Meher Baba's Life & Travels
In late October 1936, Meher Baba flew from Karachi in then British India to Baghdad by Imperial Airway in their Hadley Page-42 passenger biplane "HADRIAN". The route took this plane over Qatar.
This was the first time the Avatar flew in a plane for a significant distance.
See http://www.meherbabatravels.com/air-travels/hadrian-hp42-handley-page-1936/
Read the other destinations of this journey.
http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/pakistan/gwadar-pakistan/
http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/oman-muscat/http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/u-a-e-sharjah/
http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/bahrain/http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/kuwait/
http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/iraq/basra-iraq/http://www.meherbabatravels.com/location-gallery/iraq/baghdad-iraq/
On Monday, 19 October 1936, Adi Sr. drove Baba to Bombay, and the next evening at 9:00 P.M., accompanied by only Kaka and Chanji, Baba boarded the Kathiawar Mail train for Karachi. (There were Hindu-Muslim communal riots in Bombay, prior to Baba's departure.) Reaching Karachi two days later, Baba met Pilamai and her family, and his maternal aunt Banu Masi and her family.
Baba and the mandali left Karachi on the 24th on the 24-seat Imperial Airways Hadrian biplane. It was his ninth foreign journey. Baba's first international air travel proved distressing for Kaka and Chanji who suffered from headaches and vomited during the flight, due to severe turbulence from Bahrain to Basra.
Arriving in Baghdad on the evening of Sunday, 25 October, Baba and the mandali checked into a hotel. The next day they took a tour of Baghdad. On the 27th, Baba visited the shrine of Hazrat Abdul Qadir Gilani — a Sufi Perfect Master of his time. Baba remained in the Muslim tomb for some time, but made no comment on his work.
Routes
The route that the plane took was from Karachi - Gwadar, Muscat, Oman - Sharjah, U.A.E. - Qatar - Bahrein - Kuwait - Basra, Iraq - Baghdad, Iraq.
The plane Meher Baba and his men flew in was called the "Hadrian" - one of 8 plane in the Hadley-Page Imperial Airways fleet. Each plane was
given a name.
Hadrian's registration was "AAUE" No.42 / 2
The price to fly between Karachi and Baghdad was over 30 English pounds
Courtesy of Wikipedia
Qatar (Standard Arabic: [ˈqɑtˁɑr]; English pronunciation: /kəˈtɑr/ kə-TAR; local pronunciation: [ɡitˁar]), also known as the State of Qatar or locally Dawlat Qaṭar, is an Arab emirate in the Middle East, occupying the small Qatar Peninsula on the northeasterly coast of the much larger Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the south; otherwise the Persian Gulf surrounds the state. A strait of the Persian Gulf separates Qatar from the nearby island nation of Bahrain.
Qatar is an oil- and gas-rich nation, with the third largest gas reserves, and the first or second highest GDP per capita in the world. An absolute monarchy, Qatar has been ruled by the al-Thani family since the mid-1800s and has since transformed itself from a British protectorate noted mainly for pearling into an independent state with significant oil and natural gas revenues.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Qatari economy was crippled by a continuous siphoning off of petroleum revenues by the Emir, who had ruled the country since 1972. His son, the current Amir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, overthrew him in a bloodless coup in 1995. In 2001, Qatar resolved its longstanding border disputes with both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
History
Recent discoveries on the edge of an island in the West of Qatar indicate early human presence in pre-historic Qatar. Discovery of a 6th millennium BC site at Shagra, in the South-east of Qatar revealed the key role the sea (Persian Gulf) played in the lives of Shagra’s inhabitants. Excavation at Al-Khore in the North-east of Qatar, Bir Zekrit and Ras Abaruk, and the discovery there of pottery, flint, flint-scraper tools, and painted ceramic vessels there indicates Qatar’s connection with the Al-Ubaid civilization which flourished in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates during the period of 5th –4th millennium BC. There had also been a barter-based trading system between the settlements at Qatar and the Ubaid Mesopotamia, in which the exchanged commodities were mainly pottery and dried fish.
Islam conquered the entire Arabian region in the 7th century in a string of wide spread conflicts resulting in the Islamization of the native Arabian pagans. With the spread of Islam in Qatar, Muhammad sent his first military envoy Al Ala Al-Hadrami to Al-Mundhir Ibn Sawa Al-Tamimi, the ruler of Bahrain, which extended from the coast of Kuwait to the south of Qatar, including al-Hasa and Bahrain Islands, in the year 628, inviting him to accept Islam as he had invited other kingdoms and empires of his time such as Byzantium and Persia. Mundhir, responding Muhammad, announced his conversion to Islam, and all the inhabitants of Qatar became Muslim, heralding the beginning of the Islamic era in Qatar.
In medieval times, Qatar was more often than not independent and a participant in the great Persian Gulf–Indian Ocean commerce. Many races and ideas were introduced into the peninsula from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, as well as the Malay archipelago. Today, the traces of these early interactions with the oceanic world of the Indian Ocean survive in the small minorities of races, peoples, languages and religions, such as the presence of Africans and Shihus. It is often believed that Qatar was the birthplace of cheese. In ancient times, nomadic hunters made cheese from the teats of their cows. They produced local cheeses which are still used today most famously, Al-Jizzab Cheddar (a hard cheese that was previously used to stone adulterers) and Al-Messi Brie.
Although the peninsular land mass that makes up Qatar has sustained humans for thousands of years, for the bulk of its history the arid climate fostered only short-term settlements by nomadic tribes. Until 1913 it was a part of Ottoman Empire.
The British initially sought out Qatar and the Persian Gulf as an intermediary vantage point en route to their colonial interests in India, although the discovery of oil and other hydrocarbons in the early twentieth century would re-invigorate their interest. During the nineteenth century, the time of Britain’s formative ventures into the region, the Al Khalifa clan reigned over the Northern Qatari peninsula from the nearby island of Bahrain to the west.
Although Qatar had the legal status of a dependency, resentment festered against the Bahraini Al Khalifas along the eastern seaboard of the Qatari peninsula. In 1867, the Al Khalifas launched a successful effort to squash the Qatari rebels, sending a massive naval force to Al Wakrah. However, the Bahraini aggression was in violation on the 1820 Anglo-Bahraini Treaty. The diplomatic response of the British to this violation set into motion the political forces that would eventuate in the founding of the state of Qatar on December 18, 1878 (for this reason the date of December 18 is celebrated each year as the National Day of Qatar). In addition to censuring Bahrain for its breach of agreement, the British Protectorate (per Colonel Lewis Pelly) asked to negotiate with a representative from Qatar.
The request carried with it a tacit recognition of Qatar’s status as distinct from Bahrain. The Qataris chose as their negotiator the respected entrepreneur and long-time resident of Doha, Muhammed bin Thani. His clan, the Al Thanis, had taken relatively little part in Persian Gulf politics, but the diplomatic foray ensured their participation in the movement towards independence and their hegemony as the future ruling family, a dynasty that continues to this day. The results of the negotiations left Qatar with a new-found sense of political selfhood, although it did not gain official standing as a British protectorate until 1916.
20th and 21st century
The reach of the British Empire diminished after the Second World War, especially following Indian independence in 1947. Pressure for a British withdrawal from the Arab emirates in the Persian Gulf increased during the 1950s, and the British welcomed Kuwait's declaration of independence in 1961. When Britain officially announced in 1968 that it would disengage politically (though not economically) from the Persian Gulf in three years' time, Qatar joined Bahrain and seven other Trucial States in a federation. Regional disputes, however, quickly compelled Qatar to resign and declare independence from the coalition that would evolve into the seven-emirate United Arab Emirates. On September 3, 1971, Qatar became an independent sovereign state.
In 1991, Qatar played a significant role in the Persian Gulf War, particularly during the Battle of Khafji in which Qatari tanks rolled through the streets of the town providing fire support for Saudi Arabian National Guard units which were fighting against units of the Iraqi Army. Qatar also allowed Coalition troops from Canada to use the country as an airbase to launch aircraft on CAP duty.
Since 1995[update], Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has ruled Qatar, seizing control of the country from his father Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani while the latter vacationed in Switzerland. Under Emir Hamad, Qatar has experienced a notable amount of sociopolitical liberalization, including the endorsement of women's suffrage or right to vote, drafting a new constitution, and the launch of Al Jazeera, a leading English and Arabic news source which operates a website and satellite television news channel.
The International Monetary Fund states that Qatar has the highest GDP per capita in the world, followed by Liechtenstein. The World Factbook ranks Qatar at second, following Liechtenstein.
Qatar served as the headquarters and one of the main launching sites of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In March 2005, a suicide-bombing killed a British teacher at the Doha Players Theatre, shocking for a country that had not previously experienced acts of
terrorism. The bombing was carried out by Omar Ahmed
Abdullah Ali, an Egyptian residing in Qatar, who had suspected ties
to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Government and politics
Qatar has an emirate government type. Based on Islamic and civil law codes; discretionary system of law controlled by the Amir,
although civil codes are being implemented; Islamic law dominates family and personal matters; the country has not accepted compulsory International Court of Justice
jurisdiction.