In the 1930s there was an attempt by the British Government, acting on behalf of Oman and the Trucial Shaikhs, to negotiate agreed boundaries with the newly-united Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Various ´lines´ were discussed and, although the matter lapsed, the Saudis remained dissatisfied. In three particular areas they came to consider that they had justifiable claims for further territory.
One of these was Buraimi, an oasis covering about 13,000 sq. miles strategically placed at the crossing of the roads from Najd and Abu Dhabi to Muscat and from the northern Shaikhdoms to inner Oman. The Buraimi oasis consisted, in 1949, of eight villages with a population of some 25,000, many from the Na´im tribe.
It seems that the Na´im gave allegiance to the Imam of Oman until c.1800 when the conquest inspired by Shaikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab brought the Najdis to the area. They collected zakat (religious tax) and installed a Governor who had much influence in Oman, then torn by dynastic disputes. In 1819 Buraimi came again under the control of a powerful Sultan of Muscat, although the two strong personalities of the Northern coast, the Shaikhs of Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, exercised considerable influence. By 1830 the Najdis again interested themselves in the oasis, collected zakat for the government in Riyadh, and established an administration. But in 1869 they were expelled by an alliance of the Sultan of Muscat and Shaikh Zaid ´the Great´ of Abu Dhabi. Zaid gradually established a paramount position in six of the eight Buraimi villages. In the frontier negotiations of 1935 Buraimi was not claimed by the Saudis, and at the end of the 1940s Zaid bin Sultan (famous President of the United Arab Emirates) was, as Governor of the six Abu Dhabi villages on behalf of his brother the Shaikh, the leading figure in the Oasis.
The second disputed area was al-Liwa, a group of villages in the desert about 100 miles south-west of Abu Dhabi. Liwa was always of particular interest to the Trucial Shaikhs as it was the ancestral home of the Bani Yas tribe which provided the ruling families of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Liwa, with a population of perhaps 3000 in the date-picking season, had, like Buraimi, a history of periodic Najdi (i.e. Saudi) tax collecting and was also not claimed in 1935.
The third area of concern was Khor al-´Udayd, a marshy coastal region with some nearby islands at the base of the Qatar peninsula. Again the history is of changing tribal allegiance; in 1935 Udayd, unlike Buraimi and Liwa, was claimed as Saudi territory, but this was refused by the British. Just before the Second World War the Foreign Office suggested that Udayd be ceded or leased by the Shaikh of Abu Dhabi to the Saudis in return for payment, but this proposal was rejected by the India Office, then still responsible for British relations in the Gulf.

The Buraimi Crisis
In 1949, after protests that a party of American oilmen had travelled in Abu Dhabi territory without the authorisation of the Shaikh, the Saudis put forward a claim to much of the territory of the Shaikdoms, including Buraimi, Liwa and Udayd. The claim was rejected by the British and discussions took place in Dammam which did not resolve the dispute. In August 1952 a small Saudi force established itself in Hamasa, one of the two Omani villages of Buraimi. The Sultan of Muscat collected levies to expel them but was dissuaded by the British, themselves under American pressure. The British did, however, put men of the Trucial Oman Scouts into the Abu Dhabi part of the oasis to prevent further encroachments. An uneasy confrontation followed until the signature on 30 July 1954 of the Jeddah Agreement to refer the whole question to an impartial international tribunal headed by a Belgian judge of the International Court. The Saudis and the British, who also represented Abu Dhabi and Oman, submitted elaborate Memorials of their cases for consideration.

Territorial tradition in Arabia
In traditional Islamic legal theory, sovereignty was exercised not over a specific territory but over people. A Muslim acknowledged the sovereignty of his ruler by paying the religious tax (zakat) enjoined by the Prophet, which ranked with ritual prayer and the pilgrimage to Mecca as one of the Pillars of Islam. Sovereignty could not be shaken off by moving to another place beyond the practical reach of the ruler - a point of particular importance in Arabia where many of the great tribes were Bedouin. Rulers in adjacent regions found it unnecessary to draw exact frontiers between them. Sovereignty was claimed over a tribe or the oasis in which it lived and there was little concern about ownership of the areas of useless and usually featureless sand which lay between one settlement and another. It was not until the twentieth century had shown that any dune might cover a deposit of oil that delimitation of precise boundaries assumed extreme importance.

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