Persian Makran is exclusively Sunni except for the district of Jask. At Gwadar, Sunni, Khojah and Ibadhi rub shoulders. The Oman sultanate is predominately Ibadhi. In the territory con- trolled by the Emir of Nejd the official religion is Wahabi, but a few Shiahs are still to be found in the districts of El Hasa and Hofuf. Bahrein is Sunni, but has a large Shiah population of Persian origin. Kuwait is Sunni, with Wahabi leanings.
The Khojahs number some 2,000 souls and are distributed over the ports of the Gulf, mainly on the Arab side. They are descended from Hindus of Sind and Kach, who were converted from Hinduism to the Isma'ili form of the Shiah faith in the 15th century of the Christian era.
Hindus total about 1,500 and are to be found in all the princi- pal ports of the Gulf, especially at Gwadar, where their presence gives rise to occasional fanatical disturbances. Panislamic ideas have obtained h'ttle hold in this region; in Persia and wherever people are Shiahs the pretensions of the Sultan of Turkey to the headship of the Mahommedan world are rejected, as also in Oman, where the bulk of the population are Ibadhi.
Missions. Roman Catholic missions have at intervals worked in the Persian Gulf, on the Persian side since the beginning of the iyth century; they are still represented at Bushire. The first Protestant mission to the Gulf was initiated by Henry Martyn in 1811; his Arabic New Testament appeared in 1816. The American Arabian mission was founded in 1889 in the United States; the first agents of the mission were the Rev. J. Cantine and the Rev. S. Zwemer, who established a branch at Bahrein in 1892 and later at Muscat. Politi- cal complications arising out of the work of the Arabian mission have been singularly few, a happy circumstance which must be attributed chiefly to the missionaries themselves, whose general opinion is that for a Mahommedan country the Persian Gulf and eastern Arabia are peculiarly free from religious fanaticism.
Historical. The Persian Gulf has figured in history from the earliest times. A myth (preserved by Berosus) records that Oannes (Hea) the fish-god came up from that part of the Erythraean Sea which borders on Babylonia, to teach the inhabitants of that country letters and sciences and arts of every kind. This seems to indicate the arrival, in ships, of strangers of a higher grade of civilization. These strangers may have come from China, but Sir H. Rawlinson considers they were a dark race not belonging to the Semitic family. Rawlinson also suggests that the Phoe- nicians may have originally come from the Bahrein Is. and ex- tended westwards to the settlements on the Mediterranean at least 5,000 years ago. Though there is no direct evidence of this con- nexion, enormous numbers of tumuli, probably of Phoenician origin, exist on the Bahrein Is., which also contain tumuli of Babylonian age. Babylonian tumuli have also been found at Bushire. Col. Yule, from Chinese annals of the 7th and 8th cen- turies, says that Chinese ships came as far as Siraf (Tahiri) and the Euphrates, where they lay at Hira near Kufa, and adds that this trade fell off in A.D. 878 owing to civil war in China. From the records of Fa-Hian of the 4th century it is clear that ships from China exchanged merchandise with Arab vessels at Ceylon, and this is confirmed by the account of Cosmas, who wrote be- tween 530 and 550 A.D. Along the shores of the Persian Gulf in 326 A.D. came Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander, on his way from the Indies to the Tigris delta; from Basra sailed Sindbad in the pth century in one of the many Arab craft which traded thence to India, Ceylon and Zanzibar. Thousands of years before Christ the pearls of Bahrein were sold in Egypt; Bahrein still supplies 80% of the world's output of pearls. After the Phoe- nicians, Babylonians, and Arabs came the Persians; though they never aspired to command of the seas and are indeed not a mari- time race, the Persian Gulf was no obstacle to them, and at one time or another they occupied Muscat and parts of Oman and Bahrein, and penetrated into the greater part of Arabia.
Commerce between East and West had from early times followed this route in preference to that of the Red Sea, and when during the I5th century Genoa and Venice successively lost their positions in Oriental commerce, through the capture of Constantinople by the Turks and by the hostility of the Mame- lukes of Egypt respectively, the country which most earnestly devoted itself to the quest of a new way to India was Portugal. Albuquerque seized several towns on the coast of Oman, including
Muscat in 1507, and soon afterwards established his authority on the I. of Ormuz, at the N. of the Gulf. Towards the end of the i6th century the Dutch made their appearance in Indian waters as rivals of the Portuguese; and in 1616 the first British " fac- tories " of the East India Co. were established on the Persian coast. In 1622 the Portuguese were expelled from Ormuz by joint efforts of the British by sea and of the Persians by land; in 1650 they finally left Muscat. In 1664 the French made their ap- pearance on the scene, but did little trade. It is, however, of in- terest to note that in 1698, in consequence of a nominal agreement, from which nothing resulted, among the principal Europeans in the East, the French undertook the policing of the Persian Gulf against pirates. The Dutch, who had played no part in expel- ling the Portuguese, now became increasingly predominant, and the wars that were waged in Europe between England and Hol- land had their counterpart in the Persian Gulf.
In 1674 hostility between Holland and England ceased, but the position was radically unsatisfactory owing to the prevalence of piracy, from which both England and other nations suffered heavily. At the beginning of the i8th century the improved state of affairs in India began to have an effect on the Company's branches in the Persian Gulf and by the middle of the i8th cen- tury the Dutch settlements had disappeared.
Henceforward the bulk of the trade was in British hands, but piracy was rife, the slave trade flourished, and the coast towns and islands of the Persian Gulf had fallen from their ancient prosperity to a lower level than they had experienced for some centuries. To restore this prosperity had for about a century before 1921 been the secular mission of Great Britain in these lands, the British resident in the Persian Gulf, acting as the representative of the Government of India, being the umpire to whom by long custom all parties on both coasts appealed and who had by trea- ties been entrusted with the duty of preserving peace.
Students of international politics are familiar with the claims of nations to a position of preference in certain regions, based upon historic, economic or geographical considerations. The claims of Great Britain to such a position in this region are unique. But beyond two brief occupations of the I. of Kharag, and the continuous possession of a few square miles of desert land at Bas- idu, the S.W. end of the I. of Qishm, she has at no time acquired territory in that region, although she has for generations borne an honourable burden there which no other nation has ever under- taken anywhere, except in the capacity of sovereign. British in- fluence kept the peace amongst peoples who were not subjects of the King-Emperor; Great Britain lighted, buoyed, charted and patrolled for over a century waters over which it claimed no for- mal lordship ; and kept in strange ports an open door, through which traders of every nation might have equally free access to distant markets. On the other hand, a steady and increasing market was gained for the products of the British Empire, and in particular for those of India; the ports of the Gulf were made safe, not so much for the British as for the Indian trader; nearly 75 % of the trade of the Gulf ports was in 1921 with India, and an even greater proportion in the hands of Indians, Persians and Arabs. A good market had been created for Indian products, particularly yarns and cereals. But more than this, Great Britain had gained a reputation for patient and persevering efforts to promote the spread of civilization in these regions, a prestige which yielded profit during the difficult years of the World War, and was not with- out its effect in India. With the exception of local disturbances of old standing at Muscat, and at Bushire (where they were fomented by German gold), the Arab and Persian population of both shores maintained a friendly attitude to Great Britain throughout the war, although British gunboats were seldom, if ever, seen at that time in waters which in peace they had regularly patrolled.
The peculiar interests, strategic, political and commercial, of Great Britain in the Persian Gulf have never been denied; they are intimately connected with the welfare of India, with the security of its communication with the outside world, and of its internal tranquillity. The considered policy of the British Govern- ment was embodied in 1903 in Lord Lansdowne's declaration in the House of Lords that " we should regard the establishment of
