The Qatami family: the Kuwaiti captain who wrote the Gulf’s sailing manual

Before satellite navigation, a Kuwaiti nakhoda learned the sea by apprenticeship and memory. Isa bin Abdulwahab Al-Qatami put it on paper. His Dalil al-Muhtar fi Ilm al-Bihar (“The Chooser’s Guide to the Science of the Seas”), first printed around 1914, gathered routes, stars and anchorages for captains sailing to India and East Africa — and made the Qatami name known across the Gulf.

A falcon’s name

The Qatami are an old Kuwaiti family, a branch of Al-Zayed tied by marriage and neighbourhood to the Al-Ghanim. Qatami is a classical word for a sharp-eyed falcon; the lexicographer Jalal Al-Hanafi noted that families linked to the Al-Ghanim carry bird names — Al-Saqr, Al-Shaheen, Al-Qatami. Today the family has two branches, descended from the brothers Abdulaziz and Isa Al-Abdulwahab.

The navigator

Hamad Al-Saeedan’s Kuwaiti encyclopaedia gives Isa’s birth as 1870 and calls him Kuwait’s first navigator. Besides the Dalil, he wrote on weighing pearls and a handbook for travellers, pearl merchants and divers. The Dalil went through four editions; his son, Captain Abdulwahab Isa Al-Qatami, added his own treatise on fishing, passage and sea trade as an appendix. The fourth edition was published in Kuwait in 1976, according to the University of Pennsylvania library catalogue.

Captains of the long voyages

• Abdulwahab Isa Al-Qatami received a navigation certificate from the British naval command in July 1938, when he retired from the sea.
• Yusuf Isa Al-Qatami is recorded as the first Kuwaiti captain to reach Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
• Abdulwahab bin Abdulaziz Al-Qatami, born 1892, a long-voyage captain, became head of the Municipality in 1938 and was later consulted by the government on the Gulf continental shelf.

In Sharq

The family’s name survives on a mosque in Fereej Al-Shamlan, Sharq, founded in 1834 by Malka bint Mohammed Al-Jabr Al-Ghanim and rebuilt by the Ministry of Awqaf in 1952, and on Isa Al-Qatami Street.

Photo: the wooden ship Al-Hashemi II on Kuwait’s shore — a modern vessel built in the style of the long-voyage dhows, not a Qatami ship. Photo by Mosbatho, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: Farhan Al-Farhan, “Al-Qatami in Kuwait”, Al-Qabas, 16 November 2001, via the Kuwait History forum; Hamad Al-Saeedan, Concise Kuwaiti Encyclopaedia, vol. 3, pp. 1174–1176; University of Pennsylvania Libraries catalogue, Dalil al-Muhtar fi Ilm al-Bihar, 4th ed., Kuwait 1976.