Nasr Al-Madhkur

Sheikh Nasr Al-Madhkur (Arabic: الشيخ نصر آل مذكور‎‎) was the 18th century local governor of what was described by a contemporary account as an "independent state" in Bushire and Bahrain. The account by German geographer Carsten Niebuhr who visited the region at the time describes Sheikh Nasr as "the sole Monarch of the isle of Bahrain”. He lost Bahrain in 1783 after his defeat by the Bani Utbah tribal alliance at Zubarah in 1782.

The Al-Madhkur family was regarded as omani arab tribe and led the Bushehr province on the Persian Gulf littoral. According to Carsten Niebuhr, the 18th-century German geographer, the Abu Shahr Arabs under the Al Madhkurs were one of three major Arab forces ruling parts of southern Persia in the 1760s. Although the Abu Shahr Arabs lived on the Persian Gulf littoral they should not be confused with Huwalas, and did not share their sense of identity, at least according to Niebuhr. Niebuhr visited Bushire in 1765 and when he wrote of independent Arab states he included Bushire. However it seems likely that under the system of suzerainty, the Al-Madhkurs held at least nominal allegiance to governors in southern Persia.

In 1753, from their base in Bushire, the Al Madhkurs took over Bahrain, the position of which had been badly undermined by the chaos following successive invasions. It appears that al-Madhkur used Bahrain as a place to send those suffering from leprosy and venereal disease.

From 1748 to 1750 many tribal Arabs tried to occupy Bushire but failed. Later on they sided with Dutch-German trading companies and attacked the city while the news reached the Fars governor. It took then a year to send a strong 2000-man army on horseback to get rid of all invaders. When the news reached Bushire, Al-Mazkour and their allies left the city for good. The prosperity and emerging position of Zubarah as a flourishing pearling centre and trading port, now in modern Qatar, had brought it to the attention of the two main regional powers at that time, Persia and Oman, which were presumably sympathetic to Sheikh Nasr’s ambitions. Zubarah offered great potential wealth because of the extensive pearls found in its waters.

A quarrel arose in 1782 between the inhabitants of Zubarah and Persian-ruled Bahrain. Zubarah natives traveled to Bahrain to buy some wood, but an altercation broke out and in the chaos an Utub sheikh's slave was killed. The Utub and other Arab tribes retaliated on 9 September by plundering and destroying Manama. A battle was also fought on land between the Persians and the Arab tribes, in which both sides suffered casualties. The Zubarans returned to the mainland after three days with a seized Persian gallivat that had been used to collect annual treaty. On 1 October, Ali Murad Khan ordered the sheikh of Bahrain to prepare a counter-attack against Zubarah and sent him reinforcements from the Persian mainland.

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