Page 114 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

94 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

the representative of Ibn Sa‘ud in Bahrain, and the Sharif and al-Safar
families, the British native agents who acted as the representatives of the
shippers Grey Mackenzie. The area attracted immigrants who had business
ambitions and could afford a more expensive lifestyle. By the early 1900s
inflated property prices and the lack of opportunity for investment in real
estate forced many foreign entrepreneurs to move to the ‘new’ neighbour-
hoods of western Manama.
In the inner city few individuals were able to organise their lives and
activities around tribal connections, since sectarian and economic con-
siderations prevailed. The halat settlements along the eastern coast, which
accommodated some Sunni tribal groups, lived off pearling and fishing
and had strong social and economic ties with Muharraq. The history of
the al-Dawawdah, a tribe of pearl divers, is fairly typical of the ways
in which integration into Manama was characterised by a loosening of
tribal bonds. In 1875 some thirty families, most likely from al-Hidd,
lived around Manama’s Portuguese Fort. At the turn of the century,
they relocated closer to the town, moving between Halah Ibn Iswar and
Halah Ibn Anas, the largest settlements along the eastern coast of the
town. By the 1930s the formation of a new neighbourhood named Farij al-
Dawawdah suggests that this group had lost its tribal exclusivity through
sedentarisation and intermarriage. 48 In the case of the al-Lahmada tribe,
it was their conversion en masse to Shi‘ism sometime in the second half
of the nineteenth century which favoured their integration into Manama’s
satellite village of Ras Rumman. 49
In pre-modern Manama, neighbourhoods had no administrative, fiscal
or corporate personality. The Jewish community, for instance, neither
formed a distinctive urban cluster nor was subject to a separate fiscal
regime as suggested by attempts on the part of Shaykh ‘Isa to impose a
50
head tax on the community in April 1906. With no spatial, administra-
tive or cultural markers separating the various districts, locals conceptual-
ised the identity of urban quarters as the domain of influential merchants
and as a continuous process of colonisation of al-mazra‘ah and al-
barriyyah. As will be explained in the following sections, at the turn of

48
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, p. 1011; ‘List of Some of the Families into which the Arab
Tribes Residing in Bahrain are Divided’ in ‘Memo on the Islands of Bahrain’, 11 July
1875, R/15/1/192 IOR; interview with ‘Abd al-Rahim Muhammad, Manama, 17 April
2004.
49
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, p. 1161; interviews with ‘Ali Akbar Bushehri and Muhammad
Ishaq ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Khan, Manama, 18 March and 8 April 2004.
50
‘Administration Report on the Persian Gulf Political Residency and Maskat Political
Agency for 1906–1907’ in The Persian Gulf Administration Reports 1873–1949, vol. VI,
p. 67.