Qatar Pride

[qatarperegrine]

We just got our picture from the dress-up booth of the students' Independence Day celebration:

Marjorie, freshly hennaed and sporting a thobe al nashal and (fake) traditional jewelry, pretends to play the rababah, while a thobed Justin shows off a borrowed sword.

Comments

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

Wow! You got him in front of a camera!! I'm very impressed...

So please pardon the completely n00b question, but the stuff on your head - is that worn over or under a shayla?

Neat pic, thank you!

[qatar.livejournal.com]

It took some work, let me tell you!

The jewelry is (fake) Bedouin, not stuff that people would wear regularly now. I'm not really clear on how it would have been worn, though.

Questions

[don-k-hotay.livejournal.com]

1. Is the chair design Native American? Navaho?

2. So what is the story surrounding Independence Day?

Re: Questions

[qatar.livejournal.com]

Nope, the cushions are the absolutely prototypical majlis cushions. Very Qatari.

The story of independence, as I understand it: in the late 19th century, the UK wanted to secure the western border of the Arabian Gulf, in order to keep the trade route to India safe. It therefore made treaties with the 10 most powerful sheikhs living along the coast -- the Al Sabahs up in what is now Kuwait, the Al Khalifas is Bahrain, the Al Thanis here in Qatar, and so on down to (but not including) Oman. It didn't actually want to govern the trucial states, but wanted them to be governed stably by people friendly to their interests. (Sound familiar?) Those coastal sheikhs, meanwhile, were quite happy to become British protectorates, since it meant (a) Britain protected their borders and (b) those particular sheikhs, who were really just the heads of the most influential families in the area, became formal heads of state.

After Britain lost India, it lost its need to secure the rest of the region, and began granting more and more autonomy to the sheikhs. Kuwait declared independence in 1961, which actually didn't go hugely well. The other trucial states seemed happy to have Britain stick around and keep the Al Sauds, the Ottomans and the Persinas at bay, but in 1968 Britain announced that it would withdraw from the Gulf entirely by the end of 1971. The nine remaining trucial states spent those three years negotiating with each other to form some sort of federation, but before the negotiations were done, both the Al Khalifas (in now-Bahrain) and the Al Thanis (in now-Qatar) pulled out.

That the Al Khalifas sought independence make sense to me. Bahrain is pretty different from the other trucial states, being Shi'a; it was so tied to Iran that the Shah said he wouldn't support any trucial federation that included it; it had better infrastructure than the other states; and, as an island, its borders made sense. So it declared independence in mid-August 1971. Why Qatar pulled out is less clear to me, especially since they'd been the ones to draw up the federation's constitution in the first place; this site says Qatar sought independence because it felt more secure than the other emirates for two reasons. First, oil (though not LNG) had already been found, so an income was secure. Second, as Wahhabists, the Al Thanis were more closely tied to the house of Saud and therefore felt less threatened.

At any rate, on Sept. 3, 1971, Qatar also declared independence. And, in the beginning of December, the remaining trucial states declared independence as the United Arab Emirates.