pearling fleet were of Persian origin.71 These men spent four to five months away from their home port in very close proximity to one another, and the extremely adverse conditions of the pearling experience created an intimacy and interdependence among the crew that, it is said, informed these men’s social interactions on land.72 Not all the foreigners serving on the Kuwaiti ships were permanent residents of the town.73 Nonetheless, their experiences at sea taught Kuwaitis how to coexist with difference. Of course, such cultural cohesion need not be overstated as lines of demarcation certainly existed within urban society. Intermarriage between religious or ethnic communities, and particularly between religious sects, was rare; it was also uncommon for members of the merchant elite to marry outside their class. Shi‘is, Christians, and Jews, meanwhile, had separate cemeteries, and there was also one Jewish and three Persian schools in town.74 Nonetheless, their travels to various ports around the region and to market towns of the interior, coupled with the intermingling of local and foreign merchants and Bedouin traders in the town market, made Kuwaitis open to different cultures and religions. Such a cosmopolitan outlook was 210 M Farah Al-Nakib common in port cities in the region and around the world. According to Rhoads Murphey, “port functions, more than anything else, made a city cosmopolitan, a word which does not necessarily mean ‘sophisticated’ but rather hybrid. A port city is open to the world, or at least to a varied section of it. In it races, cultures, and ideas as well as goods from a variety of places jostle, mix, and enrich each other and the life of the city.”75 The townspeople’s openness was sometimes reflected in the customs and habits they picked up from the places they visited. As Pelly reported in 1865: “At Koweit . . . the Arabs are far less bigoted than in the interior. They smoke the Persian Nargeilah . . . and the Turkish Cheebook.”76 More importantly, Pelly also noted that the town’s inhabitants, “Jews included, enjoy complete religious toleration.”77 The majority of the population were Muslim, and particularly Sunni Muslim, but in a way that was “tolerant to others and not over rigid to themselves.”78 This religious tolerance is perhaps best exemplified by the experiences of the American missionaries, who held regular Sunday services in Arabic in a house in the center of town near the suq attended by many Kuwaiti men, women, and children. Over the course of 30 years, thousands of Kuwaitis “became familiar with the sayings and doings of Jesus.”79 Of course such religious tolerance should not be overemphasized, as the missionaries regularly faced opposition from the town’s mullahs, who warned the public during Friday sermons against attending their hospitals or schools.80 Though this preaching had little impact on the public’s behavior toward the missionaries, Kuwaitis remained vehemently opposed to apostasy, as one young man learned in 1920. When news that he had taken communion reached the suq, “public opinion stiffened against him. No one would give him employment and he had difficulty in buying sugar and tea and other necessities . . . There could be no sympathy with an apostate.”81 Nonetheless, Kuwaitis were not averse to engaging the missionaries in religious discussion and debate in public: during their church services, on the verandah of the hospital while waiting to be treated, and in the mission’s Bible shop located opposite the main suq mosque.

The Morphology of a Port Town The primacy of Kuwait’s port economy was also reflected in the town’s spatial morphology, as it was largely the activities of the merchants and mariners that shaped the contours of the urban landscape before oil. The architecture and urban design of the pre-oil townscape resembled that of many other “pre-modern” Arab-Islamic cities, with inward-looking courtyard houses tied together into tight neighborhood clusters by narrow lanes and blind alleys. In terms of urban organization, however, it was the town Inside a Gulf Port M 211 harbor rather than a mosque, palace, or citadel that served as the locus of expansion, making it similar to port towns from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. In this way Kuwait Town closely resembled the port of Manama in Bahrain, as well as the smaller maritime towns of the Arab Gulf coast such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha, whose seafront harbors were the busiest parts of the city.82 Unlike these latter towns, however, where “[f]orts, bastions and towers . . . were the landmarks of new tribal settlements and functioned as the poles of urban expansion,” structures symbolizing the central authority and agency of the rulers were largely absent from Kuwait’s urban landscape, as they were in Manama.83 Because of the minimal interference of the Al Sabah in urban affairs over the first two centuries of the town’s existence, it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that Kuwait Town contained a fortified palace that “towered over surrounding neighbourhoods and harbours.”84 By this time, however, the morphology of the urban landscape had already been determined by the town’s maritime sectors. Though the town was initially established facing the seafront Bani Khalid fort that later became the site of the Al Sabah rulers’ Seif Palace,85 it was the harbor that adjoined the fort/palace that became the central locus of Kuwait’s continuous growth over the next two centuries. The town’s coastline, markets, and residential quarters all emanated out from this central point that initially consisted of a “commodius harbor for small craft,” the small size of which did not correspond to the town’s high level of shipping activity.86 Without the imposition of customs duties the town had no central customs house, and there was therefore no need for a particular place where the trading vessels would be required to load and unload their cargo to be inspected and charged their respective duties. Rather, when arriving back into town Kuwait’s pearling and trading vessels pulled right up to shore, where their crews unloaded their wares and gear and prepared the ships for mooring. The foreshore running the length of the town therefore developed into “one great shipyard of Arab dhows.”87 The coastline to the east and west of the central harbor was divided up into several tidal jetties (inqā‘, sing. niq‘a) in which the town’s fleet could moor and undergo repairs while being protected from the waves.88 Like most public services and facilities in the town, these jetties—without which “the maritime life of Kuwait would be impossible”89—were funded, built, and maintained by the town’s ship-owning merchants, “each according to his ability to pay and according to the number and size of the boats in his possession.”90 The first row of houses facing the sea belonged to the town’s nakhodas, merchants, and ship-owners, and a boat-owner usually built a niq‘a directly opposite his house for the mooring of his own ships and those in the vicinity. Between the inqā‘ and 212 M Farah Al-Nakib the first row of houses were several ‘amāyer (sing. ‘amāra) or warehouses belonging to merchants and ship-owners that stored and sold wood and other seafaring and building materials.91 Most ship-building and repairing activities also took place along the town’s foreshore, and the dhow yards gave Kuwait Town, in Villiers’ opinion, “one of the most interesting waterfronts in the world.”92 This coastal strip, known as the sahel, grew considerably during the pearling boom. By 1912 the main boat harbor in Sharq (different from the central harbor) was enlarged to three times its former size and the dhow- building yards expanded with the rising demand for pearling vessels.93 The seafront became lined with ever more “huddle[s] of beams and planks,” while the number of ships berthed in the inqā‘ in the off-season multiplied.94 As Villiers described the scene in 1939: “All along the waterfront . . . almost from wall to wall of the town, the big ships and the little ships jostle one another. On the beach, on the tidal flats, and in the sea they lie cheek by jowl.”95 The sahel was one of the most important and vibrant morphological sectors of the pre-oil urban landscape, and the inqā‘, ‘amāyer, shipyards, dhows, and the constant clutter of “maritime paraphernalia” covering the length of the coast all year round left little doubt that Kuwait was an active maritime town.96 Like the sahel, the central harbor near the palace also expanded during the economic expansion at the turn of the twentieth century to accommodate the substantial increase in trade that resulted from both the introduction of British steamers and the pearling boom. Although British ships had been anchoring at Kuwait since the town was first used as a temporary transit station by the East India Company factory in the late eighteenth century, the rise in shipping activity in the early twentieth century war- ranted the expansion of the town’s docks. Three anchorages were built, each with a capacity to receive ships of different sizes (fishing and pearling vessels, larger deep-sea shipping and trading dhows, and British steamers).97 It was during this period that we see the town’s natural harbor transform from being a physical “shelter for ships” into a port, “an economic concept.”98 Also contributing to this transformation was Mubarak’s imposition of customs dues. A customs administration building was built in 1904 along with a spacious and secure stone warehouse for the reception and safe storage of the merchants’ goods as they waited to be taxed and carried to the markets.99 While such warehouses were, according to Lorimer, built for the merchants’ “convenience,” they were also needed to accommodate Mubarak’s numerous new customs regulations: as of 1908, for instance, goods had to be inspected at the customs premises prior to the levy of duty, which required additional space.100 Nonetheless, Mubarak’s improvements Inside a Gulf Port M 213 to the port facilities were a boon to the merchants’ trade. In 1912 he ordered a “three-ton hand-power crane for landing and shipping heavy packages at the wharves” from England, and extended the covered and enclosed areas of the customs premises to minimize the “old risk of loss and damage by thieves and weather.”101 With its transformation into a port complex in the early twentieth century, the furdha, as it was called, finally reflected the level of economic activity passing through it, “and from the customs yard a continual stream of horses, horse-drawn carts, and Persian coolies, laden with bales and boxes, emerged to toil laboriously up the hill towards the [suq].”102 An extension of Kuwait’s role as a port was its florescence as a market town, and the suq comprised the central part of the built-up area. The oldest section was the Souk al-Tujjar directly facing and stemming from the central port. This was the site of the town’s first shops that sold goods imported from Basra, Iran, India, and elsewhere. The rest of the suq was segmented into smaller inner markets (aswāq). As the town gradually grew from the early eighteenth century onward so too did the market area, continuously extending southward from the port in the shape of a central corridor flanked by the town’s residential districts. During the trading boom of the early twentieth century most shops in the Souk al-Tujjar were converted into offices from which the merchants ran their growing businesses and displayed samples of their imported commodities, which they sold wholesale to the petty traders of the inner aswāq.103 In the earlier stages of the town’s history most of these aswāq, such as the central Souk al-Dakhili, were unspecialized, each containing merchandise as diverse as meat, wheat, spices, fabric, chinaware, and medicines. During the period of “remarkable growth” at the turn of the twentieth century the markets grew considerably.104 In 1903 Kuwait Town contained 500 shops, and at least 40 new ones were opening annually.105 In 1904 the bazaar was reportedly larger and better supplied than it had been only two years previously.106 Several new markets had opened by 1912 and, according to the Political Agent at the time, “all are thronged.”107 The new markets became increasingly organized according to the merchandise and craft of their vendors, and the suq grew to incorporate up to 50 specialized branches that vividly captured both the town’s occupational organization as well as the patterns of Kuwait’s regional and international trade.108 There were separate markets for locally crafted merchandise such as cloaks, oils, and copperware, foodstuffs like wheat, dates, meat, and fish, and imported commodities including wooden storage chests from India and second-hand jackets from America. Eventually the suq extended right down to the Sahat al-Safat, the open- air Bedouin market on the edge of town. Here the surrounding Bedouin 214 M Farah Al-Nakib tribes set up temporary stalls every morning where they traded their desert produce such as milk, butter, ghee, horses, and sheep with the townspeople in exchange for dates, clothing, firearms, salt, and manufactured items.109 The area also served as the point of arrival and departure for the caravans trading between Kuwait and the interior, and the encampment of caravaneers created a sort of “suburb” just outside the urban limits.110 The Safat was the counterpoint to the sahel: whereas the latter was where the town interacted with the sea, the former was where the urban met the desert. Just as the number of ships berthed along the sahel revealed the extent of the town’s maritime activities, so the number of camels resting in the Safat, sometimes numbering up to 500, emphasized Kuwait’s importance in the caravan trade.111 Over time urban sprawl incorporated the Safat into the town’s expanding landscape.

Public Space and Public Life Everyday life in Kuwait before oil was also largely shaped by the economic, political, social, and spatial realities born out of its mercantile and maritime identity just described. The sahel and suq were the town’s most lively centers of daily human activity. Such common urban spaces brought townspeople of various social and cultural backgrounds to interact regularly with one another and engendered a vibrant urban life. The Safat, for instance, was the main town square used for public festivities during which all members of the urban population came together in celebration:

On the afternoon of a religious festival, rich and poor, all dressed in new clothes for the occasion, would flock to the main town square to see the sheikh’s armed bodyguards perform the Bedouin war dance (ardha). Many women stood on roof-tops to enjoy a better view, while others mingled in the general crowd. The sheikh himself would usually be present and take part in the dance, and on his arrival women spectators would often express their delight with the traditional shrill ululation.112

According to social geographer Fran Tonkiss, common rights to such shared urban spaces that afford “equal and in principle free access to all users” provide a sense of social and political belonging in the city, a symbolism the Safat grew to embody alongside its everyday function as the Bedouin market.113 The sahel was also occasionally a site of such public celebrations, most notably the start and end dates of the annual pearling season when the wives, children, neighbors, and friends of the mariners and divers came down to shore to bid the pearling vessels goodbye or to welcome them home Inside a Gulf Port M 215 with much singing and dancing. The guffāl celebrations at the end of the season, according to al-Hijji, “surpassed all others in scale” and the “atmosphere of joyous anticipation on shore defies description.”114 The guffāl made the town whole again, bringing thousands of fathers, sons, and brothers back to their families after five difficult months at sea. Aside from such public celebrations, however, for the most part the sahel was a place of unplanned and incidental, though not entirely unexpected, encounters; it represented the type of urban public place that the townspeople shared “as a matter of fact.”115 Because the sahel was, as one townsman describes it, Kuwait’s “gateway to the outside world,” it was one of the busiest spaces in the town year round, crowded with merchants and laborers alike.116 People interacted with one another along the sahel largely through “marginal encounters” as they went about their busy tasks in the space that guided Kuwait’s maritime industries.117 The town’s ship-builders were always hard at work in the dhow-building and repair yards on the waterfront in Sharq. Depending on the season, the crew of a pearling ship might be getting ready for a voyage or preparing their ship for berthing, and the dancing, singing, and rhythmic clapping that accompanied their arduous work made the sahel a very lively place. It was also common for large sections of the coastal strip to be blocked off by men sitting on the ground making sails, and fishermen mending their large nets. Meanwhile, if it was the end of the trading season the vast arrays of imported goods, ranging from mangrove poles to cartons of tea and bags of rice, would be unloaded directly onto the beach, examined by the importing merchants, and then prepared for storage or selling. Another familiar scene along the sahel was the mainly Persian water-carriers filling kerosene tins or saddle bags with water from the Shatt al-Arab to be delivered to the houses of the town, and women were often seen sitting on the beach with empty tins waiting for the dhows to arrive to buy water for their homes.118 Groups of women could also normally be found washing clothes down on the shore against a shallow breakwater, gathering together in groups to socialize as they worked and waited for their clothes to dry in the sun with their children swimming in the sea nearby. There were also features of the sahel that fostered a more deliberate kind of social exchange: spaces for “visiting and being visited” by friends and acquaintances.119 One was the string of coffee houses along the beach and at the port, where sailors, fishermen, and ship captains would rest from their day’s work to drink tea or coffee and smoke nargīla.120 The other was the datcha, a coral and mud bench built out from the front wall of a house and carpeted for seating, most commonly found lining the front wall of the seafront houses. From the datcha captains watched their ships and engaged with their crews, old sailors sat reminiscing about their days at sea, merchants watched their wares being unloaded or prepared for voyage, all the 216 M Farah Al-Nakib while exchanging news of the sea and distant ports with one another.121 Sailors and other townspeople going about their business along the sahel would briefly pause to greet these men, for as Villiers learned during his visit to Kuwait in 1939: “the walker . . . must always salute the sitter.”122 There is no greater evidence that life in the pre-oil town was as much something to watch and discuss as it was something in which to participate than the preponderance of the datcha. The most prominent public space of social exchange in pre-oil Kuwait Town was the central suq, in which most daily activity was concentrated.123 The Danish traveller Barclay Raunkiaer observed in 1912 that most pedes- trian traffic every morning streamed toward the market, then returned back into the residential neighborhoods at around noon for lunch and the afternoon rest, and then streamed back into the market in the late afternoon until evening.124 The suq was not merely a place in which to trade and buy one’s daily food and supplies; it was also an important space of everyday sociability. “Here is where the great mass of people congregate during the days. It is the hub of the town,” wrote one of the American missionaries in 1910.125 Proprietors treated their shops as small reception rooms, and buyers were treated as guests, invited to sit down for a chat and some tea or coffee from the itinerant bazaar tea-sellers.126 As a public space of social and commercial exchange, everybody in town—including Bedouin and foreign visitors—had equal access to the suq. Every morning and every afternoon the townspeople were there, “visiting and being visited, drinking coffee, chat- ting, calling on this merchant and that, and greeting shaikhs and wise men, sitting on carpets outside shops or inside shops, looking on at the teeming life all around . . . listening to good yarns and bad gramophones.”127 The nakhodas also spent most of their time there when they were back in their home port, as did the poorer sailors and pearl divers who “swagger[ed] in the suq, dressed in their best clothes, swinging their canes and their rosaries, sitting in the coffee-shops, drinking from the hookas, visiting and exchanging stories.”128 The suq also played an important role in the social lives of less affluent urban women who regularly did the shopping for their own households and often worked as domestic servants for richer families. Their daily visits to the suq gave such women the opportunity to “learn the latest gossip and see the general activities of the town.”129 In order to supplement the limited incomes of their husbands many women were also market traders. The suq was also the main site at which the ruler communicated with the public, as his kishk (kiosk) in which he held daily public audience with the townspeople to hear their grievances and settle their disputes was located in the heart of the market area. Official notices relaying important political and commercial information—such as the start and end dates of the pearling season, as well as municipal announcements after 1930—were written Inside a Gulf Port M 217 out and posted on a wall near the kishk.130 The suq thus offered one of the only means of mass communication before the advent of local newspapers in the 1940s aside from word-of-mouth, which the markets also facilitated. As the Political Agent put it in 1938, in the suq “nothing is secret.”131 It was also where one went to learn the news of the world at large, either by word of mouth or by reading one of the foreign newspapers available in the mission- ary Bible shop. Because of the amount of news and views passing through the markets, “no Arab would spend a whole day out of the suq if he could avoid it.”132 Urban sectors like the suq and sahel—which brought diverse members of urban society to interact regularly with one another—remained socially and culturally mixed public spaces before the advent of oil, both effecting and reflecting the town’s cosmopolitan outlook. Nonetheless, as Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift rightly warn, “we cannot ignore the fact that spaces such as bazaars and streets are riddled with power inequalities of one sort or another.”133 For example, though all members of Kuwaiti urban society could attend celebrations and ceremonies in the Safat, and though members of all religions and sects had the right to worship and perform religious rituals, only Sunni celebrations and rituals were performed in public. Minority groups tended to conduct their own ritual ceremonies within the confines of courtyard houses. The Shi‘is did not hold‘ashūra processions through the town as was common in Iraq and Bahrain but rather held their ritual ceremonies in private homes, separately for men and women.134 Similarly, the African community had their own private social club in a courtyard house where they performed ritual dances every Thursday.135 While it is unclear, due to a lack of sufficient evidence, if minority groups were explicitly prevented from carrying out such events in public, the fact that only the Sunni majority had the implicit right to public performance and worship reveals one important distinction between them and the rest of urban society. Furthermore, the fact that everyone had access to places like the suq and sahel regardless of background or class did not mean that lines of separation and exclusion within these spaces were nonexistent. The famous Bu Nashi coffee shop near the Souk al-Dakhili, for example, was a relatively exclusive place frequented by the town’s merchant elite and members of the ruling family; sailors, porters, and other laborers usually went to coffee houses along the sahel. Though women could engage in commercial activities in the suq, they had a separate market of their own, known as the Souk al-Harim (Women’s Market), in which to do so. In other words, though women, laborers, and religious minorities were all visible in public spaces and participated actively in different aspects of urban life, such marginalized groups all faced limitations and exclusions in their everyday urban experiences. Nevertheless, both Kuwaiti historical memory and the testimonies 218 M Farah Al-Nakib of contemporary observers maintain that such exclusions rarely amounted to overt sectarian tensions within the urban population, either along class, ethnic, or religious lines.

The Organization and Social Life of Urban Quarters In addition to being the most vibrant centers of daily human activity, the suq and the sahel also served as the poles of expansion for the town’s largest morphological sector: the residential areas that extended away from the sea “in two wings” to the east and west of the central port and market area.136 The town consisted of two main sea-facing residential quarters: Jibla to the west of the port and Sharq to the east. As the town population increased, Sharq and Jibla extended laterally along the coast more rapidly than they did inland toward the desert, demonstrating the needs and desires of the townspeople to remain in close proximity to the sea and creating the “peculiar length and narrowness” that characterized the town’s shape until the early twentieth century.137 Although urban growth was largely unplanned in pre- oil Kuwait Town, there was an inner logic to the sociospatial development of the residential areas that was in large part determined by the town’s two main economic sectors: trading and pearling. Jibla developed into the hub of the urban “oligarchy who owned the boats”: the Sunni Najdi merchant elite families who controlled Kuwait’s deep-sea carrying trade, like the al- Ghanims, al-Marzouqs, and al-Sagers (to name a few). Though intrinsically dependent on the town’s maritime identity as a port, Jibla’s families did not necessarily make their living directly through seafaring. Rather, they were traders whose businesses were closely connected to other ports around the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Sharq’s inhabitants, on the other hand, were more directly dependent on seafaring for their livelihood; it was where most of the towawīsh (pearl merchants), nakhodas, ship-builders, sailors, and pearl divers lived.138 Though there were some exceptions, historical tradition preserves this general distinction between Jibla as the town’s mercantile quarter and Sharq as the maritime and pearling quarter.139 During the population upsurges of the early twentieth century, the demand for homes to accommodate newcomers increased substantially, leading to a peak in the house-building industry.140 The Political Agent reported in 1916 that “building operations are in evidence in all quarters of the town, which is rapidly extending.”141 Between the late 1880s and 1920 the town’s built-up area expanded tenfold, representing the greatest period of urban expansion Kuwait experienced prior to the advent of oil urbanization in 1950.142 While both quarters grew substantially, Sharq expanded more so than Jibla because it absorbed most of the newcomers. An entirely new inland quarter (Mirqab) also emerged during this period, extending southwest well beyond the Safat.143 Inside a Gulf Port M 219

Some discernible trends in the distribution of urban society within these three residential areas existed. While it contained some middle-income and a few poor families, Jibla was the most socially and economically exclusive of the urban quarters. Its inhabitants were mainly of Najdi origin, though there were also some Persian residents. Sharq, on the other hand, was the town’s maritime and pearling quarter that, particularly after the pearling boom, became the town’s largest and most culturally heterogeneous district, representing families from the highest to the lowest socioeconomic strata. It contained Najdis, Baharna, Hasawiyya, and recently settled Bedouin, among others; its inhabitants were sailors, pearl divers, ship-builders, nakhodas, and, though fewer than in Jibla, wealthy merchants. Mirqab, by contrast, was a relatively homogeneous place composed predominantly of Najdi Arabs who were mostly laborers working in land-based industries such as construction. But just as Jibla contained some less affluent families, Mirqab also contained a few well-to-do households such as the al-Shaye‘ family.144 It should be noted that this sociospatial distribution of urban society within the three main residential quarters was not entirely the outcome of deliberate cultural or socioeconomic segregation. The fact that most of the town’s rich lived along the seafront while the poorest residents lived “on the sand dunes” at the back of town, away from the sea, was not an explicit act of ghettoization by the town’s elite as much as it was engendered by the need for certain groups to retain contact with the water.145 Families with direct links to the port and the town’s fleet—ship-owners, nakhodas, and dhow- builders—tended to live along or near the water to remain in close proximity to the harbor, their ships berthed in the inqā‘, and the dhow repair yards.146 Laborers, porters, sailors, and divers did not need to retain permanent access to the ships and so lived further inland. Shopkeepers and petty traders lived closer to the suq, sometimes on residential streets located behind their own shops. Many of Mirqab’s population were juss (gypsum mortar) manufac- turers who worked in the quarries located on the edge of town.147 In other words, where one lived was often determined by the source of his livelihood. The distribution of the town’s population in certain areas was also largely an outcome of immigration trends and patterns of economic growth. When the town was first settled, it extended laterally along the coast and the oldest families therefore lived closest to the water. During the economic boom of the turn of the twentieth century new areas were created further inland to accommodate the constantly arriving newcomers, who were primarily mariners and laborers. Although we can ascribe such general characteristics to the town’s three main urban quarters, most neighborhoods (firjān, sing. farīj) within these larger districts were socially and culturally mixed. There was no distinctly Hasawiyya or African farīj, no separate Jewish or Shi‘i enclave, no neighborhood occupied exclusively by Baharna ship-builders or Bedouin pearl divers. 220 M Farah Al-Nakib

Even the seafront was not restricted to merchants but contained houses of nakhodas and dhow-builders. The Persian community, as an example, did not reside in a separate area but was scattered all around town in a manner that adhered to the sociospatial logic of urban organization described above.148 So, the older trading families like the Ma‘rafis lived along the seafront close to their ships, whereas the newer and more “humble” families of sailors, porters, and water carriers lived further inland in Mirqab.149 It was common for the town’s many firjān to be named after particular tribes or ethnic groups. The inland Sharq neighborhoods that developed in the early twentieth century, for instance, had names like Farij al-Sawaber (a local tribe) and Farij al-Baluch. Other firjān such as Farij al-Ghunaim on Jibla’s coastline were frequently named after individual families. However, most Kuwaitis who lived in these neighborhoods before oil concur that the name of a farīj rarely dictated the identity of its occupants, and the naming of urban neighborhoods and streets after families, tribes, or ethnic groups was not a demarcation of turf. Rather, it represented an urban custom of projecting the name of the oldest, largest, most influential, or most visible household, tribe, or social group onto the surrounding space. While members of a particular tribe or ethnic group might have initially clustered together in a particular area when first settling in the town, thereby ascribing their own identity onto it, that neighborhood was in no way restricted to members of that group. The Farij al-Sawaber included many Hasawiyya, Persians, and members of other tribes such as the Awazim.150 Neighborhoods named after big merchant families, meanwhile, usually referred to the oldest or biggest family in the area; it also often identified the patron household of the farīj who the less affluent families depended on. Residential proximity significantly narrowed the social distance between groups of different backgrounds. The one recurring memory that urban Kuwaitis have about life before oil was that, whether or not it contained members of an extended family, the farīj constituted the focal point of their social lives and everyday existence. It was uncommon for a resident of Sharq to visit regularly with friends or family who lived in Jibla, and vice versa, given how long it took to travel two or three miles by foot along the many winding streets.151 The time one had to socialize at the end of the working day, which ended with the sunset prayer, was relatively short. As the town had no street lamps, people would start making their way home before darkness fully descended and therefore had to remain relatively close to home during the hour and a half between the sunset and night prayers. As one townsman described it, “If one didn’t go to visit his neighbors [after work], he wouldn’t go anywhere.”152 Locality often therefore superseded class, ethnicity, or religion in the construction of urban identities before oil. Neighborhood networks were essential Inside a Gulf Port M 221 for the integration of newcomers to the town at a time when there was no central state administration managing the arrival and movements of immigrants.153 That is not to say, however, that identities of origin were unimportant; family names such as al-Hasawi, Behbehani, Ashkanani, Dashti, Bushehri, and so on, reveal that people in Kuwait used the age-old custom of classifying themselves and others according to their place of origin. This sometimes applied to individual families as well as to whole communities like the Baluch or Baharna. Such names did not, however, signal social exclusion or an absence of their sense of belonging to Kuwait Town. There was no single term for “immigrant” in the cultural lexicon of the pre-oil Gulf, as “immigrants” were diverse and various.154 Nor does the term “Kuwaiti” (as a signifier of identity or formal subjection to a state) appear in local sources before oil, reflecting the fact that there was no indigenous “Kuwaiti” population before the arrival of the ‘Utub (as there was in Bahrain) and everyone in Kuwait came from somewhere else. Kuwaiti urban society was, in other words, made up entirely of immigrants. Though it was common that dress, taste, or other forms of material culture, as well as family names, often distinguished members of particular communities, these were not divisive markers, nor an indication that these groups had not assimilated. Rather, this suggests the peaceful coexistence of multiple communities, where people were not obligated to subsume their own traditions and backgrounds to fit into a singular cultural identity. The multiplicity of languages, tastes, and styles is precisely what created the social life and cultural milieu of Kuwait as a port town before oil. As William Beeman argues for the Gulf region as a whole, its very identity lay in the fact that it was hybrid, and this hybridity was reflected in the mixed nature of the town’s firjān.155

Conclusion Once the first barrels were exported in 1946, Kuwait’s port economy was superseded by the new oil economy. With this drastic economic shift came the almost complete transformation of the political, social, and cultural structures and dynamics of urban life described above. Though the merchants remained economically and socially powerful figures in Kuwait, oil gave the rulers complete economic and political autonomy. Seafaring and maritime occupations were replaced by employment in the government sector, reducing the merchants’ influence and control over the urban population. Stable jobs coupled with the advent of generous state welfare programs transformed the majority of the population into a relatively affluent bureaucratic class, while manual labor became increasingly handed over to new migrants. Though immigration increased substantially after oil, the ability of newcomers to integrate into the local population was obstructed 222 M Farah Al-Nakib by the new nationality law of 1959, which made access to Kuwaiti citizenship extremely restrictive and transformed Kuwaiti national identity into a homogeneous and exclusive association that belies its port city heritage. Throughout the first two decades of oil the townspeople were relocated en masse to new suburbs built by the government beyond the old town wall, through which the new benefits of the welfare state such as housing, health care, education, and subsidized foodstuffs could be easily distributed to the public. Separate residential areas were created for the townspeople, sedenta- rizing Bedouin, and non-Kuwaitis, and such social segregation hindered the assimilation of the latter two groups into Kuwaiti urban society. Meanwhile, the former port town was almost entirely demolished to make way for the new, modern Kuwait City planned in its place. This development process saw the elimination of most of the town’s old maritime features such as the dhow-building and repair yards (which were relocated outside the city limits in 1970), the harbors and markets (large portions of which were demolished, though small sections were retained for posterity), and even the old furdha itself (which in the 1980s was entirely replaced by the expanding Seif Palace). Modern development thus erased most traces of Kuwait Town’s pre-oil maritime identity that defined the structures and dynamics of urban life for more than two centuries before the advent of oil. The objective of this chapter has been to resurrect this important aspect of Kuwait’s past and to provide a deeper understanding of how the primacy of its port determined much more than the town’s economic structures before oil. As has been shown, practically every aspect of urban life for more than two centuries in Kuwait was either directly or indirectly shaped by the town’s port. Its political stability stemming from the balance of power between the rulers and merchants, its dynamic and active everyday public life that was concentrated in the markets and along the seafront, its residential quarters that were sociospatially organized according to the town’s two main industries of trading and pearling, the systems of patronage and mutual support that permeated all levels of urban society: these dynamics that defined urban life in Kuwait before oil were intrinsically linked to its mercantile and maritime identity. The fact that Kuwait ceased to be a port city after the advent of oil can perhaps explain the many social, cultural, and morphological changes the country witnessed after 1950.

Notes

1. See, for example, Hala Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf: 1745–1900 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997); Jacqueline Ismael, Kuwait: Dependency and Class in a Rentier State (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993); and Frederick F. Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Inside a Gulf Port M 223

2. Frank Broeze, “Kuwait Before Oil: The Dynamics and Morphology of an Arab Port City,” in Gateways of Asia: Port Cities of Asia in the 13th–20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (London: Kegan Paul International, 1997), 180. 3. Broeze, “Kuwait Before Oil,” 179. 4. The date of the Utub’s settlement in Kuwait as well as the route of their migration are both contested in existing historiography. Some primary sources suggest that the Utub may have settled in Kuwait a century earlier. However, what is most important to the current study is that by the middle of the eighteenth century Kuwait was an active and prosperous port town. For conflicting accounts and debates on the Utub’s arrival in Kuwait see: Francis Warden, “Historical Sketch of the Uttoobee Tribe of Arabs (Bahrein) from the year 1716 to the year 1817,” reprinted in R. Hughes Thomas, comp. and ed., Arabian Gulf Intelligence: Concerning Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Muscat and Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and the Islands of the Gulf, Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, new series, no. 24 (1856) (Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1985), 362; Yaqub Yousef al-Ghunaim, Sheikh Ahmed Aljabir wa Mas’alat al-Hudud al- Kuwaytiyya (Kuwait, 1999), 10; and Ulrich W. Haarmann, “Two 18th-century Sources on Kuwait: Murtada b. Ali b. Alwan and Carsten Niebuhr,” in Kuwait: The Growth of a Historic Identity, ed. Ben J. Slot (London: Arabian Publishing, 2003), 37–38. 5. Lewis Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes, Trade and Resources around the Shore Line of the Persian Gulf,” in Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society, vol. XVII (January 1863–December 1864) (Bombay: Education Society’s Press), 72–73. 6. A. B. Kemball, “Memoranda on the Resources, Localities, and Relations of the Tribes Inhabiting the Arabian Shores of the Persian Gulf (1845),” reprinted in Arabian Gulf Intelligence, 109. 7. Broeze, “Kuwait Before Oil,” 152. 8. Carsten Niebuhr, Travels Through Arabia and Other Countries in the East, vol. II, trans. Robert Heron (Edinburgh: R. Morison and Son, 1792; reprint Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994), 127. 9. Kemball, “Memoranda on the Resources,” 109. 10. Felix Jones, “Extracts from a report on the Harbor of Grane (or Koweit) and the Island of Pheleechi, in the Persian Gulf (1839),” reprinted in Arabian Gulf Intelligence, 52; George Barnes Brucks, “Memoir, Description of the Navigation of the Gulf of Persia, With Brief Notices of the Manners, Customs, Religion, Commerce, and Resources of the People Inhabiting its Shores and Islands,” reprinted in Arabian Gulf Intelligence, 575; Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes,” 73. 11. J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, vol. 2 (Calcutta, 1908; reprint Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England: Archive Editions, 1986), 1053–58. 12. Fattah, Politics of Regional Trade, 23–25. 13. Ismael, Kuwait, 22. 14. Fattah, Politics of Regional Trade, 26. 15. Suhail Shuhaiber, “Social and Political Developments in Kuwait Prior to 1961,” in Kuwait: The Growth of a Historic Identity, ed. Ben J. Slot (London: Arabian Publishing, 2003), 98. 16. Shuhaiber, “Social and Political Developments,” 98. 224 M Farah Al-Nakib

17. Abdulaziz al-Rushaid, Tarikh al-Kuwait (Kuwait: Qurtas Publishing, 1999), 109; Yousef bin ‘Issa al-Qina‘i, Safhat min Tarikh al-Kuwait (Cairo: Dar Sa‘ad Misr, 1946), 8. 18. Alan Rush, Al-Sabah: History and Genealogy of Kuwait’s Ruling Family (London: Ithaca Press, 1987), 2. 19. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes,” 74. 20. For more detail on these issues see: Ahmad Abu-Hakima, The Modern History of Kuwait, 1750–1965 (London: Luzac & Co., 1983); and Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf. 21. Al-Qina‘i, Safhat, 14. 22. Al-Rushaid, Tarikh al-Kuwait, 228. 23. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes,” 74. 24. Harford Jones Brydges, An Account of the Transactions of His Majesty’s Mission to the Court of Persia in the Years 1807–1811 (London: James Bohn, 1834), 12. 25. Yacoub al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea, trans. Fahad Ahmad ‘Isa Bishara (London: Arabian Publishing Ltd., 2010), 54. 26. Lewis Pelly, Report on a Journey to Riyadh in Central Arabia (Cambridge: Oleander, 1865), 10. 27. R15/5/1/478: Political Agent, Kuwait to Political Resident, Bushehr, 28 March 1906. 28. Rush, Al-Sabah, 175. 29. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1076. 30. Ibid. 31. For a thorough analysis of the political dynamics between the rulers and merchants before and after oil see Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 32. Crystal, Oil and Politics, 45. 33. Ibid., 55. 34. For a full account of the 1938 Majlis movement, including its catalysts and outcomes, see Crystal, Oil and Politics, 47–55. 35. IO/R/15/5/205: Political Resident, Bushehr to Secretary of State for India, London, December 21, 1938. 36. Alan Villiers, Sons of Sindbad (London: Arabian Publishing, 2006), 353 [note that this is a republication of the same work (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), published also as Sons of Sinbad (New York: Scribner’s, 1940, rev. ed. 1969). The British and US editions are paginated differently.]; Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1006. 37. Kemball, “Memoranda on the Resources,”109; A. B. Kemball, “Statistical and Miscellaneous Information Connected with the Possessions, Revenues, Families, &c. of His Highness the Imaum of Muskat; of the Ruler of Bahrain; and of the Chiefs of the Maritime Arab States in the Persian Gulf (1854),” reprinted in Arabian Gulf Intelligence, 296. 38. “Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency for the year 1912,” reprinted in Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1957, vol. VII (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1989). 39. al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea, 42. Inside a Gulf Port M 225

40. IO/R/15/5/236: Political Agent, Kuwait to Political Resident, Bushehr, November 26, 1912. 41. This socioeconomic analysis of Kuwait’s urban population is based on the period after the pearling boom at the turn of the twentieth century. Very little evidence exists on the socioeconomic status of members of urban society before this time. There is, however, some room for speculation. As the townspeople had been heavily involved in trading and pearling since the eighteenth century, similar social hierarchies must have existed before the economic shifts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While improving the general standard of living for urban society as a whole, the pearling boom sharpened existing divisions between social groups, particularly between those at the very top and the very bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. 42. Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 65. 43. Shuhaiber, “Social and Political Developments,” 104. 44. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1055. 45. Violet Dickson, Forty Years in Kuwait (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 106. 46. Ashrāf families claim prestigious lineage as descendants of the Prophet. They were usually landowners and maintained an elite social status in Kuwait, as elsewhere in the Islamic world. 47. Al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea, 44. 48. Ibid., 45. 49. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 305. 50. Ibid., 322. 51. Mohammed Jamal, Al-Hiraf wa-l-Mihan wa-l-Anshita al-Tijariyya al-Qadima fi-l-Kuwait (Kuwait: CRSK, 2003), 153. 52. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1054. 53. Broeze, “Kuwait before Oil,” 160. 54. Oral interview with Mr. M. H. Dashti, April 6, 2009, Kuwait (hereafter Dashti interview). 55. Al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea, 44–45. 56. Saif al-Shamlan, Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Kuwaiti Memoir (London: The London Centre of Arab Studies, 2001), 95. 57. “Kuwait news for period from 1 to 15 July 1929,” reprinted in Political Diaries of the Arab World: Persian Gulf 1904–1965, vol. 8, ed. R. Jarman (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1990/1998). Diving on one’s own meant that the diver, though sailing with a full crew, did not take a share of the ship’s total profits at the end of the season, nor did he add his catch to the collective pile. 58. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1051–52. 59. Ibid. 60. In this point I, like Frank Broeze, disagree with Jill Crystal’s assertion that: “The leading trading families were a homogeneous lot.” Crystal, Oil and Politics, 39; Broeze, “Kuwait Before Oil,” 50. 61. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1055. 62. This advantage over their regional counterparts stemmed from the fact that the British were only minimally involved in Kuwait’s internal affairs until the signing of the oil concession in 1934. 226 M Farah Al-Nakib

63. Kemball, “Memoranda on the Resources,” 109. 64. Ahmed al-Khatib, al-Kuwait: Min al-Imara ila al-Dawla, Dhikrayat al-‘Amal al-Watany wa al-Qawmy (Beirut: Al-Markaz al-Thaqafy al-‘Araby, 2007), 27. 65. IO/R/15/5102: Political Agent, Kuwait to Civil Commissioner, Baghdad, September 19, 1918. 66. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1051–1052. 67. IO/R/15/5/236: Political Agent, Kuwait, to Political Resident, Bushehr, November 26, 1912; C. Stanley G. Mylrea, Kuwait before Oil (unpublished memoirs written between 1945 and 1951), 111. 68. Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency for the year 1918,” reprinted in Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1957, vol. VII (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1989). 69. IO/R/15/5102: Political Agent, Kuwait to Civil Commissioner, Baghdad, September 19, 1918. 70. IO/R/15/5/205: Political Resident (from Kuwait) to India Office, London, October 19, 1938. 71. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1053. 72. Dashti interview. 73. Al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea, 27. 74. Edwin Calverley, “Education in Kuwait,” Neglected Arabia 142 (1927): 14. 75. Rhoads Murphey, “On the Evolution of the Port City,” in Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th to 20th Centuries, ed. Frank Broeze (Australia: New South Wales University Press, 1989), 225. 76. Pelly, Report on a Journey to Riyadh, 11. 77. Pelly, Report on a Journey to Riyadh, 10. 78. H. H. Dowding, Koweit: A Report (Simla: Government of India, 1903), 19. 79. Mylrea, Kuwait Before Oil, 62. 80. “The Annual Report of the Arabian Mission,” Neglected Arabia 140 (1927): 4–5. 81. Mylrea, Kuwait before Oil, 140–45. 82. Khaled Adham, “Rediscovering the Island: Doha’s Urbanity from Pearls to Spectacle,” in The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity and Urban Development, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (London: Routledge, 2008), 224. 83. Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 52. 84. Ibid. 85. Mohammed al-Shaybani and Barrak al-Mutairi, Al-Qadha’wa al-Qadha fi- l- Kuwait Munthu al-Nash’a hatta al-Dawla (Kuwait: Markaz al-Makhtutat wa al-Turath wa al-Watha’iq, 1999), 13. 86. J. H. Stocqueler, Fifteen Months Pilgrimage through Untrodden Tracts of Khuzistan and Persia (London: Saunders and Otley, 1832), 19; Barclay Raunkiaer, Through Wahhabiland on Camelback (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 39. 87. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 308. 88. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1049. 89. Mylrea, Kuwait before Oil, 33. 90. Al-Shamlan, Pearling, 57. 91. Mohammad Jamal, Aswaq al-Kuwait al-Qadimah (Kuwait: Centre for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2004), 28. 92. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 308. Inside a Gulf Port M 227

93. “Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency for the Year 1912.” 94. Raunkiaer, Through Wahhabiland, 43. 95. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 308. 96. Ibid. 97. Jamal, Aswaq al-Kuwait al-Qadimah, 7. 98. Murphey, “On the Evolution of the Port City,” 230. 99. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1047; “Administration Report on the Persian Gulf Political Residency for 1905–1906,” reprinted in Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1957, vol. VI (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1989). 100. “Administration Report on the Persian Gulf Political Residency for 1907–1908,” reprinted in Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1957, vol. VI (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1989). 101. “Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency for the year 1912.” 102. Zahra Freeth, Kuwait Was My Home (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), 50. 103. Jamal, Aswaq al-Kuwait, 8. 104. “Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency for the Year 1916,” reprinted in Persian Gulf Administration Reports, vol. VII. 105. Dowding, Koweit, 18. 106. Samuel Zwemer, “Koweit Occupied,” Neglected Arabia 49 (1904): 7. 107. IO/R/15/5/236: Political Agent, Kuwait to Political Resident, Bushehr, November 26, 1912. 108. A thorough and fascinating reconstruction of the old suq has been done by Mohammed Jamal in his work produced almost entirely through extensive oral testimonies from members of the pre-oil urban population. See footnote 91 above. 109. Pelly, “Remarks on the Tribes,” 73–74; Samuel M. Zwemer, Arabia: The Cradle of Islam (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1900), 128. 110. J. R. Povah, Gazetteer of Arabia (Calcutta: Government of India, 1887), 44. 111. Mylrea, Kuwait before Oil, 39. 112. Ronald Lewcock and Zahra Freeth, Traditional Architecture in Kuwait and the Northern Gulf (London: Archaeology Research Papers, 1978), 7. 113. Fran Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 67. 114. Al-Hijji, Kuwait and the Sea, 31. 115. Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory, 68. 116. Oral interview with Mr. M. Dashti, April 7, 2009, Kuwait (hereafter M. Dashti interview). 117. Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory, 68. 118. Garrett De Jong, “The Ubiquitous Gasoline Tin,”Neglected Arabia 153 (1930): 10. 119. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 321. 120. Jamal, Aswaq al-Kuwait, 7. 121. Freeth, Kuwait Was My Home, 105. 122. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 310. 123. Tonkiss, Space, 67. 124. Raunkiaer, Through Wahhabiland, 53–54. 125. Arthur K. Bennett, “A New Beginning at Kuweit,” Neglected Arabia 73 (1910): 14. 228 M Farah Al-Nakib

126. Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches (London: John Murray, 1947), 192; Zahra Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), 107. 127. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 321. 128. Ibid. 129. Lewcock and Freeth, Traditional Architecture, 7. 130. Al-Shamlan, Pearling, 92. 131. IO/R/15/5/205: Political Agent, Kuwait to Political Resident, Bushehr, June 25, 1938. 132. Villiers, Sons of Sindbad, 321. 133. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 139. 134. Stark, Baghdad Sketches, 222. 135. Ibid., 208. 136. Bennett, “New Beginning,” 13. 137. Lewis Scudder, “May Your Feat Be Blessed,” Neglected Arabia 194 (1941): 15. 138. Al-Shamlan, Pearling, 93. 139. Al-Khatib, al-Kuwait, 31. 140. IO/R/15/5/236: Political Agent, Kuwait to Political Resident, Bushehr, November 26, 1912. 141. “Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency for the Year 1916.” 142. Kuwait Municipality, Planning and Urban Development, 1980, 14–15. 143. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1049–1050. 144. Farhan Abdullah al-Farhan, Tarikh al-Mawaqi‘ wa-l-Amkena ﬁ Dawlat al-Kuwait (Kuwait: Matabi‘ al-Risala, n.d.), 476. 145. Saif Abbas Abdulla Dehrab, “Childhood in the Sand,” in Remembering Childhood in the Middle East: Memoirs from a Century of Change, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 178. 146. Freeth, Kuwait, 105. 147. Al-Farhan, Tarikh al-Mawaqi‘, 476, 479. 148. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 1051. 149. Dehrab, “Childhood,” 178. 150. Dashti interview. 151. C. Stanley G. Mylrea, “Annual Report of Men’s Medical Department, Kuweit,” Neglected Arabia, 96 (1916): 13. 152. Oral interview with Mr. M. al-Saddah, April 5, 2009, Kuwait. 153. Nelida Fuccaro, “Pearl Towns and Early Oil Cities: Migration and Integra- tion in the Arab Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in Migration and the Making of Urban Modernity in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond, ed. Ulrike Freitag, Malte Fuhrmann, Nora Laﬁ, and Florian Riedler (London: Routledge, 2010), 106–8. 154. Fuccaro, “Pearl Towns,” 107. 155. William Beeman, “Gulf Society: An Anthropological View of the Khalijis—Their Evolution and Way of Life,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 148–49. PART III

Peoples of the Gulf CHAPTER 9

Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf, c. 1500–1947

James Onley1

Mixed with the indigenous population [of Manama is] a small but unmistakable colony of Indians, merchants by profession, and mainly from Guzerat, Cutch, and their vicinity, [who] keep up here all their peculiarities of costume and manner, and live among the motley crowd, “among them, but not of them.” —William Palgrave, 18622

e know very little about Indian communities in the pre-oil Persian Gulf, such as the one described above. Their makeup was very dif- Wferent from the Gulf’s South Asian communities today. Before the dawn of the oil era and the partition of India after World War II, only a few thousand Indians resided there—the majority of them merchants and their families, such as those William Palgrave saw in Manama in 1862. Many were wealthy and influential, elite members of society. The region’s economic dependence on India and India’s profound cultural and political influence on the region up to 1947 was such that locals regarded India and Indians as highly as they now regard the West and Westerners. For generations leading up to Britain’s withdrawal from India, the shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia formed part of Britain’s Indian Empire. India and Indians represented power and prestige. This long-held view of India and Indians in the Gulf changed profoundly after the dissolution of the Indian Empire, when the economic and political importance of the West and the Arab world quickly replaced that of India. With the arrival of oil wealth in the shaikhdoms in the following decades, Eastern Arabia witnessed a rapid expansion in the construction and service 232 M James Onley sectors—an expansion that has continued, in ebbs and flows, ever since. This economic expansion has attracted millions of working class South Asians to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, changing the demographics of the region’s South Asian communities beyond recognition. To appreciate the magnitude of this change, one need only contrast Palgrave’s description above with the most common image of South Asians in the Gulf today: that of low-wage migrant workers in the construction and service sectors. In line with this image, the vast majority of studies of South Asian communities in the Gulf are concerned with migrant laborers in the post-1947 era.3 By contrast, there are only 20 studies of Indians in the pre-oil Gulf, mainly case studies.4 As yet, we have no complete picture of Indian communities in the pre-oil Gulf, particularly of the merchants, which is surprising given the leading roles they played. This chapter fills in some of the blanks.5

India’s Pre-Oil Connections with the Gulf The Gulf’s trade links with India extend back into antiquity, as evidenced by the countless Indian artifacts one finds in Bronze Age archaeological sites (from 2300 to 1000 bc) and modern-day museums in the GCC states, Iraq, and Iran. While there may well have been an Indian mercantile presence in the Gulf since the Bronze Age, the earliest account we have of an Indian community there comes from a book written in 916 ad by the Arab historian Abu Zayd Hasan referring to over 100 Hindu merchants at the southern port of Siraf, Iran.6 After the decline of Siraf in the eleventh century, this community would most likely have relocated to the island of Kish (Qais), which replaced Siraf as the Gulf’s leading port. When Hormuz rose to prominence in the fourteenth century, contributing to Kish’s decline, the community probably moved there. After Hormuz was destroyed as a trading center by a combined Safavid-English force in 1622, the Indian community dispersed to Bandar Abbas and Muscat. The oldest community in the Gulf today, also Hindu like that in Siraf, seems to be the one in Muscat, which dates to at least the fifteenth century.7 The second oldest is probably the Hindu community in Manama, first mentioned in Dutch records in 1667, but which is almost certainly older than that.8 The third oldest is the Lawati community of Muscat and Matrah, which dates from either the Ya‘ariba dynasty (1625–1743) according to J. E. Peterson or the 1770s according to Calvin Allen.9 The merchants, tradesmen, and family members who made up these communities came mainly from Sindh, Kutch (Kachchh), and historic Gujarat (the Kathiawar peninsula, a.k.a. Saurashtra, and the eastern coast of the Gulf of Cambay)— regions that straddle the southern border between present-day Pakistan and India.10 The main ports and towns that Indian merchants in the Gulf traded with varied over the centuries, as Table 9.1 shows. Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 233

Most of the goods imported by Gulf ports—wood, metal, cloth, rice, coffee, tea, sugar, ghee, spices, etc.—were shipped from the ports in Table 9.1. The Gulf’s most notable exports were pearls, specie, horses, and dates. Pearls were the backbone of the economy for Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates) until the 1930s. They were bought by pearl merchants, usually Indians, and taken to India, where they were sold on the world market. Because of this, and the monopoly Indian merchants enjoyed in the Gulf credit market, Indian ports became banking centers for the Gulf—notably Bombay in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, the Indian rupee was commonly used in many of the region’s ports as early as the seventeenth century,11 emerging as the principal currency of trade in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States, and Oman from the 1890s to the 1960s. Even today, older GCC nationals refer to their local dirham, dinar, or riyal as the rupee-ya. The strong Indian influence on the ports and people of Eastern Arabia and southern Iran is clearly evident in the styles of architecture, clothing, and cuisine. Gulf dhows were built with wood imported from India. Indian- style buildings, often built by Indians, dominated Gulf ports. Kashmiri shawls adorned the heads of the ruling families of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, and colorful Indian-style turbans were worn by many Arabs on both sides of the Gulf, including the Qawasim (the ruling family of Lingeh, Ras al-Khaimiah, and Sharjah) and the Al Bu Sa‘id (the ruling family of Oman). Gulf Arabs and Iranians have long eaten their lamb and fish with curry and rice from India. The long-resident Indian communities in the Gulf per- sonify these ancient connections. Arab merchants also traded with Indian ports, of course, but the only sizable Arab communities were to be found in the ports on the Konkan and Malabar coasts (notably Bombay and Calicut) because elsewhere it took too long for merchants to return to the Gulf.12 Those who sailed the farthest, to the Malabar coast (Kerala), tended to settle down and take local wives, the legacy of which is the Mappilas (Indo-Arabs), a sizable minority accounting for a quarter of all people in Kerala and the majority of all Muslims in that state.13 The ports of Sindh, Kutch, and Gujarat also attracted Arab merchants, but few actually settled there, with the exception of Cambay, Surat, and Karachi during the heyday of those ports, as well as Gwadar (300 miles to the west of Karachi), a dependency of Oman from 1783 to 1958.

Demographics The majority of Indians in the pre-oil Gulf were merchants or members of merchant families. They can be placed into seven main groups: Banians (Hindus and Jains); Khojas, Lawatiyya, Bohras, and Memons (Muslims); and Catholics and Anglicans (Christians). There were three other groups whose

Table 9.1 Principal Indian ports and towns trading with the Gulf, c.1500–1947

Region Port / town Period

Sindh Karachi (B) Eighteenth to twentieth centuries Lahori Bandar Thirteenth to nineteenth centuries Thatta Fourteenth to eighteenth centuries Debala First century bc to thirteenth century ad Hyderabad Eighteenth to twentieth centuries Shikarpur Eighteenth to twentieth centuries Punjab Multan Eighth century bc to nineteenth century ad Lahore (B) First to twentieth centuries Kutch (Kachchh) Lakhpat Eigheenth century to 1819 Jakhau Seventeenth to nineteenth centuries Mandvi Sixteenth to twentieth centuries Mundra Seventeenth to twentieth centuries Bhuj Seventeenth to twentieth centuries Anjar Sixteenth to twentieth centuries Tuna Port Eighteenth century to 1930s Kandla Port 1930s onward Gujarat Jamnagar Sixteenth to twentieth centuries Porbandar Tenth to twentieth centuries Diu (P) Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries Gogha Fifth to nineteenth centuries Bhavnagar Eighteenth to nineteenth centuries Cambay now: Khambhat Tenth to sixteenth centuries Baroda now: Vadodara Tenth to twentieth centuries Broach (B) now: Bharuch First to nineteenth centuries Surat Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries Konkan Coast Damão (P) now: Daman Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries Bassein (P, B) now: Vasai Sixteenth to eighteenth centuries Bombay (P, B) now: Mumbai Sixteenth to twentieth centuries Chaul (P, B) First to seventeenth centuries Dabhol or Dabul Fifteenth to seventeenth centuries Goa (P) Twenty-second century bc to seventeenth century ad Mangalore (P, B) First to twentieth centuries Malabar Coast (Kerala) Cannanore (P, D, B) now: Kannur Twelfth to twentieth centuries Calicut (B) now: Kozhikode Twelfth to twentieth centuries Cochin (P, D, B) now: Kochi Fifteenth to twentieth centuries Quilon (P, D, B) now: Kollam First to twentieth centuries Coromandel Coast Masulipatnam (D, F, B) Seventeenth to eighteenth centuries now: Machilipatnam Madras (B) now: Chennai Eighteenth to twentieth centuries Bengal Calcutta (B), now Kolkata Eighteenth to twentieth centuries

Key: P = Portuguese colony (during part of the era indicated) B = British colony (during part of the era indicated) D = Dutch colony (during part of the era indicated) F = French colony (during part of the era indicated) a Western accounts of Karachi, Lahori Bandar, and Thatta up to the nineteenth century often called these towns Debal (Dibal, Dabul, Daybul, Diul, etc.), mistakenly believing it to be their ancient name. Although Debal had long ceased to exist by 1500, it is listed here for the sake of clarity. See John Abbott, Sind: A Re-Interpretation of the Unhappy Valley (London: Oxford University Press, 1924), 43–58. 236 M James Onley presence was either too small (numbering just a handful) or too brief to warrant coverage in this chapter. The first group was a small community of Sunni Mappilas from the Malabar coast who resided in Muscat during the height of Portuguese power in the Gulf (1507–1650). The second group was Sikhs from the Punjab, a community established in the wake of the British occupation of Iraq during World War I. Its arrival was symbolized by the construction of a Sikh temple (gurdwara) just outside Baghdad’s old city limits by soldiers from the Indian Army soon after the British capture of Baghdad in 1917. Another large community of Punjabis resided in western Iran during 1927–1938 helping to build the Trans-Iranian Railway linking the Caspian Sea with the head of the Persian Gulf. A third group was Parsis (Indo-Persians) from Gujarat and Bombay, who rarely appear in historical accounts of the region’s ports and towns. Each of these groups was comprised of communities formed on the basis of religion, caste, clan, occupation, region (homeland), language, ethnicity, and/or ancestry. Thus, we find three jatis (occupational groups) of Hindu Banians, divided into ten regional communities; there were two regional communities of Jain Banians; there were three sects of Shi‘i Muslims, divided into ten regional communities; there were two communities of Sunni Muslims; there were eight communities of Roman Catholics; and there were two communities of Anglicans (Church of England). All together, there were at least three dozen distinct communities of Indian merchants in the Gulf before 1947, as Table 9.2 illustrates. If nonmerchant groups are included—such as merchant sailors, naval seamen, soldiers, and Indian oil workers—this list would be considerably longer and more complex. The vast majority of merchants originated from the five closest regions to the Gulf—Rajasthan, southwest Punjab, Sindh, Kutch, and Gujarat—although they also had a substantial presence in Bombay by the nineteenth century. Within their own occupational and religious groups, Rajasthani, Punjabi, Sindhi, Kutchi, and Gujarati merchants formed endogamous regional communities based on a shared homeland (region, district, and town). Thus, each member of a religious group in the Gulf (such as an Ithna‘ashari Khoja) would further identify him/herself along regional lines (Sindhi, then South Sindhi, then Hyderabadi)—an identity and solidarity that would determine the community to which s/he belonged. For instance, while we have numerous Arab and Western accounts describing the “Indian community” or “Kutchi community” in Muscat and Matrah, its members’ primary solidarity was with their fellow regional co-religionists with whom they shared the same dialect and sect: Kutchi Bhatias, Kutchi Lohanas, Kutchi Ithna‘ashari Khojas (Lawatiyya), Kutchi Nizari Khojas, or Kutchi Memons. Within these communities, its members further distinguished between each other: Kanthi Bhatias (being Bhatias

Table 9.2 Indian merchant groups and communities in the Persian Gulf, 1500–1947

Faith Group Jati / sect Community Origins

Hindu Banians Khatri 1. Multani S.W. Punjab: Multan caste: Kshatriya sect: Vaishnava Bhatia 2. Multani S.W. Punjab: Multan caste: Kshatriya 3. Sindhi Sindh sect: Vaishnava 4. Kutchi / Kanthi Kutch: Kanthi Patt (Kutch’s Coastal Belt region) 5. Halai / Kathiawari W. Gujarat: Halar District of the Kathiawar peninsula 6. Gujarati / Meshri E. Gujarat: Surat, etc. Lohana 7. Sindhi Sindh jati: Bhaiband 8. Kutchi / Kanthi Kutch: Kanthi Patt (Kutch’s Coastal Belt region) caste: Kshatriya sect: Vaishnava 9. Halai / Kathiawari W. Gujarat: Halar District of the Kathiawar peninsula 10. Gujarati / Meshri E. Gujarat: Surat, etc. Jain Jain 11. Shravak (jati: Lad) Gujarat caste: Vaishyaa 12. Marwari (jati: Oswal) Rajasthan: Marwar sect: Svetambara Muslim Khojas Nizari Isma‘ili Shi‘a / 13. Sindhi Sindh, mainly Hyderabad Agha Khani Shi‘a 14. Kutchi / Kanthi Kutch: Kanthi Patt (Kutch’s Coastal Belt region) 15. Halai / Kathiawari W. Gujarat: Halar District of the Kathiawar peninsula 16. Gujarati E. Gujarat: Surat, etc.

continued Table 9.2 Continued

Faith Group Jati / sect Community Origins

Ithna‘ashari Shi‘a 17. Sindhi Sindh (Nizari converts, 18. Kutchi / Kanthi Kutch: Kanthi Patt (Kutch’s coastal belt region) 1860s–) 19. Halai / Kathiawari W. Gujarat: Halar district of the Kathiawar peninsula 20. Gujarati E. Gujarat: Surat, etc. Lawatiyya 21. Sindhi-Kutchi in Oman Sindh & Kutch (Arabised Ithna‘ashari Khojas, 1860s–) Bohras Musta‘li Isma‘ili Shi‘a 22. Da’udi / Dawoodi Gujarat Memons Hanafi Sunna 23. Kutchi / Kanthi Kutch: Kanthi Patt (Kutch’s Coastal Belt region) Mappilas Shafi‘i Sunna 24. Malabari Malabar coast (Kerala) (Indo-Arab) (Malayali, Keralite) Christian Catholics Luso-Indian 25. Gujarati Gujarat: Diu (P) (Indo-Portuguese, 26. Konkani, Marathi, etc. Konkan coast: Eurasian) Daman / Damão (P) Bassein (P, B) Bombay (P, B) Chaul (P, B) Mangalore (P, B) 27. Goan / Konkani Konkan coast: Goa (P) 28. Malabari Malabar coast: (Malayali, Keralite) Cannanore (P, D, B) Cochin (P, D, B) Quilon (P, D, B) East Indian 29. Gujarati Gujarat: Diu (P) (Indian converts) 30. Konkani, Marathi, etc. Konkan coast: Daman / Damão (P) Bassein (P, B) Bombay (P, B) Chaul (P, B) Mangalore (P, B) 31. Goan / Konkani Konkan coast: Goa (P) 32. Malabari Malabar coast: (Malayali, Keralite) Cannanore (P, D, B) Cochin (P, D, B) Quilon (P, D, B) Anglican Anglo-Indian 33. Konkani, Marathi, etc. Konkan coast: (Eurasian) Bombay Presidency (B) Madras Presidency (B) Marathi Christian 34. Marathi Konkan coast: (Indian converts) Bombay Presidency (B) Sikh Sikhs 35. Punjabi Punjab Zoroastrian Parsis 36. Gujarati Gujarat (Indo-Persian)

Key: P = Portuguese colony (during part of the era indicated) B = British Colony (during part of the era indicated) D = Dutch Colony (during part of the era indicated) a Jains are a casteless religious community, but Hindus have long accorded them the status of Vaishyas (merchants) within the Hindu caste system because of their engagement in trade, although many Jains object to this. 240 M James Onley from Kanthi Patt, the coastal belt region of Kutch), then Mandvija Bhatias (being Bhatias from the port of Mandvi). Religion was a social barrier to the emergence of wider trans-religious group solidarities like Kutchiness (Kachchhiyat), Sindhiness (Sindhiyat), and Indianness (Hindiyat), which did not emerge until the twentieth century.14 A full list of all regional religious communities in the Gulf would be too long to include here. These communities were more than religious, regional, and social in nature, and they functioned like guilds, often dominating a particular segment of a town’s economy to the exclusion of other rival communities. The practice of endog- amy, therefore, had an additional commercial purpose: the reinforcement of business ties and preservation of specialized skills and trade secrets within communities.15 Despite the Gulf’s strong trade links with Konkan and Malabar ports, there appears to have been few, if any, Indian merchants in the Gulf from those places, except during the heyday of the Portuguese Empire in the Gulf in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when one found Catholics from the Konkan coast in Hormuz, Bandar Abbas, Bandar Kong, and Muscat, and Mappilas from the Malabar coast (Kerala) in Muscat. This also applied during the heyday of the British Indian Empire, when one found Anglicans from Bombay on the Konkan coast in Baghdad, Basra, Bahrain, Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas. A possible reason for this is that the Gulf’s summer climate, in the low 50s°C, was not a deterrent to Sindhis, Kutchis, and Gujaratis because it was similar to their homelands, while Konkanis and Malabaris, who were used to maximum temperatures in the low 30s°C, would have regarded the Gulf in summer as intolerable. Instead, Konkani and Malabari merchants, when they did leave home, preferred to travel to the east coast of India and Southeast Asia, where the climate and business prospects were better. The sections below provide brief sketches of the main groups, starting with the oldest group of all: the Banians.

Banians: Hindus and Jains Banian or Bania was a general term used by Arabs and Europeans for people from one of the many merchant jatis (occupational groups) within the Hindu caste system, which also encompassed Jains. All Jain merchants and most Hindu merchants are Vaishyas (members of the third caste, merchants). All the Hindu merchants in the Gulf, however, appear to have been Kshatriyas (the second caste, warriors and rulers), with the exception of a small community of Brahmins (the first caste, priests and scholars) in Muscat in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. From a caste-conscious perspective, the term Banian would not have been welcomed by the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, but they evidently put up with the Arab and European’s understandable ignorance. Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 241

The Arabs adopted the term Banian (with an -n) in the distant past from the Gujarati word for merchant: vaniyo (sing.) and vaniya (pl.), originating from Sanskrit vanija (root), vanik (sing.), and vanijah (pl.).16 The Portuguese adopted the term in the sixteenth century after they established their empire in the region. When the English, Dutch, and French arrived in the seventeenth century, they too adopted the term. Aside from Banian, the Arabs also used the term al-Hindi (pl. al-Hunud), meaning Indian. Iranians do not appear to have used Banian at all. The Persian term for a Hindu merchant was Gur / Gaur (pl. Guran / Gauran) and Gabr (pl. Gabran), meaning infidel—the name originally used for Zoroastrians. Another Persian term was Hindu (pl. Hunud), meaning Hindu, although it could also mean Indian. Other Persian terms were Hindi and Hindustani (pl. Hunud), both meaning Indian. Although Iranians did not describe Hindu merchants in Iran as Banians, Arab and European visitors did in their travel accounts. In the interests of clarity and consistency, therefore, this study uses Banian for all Hindu merchants in the Persian Gulf region, even through Iranians and Indians did not use the term themselves. Hindu merchants accounted for the majority of Indians in the Gulf region’s ports and towns from antiquity until the 1860s. The largest single group of Indians in the Gulf region during the Safavid era (1501–1722) was the Khatris: Hindu Kshatriya merchants from Multan in the southwestern Punjab. Travelers’ accounts usually described them only as “Multanis.” Thousands lived in the bazaars of Iran’s inland cities, from Mashhad to Tabriz. They dominated the caravan trade between India, Iran, and Central Asia. The largest community, which numbered around 10,000 at its height, resided in Isfahan while it was the Safavid capital (1598–1722).17 The Khatris lived together in caravanserais, inns constructed around a courtyard large enough to accommodate a caravan, located in the town bazaars and along the caravan routes. The biggest caravanserais and the greatest number were in Isfahan, Mashhad, and Shiraz. Some of these were likely owned and operated by the Khatris exclusively for their own community, as was the case in Central Asia, allowing them to live separately from Muslim society. In contrast, Indian Muslim merchants, being Shi‘a, chose to live among Iranians or stay in communal caravanserais with Iranian travelers.18 In the ports of the Persian Gulf, the majority of Indians between the tenth and sixteenth centuries were Gujarati Jain merchants—collectively known as Shravaks (a.k.a. Jain Vanias)—who are comprised of numerous jatis.19 From the seventeenth century onward, Jain merchants along the Gulf coast were displaced by Hindus, virtually all of whom were from the Bhatia and Bhaiband Lohana merchant jatis of the Kshatriya caste from Sindh, Kutch and western Gujarat. After the decline of the Multani Khatri communities following the collapse of the Safavid Empire in 1722, Bhatias and 242 M James Onley

Lohanas accounted for the majority of Indians in the Gulf until the 1860s and the majority of Hindus until the arrival of Hindu oil workers and soldiers in the 1910s. During the Safavid era, the largest Hindu community along the shores of the Persian Gulf was to be found at Hormuz, the region’s leading port at the time, under Portuguese control from 1507/1515 to 1622.20 Various European accounts tell us there were 800 Hindu households in Hormuz in the sixteenth century, but, unlike the Iranian interior, they were outnumbered by 1,200 Indian Muslim households.21 It is unclear which castes the Hindus belonged to, but most of these “Hindus” were in fact Shravak Jains (most likely from the Lad jati) from Jamnager, Porbandar, Diu, and Cambay in Gujarat, who accounted for the majority of Indians in the Gulf before the late sixteenth century.22 The presence of 2,000 Gujarati households, both Hindu and Muslim, on the island gave Hormuz the feel of an Indian city.23 After the Anglo-Safavid destruction of Hormuz in 1622, Hormuz’s Indian community fled to nearby Bandar Abbas and Muscat. Following the fall of Hormuz, Bandar Abbas’s population rose to 1,400– 1,500 houses by 1670, of which one third belonged to Indians, mainly Banians. Assuming an average of six people per house, Indians might have numbered as many as 2,800–3,000 during the busy sailing season of October–April.24 The Indian presence in Bandar Abbas remained the largest along the shores of the Gulf, followed by Muscat and Basra, until Bandar Abbas’s economic decline in the 1740s–1750s. Between the 1750s and the 1950s, the Indian presence in Oman—mainly Muscat and neighboring Matrah—was the largest in the entire Gulf region, followed by a steadily increasing number of communities of fluctuating size in ports throughout the region. During the era of Portuguese hegemony in Oman (1507–1650), the wealthiest Indians in Muscat were Banians and Christians from the Portuguese colony of Diu in Gujarat.25 Muscat’s strongest trade links with India before the economic rise of Bombay in the eighteenth century seem to have been with Gujarat. Even as late as the 1750s, when Bombay began to dominate Indian Ocean trade, one Dutch East India Company employee in Gujarat was still able to remark that “the roadsteads of Kathiawar teemed with Muscati ships and many Banians in Muscat came from Kathiawar.”26 By the eighteenth century, however, Bhatias from Thatta in Sindh had become the dominant Banians in Muscat. Danish explorer Carsten Niebuhr, who visited Muscat in 1765, observed: “In no other Mahomedan city are the Banians as numerous as in Maskat; their number in this city amounts to no fewer than 1,200.”27 Aside from the Indian merchant communities, there were also builders, carpenters, and shipbuilders from India.28 By 1809, one observer thought the Banian communities in Muscat to number 4,000, Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 243 which was about 6 percent of the estimated population.29 By the early 1820s, Captain Brucks of the Bombay Marine (as the Indian Navy was then known) thought the Banian communities in Muscat to be about 2,000, also 6 percent of the estimated maximum population, while he believed there to be 1,000 Banians in Matrah (all Sindhi and Kutchi), which was about 55–66 percent of the town’s estimated population.30 In 1835, Lieutenant Wellsted of the Indian Navy visited Oman and observed that there were about 1,500 Banians in Muscat, remarking that this was the largest Indian presence in Arabia.31 From the 1790s onward, however, economic circumstances forced the previously dominant Sindhi Bhatia community to slowly relocate to Bahrain and Bandar Abbas, and eventually Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the 1890s. By 1900 only two Sindhi Bhatia merchants still resided in Muscat and by 1914 there were none.32 As the Sindhi Bhatia community dwindled, a new community of Kutchi Bhatias emerged. Basra had the second largest Indian presence after Muscat during the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. James Buckingham, who spent three months in Basra in 1817, noted that there were about 200 Indians in Basra at this time, out of a total population of 100,000. The majority of Indians were Banians, the most senior of whom was a British East India Company broker. The Banians imported goods from India and East Africa through their agents (likely family members) in Muscat, although a few traded directly with Bombay.33 The other Indians in Basra were Hindu sepoys (Indian infantrymen) of the East India Company’s factory guard.34 In the Trucial States, the oldest Banian communities seem to have been at Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, both of which were noted in 1822 by Captain Brucks, when he conducted his maritime survey of the region.35 He noted “a number of Banians” in both ports, with many of those in Sharjah wearing Arab dress. There may also have been a Banian community in Ras al- Khaimah before the town’s destruction by the British in 1819. The Banian community in Dubai— today the largest in the UAE—was established in the 1890s, when Sindhi Bhatia merchants, as well as Khoja merchants, from elsewhere in the Gulf moved there. By the early 1900s, there were 67 Banians (all likely Sindhi Bhatia) and twenty-three Khojas, with an additional 20 Banians visiting the port during the pearling season.36

Khojas and Lawatiyya Since the sixteenth century, if not before, it appears that most Muslim Indian merchants in the Gulf were Khojas (sing. Khoja / Khojah, pl. Khawaja) from Gujarat and later Bombay. Khojas have been the major Muslim trading caste of western India for centuries. Today, all Khojas from Gujarat, Kutch, 244 M James Onley and Sindh are Shi‘i, most of whom are Nizari Isma‘ilis (Agha Khanis) who follow the Agha Khan as their Imam. In the Gulf, the vast majority of Khojas were Agha Khani until the 1860s, when about half converted to Ithna‘ashari (Twelver) Shi‘ism after a schism with the Agha Khan. By the early twentieth century, John Lorimer notes that not more than half of Khojas in the Gulf region were Agha Khanis.37 Most of the Agha Khanis who had converted to Ithna‘ashari Shi‘ism in the Gulf resided in Oman, where they accounted for 90 percent of the Khoja population in the early twentieth century.38 Outside of Oman, the majority of Khojas from Sindh, Kutch, and Gujarat were Agha Khani, and only a minority were Ithna‘ashari. The Ithna‘ashari Khoja community in Oman is known as the Lawatiyya / Luwatiyya (sing. Lawati / Luti). The Lawatiyya are distinct from mainstream Khojas in that they are the descendants not of Lohana Hindus from Gujarat but, as Calvin Allen argues, of Bhatia Hindus from Sindh. Many Lawatiyya claim to originate from Hyderabad in Sindh and were sometimes given the nisba “Hyderabadi” as a result.39 Analysis of their language, Khojki (a hybrid of Sindhi and Kutchi), however, indicates the Lawatiyya came from both Sindh and Kutch. They therefore must have formed a single community on the basis of their shared clan ancestry and subsequent intermarriage over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, most are Omani nationals who wear Omani national dress and consider themselves Omani Arabs. The word Khoja is both the name for anyone belonging to the Khawaja and the title used by them, coming before one’s name. The origins of the word khoja are debated, but the most common explanation is that it is a corruption of khwaja (pronounced khajeh, Persian for “master” or “lord”), which corresponds to thakur or thakkar (Hindi for “master”)—the title of respect used by Rajput notables and members of the Kshatriya caste of warriors and rulers, from whom the Khojas are descended through their Lohana and Bhatia Hindu ancestors.40

Memons The Memons (Memans) were one of the two smallest merchant communities in the Gulf region, along with the Bohras, although larger communities resided in Aden and East Africa. Memons (pronounced May-mon) are Sunnis, unlike the majority of Indian Muslim merchants in the Gulf who were Shi‘a.41 They come from Sindh, Kutch, and Gujarat, but trace their origins back further to Rajasthan. Like the Lohanas, Memons are Rathore Rajputs and were once Lohanas themselves. Memons, like Khojas, were originally from Thatta in Sindh, but most moved east to Kutch in the sixteenth century and, in the seventeenth Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 245 century, further east again to the Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat. By the twentieth century, the Memoni identification with Kathiawar became so strong that Kathiawari Memons—the largest group, being comprised of the Halai, Dhoka, Bhoraji, and Veravada—were known simply as Memons, while those still in Kutch were known as Kutchi Memons and those in Sindh as Sindhi Memons. The Memon communities beyond the shores of India were almost entirely from Kutch.42 After partition in 1947, most Memons in Kutch and Gujarat moved back to Sindh, now in Pakistan. The size of the Kutchi Memon communities in the Gulf region is unknown, but the British authorities in Bombay in the 1890s believed they were generally to be found in the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, except for Muscat, where they had recently been forced out by the Khojas.43 Despite this assumed presence, Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf records just one tiny Memon community in the entire Gulf, at Bushehr, in the early twentieth century, comprised of just four people.44

Bohras The Bohras, like the Memons, were one of the two smallest Indian communities in the Gulf, although larger communities resided in Aden and East Africa. The Bohras are Musta‘li Isma‘ili Shi‘is from Gujarat. The word bohra (also spelt bohora, bohrah, borah, vohra, vora) means “trader” or “merchant” and comes from the Gujarati vohorvu, meaning “to trade”—indicating that the first Bohras were merchants at the time of their conversion to Islam by Isma‘ili missionaries (known as pirs) from Yemen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In contrast to the Khojas and Memons, Bohras were originally nonmartial Hindus from the Brahmin and Vaishya (merchant) castes. Bohras share the same religious ancestry as the Khojas: Hindu and Fatimid, although they follow a different imam.45

Christians: Roman Catholics and Anglicans Before the nineteenth century, the Christian Indian presence in the Gulf was comprised entirely of Roman Catholics from the colonies and former colonies of Portuguese India (the Estado da Índia)—see Table 9.3. Most were converts, or the descendants of converts, from Hinduism from the sixteenth century. The Portuguese called them Canarims,46 a corruption of Canara / Kanara: the coastal region of Karnataka state, forming the southern section of the Konkan coast. Today they are more commonly known as “East Indians” in India. A secondary group of Indian Christians were Eurasians: Indo-Portuguese, the descendants of Portuguese men (known as Casados, meaning “married”) and Indian women from the sixteenth century. 246 M James Onley

Table 9.3 Portuguese colonies in western India

Region Colonies Dates Now in

Gujarati coast Diu 1535–1961 Daman & Diu union territory Konkan coast Damão or Daman 1559–1961 Daman & Diu union territory Bassein now: Vasai 1534–1739 Maharashtra state Cacabe de Tana now: Thane 1530–1739 Maharashtra state Bombay now: Mumbai 1534–1661 Maharashtra state Chaul 1521–1740 Maharashtra state Goa 1510–1961 Goa state Mangalore 1568–1640 Karnataka state Malabar coast Cannanore now: Kannur 1505–1663 Kerala state Cochin now: Kochi 1503–1669 Kerala state Quilon now: Kollam 1519–1661 Kerala state

They were known as Mestiços (mixed race) and Descendentes (descendants), but more commonly today as Luso-Indians (from Lusitania, the Roman name for Portugal). Indian Catholics typically had Christian given names and Indian surnames, while Luso-Indians had Christian given names and Portuguese surnames like Pinto, da Silva, and de Souza.47 In the nineteenth century, another denomination of Christian Indians appeared in the Gulf: Anglicans from British India. Some were the descendants of converts from Hinduism, like Catholic East Indians, but most Anglicans were Eurasians, known as “Anglo-Indians”: the descendants of mixed marriages between British men and Indian women. Indian Anglicans typically had Christian given names and Indian surnames, while Anglo- Indians had Christian given names and British surnames like Campbell, Edwards, and Smith. Christians from India were visibly distinct from the other Indian communities in the Gulf: they dressed as Europeans, not Indians. During the height of Portuguese power in the Gulf (1507–1650), they resided mainly in Hormuz, Bandar Abbas, Bandar Kong, and Muscat. After the Portuguese were expelled from Muscat in 1650, a small community lingered on in Bandar Kong, which remained under Portuguese control until 1750.48 Hormuz had 300 Indian and Eurasian Christian households in the early seventeenth century.49 After the demise of Portuguese power in the Gulf, the number of Christians from India declined. By 1869, there were only 20 Christians from India in coastal Iran, all in Bushehr—the headquarters of Britain’s political residency in the Gulf. Of these, half were Luso-Indians and half were Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 247

Anglo-Indians. Their occupations give some idea of their status and position in society: all but one of the Anglo-Indians held clerical posts within the Gulf Residency and the local British telegraph station, while all but two of the Luso-Indians worked as domestic servants for British officers at the Gulf Residency and British telegraph station. One Luso-Indian worked as the Gulf Residency postmaster, while the other worked for a British shipping company. From the 1920s on, the establishment of modern governments in the Gulf Arab states under British Indian guidance resulted in the recruitment of many Indians, especially Christians, to fill administrative positions in their expanding civil services—posts they continue to fill up the present. From the 1940s on, the same pattern occurred in state-owned oil companies and local businesses.50 Luso-Indians from Goa continued to account for the majority of domestic servants in British and American employ in the Gulf until at least the mid-twentieth century.

Gulf-wide Patterns The formation of an Indian community in a given place was the result of many factors, including trade routes, economic opportunities, local demands, religious tolerance, and the policies of the local ruler. Community formation was a quiet and gradual process that largely went undocumented, with the result that historians have great difficulty dating it. The dwindling or disappearance of a community, on the other hand, was often the result of dramatic circumstances that were documented by European observers. Thus, war sometimes forced a community to relocate, for instance, as happened in Hormuz in 1622, Isfahan in 1722, Zubara in 1811, Bahrain in 1842–43 and 1869, Sur in 1865, and Doha in 1867. Sometimes a town’s economy declined, motivating the Indian merchants there to relocate to anther town, as happened in Bandar Abbas in the 1740s–1750s. Sometimes an Indian community’s own economic prospects declined, as happened with the Sindhi Bhatia community of Muscat in the early nineteenth century, which was displaced by a Kutchi Bhatia community. Sometimes a local ruler came to regard the entire Indian merchant community in his town as an unwanted commercial rival, so he forced them out, as happened in Doha in the early 1880s and Kuwait in the early 1900s. And sometimes religiously motivated attacks on individual Hindu merchants, or whole Hindu communities, forced them to flee for their lives, as happened in Iran during the reign of Nadir Shah (1736–1747) and in Bahrain in 1833—the latter provoking an armed intervention by the Bombay Marine.51 After a community’s departure, for whatever reason, a new one might form decades or centuries later; but occasionally the departure was permanent, as happened at Hormuz in 1622, Sur in 1865, and Qatif in 1900. 248 M James Onley

Before the twentieth century, historians have only anecdotal accounts of different ports at random times to draw upon; there exists no survey or big picture of the Persian Gulf as a whole. Willem Floor’s monumental work, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, 1500 –1730 (2006), which draws upon archival records in Portugal, India, and Holland, and historical travel accounts in Portuguese, Dutch, Persian, French, German, and English, is the most extensive compilation of anecdotal evidence from the early period covered by this chapter. In it, one finds that most Indians in the Gulf were described as “Banians” or “Hindus” (many of whom were probably Jains in the sixteenth century), followed by Muslims, then Christians. Hindus and Jains were to be found in most if not all ports, Muslims in many ports, and Christians from Portuguese India at just Hormuz, Bandar Abbas, and Muscat during the height of Portuguese control of the Gulf, as well as Bandar Kong until 1750.52 This balance changed in favor of Muslims after 1868, when Imam Azzan bin Qais seized power in Muscat and imposed an intolerant fundamentalist regime over Oman’s ports, making life difficult for non-Muslims. In 1868, Muscat’s Banian population numbered 2,000; by 1870, it had dwindled to 250.53 Although Azzan was ousted in 1871 and religious tolerance restored, the Banian community never recovered. Thirty-five years later, when Lorimer conducted his Gulf-wide survey around 1905, he noted that the Hindu community in Muscat still numbered 250.54 Another notable feature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Gulf was that the vast majority of Indians (and Indian imports) came from Gujarat, in contrast to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gulf, when the vast majority of Indians came from Sindh, although Indian imports came from across western India via Bombay by then. European accounts of the pre-nineteenth century Gulf rarely distinguish between Muslim sects, but it would seem likely that most Muslim Indians described in them were Shi‘i. The first maritime survey of the Persian Gulf in which Indians were recorded was conducted in the early 1820s by Captain George Brucks of the Bombay Marine. In the survey, he provides a general description of each coastal town on both shores of the Gulf. He remarks that Banians were to be found in “most ports” and that “the trade with India, particularly with the Malabar Coast and Bombay, has become very considerable.”55 He found Banian communities in Muscat, Matrah, Khur Fakkan, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Manama, and Bandar Abbas. In Muscat, he observed about 2,000 Banians who were “brokers to most of the Arab merchants, and generally agents to any European ship that trades to this place. Some have great influence with the Imaum [the ruler, Sayyid Said], who finds it greatly to his interest, and the benefit of his revenues, to give them every encouragement.”56 Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 249

In Matrah, he discovered about 1,000 Banians from Sindh and Kutch, all engaged in trade.57 In Khur Fakkan, he found about 50 Banians, who comprised about 25 percent of the population.58 In Sharjah, he observed “a number of Banians” working as pearl merchants, goldsmiths, and cloth and grain dealers who “generally adopt the Arab dress.”59 In Abu Dhabi, he found “a number of Banians” working as traders and goldsmiths.60 In Manama, he observed about one hundred Banians working as merchants and shopkeepers. 61 At Bandar Abbas, he noted “a few Banians.”62 He mentions no Indian communities in Kuwait, Bushehr, Kangan, and Lingeh, despite the considerable trade these ports had with India—but it is likely some resided there as well.63 Brucks mentions no Indian Muslims in the Gulf, although it is possible that he used “Banian” as a generic term for any Indian merchant—a practice not unknown at the time. The earliest comprehensive survey of Indians living in the Gulf is an 1869 census of all people entitled to British protection in southern Iran, compiled by the British Government of India. The census includes everyone from Princely India (comprised of British protectorates and protected states) and British India, as well as Portuguese Indians in British employ. It provides a fascinating demographic snapshot of the Indian communities along the southern coast of Iran. Table 9.4 offers a summary of the census. Of those listed, Muslims were the largest group (80.4 percent), followed by Hindus (15.5 percent), and Christians (4.1 percent). The majority of Indians (85 percent) were either merchants, their families or assistants, most of whom were Muslim (70 percent). Forty-nine Muslim men—all Khojas, all merchants but one—were accompanied by their wives. In contrast,

Table 9.4 Indians under British protection in southern Iran, 1869a

Location Number Demographics

Bandar Abbas 307 Muslim: 260, Hindu: 47 Bushehr 77 Muslim: 56, Christian: 20, Hindu: 1 Qishm Island 35 Muslim: 35 Lingeh 33 Hindu: 17, Muslim: 16 Minab 29 Muslim: 27, Hindu: 2 Kish Island 7 Hindu: 7 Henjam Isand 3 Hindu: 2, Muslim: 1 TOTAL 491 a The following information comes from J. A. Saldanha, ed., Précis of Commerce and Communications in the Persian Gulf, 1801–1905 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1906), Appendix E: “Returns of British Subjects and British Protected Persons on the Persian Coast and Islands, 1869,” 119–47. 250 M James Onley only one Hindu merchant was accompanied by his family, though just his sons, no wife or daughters. Between 27 and 37 percent of British-protected Indians in southern Iran were born in the Gulf—in Bandar Abbas, Lingeh, Qishm Island, Muscat, and Sharjah—of which just five were Hindu and the rest Muslim. The five Hindus were born in Lingeh and on Qishm Island, indicating the presence of Hindu families there before the mid-nineteenth century. A quarter of all British-protected Indians in southern Iran were third generation residents, their fathers having been born in the lower Gulf. The census also shows that Sindhis were the largest regional group (42.8 percent), of whom half were born in the Gulf, mainly Bandar Abbas. Gujaratis were the second largest regional group (18.5 percent), a quarter of whom were born in the Gulf. People from the Konkan coast accounted for 14 percent of British-protected Indians in southern Iran, although they might have originally come from elsewhere, such as the soldiers, who were most likely Marathi, Rajput, or Baluch (the main “martial races” of the Bombay Army). None of those from the Konkan coast were merchants or born in the Gulf. Kutchis were the fourth largest group, accounting for 10.4 percent of British-protected Indians in southern Iran, all merchants or from merchant families. The majority of Kutchis (56.8 percent) were born in the Gulf, most likely in Muscat, suggesting that the largest concentration of Kutchis in the Gulf was in Oman. Punjabis were the next largest group; all but one originated from Multan, but their families had lived in Shikarpur in northern Sindh for two or more generations. The most extensive survey of Indian communities in the Gulf before the 1920s is to be found in Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, compiled from information gathered by local informants around 1905. Lorimer’s survey covers only towns on the coast or close to it; it omits Iran’s interior towns, like Shiraz and Isfahan, and towns in Iraq north of Baghdad. These limitations aside, it is possible to assemble an overview of the size and composition of the Indian communities in the Gulf over 100 years ago. From this survey, we can make a number of observations. There were around 4,840–5,060 Indians in southern Iraq, coastal Iran, Bahrain, the Trucial States, and Oman around 1905. There were no Indians in Kuwait, Qatif (in Hasa), Doha (in Qatar), Ajman, Khur Fakkan, or Fujairah, although we know that Indian merchants had resided in most of these ports in the past. Muslims formed the largest grouping, numbering around 3,610–3,860 (about two-thirds), the vast majority being Sindhi Khojas. The Khojas in Matrah, Oman were the largest Indian community in the Gulf, numbering 1,050. Hindus in the Gulf numbered around 1,090–1,250 (about one- third), most of whom came from Sindh or Kutch, the largest group being in Muscat: 202 men and 51 women and children. Up to 1868, however, the Banians in Muscat had been the largest Indian presence in the Gulf: Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 251 numbering 2,000 at their height. During the intolerant fundamentalist regime imposed by Imam Azzan bin Qais between 1868 and 1871, however, most Banians fled Oman and never returned. Just like the 1869 census, Lorimer’s 1905 survey also reveals Sindhis to have been the largest single group in the Gulf. Interestingly, more Indians resided in Eastern Arabia (2,265–2,430) than in coastal Iran (995–1,050) or southern Iraq (1,580), with Oman having the greatest number (1,650– 1,665; with Gwadar: 2,058–2,073). Unlike the 1869 census, however, Hindu merchants appear to have been almost as likely to be accompanied by their wives and daughters as Muslim merchants: Lorimer records Hindu families in eight places (Qishm Island, Chabahar, Gwadar, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain, Matrah, and Muscat) and Khoja families in ten (Lingeh, Bandar Abbas, Minab, Gwatar, Gwadar, Sharjah, Khaburah, Suwaiq, Matrah, and Quriyat)––all located in the lower Gulf. In fact, Indian women and children probably resided in far more places then this, for Lorimer notes that the Khojas were “generally accompanied by their wives and children” in the Gulf.64 The most likely reason for the presence of wives and children in some locations and not others is that they were safer and more tolerant environments than the other ports and towns. The wives and daughters of unaccompanied Indian merchants in the Gulf would have resided with the merchants’ parents in India. Merchants usually returned to India to see their family every year or two, leaving affairs in the hands of a business partner during their absence––often a relative. In Oman, Robert Landen observes how

Usually the Hindus remained in Musqat for only 15–20 years, interrupt- ing their stay with long visits to their homes and families in India. They did not bring their families to live in Musqat, preferring to shield their loved ones from the harsh climate and the necessity of coping with an unfamiliar and often unsympathetic culture.65

The Khojas, in contrast, “were more or less permanently settled in Oman” with their families.66 Another explanation for why Hindu merchants in some Gulf ports were unaccompanied by families is that they were bach- elors: they spent their careers overseas and only married when they returned home to retire.67 The presence of Hindu women in the lower Gulf is a startling find, for it contrasts sharply with the observations of Claude Markovits and others, whose work concludes that Hindu merchants rarely took their wives and daughters with them overseas. He observes that “Diverging concepts of purity and impurity made it rare for Hindu merchants to take their wives out of India, while Muslim merchants generally travelled with their families, 252 M James Onley especially to Muslim lands.”68 Overseas travel––known as crossing the kala pani (black water)––was regarded as taboo by many twice-born Hindus (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas) because it might pollute one’s soul, causing one to lose his/her varna (caste), which can only be restored through ritual purification. Despite this belief, a minority of Hindu merchants have always been willing to travel overseas. Markovits hypothesizes that the decision by Hindu merchants to leave their wives and daughters behind in India was a compromise, done to maintain the purity of the family and family home, although some Indian historians refute this idea.69 Merchants returning from overseas could restore their purity by undergoing ritual penance and purification ceremonies. The lower Gulf’s relative closeness to India may have been why Hindu merchants were less reluctant to bring their wives and daughters with them, if it was safe to do so. Despite the apparent thoroughness of Lorimer’s Gazetteer, however, his survey is far from complete and is, no doubt, full of errors. This survey gives us, at best, only a general picture of the Indian communities in the Gulf in the early twentieth century. When we compare Lorimer’s c.1905 survey with two estimates of Indian nationals in the Gulf region in 1948, the population appears to have increased by perhaps a third, from roughly 5,000 to roughly 7,500 (see Table 9.5).

Table 9.5 Indians in the Gulf, c.1905 v. 1948

c. 1905 1948 Country Total pop. Total pop.a Oil workersb

Iran 995–1,050 2,500 2,470c Iraq 1,580 650 ? Kuwait 0 1,250 3,211 Bahrain 191–325 1,138 658 Qatar 0 ? 552 Saudi Arabia 0 ? 914 Trucial States 408–428 ? 33d Oman 1,650–1,665 1,145e 0 TOTAL 4,824–5,048 6,683 7,838 a C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1951), 528. Kondapi’s numbers are likely limited to Indian nationals, although the “nationality” of some people was still unclear in 1948 owing to the ongoing population transfer between Pakistan and India at the time. b Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf, and the International Oil Companies, 1910–50,” 563. c No figures are available for 1948, so this is the number from 1947. d No figures are available for 1948, so this is the number from 1947. e This number likely excludes the Lawatiyya community in Oman. Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 253

The other main Indian population centers in the Middle East in 1948 were Aden (5,594) and Egypt (1,000).70 The apparent gradual increase revealed here disguises periodic spikes in the population, such as World War I when the British Government of India employed over half a million Indian servicemen and civilians during its occupation of Iraq,71 or World War II, when it employed thousands more in a second occupation of Iraq and Iran. With the gradual dawn of the oil era in the twentieth century, the South Asian population in the region steadily increased, rising to over half a million Indian and Pakistani nationals by 1975 and almost six and a half million South Asians by 2002.72 The demographics accordingly became increasingly diverse and complex.

Occupations Besides religion, another way of categorizing Indians in the Gulf is by occupation. Before the twentieth century, the vast majority of Indians were merchants of one sort or another—ship owners, wholesale merchants, pearl merchants, investors, property owners, brokers (dalals), agents (gomasthas), bankers (sarrafin in Arabic, sing. sarraf; shroffs in English), retailers, shopkeepers, and customs collectors. The sarrafin in particular were indispensible for the economy of Bahrain, the Trucial States, Oman, and many Iranian ports.73 There were also small numbers of artisans in many Gulf ports: jew- elers, builders, carpenters, and ship-builders. Countless Indian sailors frequented Gulf ports as temporary visitors for millennia, while small garrisons of Indian soldiers guarded British diplomatic missions in a few towns from the late eighteenth century onward. During the twentieth century, Indian office workers and oil workers began to appear, the latter eventually numbering in the thousands by the 1920s. These different groups are examined in more detail below. Some Indians lived in the Gulf on a short-term basis, others settled down there with their families, but very few integrated into local society. The only ones to have fully done so are the Lawatiyya, who intermarried with Omanis and are today Omani nationals. The most prominent Indians in the Gulf were pearl merchants, wholesale merchants, and sarrafin, but only the latter two (often one and the same person) seem to have resided there permanently. Indian pearl merchants, unlike their Arab and Persian counterparts, neither owned pearling fleets, nor employed divers. Instead, they visited the main pearling centers of the Gulf during the summer pearling season of May to October—principally Bahrain and, during the Portuguese era, Hormuz and Bandar Kong in Iran, as well as Julfar (Ras al-Khaimah)––where they bought pearl harvests from their Arab and Persian counterparts. They sometimes bought them directly from pearling dhow captains or the Gulf ’s minor pearling centers of Kuwait, 254 M James Onley

Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain. At the end of the pearling season, they brought them back to India where they sold them on the Indian and world markets. Gulf pearls were more prized and expensive than Indian pearls, in part because perfume and body oil do not fade their luster.74 Some idea of the number of Indian pearl merchants in the Gulf can be gauged by the larger Indian presence in Bahrain and Dubai during the summer pearl season: 134 in Bahrain (out of a total Indian population of 240) and 20 in Dubai (out of a total Indian population of 110) in 1905. Hindus appear to have dominated the pearling trade, accounting for about 80 percent of Indian pearl merchants in Bahrain and Dubai.75 Before oil, pearls were eastern Arabia’s single most important export item, bringing in more money to the economies of the shaikhdoms than anything else. They were as important for local prosperity then as oil and gas are now. In contrast to Indian pearl merchants, their wholesale counterparts resided in the Gulf year round. They were engaged in the importation of food (rice, sugar, coffee, tea) and material (wood, metal, cloth) from India and the export of dates and horses to India, which they transported on their own dhow fleets. As Eastern Arabia and southern Iran were heavily dependant on goods and food from India, Indian wholesale merchants played a central role in the economies of these coastal regions. Table 9.6 shows how dependant the Gulf ports were on trade with India in the early twentieth century.

Table 9.6 Gulf trade with India (as a % of overall trade), 1904a

Imports from India Exports to India Lingeh 63.0% Bahrain 75.3% Bahrain 59.7% Bandar Abbas 75.2% Muscat 57.2% Muscat 74.0% Trucial States 55.0% Trucial States 71.3% Kuwait 49.4% Lingeh 35.6% Bandar Abbas 47.4% Kuwait 34.8% Bushehr 34.6% Muhammara 32.2% Muhammara 32.8% Bushehr 22.4%

a Government of India, Foreign Department, Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agency for the Years 1904–05 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1906; reprinted by Archive Editions, 1986), 23, 34, 56, 65, 78, 86, 91, 96, 104, 108, 116, 123, 128–31, 135, 139, 145, 147, 153, 155. Note: the earliest statistics available for Kuwait come from S. G. Knox (Political Agent, Kuwait), “Trade Report for Kuwait, 1905–06,” April 12, 1906, in ibid. Administration Report of the Persian Gulf . . . 1905–06, pp. 5, 8. Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 255

Jerome Saldanha notes that “Bahrain has always maintained a large direct commercial intercourse with India; in fact about two-thirds of its trade has always been Indian, while, in the trade of the Arab Coast [Trucial States], India has at any rate, from 1873 to 1902, taken a place second to that of the Persian ports in direct traffic and it is only since 1903 that India holds the first place in this respect.”76 A comparison with Hormuz, the leading port in the Gulf in the fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, shows a similar dependency on India. In the 1540s, 46 percent of its customs revenue came from Indian imports: 36–38 percent from Gujarat (Diu, Cambay, and Surat), equaling its imports from mainland Iran, and 7–8 percent from Sindh (Thatta and neighboring Lahori Bandar), which was marginally smaller than its imports from Basra.77 Some of the wealthiest Banians were also sarrafin, loaning money and providing credit to Arab and Persian Muslims. They connected the Gulf to India’s financial centers, dominating the credit market in Bahrain, the Trucial States, Oman, and many Iranian ports as a result. India’s financial dominance in the Gulf was such that, between the 1890s and the 1960s, the Indian rupee was the main unit of currency in Eastern Arabia. Arab and Persian debtors typically used property as security and those unable to repay their Hindu creditors lost their land—a common occurrence due to the high rates of interest. As a result, Banians became one of the largest landholding groups in the Gulf, as Mark Speece explains in the case of Oman:

. . . landholdings were closely linked with the banking functions of the Banian community, as many land transfers were the result of mortgage foreclosures. Land, houses, and date palms [date plantations] were about the only collateral that the local population had to offer in return for a loan that would tide them over to the next date harvest. The level of indebtedness was high, and foreclosures a regular occurrence. . . . The Indian community certainly held extensive properties in urban areas, acquired either through purchase or default.78 . . . It is not always clear in the sources whether holdings were gained through foreclosure or purchased as investments, but this is an irrelevant question when simply establishing the rent capitalist involvement of the Indian merchants.79

By the early twentieth century, most of the waterfront property in Muscat and Matrah was owned by Kutchi Banians,80 while Indian landholdings throughout Oman during this time were also extensive, even though the number of Banians had dwindled to just 35 in a total Hindu population of 290 in both Muscat and Matrah.81 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the status of most Indians as British-protected persons meant that they could appeal to the British authorities to enforce debt repayment and 256 M James Onley foreclosures in the British-protected states of Eastern Arabia and Iraq during the British Mandate. Indian merchants completely dominated the import–export and finance sectors of Muscat, Matrah, Bandar Abbas, and Gwadar.82 The Danish explorer Carsten Niebuhr, who visited Muscat in 1765, observed that the Banians, as moneylenders and bankers, held sway over the Arab ruling elite.83 In 1869, Britain’s Political Resident in the Gulf observed that, with the exception of two or three Omani merchants, Muscat’s trade was entirely in the hands of Banians and Khojas.84 In 1920, the British consul in Bandar Abbas noted that three-quarters of that port’s trade was controlled by a hundred Banians (likely Bhatias) from Shikarpur in Sindh.85 In a number of cases, notably Bahrain and Oman, local rulers or governors farmed out the administration of their customs administrations to Indian wholesale merchants. In Bahrain, for instance, a series of Banian firms managed the Manama customs house from at least the 1890s until 1924. In 1905, customs collected by the Banian firm running the Manana customs house accounted for 50 percent, or Rs.150,000 (Rupees), of Bahrain’s annual revenue.86 In Muscat, Banian firms managed the customs administration for much longer, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Indian wholesale merchant firms seem to have been run as family businesses, with a large firm typically having relatives in two or more Gulf ports. Members of the firm would circulate from port to port and from the Gulf to their hometown every few years. Merchants in towns and ports deemed “unsafe” kept their families with their parents back in India and returned to visit them from time to time.87 Before the establishment of formal civil courts in the twentieth century, a number of rulers in Eastern Arabia appointed wealthy Indian wholesale merchants to their commercial courts, known as the majalis al-tujara or majalis al-‘urf. In Bahrain, for instance, two Banians, two Bahraini Arabs (one Sunni, one Shi‘i), and two Najdi Arabs sat on the local majlis al-‘urf.88 The councilors met informally, as need arose, to arbitrate all cases not involving Islamic law. The majlis resolved commercial disputes according to local customary law. It had no judge (qadi) and reached all its verdicts by consensus.89 The rulers appointed only the most influential local merchants as members of these courts. Indian retail merchants (shopkeepers), artisans, and their families were another sizable group of Indians in the Gulf in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indian shops sold all manner of goods from India (from peppers to pencils), while Indian builders constructed buildings, and Indian artisans made jewelry, furniture, ships, and clothing. These shopkeepers and artisans were the most public face of the Indian communities in the Gulf. Arabs, Persians, and Europeans encountered them on a daily basis. Theirs are the faces that appear in the early photographs of the Gulf ports. It was Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 257 through them that Indian material culture found its way into the homes of Arabs and Persians, and even shaped their homes, with the result that, over the course of centuries, Indian food and design became an integral part of Gulf coastal culture. Another group of Indians in the Gulf was the hundreds, later thousands, of Indian soldiers and sailors stationed there to protect British Indian interests in the region. They were recruited from the Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh “martial castes” of India. From the late eighteenth century onward, the British Indian residencies in Basra (1778–1809), Baghdad (1798–1914), and Bushehr (1778–1946) each had a guard of sepoys (Indian infantrymen) and sowars (Indian cavalrymen) to protect their establishments. From the late nineteenth century on, British Indian consulates and political agencies around the region were also assigned their own Indian Army guards. During World War I, the Indian Army sent nine divisions to Iraq as Indian Expeditionary Force D, comprised of over half a million Indian servicemen and civilians.90 It sent another eight battalions to Iran, a force known as the South Persia Brigade. After the war, the Indian Army maintained a reduced presence in Iraq until the end of the British Mandate in 1932. During World War II, four Indian Army divisions returned to Iraq and Iran. Lascars (Indian sailors) were first stationed in the Gulf in 1821 when the Bombay Marine, as the Indian Navy was then known, established a Gulf Squadron to protect British Indian shipping from piracy, although lascars had been sailing in the Gulf since 1612. At any one time, there were up to a hundred lascars in the squadron patrolling the Gulf. In 1863, the squadron, along with the entire Indian Navy, was disbanded as an ill-conceived cost-saving measure, but it was reestablished in 1869 by the Royal Navy. Lascars continued to serve in the squadron until Britain’s military withdrawal from the Gulf in 1971. Lascars also served on the British India Steam Navigation Company ships that sailed between the Gulf and India from 1862 to 1972. Another important group of Indians in the Gulf, although small in number, was white-collar office workers, mostly Christians. From 1864 onward, the British Government of Bombay, which was then responsible for Britain’s relations with the region, began to employ Indian and Eurasian officers and clerks from the Bombay Uncovenanted Civil Service (known as the Bombay Civil Service after 1891) on the staff of its Gulf Political Residency at Bushehr and its Indo-European Telegraph stations dotted along the southern Iranian coast.91 After World War I, ruling shaikhs began to recruit such men from India for the new municipal councils, government departments, and oil companies they were establishing, starting with the Manama Municipal Council in 1919. Local shipping companies soon followed suit due to the increasing paperwork involved with global trade. Indian office workers were distinct from their mercantile counterparts in both their social background and appearance: they came from Indian clerical and civil service families 258 M James Onley and dressed as Europeans. Through them, the Gulf Arab states inherited the bureaucratic traditions and practices of the Government of India—norms that still shape the GCC governments today due to their continued large- scale employment of Indian civil servants. Yet another group of Indians was the skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled oil workers. They held a wide variety of jobs both in the field (such as engineers, mechanics, artisans, blacksmiths, drivers, drillers, and laborers) and in the office (such as clerks, accountants, typists, office attendants, and storekeepers). Indian oil workers were first recruited by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC, now British Petroleum or BP) from 1909 onward to work in the oil fields of southwest Iran and its refinery at Abadan. By 1910, APOC employed 158 Indians. Around 1922, APOC opened a recruiting office in Bombay. By 1925, APOC employed 4,890 Indians, after which the number of Indians gradually declined as qualified Iranians took their place.92 The Bahrain Petroleum Company began to recruit Indians in 1933. It opened a recruitment office in Bombay in July 1936 and, by October 1937, it employed 236 Indians, rising to a high of 659 by 1949.93 The Kuwait Oil Company began hiring Indians in 1935, although the number of Indians never exceeded a few dozen until oil production began in 1946, after which the numbers shot up dramatically: 28 in 1945, 177 in 1946, 723 in 1947, 3,211 in 1948, and 4,908 in 1949. It recruited its Indian employees through the APOC office in Bombay. Petroleum Development Qatar began hiring Indians in 1937, although its circumstances remained the same as Kuwait’s, with the number of Indian employees not rising above a few dozen until the start of oil production after World War II: 194 in 1947, 552 in 1948, 690 in 1949, and 841 in 1950. It also hired its Indian employees through the APOC recruitment office in Bombay.94 Both Petroleum Development Trucial Coast and Petroleum Development Oman started to employ Indians in the 1940s, but their numbers did not rise above a few dozen until the start of oil production in the 1960s.

Conclusion This chapter offers the first comprehensive survey of Indian communities in the Gulf region roughly between 1500 and 1947—a time before the oil era and India’s partition, after which South Asian demographics in the region and the region’s relationship with South Asia changed dramatically. Chief among this chapter’s findings is that there was no single Indian community in any Gulf town in the same way that one can speak of the British community in Dubai for instance. Indians in the Gulf were divided into dozens of endogamous communities, three dozen of which have been examined here. The identity and solidarity of each community was Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 259 multilayered, based on a mixture of one’s religion, caste, clan, occupation, region (homeland), language, ethnicity, and/or ancestry. Within each of these categories, one’s identity was further subdivided. Thus, the term Banian, while helpful as an analytic category, merely scratches the surface of a multilayered identity. These layers of identity and solidarity largely determined the community to which an Indian merchant belonged and the trade networks within which he operated. Another finding is that not all Indians in the Gulf were migratory, residing in the region temporarily as they do today: some were clearly diasporic, residing there for generations. Hindu men in the lower Gulf were more likely to bring their families with them and to put down roots in safe towns because of the geographical proximity to India, while Muslim men did so in safe towns throughout the Gulf region as a whole. The cultural integration of Indians with the local population varied considerably: most lived “among them, but [were] not of them,” as William Palgrave observed at the start of this chapter, while others adopted local dress to some degree, as George Brucks saw in Sharjah in 1822. One Indian community, the Lawatiyya, became thoroughly Arabized by the 1870s. The Indian communities in each town, while comprised of both transitory and diasporic members, were themselves long-lived. They built temples, churches, mosques, community halls, graveyards, and crematoria, while their members had extensive property holdings in the Gulf, especially in Oman. The Indian communities in the port towns of the Gulf were a physical manifestation of these ports’ intimate connection with, and heavy dependence on, India in virtually every aspect of daily life. This connection and dependence was self-evident to anyone living in the region before 1947, even though Indians accounted for a minority of the region’s population. The end of the Raj and British Indian control over Eastern Arabia in 1947 coincided with the dawn of the oil era in what would become the GCC states and their subsequent reorientation toward the Arab world and the West. This reorientation ended symbolically with the replacement of the Gulf rupee by local dirhams, dinars, and riyals in the 1960s and the demise of the British India Steam Navigation Company, which had connected the region with India between 1862 and 1972. Today South Asians form the largest single group in the GCC after nationals; in Qatar and the UAE, they actually outnumber the national population. But, despite their great numbers, South Asians are no longer viewed as a dominant group in the Gulf because they no longer command the economic and political power they once held. There are several reasons for this. After each GCC state passed nationality laws, most Indian business families found themselves on the wrong side of the national/ non-national divide. When new visa restrictions were introduced for non- nationals, it became difficult for these families to stay together. After the 260 M James Onley states passed laws restricting property ownership and businesses majority ownership to nationals, these families were forced to sell their property and take on local business partners at a loss. These factors, among others, resulted in the gradual disappearance of the long-resident Indian diaspora in the Gulf, changing it to a predominately transitory expat presence with no family roots in the region. This, combined with the arrival of millions of South Asians in the construction and service sectors in the decades after 1947, transformed the region’s South Asian communities beyond recognition. Before writing this chapter, I was surprised that no comprehensive survey of Indians in the Gulf before oil had been written. After five years of painstaking research, I now understand why. The diversity, geography, and duration of the communities—three dozen communities residing in just as many towns over the course of nearly half a millennium—makes the endeavor extremely time-consuming and complex, a problem further compounded by the relative scarcity of published and archival sources. While ethnographic studies of some South Asian groups are abundant, very little has been published on others. Indian and Pakistani academics, for instance, rarely write about the Banians of Sindh, all of whom left for India after partition, because Indians and Pakistanis regard the subject as “foreign” history, looking at the subject as they do through a post-partition lens.95 After squeezing all one can from the published sources, both historical and academic, one turns to the archival records only to find them few and far between: historians have only fragmentary evidence with which to work and this is scattered around the world in public archives and private collections. Very few of the South Asian families in the Gulf today can trace their roots back to the pre-oil era, and those who can, such as the Jashanmals (Sindhi Banians), have sadly lost most of their historical records—in this case, during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. While it is possible to locate private papers in India and Pakistan belonging to people who lived in the Gulf before 1947, the difficulty of doing so increases the further back in time one goes: private papers from the 1910s might be possible to locate, but records from the 1510s almost certainly not. Autobiographies by Indian merchants in the Gulf—such as Ram Buxani’s Taking the High Road and Maghanmal Panchola’s Footprints: Memoirs of an Indian Patriarch—have begun to appear in recent years, but these are naturally limited in scope to the twentieth century.96 Interviews, too, typically limit one to the twentieth century. To compensate for this scarcity of private papers and personal accounts, historians must rely on the more abundant, but still fragmentary, information in government records compiled by British, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Ottoman, and Persian officials, as well as contemporary travel accounts published by their compatriots. The dispersed nature of these archives—in Karachi, Surat, Bombay, New Delhi, Goa, London, Lisbon, The Hague, Paris, Istanbul, Tehran—as well as the Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 261 multiple languages one must master to access them, are additional impedi- ments to anyone attempting to write a survey of Indian communities in the Gulf. What all this means is that a case study of one town, community, or century is practical, but a truly comprehensive detailed survey covering all towns, communities, and centuries, is not—that is, not yet. One hopes that the increasing availability of records and historical publications online in digital format over the coming years will enable historians to further explore this important but neglected topic.

Notes

1. This paper was commissioned in 2008 by Lawrence Potter and Gulf/2000 for this book and has benefited immensely from his insightful feedback over the years, for which I am extremely grateful. It is based on archival work and/or fieldwork in London, Manama, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Bandar Abbas, Hormuz, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Goa. It was presented in the UAE in 2009 at the Gulf/2000 conference held at and cosponsored by the American University of Sharjah, in Paris in 2011 at Sciences Po’s Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (CERI), and in New Delhi in 2012 at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for West Asian Studies and Jamia Millia Islamia’s India-Arab Cultural Centre. I would like to express my gratitude to Gulf/2000, AUS, CERI, JNU, and JMI for providing me with the opportunity to share drafts of this paper. Aside from Lawrence Potter, I also received very helpful feedback from Chhaya Goswami, M. H. Ilias, N. Janardhan, Shelly Johny, A. K. Pasha, Prakash C. Jain, Sima Baidya, A. K. Ramakrishnan, Kundan Kumar, Ginu Zacharia Oommen, Anisur Rahman, Shrideep Biswas, Fatemeh Teimoorzadeh, Nafla Kharusi, Abbas Al-Lawati, Alla Al-Lawati, Fahad Bishara, Andrew Gardner, Nelida Fuccaro, Rudi Matthee, Willem Floor, Marc Valeri, and Dionisius Agius. 2. William Palgrave, Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862–63, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1865), 211–12. Palgrave visited Bahrain in 1862. 3. There are hundreds of studies of South Asian migrant workers in the post-1947 Gulf. Recent examples include Andrew Gardner’s City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), Syed Ali’s Dubai: Gilded Cage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), and Neha Vora’s Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Thanks to works like these and many others, we know a great deal about South Asians in the Gulf in recent times, especially migrant laborers. 4. The most famous of these is Calvin H. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44, no. 1 (1981): 39–53, based on his doctoral dissertation: “Sayyids, Shets, and Sultans: Politics and Trade in Musqat under the Al bu Said, 1785–1914,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1978). The most comprehensive book-length studies are: Stephen Frederick Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), about half of which deals with Iran, and 262 M James Onley

Chhaya Goswami, The Call of the Sea: Kachchhi Traders in Muscat and Zanzibar, c.1800–1880 (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2012). Indian merchants are discussed extensively in M. Redha Bhacker, Trade and Empire in Muscat and Zanzibar: Roots of British Domination (London: Routledge, 1992), although they are not the focus of his book. There are also two anthologies on the subject: Prakash C. Jain, ed., Indian Diaspora in West Asia: A Reader (New Delhi: Manohar, 2007) and Prakash C. Jain and Kundan Kumar, eds., Indian Trade Diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula (New Delhi: New Academic Publishers, 2012). Surprisingly, the vast majority of the book-length studies of the Indian diaspora in West Asia and the western Indian Ocean mention the Persian Gulf only in passing. Examples of the Sindhi diaspora include Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Mark-Anthony Falzon, Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, 1860–2000 (Leiden, Brill, 2004). 5. For a more detailed study, please see my forthcoming book on India and the Persian Gulf. 6. Siraf (modern Tahiri) was located halfway between Bushehr and Lingeh, opposite Bahrain. André Wink, Al Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, vol. 1: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam, 7th–11th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 65. 7. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 39. 8. The records from 1667 are cited in R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 1640– 1700 (Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1998), 21 fn. 40. Willem Floor believes the community is much older than this (correspondence, Mar. 2009). Claude Markovits dates the community to at least the early eighteenth century in his book, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947, 11–12 and fn. 6. 9. J.E. Peterson, “Oman’s Diverse Society: Northern Oman,” Middle East Journal 58 (2004): 42; Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 48–50. 10. Kutch state became a district of Bombay state in 1956 and a district of Gujarat state in 1960. 11. Thomas Herbert found it in use in southern Iran in the 1620s. See Thomas Herbert, Travels in Persia, 1627–29, ed. Sir William Foster (London: Routledge, 1928), 35. 12. Konkan Coast: the coasts of modern-day Maharashtra state and Karnataka state in India, named after the Konkani people. Malabar Coast: the coast of modern- day Kerala state, named after Malayali people (Keralites), although the term is also confusingly used for the coasts of Karnataka and Kerala states. 13. For details, see Stephen Frederic Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mappilas of Malabar, 1498–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). 14. For more about regional identities, see Falzon, Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, 29–38; Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 27–28; Sumit Guha, “The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India c. 1600– 1990,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 148–67. 15. John Ovington, A Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1696), 278–79. 16. Henry Yule and Arthur Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo–Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymology, Historical, Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 263

Geographical and Discursive, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1903), 63; correspondence with Shrideep Biswas, March 2014. 17. For more about the Khatris, see Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750, 57–59, 66–75; Baij Nath Puri, The Khatris: A Socio-Cultural Study (New Delhi: M.N. Publishers, 1988). 18. Scott Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 122, 154, 212; idem, “Multanis and Shikarpuris: Indian Diasporas in Historical Perspective” in Global Indian Diasporas: Exploring Trajectories of Migration and Theory, ed. Gijsbert Oonk (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 50–51. Multanis during the Safavid era and Shikarpuris (Multanis from Shikarpur) during the Qajar era accounted for the majority of Indians in northern and central Iran, although Levy’s coverage of Iran per se in these two works is limited. 19. For more about the Shravaks, see R. E. Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay Presidency, vol. 3 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1920–22), 431–36. 20. The Portuguese initially captured Hormuz in 1507, but they waited until 1515 before taking control of the island’s government and stationing a garrison and naval squadron there, solidifying their hold on the region. 21. Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2006), 16. 22. Ruby Maloni, “Straddling the Arabian Sea: Gujarati Trade with West Asia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Indian Trade at the Asian Frontier, ed. S. Jeyaseela Stephen (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2008), 194. 23. Floor, Five Port Cities, 29. 24. Ibid., 251, 271. 25. Ibid., 355–56. 26. Report dated January 4, 1755, from VOC/OB 2863, fol. 38, quoted in R. J. Barendse, Arabian Seas, 1700–1763, vol. 1: The Western Indian Ocean in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 323. 27. Carsten Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia and Other Countries in the East, trans. Robert Heron (Edinburgh: R. Morrison & Son, 1792; translated from the original 1772 German edition), 116. 28. Floor, Five Port Cities, 356 29. Vincenzo Maurizi, History of Seyd Said, Sultan of Muscat; Together with an Account of the Countries and Peoples on the Shores of the Persian Gulf, Particularly of the Wahabees (London: J. Booth, 1819; reprinted Cambridge: Oleander Press, 1984), 23, 29, 127–30. Maurizi worked for the Sultan of Muscat during 1809–14. He estimated Muscat’s population to be about 60,000. 30. Capt. George Brucks, “Memoir Descriptive of the Navigation of the Gulf of Persia with Brief Notices of the Manners, Customs, Religion, Commerce, and Resources of the People Inhabiting Its Shores and Islands,” in Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government, new ser., 24, ed. R. Hughes Thomas (Bombay: Bombay Education Society Press, 1856; reprinted by Oleander Press, 1985), 629, 631. Brucks remarked that “The population of Muskat is constantly fluctuating. At times it amounts to near thirty thousand souls; at other times there is not more than ten to twelve thousand” (p. 631). He estimated the population of Matrah to be 15,000–18,000 (p. 629). 264 M James Onley

31. J. R. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1838; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druke, 1978), 19, 21. 32. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 43. 33. James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Medina, and Persia (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 379. 34. Ibid., 380. 35. Brucks, “Memoir Descriptive of the Navigation of the Gulf of Persia . . . ,” 544, 547. 36. J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2: Geographical and Statistical (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908), 455. 37. Ibid., 2379. 38. Ibid., 1034, 2380. 39. For more about the Lawatiyya, see Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 48–52; Abbas Mustafa Al-Lawati, “The Lawatiya of Oman: The Identity Transformations of an Ethno-Religious Minority,” MA diss. (University of Exeter, 2012); Peterson, “Oman’s Diverse Society: Northern Oman,” 40–43. 40. Farhad Daftary, The Isma‘ilis: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 443. 41. The Memons should not be confused with the Momins, a predominantly Shi‘i group in Gujarat. 42. James Campbell, comp. & ed., Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. 9: Gujarat Population, part 2: “Musalmans” by Khan Bahadur Fazalullah Lutfullah Faridi (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1899), 51. 43. Ibid., 51–52. 44. Lorimer, comp. & ed., Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2: Geographical and Statistical (1908), 344. 45. For more about the Bohras, see Daftary, The Isma‘ilis, 238–41, 276–300; Shaikh T. Lokhandwalla, “The Bohras: A Muslim Community of Gujarat,” Studia Islamica 3 (1955): 117–35. 46. Floor, Five Port Cities, 364 fn. 232. 47. For more about Luso-Indians, see Charles Dias, The Portuguese in Malabar: A Social History of the Luso Indians (New Delhi: Manohar, 2013); M. N. Pearson, The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 48. João Teles e Cunha, “The Portuguese Presence in the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 208, 214. 49. Floor, Five Port Cities, 16. 50. See Selma Carvalho’s Into the Diaspora Wilderness: Goa’s Untold Migration Stories from the British Empire into the New World (Goa: Broadway Publishing House, 2010), 57–130. 51. For details of the 1833 incident in Bahrain, see James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 140–43, 174–78. 52. Floor, Five Port Cities, 16, 142–43, 251, 355–58, 436–39, 497–98; Cunha, “The Portuguese Presence in the Persian Gulf,” 208, 214. 53. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 45–46. 54. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2: Geographical and Statistical, 1185. 55. Brucks, “Memoir Descriptive of the Navigation of the Gulf of Persia . . . ,” 613. Indian Communities in the Persian Gulf M 265

56. Ibid., 631. 57. Ibid., 629. 58. Ibid., 624. 59. Ibid., 544. 60. Ibid., 547. 61. Ibid., 566. 62. Ibid., 604. 63. Ibid., 575, 585, 591, 600–1, 627. 64. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2: Geographical and Statistical (1908), 2379. 65. Robert Landen, Oman since 1856: Disruptive Modernization in a Traditional Arab Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 140. 66. Ibid. 67. John Watson, comp. & ed., Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. 8: Kathiawar (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), 149. Watson observes: “From ancient times [the Banians of Gujarat] have been in the habit of making voyages to Zanzibar and Arabia, going in their youth and returning to their native town with the fruits of a life of industry and toil. On their return, they generally marry.” 68. Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947, 27. 69. Ibid. Ranabir Chakravati is one such historian. 70. C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1951), 528. 71. Stefan Tetzlaff estimates they numbered 588,717 at their height, of which 295,565 were Indian servicemen and 293,152 were Indian civilian support staff. Tetzlaff, “The Turn of the Gulf Tide: Empire, Nationalism, and South Asian Labor Migration to Iraq, c. 1900–1935,” International Labor and Working-Class History 79 (2011): 14. 72. Myron Weiner, “International Migration and Development: Indians in the Persian Gulf,” Population and Development Review 8, no. 1 (March 1982): 5; Government of India, Report of the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora (New Delhi: Ministry of External Affairs, Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin Division, 2000), 21; Andrzej Kapiszewski, “Arab Labor in the Monarchies of the Persian Gulf,” Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia 16 (2003): 21–36. Also see Ian Seccombe and Richard Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf, and the International Oil Companies, 1910–50,” International Migration Review 20, no. 3 (1986): 548–74, especially the table on page 563; Anisur Rahman, Indian Labour Migration to the Gulf: A Socio-Economic Analysis (New Delhi: Rajpat Publications, 2001), 17–31. 73. For more about Indian sarrafs and the money and credit markets in the Indian Ocean, see Ray, “Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination”; Lakshmi Subramanian, “Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 21 (1987): 473–510; idem., “Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795,” Modern Asian Studies 19 (1985): 205–37; Om Prakash, “English Private Trade in the Western Indian Ocean, 1720–1740,” Journal of the Economic 266 M James Onley

and Social History of the Orient 50 (2007): 215–34; Marina Martin, “Hundi/ Hawala: The Problem of Definition,”Modern Asian Studies 43 (2009): 909–37. 74. Floor, Five Port Cities, 514. 75. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2, 455, 1160. 76. J. A. Saldanha, ed., Précis of Commerce and Communications in the Persian Gulf, 1801–1905 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1906), 56. 77. Floor, Five Port Cities, 62. 78. Mark Speece, “Aspects of Economic Dualism in Oman, 1830–1930,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 21 (1989): 504. 79. Ibid., 505. 80. Allen, “The Indian Merchant Community of Masqat,” 40–47, 52. 81. Speece, “Aspects of Economic Dualism in Oman, 1830–1930,” 506; Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2: Geographical and Statistical, 1185. 82. For Oman, see Speece, “Aspects of Economic Dualism in Oman, 1830–1930,” 503–06. For Bandar Abbas, see Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: Bandar Abbas– The Natural Trade Gateway of Southeast Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2011), 30–31. 83. Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, 116. 84. Pelly (Gulf Resident) to Gonne (Secretary, Bombay Government), June 19, 1869, in Saldanha, ed., Précis of Commerce and Communications in the Persian Gulf, 1801–1905, 32. 85. Floor, Bandar Abbas, 31, 161. 86. Prideaux (Political Agent, Bahrain) to Cox (Gulf Resident), June 24, 1905, L/P&S/10/81, register no. 1508/1905 (India Office Records, British Library, London). This is reproduced in Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. 2: Geographical and Statistical, 251. 87. For details, see Ray, “Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination” and Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 6–7, 176–78. 88. “Memorandum Regarding the Bahrein Majlis or Permanent Native Court of Arbitration,” no author indicated [likely Prideaux, Political Agent, Bahrain], February 25, 1906, enclosed in Cox (Gulf Resident) to Secretary of Indian Foreign Department, February 25, 1906, L/P&S/10/28 (India Office Records, British Library, London). 89. Fuad Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain: The Transformation of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 111. 90. See footnote 71 above. 91. For a list of these officers in 1869, see Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj, 242–47. 92. Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf,” 557, 559. 93. Ibid., 559–63. 94. Ibid., 562–64. 95. Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 3. 96. Ram Buxani, Taking the High Road (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 2003); Maghanmal J. Panchola, Footprints: Memoirs of an Indian Patriarch, as narrated to Vasanti Sundaram (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 2009). CHAPTER 10

The Baloch as an Ethnic Group in the Persian Gulf Region

Carina Jahani

his chapter aims to describe the Baloch as an ethnic group in the Persian Gulf region, and particularly to discuss issues of ethnic, Tlinguistic, and cultural identity. Balochistan and the Baloch1 have during the past few decades attracted international attention in the shadow of political crises in Afghanistan, such as the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the US ouster of the Taliban government in 2001. Balochistan, the land of the Baloch, is a region with disputed borders situated in southeastern Iran, southwestern Pakistan, and southern Afghanistan. On present-day political maps, Balochistan constitutes the largest province (by area) of Pakistan. In Iran, the province of which Balochistan is a part is also the largest province. It comprises the northern area of Sistan as well and carries the official name Sistan and Balochistan Province. Baloch nomads have moved with their animals over long distances for centuries. Some were also tradesmen, while others were recruited as soldiers for armies in Balochistan as well as elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region. In modern times, many Baloch have also moved in search of greater political freedom and/or better economic opportunities. There are thus larger or smaller communities of Baloch outside Balochistan proper, for example throughout northeastern Iran (particularly in Khurasan and Golestan Provinces), throughout southwestern Iran (e.g., in Hormuzgan, Kirman, and Fars Provinces), in Turkmenistan, in Punjab and Sindh Provinces in Pakistan, where they were rulers in former times, as well as across the Persian

Map 10.1 Distribution of the Baloch in the Persian Gulf Basin. Source: Michael Izady, Gulf/2000. The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 269

Gulf and Sea of Oman, particularly in Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Baloch are also settled in East Africa, India, Australia, Europe, and North America.

The Baloch: Contested Definitions There are several possible definitions for “Baloch.” The two most common are that a Baloch is a person who belongs to the Baloch ethnos [ethnic community] either by virtue of membership in a Baloch tribe or as a speaker of the Balochi language. However, both definitions are problematic. The population of Balochistan is not ethnically homogeneous. Spooner summarizes a number of the problems in identifying who is a Baloch by noting that some communities are identified (by themselves and others) as Baloch, with the implication that they are descended from those who entered the area as Baloch. Others, though considered members of the Baloch ethnos, are known within Balochi society by other tribal and subethnic designations, which may indicate that they have adopted Balochi identity relatively recently.2 Neither can the Baloch be defined by their religious affiliation, since there are, apart from the Sunni majority, also adherents of Shi‛i Islam and the Zigri [Zikri]3 religion among them. There were also Balochi-speaking Hindus in the Dashtyari area of Iranian Balochistan down to the early twentieth century.4 In former times, only the Baloch pastoral nomads were known as baloch, whereas the agriculturalists were called shahri, “townspeople.”5 There are, furthermore, considerable divergences in social stratification between the northern and southern parts of Balochistan. In the north, a tribal structure with chiefs (Bal. sardār) as leaders is the rule, and the traditional economy is based on pastoral nomadism. In the south, where settled agriculture along the river banks and in oases is the basis of the traditional economy, cultivation required the protection of rulers (Bal. hākem/hākom) against raiding nomads. The tribal structure is more egalitarian, while the social system in the south of Balochistan includes, in addition to rulers and agriculturalists, domestic servants and artisans of lower social status, as well as former slave clans.6 This division of Balochistan is deeply rooted and the northern areas have traditionally had stronger natural links to Kandahar and Sistan than to southern Balochistan, which in turn has been more closely linked to Oman and the Indian Ocean.7 Even though some scholars8 stress the importance of the Balochi language as a uniting factor, the linguistic criterion is problematic inasmuch as many who identify as Baloch and belong to Baloch tribes, particularly outside Balochistan proper, no longer speak Balochi. Furthermore, there are 270 M Carina Jahani also speakers of other languages in Balochistan who regard themselves as part of the Baloch ethnos, mainly the Jadgals and the Brahuis.9 A definition of the Baloch used by Hosseinbor is “all those who identify themselves as such either through language or ethnic origin.”10 It is very hard to give an estimate of the number of people that fall under this definition. The main reason is that there are seldom questions about ethnic affiliation or language use in censuses carried out in the countries where the Baloch live. Based on available statistics, the total number of Balochi speakers may amount to around 10 million. There are also many who regard themselves as Baloch by ethnic descent but do not speak Balochi.11 The largest group of Balochi speakers is found in Pakistan, with perhaps 6 to 7 million out of a total of 194 million people.12 But there are also many Baloch in Iran, where Balochi speakers constitute around 2 percent of the total population, amounting to approximately 1.5 million out of a total population of 77.4 million.13 For Oman with a total population of about 4.1 million,14 Valeri estimates the number of Baloch at about 200,000 and Peterson slightly higher.15 The Baloch in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, India, East Africa, and other countries probably number 1–2 million at the most.

The Contested Origin of the Baloch The origin of the Baloch is rather unclear, as is the etymology of the ethnonym.16 Despite attempts on the part of some Baloch to establish a “true Islamic” genealogy for themselves,17 it is likely that the original habitat of those who identify as Baloch today was in the northwestern part of the Iranian linguistic area, and that they migrated southeastward under pressure from the Arab, Turkic, and Mongol invasions of the Iranian plateau from the mid-seventh century ad onwards.18 It also appears that tribes and groups of various ethnic origins have been incorporated into the very heterogeneous ethnic group today known as the Baloch.19 Titus finds that the Balochi hierarchic society has been much more suitable for incorporation of outsiders than Pashtun society, which is of a more egalitarian type.20 Strategic marital alliances are one of the important means of incorporating new tribal elements, according to Boedeker. He also mentions other rituals for assimilation and finds that tribal affiliation among the Baloch “is based more on political considerations than on descent.”21 Hosseinbor refers to the “rival ethnic claims to the Baluch and their homeland put forward by the Persian and some of the Arab nationalists” and to contemporary demagogy appealing either to an “Aryan/Iranian” or to a “Semitic” origin of the Baloch.22 In the official discourse in Iran, the “Aryan/Iranian” origin is, of course, favored. The strongest argument for The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 271 this origin is the linguistic one.23 On the other hand there is a strong inclination among the Baloch across the Persian Gulf to identify as Arabs. In this context, Valeri notes that documents from Yemeni authorities and Ibadi Omani scholars are said to prove the “Arabness” of the Baloch and suggest that the Baloch were sent to Balochistan to propagate Islam.24 The contested origin of the Baloch may thus also cause further divisions among the already fragmented Baloch ethnos, and it is definitely an argument that Sunni Arab governments will use in order to gain more influence among the Baloch, who, contrary to the Persians, mainly are adherents of Sunni Islam.

The Balochi Language and Its Dialects From a historical point of view, Balochi is classified as a northwestern Iranian language, closely related to Kurdish, although it is spoken in the southeastern corner of the Iranian linguistic area.25 The main dialect split is between Western, Southern and Eastern Balochi.26 These groups constitute a very broad dialect division, within which further dialect demarcations can be made. Western Balochi dialects are spoken in the northern Balochi-speaking area in Iran, from Khash northward, as well as in Khurasan and Golestan, in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and in the northwestern Balochi-speaking areas of Pakistani Balochistan. The Western Balochi dialects spoken in Iran are often referred to as Sarhaddi (around Zahedan/Khash) and Sistani/ Rakhshani (further north). The dialects of the districts of Sarawan (in Iran) and Panjgur (in Pakistan) are transitional between Western and Southern Balochi and, in the case of Sarawani, also more deeply influenced by Persian than most other Balochi dialects.27 Southern Balochi dialects are spoken in the southern areas of the Balochi- speaking parts of Iran, up to Pahra (Iranshahr), and in Pakistan, up to the Kech valley, as well as by a majority of the Baloch in Karachi and in the Gulf states. There are also Balochi speakers in the coastal areas west of Sistan and Balochistan Province in Iran, for example, in Jashk, Minab, and Bandar Abbas. The dialects spoken on the coast differ considerably from those spoken further north. Karachi Balochi is mainly based on Southern Balochi dialects spoken in Iran (from where there was a heavy influx of Baloch, especially after the attack on Balochistan by the Pahlavi government in 1928) but is today heavily influenced by surrounding Indo-Aryan languages, particularly Urdu. The group known as Korosh speak variants of Balochi that from a linguistic point of view can be described as a separate subgroup within the framework of the Balochi language, but would probably be placed under 272 M Carina Jahani

Southern Balochi in a broad dialect division. They live mainly in Hormuzgan Province, the south of Fars Province, and in the northwestern part of Fars Province. Like the Western and Southern dialects, Eastern Balochi is not a unified dialect, but rather a conglomerate of dialects often referred to by the tribal names of the speakers such as Marri, Bugti, Leghari, Mazari, etc. Although several of the early descriptions of Balochi were based on Eastern Balochi, there is too little material available to make well-informed dialect divisions within the Eastern Balochi group. The Baloch in the Persian Gulf area are thus speakers of Southern Balochi dialects. The available descriptions of such dialects are mainly from the British colonial period.28 The only recent descriptions of Southern Balochi dialects are those by Tim Farrell and Nigel A. Collett.29

Religion, Literature, Art, and Music among the Makrani Baloch The Baloch are, as already mentioned, mainly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school of law. There are, however, also Shi‛ites, particularly in the western regions of Bazman, Robar (Rodbar), and Dalgan.30 The Korosh are also predominantly Shi‛ites. Another religious minority among the Baloch are the Zigris. Their religion developed in Makran out of Islam under somewhat unclear circumstances sometime between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries.31 Zigrism was widespread throughout Makran before severe persecutions erupted against them about a century ago. There are also Zigris on the Arabian Peninsula, particularly in Oman. On the other hand, there are no Zigris further north in Balochistan. In addition to formal religion, certain spiritual practices are also prevalent in Balochistan. One phenomenon that occurs in Makran and “is an important marker of Makrani identity,” is that of spirit-healing.32 Sultana describes the belief in spirits and supernatural powers as

a product of the various outside influences that have shaped Makrani culture. The inhabitants of Makran in general, and the coastal areas in particular, are strong believers in the supernatural powers of the land, wind, and sea, which are said to cause certain diseases or create other problems in people’s lives. One of the most commonly believed supernatural powers is gwat (wind, spirit), which is thought to cause illness by attacking the heart and mind.33

There are special ceremonies for expelling this gwat, the so-called leb (play) performances, which normally include some kind of music therapy. Sultana The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 273 holds that it is likely they are unique to Makran, where they used to have an important social function. They are more common today among the lower social classes and among the Zigris than among the Sunnis, many of whom view this kind of performance with suspicion.34 Mirzai mentions the rituals zar, liwa, malid, and gwat practiced by descendents of African slaves as part of the African heritage found in southern Iran, including Balochistan.35 In fact, leb is described by Sultana as an emerging identity marker, during which African dress is also sometimes used.36 Classical Balochi poetry has a strong tradition throughout Balochistan. Elfenbein notes that “the language of classical Baluchi poetry is traditionally in three dialects (in order of their status and importance): Coastal, Eastern Hill Baluchi, and Kechi.”37 Many renowned poets during the past 200 years have also been from Makran and speakers of Southern Balochi.38 In the modern era, Zahur Shah Sayad Hashmi (1939–1978) was one of the leading figures of Balochi literary endeavors. He was born in Gwadar, at the time under Omani rule, but later moved to Karachi, where he spent the latter years of his relatively short life. He was a poet, but also wrote the first-ever novel in Balochi,39 and he took a great interest in linguistic issues, such as word coinage and problems related to orthography and language standardization. There are, however, many more poets and writers among the coastal Baloch in Pakistan. Among the poets, Murad Sahir, G. R. Mulla, and Bashir Bedar ought to be mentioned, and among the novelists and short story writers Ghani Parwaz, who lives in Turbat on the eastern (Pakistani) side of Balochistan, is a leading figure. Siddik Azat (also known as Saleem Ismail A. Jawadri) is a renowned poet and literary critic. He was born in Tump, also in Eastern Balochistan. After having spent most of his life in the United Arab Emirates, he is now a resident of Sweden. Another writer who deserves mention is Saba Dashtyari (1953–2011). He was born and grew up in Karachi, and later became a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Balochistan, Quetta. His writings are mainly factual prose on philosophical and linguistic topics. He also established the Sayad Hashmi Reference Library in Karachi, where he managed to gather a great number of publications in various languages on topics related to the Balochi language and Balochistan. Due to his political activities, he was assassinated in 2011. In an interview which I had with him in 1994, he complained about the lack of interest among the youth to preserve and promote their mother tongue, and concluded that Balochi would soon be only the “the grannies’ language (ballukānī zubān).” The literary movement has been stronger in Pakistan than in Iran. One of the few writers in Balochi from Western (Iranian) Balochistan is Aziz Dadiar, born in Champ, southwest of Pahra (Iranshahr), Iran. After the 274 M Carina Jahani

Islamic Revolution he sought refuge in Sweden, where he is now living. His writings consist of poetry and factual prose. A venerated singer of classical poetry was Mulla Kamalan (1941–2010) originating from Dashtyari in Western Balochistan. A number of his performances can nowadays be seen on YouTube.40 Among renowned Baloch musicians, Ostad Sher Mohammad Espandar,41 Ostad Dorr Mohammad Srodi, Ostad Arzu, and Ostad Gholam Rasul Dinarzehi,42 among singers Ostad Fayz Mohammad, Ostad Sattar, and Ostad Shafi, and among paint- ers, Hasan Yadegarzadeh and Sima Sardarzahi43 can be mentioned. Two renowned Baloch singers in Scandinavia are Ostad Abd ul-Rahman Surizahi, who lives in Norway,44 and Rostam Mirlashari, who lives in Sweden.45 The two most important centers for literary societies in Pakistan are Quetta and Karachi, outside the Gulf littoral per se. Turbat is, however, gaining increasing importance as a cultural center. In Iran it has for political reasons been much more difficult to establish cultural centers, but the Foundation of Iranology (Per. Bonyad-e Iranshenasi) (Bunyad-i Iranshinasi) in Iranshahr deserves mention. There is also a literary society active in the United Arab Emirates, the Balochi Labzanki Sarchammag. Sabir Badalkhan, originally from Turbat in the Kech valley and now a researcher in Italy, has seen life changing in Balochistan. He recalls this change vividly. He notes that employment in the Gulf states altered the previously strict social relations between the various layers of population in Makran.46 Collett also comments on this, even though he finds that attitudes about social status, the position of women, and other core values are much less prone to change than, for example, attitudes toward music, film, and dress.47 Employment in the Gulf was available to everybody and “since the low-caste and working strata of Baloch society had a longer tradition of hard work they found it a paradise.”48 In women’s songs, sung, for example, as lullabies or at weddings and recorded by Badalkhan, there are ample references to the economic prosperity offered in Dubai, as well as to the bravery of the Baloch serving in the Omani army. Badalkhan also mentions the new trend of glorifying the modern nationalist movement in both men’s and women’s songs.49

A Brief Overview of Balochi History Ancient trade routes through Balochistan connected West Asia with South Asia, and the shores of Balochistan linked the Iranian Plateau to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa by means of the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. From Alexander the Great’s time onward, many conquerors have passed through this region by land or sea. Spooner notes that “throughout its history the area between Iran and India has been strongly affected by The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 275 influences from the more fertile areas surrounding it, particularly Kermān, Sīstān, Qandahār, Punjab, Sind, and Oman.”50 There is a debate between different factions of scholarship about the dating of the arrival of the Baloch in present-day Balochistan. Some (most non-Baloch historians) hold that their presence dates back slightly more than a thousand years, whereas others (mainly represented by Baloch scholars) are of the opinion that the Baloch have been present in the area since the time of the Achaemenid empire, that is, for more than 2,000 years. In view of the discussion above, it is likely that there are both later immigrants and earlier populations among those who identify as Baloch today. However, the arrival of the Baloch per se, that is, the speakers of the Balochi language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, most likely took place after the Arab conquest of the Iranian Plateau in the seventh century ad. The Baloch are mentioned in a Middle Persian text from the eighth century ad and later in the New Persian heroic epic poem Shāhnāma from the tenth century ad, here in connection with the northern regions of Iran. Arab geographers from approximately the same time mention them in association with other tribal populations in the area around Kirman.51 The difficulty of reconstructing the history of the Baloch is pointed out by Badalkhan as he tried to unravel their encounters with the Portuguese. In addition to problems with the Portuguese archives, he notes that “we face a far more complicated task when we turn to the Baloch sources which [are] exclusively oral since writing was not known to them until the second half of the twentieth centuries. The only way open to us is to consult the rich living oral tradition in Balochi which preserves and transmits important events of Baloch life.”52 According to the classical poems of the Baloch, their original tribal division goes back to the four sons and one daughter of a certain Mir Jalal Khan, referred to as the ruler over all the Baloch sometime between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries ad.53 The era of classical Balochi poetry has the rule of Mir Chakar Khan Rind, one of the greatest Baloch heroes and often referred to even today, as its peak. He is described as having ruled over large areas from his palace at Sibi, in northeastern Balochistan, during the latter part of the fifteenth and/or early part of the sixteenth century.54 Badalkhan describes how relations across the Gulf have been depicted in women’s songs and how the contents of these songs change “in accordance with time and the socio-economic conditions of the day.”55 He refers to old songs of Baloch bravery, such as that of Mir Kambar, “a hero from western Makran, who fought against an invading army and released some captives and looted goods at the cost of his life” probably during the eighteenth century.56 Another oral literary cycle depicting resistance against intruders on 276 M Carina Jahani the coast is that of Mir Hammal-i Jiand of Kalmat and his struggle against the Portuguese in the sixteenth century.57 An important milestone in Balochi history is the establishment of the Balochi-Brahui Khanate of Kalat in 1666. The Ahmadzay khans of Kalat then ruled over at least parts of the area inhabited by the Baloch until the formal overthrow of the khanate by the Pakistani military in 1948. Mir Nasir Khan I (1747–95), the most important of the Ahmadzay rulers, “established the organization of the state of Kalat for the remainder of its existence” and “was the only khan who successfully transcended tribal loyalties.”58 However, not even Mir Nasir Khan I had supremacy over all local Baloch rulers. The position of the Khan of Kalat was weakened after the death of Mir Nasir Khan I and then further after the incorporation of the khanate into the British colonial system in 1839. With the so-called forward policy of Robert Sandeman (administrator of British Balochistan, 1877–1892), the power of the khan was further curtailed by the new British policy of administering the tribes directly through their local chiefs rather than through the Khan of Kalat.59 This policy made it easier to divide and rule. There were, nevertheless, revolts against the British in various parts of British Balochistan, where a nationalist discourse started to take shape during the first decades of the twentieth century. More or less organized risings against the British and Pakistani overlordship have continued with varied intensity until today.60 Hosseinbor points out Kej (Kech), Dizak (Dezzak), Bampur, Panjgur, Kaserkand (Per. Qasr-e Qand), Sarbaz, Magas, Geh, and Bahu as “major feudal centers” in the southern part of Balochistan.61 Of these Kech and Panjgur are situated east of today’s border between Iran and Pakistan and the rest are on the Iranian side.

The Qajar Intrusion It was not until the reign of Muhammad Shah (1834–1848) that the Qajar dynasty of Persia seems to have made their first attempts at establishing control in Balochistan.62 At that time, the strongest power centers were Bompur (Per. Bampur) and Dezzak (in the Sarawan valley). Bampur was permanently occupied after 1850,63 and was the capital of the governor of Persian Balochistan, subordinate to the prince-governor of Kirman.64 The ruins at Bampur bear witness to the fact that in the late nineteenth century it was a major town, with “a large, well-built mud fort, crowning an elevation about 100 feet in height.”65 The Baranzehi rulers in Sarawan were originally immigrants from Afghanistan, probably around the beginning of the nineteenth century, but they were soon assimilated to the Baloch ethnos.66 The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 277

There were also local rulers further to the south, in the Gulf region proper. Sykes writes that

Geh, with Kasarkand on the east, and Bint on the west, form the three towns in Persian Makrán first reached by the traveller from the coast, and are each said to possess the same population, which scarcely exceeds 2000 inhabitants, so far as we could judge. Captain Grant in 1809 wrote of Geh, “that it was reckoned the second city in Makrán, Kej being the first.” The Governor of Geh, Mohim Khán, is a Kuh Baluch of Lashár, and half-brother of its chief. The old ruling family was that of the Bolídi . . . Upon the whole, the condition of the people seemed wretched, the local Governor, unchecked as in Persia by growing public opinion and the telegraph, grinding them so terribly that there was a large and increasing emigration to Karachi, Maskat, and Zanzibár.67

After the death of the Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah in 1896, there was a rebellion against Persian rule over Balochistan and Tehran did not assert control for several decades. Describing the situation about 1890, the British imperialist Curzon characterizes Persian governance in Balochistan as “attended with oppression, corruption, and consequent revolt.”68 The derog- atory term gajar used among the Baloch for “Persians” or even “non-Baloch Iranians” (including for example Azerbaijanis and others in power), origi- nates from the nineteenth century and the attacks on Balochistan by the Qajars. There are reports that the Baloch even murdered their own wom- enfolk during the attacks out of fear that they would otherwise be raped by the attacking soldiers.

Balochi Trading Activities There are numerous accounts of long-distance trade to places like North Africa, India, and China in the oral narratives recounted by the Baloch for generations.69 Badalkhan refers to reports that the Baloch consolidated their rule over Makran in the twelfth century ad with Kech [Kej] as their center, and that they engaged in maritime commerce all the way from Arabia to China.70 The port of Tis [Tiz]71 near present-day Chabahar is also described as flourishing in the twelfth century.72 Badalkhan likewise refers to Marco Polo’s account from the end of the thirteenth century that the people of Makran “live on merchandize and industry, for they are professed traders, and carry on much traffic by sea and land in all directions.”73 There is no question that the Makrani Baloch were capable seamen, and that they, like other local groups, engaged in “piracy” in local waters. This made it more difficult for powers operating in the area (the King of Hormuz, 278 M Carina Jahani the Safavids, Portuguese and Ottomans) to guarantee safe trade. Even though the king of Hormuz paid protection money to the Baloch (referred to as Nautaques by the Portuguese) so they would not attack ships going to and from the island, it did not always work. “The pirates still attacked and the king of Hormuz therefore had a flotilla cruising there to guard the coast of the Nautaques, later assisted by Portuguese vessels. In 1515, Shah Esma‘il I asked the Portuguese for naval support to eradicate the Nautaques based on the coast of Gwadar, a joint operation that was carried out without success.”74 The Baloch presence in multiple locations along the shores of the Indian Ocean (Balochistan proper, the Arabian Peninsula, India, East Africa, Zanzibar, Pemba etc.) is, of course, a factor that has stimulated their overseas trade activities. The fact that in the early nineteenth century the sultan of Oman ruled not only on the Arabian Peninsula, but also on the northern shores of the Gulf (including Gwadar, Chabahar, Bandar Abbas, Bandar Lingeh, and the islands of Qishm, Hormuz, and Larak in the Strait of Hormuz) as well as Zanzibar and several ports on the East African coast, also faciliated trade between the different ports under Omani overlordship.75 Badalkhan holds that “the seafaring activities of the people on the Makran coast prospered considerably until the second half of the 19th century when the British opened a regular shipping-line in the Persian Gulf linking several Makrani coastal towns with India on the one hand and with the Persian Gulf states on the other.”76 He reports that there were Baloch long-distance trading vessels still in use in the early 1930s and describes how the crew of these vessels was composed and how the profit from each trading journey, which was normally between three and six months long, was divided between the different crew members.77 As Redaelli notes, particularly in southern Balochistan, members of the lower social strata “have intermingled with descendants of the slave and servile groups originally from the coasts of east Africa.”78 He further comments that the slave trade from East Africa to the Persian Gulf and South Asia “was one of the most lucrative and important trades in the Indian Ocean” and that “Makrān had always been one of the main markets for this trade.”79 The slaves in Balochistan, it seems, were mainly employed as domestic servants and agricultural laborers.80 Nicolini also mentions the development of a new slave trade route from the coast of Balochistan to the Arabian Peninsula in the early twentieth century, due to British restrictions on the slave trade from East Africa.81

Balochistan Divided In the late nineteenth century, Balochistan82 was split up between Persia, Afghanistan, and British India by the border demarcations known as the The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 279

Goldsmid Line (1872) and the Durand Line (1893). The Goldsmid Line, which divided the heartland of the Baloch between British India and Persia, was imposed, among other things, because of the need to protect the British telegraph line, which had reached Gwadar in 1863. The contestants for influence in Makran were, in addition to the local Baloch rulers, British India, Qajar Persia, and Oman. Colonel Goldsmid, the chief of the border commission, admitted that the only right of Persia over the local Baloch rulers was that “of the strong over the weak; of the prestige of a high-sounding monarchy over the obscurity of a small chiefdom.”83 The political borders have never been recognized by the Baloch. The inhabitants of Sarawan in Iran have strong links with the population of the Panjgur area in Pakistan, as do the population of Sarbaz in Iran and the Kech valley in Pakistan, to give two examples. It is also noteworthy that many of the early settlers in Karachi from the late nineteenth century onward, that is, before partition and the arrival of the Muhajirs, were from the southern parts of Western (Iranian) Balochistan, who either fled the Qajar attacks or went there in search of a better livelihood. They were later joined by larger numbers in the aftermath of the Pahlavi attack on Balochistan in 1928. Many still keep close contacts with their relatives in Western Balochistan. The political division of Balochistan has led to fractionalizations within the Baloch ethnos in modern times. The increasing number of Baloch who receive an education do so in different languages, such as Persian/Dari in Iran and Afghanistan and Urdu/English in Pakistan. There has also been considerably more freedom of cultural expression in Pakistan than in Iran. The vast majority of books and magazines published in Balochi originate in Pakistan. Political organizations among the Baloch have also been curtailed, not only by the division into different tribal and socioeconomic units in Balochistan, but also by the division of the Baloch into different countries with different political situations. Spooner accurately remarks that “three separate national governments, none of which included Baluch representation, have sought to integrate and assimilate them into national life at mini- mum cost.”84 Today, local affiliations are stronger in Iran than in Pakistan, where there seems to be a stronger sense of supra-tribal belonging to the Baloch ethnos.

Iranian Policy toward Balochistan It was only after the accession in 1925 of the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah, that new attempts were made to subdue the local rulers in Balochistan. In 1928, Persian armies attacked Balochistan and ousted Dost Mohammad Khan Baranzahi, who ruled Bompur and controlled not only the central belt of Bompur-Pahra-Sarawan, but had also entered into marriage alliances 280 M Carina Jahani with several rulers in Makran. He was later killed by the Pahlavi regime in 1931.85 According to Harrison, “the relatively inchoate state of Baluch nationalism in Iran at the advent of the Khomeini revolution . . . reflected the fact that Reza Shah and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi had made a more thoroughgoing effort to contain Baluch nationalism than their British and Pakistani counterparts.”86 The two Pahlavi shahs, who ruled from 1925 to 1941 and 1941 to 1979, used all means at their disposal to suppress subnational identities such as that of the Baloch, including military force, coopt- ing and buying off the tribal chiefs, and having the army rule directly in sedentary areas. There were no comprehensive measures taken by the central government to develop the economy and educational facilities in the province. The Baloch were not allowed to wear traditional attire in public, and publishing newspapers, magazines, or books in Balochi was prohibited. Above all, Mohammad Reza Shah sought to prevent the emergence of a Balochi nationalist movement such as found in Pakistan, which was made easier due to the “segmented character” of Western (Iranian) Balochistan.87 Even so, simmering resentment led to a number of open rebellions from 1928 to the end of the Pahlavi era. After the Islamic Revolution, the Baloch started to reclaim power in Iranian Balochistan. Hosseinbor points to the political and cultural freedom of the first months after the revolution when the Baloch were able to “express their national sentiments; carry out open political activities; use their national dress in school and public offices without prohibition by the government; and read, write, and publish in their language for the first time in fifty years.”88 However, this freedom was short-lived, and when the new Islamic government had consolidated power, it started intimidating those who had launched Balochi literary or other cultural activities and also continued the former policy of mainly appointing Shi‛i administrators from places like Sistan, Khurasan, and Kirman. By the 2000s this had led to a continuing low-level insurgency. Today, border trade, including smuggling, is one of the more lucrative activities that the Baloch can engage in. The price of many commodities varies considerably between the different countries in the region, and a significant amount of unofficial trade is carried out by Baloch. An extremely lucrative commodity, sadly to say, is drugs, and in the wake of smuggling there is also addiction, which is now a severe problem in Balochistan. The Iranian fiction writer Mahmud Dowlatabadi provides a first-hand account of petty border trade in his travelogue through Balochistan entitled Meeting the Baloch [Per. Didār-e Baluč],89 where he takes a bus from Zahedan to Mirjaveh at the Pakistani border and back. He describes the friendship that developed among the travelers in the bus as they tried to The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 281 protect each other from the authorities at the checkpoints along the road. Dowlatabadi also quickly realized that there was a distance between him and the locals. In the following passage from the book, the driver, whom Dowlatabadi prefers to call Sohrab, starts by instructing the new passengers where to sit:

“You, sit down there, beside Dost Jan, and you, move this way. Make some space.” They can fix the rest themselves. Among all of them there are only two or three who have so much luggage that they cannot handle it themselves. They spread it out in the bus, among the passengers. Each item is given to somebody, somewhere. The goods are distributed. Now there are no longer twenty curtains on top of each other. They are all spread out under someone’s seat. Other goods disappear in the same way. Only occasionally Sohrab must interfere. “Hey there, take this shawl and put it under your chair.” And someone takes it and puts it under the chair. What is left in the hands of the young petty trader is taken by the conductor and put somewhere where it is invisible. Now the bus is loaded up with people and goods. Nobody gives me anything to hide. There is still a distance. They don’t trust me. I am still a stranger.

For several years the Iranian government has been constructing a barrier wall on its border with Pakistan, which is expected to be completed by 2015.90 The official purpose is to prevent illegal border crossings and to stop drugs from entering Iran. The more obvious reason for the barrier is to prevent unofficial border crossing.91 The Pakistani government has not objected to the wall since it aids the fight against their own Baloch insurrec- tion. In addition, the governments of Iran and Pakistan seek to control the movement of Baloch across the border because of the growth of Sunni religious centers and training camps for radical Islamist groups in Pakistan. In one of his poems written after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the Baloch poet and politician Saba Dashtyari calls the border between Pakistan and Iran “the Berlin Wall of the Baloch.” In the poem, he repeatedly asks the question: “When is our wall going to come tumbling down (may dīwāl kadī prušīt)?”

The Baloch Presence in the Arabian Peninsula and Beyond There is a considerable Baloch presence in the Arabian Peninsula. Al Ameeri points to three major reasons for this: the recruitment of Baloch as 282 M Carina Jahani soldiers, the historic connection of Gwadar to Oman, and the later migrations from Western Balochistan as a result of the military operations conducted by Mohammad Reza Shah in the 1950s.92 He also notes that some Iranian Baloch came to Kuwait and Bahrain during the pearling days,93 that is, before World War II. To this one might add “the general tendency for ethnic or sectarian communities to spread into neighboring lands”94 and the new economic opportunities on the Arabian Peninsula that arose with the advent of the oil era.95 The Baloch presence in Oman is attested from at least the time of the Ya‛rubids (1625–1743), and probably earlier. From then until recent times they are most often mentioned as serving in a military or police capacity. Thus when battling the al-Ya‛rubi ruler, the Portuguese hired Baloch soldiers to man their forts in Oman.96 A report by an official of the Dutch East Indies Company states that in 1673 Baloch made up much of the crew of Omani merchant vessels making runs to Mokha, Sindh, and India, and were paid good wages.97 Al Ameeri dates early recruitment of Baloch soldiers to the first half of the eighteenth century, “when the Omani rulers sought the help of the Makran tribesmen to build and consolidate their defence fronts.”98 Miles writes that in 1736 when the Imam of Oman learned that the Baloch were considered brave and well-armed, he sent agents across the Gulf of Oman to request the Baloch chiefs to allow their men to be enlisted in his service. The commander of the Baloch later died in battle, but the soldiers “apparently did not return to Mekran, but remained in Oman and formed the nucleus of the settlement known as Mazoon, a walled town in Al-Dhahireh,” reported by Miles to be inhabited solely by Baloch in the early twentieth century.99 Although there has probably been some Baloch presence in the port towns of the Persian Gulf since time immemorial, their numbers were relatively few in the early twentieth century. According to Lorimer,100 the largest number was found in the Sultanate of Oman, with about 20,000, or 30,000 if the Jadgals were included. In Trucial Oman they amounted to about 1,400 with negligible numbers in Qatar, Bahrain, Hasa, and Kuwait. There appeared to be none in Najd. In Turkish Iraq there were about 3,000. There were also some in southern Arabistan where they served as mercenaries for the Shaikh of Muhammara.101 In 1784, the Khan of Kalat gave Gwadar as a (possibly temporary) gift to Sayyed Sultan b. Ahmad, who was a pretender to the throne of Oman. His accession to rule in 1792 led to a lasting connection with Balochistan and a continuing source of soldiers for the Omani sultan. Many of the recruits were from the Kech valley or the coast.102 In 1792, Sayyed Sultan also sent a force to capture and annex Chabahar to Oman.103 Chabahar stayed The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 283 under Omani supremacy until 1872, when the Persian governor of Bampur attacked it and expelled the Omanis. Gwadar remained as the only Omani enclave left on the Makran coast until 1958, when Pakistan bought it for £3 million.104 After the end of World War I, it was decided to replace a British Indian contingent in Muscat, which had been placed there during the war to ensure the safety of the port, with a Baloch unit.105 Thus, the first modern organized army unit in Oman was composed solely of Baloch.106 The recruitment of soldiers from Balochistan to the Omani forces went on at least to the mid-1980s, since it is described as an ongoing process by Collett.107 He notes that it was very attractive to become an Omani soldier and that competition was high for this rather well-paid position. The actual recruitment process is described as making sure that no specific region or social class was entirely predominant among the recruits.108 Foxton describes the Omani Baloch as well integrated, some of them holding senior positions in the government, the ministries and the armed forces, although many still spoke Balochi at home.109 The issue of the integration of the Baloch in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula is a sensitive one. Sources differ on the extent to which those of Baloch origin take pride in their ethnic identity. Saleem Ismail A. Jawadri, a longtime resident in the UAE, points out that relations between the Baloch and the Arabs changed after the oil economy made the region one of the richest in the world. Previously, the Baloch were held in high esteem among the Arabs as chivalrous and gallant and regarded as equals, but since the oil boom there has been an increasing feeling of aversion and distrust toward them. For their part, the Baloch regard the Arabs as unreliable. Jawadri notes that there are still some wealthy Baloch families in the Gulf states who consider themselves superior to the Arabs and take every opportunity to point this out.110 Jawadri observes that many of those who have come to the Gulf during the past 50 years try to hide their Balochi origin in public, particularly those who have settled in the UAE, due to the negative attitude toward the Baloch held by the new generation of the ruling families in some of the emirates.111 Peterson likewise writes that since there is a feeling of discrimination, which “has no legal basis,” some of the younger Omanis of Baloch origin “exhibit signs of alienation.”112 Many Baloch still speak Balochi, eat traditional Balochi food, listen to Balochi music, etc., and retain a firm connection to their homeland. Some have kept Iranian or Pakistani passports so they can visit family there.113 Al Ameeri writes that the descendants of the Baloch who arrived in the Arabian Peninsula as early as in the first half of the eighteenth century still take pride in calling themselves Baloch (Ar. al-Balūsh).114 284 M Carina Jahani

One of the problems the Baloch in the Arabian Peninsula face, more so in the UAE and Kuwait and less so in Oman, is that of statelessness. The stateless people are often known as bidoon (Ar. bidūn, “without”). Only Arabs who can prove longstanding local roots are entitled to citizenship in these countries—although there are cases of non-Arabs, such as Baloch, who have received citizenship, usually in return for military service. However, many Baloch (as well as immigrant Arabs, Sindhis, and other non-Arab residents in the UAE) are not recognized as full citizens, even if their families have lived there for generations. They face various difficulties, such as acquir- ing property, getting a driving license, obtaining birth certificates for their children, getting adequate health care, benefitting from free primary and secondary education, being able to enroll in higher education, etc. In recent years, a number of stateless persons have been able to acquire identity cards, which has given them some kind of legal status. There has recently been an agreement between the UAE and the Comoro Islands to give Comorian citizenship to stateless persons in the UAE.115 There is a strong feeling on the part of many bidoons that this is a way for the Emirati authorities to buy themselves out of the problem and in this way escape criticism from the international community instead of accepting the Baloch and other non-Arabs as citizens in a country where many have lived for generations. Furthermore, the Comorian passports can be a way of getting rid of dissidents. Tensions have increased in the Arabian Peninsula partly due to government policies since the “Arab Spring” risings began in 2011. In Bahrain, as an example, Baloch policemen have been accused of killing Shi‛i protesters on behalf of the Sunni Arab government.116 After the Arab Spring demonstra- tions the oppression of the bidoon is reported to have increased as well.117 In addition to Oman proper, in the early nineteenth century the Sultan of Oman held not only Gwadar and Chabahar on the Makran coast, but also important ports in East Africa and Zanzibar. Early Baloch settlements in East Africa originate from this time. Later, Baloch soldiers served in the Belgian, German, and British colonial armies in East and Central Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.118 Now that the East African countries are independent, the Baloch are no longer part of the army, but engage in trade, agriculture, transportation, etc. They mainly speak Swahili, although there has been some revitalization of Balochi due to newcomers from Balochistan, particularly from the Iranian side after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.119 There may be up to a few thousand Baloch in East Africa, mainly in Zanzibar, Kenya, and Tanzania, some of whom have taken on leading political or cultural roles in their societies.120 There is also a substantial Baloch presence reported for India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.121 The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 285

Chabahar and Gwadar, Two Important Ports The two most important ports in today’s Balochistan, Chabahar and Gwadar, are situated in Iran and Pakistan, respectively, and face similar challenges. A free trade zone was established in Chabahar in 1992 “to attract foreign investment, create jobs and mobilise the potential of the region.”122 A trilat- eral agreement between Delhi, Tehran, and Kabul was signed in 2003 covering “the terms of overland transit, the expansion and modernisation of the Chabahar port and upgradation of a road link to western Afghanistan.”123 This should be seen as an attempt to diminish the role of Pakistan in the Afghan economy and to bypass sanctions on transit from Afghanistan to India. In light of the Chinese involvement in Gwadar (discussed below), further Indian investments are anticipated for the development of Chabahar Port and free trade zone, as well as infrastructure to connect it better to interior Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.124 According to Afrakhteh, “the rapid growth in the population of Chabahar as result of the Free Trade Zone has resulted in different forms of social inequality,”125 and segregation between those living in the new quarters who are mainly employed in the service sector, and those in the old quarters, who are farmers, fishermen, or have other low-income employment.126 Many Baloch nationalists also see the free trade zone as a strategy on part of the government to stimulate non-Baloch Iranians to settle in Chabahar, thus consciously “diluting” the Baloch population and causing the port to lose its Balochi character. The construction of a modern port in Gwadar with major Chinese financing commenced in 2002.127 It was closely linked to plans for a trans- Afghanistan gas pipeline, which has not yet been constructed, and may never be. The Deep Sea Port Project, as well as plans to construct a new military garrison in Gwadar, are viewed by Baloch nationalists with similar suspicion as the Chabahar free trade zone. There have been several attacks over the years against individuals and companies engaged in constructing the port facilities.128 So far the port has not succeeded as a business venture because of the security situation. The control of Gwadar Port was handed over to China in February 2013.129 The fear that the newly revitalized ports will eventually lead to a total loss of the Balochi language and Balochi identity in the coastal region is depicted in a short story written in Balochi and titled “Ormara in 2030” (Bal. Ōrmāṛa 2030ā), where the author, Ghaws Bahar, describes a possible future scenario in the port of Ormara, a town in Gwadar district.130 The main character in the story is Balach, who is an old Baloch nationalist and poet. When the story opens, he is sitting and watching the sea. He sees people dressed in different kinds of clothes, even shorts and skirts, something 286 M Carina Jahani which definitely doesn’t conform to the Balochi dress code. Nobody speaks Balochi any more either. Balach remembers how he had foreseen and warned against this situation in his days as an active politician, but nobody had taken him seriously enough to do anything. Balach hears young people conversing in Urdu and English, then suddenly somebody speaks to him in Balochi. He turns around and finds that it is a beggar. The next day Balach’s death is announced from the mosque, in Urdu rather than in Balochi. In view of the strategic importance of the rival ports of Chabahar (on the Gulf of Oman) and Gwadar (on the Arabian Sea), not only locally and regionally, but in the global economy and power balance, it is likely that Balochistan will attract even more international attention as these two ports and infrastructure connecting them to the interior develop. One of the main issues will be to ensure some kind of stability in the region in view of the different claims on it from foreign states, the central governments and the Baloch local population.

A Baloch Public Voice for Political and Social Change It is very difficult to give a brief account of a subject as multifaceted as Baloch nationalism and the present Balochi political discourse, and a full treatment of these is outside the scope of this study.131 There is a considerable difference between the ideological basis for resistance against the central government in Iran before the Islamic Revolution, when the discrimination against the Baloch was felt as an issue of Persian nationalism and chauvinism, and after the revolution when the dichotomy between Shi‛i and Sunni Islam is much more accentuated. The opposition in Pakistan also normally justify their struggle with nationalist arguments against Punjabi domination. One must thus account for ideological differences in the Balochi nationalist discourse, ranging from strong adherents of Islam to Marxists who profess atheism. As for political solutions to the “Balochi question,” some advocate federal solutions within the present-day states, whereas others see an independent state of Balochistan as the only satisfactory outcome. The grievances voiced in the Balochi nationalist discourse in Pakistan are mainly that profit from the rich national resources in Balochistan, such as natural gas and minerals, is only to a marginal degree returned to the province, whereas those in Iran feel discriminated against due to their Sunni creed and resent the haughty attitude of some Persians toward them. The development of the ports of Chabahar and Gwadar is another sensitive issue, since the Baloch feel that they are not part of this process, which is in the hands of the central governments in Tehran and Islamabad. Grare sums up the grievances with the words “expropriation, marginalization, The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 287 and dispossession,”132 and in a recent paper gives a summary of some current problems.133 Quoting a newspaper article, he describes the situation in Pakistani Balochistan as a “cauldron of ethnic, sectarian, secessionist and militant violence, threatening to boil over at any time.”134 Several sources also discuss Islamic radicalization in Balochistan. Grare finds that “Islamization is currently experiencing a qualitative change in Balochistan. Amid the state of anarchy in the province and led by the Deobandi madrassa network, radicalization is on the rise and sectarian groups have stepped up their activities in the region. The number of sectarian killings has increased almost exponentially over the past few years in a province traditionally known for its deeply entrenched secularism.”135 Noraiee also notes that “as the jihad in Afghanistan became an important source of inspiration for all Islamic groups and strengthened the position of Deobandis, the ground was further cultivated for radical Islamists to take root in Balochistan. Religion in Balochistan has thus become stronger and more radicalised in the past 25 years.”136 In fact, Dudoignon argues that the British during their latter years in power in the Indian subcontinent ousted the strongly political, anticolonial, and anti-Western re-Islamization movement.137 Although possibly not strongly ideological at the outset, the Jundullah (Army of God) movement, led by Abdolmalek Regi until his arrest and execution in 2010, can be seen as one of the outcomes of this Sunni Islamic and political radicalization. Jundullah claims to fight for Sunni Muslims in Iran, and the organization has assumed responsibility for several acts of terror against the central government and Shi‘ite mosques in Iranian Balochistan.138 There have been accusations from the Iranian government against the United States and Great Britain for supporting Jundullah. There are also new organizations constantly appearing and carrying out acts of violence that further destabilize the region. One of these calls itself Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice).139

Contested Identities The Persian Gulf littoral today is divided into eight states—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—with Pakistan also included in the greater Gulf area. The aim of the national governments is to create national identities, often by force and at the cost of local and regional identities. In Iran during the Pahlavi era all attempts at strengthening local customs, traditions, and cultures were viewed as opposition to the nation and as threats to the territorial integrity of Iran. Mojab and Hassanpour describe this hegemony as the propagation of “racist and national chauvinistic myths in the state-controlled media, in 288 M Carina Jahani educational institutions (all state owned), and in government organs,” deny- ing the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity of Iran.140 If there is a weak sense of identification with any of the states where they presently live, there is on the other hand, particularly among the inhabitants of the southern parts of Balochistan, a strong feeling of belonging to a common Khaliji [Gulf] culture. Just as there has been a considerable Arab population on the northern shores of the Gulf littoral, there has also been a strong Baloch presence on its southern shores for several centuries. It is as natural for a Baloch living in the southern areas of Iranian Balochistan to move to Oman as it would be to settle in one’s own home town or village. In the 1980s, when I visited Pakistani Balochistan for the first time, it appeared normal that at least some men from each extended family were working on the other side of the Persian Gulf. As discussed at the beginning of the chapter, there are many problems with the concept of a Balochi identity. Often tribal identities are more tangible than a feeling of belonging to a Baloch ethnos. In such a setting, multiple, overlapping identities are common, and a Baloch will, for example, on some occasions use a tribal identification, and at other times identify as a Baloch or as a Sunni (as opposed to a Shi‛i). A number of things can in the long run be the very factors that drastically alter, or possibly even eradicate, local and regional identities such as that of the Baloch. These include the use of the national language in the educational system, a growing service sector where employment requires good knowledge of the national language, and the introduction of state media (radio and even more so TV). Under such circumstances the cultural bonds between different ethnic groups living in the Gulf littoral are threatened. On the other hand, one should not underestimate the so called “Al Jazeera effect” of the Web, blogs, other social media, e-mail groups, and the like to give voice to a Balochi identity and demand a greater share of self-determination. It is possible to post literature as well as material regarding orthography, reading and writing lessons, online dictionaries etc. on the Web in order to promote reading and writing in Balochi. The same applies to political and religious manifestos. In fact, Anthony Smith argues that “in the modern era, ethnie [ethnic communities] must become politicized, must enter and remain in the political arena, and must begin to move towards nationhood, even if they have no intention of becoming full nations themselves. That is to say, they are forced to forsake their former isolation, passivity and cultural accommodation, and become activist, mobilized and politically dynamic.”141 This means that the Baloch would need to have an ongoing nationalist discourse in order to be recognized as an ethnie. There are many bridges to cross in order for an effective nationalist discourse to take place, the most important of which may be The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 289 the tribal divisions and the social stratification in Balochistan. In addition to this, there are also contesting ideologies involved in such a discourse, and there is no democratic tradition to fall back on. The prospect for a unified nationalist discourse in Balochistan at present is thus rather poor. At one extreme there is the prospect of achieving full incorporation into the existing states, something which might, in the case of the Baloch, jeop- ardize not only their language, culture, and eventually their identity as an ethnie, but also things as tangible as family relations with close relatives on the other side of the Balochi “Berlin Wall.” In view of the strong feelings of expropriation, marginalization, and dispossession prevalent among the Baloch on both sides of the Goldsmid Line, it is unlikely that any significant percentage of the Baloch population either in Iran or in Pakistan would opt for this path. It would also not be an option for Baloch living in the states of the Arabian Peninsula, where they often cannot even acquire citizenship.

Concluding Summary If the Baloch at present are a marginalized ethnic group, struggling for survival as an ethnie with their own specific language and culture in the countries around the Persian Gulf where they are living, this has not always been the case. Down to the mid-nineteenth century, local Baloch rulers both in Eastern and Western Balochistan were their own masters. The Baloch were renowned for their bravery and resistance against invaders, and were highly respected soldiers. Service in foreign armies has over the centuries been one of the incentives for them to spread from the northern shores of the Persian Gulf littoral to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Another reason has been long-distance trade around the Indian Ocean. With the encroachment in the nineteenth century of the British in the Indian subcontinent from the east and the Qajar rulers in Iran from the northwest, the Baloch were put under heavy political pressure. Their land was divided by the borders that were imposed over their heads, and today they find themselves split up, not only between Iran and Pakistan, but also Afghanistan, Oman, and the UAE, to mention some other countries where there is a considerable Baloch presence. The Baloch have for centuries struggled against the whims of nature, such as prolonged droughts and famines and then sudden floods and earthquakes. Long periods of drought have caused migrations in search of a better livelihood, northward to northern Iran, Afghanistan and all the way to Turkmenistan, westward along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf, east- and northeastward to Punjab, Karachi, and other parts of Sindh, and southwards across the sea to the Arabian Peninsula. Baloch also took part in pearl diving and later were part of the migrant labor force of the Gulf states 290 M Carina Jahani during the oil boom. Border trade has been a way of surviving when agriculture and pastoral nomadism has failed. Today this is a lucrative business but, unfortunately, it has also brought the scourge of drug trafficking. The Baloch find themselves at several crossroads. They are caught between rural life and increasing urbanization, between traditional religious beliefs and radicalized Islam, between incorporation into the states they live in and attempts at self-determination, between a desire to preserve their traditional values, honor code, language, and culture, and hopes for a better future with education and progress in “the modern world.” Only the future will show how they are able to manage or solve these dilemmas.

Notes

Many thanks to Saleem Ismail A. Jawadri for valuable information, particularly on the situation of the bidoons in the Gulf states, to Aziz Dadiar, Hoshang Noraiee, and Noora Lori for useful comments on a draft of this chapter, to Michael Izady for making the map, and, last but not least, to Lawrence Potter for his continuous encouragement and support during the writing process, for providing references that enriched the chapter, and for very careful editing of the manuscript.

1. Here the spellings Baloch, Balochi, and Balochistan are used, instead of the more usual Baluch, Baluchi and Baluchistan, in order to represent their pronunciation in Balochi rather than Persian. In Arabic, the terms Balush and Balushi are used as a noun and adjective respectively. 2. Brian Spooner, “Baluchistan, i: Geography, History, and Ethnography,” in Encyclopædia Iranica III (1989), 599. 3. Zigri is the common Balochi pronunciation. However, in most academic literature the Persian pronunciation Zikri is used. 4. Abdolhossein Yadegari, “Pluralism and Change in Iranian Balochistan,” in Carina Jahani, Agnes Korn, and Paul Titus, eds., The Baloch and Others: Linguistic, Historical and Socio-Political Perspectives on Pluralism in Balochistan (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2008), 250. 5. See, for example, Brian Spooner, “The Baloch in Islamic Civilization, Western Ethnography, and World History,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 4 (2013): 143; Mohammad Hassan Hosseinbor, Iran and its Nationalities: the Case of Baluch Nationalism (Karachi: Pakistani Adab Publications, 2000), 61; Adam Nader Baranzehi, “The Sarawani Dialect of Balochi and Persian Influence on It,” in Carina Jahani and Agnes Korn, eds., The Baloch and Their Neighbours: Ethnic and Linguistic Contact in Balochistan in Historical and Modern Times (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2003), 79; Yadegari, “Pluralism and Change in Iranian Balochistan,” 254; Hoshang Noraiee, “Change and Continuity: Power and Religion in Iranian Balochistan,” in Jahani et al., The Baloch and Others, 346. 6. See, for example, Yadegari, “Pluralism and Change in Iranian Balochistan,” 252. 7. See also Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 610–11. 8. Including Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 599; Hosseinbor, Iran and Its Nationalities, 55–56; and Ugo Fabietti, “Equality versus Hierarchy: Conceptualizing Change The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 291

in Southern Balochistan,” in Paul Titus, ed., Marginality and Modernity: Ethnicity and change in Post-Colonial Balochistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5, who also mentions a “shared system of values” as a uniting factor, the “Balochi honour code” (Bal. balōčmayār). 9. The Jadgals/Brahuis are bilingual in Jadgali/Brahui and Balochi (or even trilin- gual adding the national language as well). See, for example, Behrooz Barjasteh Delforooz, “A Sociolinguistic Survey among the Jadgal in Iranian Balochistan,” in Jahani et al., The Baloch and Others, 23–43; Yadegari, “Pluralism and Change in Iranian Balochistan,” 249–50; Taj Mohammad Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development (Karachi: Karachi Royal Book Co., 2004), 126–31; Carina Jahani, “The Balochi Language and Languages in Iranian Balochistan,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 4 (2013): 163–64. 10. Hosseinbor, Iran and Its Nationalities, 68. For a thorough discussion of Baloch ethnicity, see Spooner, “The Baloch in Islamic Civilization,” 144–46. 11. For more details, see Jahani, “The Balochi Language and Languages in Iranian Balochistan,” 154–55. A Web page that is attributed to “The Government of Balochistan in Exile” maintains that there are approximately 15 million Baloch in the world, with about 2.06 million in Iran, 8.3 million in Pakistan, and 930,000 in Afghanistan, with the others widely scattered. See: http://governmen- tofbalochistan.blogspot.se/2006/04/economic-potential-of-balochistan_24. html. Selig S. Harrison, In Afghanistan’s Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1981), 177–78, also discusses the dilemma of establishing trustworthy population statistics for the Baloch. 12. 2014 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, August 2014). See http://www.prb.org/pdf14/2014-world-population- data-sheet_eng.pdf 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Marc Valeri, “Identity Politics and Nation-Building under Sultan Qaboos,” and J. E. Peterson, “The Baluch Presence in the Persian Gulf,” both in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (London: Hurst, 2013), 182 and 233 respectively. A Baloch-moderated Web page, however, estimates that about 35 percent of Oman’s population, that is, about 1.4 million, are Baloch. http://baask.com/diwwan/index.php?topic=6987.0. Another Web page (http:// www.joshuaproject.net/people-profile.php?peo3=15034&rog3=MU) estimates the number of Baloch in Oman at slightly less than 0.5 million. None of these sources discuss use of the Balochi language among the Baloch in Oman. 16. For a summary of suggested etymologies for the ethnonym, see Agnes Korn, Towards a Historical Grammar of Balochi (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2005), 45–47. 17. According to one of the legends in the epic tradition of the Baloch, they are of Arab origin and migrated from Aleppo in Syria after the battle of Karbala, where, despite the fact that the majority of the Baloch today are Sunni Muslims, the narration has it that they fought on the side of the Shi‛ite Imam and martyr Hussein against his enemy, the Umayyad caliph Yazid. (M. Longworth Dames, Popular Poetry of the Baloches, I (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1907), 1–2. Now available online from HathiTrust Digital Library: http://www.hathitrust. org/. 292 M Carina Jahani

18. This is what Breseeg calls the “orientalist version of Balochi history.” There is also another theory, namely that the core of the Baloch settled in Balochistan and mixed with other local peoples as early as 2,000 years ago, as a continued movement of the Aryan tribes that had already invaded the Iranian plateau from the north. Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development, 116–25. 19. See, for example, Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 599–600, 607. 20. Paul Titus, “Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pushtun: Stereotypes, Social Organization and History in Western Pakistan,” Modern Asian Studies 32, 3 (1998): 666–69. See also Brian Spooner, “Who Are the Baluch? A Preliminary Investigation into the Dynamics of an Ethnic Identity from Qajar Iran,” in Edmond Bosworth and Carole Hillenbrand, eds., Qajar Iran: Political, Social and Cultural Change 1800–1925 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 100–1, quoting Barth, who also discussed the issue of social structure and the incorporation of new elements. 21. Just Boedeker, “Baloch Identities: A Matter of Descent or Mentality?,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 4 (2013): 233–34. 22. Hosseinbor, Iran and Its Nationalities, 67. 23. In Iran, Balochi was long regarded as a dialect of Persian, to which it is closely related, and only recently has it been described as a “language” by Iranian linguists. 24. Valeri, “Identity Politics and Nation-Building,” 198. 25. The strict division of Western Iranian languages into a Northwestern and a Southwestern branch has been questioned by Ludwig Paul and Agnes Korn. See Ludwig Paul, “The Position of Balochi among Western Iranian Languages: The Verbal System,” in Jahani and Korn, The Baloch and Their Neighbours, 71; Korn, Towards a Historical Grammar of Balochi, 329‒30. 26. For a Balochi dialect map, see Carina Jahani and Agnes Korn, “Balochi,” in Gernot Windfuhr, ed., The Iranian Languages (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 638. 27. See Carina Jahani, “State Control and its Impact on Language in Balochistan,” in Annika Rabo and Bo Utas, eds., The Role of the State in West Asia (Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2005), 158–60. 28. See Korn, Towards a Historical Grammar of Balochi, 33–36. 29. Tim Farrell, Basic Balochi (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1990), as well as several articles by the same author describing Karachi Balochi; Nigel A. Collett, A Grammar, Phrase Book and Vocabulary of Baluchi (as Spoken in the Sultanate of Oman), 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Burgess & Son, 1986). There is also new linguistic research being carried out on the Makran coast in Iran by Maryam Nourzaei (Uppsala University) and Agnes Korn (Frankfurt am Main University), which is awaiting publication. 30. Yadegari, “Pluralism and Change in Iranian Balochistan,” 256. 31. Sabir Badalkhan, “Zikri Dilemmas: Origins, Religious Practices, and Political Constraints,” in Jahani et al., The Baloch and Others, 296–300. 32. Farhat Sultana, “Gwat and Gwat-i-leb: Spirit Healing and Social Change in Makran,” in Titus, ed., Marginality and Modernity, 28. 33. Sultana, Gwat and Gwat-i-leb, 30–31. 34. Ibid., 48–49. The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 293

35. Behnaz A. Mirzai, “Identity Transformations of African Communities in Iran,” chapter 13, this volume. 36. Sultana, Gwat and Gwat-i-leb, 49. 37. Josef Elfenbein, “Baluchistan iii: Baluchi Language and Literature,” in Encyclopædia Iranica III (1989), 640. 38. See, for example, Josef Elfenbein, An Anthology of Classical and Modern Balochi Literature, vol. I (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), 275, 287, 289. 39. Nāzuk (Karachi, 1976). 40. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNqS1ku74WI; http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN4gGvowD1s. 41. Also on YouTube; see for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= C2sxS_DuzM4. 42. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aVP-1oyHI; http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dGJtmMPjHeo. 43. For some of her paintings, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ SFYdO1MGME. 44. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk-jCrB2Wpg; http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-FgxJSMqhI . 45. See, for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLqAj3SAHb4; http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eruclk6mg. 46. Sabir Badalkhan, “The Changing Content of Baloch Women’s Songs in Eastern Makran,” in Charles Melville, ed., Proceedings of the Third European Conference of Iranian Studies, part 2 (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1999), 114. 47. Nigel A. Collett, “Baluch Service in the Forces of Oman: A Reflection of Makrani Society and an Impetus for Change,” Newsletter of Baluchistan Studies [Naples] 2 (1985): 14. 48. Badalkhan, “The Changing Content of Baloch Women’s Songs,” 115. 49. Ibid., 119. 50. Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 607. 51. Ibid., 606; M. Longworth Dames, The Baloch Race: A Historical and Ethnological Sketch (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1904), 26–33; Vahe Boyajian, “Towards the Interpretation of the Term balōč in the Šāhnāme,” in Jahani and Korn, The Baloch and Their Neighbours, 313–15. 52. Sabir Badalkhan, “Portuguese Encounters with Coastal Makran Baloch during the Sixteenth Century: Some References from a Balochi Heroic Epic,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 10, 2, (2000): 157. It must, however, be remembered that the oral poetry was often composed to glorify the rulers and their victories and it must therefore be used with caution as a source for reconstructing history. 53. Dames, The Baloch Race, 36. The dating of Mir Jalal Khan’s reign is somewhat uncertain but may have been in the thirteenth or fourteenth century ad, see, for example, Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 609; http://baask.com/diwwan/index. php?topic=7970.0; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_(Baloch_tribe). 54. Elfenbein, “Baluchi Language and Literature,” 640. 55. Badalkhan, “The Changing Content of Baloch Women’s Songs,” 109. 56. Ibid., 112. 294 M Carina Jahani

57. See, for example, Badalkhan, “Portuguese Encounters with Coastal Makran Baloch,” 158–68; Elfenbein, An Anthology of Classical and Modern Balochi Literature, vol. I, 338–41. 58. Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 611. It should, however, be remembered that the Khanate of Kalat was not a “state” in the modern sense of the word. 59. Ibid., 615; Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development, 161. 60. For descriptions of recent struggles against the Pakistani Government, the reader may refer to Harrison, In Afghanistan’s Shadow; Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development; Martin Axmann, “Phoenix from the Ashes? The Baloch National Movement and Its Recent Revival,” in Jahani et al., The Baloch and Others; Martin Axmann, Back to the Future: The Khanate of Kalat and the Genesis of Baloch Nationalism 1915–1955 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008). 61. Hosseinbor, Iran and Its Nationalities, 37. Hoshang Noraiee (private communication) adds Seb and Lashar to the list of important local chiefdoms in Western (today’s Iranian) Balochistan. 62. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 255. 63. Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 616. 64. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 263. 65. Ibid., 263–64. 66. Jahani, “State Control and Its Impact on Language in Balochistan,” 159, note 25; Yadegari, “Pluralism and Change in Iranian Balochistan,” 251. 67. Percy M. Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia or Eight Years in Irán (London: John Murray, 1902), 113–14. Now available online from HathiTrust Digital Library: http://www.hathitrust.org/. 68. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 264. 69. See, for example, the titles of the folktales in Behrooz Barjasteh Delforooz, Discourse Features in Balochi of Sistan (Oral Narratives), revised version (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2010) online at: http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/ get/diva2:345413/FULLTEXT01.pdf, 283–84. 70. N. A. Baloch, “The Sultanate of Makran,” Pakistan Journal of History and Culture 13/1 (1992): 107–08, cited in Sabir Badalkhan, “Coastal Makran as Corridor to the Indian Ocean World,” Eurasian Studies I/2 (2002): 243. 71. The current spelling is Tis, but historical sources often use the form Tiz. 72. Badalkhan, “Coastal Makran as Corridor,” 243. 73. Ibid., 244. 74. Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2006), 43–44. Further references are included here. 75. Lawrence G. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century,” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 129. 76. Badalkhan, “Coastal Makran as Corridor,” 246–47. 77. Ibid., 247–49. 78. Riccardo Redaelli, The Father’s Bow: The Khanate of Kalāt and British India (19th –20th Century) (Florence: Manent, 1997), 39. 79. Ibid., 39, note 41. The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 295

80. Badalkhan, “Coastal Makran as Corridor,” 254. See also Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The Slave Trade and the African Diaspora in Iran,” ZIFF Journal 2 (2005): 31. http://www.swahiliweb.net/ziff_journal_2_files/ziff-2005-05.pdf 81. Beatrice Nicolini, “The 19th Century Slave Trade in the Western Indian Ocean: The Role of the Baloch Mercenaries,” in Jahani et al., The Baloch and Others, 340–41. See also Willem Floor, “The Trade in and Position of Slaves in Southern Iran, 1825–1925,” Studia Iranica 41(2012): 268–73. 82. Of course, there was no “Balochistan” state in the modern sense of the word to be divided. Balochistan is here used to denote “areas inhabited by the Baloch.” 83. Sir Frederic John Goldsmid, Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission 1870–71–72, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1876), xlii; see also Hosseinbor, Iran and Its Nationalities, 74. 84. Spooner, “Baluchistan,” 619. 85. Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development, 179–83. 86. Harrison, In Afghanistan’s Shadow, 93. 87. Ibid., 94–95. 88. Hosseinbor, Iran and Its Nationalities, 166. 89. Tehran: Entešārāt-e Peyvand va Šabgir, 1356 (1977/78). 90. See for example, “Iran to seal off Pakistan borders within 3 years,” AFP, July 3, 2011, http://tribune.com.pk/story/201016/iran-to-completely-seal-pakistan- afghanistan-borders-by-2015-report/; also Martin W. Lewis, “The Iran- Pakistan Border Barrier,” GeoCurrents, May 13, 2011, http://www.geocurrents. info/geopolitics/the-iran-pakistan-border-barrier. 91. Note that the border between Iran and Pakistan is one of the main routes by which political dissidents and other asylum seekers have left Iran after the Islamic Revolution, aided by local Baloch. 92. Saeed Mohammad al Ameeri, “The Baloch in the Arabian Gulf States,” in Jahani and Korn, eds., The Baloch and Their Neighbours, 237. 93. Ibid., 241. 94. Peterson, “The Baluch Presence in the Persian Gulf,” 231. 95. Ibid., 232. 96. Floor, Five Port Cities, 337. 97. Ibid., 363. 98. Al Ameeri, “The Baloch in the Arabian Gulf States,” 237. 99. S. B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf, 2nd ed. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1919; repr. (two vols. in one) Frank Cass & Co., 1966), 252. 100. J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, vol. II (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908), 258. 101. It has been questioned, however, whether the Baloch soldiers should be regarded as mercenaries. Some of my Baloch colleagues argue that the main motivation of the Baloch soldiers was not ﬁnancial reward but their tribal honor code and their pride in being gallant warriors. Baloch tribal chiefs had defense agreements with Arab tribes, they point out, and under those agreements, the Baloch had to provide soldiers for the Arabs. 102. Collett, A Grammar, Phrase Book and Vocabulary of Baluchi, viii. 103. The history of Gwadar and Chabahar is set out in Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. I, 601–22; see also Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier,” 129. 104. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier,” 139, 143. 296 M Carina Jahani

105. William Foxton, “Arabic/Baluchi Bilingualism in Oman,” Newsletter of Bal- uchistan Studies [Naples] 2 (1985): 32. 106. Peterson, “The Baluch Presence in the Persian Gulf,” 236. For more on Baloch service in the Omani military, see 235–38. 107. Collett, “Baluch Service in the Forces of Oman,” 8–15. 108. Ibid., 8–9. 109. Foxton, “Arabic/Baluchi Bilingualism in Oman,” 34. 110. Interview, Saleem Ismail A. Jawadri, Baloch writer and poet, originating from the coastal area of Eastern Balochistan (today’s Pakistan), previously resident in the United Arab Emirates and resident in Sweden since 2013. Interview carried out by means of oral discussion on August 5, 2013, and thereafter I received written answers to speciﬁc questions on September 6, 2013. 111. Ibid. 112. Peterson, “The Baluch Presence in the Persian Gulf,” 238. 113. Interview, Saleem Ismail A. Jawadri, see note 110. 114. Al Ameeri, “The Baloch in the Arabian Gulf States,” 240–41. Al Ameeri, however, also writes that the descendants of “the Baloch who came to the Gulf in the ﬁrst half of the 18th century have completely lost their language and cultural identity.” In my interview with Jawadri, he contests the information that the Baloch whose ancestors came to Oman in the eighteenth century have lost their Balochi language. 115. See, for example, http://rebeleconomy.com/comoros-islands/special-the-uaes- abandoned-people/ 116. http://www.examiner.com/article/baloch-policemen-killing-protesters-bahrain- says-woman-journalist 117. See, for example, http://www.bedoonrights.org/2012/06/07/gulf-states-threatened-by-bedoon-activism/ 118. Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi, “The Baluchi of East Africa: Dynamics of Assimilation and Integration,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 4 (2013): 130. 119. Ibid., 127. 120. Ibid., 131–33. 121. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baluch_(Uttar_Pradesh); http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Baloch_(Gujarat). 122. Hassan Afrakhteh, “Social, Demographic and Cultural Change in Iranian Bal- ochistan,” in Jahani et al., eds, The Baloch and Others, 222. 123. http://www.eurasiareview.com/19052013-stung-by-gwadar-india-looks-for-business-in-chabahar-analysis/. 124. See http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/05/307288/india-eager-to-invest-in- irans-chabahar/; http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-08-05/news/ 41093498_1_chabahar-india-and-iran-transit-agreement. 125. Afrakhteh, “Social, Demographic and Cultural Change in Iranian Balochistan,” 222. 126. Ibid., 218. 127. Axmann, “Phoenix from the Ashes?,” 271. 128. http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/ karachi/22-Feb-2011/Gwadar-Bomb-blast-wounds-three-soldiers; http://www. thefreelibrary.com/Bomb+attack+injures+8+in+Gwadar.-a0303419322; http:// www.thenewstrack.com/gwadar-port-bomb-blast-10-killed-5-injured/. The Baloch as an Ethnic Group M 297

129. http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/china-takes-control-of- gwadar-port/article4429638.ece. 130. Published in Karkēnk [The Oyster], a book of short stories (Quetta: Balochi Acad- emy, 2003), 5–13. 131. The interested reader can refer to a number of works by both Baloch and non- Baloch authors on the subject. See, for example, Inayatullah Baloch, The Prob- lem of “Greater Baluchistan”: A Study of Baluch Nationalism (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987); Harrison, In Afghanistan’s Shadow; Hosseinbor, Iran and its Nationalities; Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development; and Axmann, Back to the Future. 132. Frédéric Grare, “Pakistan: The Resurgence of Baluch Nationalism,” Carnegie Papers 65 (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2006), 5. Online at: http://carnegieendowment.org/files/CP65.Grare.FINAL. pdf. 133. Frédéric Grare, “Balochistan: The State Versus the Nation,” The Carnegie Papers, South Asia (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 2013). Online at: http://carnegieendowment.org/files/balochistan.pdf. 134. Naveed Hussain, “Fiddling While Balochistan Burns,” Express Tribune, August 15, 2012, cited in Grare, “The State Versus the Nation,” 4. 135. Grare, “The State Versus the Nation,” 17. For the origin of Deobandism, see Noraiee, “Power and Religion in Iranian Balochistan,” 349–54. 136. Noraiee, “Power and Religion in Iranian Balochistan,” 361–62. 137. Stéphane A. Dudoignon, “Zahedan vs. Qom?: Les sunnites d’Iran et l’émergence du Baloutchistan comme foyer de droit hanafite, sous la monarchie Pahlavi,” in Denise Aigle, Isabelle Charleux, Vincent Goossaert and Roberte Hamayon, eds., Miscellanea Asiatica: Mélanges en l’honneur de Françoise Aubin (Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2010), 277. 138. See, for example, http://theiranproject.com/blog/2012/10/24/irans-mp-points- the-finger-at-qatar-over-chabahar-mosque-suicide-bomb/; http://www.theguard- ian.com/world /2010/dec/15/iran-suicide-bombing-shia; http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ 2009_Pishin_bombing; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jundallah_(Iran). 139. http://www.trackingterrorism.org/group/jaish-al-adl-army-justice. 140. Shahrzad Mojab and Amir Hassanpour, “The Politics of Nationality and Ethnic Diversity,” in Saeed Rahnema and Sohrab Behdad, eds., Iran after the Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995), 231–32. 141. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 157. CHAPTER 11

“Purity and Confusion”: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf

Ahmed al-Dailami

Introduction In the cultural lexicon of the medieval Middle East the intermingling of “Arabs” and “Persians,” al-Arab wa al-Ajam, evoked hazards—at least for Ibn Khaldun—of confusion, impurity, and even annihilation, as was the fate of his Arab tribes who “mixed with Persians.”1 This trope is not only alive and well, but thrives within the vernacular nationalist imaginaries of Iraqis, Bahrainis, Kuwaitis, and other Arabic-speaking populations that share historically porous boundaries with Iran. Apart from perhaps Iraq, nowhere is this binary more salient than on the borderlands of where Arabia “ends” and Persia “begins” or vice versa: the body of water we call “the Gulf.” As relations between Iran and its Arab neighbors become particularly strained, the study of ethnicity and sectarianism in the Gulf has become a booming subfield of Middle Eastern Studies.2 Other scholars have chosen to speak of shared histories between Iran and the Arab world.3 This chapter skirts the question of difference or similarity to ask questions about how political allegiances and ethnic identifications become related beyond strategies of divide and rule, or through some vague sense of historical cosmopolitanism. It examines how people have chosen to invalidate, reassemble, and strategically redeploy their cultural identifications in nation-states in which the relationship between the political and the ethnic, or more accurately between political citizens and ethnic subjects, remains unresolved. Perhaps 300 M Ahmed al-Dailami no other category of identification elucidates this particular facet of political life in the Gulf better than the Hawala, or the “wandering Arabs” of the Gulf. Those new to the history of the Gulf might find the choice of a relatively obscure group of migratory Arabs a peculiar subject of study. Literally, “the wanderers” or “those who transform,” the Hawala is a category of identification whose spoken root lies in an act of transference from Arabia to Iran and back. Properly contextualized, the history of this term, who has appropri- ated it, and for what reasons is revealing insofar as it indicates the gradual estrangement of the populations of the northern (Persian) and southern (Arab) Gulf. Since the mid-twentieth century, the changing connotations of the term “Hawala” demonstrate how colonialism, nationalism, and even political Islam have successively imposed their exclusions. Additionally, and beyond being an empirical corrective to the confusion that surrounds the Hawala, the chapter advocates a broader and more critical approach to thinking about ethnicity and its relationship to nationalism in the contemporary Gulf, where the latter is too often spoken of self-evidently as “national identity.” This chapter first provides readers with some basic information on the historic or “real” Hawala as a group with a particular past, starting with a brief etymological exploration of the category. From there, I argue that such a primordial approach is no longer relevant nor particularly revealing due to the sheer incongruence between the historical versus the contemporary populations that self-classify as Hawala.4 Finally, and with that axiom in mind, I argue that it is precisely this incongruence that must be viewed historically and contextualized.5 As a category of identification, the present-day Hawala must be understood as a result of the colonial imaginings of the late British Raj in the Gulf followed by the rise of Arab and Iranian nationalism in the 1950s, the independence of the Arab states of the Gulf in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally the Iranian Revolution toward the 1980s. Woven throughout the chapter are a series of questions that attempt to conceptualize and concretize what it is that we are discussing when we use the term Hawala: Is it an ethnicity, a narrative, or some other type of identification? Moreover, who is doing the identifying—is it a self-identification or an externally imposed one? Is it relational—one that derives meaning from being antagonistic to other categories; or is it a categorical one where group membership is determined by a shared attribute such as language, religion, or nationality? Is it an identification that is interest-based, or does its meaning lie within the ideological and discursive realms, or some combination thereof? Methodologically, this chapter does not aspire to be a comprehensive ethnography that offers an engagement with the literature on authenticity, The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 301 ethnicity, genealogy, nationalism, and historical narrative, all highly relevant to the subject at hand. However, such concepts are necessary tools to at least highlight what is interesting about the Hawala insofar as it is, as an identity, no longer an immediately discernible and stable group of people. Rather, it is a claim to authenticity, to being Arab as opposed to Persian, necessitated by, and increasingly encoded within, the postcolonial state-building projects of the Gulf at particular historical watersheds. In order to demonstrate this without extensive fieldwork, I turn instead to the emerging field of minority history in the Gulf, and specifically the growing number of Hawala histories. By looking at how contemporary historians have variously written about their pasts, aided by archival research in Bahrain and the British colonial records, the contours of a complex, almost baroque interplay between social mobility and ethnicity sheds light on the Gulf’s particular history of post-colonial nationalism.

Etymology and the “Historic Hawala” Like almost everything else about the Hawala, the etymology of the term is contested. Because a state or formal institution never codified the term, its origins remain shrouded in conjecture. Most etymologies of the term can be grouped into three broad categories: the first are geographic etymologies that posit a place from which the term Hawala is derived and from where the Hawala territorially originate, and the second are genealogical deriva- tions that explain the term Hawala as the proper name of a particular tribe or clan. In Lorimer’s Gazetteer alone, the tribe of Bani Hawal, the village of Hawala in Hijaz, and the town of Hulah in Najd, a stretch of the Tigris called Huwailah, the deserted town of Huwailah in Qatar, and the Hawalat tribe are all examples of where one can start tracing the origins of the term. Between these two frameworks (the geographic and the genealogical), the number of explanations is potentially so numerous that the term’s etymology soon takes on an air of conjecture akin to overambitious ancestral histories. The third and by far most widely reiterated etymology of the term Hawala comes in another form altogether, and will be the operative one for the remainder of this chapter. Rather than cite place or pedigree, this explanation of the term Hawala comes in the form of a narrative. Very different from the geographic and proper name typologies, the narrative etymology takes the root of the Arabic word Hawala ( ), commonly understood to denote those who “move,” “change,” “transform,” “descend,” “migrate” or “wander,” as the basis of who the Hawala are. The primary content of this narrative is a simple ethno-historical claim: the Hawala are a set of Arab clans of identifiable tribal descent who had migrated from Arabia and lived in southern Persia, and have since returned to the Arabian Peninsula. 302 M Ahmed al-Dailami

When and where the term Hawala is common and meaningful, its soft h sound is explained by citing the Persian corruption of the Arabic term sound that does not exist in (ح) ḥauwwala (pronounced with a guttural ḥ sound, simultaneously removing the (ه) Persian) to Hawala with a soft h Thus as this group 6.(و) stress on the consonant, w, or middle Arabic vowel ū of Arab clans settled in Persia, they were called the Hawala first by their Persian-speaking neighbors, and in due course by their Arab brethren across the Gulf in Arabia. The etymological end result is a term whose very pronunciation reinforces the narrative invoked, and it is on the construction and deployment of this narrative that I would like to focus. However, first it will be useful to provide a brief overview of how other historians have written about the Hawala. The British colonial records include the work of some of the most fas- tidious collectors of ethnographic knowledge on the Gulf region. Of these, Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia is perhaps the most celebrated.7 As a compendium of tribal, genealogical, geographic, and ethnographic knowledge compiled over several decades between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the work is unique both as a reference and as a document indicative of its time. Part of the entry, under “Huwalah or Hulah, singular Holi,” is worth quoting at length:

A class of Sunni Arabs found in Bahrain, Hasa, Qatar and Trucial ’Oman, and on the island of Sirri; they are a community who, after being domi- ciled for years or even generations on the Persian coast of the Gulf, have returned whether as individuals or groups to the Arabian side; the name of “Huwalah” is not one acquired by them during their sojourn in Persia, but has been conferred on them by the Arabs among whom they settled on their return to Arabia. . . . Many of the Huwalah are unable to say from which of the Arab tribes they are descended . . . they have no tribal institutions or organisation . . . but some of them form groups named after a common ancestor more or less remote, or after the place from which they have come. . . . They have altogether lost their fighting instincts and are entirely given up to commerce, the handicrafts and other money-making pursuits, some on a large and some on a humble scale . . . The total number of Huwalah in the part of Arabia where they are called by this name may be roughly estimated at 18,000 souls.8

The entry establishes the Hawala as a class [emphasis mine] of genealogically questionable Sunni Arabs who used to inhabit the Persian coast of the Gulf, and who are predisposed to livelihoods in crafts and commerce. The entry also includes a narrative that explains that the Hawala have since returned to Arabia. Critically, the need to explain this demographic anomaly in the The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 303 making is already detectable in the choice of the word domicile. As a word that implies more than one place of origin or habitation, its use foreshadows the problems that arise when the Hawala are imagined as part of the nation- states of today. At any rate, there are no precise dates cited for the historic transfer back to Arabia because such migrations took place over the course of decades rather than in an incident of collective exodus. Where dates are given, historians of the Hawala such as Mohammed Gharib Hatam and Jalal al-Ansari, among others, cite the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century as the point at which some Arabs left for the Iranian coast. The reasons that are cited for their departure include economic hardship in Najd, the expansion- ist tendencies of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia, and the pull of lucrative trade opportunities afforded by the purging of piracy from the Gulf by the British navy.9 Others have cited better environmental conditions, or indeed the opportunity to consolidate independent Arab principalities along the Persian coast of the Gulf in the absence of a strong central government in Iran.10 Hence the Hawala become “those who moved” or “transformed.” Significantly, it is at that juncture, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that the term Hawala begins to appear in documentation with of (ه) sound of the original Arabic rather than the soft h (ح) the deep ḥ the corrupted Persian pronunciation with which the word Hawala is now pronounced.11

Who Were the Historic Hawala? The use of the term Hawala, however, has not always been nebulous and unspecific. Akin to the Chinese in Malaya or the Gujaratis of East Africa, the Hawala have historically been traders and merchants, although it is practically impossible to generalize and speak of a collective socioeconomic status. Furthermore, no unified Hawala political-mercantile state ever existed like that of Hormuz or even that of the Qawasim during the fourteenth to sixteenth and eighteenth to nineteenth centuries respectively. Here, the question of whether there was ever a collective coherence to the Hawala as a sociopolitical entity arises. Some Hawala clans did have political ambitions and ruled several ports and their hinterlands along the shores of the Gulf as shaikhs.12 Among the most prominent of these were the al-Madhkūr of Bushehr (1730s–1850) and Bahrain (1753–83).13 Their presence there coincided with the rise of the Qawāsim shaikhly clan who became the lords of several major ports on both sides of the Gulf (Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Bandar Lingeh) at roughly the same time during the eighteenth century. Either vassals of Persian or other Arab overlords, Hawala clans never cohered into singular political entities akin to other regional dynastic states in the making. 304 M Ahmed al-Dailami

There is no question that the eighteenth century was the heyday of the historic Hawala. A Dutch description of the Persian Gulf in 1756 mentions “a caste of Arabs who are referred to by the general name of Houlas.” They were able to muster 6,000 men and inhabited all the usable harbors on the Persian coast, from Bandar Lingeh to Cape Bardistan (west of Kangan).14 The traveler Carsten Niebuhr, who visited the Gulf in 1765, devoted a section of his book to the independent Arab states on the Persian coast.15 He notes that the Hawala (referred to as Houle), were a “numerous tribe” that were masters of the ports from Bandar Abbas to Kangan, as clearly demarcated on his map. He notes that they are Sunni Arabs, not subject to the Persian government. Each city was led by a different shaikh and they were frequently fighting with each other, but were too divided to take joint action.16 Niebuhr lamented that these Arabs “have no historian to spread their fame beyond their own narrow confines.”17

The Hawala Today At present, the Hawala of the Arab Gulf are said to be mainly concentrated in the cities with the longest histories of trade and migration with the opposite (Persian) shore, and their numbers are generally considered to be historically small. (As quoted above, around 1900 Lorimer mentions a total of 18,000 for the entire Gulf region.) Most Hawala histories locate them primarily in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait, with smaller communities in eastern Saudi Arabia and Oman.18 They also unanimously mention that the Hawala spoke Arabic as their mother tongue. Significantly, the term Hawala is not an official identity. Rather, it is firmly enmeshed in a field of subnational identifications that circulate informally throughout the Gulf. These include sectarian and religious categories such as Sunni and Shi‘i. However, the Gulf ’s communitarian vocabulary also includes broadly ethnic terms such as Baluchis, Ajamis (Persians), Bohras, and Banians (merchant communities/ castes from the subcontinent). Although an ethnic identification of Hawala is used throughout much of the Gulf, this is not so everywhere in the Arabian Peninsula. For example, the Hawala are probably unheard of in the Hijaz or Yemen, and are not mentioned among historians and genealogists as living in the peninsula’s interior. It is almost certain that the term’s vernacular purchase lies firmly along the peninsula’s eastern shores, and even there other terms are used interchangeably with it, including ‘arab fāris, the Arabs of Fars, or ‘arab bar fāris, the Arabs of the plains of Fars. As an identification, the term seems to have taken root more in Bahrain than anywhere else in the Gulf. This is not surprising given the continuous historic migrations of families between Bahrain and the Persian coast. Also, the sheer historic diversity of Bahrain’s The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 305 demographic and ethnic makeup as well as the island’s particular colonial history gives such categories particular currency as they become part of an indispensible communitarian vocabulary, not unlike what exists in Lebanon or Iraq. As for a dialect, little can be concluded about what sort of Arabic the Hawala speak without extensive ethnolinguistic fieldwork. In spite of recent impressive work on the Arabic dialects of the peninsula,19 the diversity of Arabia’s vernacular linguistic landscape is often underappreciated. Such diversity is often subsumed under the generic term of “Gulf Arabic,” or khalīji, a crude term that obfuscates more than it reveals. Although there is no clearly distinct Hawala dialect today, the Hawala speak with an accent that is more consistent with the forms of Najdi peninsular Arabic of central Arabia as opposed to other dialects that exist on the western shore of the peninsula. For example, the Hawala do not speak Bahrāni, a dialect found along a thin ribbon of mainly Shi‘i settled and historically agricultural communities of the coast from Hasa and Qatif in Saudi Arabia, to Bahrain, the Emirates and into Oman and Yemen, roughly the same area as Hawala settlement.20 The Hawala are exclusively Sunni, and their tribal affiliations are weak if extant at all in any meaningful way. Several historians make assertions about their tribal origins. Most cite a number of tribes, rather than a unified tribal ancestry for them. The tribes to which most Hawala families claimed to belong include the Banu Tamim, Banu Malik, and Banu Hammad.21 Other Hawala clan names include the Banu Bishr, Banu Ubaidil, al-Ali, al- Haram, al-Maraziq, al-Nusur, and the al-Madhkur.22 As such the Hawala can be better described as a set of migratory clans rather than tribal Arabs with a single identifiable lineage. In the contemporary era, Hawala merchant families such as the Wazzans of Bahrain managed to transform their trading businesses into large and highly diversified conglomerates during the oil boom of the late twentieth century.23 As in the case of their forebears, the largest of these businesses are transnational and operate in virtually all of the Gulf’s major metropolises and beyond. Their disproportionate presence in the business community has resulted in a reputation for financial acumen. Significantly, economic privilege is one stereotype that will become important in what follows. Furthermore, many of the Hawala have been politically active members of their communities, and linked to nationalist and labor networks that stretched from Basra to East Africa during the twentieth century. This was particularly the case in Bahrain, where men like Abdulrahman al-Bakir and Jasim Murad led the Arab nationalist movement of the 1950s, but were also founding members of the native press and related literary circles.24 306 M Ahmed al-Dailami

The Hawala “Narrative” Beyond providing some background to the rest of this chapter, the line of investigation pursued above is neither particularly interesting nor profitable. In fact, any attempt to define a group though stable cultural “characteristics” harkens back to an older anthropology that is often essentializing and reductionist. The rest of this chapter will not, therefore, be a conventional ethno-history of a group with discernible “customs and traditions.” For if we were to pursue such an analysis, it would mean writing about a relatively small, somewhat obscure set of migratory clans traveling between the eastern and western shores of the Gulf, a historically normal state of affairs. Beyond the epistemological problems with such an approach, there is no compelling reason to support the idea that the historic Hawala are a culturally, economically, or politically distinct entity today. Those who self- classify as Hawala have no unique dialect, customs, folklore, or iconography that set them apart from those around whom they live on either shore of the Gulf. Although stereotypes of formidable business acumen and liberal political attitudes prevail, they remain mere stereotypes. But then why does the term persist, and if it no longer refers to a particular group of people, what new meanings and significance has it taken on? To answer these questions one has to isolate an all-important peculiarity of the Hawala as a category, one that has furnished it with both its controversy and longevity. That is the very historical claim from which the Hawala nomenclature is most probably derived: their historic alienation from, but eventual return to Arabia. In other words, what those by virtue of calling themselves Hawala immediately share more than anything else, is a narrative. I use the term narrative not in the sense of a diasporic displacement or of collective suffering, but rather as an itinerary of departure, and critically, of return. Although “narrative” carries heavy connotations of collective experience such as trauma, loss, etc., the Hawala “story” is based on the fact that movements from, and back to, Arabia took place, rather than the desire to honor any particular experience. A Hūli (singular) is practically defined by this restorative, even redemptive “homecoming” back into the Arab fold. More than anything else then, the narrative is an insistence on return, one that directs us not to a particular group of people but to the questions—return to what, and from where, and why such an insistent equating of origins and final destinations? Why this insistence on being “not, not Arab.”25 Therefore, more rewarding is to take seriously what the term has come to signify in the contemporary Gulf: Arabs returned from Persia. This is not The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 307 because the narrative, rather than the historical version of Hawala history, is a more probable explanation of the Hawala’s past, but precisely because it is vastly more popular, and by extension, more telling about the present.

The Geopolitics of Stigma To begin to comprehend “Hawala” as a meaningful identification is to recognize its inconsistent place in a much larger system of signification. This larger set of oppositions between being Persian or Arab or Sunni or Shi‘i in the Gulf of today is given ideological and material force once it is contextualized as part of a wider history of indirect colonial rule and the postcolonial geopolitical framework. The more fascinating element of the Hawala as an identification is revealed when we allow the historical element of who the “real” Hawala are to recede into the background and focus on how ethnic claims-making came to promise socioeconomic and cultural inclusion during the second half of the twentieth century. First under the auspices of a maturing colonial state, then under the various nationalisms that rose against it, and finally in the context of the postcolonial national/cultural projects of the Gulf, the category of the Hawala took on new meanings and associations. To begin to decipher such changes one can start with one of the earliest mentions of the term Howli/Hawala that we know of, not only for what it says, but also for where and how one can see it.

* * *

On the second floor of the Bahrain National Museum, in a room named “Documents and Manuscripts,” there are numerous glass cases that display fragments of manuscripts, papers, and parchments. One such case contains a land deed to a palm grove that had been sold near the village of Salmabad, a few kilometers south of Manama. The document, dated 1628 ce (1037/38 Hijri), bears the name of “al makhzouma bint al mar’hum ‘hassan ‘hurrami al ‘hūli,” or “the honorable daughter of the deceased Hassan Hurrami al hūli” (pronounced how-li). The document is said to be among the first ever use of the term hūli (singular for Hawala).26 (ح) Significantly, the term howli in the document is spelled using deep ḥ -that is, the document uses the original, “pre-cor ,(ه) rather than the soft h rupted” pronunciation, giving credence to the “corruption thesis.” Again, etymological conjecture here is neither analytically fruitful, nor particularly interesting. However, what is notable is that to my knowledge, the document contains the only mention of the term howli in the entire National 308 M Ahmed al-Dailami

Museum, or any of its numerous publications for that matter. Furthermore, the document is presented as part of a series of other similarly dated manuscripts that speak not to any multicultural/polyglot past but simply to the antiquity of legal transactions in Bahrain. In other words, it is a display of national credentials, and not, by any stretch of the imagination, an exploration into the ethnic “origins” of the Hawala as “one group among many” that have historically inhabited the islands. As far as the National Museum is concerned, that would detract from the pressing ideological compulsion of projecting Bahrain as a stable legal entity well into the past. As one can expect, such a nationalist imaginary is hard at work throughout the halls of this, and every other national museum up and down the Arab side of the Gulf. Formulated at times of great political insecurity, the projects that aimed at producing “national identities” for the Gulf states were forged in the shadow of Iranian nationalism under the shah, Marxist Revolution (Oman, 1962–1969), Islamic Revolution (Iran, 1978–1979), destructive wars (Iran– Iraq 1980–1988), and attempted annexations (Kuwait, 1991), not to mention territorial claims, either over entire states (Bahrain), or territories (the Tunb Islands and Abu Musa). The newly independent Gulf states’ larger neighbors of Ba‘athist Iraq, but particularly Iran (both before and after its revolution), are often invoked not only as regional rivals, but as existential threats. It is in the wake of such threats that the Gulf states began con- solidating their cultural assets into the great themes of their state-building projects: genealogically conceived Arab authenticity and orthodox Sunni Islam, all underwritten by an ideology of social mobility afforded by a benevolent state. Far from being a display of “coffee pots and camels,” these cultural projects are extremely ambitious and increasingly directed not only to domestic audiences but to global ones.27 Peninsular Arabia is presented not only as the source of Islam, but its guardian. Not only is it the origin of the real Arab tribes, but their last remaining stronghold of authenticity in the face of encroaching ideological enemies, be they communists, Iranians, the American military presence, or much more commonly an impending tide of unrestrained immigration. Various scholars have studied how Islam and Arab authenticity have become the twin pillars of these narratives of orthodoxy and legitimacy in the Arab Gulf.28 As such this is also the time, roughly the 1970s onward, in which various groups, be they ethnic or religious minorities (or majorities) began to experience the full brunt of the nationalist projects of various Gulf states. However, museums and their often unconvincing displays of national purity are but the latest step in a process of national consolidation that began much earlier in the twentieth century. The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 309

Colonial Beginnings During the late colonial period in the Gulf, roughly the mid-twentieth century, something curious began to happen to the Hawala as a category. Although records are scant, there were those in the British colonial establishment of the Gulf who felt compelled to systematize their ideas about the populations they governed. Given that the tribe or religious community was almost always the basic unit of political calculus wherever the British Empire allied with native rulers, this was particularly pressing for groups of ambiguous communal designation. The process by which colonial officials conceived of political life among natives in cultural and ethnic terms was no mere “on the spot” observation, but arose from a long tradition of thought about “traditional societies,” which had its origins in the shift toward indirect colonial rule in India after the Mutiny of 1857, and become salient by the twentieth century. One man who wrote prolifi- cally about the various peoples of the Gulf in such terms was Charles D. Belgrave, adviser to the Emir of Bahrain Shaikh Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa between 1926 and 1956.29 Like other officials of the British Raj around the subcontinent and Indian Ocean, Belgrave developed a keen awareness of the tribal, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity of the Gulf, and particularly for the demographically messy, polyglot place that was preindependence Bahrain. To men like Belgrave, as well as the Political Agents and Residents of the Gulf with whom he corresponded on an almost daily basis, the key to gov- erning “traditional society” was to develop a knowledge of its constituent parts: tribes, sects, castes, races, and ethnic groups. It was a view of native political life as dominated by forms of politics and economics defined by religious, kin-based, or customary ties. As Karuna Mantena has noted in her study of the intellectual history of indirect colonial power, “These emphasized the non-rational bases of sociability, that is, in terms of either the external force of social and economic structures or pervasive cultural attachments and historical habits . . . the question of politics [or political leanings among natives] was thus reframed in a context that increasingly emphasized the limits of political action in relation to social and cultural determinants.”30 This view of native political behavior as collectively determined in social and economic terms would have important legacies. Such a normative conception of political life was no mere strategy of dividing and ruling. It was an attempt to justify colonial rule by conceptualizing traditional societies as requiring, as a matter of their own survival, the preservation of traditional or customary forms of political organization.31 It is within this normative world that ethnic/religious identity and political allegiance were fused in order to make day to day policy decisions in the Gulf during the period of British “protection.” 310 M Ahmed al-Dailami

In late 1949 Belgrave compiled a report, “Persians in Bahrain,” as part of a correspondence with the British Political Agent to discuss what would be done about the Persian claim to Bahrain. The report is a concerted attempt at an ethnic classification of the Persians of the Gulf.32 Where Belgrave speaks of the Hawala, the report is worth quoting at length:

[They are] Sunni Persians, of the Shafi [Shafi‘i] sect, who have been established in Bahrain for several generations. They and the Sunni Persians claim that their ancestors were Arabs who migrated from Arabia to Persia many centuries ago, some of them, later, re-crossed the Gulf to Bahrain and to other Arab States such as Qatar and Oman. They call themselves Arab but the Baharna [Shi‘i Arabs of non-tribal descent] and the Bahrain Arabs [meaning Sunni Arabs of tribal descent] invariably refer to them as Holis. Few of them have been in Bahrain for more than two or three generations . . . They are not really liked by the Arabs or by the Baharna and they do not intermarry with the Arabs. There have been a few instances in recent years of Arabs accepting offers for their daughters from Holis but in most cases the marriages have been forbidden by the Ruler at the request of the other members of the family or tribe. Like many people whose origin is dubious the Holis advertise themselves in every possible way as being true Arabs though many of the older men among them still refrain from wearing the Arab ‘agal . . . Commercially they are the backbone of the community, they are energetic and prosperous and have more ability in trade both in the bazaars and in the pearl markets, than the Arabs or Baharna. Probably their mixed Persian and Arab backgrounds is an advantage to them. At the same time they are always conscious that the Arabs regard them as Persians. The Khalifah Shaikhs for example, will pay more attention to a ragged Bedouin from the desert than to a Holi merchant. The holis are better educated and richer than the Arabs, they own much property both in the towns and in the country, they are progressive and keenly political . . . Young Holis are the leading lights in the [political and cultural] clubs . . . [and there is] cause to believe that for political reasons many of the young anti- government Holis, who direct the affairs of the clubs . . . 33

Already before the latter half of the twentieth century, the Hawala were no longer seen as Arabs by the British political establishment, but as Persians. Moreover, the Hawala’s genealogical ambiguity translates into a form of political unreliability and social stigma. The roots of such curious transformations about who the Hawala are and what they “stand for” to contemporaries of Belgrave lie in the context in which the report was written and can be considered a sign of its times. The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 311

During a period of intensified migratory flux between Iran and the Arab side of the Gulf, roughly the decade of the 1930s, governments in the Gulf began placing controls on the movement of persons and families from Iran in unprecedented ways.34 The most prominent of the local Arab rulers, Shaikh Khaz‘al of Khuzistan, was “pacified” by Reza Shah in 1924. Sunni migration to the Arab side of the Gulf is generally thought to coin- cide with the consolidation of power by Reza Shah in the 1920s and 1930s. Migrants from Iran went from numbering in the tens of thousands every year during the 1930s to a handful of families by the 1960s. It is roughly at the same time (the 1930s) that passports and birth certificates became compulsory in the Gulf, bureaucratic innovations produced by what Benedict Anderson has called a “vectoral convergence of migration and nationalism in an industrial age.”35 Furthermore, fears of an Iranian demographic takeover were only exacerbated when the Iranian government, up until 1971, repeatedly renewed its claims to Bahrain and other territories “protected” by Britain in the Gulf. The antagonistic attitude of the shah’s government informed the need (as imagined by British-protected states of the Gulf) to reduce the political exposure of their populations to Iranian political irredentism.36 This is not to say that distinctions between Arabs and Persians were of purely colonial fabrication, but simply to make the uncontroversial claim that colonial officials imagined a convergence between ethnic identity, political allegiance, and administrative territory well before “Third World” nationalism attempted to do so later in the twentieth century.37 The Persians and Arabs of the Gulf are no exception to this. However, “Third World” nationalism would also play a very prominent role in developing an ethnic consciousness in the Gulf as well. If Iranian irredentism had fanned the flames of Arab-Iranian antagonism among elites in the Gulf, then Arab nationalists of the Gulf also cultivated ideas of Arab national purity that excluded the Gulf’s large Persian-speaking communities.38 In 1952, Bahrain’s venerable Persian School was shut down (by the state), and before the turn of the decade, Nasserist leaders were writing nationalist tracts that railed against the dangers of the “fifth column” that the Persian communities of the Gulf represented.39 Finally, it is precisely at this time that the infamous dispute erupted over the correct geographic designation for the Gulf (Arabian or Persian), one that bitterly persists to this day. Consequently by the 1950s colonialism and nationalism had, in different ways and for different reasons, made it increasingly undesirable to be of Persian background on the Arab side of the Gulf. The result was that another category of people, far more numerous than the historic or “real” Arab Hawala, began to speak of themselves as such. They were the large community of Sunni Persian speakers from the south of Iran, who until 312 M Ahmed al-Dailami then had been satisfied to speak of themselves as Ajam, the generic term in the Gulf for Persians or Persian speakers. As more and more Ajam, or Persians, spoke of themselves as Hawala, administrators like Belgrave associated the term Hawala with Persians rather than its original Arab referents; hence in his report he defines the Hawala as Persians. Unlike the Hawala, the Ajam of the Gulf spoke Persian as a first language, still had close familial connections to Iran, and family names clearly derived from Persian towns and villages such as the Janaḥīs of Janaḥ, Kuhijīs of Kuhij, and the Bastakīs of Bastak. Their migration to the Arab side of the Gulf took place intermittently and most probably overlapped with the movements of the Arab Hawala. The reasons for the large influx of Iranians to the Arab side include Reza Shah’s centralizing modernization program. The most unpopular of its elements were military conscription, the imposition of new taxes on the ports of the south, and according to some, the inter- mittent persecution of southern Iran’s Sunnis.40 All these factors contributed to the accelerated transference of Iran’s Sunnis to the other side of the Gulf over the course of the early to mid-twentieth century. It was the Islamic Revolution of 1979, however, that alienated the Arab populations of the Gulf from Iran more severely than any other previous event.41 The revolution reinforced the ethnic divisions that secular nationalism had established between “Arabs” and “Persians” with the sectarian division between Sunnis and Shi‘is. This and the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980 led to the formation in 1981 of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an act of geopolitical consolidation that was ominous news for the Persian- speaking populations of the Arab side of the Gulf. However, for Sunni Persian speakers, the revolution’s Islamicization of political life presented an opportunity to reinvent themselves as political subjects. By the end of the twentieth century, one would be hard pressed to find any Sunni Persians that would call themselves Persian or Ajami. Practically the entire community, whose numbers probably far exceed those of the historic Hawala, now prefer to speak of themselves as Arab. In Bahrain, this transformation has taken on even grander proportions. Not only has the community now decided to reidentify as Arab through the category of the Hawala, but it has even chosen to dissociate from the Persian language in creative ways. Unlike Shi‘i Persians of the Gulf who still commonly speak Persian (even if their formal education is in Arabic), there are hardly any young Sunni Persian speakers any longer.42 So powerful is this younger generation’s impulse to dissociate from Iran, that the Persian language that their parents would speak is now—bizarrely— referred to as Hūli, or the supposed tongue of the Hawala: an entirely new term for what is basically a southern dialect of Persian. If the Hawala had a language of their own, it would simply be Arabic. The reason for this is The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 313 that Persian-speaking Sunnis with the legacy of Persian as a first language— often identifiable in an older generation’s imperfect Arabic—would rather call it Hūli than Ajami, as if it were something other than a southern vernacular of Persian, or what is often called Bastaki.43 Although it is very difficult to find documentary evidence, there are some vestiges of such a transformation available to historians. For example, Bahrain’s thriving associational life of cultural and sports clubs in the 1950s included clubs that catered to particular communities. Bahrain’s large Persian community of both Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims established Nādi al-Firdawsi, or the Firdawsi Club, a choice of name which could not have been more deliberate, but more importantly for which the original membership lists survive.44 The list includes names like Bastaki, Khunji, and Akbari, all Persian Sunni families that formerly participated in Persian cultural and associational life. By the late twentieth century, not only did Persian associational life no longer include its Sunni members, but any organization that had an overtly Persian nomenclature made it untenable and subject to deep political suspicion. Today, not a single secular institution of that sort exists. The only overtly “Persian” institution is the ma’atam al ‘ajam al kabīr, the oldest and most prominent “Persian” mosque of Manama. This was first built in 1892, and as a mosque is not easily subject to closure. Ultimately the culmina- tion of this process has been the practical redefinition of Sunni Persians as Hawala, particularly in Bahrain. In fact, the mutation of the category of the Hawala is now so complete that the term now means Persian rather than Arab. In the process, the term has taken on pejorative connotations that have even prompted some historians to liken it to the profanity of a racial slur.45 Such connotations indicate that the impulse to “self-Arabize” by many Persian Sunnis is by no means entirely successful or complete, but that it is persistent and perhaps even prudent in the long term. The reasons for this disavowal are complex, numerous, and cannot be thoroughly explored here. Nevertheless, the expansion of the Hawala category to include formerly excluded others has to do with the ways in which racial and ethnic hierarchies have hardened. In the Gulf, genealogical considerations are of particular importance, perhaps unsurprising for hereditary monarchies with extensive investments in tribal politics. But eschewing such cultural considerations means that concrete material interests are also at stake, if not for individuals, then for entire communities as they conform or resist assimilation into the politically acceptable conventions and categories of national membership.46 Obviously, the type of cultural repudiation I have discussed here is most pressing for those whose national credentials are more questionable than others, in this case Persians rather than Arabs. After the Islamic 314 M Ahmed al-Dailami

Revolution in 1979 Sunni Persians were of the “wrong” sect in Iran, and the “wrong” ethnicity in Arabia. The Hawala narrative was a convenient way for Sunni Persians who now lived in the Arab Gulf to narrate their way out of such an anomalous position. They, along with the historic Hawala, were now Arabs, whose residence in Persia was temporary, and who have now “returned.” So far, we have seen how an empirical definition of the Hawala as a historic “people” is no longer tenable. With the transformations of cultural convention and social structure that took place over the course of the twentieth century, colonialism, nationalism, and political Islamism variously imposed new ideals of what it meant to be Persian or Arab in the Gulf, thus idealizing or stigmatizing certain ideas of allegiance, citizenship, and belonging at the expense of others. In due course, the category of the Hawala became a lifeline for those who felt compelled to reinscribe themselves into acceptable polities under new historical circumstances, completely altering the term’s referents by the end of the twentieth century. Such a reinscrip- tion occurs most revealingly though the actual writing of the history of the Hawala by various contemporary historians from the Gulf. Written with a clear corrective tenor, new histories with a revisionist impulse are perhaps the best window into how identifications are protected from intrusion, or recrafted to reflect new political realities.

The Hawala and the Writing of Minority Histories in the Gulf As the state-building projects of the Arab Gulf matured, so too did the nationalisms that informed them. Yet, the contemporary nationalism of the Gulf states has had an evolutionary trajectory so different than that of neighboring nationalisms that scholars do not even refer to it as such, opting instead for “national identity,” a perennial favorite of Gulf scholars. The preponderance of the literature on national identity, however, probably has more to do with the unsaid consensus that the Gulf has no such thing, rather than an excess of it. That is also why most discussions of “identity” in the Gulf are constructivist studies of how states manufacture or selectively produce such identities.47 But if we are to move beyond the world of official representations, more oblique approaches to how such nationalisms are variously celebrated, internalized, or challenged, are necessary. In other words, it would require examination of how such hegemonies operate within the body politic itself. One genre of writing that allows for such visibility is the field of contemporary historical writing in the Gulf. For the experimental nationalisms of the Gulf, the writing of history by both laypersons and scholars has become a revealing laboratory. A relatively new and bourgeoning subfield of Gulf history comes in the form The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 315 of “communal” or “minority histories,”48 although the term “minority history” does not capture the particular historical experience of many of these groups. They include the Baluchis, the Hawala, and various transnational communities such as Zanzibaris in Oman. Because the publication of such histories depends on how little political controversy they will stir, they rarely challenge the dominant narratives of the state. Although innocuous to more dominant groups in society, such histories encode messages that demand inclusion by fusing historical empiricism with current idioms of authenticity and orthodoxy. To explore these histories, therefore, is to show how the Hawala have come to represent themselves within the national community. More importantly, it is one way to expose the parameters of the hegemonic order to which historical knowledge constantly refers and responds, i.e. those to whom this new knowledge is presented. It is precisely in this mode that one is compelled to interpret the purpose of such histories: to zealously present one’s national credentials. The revelatory potential of such “adaptive responses to nationalism” is immense, and is far richer than the way official state discourse represents its “others.” This is why I have chosen to look at the narrative acrobatics embedded in “Hawala” history as it is written by those who claim to be Hawala themselves. In particular, I examine two histories: Tarikh ‘Arab al-Hawala wal ‘Utub (The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub [tribes]) by historian Jalal al-Ansari of Saudi Arabia published in Beirut in 2011, and Tarikh al ‘Arab al-Hawala: dirasa tarikhiyya watha’iqiyya (The History of the Arab Hawala: A Documentary History) published in Kuwait in 1996 by Mohammed Gharib Hatam of Kuwait. Both are popular histories of the Hawala widely available throughout the Gulf today, although they take different approaches and are of very different scholarly quality. I have chosen to begin with Hatam’s Documentary History first, only insofar as it was published more than a decade earlier than Al-Ansari’s history.

“Hawala at the Gates” Mohammed Gharib’s book on the history of the Arab Hawala is a popular history written for a popular audience. The author claims no particular scholarly authority, but does assert that the book will “clarify in the language of social scientists every family, branch, tribe, village, and city” that relates to the Arab Hawala.49 As such it is an attempted “total history,” very much like one that would be written for a nation. The scientific method evoked is meant to emphasize not only the empiricism of the author’s approach, but to qualify the Hawala themselves for national membership—the main thrust 316 M Ahmed al-Dailami of the book. For it is though narratability and documentary rationality that such histories may enter the historical canon.50 It is not the methodologically acceptable writing of a minority history that makes this book particularly interesting. Documents go unreferenced, events are mentioned without dates, and a slew of anachronisms, elisions, and inaccuracies disqualify it from the conventions of good historical writing. Nonetheless, it is one of the first attempts at minority history in the Gulf. It is questionable, though, whether this is a minority history in the first place, since histories of minorities conventionally attempt to broaden the field of mainstream national history by including those previously excluded and omitted from its overarching narrative be they women, ethnic groups, working classes, etc. But the author seems uninterested in that kind of project. Tarikh Arab al-Hawala is a reversal of the othering process itself. In other words, it is an attempt at effacing difference rather than expressing it. It effaces the difference between those tainted with their history of “mixing with Persians” and those whose Arab genealogies remain intact. Before Tarikh ‘Arab al-Hawala begins, the reader is presented with a copy of a “historical document” or wathiqa, reprinted with the caption: “documentary evidence that Kuwait has been an independent state, with its own flag since 1743 . . . it [the wathiqa] also mentions the impressive seamanship of the nakhoda (sea captain) Gharib bin Hatam” (presumably an ancestor of the author). This implicit adherence to the state narrative of national origins, one that anachronistically pre-dates the independence of the current state of Kuwait by centuries, correlates the Hawala narrative with that of the state of Kuwait itself. For if the Hawala are to “truly belong”, they must do so not on competitive terms, in the sense of being more authentic, but on normative ones, that is, as authentic. Here the author betrays the book’s ultimate referent and audience: those who adjudicate who is to be allowed truly national credentials. The Hawala are, almost literally in Kuwait’s case, knocking at the gates.51 In order to achieve this seamlessness with received notions of national belonging in the Arab states of the Gulf, certain historical “truths” need to be established, primarily among them “unequivocal proof of the ‘Arabness’ or ‘urubah, of the Hawala in southern Iran.” Herein however lies the type of exclusive national imaginary at work, for if one is to evoke the nation genealogically in its genesis, then real belonging becomes not a matter of when an independent state emerged and who may have fought for its independence, but who can claim descent from its founding fathers. Similar to a process compellingly described in Andrew Shryock’s Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination,52 the author positions the Hawala, and by extension himself, at the center of a narrative of authenticity in transcribing the history of the Hawala from a fragmented body of The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 317 oral histories into a documentary “total history.” The book is written in a remarkably consistent vocabulary and idiom of shaikhs, tribes, genealogies, sayyeds, honor, and noble descent, where these tropes function not as markers of Hawala particularity, but as vouchers and valuators of their legitimate membership into the genealogically acceptable (i.e., Arab and not Persian) national community. A sense of historical anachronism is evident throughout the book; for example, there is a tendency to mishandle the passage of time by citing terms and institutions that could not have possibly existed or applied to the subject at hand. Such a tendency is clearly visible from the opening pages of the book, where Hatam recounts how certain Hawala clans “returned to the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council,” after the Persian government enforced its cultural modernization programs in the south.53 Gallant Hawala leaders are spoken of as Arab, national heroes, such as Muhammad A‘zam Bastaki, Khan of Bastak, who “refused to be ruled by an ‘Ajami (Persian),”54 even though the khan’s own memoirs were written in Persian. One passage recounting an episode when Hawala leaders and their men on the island of Kharg resisted the depredations of the Qajars is worth quoting at length:

. . . their courage and tenacity were unbelievable, but numbers (of soldiers) may defeat bravery. Indeed they were honorable and devoted to safeguarding their nation/homeland (watanuhum) [emphasis mine], their island, and their “Arabness,” to keep the government in Shiraz from con- quering the land of their Arab ancestors . . . 55

However, the most remarkable element of Hatam’s Documentary History is how expansive it is on who the Hawala are. Practically all of southern Iran’s Sunnis are regarded as Hawala, developing an unsaid sectarian line of division between Arabs and Persians in the process. Characteristic of the postrevolutionary (1979) era in the Arab Gulf, the genealogical interrogation that Hatam carries out leaves no room for anomalies such as Sunni Persians, or indeed Shi‘i Arabs. There is not a single mention of either in the entire book, even though they probably outnumbered the historic (Arab) Hawala both in their adopted homeland of southern Iran such as in the cities of Bastak, Khunj, and Lingeh, and some sites they chose to migrate to upon their return to Arabia such as Bahrain and Qatif. Using a large number of remarkably elaborate (but unreferenced and undated) genealogical trees, interviews with mashayikh or “elders,” and miscellaneous wathai’iq, or documents, Hatam exerts great effort to generate distinguished lines of descent, often relating them to ancient Meccan nobil- ity or descendants of the Prophet. No attention is paid to the fact that the sacred family trees that the author himself uses are often written in Persian. 318 M Ahmed al-Dailami

Furthermore, the claim to “Arabness” is developed using the lineages of Islamic antiquity, forgetting that the Hawala are said to have migrated to Iran in the seventeenth century at the earliest. However, such details do not detract from the remarkable political artifact that this book amounts to: an attempt to widen the definition of the historic Arab Hawala to include practically all of southern Iran’s Sunnis, who until the publication of this book felt no immediate compulsion to generate such pedigrees. My objective here is not to establish the historical inaccuracy of this particular account of the past, but to retrieve it as part of the historical record of the Hawala—how they are defined, and what that tells us about the way state-driven nationalism operates in the Gulf today. Saving the Hawala from genealogical and historical obscurity, the author demands an exclusive definition of Hawala as Arabs as opposed to Persians, and Sunnis as opposed to Shi‘is. Therefore rather than questioning the contemporary boundaries of citizenship and national belonging in historical terms, the book simply reinforces them by acting as a guardian of “Arabness” on Arabia’s borderlands.

Corrective Narrations: The History of the Hawala Revised In contrast to Hatam’s book, Jalal al-Ansari has produced a more eloquent and far more generously referenced piece of historical writing. In this much more recent history of the Hawala and their relationship to the ‘Utubi tribes of Arabia, Ansari begins by acknowledging the confusion and controversy that surrounds the Hawala as an identification. He describes at length the stigma resulting from misconceptions and inaccuracies about who the Hawala actually are and were. However, from the book’s introduction it is clear that Ansari’s book shares a remarkable ideological affinity with other Hawala histories, including Hatam’s, in its insistence on the unequivocal “Arabness” of the Hawala clans. The introduction begins with a quotation from the writings of the Shaikh of Qatar, Muhammad bin Ahmed al-Thani, which to Ansari encapsulates the unacceptable confusion that surrounds the Hawala and their origins:

[The Hawala are] “Arabized Persians [‘ajam ista’rabu], and Persianized Arabs [‘arab ista’ jamu], and mixed with Arabs in their villages, and became akin to vassals to them [the Arabs]; most of them are traders, sailors, and clerics, and are among the earliest inhabitants of Bahrain and Qatar, and among them are Sunnis and Shi‘is . . . ”56

This quotation, by a person of not insignificant background, combines all the fallacies of impurity and confusion about the Hawala that the author The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 319 ultimately seeks to challenge: dubious genealogical lineage, base social standing, and to add insult to injury, unclear religious leanings create for Ansari the “problem” that the rest of his history attempts to rectify in historical terms. The book continues with a brief history of imperial competition among Ottoman, Dutch, and Portuguese forces in the Gulf during the eighteenth century. It quickly moves on to etymological explorations of the term Hawala, citing its first mention in an early history of Bahrain by one of its famous learned scholars, Shaikh Yusuf al-Bahrani, during the year 1700, or 1113 of the Hijri calendar.57 Throughout the first half of the book, the Hawala are presented as shaikhly clans akin to their ‘Utubi Arab brethren with whom they variously ally politically, compete, but also trade and coexist. Interestingly, the book then desists from narrating an early history of the Hawala to develop a taxonomy of Arabs and then non-Arabs that inhabit the Gulf basin.58 Cited in this order, Bedouin Arabs, Baharna Arabs, Arabs of the northern Gulf, and finally the Hawala Arabs are sequentially given tribal designations and territorial geographic demarcations. Al-Ansari then moves to other groups that inhabit the Gulf. These include the Persians (Ajam), Omanis, and Baluchis. Finally, once this ethnic catalogue is established, he begins to describe the Hawala al-asliyun, or the “original Hawala,” and duly establishes venerable tribal and familial origins of various “authentic” Hawala clans. None of the above is either referenced or sourced, but simply listed in order to arrive at a final, concise definition of the Hawala and their unquestionably pure Arab, or ṣarīḥ, origins.59 The next 200 or so pages contain a formidable contribution to the history of the Gulf where the author lays out a detailed description of the history of Hawala clans, their reaction to imperial intrusion into the Gulf, their relations with the ‘Utubi tribes of the Gulf’s opposite (Arab) shore, biographies of Hawala leaders, and throughout, their dealings with the political ambitions of the Persian government in its unruly southern territories. Although a far more detailed and well-researched piece of writing, the end result is something not dissimilar to the thrust of Hatam’s book: an attempt to create historical mirror images of independent Arab shaikhdoms on both the Gulf’s Arab and Persian shores, with the Hawala clans as rulers of such shaikhly dominions in Persia, and their ‘Utubi relations in Arabia. However, there is much more to al-Ansari’s book than the retrieval of a Hawala past. Perhaps the most valuable part of the book is in its contextu- alization of the controversy that informs the term Hawala as just one point of contention in a much larger set of axes of identity. Chapter 11 of the book titled “The Arabo-Persian Conflict and Its Effects on the Morphology of Gulf Identity” (al-‘sira’ al-‘arabi al-farisi wa ta’thirahu al-siyaghat al hawiyya al khalijiyya), is a thoughtful reflection on why the Hawala have become a 320 M Ahmed al-Dailami source of contention and a focal point of identity politics in the Gulf. In it, the author cites a register of political conflicts that have eliminated the historical cosmopolitanism attributed to the Gulf as a polyglot, multiethnic region, however tenuous such a claim may be. In this chapter, al-Ansari begins by citing the age of high nationalism in the Middle East and remarks on how “rather than fighting to maintain their identities, the people of the Gulf have fought to change them.”60 In what follows, he laments the history of violence and conflict of the twentieth century Gulf. With some nostalgia, he mentions the destructive spread of nationalism, sectarianism, and notably the emergence of “role models” in the hierarchies of Arab Gulf citizenship, or what he calls “groups that rise to prominence at certain historical junctures that can showcase their cultural identity at the expense of other groups . . . ” supported “by the media and financial resources [of states].”61 As a history of the Hawala, al-Ansari’s book does not directly challenge official narratives of national identity in the Gulf. In fact, al-Ansari is unable to move beyond the realm of historical empiricism in service of maintaining the genealogical purity of the Arab Hawala. To him, the history of the Hawala remains simply a search for truths of a forgotten past rather than a tool to question the arrangements that govern the present. Toward the end of the book he writes: “The responsibility falls on the sons of this group [the Hawala] to spread the correct [message] that insists on the purity of [their] Arabness, and to respond to irresponsible efforts that do otherwise, by thinking and writing [about the truth].”62

Conclusion At least for the past half century or so, the Hawala have evaded definition. If there are any conclusions to be drawn from the category’s unstable trajectory as an ethnicity, it is that the mercurial character of the term lies not with the difficulty of retrieving a particular past, but with the political history of nation-building in the Gulf. As the state-building projects of the Arab Gulf states mature, the category of the “Hawala” has lost reference to its antecedents, gradually morphing into a versatile narrative of departure from and return to peninsular Arabia. Simultaneously, one can detect a harden- ing of the categories of Arab, Persian, Sunni, and Shi‘i that render this narrative of origins and destinations one of “pilgrimage back to an ancestral source . . . [as] movements of descendants towards ancestors, and of inferiors to superiors.”63 Even though the body of historical writing that has emerged on the Hawala seems to perpetuate the exclusive boundaries of national belonging, not all of them do so without some critical reflection. More sensitive cultural The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 321 critics and historians correctly assume that exploring religious and ethnic identities as if they were self-evident contributes to the reckless, and already excessive politics of sectarianism in the Gulf. As perhaps the preeminent contemporary historian of the Hawala, Jalal al-Ansari is well aware of the destructive nature of identity politics in the Gulf. In a reflexive grieving for a cosmopolitanism lost, his book nevertheless confronts the chauvinism and xenophobia that its author detects in the popular nationalisms of the Gulf of today. To him such phenomena are best exemplified in the emergence of what roughly translates to an “ideal-type role model,” in the figure of ‘arab al-sahra, or the “Desert Arab,” “ . . . he who is proud of the purity of his Arab lineage, Arabic language, its authenticity free from the taint of other nationalisms.”64 He shows how this type of dogmatism circulates in the press and media, creating, normalizing, and then propagating stereotypes and prejudices about the Gulf’s various “others.”65 Reflecting on the polarized state of affairs in the Gulf after the Iranian Revolution, al-Ansari goes even further, and turns to the Arabic literary canon as a source of historical elucidation and perhaps political inspiration. In conceptualizing the historical “hybridity” of the Gulf, the author presents an antidote, a literary antithesis of the purebred role model of the “desert Arab” in the figure of Sindbad the Sailor. The name Sindbad, and the compendium of tales, One Thousand and One Nights, in which Sindbad figures prominently, are probably, at least in part, of Persian origin. Even though Sindbad is from the Arab city of Basra, his legendary peregrinations among the ports of Arabia, Persia, and the subcontinent are a literary encap- sulation of the embattled cultural heritage of the Gulf. Albeit clear in his leanings as a historical purist when it comes to defending the “Arabness” of the historic Hawala, al-Ansari is no simple polemicist either. With a mixture of nostalgic lament and candid cultural criticism, he reminds us that there remain in the Gulf those willing to retrieve from the past what states have conveniently eschewed: a long, if beleaguered history of normal fraterniza- tion rather than sensational rivalry between the Arab World and Iran on their mutual borderlands.

Notes

1. “ . . . (Arabs) mixed with Persians and other non-Arabs. Purity of lineage was completely lost, and its fruit, the group feeling, was lost and rejected. The tribes, then, disappeared and were wiped out, and with them, the group feeling was wiped out.” Ibn Khaldun, “On Purity and Confusion of Lineage,” in The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, vol. 1, trans. Franz Rosenthal, Bollingen Series XLIII (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1958), 267. 322 M Ahmed al-Dailami

2. Toby Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Lawrence G. Potter, ed., Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (London: Hurst, 2013); Frederic Wehrey, Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 3. H. E. Chehabi, “Iran and Iraq: Intersocietal Linkages and Secular Nationalisms,” in Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, ed. Abbas Amanat and Farzin Vejdani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 4. This is particularly true in Bahrain where the term Hawala has more purchase as a meaningful category than anywhere else in the Gulf, but also where its use has changed most dramatically. 5. This incongruence has its roots in the rise of an ethnic consciousness in the Gulf akin to what Andrew Shryock has called “popular genealogical nationalism.” See his Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 311–28. 6. The term Hawala I use here is derived from the pronunciation of the formal Arabic . Other vernacular pronunciations would see the terms transliterated differently. 7. The Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, ’Oman and Central Arabia, ed. J. G. Lorimer. Volume 1 (Historical) and Volume 2 (Geographical) (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1915 and 1908); repub. by Gregg International (1970) and others). 8. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, 754–55. 9. Mohammed Gharib Hatam, Tārīkh ‘Arab al-Hawala: dirāsah tārīkhiyyah wathā’iqiyyah (The History of the Arab Hawala: A Historical Documentary Study) (Beirut, Lebanon: al-mu’assasah al‘arabiyyah lil dirasāt w’al nashr, 2003), 2–15; Jalal al-Ansari, Tārīkh ‘Arab al-Hawala wa al’Utūb (The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub) (Beirut, Lebanon: dār al-‘arabiyyah lil mawsū’āt, 2011). 10. For more on the Arab migrations in the Gulf see Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi, “The Arab Presence on the Iranian Coast of the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For a discussion of the Iranian takeover of the Arab principalities of the Persian coast during the nineteenth century, see Lawrence G. Potter, “The Consolidation of Iran’s Frontier on the Persian Gulf in the Nineteenth Century” in War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and Present, ed. Roxane Farmanfarmaian (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–48. 11. I discuss this early appearance of the term with more detail in a subsequent section of this chapter. 12. A study of this subject appeared after this chapter was competed. See Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Hula Arabs of the Shibkuh Coast of Iran (Washington, DC: Mage, 2014). 13. For more on the al-Madhkur, see Stephen R. Grummon, “The Rise and Fall of the Arab Shaykhdom of Bushire: 1750–1850” (PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1985). 14. “A Description of the Persian Gulf and Its Inhabitants in 1756,” Chapter 2 in Willem Floor, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs—The Politics of Trade The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 323

on the Persian Littoral 1747–1792 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2007), 27–30; quotation on p. 27. 15. M. Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia and other countries in the East, vol. II, trans. Robert Heron (Edinburgh: R. Morison and Son; reprint Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994), Section XXIII, 137–57. 16. Niebuhr, Travels, 143–45. For more detail on the internecine struggles, and maps of the Arab alliances on the Iranian coast, see Thomas M. Ricks, Notables, Merchants, and Shaykhs of Southern Iran and Its Ports: Politics and Trade of the Persian Gulf Region, AD 1728–1789 (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2012). This book is based on his “Politics and Trade in Southern Iran and the Gulf, 1745– 1765” (PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1975). 17. Niebuhr, Travels, 140 18. For examples of how some have recorded the distribution of the Hawala see: India Office Records, R/15/2/484 “Persian Claim to Bahrain,” April 1946–December 1950; Hatam, The History of the Arab Hawala and Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub. 19. Clive Holes, Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 20. Clive Holes, “The Arabic Dialects of Arabia,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 36 (2006): 25–34. 21. Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub, 65. 22. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf; Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub, 65. 23. For more on Hawala business families see Michael Field, The Merchants: The Big Business Families of Arabia (London: John Murray, 1984). 24. Although the British India Office Records include passing references to the Hawala as a middle class or “intelligentsia” of sorts, the only extensive discussion of such a phenomenon in English can be found in Assem Dessouki, “Social and Political Dimensions of the Historiography of the Arab Gulf,” in Statecraft in the Middle East: Oil, Historical Memory, and Popular Culture, ed. Eric Davis and Nicolas Gavrielides (Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991), 92–115. However, this should be used with caution. 25. The phrase was first used by Walid Sadek. Refer to his article, “Seeing Rude and Erudite” in Third Text 21 issue 3 (May 2007): 257–65. 26. al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub, 52. 27. The following are collective volumes that include work on the expanding investment of the Gulf states in projects that promote their cultural capital to global audiences. These are: Kingdom without Borders: Saudi Political, Religious and Media Frontiers, ed. Madawi al-Rasheed (London: Hurst, 2008); Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf, ed. Paul Dresch and James Piscatori (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005); and Statecraft in the Middle East, ed. Davis and Gavrielides. 28. See James Piscatori, “Managing God’s Guests: The Pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Legitimacy” in Monarchies and Nations; Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mandana Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Michael Herb, All in the 324 M Ahmed al-Dailami

Family: Absolutism, Revolution, and Democracy in the Middle Eastern Monarchies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). 29. Belgrave kept a personal diary that spans most of his 30-year career in addition to an extensive official correspondence with the British Political Agent at Bushehr and the India Office prior to 1947. For a sample of Belgrave’s published writings see The Pirate Coast (Beirut: Librarie Du Liban, 1960) and Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960). 30. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Origins of Indirect Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 14. 31. For a more extensive discussion of the institutional, historical and ideological reliance of indirect colonial rule on the concept of “traditional society” see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). However, Mantena’s intellectual history of indirect colonial rule remains the most authori- tative and rigorous exploration of the ideological underpinnings of colonialism, and particularly how the models of traditional society developed after 1857 were essential to the colonial princely state system that evolved India, but later in Malaya, Africa and across various European empires. 32. This was not unique to the correspondence of state officials. The Bahrain Oil Company, like most other oil companies in the Gulf, including Iran, routinely used an ethnic classification system for its workers. These categories included Bahraini, Iraqi, Baluchi, Iranian, Muscati, Saudi, Omani, and others. See table accompanying “Growth in Employment of Non-contract Daily Rate BAPCO workers 1939–1948,” in Foreign Office Records: FO/361/74942. 33. India Office Records, R/15/2/484, “Persian Claim to Bahrain,” Letter to C. J. Pelly, Esquire, OBE, ICS, HBM Political Agent, Bahrain. “Persians in Bahrain,” April 1946–December 1950. 34. See Ian J. Seccombe, “Labour Migration to the Arabian Gulf: Evolution and Characteristics 1920–1950,” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 10, no. 1 (1983): 3–20. For more on migration between Iran and the Arab Gulf see Shahnaz R. Nadjmabadi, “Cross-Border Networks: Labour Migration from Iran to the Arab Countries of the Persian Gulf,” Anthropology of the Middle East 5, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 22. 35. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 69. 36. For example see file IOR/15/2/484, for entries between April 1946–December 1950 with extensive discussions of Persian influence on politics in the Arab Gulf. 37. Although the colonial roots of nationalism is an extensively debated subject, one of the most succinct discussions of the phenomenon was penned by Perry Anderson. See “Gandhi Center Stage,” London Review of Books 34, no. 13 (July 5, 2012), 3–11. Other discussions of the subject include John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 57–59 and Anderson, “The Spectre of Comparisons,” 65. 38. Arab nationalism has historically emphasized language as a marker of one’s national credentials. Therefore although mild in terms of ethno-nationalism, early Arab nationalism in the Gulf was uncompromising when it came to exclud- ing, as non-Arabs, those who did not speak Arabic as their mother tongue. The Hawala between Persians and Arabs M 325

39. Abdulrahman Al-Bākir, Min al Bāhrayn ilā Sant Helāna (From Bahrain to St. Helena) (Beirut: Dar al-Kunuz al-Adabiyyah, 1965), 1–15. 40. Nadjmabadi, “Cross-Border Networks.” 41. For more on the effects of the Iranian Revolution on the political landscape of the Gulf see Lori P. Boghardt, Kuwait Amid War, Peace and Revolution: 1979–1991 and New Challenges (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Laurence Louër, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (London: Hurst, 2008). 42. The fact that there are still large numbers of Shi‘i Persian speakers of a younger generation disqualifies the resort to national educational curricula as an explanation for why Sunni Persians no longer speak Persian. 43. The reference is to the Iranian town of Bastak, located in the foothills of the Zagros mountains northwest of Bandar Lingeh, which sent many migrants to the Arab side of the Gulf. 44. Bushiri Archive, Manamah, Bahrain. 45. Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub, 298. 46. The literature on the relationship between ethnicity, nationalism, class, and political economy is vast. Between the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and history, a number of approaches have been taken to examine the relationship between the material interests of particular groups and colonial power, official nationalism, and capitalist penetration. For more on the subject see: Manu Goswami, Producing India: from Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991); A nderson, The Spectre of Comparisons; Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination; and Craig J. Calhoun, Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream (London: Routledge, 2007). 47. There is a considerable, and expanding, literature on the construction of “national identity” in the Arab Gulf states. The following is a small but representative sample of this popular subfield of Gulf studies: Christa Salamandra, “Cultural Construction, the Gulf and Arab London,” in Monarchies and Nations, eds. Piscatori and Dresch; Neil Partrick, “Nationalism in the Gulf States” in The Transformation of the Gulf: Politics, Economics and the Global Order, eds. David Held and Kristian Ulrichsen (London: Routledge, 2012); Sulayman Khalaf, “The Nationalisation of Culture,” in Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States, ed. Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (London: Saqi, 2008). 48. For examples of this literature, see Madawi Al-Rasheed, “Transnational Connections and National Identity: Zanzibari Omanis in Muscat” in Monarchies and Nations; Ahmed Yaqub al-Mazmi, al-balūch wa bilādihim fi dalīl al khalīj (The Baluch and Their Homeland in the Guide to the Gulf) (Beirut, Lebanon: Mu’assasat al-‘Intishār al-‘Arabī, 2012); Hatam, The History of the Arab Hawala; al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub. 49. Hatam, The History of the Arab Hawala, 7. 50. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98. 51. In historical terms, Kuwaiti citizenship is quite literally spoken of as accruing to those who lived within the settlement’s original walls. For more on this see Anh 326 M Ahmed al-Dailami

Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion and Society in Kuwait (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). 52. See note 4. 53. Hatam, History of the Arab Hawala, 12. 54. Ibid, p. 19. 55. Ibid, 20. 56. Wizārat al-Khārijīyah, al-Dawḥah, Qatar, Lamahāt min Tārikh Qatar (Glimpses from the History of Qatar) (Doha: Idārat al-Maʻlūmāt wa-al-Buḥūth, 2005), 49 and 82 quoted in Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub, 20. 57. Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the ‘Utub, 52. 58. Ibid., 55–60. 59. Ibid., 73. 60. Ibid., 237. 61. Ibid., 240. 62. Ibid., 297. 63. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 94. 64. Al-Ansari, The History of the Arab Hawala and the Utub, 241. 65. Ibid., 241. CHAPTER 12

The African Presence in Eastern Arabia

Matthew S. Hopper

Introduction For four decades, football teams representing each of the Arab Gulf states have competed for the coveted regional football championship title in the Arabian Gulf Cup of Nations (Kass al-Khalij), the Gulf’s premier athletic contest. Each fall, thousands of spectators in national dress crowd stadiums to cheer on their national teams. Foreign observers of the competition frequently express surprise at the notable African appearance of a large number of the spectators and players at the contest. These observers may justifiably wonder whether the presence of Africans in the Gulf, which is visible at events like the Kass al-Khalij, stems from recent migrations from Africa, from long-standing patterns of intermarriage between Arabs and Africans through trade and colonization, or from a deeper history involving the slave trade. Those who know something of the region’s medieval history may also wonder whether Africans in the Gulf today may be descendants of participants in the famous Zanj slave revolt of Basra in the ninth century ce. In each of the Arab states of the Gulf, a substantial African presence is visible today. Individuals of African ancestry are observable at every socioeconomic level and make up a particularly recognizable minority among the Gulf’s most popular celebrity athletes and musicians. Yet the vast majority of people of African descent in eastern Arabia today speak Arabic as their primary language and self-identify as Arabs rather than Africans. The Gulf has not experienced a Western-style, racially based civil rights movement, and pan-Africanist sentiment is largely unknown. 328 M Matthew S. Hopper

Visitors from the Atlantic world may therefore find African populations in the Gulf an uncomfortable fit with the more familiar features of the African diaspora in the Americas. From an Atlantic perspective, racial identifications in the Gulf may seem paradoxical because, in contrast with the Atlantic world, where race has tended to be reckoned by skin color (most dramatically in the “one-drop rule” of the North American experience), in the Indian Ocean world, race has tended to be reckoned by paternal descent. Because Arab men have historically enjoyed widespread regional mobility and have married into families well beyond the shores of the Gulf, the progeny of ethnically mixed unions have generally retained Arab genealogical (and therefore racial) identity whether their mothers were African or Southeast Asian.1 Skin color does matter in the Gulf (or there would not be so many skin-lightening clinics in Dubai) but in ways that differ from the Atlantic context—it does not indicate one’s patriline. Because Gulf populations are fluid and heterogeneous, including descendants of Arab families who settled over generations in East Africa and returned to the Gulf during the racial turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, and because these populations are influenced by the recent homogenizing trends of urbanization and national dress, there remains little incentive for those with servile ancestry to highlight that part of their family history. The African ancestry of many of the Gulf’s inhabitants has therefore been obscured by what Pier Larson has called “the countervailing forces of historical amnesia.” Larson reminds us that, although commemorating enslavement is characteristic of the Atlantic branch of the diaspora, we must be careful not to expect to find that universally throughout the global African diaspora. In other branches of the African diaspora, including much of the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world, there have been good reasons for the descendants of enslaved Africans and their enslavers to purposefully forget or differently remember the trauma of slavery.2 Deciphering these paradoxes requires an understanding of the history of the Gulf over at least two centuries. It is true that the significant African presence there today is largely attributable to the history of the slave trade. But this history has far more recent origins than is often assumed, and is closely tied to the history of globalization. A great many Africans were imported to eastern Arabia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to work in the production of commodities—like dates and pearls—for global markets. Not all slaves were Africans. Historically, the Gulf engaged slaves from Georgia, Armenia, the Caucasus, Baluchistan, and elsewhere. Likewise, not all Africans in the Gulf were slaves. But voluntary migration to the Gulf from Africa was extremely limited, and most people of African descent in the Gulf today trace their lineage to the unique period in the Gulf’s history when capitalism and global markets converged to create new demand for The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 329 labor that was met largely through the slave trade from Africa. This chapter examines the origins and legacy of contemporary African populations in the Gulf with particular focus on economics and labor.

Demographics The African presence in the Gulf is difficult to quantify prior to the late nineteenth century when British officials began to make concerted efforts to identify population groups in areas under their jurisdiction. By the turn of the twentieth century, Africans were a distinctly visible minority among Gulf populations and may have made up between a tenth and a quarter of the Gulf’s population. In 1876, the resident British government surgeon in Muscat estimated that a quarter of Muscat and Matrah’s 40,000 residents were “Negroes” and half of the remaining population was of “mixed race,” consisting of “different degrees of admixture between the Arab and the Negro, and the Arab and the Abyssinian.”3 Around the turn of the century, British imperial officials attempted to arrive at more accurate assessments of Gulf populations. In 1905, J. G. Lorimer estimated that Africans made up roughly 17 percent of the total population of coastal eastern Arabia between Oman and Kuwait. This included 11 percent of Kuwait’s population, 22 percent of Qatar’s population, 11 percent of Bahrain’s population, 28 percent of the Trucial Coast’s population, and 25 percent of Muscat and Matrah’s population. By contrast, African Americans made up 10–12 percent of the US population according to the censuses of 1900 and 1910.4 In the absence of formal assessments before the modern period, it is difficult to estimate the size of African populations in the Gulf’s distant past. Before the late nineteenth century, the limited sources for such estimates include descriptions by European visitors and representatives of the British East India Company, which are inherently subjective, anecdotal, and impressionistic, as European travelers seldom saw beyond the major port cities of the region and usually stayed briefly. If there was a large African presence in the Gulf before the late eighteenth century it appears to have been largely invisible to outside observers, as their accounts make scarce mention of them. By contrast, European travelers of the early nineteenth century attest to a significant African population in the Gulf and a thriving slave trade. This limited evidence suggests that either the numbers of Africans increased significantly or that European visitors became more aware of Africans. Africans were undoubtedly present in the Gulf prior to the late eighteenth century, despite their limited visibility to outsiders. John Ovington (1693) described the inhabitants of Muscat without mentioning Africans and referenced slavery only in the context of the mercy that was shown to 330 M Matthew S. Hopper enslaved captives taken when Muscat soldiers evicted the Portuguese from the Gulf. He does, however, relay a second-hand story told by Edward Say in which 30 “Black Sailors” jumped overboard from a ship bound from Muscat to Surat in order to evade capture by pirates.5 The Scottish sailor Alexander Hamilton, who visited Muscat around 1700, observed that slaves roasted fish on hot rocks in Muscat’s intense heat and that the king of Muscat was attended by an army of 100 slaves armed with matchlocks and swords at his forts in Nizwa and Rustaq.6 Hamilton’s account of date production at Basra makes no mention of Africans. He describes the workers who har- vested and packaged the dates (10,000 tons annually) simply as the “poor.”7 Likewise, when Abraham Parsons visited Basra, Bahrain, and Muscat aboard the HMS Seahorse in 1775 he witnessed pearling, fishing, and agriculture in a variety of forms, but if he saw Africans or slaves he did not mention them.8 Carsten Niebuhr did not include Africans or slaves in his description of Muscat except to say that a previous Imam of Muscat, “Imam Seif el Asdi” [Saif b. Sultan II, 1719–1743] of the Ya‘rubi dynasty had an army of “Caffer slaves.”9 Enslaved Africans were present in the Gulf before the nineteenth century, although their numbers appear to have been small enough to evade the notice of most European visitors. The presence of Africans in the Gulf in the military and on date plantations is, however, attested in the great Arabic chronicle of Omani history. According to Salil bin Razik’s History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman, Imam Saif bin Sultan I (1692–1711) of the Ya‘rubi dynasty owned 1,700 slaves and a third of the date palms in Oman.10 The same chronicle records that Ahmed bin Sa‘id (1744–1783) obtained 1,000 East African slaves through a single purchase in the 1740s and had a standing army made up of 1,100 slaves and 1,000 free men.11 Abdul Sheriff has suggested that the “social transformation of Oman into a mercantile state and the expansion of slave-based date production from c. 1700” helped create the demand for slave labor. He argues further that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Omani demand for slave labor served as the driving force in the expansion of Swahili traders from the East African port cities of Mombasa and Pate into the ports of southern Tanzania in pursuit of new captives.12 Beginning in the early nineteenth century, however, visitors clearly attested to a large African population and a robust slave trade in the Gulf, and especially Muscat. John Malcolm, a Scottish diplomatist who served as British emissary to the court of Persia from 1799 to 1801, identified Muscat as “the great mart” for slaves, reports the beaches of Muscat as crowded with slaves and describes a slave seller in the market. Malcolm described a diverse population of enslaved peoples: Georgians, Nubians, Abyssinians, and “the Seedee, or Caffree, as the woolly-headed Africans are called,” who he argued were far better treated than the slaves of the plantations of the Atlantic world.13 The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 331

When John Johnson visited Muscat in 1816 he witnessed a slave auction being held openly in the bazaar.14 James Silk Buckingham, who visited Ras al-Khaimah the same year, estimated the population of the town to be at least 10,000 “of whom probably three thousand are males capable of bearing arms, and certainly more than half of these are negroes, of African birth.”15 In 1817, William Heude visited Muscat and found the heat so oppressive in the summer that “the only race of people who seem to bear living on this unwholesome spot, are the blacks of the Abyssinian coast, to the southward of the Red Sea, with curled or woolly hair.” Heude also observed an open slave market which he described in detail:

Twenty or thirty young Africans, brought across the desert and chiefly from the coast of Zanguebar, were ranged in rows on either side of the bazaar, and according to their sex. They were in general handsomely trimmed (dressed is an improper term) for the occasion; and appeared in truth perfectly resigned; being certainly in as clean and sleek a condition, (with a cloth girdle round their middle, for their only covering) as their owners or purchasers could have wished. The latter, indeed, in walking between the ranks, seemed extremely particular in handling and feeling the bodies and skins of their intended purchases; extending their inspec- tions to such minute particulars as quite astonished me . . .16

Robert Mignan (1820) found that, although the Sultan of Muscat had done “all in his power to suppress slavery, a great traffic is still carried on between the eastern coast of Africa and Oman, and every family retains two or more slaves of both sexes.”17 George Keppel (1824) observed that the women of Muscat were “generally speaking, the offspring of Arab men and Abyssinian negresses.”18 Keppel also witnessed a slave auction being held openly in the market. He also noted that “the suburbs of Muscat appear more populous than the town. The inhabitants are principally Abyssinian slaves.”19 By 1831, the British Resident reported an annual importation of 1,400 to 1,700 slaves from East Africa into Muscat, with three-fourths of these coming from East Africa and the remainder from Ethiopia. Within a decade, more than 1,200 African slaves were recorded as being reexported to the northern Gulf by way of Kharg Island.20

The Slave Trade The limited sources available to us suggest that slave owning was not a large- scale phenomenon in the Gulf before the nineteenth century. Instead, it was primarily a form of conspicuous consumption for elites, and Africans were only one of a number of populations enslaved in the region. The increased 332 M Matthew S. Hopper demand for African labor in the Gulf in the nineteenth century stemmed from the brutal vicissitudes of economics—supply and demand. On the supply side, the development of a systematic business of slave trading in East Africa accounts for part of the story, and it is important to note that this development was directly connected to European slave trading. It has been contended that Arabs from Oman, who had settled in East Africa at least as early as the eleventh century, brought small numbers of captives to Arabia over the course of centuries of commerce.21 But as a large-scale endeavor the slave trade was a modern phenomenon that developed in response to European demand in the Indian Ocean and built upon indigenous African slaving networks in the Mozambique Channel. Historians formerly assumed that the extensive slave trade from East Africa to Arabia observed in the nineteenth century could be traced to ancient history, but more recent scholarship has made that perspective untenable. The records of the Zanj revolt of ninth-century Basra and an ambiguous reference in Ibn Battuta’s Rihla were once seen as clear evidence of millennia of extensive slave trading from coastal East Africa to Arabia. Sir Reginald Coupland wrote that the slave trade ran “like a scarlet thread” through centuries of East African history.22 British colonial policy in East Africa and the Gulf was likewise informed by the popular conception that slavery was an essential element of Arab and Islamic culture.23 Thomas Vernet has shown that Swahili traders were involved in trade in enslaved Africans, mostly Malagasy, from Madagascar to the coast of East Africa in the seventeenth century amounting to 3,000 to 6,000 captives each year, although he concludes that slaving in the interior of East Africa by the coastal polities appears to have been rare before the end of the eighteenth century except at Kilwa.24 French demand for labor on sugar plantations on the newly acquired Mascarene Islands in the central Indian Ocean was probably the most important factor in the transformation of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Omani merchants participated in and profited from a vibrant trade in enslaved Africans as French entrepreneurs transformed the previously uninhabited islands of Mauritius (formerly Île de France) and Réunion (formerly Île Bourbon) into sugar-producing islands modeled on the slave islands of the Caribbean. French planters sought slave labor from Africa, particularly Mozambique and Madagascar. Arab mariners, especially from Hadhramawt and Oman, actively engaged in this trade, although French producers were also able to bypass Arab intermediaries by negotiating sales directly with Portuguese Mozambique and indigenous rulers. In the best- known example, the French slave trader Maurice negotiated an arrangement with the sultan of Kilwa to provide a thousand slaves annually, an arrangement that inspired the Omani resubjugation of Kilwa in 1784. French, Spanish, and Portuguese slave traders also looked to East Africa The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 333 for supplies of captives for Atlantic markets just as Omani planters sought slave labor for their expanding date plantations in Oman. The slave trade to the Mascarenes grew dramatically between the 1720s and the 1770s and became most extensive between the 1770s and 1780s, when the intense competition for slaves drove the average price up from $22 (MT) in 1770 to a peak of $40 (MT) in 1784.25 Only after an extensive slave-trading network had developed in East Africa in response to European demand did the slave trade have a significant impact on Arabia. After Omanis took control of the key port city of Kilwa in the late eighteenth century, a significant portion of the slave trade was directed to the island of Zanzibar where Omani entrepreneurs were developing plantations of their own. Part of this transformation is attributable to the collapse of slave prices during the Napoleonic Wars as Britain seized the Mascarenes from the French and the Atlantic market for slaves diminished, which led to the halving of prices of slaves in East Africa. Prices dropped from an average of $40 (MT) to around $20 (MT) between the 1770s and 1820s. Abdul Sheriff has shown that the drop in prices and the elimination of markets in Mauritius and the Americas inspired the development of a large-scale plantation complex in East Africa. As Sheriff has convincingly argued, “It was members of the Omani merchant class who were in a position to initiate the transformation of the slave sector of the economy of Zanzibar. From their acquaintance with the Mascarenes they realized that if slaves could not be exported, the product of their labor could.”26 Omani planters in Zanzibar and on the east coast of Africa took advantage of the slave trading systems developed in response to European demand and employed slave labor on plantations of their own to produce commodities for global markets, such as cloves, coconuts, sugar, and spices. Around the same time, the available supply of African captives appears to have found a ready market in the Gulf. Demand for enslaved Africans in the Gulf long existed on a small scale as a form of conspicuous consumption, but the massive expansion in demand in the modern period developed largely in response to the demands of global markets for Arabian products, most notably dates and pearls. Traditional demand for domestic servants, soldiers, and retainers persisted, but in the modern period was supplemented by new demand for productive labor. As the Middle East, including the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, was drawn into the expanding global economy in the nineteenth century, regional dependence on global markets subjected the Gulf to the whims of international consumer tastes, and supply and demand. 27 In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Gulf experienced a boom in date exports, fueled in part by increased demand from India and new markets in North America and Europe. Likewise, the pearl diving 334 M Matthew S. Hopper industry expanded dramatically in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the fashion for pearls experienced a revival in Europe. Pearl exports sky- rocketed in the first decades of the twentieth century as the craze for pearls spread beyond royal and aristocratic classes in Europe and North America. Growing demand for labor in the date-farming and pearl-diving sectors of the Gulf economy kept the trade in enslaved men and women profitable into the twentieth century and drove many traders to participate in the slave trade from parts of Africa, Baluchistan, Persia, India, and some regions of Arabia. But the greatest trade of all was from East Africa. In 1841, Atkins Hamerton, Agent of the East India Company at Zanzibar, estimated that 15,000 slaves were imported annually from the East African coast to Zanzibar.28 Some of this population would be later transported to the Gulf. Arab traders from Trucial Oman would arrive annually, pro- cure houses in Zanzibar and purchase or kidnap slaves to bring back to the Gulf. In 1839 the Omani sultan, Sa‘id b. Sultan, complained to the British Resident that vessels “belonging to the Arabian Ports in the Persian Gulf lying between Resel Khyma and Aboothabee” carried off “by force of fraud three or four slaves for every one purchased” from his dominions in East Africa.29 A report from the British Native Agent at Sharjah confirmed that men of that district went to Zanzibar “solely for the purpose of stealing slaves.” The agent outlined some of the tactics these men used:

“One plan, I am informed, is as follows: on their arrival . . . they draw up their vessels on shore and hire houses in the island . . . accompanied by many slaves formerly belonging to that part of the world.” He continued: “These spread themselves through the place and, forming acquaintance among the slaves of the Island, persuade them to come to their own houses where they entertain them with dates, sweetmeats etc. . . . This of course establishes an intimacy, and the intercourse continues until, a favorable opportunity offering, they are seized and detained in the house.

Other tactics he recorded included kidnapping slaves who had been hired to carry goods purchased in the market, and mixing kidnapped slaves with slaves purchased in the slave market and embarking them to their ships at night in small boats owned by merchants from Sur, the Omani port city that would come to dominate the Gulf’s slave trade. 30 There were even reports of Suri slave traders “carrying kidnapped children through the public street in large baskets during the day, their mouths being gagged to prevent them from crying out.”31 By 1860, C. P. Rigby, the British consul in Zanzibar, explained that between December and March each year when ships from the Gulf were in the harbor, “Zanzibar resembles a city with a hostile army encamped in The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 335 its neighbourhood; every person who is able to do so sends his children and young slaves into the interior of the island for security; people are afraid to stir out of their houses, and reports are daily made of children and slaves kidnapped in the outskirts of the town; they even enter the houses and take children by force.”32 The following year, Rigby reported even more vessels from Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, and Sur. Rigby’s reports are filled with complaints about Qasimi and Suri actions in Zanzibar and Pemba. He was appalled by the openness with which the slave trade was carried out by so-called Northern Arabs, a term he applied to Arabs from Trucial Oman (today’s UAE) and Oman north of Ras al-Hadd. “The export of slaves was carried on by these piratical Arabs with impunity,” Rigby complained in 1861. “One dhow embarked 150 slaves, and another 126 slaves within a few yards of the British Consulate. At this season of the year, the daily slave market is held outside the town as His Highness informed me, on purpose to prevent the Northern Arabs from purchasing slaves; nevertheless the market was daily crowded, morning and evening by Joasmees and Soorees openly purchasing slaves and leading them away.”33 According to the reports of consuls at Zanzibar, the biggest participants in the slave trade were residents of Sur, Batinah, and the Trucial Coast. Although men dominated the business of transporting slaves from East Africa to the Gulf, correspondence seized aboard captured slaving dhows reveals that women were sometimes the principal buyers and even sent requests for specific types of slaves to be procured in Zanzibar. Letters addressed to buyers consistently show a significant representation of women among purchasers in Arabia. Letters seized by the HMS Vigilant in 1865 included slave trade correspondence to and from women, including a letter from [Aziza] bint Abdullah Misherafi, which accompanied ten slaves she was sending to Hamud bin Abdullah Misherafi in the dhow of Omar bin Ali bin Ahmed.34 Another letter seized by the HMS Vigilant indicated that slaves of certain ethnicities were identified to be sent to purchasers in Oman, presumably by request. The letter included the following details: The names of the slaves are these:

1. Sweil, a big one, he speaks Arabic and knows all the slaves. 2. A little boy named Songolo for Hamud bin Bedran bin Ahmed, of the slave tribe Myao. 3. A little boy named Jaisir, an Mgindo for Hamud bin Bedran, his price was $14 ½. 4. A girl who knows Arabic named Huda, a Myao for Hamud bin Bedran, $23 without customs duties. 5. A girl named Warada an Mnyasa belonging to Bint Ahmed bin Sayf. . . . The slaves are marked by shaving on the top of the head . . . 35 336 M Matthew S. Hopper

The slave trade from East Africa to the Gulf continued to grow through the mid-nineteenth century. The extent of the trade is difficult to quantify, but historians estimate that overall exports from East Africa totaled 100,000 in the seventeenth century; 400,000 in the eighteenth century; and 1,618,000 in the nineteenth century (in the final period about half of this number were sent overseas, with the other half retained on the east African coast). 36 Historians of East Africa generally agree that the slave trade peaked around the 1870s.37 Estimates for the total number of enslaved Africans transported from East Africa to the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth century range from 150,000 to 805,000.38 Not all Africans in the Gulf in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were enslaved—many had been manumitted by their masters or British officials and lived in freedom. But, since voluntary migration from Africa to the Gulf was essentially unknown in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it may safely be concluded that most of the region’s population with African ancestry is descended from those forcibly brought to the Gulf in this period.

Labor in the Pearl and Date Industries Enslaved Africans were in demand in Arabia to perform a variety of tasks ranging from the maritime (divers, sailors, fishermen, stevedores, and crewmen) to the agricultural (irrigating, pollinating, harvesting and maintaining orchards, date groves, and fields of various crops, and animal husbandry) to the domestic (cooking, cleaning, and childcare) to the elite (soldiers and retainers). Many men also worked in construction and in the gathering and hauling of construction materials. Many women hauled water, prepared meals, produced handicrafts, and worked in childcare and as attendants and domestics for households. Many enslaved Africans worked at a variety of tasks over the course of a year, and a lifetime, but the two biggest sectors of the economy that demanded African labor were pearl-diving and date- producing. Many African boys worked in date gardens when they were first imported to the region and were then moved into the pearl diving industry when they reached their early teens. Pearl divers and pearling crewmen often worked at their primary tasks during the main pearling season (April through September) and at other tasks such as fishing, hauling, or construction in the off-season, although many others were taken to more remote pearling waters, like Socotra or the Red Sea at the conclusion of the annual season in the Gulf.39 Arabia was only one of many regions that experienced a boom in the production of pearls for export between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, but it was by far the world’s largest pearl-producing region. By the turn of the twentieth century, the The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 337 value of Gulf pearls was greater than all other regions combined. The rapid growth of the Gulf’s pearl production accompanied the global boom in consumption of gems and precious stones beginning in the 1870s and the rise of a class of consumers who were able and willing to pay for them.40 As global demand for pearls increased in the late nineteenth century, prices rose and production expanded from Venezuela and Mexico to Australia, Ceylon, and the Philippines. In the Gulf, the value of pearl exports rose steadily throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1873 and 1906, the value of pearl exports from Bahrain increased more than 800 percent. The rise in production required additional labor, and made profitable the importation of slave labor, originally from East Africa and later from Baluchistan and Persian Makran. In the late nineteenth century, slave traders increasingly exported young boys from East Africa for work in the pearl industry. By the 1870s, the ratio of male to female slaves among captured slave dhows on the Arabian coast reversed previous trends, shifting overwhelmingly in favor of young males. In 1872 the HMS Vulture captured a large slave dhow off the coast of Ras al-Hadd at the entrance to the Gulf of Oman. That dhow was carrying 169 captives from Pemba to Sur and Batinah; 124 were males and 45 were females, and the majority were children.41 The HMS Philomel’s capture in 1884 had 77 men, 14 women, 51 boys, and 12 girls (128 males and 26 females), mostly Wazaramo, aboard. That dhow was bound for Batinah from Dar es Salaam, having collected the slaves by canoe between Ras Ndege and Kunduchi in East Africa.42 In November 1885 the HMS Osprey captured a 42-ton dhow around Ras Madraka in Oman bound from Ngao in East Africa to Sur with 49 male and 24 female slaves (8 men, 12 women, 41 boys, and 12 girls).43 In fact, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of any dhow captured off the Arab coast carrying more female captives from East Africa than males. Diving was labor-intensive. Each diving boat consisted of an all-male crew, including one nakhoda (captain, plural nawakhida), and an equal number of ghawawis (divers, singular ghawwas) and siyub (haulers, singular saib), in addition to an assortment of radhafa (assistants or extra hands, singular radhif ) and awlad (boys or apprentices, sing. walid).44 Diving began each morning and continued until sunset with only an hour’s break in the afternoon. Divers descended to the sea floor with the aid of a heavy stone weight, of which several sizes were kept onboard. The stone weight was attached to a rope and fitted with a loop for the diver’s foot. With the aid of the hauler, the diver would slip his foot into the loop, inhale, and descend rapidly to the sea floor.45 Typical dives would take a diver to depths of between 50 and 80 feet and would last between one and two minutes. For as long as he could hold his 338 M Matthew S. Hopper breath, the diver put oysters he collected into a net basket tied to his waist with a second rope, which extended up to the boat and was closely monitored by the careful hands of the hauler above him. The hauler pulled the diver back to the surface as quickly as possible before his air expired. Divers would rest for only a few minutes before repeating the process.46 Things continued in this way for 130 days until the end of the season.47 In the pearl industry—just as in the date industry—free men and slaves worked side by side. While free divers kept the proceeds from each pearl season, enslaved divers surrendered their earnings to their masters. But not even free divers were completely free in the Gulf diving industry. Pearling captains and wealthy merchant boat owners controlled free divers via a credit system designed to ensure their loyal service year after year. Diving crews were consistently lent amounts in excess of their earnings in order to keep them indebted. In addition, they were paid in rice and other staples from a sort of “company store,” which maximized the merchant’s profits. Since debts were recorded in debt diaries which the illiterate could not read, captains and boat owners found ample opportunity for abuse and exploitation. As early as 1863 Shaikh Muhammad bin Thani of Bida’ (Doha) in Qatar remarked to William Palgrave, “We are all from the highest to the lowest slaves of one master, [the] Pearl,” lamenting both the indebtedness of the Gulf’s divers and the growing dependence of even elites on the whims of global markets.48 Enslaved Africans and free men of African ancestry accounted for a large number of those engaged in pearl diving in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a fact found in sources ranging from Western travel accounts, early twentieth century photographs, British residency records, and early twentieth-century manumission records. Captain E. L. Durand, filing a report in 1878, noted that while most haulers in the Gulf were Bedouins or Persians, the divers were generally “sedees” (Africans) and sometimes “sedee domestic slaves.”49 J. G. Lorimer stated that the divers were “mostly poor Arabs and free negroes or negro slaves; but Persians and Baluchis are also to be found among them, and, in recent years, owing to the large profits made by divers, many respectable Arabs have joined their ranks.”50 Paul W. Harrison, who spent 12 years in the Gulf with the American Mission in the early twentieth century, recalled in 1924 that many divers on the Trucial Coast were slaves, but “they do not number over one-half the divers.” “Most of these slaves are Negroes from Africa,” he explained. “A few are Baluchees from the Makran coast between India and Persia.”51 Charles Belgrave, who spent the better part of three decades in Bahrain and the Gulf beginning in 1925, recalled that while most divers abstained from eating much during the dive season and were relatively gaunt, “the pullers were stalwart specimens; many of them were negroes with tremendous chest and arm development.”52 In 1929 the Senior Naval Officer in the Gulf estimated that there were The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 339

20,000 slave divers (roughly a quarter of the total) diving in the Gulf in each season.53 Bertram Thomas, in his report on slavery in Batinah in 1929, reported that a significant number of the divers who migrated north each season from Oman were enslaved. He estimated that a fifth of the “army” of thousands of divers that Batinah sent to the diving banks each year were enslaved.54 The dramatic growth of the date export industry in the Gulf also sharply increased labor demand. Batinah—the 150-mile stretch of coast on the Gulf of Oman north of Muscat beginning around Sib and continuing north of Suhar—was the primary area of nineteenth-century date expansion in Oman and became home to one of the largest populations of enslaved Africans. As the densest area of vegetation in eastern Arabia, Batinah had a bigger population and more agricultural production than any other part of the Arabian Gulf south of Iraq. But Batinah differed from the other date-producing areas in the region in that it required intense human effort to irrigate the palms.55 Although it has some of the richest soil in Oman, Batinah does not receive a consistent flow of water from the inland mountains and relies entirely on groundwater for irrigation through the use of wells.56 Batinah farmers employed the zijrah (zaygra), the elevated well system used throughout the Arabian Peninsula and in Mesopotamia, consisting of a massive wooden framework, usually constructed of palm trunks, and a crossbar holding a rotating pulley wheel called a manjur, connected by rope to a bull (or in rare cases a mule) to lift water from 20 feet below the surface using leather bags that poured into cement-(saruj)-coated holding tanks, which further drained into irrigation channels, aflaj, to water several acres of date palms. The labor- intensive process used a male laborer, a bidar, to work in shifts around the clock in order to water approximately every 100 trees. The work of irrigation frequently fell on the shoulders of enslaved Africans. An American date expert visiting Batinah in 1927 estimated that there were at least 15,000 wells of this kind operating in Batinah alone.57 Bertram Thomas, who worked as Wazir (minister) of finance under Sultan Taimur bin Faisal in Oman between 1925 and 1930 and had the opportunity to visit Batinah on a number of occasions, estimated that there were “tens of thousands of oxen daily” working these water wheels in 1929.58 V. H. W. Dowson of the Agricultural Directorate of Mesopotamia echoed Thomas: “Throughout the Batinah, is heard the plaintive shrieking of the pullies.”59 Bertram Thomas added that runaway slaves were often punished with long hours in chains working in irrigation: “The metallic chink of ankle-chains, heard, perhaps, from the bull-pit of a well within the date grove, is an indication of some such ill-fated escapade.”60 In addition to irrigation, Batinah date plantations required constant maintenance. Date palms have to be pollinated by hand, offshoots (suckers) 340 M Matthew S. Hopper removed, dead branches cut off, extra date bunches removed, stocks kept clean, and—when the fruit is ripe—there is the enormous task of harvesting. In addition, in the shade of the date palms, farmers grew lucerne and other animal feed in addition to vegetables for domestic consumption. Large parties of workers were required to boil the maseybili and khameyzi varieties, common in Batinah, in large copper cauldrons and dry them in the sun turning them frequently prior to shipping these popular varieties to India.61 Dates also needed to be packed or pressed and conveyed overland or by sea to ports of export. Palm frond bags had to be woven to hold the dates, and once the dates were ready to export, they had to be loaded onto boats, conveyed to their destination and unloaded. Much of this work was performed by enslaved Africans. With the extra labor required for date production, Batinah became the primary destination of slaves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was home to the largest population of Africans and their descendants.62 In 1885 S. B. Miles noted that, in contrast to the interior behind Sur, where demand for slaves was limited, in Batinah slaves were “in high request,” and consequently most slaves were eventually landed there.63 One dhow captured en route to Khaḍra‘ (near Suwaiq) on the Batinah Coast by the HMS Philomel contained 154 captives (128 male and 26 female).64 In 1930, the British consul at Muscat remarked that “apart from the Batinah Coast, the method of irrigation does not demand slave labour.”65 Batinah continued to be described by Western observers as the center of the slave trade as late as 1930.66 From the second half of the nineteenth century through the early 1920s, Batinah absorbed the vast majority of enslaved Africans sent to eastern Arabia.67 The testimonies of enslaved Africans who received manumission certificates at British consulates and agencies in the Gulf between 1907 and 1940 almost universally describe a period of at least three years in Batinah prior to being sent to final destinations elsewhere in the Gulf. For young African boys, who made up a considerable percentage of those imported in the late nineteenth century, the time between arrival in Batinah and eventual sale was often equal to the time required to mature to the age of a beginning pearl diver (early teens).

Collapse of Demand for Slaves Just as quickly as the expanding global economy created vibrant export industries in the Gulf, it ushered in their demise. The Gulf’s two leading industries collapsed in tandem in the late 1920s, both victims of competition from more developed countries, the United States and Japan, which used technology to mimic and exceed the Gulf’s production. The Gulf’s key date market in North The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 341

America dwindled as soon as the United States developed a date industry of its own in California largely as a result of direct state intervention through the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Likewise, the invention of Japanese cultured pearls signaled an end to global demand for natural pearls from the Gulf. Around the same time, economic collapse and ecological disaster in Baluchistan created new vulnerable populations who could be enslaved more readily than those in East Africa, where ports were under the increasing surveil- lance of colonial governments.68 By the 1920s, a rise in domestic kidnapping of enslaved and formerly enslaved populations within Arabia and increased slave trading across the Gulf from Baluchistan and Persian Makran gradually replaced East Africa as the major source of slave labor. These factors combined with the onset of the global depression of the 1930s marked the beginning of the end of the slave trade with East Africa. In 1902, David Fairchild, an agricultural explorer for the USDA Bureau of Plant Industry, visited the Gulf to acquire the best offshoots for propagation in California. He visited Muscat in February 1902 and arranged for the American consul to secure offshoots of fardh dates from the Semail Valley to ship to California.69 He then visited Bahrain, where he arranged to have some offshoots of the khalasa date from Hufuf in Hasa (now in Saudi Arabia) sent to Bombay as well. At Basra, he collected samples of several date palms including the popular halawi variety. He subsequently steamed up the Tigris to Baghdad, collecting samples of dates from the largest date growers around Baghdad, and packed the offshoots in mud-filled burlap sacks, boxed them, and transported them on a nine-week voyage to Washington, DC More than three decades later, Fairchild was pleased to report that several of the varieties he brought from the Gulf were being grown in the Coachella Valley in California around Mecca.70 When Fairchild’s trees procured from the Gulf and North Africa reached maturity, California began to replace the Gulf as America’s primary source of dates. By 1914 an estimated 200,000 new palms grew in California’s Coachella Valley.71 The development of California’s date industry meant the loss of the Gulf’s largest foreign export market. The decline in date exports to the United States after 1925 was precipitous. Just as quickly as California dates destroyed the Gulf date export market to the United States, the Japanese cultured pearl destroyed the Gulf pearl markets. In 1894, a Japanese noodle-shop owner named Kokichi Mikimoto perfected the ancient Chinese practice of producing cultured pearls by insert- ing a spherical piece of mother-of-pearl into oyster shells, which induced the oyster to produce a pearl. Mikimoto leased a small island named Tatoku and began producing cultured pearls from oysters grown in cages with primarily female employees, and he set out to market his new product to the world. His perfect cultured pearls began to enter the global pearl market between 342 M Matthew S. Hopper

1908 and 1911, and Mikimoto soon opened a store at London and appointed agents at Paris and New York.72 By 1913, Mikimoto had perfected the cultured pearl to the point that it could not be distinguished from natural pearls, and he offered his product at a quarter of the market price. Applying the latest in assembly-line technology, he constantly increased production. He was known to say, “I want to live long enough to see the day when we have so many pearls we can sell necklaces for two dollars to every woman who can afford one and give them away free to every woman who can’t.”73 By the end of World War I, cultured pearls made inexpensive pearl necklaces available to working-class women in Western countries. Pearl consumption rose, but demand for more expensive natural pearls declined sharply. The decline devastated the Gulf in addition to European dealers in natural (“oriental”) pearls. The value of Gulf pearl production declined steadily from 1919 to 1929 as Mikimoto increased his production. Then with the onset of the Global Depression in 1929, the Gulf’s pearl industry collapsed completely. After 1929, revenues from pearl exports were reduced to levels even below those which prevailed in the mid- nineteenth century and never recovered.

The African Legacy Although the slave trade came to an end largely because the major industries that employed slave labor collapsed, formal abolition of slavery followed the development of the oil industry. As both the pearl and date industries languished, demand for African labor evaporated. The hardest economic times for both the enslaved and the free began with the collapse of the date and pearl industries in the 1920s and 1930s. In Bahrain, the annual revenue from pearl exports in 1906 had been over 12 million rupees, and the industry had employed over 17,000 men and 900 boats. By 1931, pearl revenue was down below 2 million rupees with roughly the same number of men employed and 500 boats. By 1936, however, pearl revenue was down below 700,000 rupees with 9,800 men from the island employed in the industry and 364 boats. Pearl captains and merchants who had formerly benefited from the labor of slave divers now found them burdens. Slaves were turned out in large numbers and left to fend for themselves. Some enslaved Africans were sent by their masters to work for oil companies and forced to remit their earnings. Others became dependents of their former masters and remained nominally free with paternalistic bonds of loyalty and service tying them to the master’s household. Without the resources to properly care for their former slaves, some masters accepted labor in exchange for squatter’s rights to housing and occasional charity. Other ex-slaves became destitute, and still others fended for themselves. The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 343

It is perhaps this common experience of poverty—the families of former masters and slaves scratching out a living together in the decades before oil—that most powerfully defined the legacy of slavery for the descendants of both slaves and masters in the Gulf today. The two regions that imported the greatest numbers of enslaved Africans, Oman, and the Trucial States (now UAE), were also the last two states in the Gulf to develop significant oil industries. In the decades between the collapse of the date and pearl industries and the rise of the oil industry, the descendants of former slaves and former masters shared a common experience of extreme poverty that must certainly have shaped the relationships between the region’s ethnic majority and minorities. And it is this experience—more than religion or culture—that perhaps best explains the sharp contrast between the legacy of slavery in the Gulf from that of the Atlantic world. Although manumission was frequently granted as a pious act of charity in the Gulf throughout history, the formal abolition of slavery as an institution in the Gulf was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Following the collapse of the pearl and date industries and a period of economic depression, the growth of the Gulf oil industry led to the improvement of the economy of the region, creating the means for Gulf shaikhdoms to compensate slave owners for manumitting their slaves. In addition, under pressure from the League of Nations, the British administration in the Gulf began to press for formal declarations of abolition, particularly in view of the prospects of oil concessions after 1937, the rising power of Persia, and the shift of the seat of the British Residency from Bushehr to Bahrain in 1947. The ruler of Bahrain issued a formal proclamation against slave owning in 1937, and the ruler of Qatar legally abolished slavery and provided compensation to slave owners for manumitting their slaves in 1952. In 1951, Britain formed the Trucial Oman Levies, which patrolled against slave trading in Trucial Oman. Saudi Arabia formally abolished slavery in 1963, and Oman followed in 1971. In eastern Arabia, the path of formal abolition largely followed the development of the oil industry, which provided a source of revenue for compensation for slave owners as in the case of Qatar, as well as new occupations for newly manumitted slaves. Manumitted slaves in the Gulf shaikhdoms frequently took the clan or tribal names of their masters and were incorporated into the existing social structure with the full rights of citizens in the newly independent states.

Silencing the African Past The legacy of Africans in eastern Arabia today is clearly visible not only in the demographics of the region, but also in its culture. This heritage, 344 M Matthew S. Hopper however, is rarely acknowledged officially by the governments of Gulf states in the context of the region’s history of slavery. The celebrated musical and dance traditions known throughout the Gulf as Al-Liwa and Tambura owe a great deal to the influence of African artists forcibly taken to the Gulf. These traditions contain clearly identifiable African origins in their instruments, rhythms, lyrics, and performance styles. Liwa performances continue to take place at annual festivals throughout the Gulf and in popular tourist quarters in leading cities like Dubai.74 A degree of African influence can also be found in some forms of pearling music, and particularly in the clandestine spirit possession ritual known as zar.75 But when African influence on Gulf musical and dance traditions is acknowledged in official publications, it is generally traced to longstanding trade relationships rather than the influence of Africans forcibly brought to Arabia through the slave trade.76 Likewise, museum exhibits and displays in most Gulf cities feature images of distinctly non-African individuals performing tasks that historically were performed by Africans. Such official representations serve to silence the African legacy in the Gulf.77 Africans have significantly influenced the history of the Gulf. Their labor made possible the economic boom experienced by the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their culture enriched the musical and dance traditions of the Gulf, and may have influenced aspects of Gulf cultures not yet fully recognized. Africans never accounted for the entire enslaved population of the region, which was diverse and drew from populations in other parts of the world. For much of the Gulf’s history, slave owning was primarily a matter of prestige or conspicuous consumption for elites, and Africans were only one of a number of populations represented. But for a brief period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a convergence of factors made eastern Africa its primary source of slave labor. Because this shift coincided with the emergence of capitalism and the incorporation of the Gulf into emerging global markets, this wave of forced migration grew to especially large proportions, leaving a significant demographic and cultural legacy on the region that is recognizable today. This African population has made, and continues to make, significant contributions to the economy and cultural diversity of the Gulf and is an essential part of the region’s history. Surely some of the silencing of the African past has resulted from the intentional efforts of modern Gulf state governments to downplay the history of slavery. But without a self-conscious group actively calling for representation, public history rarely represents the past equitably. Africans contributed richly to the economy, life, and culture of the Gulf. Unfortunately, in the short term, much of the African legacy in the Gulf appears destined to be forgotten. The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 345

Notes

Abbreviations for archival sources: CDR Centre for Documentation and Research, Abu Dhabi, UAE IOR India Office Records, British Library, London, UK NMM National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK PRO National Archives, formerly Public Record Office, London, UK ZNA Zanzibar National Archives, Zanzibar, Tanzania

1. On marriage, patrilineal descent, and Arab genealogies see: Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 152–87; Jonathan Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 105–46, and Glassman, “Racial Violence, Universal History, and Echoes of Abolition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar,” in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, ed. Derek Peterson (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010), 175–206; Mandana Limbert, “Marriage, Status and the Politics of Nationality in Oman,” in The Gulf Family: Kinship Policies and Modernity, ed. Alanoud Alsharekh (London: Saqi for London Middle East Institute, 2007), 167–79. 2. Pier M. Larson, “Reconsidering Trauma, Identity, and the African Diaspora: Enslavement and Historical Memory in Nineteenth-Century Highland Madagascar,” The William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (April 1999): 357–61. 3. A. S. G. Jayakar, “Medical Topography of Muscat,” Administrative Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agency for the Year 1876–77, CDR, ND 1/H. 4. J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908), 238–41, 489–90, 1058– 77, 1382–1451. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990,” U.S. Census Bureau Population Division Working Paper Series no. 56 (Sept. 2002). Available at: http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/twps0056.html 5. John Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt in the Year 1689 (London: Jacob Tonson, 1696), 420–45. 6. Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies (Edinburgh, 1727), 64–66. 7. Ibid., 78. 8. Abraham Parsons, Travels in Asia and Africa (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), 154–61; 202–11. 9. Carsten Niebuhr, Travels through Arabia, and Other Countries in the East, vol. II, trans. Robert Heron (Edinburgh: R. Morison and Son, 1792; reprint Reading, UK: Garnet Publishing, 1994), 113–24; see here 118. 10. Salil ibn Razik, Al-fath al-mubin al-mubarhim sirat al-sadat Al bu Sa‘idiyin, trans. G. P. Badger as History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman (London: Hakluyt Society, 1871), cited in Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770– 1873 (London: James Currey, 1987), 35. 11. In Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar, 37. 346 M Matthew S. Hopper

12. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar, 35, 42. 13. John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia (London: John Murray, 1845), 9–11. 14. John Johnson, A Journey from India to England through Persia, Georgia, Russia, Poland, and Prussia in the Year 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1818), 9–12. 15. James Silk Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 484. 16. Lt. William Heude, A Voyage Up the Persian Gulf and a Journey Overland from India to England in 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819), 24–25. 17. Robert Mignan, A Winter Journey, vol. II (1820), 240–45. 18. George Keppel, Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England (London: H. Colburn, 1827, 19–23). 19. Ibid., 23. 20. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 38. 21. In fact, evidence for this trade is scant. Ghada Talhami has shown that the infer- ence that the “zanj” of the ninth-century Basra revolt refers to the same “zanj” of East Africa is problematic, as the term was used by some Arab geographers to refer to the Sudan, and most of the participants in the revolt had origins in the Nile and Red Sea zones rather than coastal East Africa. Likewise, Ibn Battuta makes only passing reference to slavery in his account of Kilwa and provides no clear evidence that Arabs were transporting enslaved Africans to Arabia in the fourteenth century. See Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, eds., The Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 75; Ghada Hashem Talhami, “The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 10, no. 3 (1977): 443–61; and Randall L. Pouwels, “Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean to 1800: Reviewing Relations in Historical Perspective,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 35, no. 2/3 (2002): 385–425. 22. Sir Reginald Coupland, East Africa and Its Invaders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 4. 23. See, for example, the correspondence of Atkins Hamerton, Agent of the British East India Company and British Consul at Zanzibar. Hamerton to Sec. Gov. Bombay (Jan. 2, 1842). ZNA AA 12/29. More recently, Abdul Sheriff in Slaves, Spices & Ivory has demonstrated that British perceptions were shaped by growing abolitionism and colonialism. 24. Thomas Vernet, “Le Commerce,” Azania 28 (2003): 69–97. See also: Pier Larson, History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000). 25. See Richard B. Allen, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 64–69. Maria Theresa dollars (MT$ ) were a silver coin currency that circulated widely in the western Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century as a major unit of exchange alongside the Indian rupee. 26. Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 48–49. 27. James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 35–46; 73–87; Immanuel Wallerstein et al. “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the World Economy,” in Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 347

Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 88–97; Donald Quataert, “Ottoman Manufacturing in the Nineteenth Century,” in Donald Quataert, ed., Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500–1950 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 87–121; Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914 (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1993), 180–88; José Morilla Critz, Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “‘Horn of Plenty’: The Globalization of Mediterranean Horticulture and the Economic Development of Southern Europe, 1880–1930,” Journal of Economic History 59, no. 2 (June 1999): 316–52. 28. Akins Hamerton to Commr. William Smyth HMS Grecian (Dec. 5, 1841), ZNA, AA 12/29. 29. S. Hennell, Resident, Persian Gulf, to Chief Sec to Govt of Bombay, from Muscat Cove, Dec. 17, 1839, ZNA AA 12 / 29. 30. “A Report from (Moollam Houssain) Native Agent at Shargah” (Oct. 21, 1846), ZNA AA 12 / 29. 31. Rigby to Secretary of Bombay Gov’t (March 30, 1860), ZNA AA 12/2. 32. Ibid. 33. C. P. Rigby to Gov of India (April 18, 1861), ZNA AA 12/2. 34. “Letters found in dhow taken by HMS Vigilant, 22nd September 1865.” ZNA AA 3/25. See also: April 1861, AA 12/2. 35. Hamis bin Seyed bin Nasr to Sheikh Hamood bin Abdullah Mussarifi (20 Rabia il Akher [Thani] 1282), ZNA AA 3/25. 36. This estimate comes from Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61–62 and 155–58. Earlier estimates vary and can be found in a variety of sources, including: R. P. Baur, Voyage dans L’Oudoe & L’Ouzigua (Lyons, 1882); R. W. Beachey, The African Diaspora and East Africa: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at Makerere University College (University of East Africa), Kampala, Uganda, on 31st July, 1967 (Nairobi, 1967); Richard Reusch, History of East Africa (New York, 1961), cited in Esmond B. Martin and T. C. I. Ryan, “A Quantitative Assessment of the Arab Slave Trade of East Africa, 1770–1896,” Kenya Historical Review 5, no. 1 (1977), 72; Ralph A. Austen, “The Islamic Slave Trade Out of Africa (Red Sea and Indian Ocean): An Effort at Quantification,” Paper presented to the Conference on Islamic Africa: Slavery and Related Institutions, Princeton University, 1977; Thomas M. Ricks, “Slaves and Slave Traders in the Persian Gulf, 18th and 19th Centuries: An Assessment,” in Slavery & Abolition 9 no. 3 (Dec. 1988): 60–70; Ralph A. Austen, “The 19th-Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” in William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cass, 1989); and Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79–81. For an excellent discussion on the challenges of retrieving quantitative data for Indian Ocean slavery see: Edward A. Alpers, “Introduction: Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa” and “Mozambique and ‘Mozambiques’: Slave Trade and Diaspora on a Global Scale” in Benigna Zimba, Edward Alpers and Allen Isaacman, eds., Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeastern Africa (Maputo, Mozambique: Filsom Entertainment, Lda., 2005), 1–12 and 39–61. 348 M Matthew S. Hopper

37. The main exception can be found in Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 35–41 and 223–35, which suggests a declining curve for exports in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Abdul Sheriff, “The Slave Trade and Its Fallout in the Persian Gulf,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (New York: Routledge, 2005), 106. 38. See Martin and Ryan, “A Quantitative Assessment of the Arab Slave Trade of East Africa, 1770–1896,” 79–86. (This is based on an estimated 2,500 per year from the 1810s and 1820s, 3,500 in the 1830s, 4,000 in the 1840s, 6,500 from 1850–1873, and 400 from 1874–1896.); Lovejoy, Transformations, 150–51. (This is based on 2,500 per year shipped in the 1810s, 3,500 per year in the 1830s, 4,000 per year in the 1840s, 6,500 per year in the 1850s and 1860s, and declining sharply to less than 500 per year after 1873); Ralph A. Austen, “The 19th-Century Islamic Slave Trade from East Africa (Swahili and Red Sea Coasts): A Tentative Census,” in William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Cass, 1989), 29, 33; and Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory, 37–41 and 226–31. 39. Matthew S. Hopper, “The African Presence in Arabia” (PhD diss., UCLA, 2006), 162–218. 40. George Frederick Kunz and Charles Hugh Stevenson, The Book of the Pearl: The History, Art, Science and Industry of the Queen of Gems (New York: The Century Co., 1908), 80; Leonard Rosenthal, The Pearl Hunter (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 66. 41. Senior Naval Officer in Persian Gulf (and Commander HMS Vulture) to Rear Admiral Arthur Cumming, Commander in Chief, East Indies (Sept. 10, 1872), PRO ADM 1/6230; Lt. C. M. Gilbert-Cooper, “Capture of a Slave Dhow: Or the Vulture and Its Prey,” (n.d.), Lt. C. M. Gilbert-Cooper Papers, National Maritime Museum, London (NMM) BGY/G/5. 42. Commander HMS Philomel to Commander in Chief, East Indies (Oct. 15, 1884), PRO ADM 1/6714. 43. Herbert W. Dowding, Commander HMS Osprey, to Rear Admiral Frederick W. Richards, Commander in Chief, East Indies (Sept. 19, 1885), PRO ADM 1/6758. 44. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. I, 2227. 45. Allan Villiers, Sons of Sinbad: An Account of Sailing with the Arabs in Their Dhows in the Red Sea, around the Coasts of Arabia, and to Zanzibar and Tanganyika: Pearling in the Persian Gulf: and the Life of the Shipmasters, the Mariners and Merchants of Kuwait (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 393–96. 46. E.L. Durand, Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agent for the year 1877–78, 32. PRO FO 78/5108; Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. I, 2228–31, and Villiers, Sons of Sinbad. 47. Belgrave, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 43. 48. William Gifford Palgrave, Personal Narrative of A Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862–63 (London: Macmillan & Co., 1883), 387. 49. E.L. Durand, Administration Report of the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Muscat Political Agent for the year 1877–78, 32, PRO FO 78/5108. The term sidi (also rendered variously as “seedee” and “seedie” was a word originating in northern India to describe people of African descent, many of whom were employed in The African Presence in Eastern Arabia M 349

maritime trade. In the wider Indian Ocean context, British officials applied the term to descendents of East Africans, enslaved and free, outside of East Africa. See Janet J. Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” The American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (Feb. 2000): 83. 50. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol. I, 2228. 51. Paul W. Harrison, The Arab at Home (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1924), 88. 52. Belgrave, Personal Column, 44. 53. Senior Naval Officer, Persian Gulf Division, HMS Triad, to Commander in Chief, East Indies Station (Sept. 12, 1929), No. 27G/56/1, IOR L/PS/12/4091. 54. “Notes on the Slave Trade by Wazir Thomas, August 1929,” P. 7418/29, IOR L/ PS/12/4091. 55. J. C. Wilkinson, Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj of Oman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 28–32, 36–47. 56. Wilkinson, Water and Tribal Settlement, 47–51; Charles C. Graf, “The Batinah Hydrologic Area,” in Sultanate of Oman, Public Authority for Water Resources, The Hydrology of the Sultanate of Oman: A Preliminary Assessment, PAWR 83–1 (Muscat, Sultanate of Oman: Public Authority for Water Resources, 1983), 28–43; Robert Dale, “The Water Resources of Oman” (Report for TetraTech International, c. 1980), James H. Critchfield Papers, private collection, Williamsburg, VA. 57. “Report of Mr. Dawson, American Manager of the Iraq Date Company Following a Visit to the Batina in 1927,” IOR R/15/1/460. For an excellent discussion of social and cultural aspects of the zijrah (zaygra) and manjur in Oman see Mandana E. Limbert, “The Senses of Water in an Omani Town,” Social Text 68, vol. 19, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 35–55. 58. “The word of Sultan Sa‘id bin Taimur, Sultan of Muscat and Oman, about the history of the financial position of the Sultanate in the past and the hopes for the future, after the export of oil, January 1968,” reprinted in Whitehead Consulting Group, Sultanate of Oman Economic Survey, 1972 (Harold Whitehead & Partners, Ltd., 1972), Appendix II. 59. “Report of Mr. Dawson.” 60. Bertram Thomas, Alarms and Excursions in Arabia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1931), 238. 61. Administration Report of the Political Agency, Muscat, for the year 1876–77, 79–82, CDR ND1/H. 62. Secretary to Government of Bombay to Political Resident, Persian Gulf (Oct. 31, 1889), IOR R/15/1/200; Maj. Saddler, “Report on visit to Sur” [April 1895, no. 5–11] quoted in J. A. Saldanha, Précis of Maskat Affairs, 1892–1905. Part I. p. 53. IOR, L/PS/20/C245. 63. S. B. Miles to E. C. Ross (Dec. 7, 1885), IOR L/PS/20/C246. 64. S. B. Miles to E. C. Ross (Oct. 31, 1884), IOR L/PS/20/C246. 65. Political Agent, Muscat, to Political Resident, Persian Gulf (Jan. 21, 1930), IOR R/15/1/230. 66. PRPG to Foreign Secretary to the Government of India, New Delhi (Mar. 18, 1930), IOR R/15/1/230. 67. G. P. Murphy, P.A. Muscat, to PRPG (n.d., No. 69 of 1929), IOR R/15/1/225. 350 M Matthew S. Hopper

68. Matthew S. Hopper, “East Africa and the End of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade,” Journal of African Development 13, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 2011): 39–65. 69. David G. Fairchild, “Persian Gulf Dates and Their Introduction into America,” U.S. Department of Agriculture Bureau of Plant Industry Bulletin 54 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1903). 70. David G. Fairchild, The World Was My Garden (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 226–44. 71. W. M. Carne, “Notes on Date Culture in America with Some Consideration of its Possibilities in New South Wales,” Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales (Sept. 2, 1914): 805. 72. Robert Eunson, The Pearl King: The Story of the Fabulous Mikimoto (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1965). 73. Ibid., 23–24. 74. Sultanat Uman Wizarat al-Turath al-Qumi wa al-Thaqafa, Ashkal Mu’asira li-Alfunun al-Sha’biyat al-Umaniya (Al-Juz’ al-thalith) (1991), 14–15, 31–32; Maho M. Sebiane, “Le statut socio-economique de la pratique musicale aux Emirats arabs unis: La tradition du leiwah a Dubai,” Chroniques Yemenites 14 (2007): 117–35; Waheed Al-Khan, Laiwa Music of the Gulf (Doha: GCC Folklore Centre, 2002), 2; Issam El-Mallah, Die Musik einer alten Hochkultur: Das Sultanat Oman [The Music of an Ancient Civilization: The Sultanate of Oman] (Muscat: Ministry of Information, Oman, 1994), 46–47. 75. Behnaz Mirzai, “The Slave Trade and the African Diaspora in Iran,” ZIFF Journal 2 (2005): 30–34. 76. See, for example, Sultanat Uman Wizarat al-Turath al-Qumi wa al-Thaqafa, 14–15, 31–32. 77. On “Silencing,” see excellent discussions by: Michel-Rolf Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Abena P. A. Busia, “Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female,” Cultural Critique 14 (Winter 1989–1990): 81–104; Eve M. Troutt Powell, “Will That Subaltern Ever Speak? Finding African Slaves in the Historiography of the Middle East,” in Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer and Y. Hakan Erdem, eds., Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 242–61; Ehud Toledano, As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). CHAPTER 13

Identity Transformations of African Communities in Iran

Behnaz A. Mirzai

ime and space transform identity, self-perception, and the perception of others, and ethnic communities in Iran are not an exception Tto this. Given its important geographical position, Iran has been the locus of cultural, economic, and population exchanges for millennia. As elsewhere, newcomers gradually assimilated1 into and transformed native populations; indeed, cultural identities have constantly evolved in Iran, leading to the emergence of multiple ethnicities. This mosaic character of Iran can be classified in three ways: by nationality, ethnicity (e.g., Persian, Arab, Turk, Kurd, Baluch, Turkoman, etc.), and religious affiliation (e.g., Muslim Shi‘ite, Sunni, or Sufi; Christian; or Jew). Though the presence of Africans in Iran dates from the pre-Islamic period, this chapter attempts to examine the modern era. During the early nineteenth century, there was a correlation between the decline in the slave trade from locations along the Atlantic (which led to a plummeting of prices along the Swahili coast) and its expansion among locations along the Indian Ocean and in the Middle East. The study of the history of Afro-Iranians is naturally part of a larger historical examination of the global African diaspora, which is a legacy of the slave trade. Within its Iranian context, this chapter examines African acculturation and identity transformation, which spans the period of the legal slave trade in the nineteenth century to the post-emancipation era of the twentieth century. It will also consider modern manifestations of reidentification. In Iran as elsewhere, the identity of the people of the African diaspora was transformed from “African” to “freed” to “Iranian.” Significant years of 352 M Behnaz A. Mirzai transition in the history of slavery in Iran occurred between 1848, when the seaborne trade of African slaves was banned, and 1929,2 when slaves were collectively freed. During this period, the identities of enslaved Africans progressed through three different stages during which the slaves were identified by various terms: newly arrived African-born slaves (bardas); settled African- and Iranian-born female slaves (kanizes), male slaves (ghulams), and those that were freed (azad); and freed African- and Iranian-born slaves and free Iranian-born people of African descent (Iranians). The identity of enslaved Africans shifted from one in which they were considered outsiders/foreigners to one in which they were considered to be one of the ethnic communities in Iran. The imposition of state and local laws contributed significantly to the change in African identity and the creation of different community patterns among the population of freeborn people of African descent. This chapter surveys the development of identity among African communities within the context of Iran’s richly multicultural society, focusing on their cultural representations and practices. Further, it examines modern cultural practices of Afro-Iranians within a historical framework in order to evaluate the transformation of African diasporic ethnicity, culture, and identity over time and place. I argue that a combination of Islamic and local customs served as unifying factors in the integration3 of Africans arriving in Iran both before and after emancipation in 1929. In exploring the African diaspora in Iran, this chapter also highlights the social and political considerations that transformed African slave-trading patterns in the area. While political identity has historically been promoted by governmental policy, Persian customs and Islam have consistently worked together to forge a comprehensive national identity, blurring subnational feelings and sentiments. Simultaneously, local ethnic and religious variables continued to create subethnic and multiethnic identities. Today, the result is seen in the existence of multiethnic groups of people that celebrate a myriad of national, religious, ethnic, regional, and cultural identities. The present analysis of Afro-Iranian identity will not only enhance the understanding of ongoing cultural interconnections and discourses in Africa and the Middle East, but will also foster a more inclusive global dialogue on diasporic and ethnocultural studies. This analysis considers the following questions: What was the self-perception and identity of enslaved and freed Africans and how did others perceive them? What contributions have displaced Africans made to Iranian society? What is the identity of African descendants of the diaspora? How have ethnicity and national self-consciousness been shaped among the Afro-Iranians? Africans who were forcibly dispersed to foreign lands historically formed collective common identities and perpetuated cultural linkages (if only symbolically). Ideas of a greater national identity can be used to understand Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 353 the general assimilation of ethnic groups within Iran, of which those of African descent have traditionally formed a subset. For this reason, their study requires a shift away from the traditional themes of Iranian history, which focus on cities, kings, and dynasties. Indeed, it is imperative to erect a new framework that appreciates Iran’s unique relationship with people of the African diaspora who acted as cultural agents and whose past was overshadowed by slavery, struggle, and change. For this reason, the term Afro-Iranian is used throughout as an abbreviated form of African Iranian (following the model of Afro-American) to refer to the peoples of African origin who have lived in Iran for generations. However, usage of the term “Afro-Iranian” needs to be considered within the context of academic studies, since local people perceive themselves as fully Iranian and reject any outside attachments. I contend that they constitute a distinct subethnic group in Iran.4 Indeed, this is borne out by my research of the diasporic Africans in the Iranian context;5 and this research will undoubtedly be relevant to future scholarship of Iran and the Middle East. Afro-Iranian is a general term that can easily be expanded to refer to many subethnic identities (e.g., Afro-Bandari Iranian, Afro-Baluchi Iranian, and Afro-Arab Iranian). While each group had a distinct experience of identity formation and transformation based on specific geographical, cultural, social, and political circumstances, we must underline interrelationships and the integration within and among people and cultures associated with the African diaspora in Iran. To date, American and European communities of the African diaspora have garnered considerably more scholarly attention than those communities in the Middle East. This is due both to the limitations of Western- dominated intellectual studies that, historically, have failed to present the realities of Middle Eastern and African societies, and to Middle Eastern scholars, who have neglected the subject of African displacement in the region. An examination of the scholarship on the African diaspora within a comparative framework will help provide clues to answering the questions raised. Diasporic experiences by Africans living in places along the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are inevitably different; notwithstanding, application of the methodology of slavery studies—which relies on archival and demographic data, newspapers, biographies, maps, images, oral traditions and cultural practices—helps illuminate social processes and political dynamics for other diasporic communities of African descent including Africans in Asia. My approach to the study of African descendants in Iran is primarily based on personal observations, interviews, oral traditions, archival materials, and literature.6 Fieldwork in rural and urban areas of Iran’s southern provinces was crucial in appreciating the communities of African descendants.

Map 13.1 Slave trade routes in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, ca. 1900. Source: Based on original research by Behnaz Mirzai. Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 355

The Slave-Trade Era (1800–1848) Geographically, Iran can be divided into two parts with contrasting cli- mates: the cold north and the hot south. While Iran’s northern population comprises predominantly light-skinned people from various ethnic groups, its southern population comprises mostly dark-skinned people, some of whom are originally from Africa. The trafficking and importation of slaves were the main reason communities of diasporic Africans were established throughout Iran. By the early nineteenth century, slaves were coming into the country either from the south by sea or from the Ottoman Empire by land. Port towns throughout the Indian Ocean played the most important role in distribution. Many slaves came from Berbera, an important Somali seaport, while others came from Muscat in the Gulf of Oman. Rarely were slaves the booty of seaborne pirates; usually, they were captured in Africa by hostile gangs or by slave dealers and were sold at various slave-trading ports throughout the Indian Ocean.7 In the Persian Gulf, slaves were trafficked by boats emanating from Sur, on the Arabian Sea, Ras al-Khaimah, and Iranian and Ottoman ports.8 Arabs from Ras al-Khaimah are reported to have hired Iranian vessels from Lingeh, Bandar Kangan, Charak, and Moghuya to convey slaves from Africa to Arabia.9 Slaves were taken in small groups to the Iranian ports of Bandar Abbas, Lingeh, and Bandar Kangan. Many were also transported to Bushehr and Basra.10 A number of Zanzibari slaves were also brought to eastern and southeastern Iran from Karachi by Baluchis, who had bought them from Arab merchants.11 Chabahar and Konarak were important ports in Baluchistan where slaves imported from Muscat and Karachi disembarked and were then transferred to other vessels. The geographic dimension of the slave trade, thus, extended from the Swahili coast of Africa through southern Arabia and deep into the Persian Gulf.12 The gender ratio of African slaves demonstrates the importance of males. According to Foreign Office dispatches in 1842, “The number of boats arriving at Kharg in August–October 1841 was put at 117, with 1,217 slaves. And an answer to a questionaire stated that some 3,000 slaves (two-thirds male and one-third female) arrived in Bushehr each year, of whom only 170 or 180 were sold in that town, the rest being sent on to Muhammara and Basra. Bandar Abbas took about one-quarter as many as were sold in Bushire and a small number was also sold in Lingeh and Congoon.”13 The many enslaved Africans who arrived at Iran’s southern ports (Lingeh, Bushehr, Moghuya, Muhammara, Bandar Abbas, and Qishm Island)14 were usually sold there, although a few were conveyed to the interior. Once the vessels docked in these ports, the slaves were taken to customs houses and 356 M Behnaz A. Mirzai were then dispersed. The Bushehr–Shiraz–Isfahan–Tehran route was the main slave-trade route into the interior of Iran.15 The process of identity formation began the moment the slaves arrived in the host society. Hence, for slaves of the African diaspora in Iran, three stages of identity formation can be delineated from the early nineteenth century to the present day.

Stage One Upon their disembarkation, most newly arrived African-born slaves were identified with their place of origin and an African ethnicity, in spite of being given new names and converting to the religion of their masters. The traders’ justification for their involvement in the slave business was the conversion of pagans to Christianity in the transatlantic slave trade16 and to Islam in the Indian Ocean slave trade. In European accounts, enslaved Africans are ste- reotypically identified by their physical characteristics. Moreover, the reflection of terminologies can be seen in the history of the European colonization of Africa and the enslavement of Africans. For instance, the Portuguese term for negro was synonymous with slave in the sixteenth century.17 Captors and slave traders routinely ranked slaves according to a system of ethnic profiling. However, it is clear that many of the racial and ethnic stereotypes that were perpetuated in the host countries were rooted in indigenous African prejudices. Moreover, Orientalists built upon the preexisting system of stigmatization to justify European colonial rule in Africa and Asia.18 For example, the records of British officials for 1842 distinguish Habashis (Abyssinians) from among 1,200 African slaves who had been recently imported.19 Mary Sheil, the wife of a British official, who traveled to Iran, classified the African slaves in Iran into three groups. She admitted that some were assigned specific tasks based solely on stereotypes:

The Bambassees who are genuine Negroes are in great disrepute as being ferocious, treacherous and lazy. The Nubees and Habeshees excepting in being black do not present the usual Negro characteristics. They are highly esteemed as being mild, faithful, brave, and intelligent and are generally confidential servants in Persia households. . . . They are never employed as field labourers, their occupations being confined to the duties of the household.20

Charles James Wills, a medical doctor in the service of the Indo-European Telegraph Department who was in Iran from the 1860s to the 1880s, com- mented that the value of African slaves in Iran varied, in part, due to their ethnicity. In general, while Habashi slaves were valued most highly for their Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 357 fairer complexions, Swahilis and Somalis fared less well as a result of their darker skin color. Mombasans, being the darkest, were the cheapest and were usually only employed as cooks or for their physical strength.21 Such distinctions among slaves are confirmed by the writings of Samuel Hennell, the Political Resident in the Persian Gulf (1838–1852), who separated African slaves imported from Jidda to Muhammara and the Persian Gulf into two groups: “Abosion [Abyssinian] and Caufrion [Kaffir or pagan].”22 Parallel distinctions were attributed to enslaved West Africans by European colonists. For example, Mandingos from the Gambia were considered valuable physically but not trustworthy, Coromantees from the Gold Coast were hardy but dangerous if angered, and Papaws from Ouidah on the Slave Coast were the most valuable.23 Traders and slave masters concurred with and perpetuated these ethnic stereotypes. However, some of these prejudices were quickly refuted as in the case of Nubian and Abyssinian slaves who were rejected in Ras al-Khaimah (apparently only Iranians would recruit them)24 but particularly prized by the chiefs of Bahrain as soldiers.25 The experience of allegiance to the idea of a “homeland” is similar among all diasporic peoples. Within their host society, enslaved Africans were detached psychologically and physically from their homeland. Many first-generation Africans shared a common notion of uprooted origin and desired to return to their motherland: Africa became a symbol of identity and power. The people of diaspora, specifically enslaved Africans, experienced analogous circumstances and maintained a collective image from the time they departed their homeland to the time they settled in their new home. Gradually, to first-generation dispersed African-born slaves, notions of home and homeland became more transmutable; as is evident in many archival sources, these slaves oscillated from a desire for African repatria- tion and Afrocentrism to one supporting their Iranian home (their place of settlement). In general, ethnicity, place of origin, and cultural and religious heritage were used as societal tools to identify and classify diasporic communities and individuals. The Persian word for slave was barda,26 which referred to all slaves, regardless of their color, nationality, or ethnicity. The use of terms such as Afriqa’i, Habashi, Zangi, Nubi, Sidi, and Kaffari reveals how ethnicity, religion, and geographical point of origin were also used to cat- egorize African-born slaves.27 These classifications can be found in Arabic literature and were used by Arab slave traders for centuries.28 We can find parallel situations during the transatlantic slave trade, where European traders labeled slaves with the names of ports at which slaves embarked, such as Mina;29 ethnic or linguistic terms, such as Nago;30 or places of origin, such as Congo. The association of these names with physical types and cultural backgrounds by European colonists perpetuated stereotypes and 358 M Behnaz A. Mirzai ethnic preferences.31 Indeed, in slave markets, the value of slaves was closely associated with their origin. Whether slave traders—who, in West Africa, were mainly Europeans and, in East Africa, Omani Arabs—correctly distinguished the origin of slaves is questionable. Regardless, the fact remains that there was great ethnic diversity among enslaved Africans, whether they were located in the Americas or the Middle East.

The Post-Prohibition Era (1848–1929) By the turn of the nineteenth century, the strategic and geographic position of the Persian Gulf became more important for both the British and the Russians. In order to protect the East India Company’s economic interests, the British navy —under the guise of disrupting seaborne piracy and ending the trade of African slaves—expanded its sphere of influence. Indeed, in 1848, discussions between the British and Iranian governments resulted in the issuance of a farman by Muhammad Shah Qajar prohibiting the maritime slave trade from Africa into Iran.32 After the mid-nineteenth century, the British dominated seaborne activities in the Persian Gulf, although they never entirely succeeded in eliminat- ing the trafficking of African slaves. Indeed, though maritime slave trade decreased, slave dealers continued their lucrative business by finding alternative ways to smuggle enslaved Africans into Iran. In some areas territorial separation and the creation of new borders divided local communities, including Africans. This can be seen in Baluchistan, where African ethnic identity was influenced by Pakistani or Iranian cultural and national identity. The majority of enslaved African populations were exported to the Americas in the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, about 3.2 million slaves were exported to destinations in the Atlantic.33 The ban on the trade lowered the number of exported slaves in the second half of the nineteenth century. Examining quantitative data concerning the slave trade and accurately estimating the number of slaves have been difficult for historians of both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade. Our data regarding slave estimates comes mainly from British sources who, for political reasons, intended to publicize their suppression of the slave trade in the nineteenth century. But these available sources offer estimates that are useful for providing comparative perspectives. In addition, because petty chiefs from the Persian Gulf used their own vessels and transported slaves to any number of small harbors that extended the length of the Gulf coast, calculating actual numbers of imported slaves is quite challenging, as Sheil pointed out. She estimated that in the mid-nineteenth century the number did not exceed 2,000 to 3,000 annually, many Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 359 of whom died.34 (By comparison, from 1835 to 1839, an annual average of 135,800 enslaved Africans were exported to the New World.35) Paul Lovejoy has suggested that about 718,000 slaves were exported from East Africa in the nineteenth century; of these, 347,000 went to Arabia, Iran, and India.36 It is estimated that the highest number of slaves was exported between 1850 and 1873, with an average of 6,500 going to Arabia, Iran, and India annually.37 Assuming that a third of these slaves disembarked at Iranian ports during the same period and extrapolating this ratio to the whole century, one may infer that of the 718,000 slaves exported from East Africa during the nineteenth century, approximately 16 percent disembarked in Iran. A quantitative and historical examination suggests that Iran was a slave- holding society, where Africans were minorities within the majority of multiethnic populations, in contrast with the slave societies of the Americas, whose social and economic functions were primarily based on slavery. Still, in the context of the Iranian population, the number of slaves was small. In 1869, when the population of Tehran was 155,736, the number of Africans was 3,281 or 2.1 percent of the population, of which 756 were black ghulams and eunuchs and 2,525 were black kanizes and concubines.38 Today, traces of this heritage are not visible in Tehran or Shiraz. Slaves who disembarked at ports along the shores and islands of the Persian Gulf and joined the local populations eventually established different patterns of African communities. The population of these slaves was concentrated in four modern provinces: Sistan-Baluchistan, Hormuzgan, Bushehr, and Khuzistan. For example, in 1885, as many as a third of the slaves sold at Bushehr were purchased by local inhabitants.39 Enslaved Africans worked in various socioeconomic sectors of society: along the coastal areas, they were employed in the fishing industry and pearling; in rural areas, they labored in agriculture; and in urban areas, they worked as domestic servants. African slaves interacted with one another, shared similar situations, and created new communal networks.

Stage Two In the mid-nineteenth century, two groups of settled Africans in Iran could be found: African- and Iranian-born slaves and freed slaves. During this period, the institution of slavery within Iran was legal, but the sea trade of enslaved Africans was prohibited. Slaves liberated by the British while on board ships were called “liberated Africans” and were sent to India and East Africa to be employed as laborers. On Iranian soil, slaves voluntarily freed by their masters were numerous. Freedom in these cases was granted to aged slaves, as well as for the purpose of rewarding faithful service or fulfilling a master’s last will or religious obligation. 360 M Behnaz A. Mirzai

Historically, city quarters or mahallas in Iran were formed by people who had common ties based on kinship, ethnic, or religious affiliation. Endogamous marriage preference bound inhabitants closely together, contributing further to the development of districts where they could find safety and comfort. Such was the case for other religious and ethnic minorities in Iran, such as the Jews.40 Around the year 1900, about 300 African- born freed slaves were living in Bandar Abbas out of a winter population of 10,000.41 These slaves had created an autonomous community, residing in the northwest portion of the city, which was consequently called the Blacks’ Quarter (Mahalla-yi Siyahan). Furthermore, they had established their own religious meeting place (tikiya) separated from other ethnic groups, where they interacted freely with one another and performed Islamic ceremonies.42 The establishment of a specific quarter provided communal networking and helped retain the slaves’ cultural identity. Yet despite the segregated geographical location of black communities in some districts of Bandar Abbas, their marriage with indigenous people gradually assisted in breaking down ethnic boundaries and led to the absorption of Africans into the host population. One of the consequences of marriage with the local people was the increase in the biracial population and the corresponding decline in the number of pure blacks, and perhaps the gradual loss of ethnic identity. Many African elements were incorporated into Iran’s local cultures by African-born slaves imported from Muscat and Zanzibar.43 The owners of slaves assisted them in finding a suitable partner, who then resided in the owner’s house. The term khanazad (house-born) was used to describe the children of African slaves born within a Persian household. This was an important step in the creation of an Afro-Iranian ethnic community and identity.44 However, African slaves did not reproduce at a high rate. Since they were susceptible to disease, many died at a young age. Their high mortality rate was one of the major reasons those of African descent disappeared from many areas, in particular from urban settings, where the indigenous populations significantly outnumbered them. One of the most important characteristics of slavery in Muslim societies was that slaves could bridge the gap from marginalization to full assimilation. Islamic law advanced legal rights to slaves, such as the right to marry and the right to request freedom;45 moreover, it supported the emancipation process, allowing slaves to become full citizens and to achieve social prominence.46 This is illustrated in the process of identity transformation, in which a slave’s status could shift from the status of outsider to the status of insider (i.e., the member of a master’s family). Throughout the post-prohibition period, slaves continued to derive their identities from their masters and families. The ease with which slaves assimilated is attributed to both enslavement at a young age and the fact Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 361 that most slaves came from areas of established monotheism in Africa (such as Somalia and Ethiopia).47 While most slaves converted to Islam, not all slaveholders were Muslim—the members of other religious groups, such as the followers of the Bahai religion, owned slaves.48 Their gradual integration into society was hastened through the assimilation of the Persian language and customs—but with African accents and expressions.49 Over time, the language structure and dialect of each particular area greatly influenced the Africans. Significantly, they absorbed the language of the local people such as Arabic, Baluchi, Luri, Abbasi, Lari, or Makrani while they neverthelsss used Swahili words in their daily lives. Swahili, indeed, became the lingua franca for the western Indian Ocean and was widely used in the Persian Gulf, southern Iran and Oman. The second stage in the nomenclatural designation of enslaved Africans was mainly associated with occupation and referred to settled African and Iranian-born slaves. On the one hand, the African population had not yet been categorized as a distinct ethnic community in Iran, and on the other, the Africans’ place of origin was gradually being forgotten. Hence, the term siyah (black) was used in the census of 1869 and referred broadly to both Iranian-born and African-born slaves who resided in Tehran.50 Siyah originally described those living on the African continent, but its usage gradually extended to refer to a subethnic group in Iran. The term hajji51 was also used to describe black kanizes and ghulams who had been brought to Iran by pilgrims during the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca).52 After the ban was instituted on the sea trade of African slaves, some Persian pilgrims would buy one or two African slaves at markets in Mecca, Medina, or Karbala and transport them through the desert into Iran.53 Thus, “hajji” specifically referred to slaves that were bought by Persian pilgrims. It was also a religious identification indicating not only their conversion to Islam but also their journey to Mecca and fulfillment of the important religious duty of hajj. Furthermore, various socioeconomic indicators (including occupation, gender, and status) were increasingly used to identify slaves: a ghulam (plural: ghulaman, ghulamha) was a male slave; a kaniz (plural: kanizan, kanizha) and jariya distinguished a female slave from a woman engaged in childcare (a dada was a woman who cared for children, and a daya was a wet nurse); a lala was a male nurse; and a khwaja, or agha, was a eunuch. These termi- nological designations reflected slaves’ statuses and the fact that they were becoming increasingly integrated into society. The use of these categories and the enslaved Africans’ active involvement in society helped create a new identity in the settled region. Enslaved Africans worked in various occupations and interacted with the public. Some married local people or their masters, which resulted in the emergence of a mixed race population—for example, Lorimer mentions that in Bandar Abbas the bulk of the population 362 M Behnaz A. Mirzai was a hybrid race of Persian, Baluch, Arab, and Negro descent known as Abbasis.54 Being black or of a mixed race was not associated with inferior- ity or shame in Iran, as opposed to the Americas.55 As such, there was no advantage in altering blackness or hiding one’s African heritage to escape discrimination or obtain membership in the society.

The Emancipation Era (after 1929) By the early twentieth century, it was estimated that thousands of African slave families lived in the regions of Kirmanshah, Kirman, and Baluchistan.56 But a significant shift was to come: slaves were legally emancipated during the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi when a bill was ratified by Parliament (Shura-yi Milli) in 1929.57 The decree upheld the principle of equality and freedom among all Iranian citizens, regardless of race. Needless to say, while the legislation theoretically removed the slave class from the social structure, it could not alter lifelong relationships between former owners and their slaves, given the depth of the slaves’ economic, social, and sometimes even personal dependency on their masters. And yet, the process of emancipation in Iran did not arise from a racial struggle, since the society was not divided along racial lines—indeed, the experiences of both black and white slaves testified to the vulnerability of all races. During the post-emancipation era, the biggest challenge many newly enfranchised citizens could have faced was learning to survive independently in an uncertain world. In reality, this uncertainty was mitigated by local cultural, social, and economic conditions. As such, individuals exercised varying degrees of independence that had a significant effect on future patterns of Afro-Iranian community development and identity formation. The realization of freedom for former slaves varied after 1929 in Iran. The post-emancipation era was characterized by the dismantling of traditional structures of social protection and economic and psychological support for people now considered to be autonomous, self-determining individuals. Some former slaves, unable to secure sufficient positions in a free society, were forced into new experiences of servitude with their former masters. For example, around the mid-twentieth century, anthropologist Henry Field observed Baluchi slaves working for owners on date plantations in Bint, a village in the Makran district.58 At the individual and collective level in society, these new citizens had two options: integration or separation. Economic independence could significantly contribute to integration; but this was not possible for many to achieve immediately after emancipation. Freed people often recognized that their full economic independence could only be achieved by relying on their former productive roles. Thus, some freed African- and Iranian-born slaves remained with their former Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 363 masters to enjoy a degree of security. They made the transition to full citizenship gradually, living with former masters until they had earned economic independence. It is not surprising that people of African descent generally did not choose to return to the homeland of their forebears. Years—or even generations— later, they did not know where their old homes were or were too old to return. Many had lost proficiency in their original African languages and had become much more integrated into Iranian society. Even those who had been born in Africa knew that their childhood experience of home would inevitably be different decades later, so adopting Iranian citizenship became the most pragmatic option. It is true not only for those of the African diaspora in Iran but also for the descendants of African slaves elsewhere that they found a degree of comfort in shared environmental, economic, social, psychological, and cultural conditions. This also shaped the relationships between ethnic minorities and Afro-Iranians, the internal structure of their populations, and the evolution of distinct identities of internal communities in modern times. For this reason, slaves’ experiences of the post-emancipation era were different, so that they collectively or individually faced diverse options. A closer examination of the post-emancipation Afro-Iranian populations suggests that regional and social factors were important in creating the diverse identities that exist today. At the collective level, we see variations in terms of Afro-Iranian community formation: assimilation is common in large cities, which saw the emergence of mixed race populations, and integration is especially common in rural areas. Importantly, members of integrated communities were not segregated or discriminated against on the basis of race (as in the Americas); instead, they lived in parallel, self- sufficient communities. Environmental and geographic constraints were important factors that impeded the assimilation of those communities in remote areas such as Baluchistan. In integrated communities, concentra- tions of specific subethnic groups provided close intercommunity networks that also allowed their members to develop relationships with the rest of society.59 In the Middle East, the structure of subsocieties, which is based on kinship patterns, emphasizes communal intermarriage. Consequently, African intermarriage in these regions was affected by such local subcul- tures, inevitably forming a distinct ethnic identity. By contrast, patterns of assimilation can be traced to more populous areas. In the large port cities, where ideas, technology, and migration brought people of diverse ethnic groups and nationalities into close contact, assimilation was inevitable. Neither of these two categories were associated with racial barriers that prevented Afro-Iranians from equitable participation in society. 364 M Behnaz A. Mirzai

Stage Three The transformation of identity is well reflected in the third stage of the nomenclatural designation of enslaved Africans. Although the identity of African slaves was directly influenced by the shift in their legal status after emancipation, the process of reidentification had begun earlier. Indeed, after several generations, many were already identified with local, familial (which was sometimes equated with occupational identity), and regional/ national identities. The term azad (freed) was used to refer to all legally freed (Iranian-born and African-born) people of African descent, suggesting the status change of ex-slaves. But gradually, the term’s legal implication became less important, and the word became broadly associated with local communal and ethnic groups and referred to Iranian-born free people. Old terminologies were adapted to the new social and legal realities and came to carry new meanings. For instance, the term ghulam, referring to African slaves, became the surname Ghulami in Afro-Iranian communities in Baluchistan. In the same way, Azadi (which means liberty) was often chosen as a surname by freed slaves during the post-emancipation period. From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, identity transformations shifted the status of Africans from that of outsiders (African-born slaves) to that of insiders (Iranian-born people), and from infidels to Muslims. The preexisting words changed in meaning, and as the memory of the slavery era faded, the original meanings of these designations ceased to be important. Thus, some terms were commonly used by African descendants for self- identification.60 Regional and national identifications were strengthened through intermarriage with indigenous people and the subsequent emergence of hybrid populations. At this stage, the meaning of ethnicity associated with Africa shifted to Iran: Afro-Iranians were no longer considered ethnically African, but rather members of one of the many ethnic groups of Iran. An example of this transformation in identity was recorded by Khusraw Khusravi, an Iranian scholar who was invited by the Iranian Oil Company to examine the impact of oil exploration on local people. In 1962, he visited Kharg Island, where he met a Zanzibari-born resident who proudly identified himself as an Iranian.61 The local social fabric also had a significant impact on determining the formation of local communities, rather than society dictating a uniform social pattern. Some regional socioeconomic structures, however, were responsible for slowing the process of reidentification, as was the case in tribal areas with rigid social hierarchies. In spite of its efforts, the Pahlavi regime (1925–1979) was not able to subsume all of the Iranian ethnic minorities into a single political, ethnic, Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 365 and cultural identity. Thus, emphasis on the importance of the antecedent Aryan characteristics of the Iranian nation inevitably separated those ethnic groups and cultures that did not share this history. To this day, members of diasporic communities uphold their traditional culture and values. Political culture has never fully penetrated or significantly impacted the personal or spiritual worlds of the descendants of African slaves. As late as 1923, French Orientalist Henri Massé observed the perpetuation of the spirit-possession ceremony, zar, in Jask.62 Modern state policy could only superficially conceal the pervasiveness of African traditions. Although some public ceremonies (such as liwa) were outlawed, many cultural expressions were maintained covertly. Practices forced underground may have been modified, but they have not been extinguished entirely.63 Instinctive resistance to the political and cultural agenda of the Pahlavi regime by Afro- Iranians, therefore, ensured their survival to the present day. While being uprooted from one’s homeland can cause feelings of insecurity, anxiety, and powerlessness (known as social displacement syndrome), the heterogeneous society of Iran allowed Africans to adjust to their new society and retain their distinct cultural characteristics.64 By and large, the modernization policies of the twentieth century changed or moderated traditional hierarchical social and economic structures. We have seen that emancipatory policies encouraged the integration of many freed African- and Iranian-born slaves. After the White Revolution in the 1960s, a further erosion of the feudal aristocratic structures gave rural communities of African descendants greater independence. The Iranian Revolution’s prioritization of religion in politics after 1979 shifted the focus of attention away from these more remote Afro-Iranian communities and allowed them respite from intensive state pressure toward cultural Westernization and modernization. Since many of the revolutionaries themselves hailed from rural areas, ethnic diversity—with all its expressions— came to enjoy greater toleration in the political system than it had before. This was further enhanced by sustained governmental efforts to undermine the regional authority of khans (or local chiefs). Most recently, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq has given communities of the same ethnic group situated on both sides of the Iran–Iraq border the opportunity to reintegrate. Overall, social and political transformations have both intensified and eased assimilation processes and have guaranteed the survival of many Afro-Iranian identities. In a pluralistic Iranian society, Africans’ adaptation to local cultural identity is evident. The process of identity reconstruction took place through everyday adjustment to outside conditions. Some aspects of their cultural identity were retained or transformed, while others were discontin- ued or replaced with new patterns. Similarly, the formation of various ethnic 366 M Behnaz A. Mirzai identities was determined by the surrounding community’s ethnic identity and social, economic, and geographic factors. The myriad of African cultural expressions enmeshed in a national collective identity demonstrates how ethnic solidarity and cultural unity can be maintained in the presence of entrenched kinship networks. Modern-day populations in Iran consider themselves to be wholly Iranian, be they descendants of African slaves or indigenous peoples or a mixture of ethnic groups. In spite of a commitment to Iranian nationalism, communities along Iran’s many frontiers have also embraced a transnational identity (such as Afro-Baluchi, Afro-Arab or Afro-Bandari) that speaks of complex intercultural relations with neighboring countries. This phenomenon is undoubtedly a feature of remote borderland communities that have maintained close familial and cultural ties with the Arab states, Iraq, and Pakistan for centuries. More recently, changing international boundaries, globalization, and modernization have further impacted these groups’ identities, both in terms of integration and disintegration. Afro-Iranian communities are similar in terms of their shared African ancestry, but they experienced divergent patterns of communal creation. This is exemplified—as it has been by other ethnic groups in Iran—especially in rural and urban communities. History, not political directives, has dictated socioeconomic differences in Afro-Iranian and indigenous communities alike. Thus, the Afro-Iranian quarters in modern Iranian cities such as Bandar Abbas have never been stigmatized as socially or economically inferior. But there are obvious differences between those that live in urban communities and those that live in rural communities: indeed, rural Afro- Iranians tend to be darker skinned and less affluent than their city cousins. Despite this, the rural Ghulami community in Baluchistan today is perceived to be equal to other members of the local urban population. Indeed, Afro-Baluchis shaped an ethnic and national self-consciousness within the context of modern multiculturalism and international politics. Their hierarchical communities successfully resisted infiltration of the dominant culture while maintaining their unique social and ethnic characteristics, as we can see within the subethnic group, the Ghulami. Societal inclusivity and geographical conditions provide the basis for group affiliation or collectively bounded identity. This is evident in large cities such as Khurramshahr and Bandar Abbas, where cultural assimilation occurs more readily than in rural areas.

“Blackness” and Racial Differentiation in Iran How do Iranians respond to the subject of “blackness” today? Modern con- ceptions tend to differ from those of the past: instead of being categorized Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 367 as African descendants, Afro-Iranians are now identified as members of an Iranian subethnic group. To members of Iranian culture, black is not a pejorative term; indeed, the Western construction of a racial identity associated with “blackness” is not found in Iranian culture. According to Islam, privilege is only based on piety, and all humankind are slaves of God (Allah). Iranian culture is derived from Islamic tenets, which stress the equality of all men and denounce any type of discrimination, be it racial or ethnic.65 Moreover, being black (siyah) was not associated negatively with backward cultural expressions or ethnicities. In fact, the line between various Iranian ethnic groups is drawn according to peculiarities of tradition, culture, and language—not race. Indeed, inclusion in or exclusion from Iranian society has not been justified on the basis of a person’s race. Similarly, skin color, social hierarchy, and wealth are not linked in Iranian culture. As such, it would be inaccurate to suggest that an individual’s skin color privileged his or her social mobility in the same way as it might have delayed a former slave’s integration or assimilation within the society after emancipation. African descendants, like those of all other ethnic backgrounds in Iran, were guaranteed legal and civil rights. Today, like many other Iranians, people of African descent are involved in various activities in society and are not conscious of a different heritage. Scholars of the African diaspora acknowledge that people of African descent worldwide were historically segregated from indigenous populations on the basis of skin color and physical features. Iran presents a different paradigm. From the mid-twentieth century onward, the term siyah has been used in different contexts: siyahan-i janub, meaning southern-born black people, is one example. Siyah also shifted in meaning from “African-born slave” to “Iranian-born person,” describing people (usually bandaris) living in the ports of the southern areas of the country, where black people constitute a large portion of the population. Although the term refers to dark- skinned people, it does not imply ethnicity in hereditary terms or land of origin, but rather geographical land of residence. Iranians’ lack of historical knowledge has led to the assumption that environmental factors—namely, the hot climate of the south—affected the skin color of Iran’s inhabitants. Siyahan-i janub is, in fact, a colloquial and antiquated term equivalent to the diasporic and modern academic term, Afro-Iranian.

The Afro-Iranian Legacy since 1929 Since emancipation in 1929, Afro-Iranians have contributed to the economy and culture of Persian society. Their performance and music are considered part of the cultural heritage of Iran, and the Islamic government has sponsored many of their public festivals. The vitality and dynamism of African 368 M Behnaz A. Mirzai identities and cultures have not only survived but have responded positively to change. As with other diasporic cultures of African origin, transformation occurred and resulted in hybridized identities and cultural expressions. They transcended familial, tribal, regional, national, and even transnational boundaries. For Iran, the African legacy has served to unify communities and create shared identities. It may be said that national loyalties and religious dedications are embod- ied in all cultural practices, even though they might exhibit regional variations in terms of performance, language, symbolic elements, and gender relationships. In Iran, many of these practices include national and Islamic elements and symbols, such as carrying the Iranian national flag, covering a sick person with a veil, the incantation of specific prayers, ceremonial abstinence during the Muslim holy months of Muharram and Ramadan, and so on. Similarly, in Brazil, African descendants have integrated African religions and traditions with Roman Catholicism and developed a new religion called Candomblé.66 The impact of indigenous religious and historical circumstances on Afro-Iranian communities cannot be overemphasized. A case in point is the African healing rituals associated with spirit-possession cults in Baluchistan that were transmogrified with reference to Sufism, the mystical expression of Islam. Among the Ghulami tribes, entirely new cultural expressions have emerged in response to Islamic mysticism. Notions of collective and national identity have guaranteed the Afro-Iranians’ survival and would not have been possible without this unique synthesis of African culture and local religion.67 Cultural expression among Afro-Iranians should be regarded as the most significant constituent of their association with Africa. Curzon remarked that due to the widescale importation of slaves from Muscat and Zanzibar, considerable African elements existed in Baluchistan.68 For example, they lived in African-type round huts made of mud or palm branches. Riyahi refers to the circumcision of girls among one particular ethnic group of blacks as the result of African culture (perhaps the Gikuyu, but more likely from Somalia or Ethiopia): “Until a few years ago, a specific group of blacks were circumcising their daughters on the rocks close to the sea in a region of Chabahar in the southwest of the city beside the tomb of Khazar. But today they do it rarely and only in secret.”69 While interactions among slaves as they journeyed from Africa and communication and cultural exchange with local Iranian populations impacted the formation of Afro-Iranian communities and illustrate the diffusion of traditional African rituals, beliefs, and symbols, the identity of these communities was also shaped by mainstream politics and societal mores. Interestingly, political transitions and reforms provided and continue to offer opportunities for those of African descent to disconnect from the Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 369 dominant social structure. Indigenous cultures were also influenced by the newcomers, as seen in the case of Bandari music of the southern coast that recalls the drums and traditional rhythms of African culture.70 Songs such as “Sangali” and “Sabalu” had roots in African culture and were performed by sailors in Iran’s southern regions.71 Musical instruments brought to Iran by Africans were used by peoples of the south. For example, the tambira, or tambora (krar in Ethiopia), originated in Sudan and was a holy instrument which continued to be used in the Nuban ritual in Iran.72 Enslaved Sudanese and Ethiopians (Abyssinians) from eastern and northeastern Africa introduced many of the spirit-possession ceremonies that are still practiced today—though these are rarely observed by nonbe- lievers in such practices.73 These ethnocultural rituals can be traced to the nineteenth-century influx of Oromo slaves into Iran from the Gurage and Shoa areas of Ethiopia in northeast Africa. Zar ceremonies74 continued to be widely practiced in Iran, even after prohibition ended the importation of African slaves. Parallels are found elsewhere in communities of the African diaspora. The bori spirit-possession cult from Nigeria, West Africa, was taken to the Americas by enslaved Africans and became known as voodoo.75 The perpetuation of these rituals in Iran illustrates the importance of ancestral acculturation to the modern expression of Afro-Iranian identity. But these rituals also reveal a degree of pragmatism: that is, tradition takes over when new methods are found to be ineffective. Thus, many of these rituals retained potency in areas that lacked effective health services or biomedical treatments. Spirit-possession rituals in Iran include the zar, liwa, malid, and gwat. Proponents of spirit-possession treatments believe that an external spirit causes illness; thus, communication with the spirit by a qualified healer offering gifts of propitiation76 will heal the afflicted person. The world of spirit healers is highly social and cohesive, securing familial and community networks and generating ethnic solidarity. Healers are revered within the community for their knowledge and spiritual power and, as a result, are respected and granted authority, power, and financial security. Healers master their practices through a process of apprenticeship, experience, and dedication. Networks of practitioners exist in Iran among Afro-Iranian communities and elsewhere in the Middle East. Such bonds between Africans in Iran and throughout the lands of the diaspora signify the process of acculturation and identity representation.

Afro-Iranian Identity in the Twenty-First Century How do Afro-Iranians perceive their heritage and identity today? Education and an understanding of history are key in enabling people of African 370 M Behnaz A. Mirzai descent to appreciate their identity and ethnic consciousness. Afro-Iranians do not have knowledge of their past. This is not unique to them; indeed, a lack of awareness about their history applies to all Persians. The identities of Iranians of the African diaspora contain elements of both their own ethnic and cultural heritage and their host societies. These identities have been transformed over time and place. As a rule, regional policies of ethnic exclusion and inclusion either produced longings for the homeland or cultivated new attitudes of national identity. In Iran, where African culture persists, the transformation of past identities into present identities for many Afro- Iranians has been relatively straightforward. During this transformation, Afro-Iranians facilitated the process of assimilation by adopting aspects of Iranian-Islamic culture, which significantly contributed to shaping their identity. Moreover, as much as cultural heritage helped foster solidarity within the communities, national identification has since inspired a sense of belonging to the larger society—the nation-state. Thus, we find Afro- Iranians representing a combination of various classes and races, including privileged Iranians and Muslims, who have—by and large—rejected identification with Africa. Not particularly interested in their ancestors’ homeland, many are also not aware of their heritage and, instead, focus their patriotic sentiments on Iran. Since 1998, I have been interviewing African descendants from various regions of southern Iran; each individual I interviewed emphasized and was proud of his or her Iranian identity. Today, Afro-Iranians are concentrated in Iran’s southern regions, as well as on its islands and along the coast of the Persian Gulf. While their presence is highly visible, no color label can be found in the national census. For this reason, the number of African descendants present in Iran’s population is not known.

Conclusion Today, the communities of descendants of African slaves represent a unique contribution to ethnic and cultural diversification in Iran. Acculturation and identity and ethnic representations are—to a great degree—responses to a combination of external and internal pressures. These responses provide general insight into the challenges faced by the ethnic minority of Afro-Iranians and, importantly, reveal the efficacy of survival strategies and adaptations in regions along the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean at large. From their arrival to the present day, the identity of African slaves and their descendants underwent a transformation from “African” to “freed” to “Iranian.” The three stages of identity formation are encapsulated in the slave-trade, post-prohibition, and emancipation eras. During these periods, the identity of enslaved Africans was transformed from newly arrived Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 371

African-born slaves (bardas) to settled African- and Iranian-born female slaves (kanizes) and male slaves (ghulams) and those that were freed (azad), to freed African- and Iranian-born slaves and free Iranian-born people of African descent (Iranians). Their status shifted from that of outsiders to insiders and from that of foreigners to an Iranian ethnic group. In Iran, people were not divided along racial lines, and none of the three stages of nomenclatural designation prevented Afro-Iranians from equitable participation in society. Cultural adaptation, economic independence, and marriage with local people gradually led Iranians to view Africans as fellow citizens rather than as aliens. Identities were forged through struggles that transcended communal, familial, local, and even national boundaries. Iranians of the African diaspora can celebrate the multiple ethnic, national, and political identities they have engendered independently and collectively. It is through the study of the rich and varied identities of Afro-Iranians that we are granted insight into the world of the diaspora.

Notes

1. I use assimilated to refer to the process through which Africans consciously or unconsciously lost their distinct ethnic, social, and cultural identities and, thus, melded into the host society. 2. On 18 Bahman 1307 Shamsi [February 7, 1929], the Iranian parliament ratified the bill. 3. In this chapter, integration implies the process through which Africans maintained some aspects of their culture and/or established (consciously or unconsciously) distinct social and ethnic identities. 4. I developed the term Afro-Iranian in 1998 within the context of a graduate “Nigerian Hinterland Project,” which was directed by Paul E. Lovejoy at York University in Canada. 5. Behnaz A. Mirzai, “African Presence in Iran: Identity and its Reconstruction,” in O. Petre-Grenouilleau, ed., Traites et Esclavages: Vieux Problemes, Nouvelles Perspectives? (Paris: Société française d’Histoire d’Outre-mer, 2002), 229–46 ; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The 1848 abolitionist Farmān: a Step Towards Ending the Slave Trade in Iran,” in Gwyn Campbell, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Routledge, 2005), 94–102; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The Slave Trade and the African Diaspora in Iran,” in Abdul Sheriff, ed., Monsoon and Migration: Unleashing Dhow Synergies (Zanzibar: ZIFF, 2005), 30–34; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “Le commerce des esclaves africains dans l’Iran du XIXe siècle,” Les Cahiers des Anneaux de la Mémoire 9 (2006): 29–40; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “The Trade in enslaved Africans in Nineteenth-Century Iran” in Kiran Kamal Prasad and Jean-Pierre Angenot, eds., TADIA—The African Diaspora in Asia: Explorations on a Less Known Fact (Bangalore: Jana Jagrati Prakashana, 2008): 411–20; Behnaz A. Mirzai, “Emancipation and Its Legacy in Iran: An Overview,” in The Cultural Interactions Resulting from the Slave Trade and Slavery in the Arab Islamic World (Paris: UNESCO, 2008). See also http://portal.unesco. 372 M Behnaz A. Mirzai

org/culture/fr/files/38502/124809720756.Emancipation_LegacyIran.pdf/6. Emancipation%2BLegacyIran.pdf 6. My field research began in 1998. I traveled to many villages and cities in Iran’s southern provinces, interviewing and collecting data on African descendants. In addition, documents collected from Iranian archives and primary sources gave me a better appreciation of the development of Afro-Iranian communities. In 2004, I completed my PhD dissertation, “Slavery, the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Emancipation of Slaves in Iran, 1828–1928,” at York University, Canada. 7. Arnold Burrowes Kemball to Colonel H. D. Robertson and Justin Sheil, July 8, 1842, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew (hereafter NAUK), FO 84/426. 8. Arnold Burrowes Kemball, 1847, NAUK, FO 84/692; H. D. Robertson to L. P. Willoughby, March 4, 1842, NAUK, FO 84/426. 9. Justin Sheil (Tehran) to Lord Palmerston, February 7, 1851, NAUK, FO 248/144, 179–87; Justin Sheil (Ispahan) to Lord Palmerston, September 1, 1851, NAUK, FO 84/144; Justin Sheil to Ameer-i-Nezam, March 3, 1851, NAUK, FO 84/857; Justin Sheil to Amir Kabir, box 6, file 24, Rabi‘ al-Awwal 29, 1267, Abolition of the Slave Trade Collection, the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran, Tehran. 10. David Wilson, Resident in the Persian Gulf, to the government, January 28, 1831, NAUK, FO 84/426. 11. Mahmud Zand-i Muqaddam, Hikayat-i Baluch (Story of the Baluch), 4 vols. (Tehran: Karun, 1370/1991), vol. 1, 169. 12. H. W. Dowding, Senior Naval Officer, Persian Gulf (Basra) to E. C. Ross, Political Resident in Persian Gulf, November 11, 1885, the British Library, London (hereafter BL), L/PS/20/246. 13. Cited in Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 1800–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 125–26. 14. Arnold Burrowes Kemball to H. D. Robinson, January 28, 1853, NAUK, FO 84/919. 15. Percy Molesworth Sykes, “The Geography of Southern Persia as Affecting Its History,” The Scottish Geographical Magazine 18, no. 12 (1902): 617–26. 16. Mieko Nishida, Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 30. 17. Ibid., 13. 18. Lord Lugard, “Indirect Rule in Tropical Africa,” in Robert O. Collins, ed., Documents from the African Past (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001), 296. 19. Samuel Hennell to H. Wellesley, chargé d’affaires at the Ottoman ports, May 8, 1847, NAUK, FO 248/129. Of these 1,200 Africans, 80 were singled out as Habashi. This number excludes the number of slaves brought by Iranian pilgrims on their return from Mecca and Karbala. Samuel Hennell to H. Wellesley, May 8, 1847, BL, L/PS/5/450. 20. Mary Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (London: J. Murray, 1856; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1973), 243–44. 21. Charles James Wills, In the Land of the Lion and Sun or Modern Persia (London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1891; new edition, Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2004), 326–27. Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 373

22. Samuel Hennell (Bushire) to Justin Sheil, January 11, 1850, BL, L/PS/5/463. 23. Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1991), 13. 24. Extracts of a letter from Wilson to the government, January 28, 1831, NAUK, FO 84/426. 25. Wilson reported that four hundred to five hundred were employed as soldiers. Ibid. 26. From the old Iranian ųarta, Avestan varǝta, Parth wardāz, Middle Persian wardag, and Pahlavan anšahrīg meaning captive. See Encyclopædia Iranica, s.v. “Barda and Bardadari.” 27. Abdullah Mustawfi, Sharh-i Zindigani-yi Man: Tarikh-i ijtima‘i va idari-yi Dawra-yi Qajar (Describing My Life: The Social and Administrative History of the Qajars), 3 vols. (Tehran: Zavvar, 1377/1998), 1:214; John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1827), 1:19. 28. Ibn Battuta, “The East African Coast. 1331,” in Documents from the African Past, 13. 29. The port of Mina, or El Mina, was on the Gold Coast, West Africa. 30. A subgroup of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. 31. Nishida, Slavery and Identity, 31. 32. J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 599. In 1851, a further 11-year agreement gave British warships the right, with the assistance of Iranian officials, to search Iranian merchant ships. In 1857, the Treaty of Paris extended the agreement for another ten years (1862–1872). In 1882, a subsequent treaty gave the British navy the right to search Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf without Iranian supervisors being present. 33. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145. 34. Sheil, Glimpses of Life, 245. 35. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 233. 36. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, 150. 37. Martin B. Esmond and T. C. I. Ryan, “A Quantitative Assessment of the Arab Slave Trade of East Africa, 1770–1896,” Kenya Historical Review 5, no. 1 (1977): 79. 38. S. Sa‘dvandian and M. Ettehadieh, eds., Amar-i Dar al-khalafa-yi Tehran (Tehran’s Census) (Tehran: Nashr-i Tarikh-i Iran, 1368/1989), 347 and Mansureh Ettehadieh, “The Social Condition of Women in Qajar Society,” in Elton L. Daniel, ed., Society and Culture in Qajar Iran: Studies in Honor of Hafez Farmayan (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002), 82. 39. Robert B. M. Binning, A Journal of Two Years’ Travel in Persia, Ceylon, etc., 2 vols. (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1857), 1: 272. 40. William Francklin, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia: In the Years 1786–7 (London: T. Cadell, 1788), 60. 41. Muhammad Ali Sadid al-Saltana (Kababi), Bandar Abbas va Khalij-i Fars (Bandar Abbas and the Persian Gulf ) (Tehran: 1368/1989), 157–58 (figure on Africans in Bandar Abbas). Winter population of Bandar Abbas in Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. 2, p. 10. 42. Sadid al-Saltana, Bandar Abbas va Khalij-i Fars, 157–58. 374 M Behnaz A. Mirzai

43. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1892; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1966), vol. 2, 259. 44. Firuz Mirza Farman-Farma, Safarnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan (Accounts of Travels through Kirman and Baluchistan) (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Muqufi-yi Khandan-i Farmanfarmayan, 1342/1963), 12, 63. 45. Joseph Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 127; Mustafa Husaini, Bardigi az Didgah-i Islam (Islam’s Standpoint on Slavery) (Tehran: Bunyad-i Da’rat al-Ma‘arif-i Islami, 1372/1993), 28. 46. Qur’an, al-Nur: 33. 47. Those of no religious affiliation also assimilated after converting to Islam. (Binning, A Journal of Two Years’ Travel, 1:272.) 48. For example, the uncle of the Bab (Sayyid Ali Muhammad, the founder of the Babi religion who claimed in 1847 to be the awaited Mahdi), Khal Akbar, owned a slave named Mas‘ud whom he purchased from a slave trader who had brought him from Zanzibar: “He [the slave] became one of the foremost followers of the Babi faith through the teachings of his master, and he married Gulchihra, an Ethiopian slave who had been kidnapped in Africa and brought to Bushehr as a child. Gulchihra gave birth to a daughter, Sa‘ida, who became a follower of the Babi faith.” (Abu’l-Qasim Afnan, Black Pearls: Servants in the Households of the Báb and the Bahá’u’lláh (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1988), 35–42.) 49. Afnan, Black Pearls, 35–42. 50. Sa‘dvandian and Ettehadieh, eds., Amar-i Dar al-khalafa-yi Tehran. 51. Hajji was used to describe female and male slaves who returned from the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca). 52. Mustawfi, Sharh-i Zindigani-yi Man, 1:214. 53. Sheil, Glimpses of Life, 245. 54. Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. 2, 10. 55. Ronald E. Hall, An Historical Analysis of Skin Color Discrimination in America: Victimism among Victim Group Populations (New York: Springer, 2010), 124. 56. Arnold T. Wilson, Persia (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 34. 57. The decree was issued by the Majlis-i Shura-yi Milli in 1929. See document 290/8034/3, Sazman-i Asnad va Kitabkhana-yi Milli-yi Jumhuri-yi Islami-yi Iran (The National Archive and Library of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Tehran, Iran. 58. Henry Field, Contributions to the Anthropology of Iran (Chicago: Field Musuem Press, 1939; repr. 1968), 238. Legal slavery ended in 1929, just before Field traveled to Iran, so this was a period of transition. 59. Hassan Arfa, a military commander, who visited Bandar Abbas in 1934, observed the concentration of Africans imported from Muscat. (Under Five Shahs (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1965), 240.) 60. Similar patterns can be found in Brazil. See Nishida, Slavery and Identity. 61. Khusraw Khusravi, Jazira-yi Kharg dar dura-yi Istila-yi Naft (Kharg Island during the Oil Domination) (Tehran: Danishgah-i Tehran, 1342/1963), 110. 62. Henri Massé described some common elements in the zar ceremony: a veil to cover the sick individual, a mama (mother) or baba (father), a stick to slightly beat the sick, chanting, and a qalyan (a water pipe for the smoking of tobacco). (Persian Beliefs and Customs (New Haven, CT: Human Relations Area Files, 1954), 755.) Identity Transformations of Africans in Iran M 375

63. Taghi Modarressi, “The Zar Cult in South Iran,” in Trance and Possession States, ed. Raymond Prince (Montreal: R. M. Bucke Memorial Society, 1968), 151; Ghulam Husain Sa‘idi, Ahl-i Hava (People of the Air) (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 2535/1976), 93. In the case of spirit possession, healers continue to perform their ceremonies secretly. By contrast, the ceremony of liwa has either been modified or has disappeared in some areas. 64. Mekuria Bulcha, Flight and Integration: Causes of Mass Exodus from Ethiopia and Problems of Integration in the Sudan (Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1988), 88. 65. Qur’an, al-Ma’idah 5:68; al-Hujurat 49:13. 66. Nishida, Slavery and Identity, 51. 67. Sporadic radical opposition to the performance of rituals associated with mysticism did not reflect general public opinion or express a dominant policy. In Baluchistan, Abdul Rahman Sarbazi, the imam (leader) of Chabahar, in 2001 prohibited the Mawlid, a widely practiced mystical, healing, and cultural ritual, claiming it to be non-Islamic. Although such an attitude could draw a line between two different Islamic factions, it did not prevent the exercise of religious freedom. In the end, demands from the nation, entertainment sectors, and scholars (seeking to obtain knowledge about this exotic practice) have turned the ritual into a form of popular culture and made it fashionable in some areas. 68. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, vol. 2, 259. 69. Ali Riyahi, Zar va bad va Baluch (Air and Wind and Baluch) (Tehran: Kitabkhana-yi Tuhuri, 1977), 3. 70. In his book, Arfa described the festivities and the exciting group-dance performances of Afro-Iranians with rhythmic African music, which took place on the occasion of the third of Isfand (February 22), the anniversary of the coup d’état of 1921 in Bandar Abbas. (Under Five Shahs, 241.) 71. Iraj Afshar Sistani, Maqalat-i Iranshinasi (Articles on Iranology) (Tehran: Nashr-i Danish,1369/1990), 499; Behnaz Mirzai, Afro-Iranian Lives, DVD (2008). 72. Cynthia Tse Kimberlin, “The Music of Ethiopia,” in Elizabeth May, ed., Musics of Many Cultures: An Introduction (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 237. 73. Though nonbelieving observers are rarely permitted access to these ceremonies, I was fortunate to be granted permission to attend a number of them by local shaikhs and elders. 74. Richard Natvig, “Oromos, Slaves, and the Zar Spirits: A Contribution to the History of the Zar Cult,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (1987): 679. 75. I. M. Lewis, “Zar in Context: The Past, the Present and Future of an African Healing Cult,” in I. M. Lewis et al. eds., Women’s Medicine: The Zar-Bori Cult in Africa and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 2. The main participants of the Bori cult in Hausaland are women (Ismail H. Abdalla, “Neither Friend nor Foe: The Malam Practitioner—Yan Bori Relationship in Hausaland,” in Lewis et al., Women’s Medicine, 41; Lewis, “Zar in Context,” 6). Evidence of spirit-possession and healing cults can also be observed among the descendants of enslaved Africans in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and the United States, as well as among the Fulbe and Bambara people (John Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton: 376 M Behnaz A. Mirzai

Markus Wiener, 2002), xxiii). Indeed, the practice of the Candomblé religion in Bahia, Brazil, can be traced to the Yoruba culture from the Bight of Benin. 76. Traditionally, the blood of a sacrificed goat or sheep is given to the afflicted person. In Tanzania, I interviewed the Masais, who told me drinking animal blood was common among their community, for it was believed to give one power. Contributors

Lawrence G. Potter is adjunct associate professor of international affairs at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1996. He also serves as deputy director of the Gulf/2000 Project, based at Columbia, which is the largest research and documentation project on the Persian Gulf states. A graduate of Tufts College, he received an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a PhD in History from Columbia. Potter was a Visiting Fellow for 2011–12 at the Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. From 1984 to 1992 he was senior editor at the Foreign Policy Association. He has edited five volumes on the region, most recently Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf (2013) and The Persian Gulf in History (2009), and published “The Persian Gulf: Tradition and Transformation,” for the Foreign Policy Association’s Headline Series (December 2011).

* * * Fahad Ahmad Bishara is an assistant professor of History at the College of William and Mary and Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. His research interests lie in the fields of legal history and the history of capitalism—primarily in the Islamic world, but also beyond it. His current research traces the legal transformation of the western Indian Ocean through the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of the East African coast during the nineteenth century. His next project is a microhistory, exploring the dhow trade in the Indian Ocean during the early twentieth century through logbooks left behind by Kuwaiti sea captains (nakhodas). He received his PhD in history from Duke University in 2012, and holds an MA in Arab Gulf Studies from the University of Exeter. His research has been supported 378 M Contributors by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Ahmed al-Dailami is a PhD candidate in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. His doctoral research is a political history of indirect colonial rule in the Persian Gulf, which arises from a broader interest in the intellectual history of conserva- tive political thought in the Arabian Peninsula and wider Middle East. He holds an MA degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and BA from Boston University. Willem Floor is an independent scholar of the social and economic history of Iran, having published more than 250 books and articles, including about a dozen on the Persian littoral of the Gulf. See especially his multivolume series The Persian Gulf, which to date includes A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities 1500–1730 (2006), The Rise of the Gulf Arabs—The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792 (2007), The Rise & Fall of Bander-e Lingeh (2010), Bandar Abbas (2011), Links with the Hinterland (2011), and The Hula Arabs of the Shibkuh Coast of Iran (2014). Another volume, Bushehr: City, Society and Trade 1800– 1945, is forthcoming. Floor received his PhD from Leiden University in 1971, after having studied sociology, economics, Arabic, Persian, and Islamology at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). After serving on the Middle East Desk (Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs) from 1968 to 1971, he worked in development projects in Africa from 1971 to 1974, before becoming a policy adviser to the Dutch minister of development cooperation (1974–83). From 1983 until 2002 he worked worldwide as an energy specialist for the World Bank. He now devotes full time to writing about Iran. Nelida Fuccaro is reader in the modern history of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research focuses on the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Syria with particular reference to urban history, the history of oil, violence, ethnicity, nationalism, and Middle Eastern frontier societies. She is the author of The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (1999) and Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (2009). She is the guest editor of the thematic contribution “Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East” in Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2013) and the coeditor of Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State (2015). As a specialist on urban history and on the Gulf Contributors M 379 region she has been the recipient of several grants for international collaborative research projects. Matthew S. Hopper is associate professor in the History Department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He earned a PhD in History at UCLA in 2006 and holds an MA in African Studies from UCLA and an M.A. in History from Temple University. His dissertation research in East Africa and eastern Arabia was funded by grants from the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays. In 2009 he was a post- doctoral fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University. His writing has recently been published in Annales, Itinerario, and the Journal of African Development, and his book, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire is forthcoming. Carina Jahani has been the chair professor of Iranian Studies at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden, since 2005. Her main fields of research are the Balochi language and its literature, phonetic-phonological and morphosyntactic studies of New Persian and minority languages in Iran, orthography, language maintenance, and language documentation. She has organized several conferences and been the leader of three research projects with a focus on the documentation and description of Iranian languages. She has also supervised a number of PhD candidates. At present she is working on documentation of Koroshi, a dialect of Balochi spoken in scattered communities throughout southern Iran and on orthography development for Balochi. Behnaz A. Mirzai is an associate professor of Middle Eastern history at Brock University, Ontario, Canada, where she has taught since 2006. Prior to this, she taught at Southern Methodist University from 2005 to 2006. Her areas of specialization include comparative and cross-cultural studies, ethnicity, slavery, and gender, as well as social, economic, and religious interactions in the Middle East. She received her PhD from York University, Canada. Prof. Mirzai has authored several articles on slavery and the African Diaspora in Iran, edited a special issue on “The Baluchi and Baluchistan” for The Journal of the Middle East and Africa (2013) and coedited Slavery, Islam and Diaspora (2009). She has also produced two documentary films, Afro-Iranian Lives and African-Baluchi Trance Dance. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1828–1929”. Muhsin al-Musawi is professor of Arabic literature at Columbia University. He is a well-known scholar and literary critic with over 20 years’ experience teaching at a number of institutions in the Middle East. He is known for an 380 M Contributors extensive knowledge of Arabic/Islamic literary tradition, ancient and modern, and a strong grasp of comparative poetics and politics as well as postcolonial theory and cultural studies. Al-Musawi’s teaching and research interests span several periods and genres. He is the author of 29 books (including four novels) and over 65 scholarly articles. His books include Scheherazade in England (1981), The Society of One Thousand and One Nights (2000) and Anglo-Orient: Easterners in Textual Camps (2000). The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003) is the first study of its kind. Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (2006) represents the most comprehensive treatment of this topic to date. Reading Iraq: Culture and Power in Conflict (2006) directs attention to cultural dynamics. He is the writer of a lengthy introduction and notes to a new edition of The Thousand and One Nights (2007). His most recent titles are The Islamic Context of the Thousand and One Nights (2009) and Islam on the Street: Religion in Modern Arabic Literature (2009). A recent book is The Medieval Islamic Republic of Letters: Arabic Construction of Knowledge, and a forthcoming title is Arab Intellectuals’ Struggle with the Past. Farah Al-Nakib is assistant professor of history and director of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait. She received her MA (2006) and PhD (2011) in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and her BA from George Washington University. Her research focuses on the urban history of Kuwait City before and after oil, including current urban trends in Kuwait and the Gulf in the twenty-first century. She also examines questions of memory and forgetting in relation to the built environment. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Journal of Arabian Studies, Built Environment, and elsewhere. Al-Nakib also currently serves as coeditor of the jadaliyya.com Cities Page, as academic adviser to the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science’s Kuwait Program at Sciences Po in Paris, and as board member of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies. James Onley is senior lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of Exeter. He holds a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford (2001), where he studied at St. Antony’s College. He specializes in the history, politics, society, and culture of the Gulf Arab states, Iran, and India, as well as British imperialism, from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Arabian Studies and the Britain and the World book series. He was director of the Exeter Centre for Gulf Studies from 2005 to 2012. He is the author of The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in Contributors M 381 the Nineteenth Century Gulf (2007), which was runner-up for the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award, and has articles or chapters on the Gulf in numerous journals and edited books. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, and has held visiting positions at the University of Bahrain (1998–1999), the American University of Sharjah in the UAE (2005–2007) and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar (2008–2009). Before join- ing academia, Onley served in the Canadian Army for 12 years and was a UN peacekeeper in Iraq at the end of the Iran–Iraq War. J. E. Peterson is a historian and political analyst specializing in the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf and is based in Tucson, Arizona. He has taught at various universities in the United States and France and has been associated with a number of leading research institutes in the United States and the United Kingdom. Until 1999, he served in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for Security and Defence in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. He is the author or editor of a dozen books and monographs, the most recent of which are The Arab Gulf States: Further Steps Toward Political Representation (2006); Historical Muscat: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer (2007); Oman’s Insurgencies: The Sultanate’s Struggle for Supremacy (2007), and The GCC States: Participation, Opposition, and the Fraying of the Social Contract (2012). He has also published some 40 scholarly articles and an equal number of contributions to edited works. He is presently working on a book on Oman since 1970, a historical biography of a major Saudi Arabian personal- ity, and a modern history of Arabia, as well as editing a volume on modern Gulf history. Gholam Reza Vatandoust is an associate professor of Near Eastern Studies and History in the department of International Relations at the American University of Kuwait. His home institution for many years was Shiraz University in Iran, and he is an affiliate of the Middle East Center at the University of Washington. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington (Seattle), and his BA with honors in political science and international relations from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Vatandoust’s scholarly interests include history and politics of the Middle East and modern Iran. He has served as the Giovanni Costigan Visiting Professor of History at the University of Washington and was the recipient of the Getty Institute Fellowship in 2006. He was named Outstanding Research Fellow at Shiraz University for 2005–2006. He was granted an award for outstanding scholarly contributions to the Province of Fars and his book, The CIA Documents on the 1953 Coup and the Overthrow of Dr. Musaddiq of Iran (2001) was named Best Book of the Year for the 382 M Contributors

Province of Fars. His most recent coauthored book in Persian, now in its second edition, titled Persian Women and Newspapers of the Constitutional Period: A Portrayal (1906–1911) was published in 2007 and 2009 and received the Sediqeh Dowlatabadi best book of the year award in women’s studies. His work Selected Texts: A Reference Guide to the History of Iran (2008), serves as a standard textbook at Iranian universities and is now in its eighth edition. The Meshkinfam Museum of Art (with Hassan Meshkinfam) was published in 2010. He has also served as the editor and contributor to four scholarly journals in Iran and has authored and edited over 12 books and over 50 articles in English and Persian. Index

Page numbers in italics denote information in tables and figures.

Abbott, Keith Edward, 181–2 Albuquerque, Afonso de, 157–8, 160, Abdulla, Abdulkhaleq, 115, 144 169–70n11 Adamiyyat, Faridun, 16n25, 74, 97n4 Albuquerque, Braz de, 160, 171n26 Aden, Yemen, 27–8, 34–5, 37, 64–5, Alim, Raja’, 111–13, 122–5 114, 136, 139, 153, 156, 158, 204, Allen, Calvin, 16n18, 232, 244 244–5, 253 Amanat, Abbas, 5, 16n25 Afrakhteh, Hassan, 285 Amin, Ash, 217 African presence in the Gulf, 327–9 Ansari, Ali M., 5 Afro-Iranian identity, 351–3, 367, al-Ansari, Jalal, 303, 315, 318–21 369–70 Arab League, 91–2, 95 Afro-Iranian legacy, 367–9 Arab nationalism, 12, 69, 74, 105, and blackness/racial difference, 328, 324n38 357, 366–7 Arabic language sources, 47–68 demographics, 329–31 Arabizing, 2, 8–9, 24, 259, 313, 318 influence and legacy, 342–4 al-Arimi, Su‘ad, 107 in Iran, 351–71 arts. See literature and the arts and pearl and date industries, 8, 12, Asadpur, Hamid, 85, 99n52 333–43, 359 Aubin, Jean, 2, 135, 170n14 post-prohibition era in Iran, 358–62 slave emancipation era in Iran, Badalkhan, Sabir, 274–5, 277–8 362–6 Bahar, Ghaws, 285–6 slave-trade era in Iran, 355–8 Bahrain, 29, 35, 183, 188, 343, 357 See also slave trade and slavery Africans in, 329–30 Ahmad, Abd al-Hamid, 107–8 Awali, 10 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 88, 91 Baloch in, 270, 282, 284 Ahmed, Mahmoud Wad, 125–6n5 Hawala in, 13, 299, 301–2, 304–5, ‘Ajam (Persians or Persian speakers), 307–13, 317–19 12, 19n71, 74, 165, 304, 312–13, and historiography, 7, 9–10, 51–3, 58, 317–19 62, 64, 74, 79, 81, 83–4, 97n13 384 M Index

Bahrain—Continued Bandar Lingeh, Iran, 24, 27–8, 30, 33, Indian community in, 208, 231–3, 36, 91, 136–9, 173–7, 180–2, 184, 243, 247–57 190–1, 197n91, 249–51, 254, 355 Muharraq, 33, 36, 132, 139 Bandaris, 26, 366–7, 369 in narrative literature, 106, 108 Afro-Bandari, 353, 366 trade, 135–6, 138–9, 142–3, 337–8, Barbosa, Duarte, 158 342 Basra, Iraq See also Manama, Bahrain al-Bassam, Khaled, 55, 64–6 Baloch, 2, 11, 250 and historiography, 4, 8, 52–3, 60 definitions, 269–70 and imperialism, 29 history, 274–9 Indian communities in, 242–3, 257 identity, 12–13, 267–70, 275, 283–5, in Ottoman Empire, 30, 34 287–90 as port city, 29–30, 33–4, 36–8, ideology, 286–7 44n52, 45n65, 131, 136–42, Iranian policy toward, 89, 279–81 146n2, 173–4, 180, 182, 190, 192 in Kuwait Town, 208, 221 slave revolt, 327, 332, 346n21 language, 269–71 and slave trade, 327, 330, 332, Makran/Makrani, 155, 159, 267, 346n21, 355 272–4, 277–80, 282–4, 337–8, Basu, Dilip, 31, 42n22 341, 361–2 Baud, Michiel, 3 in Oman, 164, 269–70, 282–4, Bayandur, Ghulam-Ali, 81 288–9, 291n15 Beck, Lois, 13 origins, 270–1 Bedouins, 109, 124, 338 political division of, 278–9 and historiography, 8, 24, 319 presence in Arabian Peninsula, 281–4 in Kuwait Town, 204–9, 213–16, religion and the arts, 272–4 219, 222 and Qajar dynasty, 276–7 and port cities, 33, 36 and slavery, 338, 355, 362–4, 366 Beeman, William O., 12, 221 and trade, 277–8, 280 Behnam, Mariam, 134 Balochistan, 89, 164, 328, 334, 337, Belgrave, Charles D., 309–10, 312, 341, 355, 358, 362–4, 366, 368. 324n29, 338 See also Chabahar; Gwadar Bent, Mabel V. A., 171n27 Baluch. See Baloch Bent, Theodore, 171n27 Baluchistan. See Balochistan Benton, Lauren, 35 Bandar Abbas, Iran Bhacker, Redha, 2 Africans in, 355, 361, 366 Bilal, Ahmad, 105–6 Baloch in, 271, 278 Bishara, Fahad, 2, 4–6, 47, 377 Hawala in, 304 British India Steam Navigation Indian communities in, 232, 240, Company, 28, 257, 259 242–3, 246–51, 256 Broeze, Frank, 31, 35, 199–200, 207, as port city, 24, 29–30, 32–3, 36, 225n60 131–2, 136–9, 173–7, 179, Brucks, George, 243, 248–9, 259, 180–92, 197n91 263n30 and slave trade, 355 Brydges, Harford Jones, 203 Index M 385

Buckingham, James S., 180, 243, 331 Determann, Jörg Matthias, 4–7 Busch, Briton Cooper, 3 Dowlatabadi, Mahmud, 280–2 Bushehr (Bushire), Iran Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 105, and caravan trading, 173–7, 182, 274, 328, 344 187–8, 190, 192 and historiography, 8–9, 24 commercial community, 185–7 Indian communities in, 233, demographics, 33, 36 243, 254 distribution of imported goods, 189 in narrative literature, 114, as distribution port, 187–90 116–17, 120 effect of political and commercial as port city, 24, 29–31, 33–4, 132, changes, 30, 135–6, 141, 182–5 136, 138–40, 143–6, 211 geography, 138–9, 174–5 Durand, E. L., 338 and historiography, 76–8, 80–3, Dutch East India Company, 36, 85–91, 101n80 242, 282 and port competition, 142, 173–5 and port hierarchy, 131–2, 190–2 earthquakes, 143–5, 151n92, as port-of-transit, 177–82 170n14, 289 as significant port city, 28–30, 192 East India Company (British), 35–6, and slave trade, 355–6, 359, 65, 136, 159, 180, 203, 212, 238, 374n48 243, 329, 334, 358. See also Dutch and trade processing/networking, East India Company 33, 138, 175 Bushehri Circle, 85–7 Fairchild, David, 341 Bushihri, Abd-Allah Biladi, 78, 81 Fanon, Frantz, 125–6n5 Bushihri, Rukn al-Tujjar, 81 al-Faraj, Khaled Muhammad, 47–8 Buxani, Ram, 260 Farrashbandi, Ali-Murad, 82 Farrell, Tim, 272 Carter, Robert, 10, 43n41, 143 Fasa’i, Mirza Hasan Husaini, 77, 97n13 Chabahar, 144, 251, 277–8, 282, Fattah, Hala, 2, 4, 201–2 284–6, 355, 368 Field, Henry, 362 Chaudhuri, Kirti N., 2, 27 Floor, Willem, 15n9, 102n84, 141, Collett, Nigel A., 272, 274, 283 147n11, 171n25, 173, 248, Costa, Paolo M., 171n26 262n8, 378 Coupland, Reginald, 332 Foucault, Michel, 31, 118 Crystal, Jill, 204, 225n60 Fuccaro, Nelida, 9–10, 23, Curzon, George N., 37, 134, 277, 368 142–3, 378

Dadiar, Aziz, 273–4 Genette, Gérard, 103 al-Dailami, Ahmed, 11, 13, 299, 378 globalization, 91, 144, 328, 366 Daryabaigi, Mirza Ahmad Khan, 77 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 2, Das Gupta, Ashin, 38 11–12, 74, 91, 145, 232–3, 258–9, Dashti, Mubarak, 207 312, 317 Dashtyari, Saba, 273, 281 Gwadar, 233, 251, 256, 273, 278–9, Dessouki, Assem, 69n10, 72n68 282–6 386 M Index

Habibi, Emile, 104 Persian-language sources, 73–96 Habibi, Hasan, 87 and Qajar Empire, 74–80 Ha’iri, Abd al-Hadi, 74, 97n5 safhat (pages) literature, 6, 49, 54–9, Hamerton, Atkins, 334 61, 64 Hamilton, Alexander, 330 second-generation histories, 54, Harrison, Paul W., 338 56–7 Harrison, Selig S., 280, 291n11 and slavery, 8 Hasan, Abu Zayd, 232 state-sponsored history, 8 Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Ali-Akbar, 87 Hopper, Matthew, 8, 327, 379 Hashmi, Zahur Shah Sayad, 273 Hormuz, Iran, 131, 134–5, 137, Hatam, Mohammed Gharib, 303, 139–43, 147n11, 156–8, 160, 232, 315–19 242, 246–8, 255 Hawala, 2, 11, 13, 69n10, 134, 208, Hosseinbor, Mohammad Hassan, 270, 299–321 276, 280 in Bahrain, 299, 301–2, 304–5, Husayn, Taha, 104, 125n3 307–13, 317–19 Hussein, Saddam, 7, 89, 365 etymology, 301–2 and historiography, 314–20 Ibn al-Mujawir, 155 history of, 299–312, 320–1 Ibn Battuta, 332, 345n21 and Iran, 299–300, 308, 311–14, Ibn Bishr al-Basri, Uthman, 51–6, 59, 316–18, 321 64, 72n65 in Kuwait, 299, 304, 308, 315–16 al-Ibrahim, Yousef, 47, 63 language, 305, 312–13, 324n38 India in Qatar, 301–2, 304, 310, 318 Bombay, 8, 25, 27–8, 30, 38, 116– religion, 302, 304–5, 310–14, 17, 136, 185, 233, 236, 240–52, 317–18 257–8, 341 and stigma, 307–14 imports and exports, 233, 243, 248, Hayden, Dolores, 31 254, 254, 255–6 Hennell, Samuel, 357 ports and towns trading with the Heude, William, 331 Gulf, 234–5 al-Hijji, Yacoub, 57, 206, 215 sarrafs (money lenders and historiography of the Persian Gulf exchangers), 38, 253, 255, Arabic-language sources, 47–68 265–6n73 archived documents, 93–5 Indian communities autobiographies and memoirs, 8, in Abu Dhabi, 233, 243, 248–9, 251, 57–9, 63, 82, 134, 208, 260, 317 254 biographies, 52–3, 57–9, 319 in Bandar Abbas, 232, 240, 242–3, canons of history, 51–4 246–51, 256 and Islamic Republic, 84–90 in Bandar Kong, 240, 246, narrative literature, 103–25 248, 253 oral sources, 5–6, 10, 18n59, 32, Banians, 240–3 49–66, 69n8, 90, 104–6, 275, in Basra, 240, 242–3, 257 316–17, 353 Bohras, 233, 244–5 and Pahlavi rule, 79–84, 100n66 Christians, 233, 242, 245–9, 257 Index M 387

demographics, 233–49, 249, 250–3 Hormuz, 131, 134–5, 137, 139–43, in Dubai, 233, 243, 254 147n11, 156–8, 160, 232, 242, Hindus, 232–55, 259 246–8, 255 in Hormuz, 232, 240, 242, 246–8, Institute for Political and 253, 255 International Studies (IPIS), 88, Jains, 233, 236, 240–2, 248 101n74 Khojas, 233, 236, 243–5, 249–51, Islamic Republic, 84–90 256 Khurramshahr (Muhammara), 30, Lawatiyya, 233, 236, 244, 36–7, 76, 80–1, 131–2, 173–4, 253, 259 177, 178, 180, 182, 187, 190–2, in Manama, 208, 231–2, 248–9, 366 256–7 Kish Island, 131, 135, 144, 232 in Matrah, 231, 236, 242–3, Mohammad Reza Shah period, 248–51, 255 81–4, 89–90, 280, 282, 364–5 Memons, 233, 236, 244–5 National Archives, 7, 80, 87, 94, 96, merchant groups and communities, 100n64–5, 102n86 233–6, 237–9, 240–7 and Qajar Empire, 74–80 in Muscat, 232, 236, 240, 242–3, Reza Shah period, 74, 79–84, 89, 245–8, 250–1, 255–6 271, 279–80, 311–12, 362, 364–5 Muslims, 233, 236, 241–4, 248–9 Shiraz, 8, 30, 34, 76, 81, 134, 138, occupations, 253–8 142, 175–7, 181–92, 241, 250, 317 pre-oil Gulf connections, 232–3 Siraf, 28, 86, 131–5, 139–40, 142, in Sharjah, 233, 243, 248–51, 147n8, 147n10, 156, 232, 262n6 254, 259 White Revolution, 365 and trade, 233, 243, 248, 254, 254, See also Bandar Abbas, Iran; Bandar 255–6 Lingeh, Iran; Bushehr, Iran; Indo-European Telegraph, 28, Islamic Revolution (1979) 257, 356 Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), 84, Iqtidari, Ahmad, 78, 82–3, 85, 88 89–90, 94–5, 97n4, 308, 312 Iran Iraq, 186, 232, 282, 299, 305, Afro-Iranian identity, 351–3, 308, 365 367–70 Baghdad, 30, 36, 50, 135, 173–4, Bunyad-i Bushihr Shinasi (The 182, 236, 240, 250, 257, 341 Foundation for Bushehr Studies), and historiography, 7, 10, 32, 52, 85–7, 89, 101n80 56, 64 Bunyad-i Iranshinasi (The Iranology Indian communities in, 250–3, Foundation), 87, 100n67–8 256–7 Constitutional Revolution and Kuwait Town, 201, 203, 205, (1905–11), 74, 77, 89 208, 217 Danishnama-yi Fars (The Fars occupation of Kuwait, 260 Encyclopedia), 87–8 and the Ottoman Empire, 30, 36, 75 and Hawala, 299–300, 308, 311–14, and World War I, 236, 253 316–18, 321 and World War II, 253 and historiography, 5, 73–96 See also Basra, Iraq 388 M Index

Islam Kish Island, Iran, 131, 135, 144, 232 and Africans, 352, 356, 360–1, Kitchener, Lord, 104, 125–6n5 367–8, 370 Kuwait, 10, 117, 233, 247, 249–50, 153 in Balochistan, 287 Arabic-language histories, 47–68 and historiography, 6–7, 50, 54 Africans in, 329 law, 26, 35, 38, 256 Baloch in, 270, 282, 284 Wahhabism, 6–7, 62, 72n65, 303 Hawala in, 304, 316 See also Shi‘i Islam; Sunni Islam and historiography, 4, 10–11, 47–9, Islamic Revolution (1978–79), 274, 51–65, 83–4, 120–1 280, 284, 286, 295n91, 300, 308 Iraqi occupation of, 260 and historiography, 73–4, 87, 89–90 Kuwait City, 222 and polarization, 312–14, 321, 365 Kuwait Oil Company, 258 Islamism, 12, 281, 287, 314 ports, 24, 28–34, 36, 38, 132, 137–9, 141–2, 144 Jahani, Carina, 12–13, 267, 379 Seif Palace, 211–12 Japan, 58, 65, 340–1 See also Al Sabah Jawadri, Saleem Ismail A. (Siddik Kuwait Town, 199–200, 221–2 Azat), 273, 283, 296n110 and cosmopolitan urbanism, 207–10 Jinab, Muhammad-Ali, 84 origins and history, 200–1 Johnson, John, 331 political structure, 201–4 Julfar, United Arab Emirates, 132, public life, 214–18 134, 142–3, 253. See also Ras social life, 218–21 al-Khaimah, United Arab social structure, 204–7 Emirates spatial morphology, 210–14 and ‘Utub, 200–2, 208, 221, 223n4 Kamali, Kurush, 87–8 Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh, 2 Landen, Robert, 251 Kasravi, Ahmad, 16n25, 74, 80 Lefebvre, Henri, 31 Kelly, J. B., 3, 65 Lienhardt, Peter, 72n65, 140 Kemball, A. B., 208 Lingeh, Iran. See Bandar Lingeh Keppel, George, 331 literature and the arts Al Khalifah, 35–6, 310 African influence on, 343–4 Khalifah, Abdullah, 108 as history, 103–125 Khalijis (residents of the Gulf), 4, 12, Lorimer, John G.: Gazetteer of the 26, 135, 143, 146, 288 Persian Gulf al-Khatib, Ahmed, 208 on Africans, 208, 239, 338, 361–2 Khaz‘al, Shaikh, 80, 89, 101n79, 311 on Baloch, 282 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 87, 280 as British document, 3 al-Khorafi, Abdulmohsen, 57, 64 on Hawala, 301–2, 304 Khurramshahr (Muhammara), Iran, on Indian communities, 244–5, 248, 30, 36–7, 76, 80–1, 131–2, 250–2 173–4, 177, 178, 180, 182, 187, on Kuwait Town, 208, 212 190–2, 366 on slavery, 8 Khuzistan, 5, 36, 80, 89, 101n79, 135, Lovejoy, Paul, 359 141, 190–1, 311, 359 Luomi, Mari, 144 Index M 389 al-Mahrus, Hasan Isa, 106 and historiography, 31 Majid, Ahmad ibn, 65, 157, 168–9n2 history of, 160–4 Malcolm, John, 330 and India, 16n18, 156–9, 162, Manama, Bahrain, 106, 138, 208, 211, 164–5, 167–8, 232, 236, 240–3, 313 245–8, 250–1, 255–6 commerce and economics, 9, 27–31, modern city of, 165–8 33–5, 38 and Portugal, 153–4, 156–67, Indian communities in, 208, 231–2, 170n15–16, 171n26 248–9, 256–7 as significant port city, 132, 153, and port hierarchy, 132, 136 156 – 60 and urbanism, 10 and slave trade, 157, 159–60, Mashayikhi, Abd al-Karim, 85–6 329–31, 355, 360, 368 Massé, Henri, 365, 374n62 and United States, 341 Matrah, Oman, 153, 155, 157–8, al-Mutairi, Hilal, 207 163–8, 232, 236, 242–3, 248–51, 255, 329 al-Nabhani, Khalifa b. Muhammad, McPherson, Kenneth, 141 52–3, 56, 61, 64 Metcalf, Thomas, 27 Al Nahyan, Zayid, 105 Mignan, Robert, 331 Najd, 83, 134, 200–2, 204, Mikimoto, Kokichi, 341–2 207–9, 218–19, 256, 282, 301, Miles, S. B., 3, 282, 340 303, 305 Miran, Jonathan, 25, 38, 41n12 and historiography, 2, 4, 7, 12, 14, Mirzai, Behnaz A., 8, 13, 273, 351, 379 51, 53, 62–5 Mojtahed-Zadeh, Pirouz, 85 Al-Nakib, Farah, 10, 18n59, 199, 380 Mombasa, Kenya, 28, 114, 159, 330, Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 82, 127n46 357 Niebuhr, Carsten, 55, 201, 242, 256, Mongol Empire, 28, 132, 137, 270 304, 330 Mughal Empire, 3, 34, 144 Nizami, Ghulam-Husain, 85–7 Muhammad, Abdulwahhab, 47 Nurizada-Bushihri, Isma’il, 83–4 Muharraq, Bahrain, 33, 36, 132, 139 Mu’mini, Fatima, 85, 87 oil industry Munif, Abdelrahman, 145 in Bahrain, 9, 108, 324n32 al-Muqaddisi, Muhammad, 132, 140, and Baloch, 282–3, 289–90 155, 169n4 and Hawala, 305 Murphey, Rhoads, 31, 42n22, 136, 210 and historiography, 1, 24, 32, 39, 50, al-Murr, Muhammad, 109–11, 114–17, 69n10, 72n68, 82–4 119–20, 122 and Indian communities, 231–2, al-Musawi, Muhsin, 6, 103, 379–80 236, 242, 247, 252, 253–4, Muscat, Oman 257–60 and Britain, 283 in Iran, 84, 364 cosmopolitanism of, 153 in Kuwait, 10, 120, 199–200, 204, demographics, 33, 164–5, 185–7, 208–9, 218, 221–2, 225n62 329 in narrative literature, 6, 104–5, geography and competition, 138–9, 107–8, 110–11, 115, 120–1, 142, 153–7, 169n7–8 123–4, 145 390 M Index oil industry—Continued pearl industry, 2, 6, 10 and nationalism, 8–9, 12, 69n10, and Baloch, 282, 289 72n68 collapse of, 340–3 oil concessions, 204, 225n62 and historiography, 58, 64–5 and port cities, 31–2, 39, 131, 137, and Indians, 233, 243, 249, 253–4 144–6, 165–6 and Kuwait Town, 199, 201–9, 212, and slavery, 342–3 214–16, 218–19, 222 and urbanism, 10, 32, 199, 218 in narrative literature, 105–6, 119 Oman and port cities, 28, 30–1, 33–4, Al Bu Sa’id dynasty, 36, 158–65, 38–9, 42n26, 132, 134, 138, 167, 233 142–4 Baloch in, 164, 269–70, 282–4, and slavery, 8, 12, 333–43, 359 288–9, 291n15 Pearson, Michael, 2, 26, 38 Dhofar uprising, 11 Pelly, Lewis, 138, 175–6, 188, 203, 210 Indian communities in, 231–3, 236, Persian Gulf 240, 242–53, 255–8 alternative histories, 9–11 Matrah, 153, 155, 157–8, 163 –8, archived documents, 93–5 232, 236, 242–3, 248–51, and borderlands, 2–3, 12, 24–5, 75, 255, 329 278–81, 289–91, 299, 318, 321, Qalhat, 132, 156–8, 169n8, 170n14 365–6 Suhar, 9, 27, 132, 135, 138–9, 142, and center/periphery, 2, 10, 25–31, 156, 168 36–7, 91, 136 Ya’rubi dynasty, 158–9, 161, 163–4 identity, 11–13, 287–8, 308–9, 311, See also Muscat, Oman 314, 319–21, 325n47 One Thousand and One Nights, 321 littoral states, 287 Onley, James, 4, 8, 65, 231, 380–1 naming of, 2, 7, 82, 86, 91–2, Orwell, George, 7 102n18 Ottoman Empire, 47–8, 60, 200 peoples, 11 and historiography, 3, 24 politicization of, 1–2, 7, 84–5, 90, 96 and port cities, 29–30, 32, 34, 36, “view from the sea,” 2–3, 25 38, 142, 160–1, 173 See also individual cities and and slave trade, 355 countries; African presence Ovington, John, 229–30 in the Gulf; Baloch; Hawala; historiography of the Persian Gulf; Pahlavi Dynasty, 12 Indian communities; port cities Pakistan, 165, 167, 232, 245, Persian Gulf day, 92, 96 253, 260 Persian language, 5, 99n51 and Baloch, 13, 267, 269–71, 273–4, Persian speakers (‘Ajam), 12, 19n71, 74, 276, 279–81, 283, 285–9 165, 304, 312–13, 317–19 in narrative literature, 110–13, 122 Peterson, John, 31, 153, 232, 270, 283, Palgrave, William, 231–2, 259, 261n2, 381 338 Plaisted, Bartholomew, 177 Parsons, Abraham, 330 port cities Parwaz, Ghani, 273 as city-states, 34–5 Pax Britannica, 29, 39, 143 and climate, 138–40 Index M 391

and geography, 138–40 Africans in, 329, 338, 343 and Gulf littoral, 132–5 Doha, 9–10, 143, 211, 247, 250, 338 hierarchy of, 138–9 Hawala in, 301–2, 304, 310, 318 and hinterlands, 140–2 Huwailah, 301 history of, 131–2, 143–6 Zubara, 32, 54, 62–3, 132, 134, and historiography, 23–40 140–2, 144, 150n73, 201, 204, and imperialism, 27–37, 39 247 legal pluralism, 35 Qawasim, 36, 132, 137, 233, 303 and migration, 135–6 al-Qina‘i, Yousef b. Isa, 54–5, 59–61 as native/indigenous town, 35–7 and pearl industry, 28, 30–1, 33–4, Rab, Samia, 9 38–9, 42n26, 132, 134, 138, Ras al-Khaimah, United Arab 142–4 Emirates, 36, 132, 137–8, 243, political economy of, 37–9 335, 355, 357. See also Julfar, sites of, 142–3 United Arab Emirates as towns, 30–9 Rashid, Ali Muhammad, 106 and trade, 132, 135–8, 140–2, Al-Rasheed, Madawi, 6–7 144–5 Raunkiaer, Barclay, 216 and urbanization, 33–4 Redaelli, Riccardo, 278 See also individual cities al-Reshaid (al-Rushaid), Abdul-Aziz, Potter, Lawrence G., 1, 131, 377 48, 52–3, 56, 59, 61–4, 66, 72n67, Priestman, Seth, 135 224n17, 224n22 Punjab and Punjabis, 13, 234, 236, Ricks, Thomas, 2, 40n7 237, 239, 241, 250, 268–9, 275, al-Rifa‛i, Talib, 121–2 286, 289 Rigby, C. P., 334–5 Risso, Patricia, 2 Qajar Empire Rouhani, Hassan, 91 and Balochistan, 276–7, 279, 289 Ruknzada-Adamiyyat, British relations, 42n28 Muhammad-Husain, 80–1 and Hawala, 317 Russia, 75, 187, 190–2, 358. See also and historiography, 3, 5, 24, 74–80 Soviet Union Indian Shikarpuris in, 263n18 Muhammad Shah, 5, 75–6, 276 Sa’adat, Abd al-Karim, 78 Muzaffar al-Din Shah, 77–8, 93 Sa’adat, Muhammad Husain, 78, 81 Nasir al-Din Shah, 76–8, 87, 93, Al Sabah (House of), 34, 36, 202–4, 277 211 and port cities, 25, 29–32, 35 Abdullah b., 60 and slave trade, 358 Ahmed al-Jaber, 72n67 state centralization, 29–35 Mubarak, 47–8, 63, 139, 203, 212 Qalhat, Oman, 132, 156–8, 169n8, Sabah I, 63, 202 170n14 Sabah II, 202–3 Al Qasimi, Sultan Bin Muhammad, Sadid al-Saltana, Muhammad Ali 104 Khan, 32, 78–9, 83, 85, 91 Qatar, 51, 84, 135, 140–2, 145, 201, safhat (pages) literature, 6, 49, 54–9, 233, 254, 258–9, 282 61, 64 392 M Index

Sa‘idi, Ghulam Husain, 24 Shuhaiber, Suhail, 202, 205 al-Salamah, Jassim, 58, 60–3 Siraf, Iran, 28, 86, 131–5, 139–40, Saldanha, Jerome, 255 142, 147n8, 147n10, 156, 232, Salih, Tayeb, 104, 124 262n6 Al Saud, House of, 6–7, 51, 63 slave trade and slavery Saudi Arabia and Baloch, 338, 355, 362–4, 366 and foreign Arab labor, 113 in Basra, 327, 330, 332, 346n21, 355 Hawala in, 304–5 collapse of, 340–2 and historiography, 5–7, 51, 62–3, emancipation era in Iran, 362–6 72n65 legacy of, 242–4 independence of (1932), 7 in Muscat, 157, 159–60, 329–31, in narrative literature, 112, 122–4 355, 360, 368 and slavery, 343 and pearl industry, 8, 12, 333–43, “seascape urbanism,” 9 359 Seif, Salma Matar, 117 post-prohibition era in Iran, 358–62 Seif Palace (Kuwait), 211–12 routes, 354 Semino, Bartolomew, 75–6 slave-trade era in Iran, 355–8 Shahibzadeh, Yadullah, 89 See also African presence in the Gulf al-Shamlan, Saif, 47, 53–5, 58–64, 66, Smith, Anthony, 288 71n51, 72n65 Soja, Edward W., 31 Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, 132, Soviet Union, 267. See also Russia 137–40, 142, 144, 147n7, 243, Speece, Mark, 255 249–51, 254, 303, 335 al-Subaiy, Abdullah, 6 Shatt al-Arab, 90, 102n83, 131, 137–9, Suez Canal, 25, 28, 42n25, 82, 93, 174, 177, 201, 205, 215 120, 127n46, 135, 185 Sheil, Mary, 356, 358 Suhar, Oman, 9, 27, 132, 135, 138–9, Sheriff, Abdul, 2, 330, 333, 346n23, 142, 156, 168 348n37 Sunni Islam, 162, 256 Shihab, Amina Abu, 113–14 and Baloch, 269, 271–3, 281, 283, Shi‘i Islam 286–8, 291n17 and Hawala, 304–5, 307, 310, and Hawala, 134, 302, 304–5, 307, 312–13, 317–18 310–14, 317–18 and historiography, 6–9, 12, 16n25, and historiography, 7, 74 74–5, 89 Indian communities, 236, 244 and Indian communities, 236, 241, in Kuwait Town, 207–10, 217–18 244–5, 248 Memons, 244–5 in Kuwait Town, 209, 217 Sur, Oman, 156–7, 247, 334–5, 337, in Muscat, 164–5 340, 355 ship-building industry, 140, 204, Sykes, Percy M., 277 207–8, 212, 215, 218–19, 253 Shiraz, Iran, 8, 30, 34, 76, 81, 134, Takriti, Abdel Razzaq, 11 138, 142, 175–7, 181–92, 241, Al Thani, Muhammad bin Ahmed, 250, 317 318, 338 Shirazi, Fursat al-Dawla, 77 Thomas, Bertram, 339 Shryock, Andrew, 316–17, 322n5 Thompson, Paul, 60 Index M 393

Thrift, Nigel, 217 Vatandoust, Gholam Reza, 5, 7, 73, Tonkiss, Fran, 214 381–2 Tosh, John, 60 Villiers, Alan, 8, 206, 212, 216 trade Vissar, Reidar, 34 Baloch, 277–8, 280 Vusuqi, Muhammad-Baqir, 79, 85, brokers, 27, 35, 38, 159, 248, 253 87–8, 92 caravan, 141, 173–7, 182, 187–8, 190, 192, 201, 214, 241 Wahhabism, 6–7, 62, commercial routes, 178–9 72n65, 303 Imperial Customs Wellsted, J. R., 181, 243 Administration, 30 Whigham, H. J., 174 and Indian communities, 4, 233, White, Benjamin, 7 243, 248, 254, 254, 255–6 White, Hayden, 103 Ottoman, 29–30 Whitelock, H. H., 181 See also pearl industry; port cities Wills, James, 356–7 Wilson, Arnold T., 3 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 12, 233 World War I, 24, 73, 79–82, 89, 236, Abu Dhabi, 8, 33, 43n40, 104–5, 253, 257, 283, 342 132, 139–40, 144, 211, 233, 243, World War II, 8, 74, 83, 94, 132, 191, 249, 251, 254 231, 253, 258, 282 and Arab nationalism, 105 Baloch in, 269–70, 273–4, 283–4, Yahosseini, Ghasem, 78, 81, 85–6, 287, 289 90, 101n80 Ras al-Khaimah (Julfar), 36, 132, Yemen, 140, 245, 271, 304–5 134, 137–8, 142–3, 243, 253, 335, Aden, 27–8, 34–5, 37, 64–5, 114, 355, 357 136, 139, 153, 156, 158, 204, Sharjah, 132, 137–40, 142, 144, 244–5, 253 147n7, 243, 249–51, 254, 303, 335 See also Dubai, United Arab Zaghlul, Sa‘d, 104, 125n3 Emirates Zahrani, Mostafa, 88 urbanism, 1, 10, 199, 218, 290, 328 Zangana, Hasan, 85–6 cosmopolitan, 207–10 Zanj slave revolt, 28, 327, and ports, 25–7, 31–4, 36, 134, 332, 346n21 142–4 Zanzibar, 55, 65, 140, 159–60, “seascape,” 9 265n67, 277–8, 284, 315, ‘Utub, 36, 54, 62–3, 135, 142, 200–2, 333–5, 355, 360, 368, 374n48 208, 221, 223n4, 318–19 al-Zayyani, Rashid, 58, 72n65 Zubara, Qatar, 32, 54, 62–3, 132, Valeri, Marc, 7, 270–1 134, 140–2, 144, 150n73, 201, Van Schendel, Willem, 3 204, 247