Progressive Management - Qatar: Federal Research Study with Comprehensive Information, History, and Analysis--Politics, Economy, Military

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QATAR - A Country Study

Library of Congress

Federal Research Division

THE FIVE COUNTRIES-Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar,the United Arab Emirates, and Oman-are all Arab states on thePersian Gulf that share certain characteristics. But they arenot the only countries that border the gulf. Iran, Iraq, and SaudiArabia share the coastline as well, and they too shared in thehistorical development of the area. Of the five states, Oman has aparticular culture and history that distinguish it from itsneighbors. It also is the state with the shortest coastline alongthe Persian Gulf. Most of Oman lies along the Gulf of Oman and theArabian Sea.

The main element that unites thesecountries is the nature of their involvement with people andnations beyond the region. The gulf has been an importantwaterway since ancient times, bringing the people who live on itsshores into early contact with other civilizations. In the ancientworld, the gulf peoples established trade connections with India;in the Middle Ages, they went as far as China; and in the modernera, they became involved with the European powers that sailed intothe Indian Ocean and around Southeast Asia. In the twentiethcentury, the discovery of massive oil deposits in the gulf made thearea once again a crossroads for the modern world.

Other factors also bring these countriestogether. The people are mostly Arabs and, with the exceptionof Oman and Bahrain, are mostly Sunni Muslims. Because they live inbasically tribal societies, family and clan connections underliemost political and economic activity. The discovery of oil and theincreasing contact with the West has led to tremendous material andsocial changes.

Important distinctions exist, however,among the five countries. Bahrain is an island with historicalconnections to the Persian Empire. Kuwait is separated from theothers by Saudi Arabia. In Oman high mountain ranges effectivelycut off the country's hinterland from the rest of the region.Moreover, various tribal loyalties throughout the region arefrequently divisive and are exacerbated by religious differencesthat involve the major sects of Islam-Sunni and Shia-and thesmaller Kharijite sect as well as Muslim legal procedures.

The Persian Gulf lies between two of themajor breadbaskets of the ancient world, the Tigris-Euphrates area(Mesopotamia, meaning "between the rivers") in present-day Iraq andthe Nile Valley in Egypt. Mesopotamia, a part of the area knownas the Fertile Crescent, was important not only for food productionbut also for connecting East to West.

Rivers provided the water that madeagriculture possible. Agriculture, in turn, enabled people tosettle in one area and to accumulate a food surplus that allowedthem to pursue tasks besides growing food, namely, to create acivilization. They chose leaders, such as kings and priests; theybuilt monuments; they devised systems of morality and religion; andthey started to trade.

Mesopotamia became the linchpin of ancientinternational trade. The fertile soil between the Tigris andthe Euphrates produced a large surplus of food; however, it did notsupport forests to produce the timber necessary to build permanentstructures. The region also lacked the mineral resources to makemetals. Accordingly, the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia wereforced to go abroad and trade their food for other raw materials.They found copper at Magan, an ancient city that lay somewhere inthe contemporary state of Oman and, via Magan, traded with peoplein the Indus Valley for lumber and other finished goods.

Trade between Mesopotamia and India wasfacilitated by the small size of the Persian Gulf. Waterprovided the easiest way to transport goods, and sailors crossedthe gulf fairly early, moving out along the coasts of Persia andIndia until they reached the mouth of the Indus. Merchants andsailors became middlemen who used their position to profit from themovement of goods through the gulf. The people of Magan were bothmiddlemen and suppliers because the city was a source of copper aswell as a transit point for Indian trade. Over time, other citiesdeveloped that were exclusively entrepts, or commercial waystations. One of the best known of these cities was Dilmun.

Dilmun probably lay on what is now theisland state of Bahrain. Excavations on the island reveal richburial mounds from the Dilmun period (ca. 4000 to 2000 B.C.).Scholars believe the monuments on the island indicate thatresidents, in addition to farming, earned money from the East-Westtrade and that other cities on the gulf coast survivedsimilarly.

The trading cities on the gulf wereclosely linked to Mesopotamia, reflected in the similaritiesbetween the archaeological finds in the two areas. The similarfinds suggest that the people of the gulf coast and the people ofthe Tigris and Euphrates valley developed increasingly complexsocieties and beliefs.

The people of the gulf coast differed fromthose of the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. The people inthe interior were nomads who had no time to build cities ormonuments and no need to develop elaborate social structures. Whenthe desert provided insufficient food for their flocks, the tribespushed into the date groves or farmlands of the settled towns.Centers on the gulf coast were subject to such nomadic incursions,as were the people of Mesopotamia. As a result, after the secondmillennium B.C. the gulf began to take on an increasingly Arabcharacter. Some Arab tribes from the interior left their flocks andtook over the date groves that ringed the region's oases, whileothers took up sailing and began to take part in the trade andpiracy that were the region's economic mainstays. These nomadicincursions periodically changed the ethnic balance and leadershipof the gulf coast.