The Al-Oqilat: A Neglected Administrative Heritage
A Study of the Al-Oqilat Management Model
By Mohammed Al-Muhanna Aba Al-KhailIn 1981, Professor William G. Ouchi published the widely discussed book Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge. It described a Japanese approach to management built on deep mutual loyalty between employees and employers. Our own country, whose cultural inheritance reaches far back into history, possesses a vast accumulated heritage from which an effective management model can be developed.
One aspect of our modern administrative heritage, however, has been almost entirely neglected and is mentioned chiefly in oral accounts. I refer here to the administrative heritage of the Al-Oqilat. These groups of Najdi merchants travelled to neighboring countries and developed a management model based on simple organization and commitment to defined values—one that sustained their activity for five hundred years.
Elements of the Al-Oqilat Management Model
The Al-Oqilat developed a management model worthy of study and documentation. It rested on three main elements:
- Noble values: chivalry, upright conduct, integrity, and mutual guarantee.
- The caravan’s organizational structure: the mulhaq, the Aqili, the leader of a khibrah group, and the caravan sheikh.
- Collective and individual relationships: buyer and seller, fellowship and mutual protection, and authority.
Organizational Structure and Advancement
An Aqili began his working life as a hired hand in a caravan and was known as a “mulhaq.” At this stage he was entrusted only with the work from which he earned his living. If his conduct demonstrated sound judgment, he received the endorsement needed to become an “Aqili.”He then gained the right to trade and to accept investors’ funds to manage, eventually becoming the “leader of a khibrah,” a group of no more than eight people. At the top of the structure stood the “sheikh or amir of the caravan.”The position required substantial wealth, a strong reputation among the tribes, education, and wisdom.
“The Al-Oqilat are not a phenomenon that flourished in one age and then disappeared. Their model was capable of building a major and well-established commercial enterprise. We should study and ground this heritage in scholarship to discover the sources of our own administrative capability, rather than wait for a Western researcher to publish a book on ‘Theory A’ in Arab management.”