The Al-Wazzan family: named for the scales they kept at the old Manakh market

In old Kuwait, a wazzan was a job before it was a surname: the man who weighed goods for buyers and sellers and took a small fee for it. Hamad Al-Saidan’s encyclopaedia defines it exactly that way, and the trade even left a proverb behind: “the weigher slipped, and the sum was lost.” The Al-Wazzan family took its name from that work.

A booth by the harbour

The historian Farhan Al-Farhan records that the first Jassim Al-Wazzan, about a century and a half before Farhan was writing, weighed people’s goods at the port. He earned a reputation for honesty and was given a small shop at the landing stage, where cargo coming off the boats could be weighed so a buyer knew he had received what he paid for. The shop passed to his son.

The weighing later moved inland to Al-Manakh, the open ground where grain, dates and salt arrived from the sea and were sold on to the desert. By a family account Farhan heard from his grandfather, the Al-Wazzans were weighing there from the reign of Sheikh Abdullah II to the time of Sheikhs Mohammed and Jarrah. Farhan adds that his own father made a point of buying from their scales because they could be trusted.

A deed written in 1281 AH (around 1864) and renewed in 1951 confirms the family owned shops in Bahaitah, the quarter between the port and Seif Palace.

From ship cargo to a grocery stall

A family business history published by New York University Abu Dhabi’s Family Business Histories project says members of the family weighed import and export cargo at Kuwait’s ports, and that they were granted reduced fees in honour of an ancestor, Najim Al-Wazzan, who was killed at the naval Battle of Al-Riqqa in 1783.

Jassim Mohammed Ali Al-Wazzan was born in the Sharq district in 1929. His father kept a small food shop built in 1898. Jassim attended Al-Mubarakiya School, left before his final year to work for a food merchant and then at a flour mill, and at about nineteen opened his own grocery in the Al-Tararih market, selling basic household goods.

Trips to Europe in search of agencies followed in the 1950s, then a partnership with the Al-Naqi family in 1959, then the Gulf’s first meat-processing plant in the 1960s. In 1976 Kuwait got a local potato-chip factory, built with Dutch machinery, where chips had previously been imported. Jassim died in 1989. The family group today trades as Mezzan, the Arabic word for a scale.

Names from the family

More recent members include Abdullah Yacoub Al-Wazzan, elected to the National Assembly in 1975, and Abdulwahab Al-Wazzan, who served as Minister of Commerce.

Farhan notes that more than one Kuwaiti family carries the name, and Al-Saidan counts three. This is the family of Jassim Al-Wazzan, rooted in the Sharq and central quarters of the old town.

Photo: A market in Kuwait City, August 1980. Photo by Miranda.Kopetzky, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: Farhan Al-Farhan, “The Al-Wazzan family (once the weighers of Al-Manakh)”, 7 November 2002, via the Kuwait History forum, citing Hamad Al-Saidan’s encyclopaedia · Family Business Histories (NYU Abu Dhabi and Tharawat Family Business Forum), “Mezzan Holding Co”, drawing on Talal Al-Wazzan’s 2017 biography of Jassim Al-Wazzan.