Today the preeminent Gulf emporium is Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. A hub for air transit, corporate operations, and retail tourism, it has an impressive number of five-star hotels as well as the world’s tallest building. Elsewhere in the region, Doha, Qatar’s capital, hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup as part of its bid for prominence, while Kuwait City, Abu Dhabi, and Manama are among the other cities with multicultural populations and a good deal of international commerce passing through. However, none of them existed before the 1700s, and even then most existed only as small fishing villages or centres of significance mainly for their own local areas.

Their rise fits a pattern of Gulf trade centres appearing and thriving, only to later be eclipsed by newcomers. Often, the fate of Gulf ports was determined by political fortunes and competition. Today’s most important entrepots owe their significance mainly to the backing of an oil economy, but also to an independence enabled by their rulers’ alliance with the British during a period in which neighbours sought to absorb them. The tenth century and later saw a fracturing of political authority which led to economic and even military competition over trade routes and revenues. This competition weighs against assertions that conflicts over trade in the Indian Ocean basin only became violent with the coming of the Portuguese and other Western Europeans. While it is true that, because of the scale of the Indian Ocean, no power sought to control its entire littoral, polities for whom trade was significant would fight for mercantile prominence in smaller areas.

Shifting Patterns of Trade

Scholars used to believe that disturbances in the Gulf region during the tenth century and the wealth and power of the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt led to a shift in Indian Ocean trade from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. However, although there is clear evidence of decline near the beginning of this period, and Siraf and al-Ubulla had passed their peak, new entrepots arose in the lower Gulf. Trade in the region was further enhanced by rulers of a Central Asian nomadic background who promoted long-distance trade and allied with the great trading families, the elite of which became even wealthier and held more power than those from previous centuries.

As described in the introduction, today the name of the Gulf, either Persian or Arabian, is a matter of international dispute linked to historic claims and recent ambitions. Along with this goes also the rise of nationalism, nationalism based on a concept of nation-states as usually ethnically homogenous. In the Gulf, this means that Iran has sought to Persianize its Gulf regions as effectively as possible, while the Arab states routinely present through their heritage industry a purely Arab and sometimes even Bedouin past while worrying about the presence of large numbers of guest workers, particularly from South Asia, as threats to that heritage.

The ethnic composition of the Gulf, however, has long been diverse. Language is not a sure guide to ethnicity, but from the early medieval period up until today, speakers of Arabic and Persian have lived mingled together all around its shores; hymns in Beth Qatraye were sung in Persian, even as most people’s vernacular was close to Arabic. Significant populations of South Asian origin also stretched along at least the upper Gulf in Late Antiquity, forming a recognizable element with a remembered association with the subcontinent, but over the generations becoming part of the regional fabric steadily augmented by both voluntary migration and slavery. People from different regions of sub-Saharan Africa were also brought as slaves to the region down the centuries, and they, too, became a recognizable group even into the present.

Arabs and Persians

“Arab” was at first an ancient Mesopotamian term for those living in the desert between Mesopotamia and the fertile lands along the Mediterranean. Later, “Arabia” became the name of a Roman province stretching from the Sinai Penin-sula into what is now Jordan, and inhabitants of this province called themselves “Arabs.” In the following centuries, how-ever, the identity seems to have become much vaguer and far less commonly invoked, perhaps the way “North Ameri-can” might apply to inhabitants of the continent but has lit-tle practical significance. In poetry written in Arabic by north Arabians before the seventh century, the broadest identity is generally Maˁadd. This term referred to the largely autono-mous peoples living south of the heartlands of the Ghassan-ids in what is now Jordan and the Lakhmids by the Euphrates, two Arabic-speaking client dynasties of the Byzantines and Sasanians respectively.

During the seventh century, however, ideas of Arab ethnicity grew in importance.

Kingship was central to speculative thought and prestige in the pyramid age. It was vital for temple ritual, as shown in the previous chapter, and also indirectly for funerary culture via the Osiris myth. It is tempting to see kingship as the essence of ancient Egypt, a condensed version of the key ideas permeating society and culture, but so much is extraordinary about pharaohs – their relationships with the gods, the realm of their afterlife, their separation from other people – that kingship almost appears as an eccentric anomaly in Egyptian society. This dichotomy is perhaps not surprising from a comparative perspective, where holders of a royal office – mostly male – embody such tensions in many societies.

If the sizes of buildings reflect the relevance of the institutions they embody, then the modern capitalist world would appear to revolve around finance, state administration, public leisure and consumption, and a few super-rich individuals. The picture changes markedly when we look back in time, as churches were the most significant landmarks of the urban landscape in medieval Europe, and buildings for ritual purposes stand out in the archaeological record of early complex societies. Control of ritual was perhaps the most important source of political authority in early states.

L’État c’est moi (‛I am the state’) declared Louis XIV according to historical legend, and it is tempting to view the ancient Egyptian state too as being identical with its king, given that he was a key figure in myth and speculative thought. However, the Sun King’s statement, if not apocryphal, would have been pointless if it had been true: the early modern French state functioned without much direct input from its king. One can discuss French royalty without referring to the French state, as one can discuss ancient Egyptian kingship – as in the previous chapter – without much reference to the Egyptian state. Kingship was an indigenous institution and the ideological centre of the state, but it was not identical with it.

Today, Westerners often associate the Gulf with religious conflict. On one side, Iran promotes a Shi’ite religious ideology, while on the other, Saudi Arabia’s official form of Sunni Islam, founded by Muhammad b. Abd al-Wahhab in the 1700s, sees Shi’ites as heretical innovators, and its leaders have often persecuted those in al-Hasa. Bahrain and Iraq have both seen internal conflict between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Contrary to occasional media headlines, these conflicts are in fact over strictly modern issues such as the distribution of national resources, but partisans still seek to martial history in making claims to local prominence and authenticity. Thus, modern Arabian Sunnis often say the Shi’ite population only dates to a period in the 1600s when al-Hasa was part of the Persian Safavid Empire, while Shi’ites in Bahrain and the nearby oases see the population as Shi’ite from the earliest decades of Islam, with Sunnis as later immigrants from central Arabia.

The actual religious history of the Gulf is far more complex. Chapter one described the origins of Islam and the beginnings of its distinct branches, particularly the Shurat, out of which Ibadism developed. Sunnism and Shi’ism were also taking shape by the 700s, but their distinctive elements were not yet developed, and we do not have clear evidence we can associate with them in the Gulf until the period covered in chapter four (trade after 1000). What follows below highlights information about different sectarian movements in the Gulf, occasionally reaching back into the past to explain how they came to be different. It also discusses Sufism, which has its roots partially in Basra and Abadan, but also developed into influential orders, one of which played a role in Gulf commerce.

Shi’ism in the Gulf

Shi’ism comes from the Arabic for a group of followers, indi-cating here those who believe that ˁAli, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, should have succeeded him as leader of the Muslim community. Although ˁAli did have partisans in the early days of Islam, the modern doctrines of Shi’ism took time to develop. The most distinctive is the idea of the imamate, according to which in every generation there is a divinely guided successor to Muhammad from among his descen-dants through ˁAli. That divinely guided successor is known as the “Imam,” the same title used among all Muslims for one who leads prayer.