"أيام ثيم ولَّت" [و‎‎١‎١‎٨] (٢٤٨/٢٣٥)

Things were changing fast. The Oil Company were bringing in
numbers of American 'roughnecks' 'roustabouts,' drillers and
tool pushers' to bring their wells on stream, and the Motherwell
bridge and Engineering Company were importing Scottish and Irish
navvies to build tanks and pipe-lines. It was quite a
cu11ure-shock , both for the Kuwaities and for the expatriates
as they are now known - and we tried to minimise it by keeoina
the two apart as far as possible. J M 9
^ d u ff ' Cted me b^ause the Shaikh had no jurisdiction over
non-Muslims and the inevitable crimes and misdemeanours had to be
tried in my court. Fortunately they were few and none of them
were serious. Since Kuwait had no gaol to which one could in all
conscience have committed a foreigner, the ultimate sanction was
instant dismi^a! with or without a fine. I found it much more
difficult to try cases without the assistance of lawyers on
either side, and indeed changed my opinion of the legal
profession which I had previously found an unmitigated nuisance
i n I n d i a .
The Arabs withstood the culture shock remarkably well, although
there were occasional difficulties. For instance much of the
local labour enlisted by the Oil Company were ex-pear1-divers who
were inevitably in debt to their previous masters. These came to
me with the request that the company should be told to deduct
their employees’ debts from their wages and pay the money to
their creditors. This was, of course, out of the question, and I
had to advise them to wait outside the offices on pay-day and
collect their debts if they could! Finally it all sorted itself
out, as there was enough money being earned to make everybody
happy. ^ J
The problem which began to exercise the minds of the Shaikh and
his advisers as it became clear that undreamt-of sums were qoinq
to accrue to the state was how to share it out. It was axiomatic
to them that nobody but Kuwaitis should be allowed any part in
it But how to define a Kuwaiti? This problem they very neatly
solved by going back to the events of 1922. In that year Kuwait
J nvaded b .y an arm y - or rather a horde - of fanatical
Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia. Had they succeeded in entering the
town an orgy of killing, looting, and burning would have ensued,
and there was something of a panic. Many of the merchants fled
o heir countries of origin - Iraq, Iran, or elsewhere - but
those who stayed behind erected a mud-wall round the town, the
poorer people doing the manual labour and the richer providinq
the food and materials for them. It was decreed that only those
who could prove they or their ancestors had been 'on the wall*
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