Qatif

Qatif is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on the Arabian side of the Gulf. The mound beneath Tarout Castle on the island offshore holds layers of occupation going back some five thousand years, to the era of Dilmun, the trading culture centred on Bahrain, and finds from the island include one of the best-known early Arabian statues. The oasis, watered by springs and planted with palms, supported towns and harbours through the Hellenistic and pre-Islamic periods, when the coast was known as al-Khatt and so famous for spear-making that khatti became the standard poetic word for a spear.

The people of the oasis were among the earliest in Arabia to accept Islam. Afterwards Qatif was ruled in turn by the Qarmatians from al-Hasa, by local dynasties and by the Jabrids; the Portuguese and the Ottomans fought over the coast in the 16th century, and Tarout's fortress was rebuilt in that period. The Bani Khalid and then the Ottomans governed until Ibn Saud took the province in 1913. Pearling and fishing sustained the town until the pearl trade collapsed between the wars.

Oil changed everything after 1938. Qatif's palm gardens kept their place as a food source for the province while the men of the oasis found work with Aramco and in the new cities, and the town grew and modernised. The old fortress at the centre of Qatif was demolished by the government in the 1980s. The town saw protests and security operations in the 2010s, and the old quarter of Awamiyah nearby was cleared in 2017 and redeveloped.

Qatif's identity rests on two things: the oasis and its Shia faith. Most residents are Twelver Shia Muslims, part of the largest such community in Saudi Arabia, and religious life is visible in the many mosques and husseiniyas, the gathering halls where sermons, recitations and mourning assemblies are held. Muharram, and above all Ashura, is the high point of the year, marked with black banners, processions, public kitchens and communal meals.

Family and neighbourhood ties are strong, and the oasis has long produced scholars, poets and writers, with a lively tradition of religious and secular poetry recited at gatherings. Palm crafts survive as a household skill — baskets, mats and fans woven from fronds — and the fishing communities keep their own vocabulary and songs from the dhow and pearling years, when boats from Qatif and Darin worked the banks offshore.

Visitors are met with the hospitality usual in the kingdom: coffee with cardamom, dates and unhurried greeting. Manners are conservative — modest dress, restraint between men and women in public, and discretion with a camera, particularly around religious buildings and gatherings. The town's relationship with the state has been tense at times, and political and sectarian questions are not a subject for casual conversation.

The Qatif governorate holds roughly half a million people, spread between the main town, Tarout Island and a ring of towns and villages including Safwa, Saihat and Awamiyah. Almost all are Saudi citizens, which makes the area unlike the expatriate-heavy cities to the south.

Work is mostly elsewhere: a large share of residents commute to Dammam, Dhahran, Ras Tanura and Jubail, many of them to Aramco and its contractors, to hospitals and to government offices. Locally, the economy rests on farming, fishing, retail and construction. The palm gardens still produce dates and vegetables for the province, though rising salinity, falling groundwater and the spread of housing have taken land out of cultivation, and the fishing fleet works from harbours at Qatif and Darin.

Daily rhythm follows prayer times and the heat: business opens early, pauses in the afternoon and revives in the evening, when the corniche and the markets fill. Weekends bring family visits and picnics in the palm gardens or on the seafront. Local concerns are practical as well as political — water and the future of the groves, jobs for young people, and the redevelopment that has reshaped parts of the oasis.

Qatif eats from the sea and the palm grove. The fish market sets the menu: hamour, safi, shrimp and crab, grilled over charcoal, fried, or cooked into machboos, the Gulf rice dish spiced with dried lime and baharat. Muhammar, rice cooked with date syrup and spices, is the classic accompaniment to fish, and sayadiyah-style fish with onions and rice appears in many kitchens. Dried and salted fish are used in stews through the year.

Dates are everywhere — eaten plain with coffee, boiled down into dibs, syrup, stuffed with nuts or sesame, and folded into pastries such as kleicha, the date-filled biscuit flavoured with cardamom that is made across Iraq and Arabia. The oasis also supplies herbs, tomatoes and greens to the wider province, and its vegetable markets are the liveliest in the morning.

Breakfast may be balaleet, sweet saffron vermicelli under a thin omelette, or eggs and beans with hot bread from a wall oven. Harees, wheat and meat pounded to a porridge, and thareed, bread soaked in stew, belong to Ramadan and to family occasions, and the public kitchens of Muharram cook rice and meat dishes in quantity for whole neighbourhoods. Sweets run to luqaimat, fried dough balls in syrup, and halwa thickened with starch and set with nuts. Arabic coffee, qahwa, pale and cardamom-scented, and sweet tea are drunk all day; alcohol is illegal in the kingdom.