Page 124 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

104 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

c onnec tions betw een Manama’s Shi‘i lea de rs and t he rural p o pu l a-

tion. The Ibn Rajabs, for instance, acquired land in their ancestral village,

Bilad al-Qadim. 71 Merchants also invested in the outskirts of the town as

the ownership of garden properties became a sign of political prestige and

social visibility. On particular days of the week they were used as the

extensions of the ma’tams and majlises of the inner city as the heads of

prominent families received and entertained their guests or celebrated
religious holidays.
Religious sentiment, patronage and public architecture
The story of Ja‘far Muhammad Qannati illustrates the ways in which piety
constituted an important resource base at the disposal of the mercantile
elites of the pearl boom. Regardless of confessional orientation, the mos-
ques and ma’tam buildings which mushroomed in the town shared impor-
tant features: sponsorship by local a‘yan as a crucial dimension of their
politics of patronage with their membership organised by ethnicity, local-
ity and occupation.
The architectural idiom and decor of religious buildings did not leave a
powerful impression upon foreign visitors. Driven by prejudice and
Christian zeal, Theodore Bent and his wife in 1899 dismissed
Manama’s mosques as ‘little better than barns’. A few years later
Cursetjee remarked that even the Friday mosque of Manama was far
from ‘picturesque and graceful’. 72 Yet religious buildings were an impor-
tant projection of the town’s collectivities upon urban space. On the one
hand, their lack of visual prominence reflected the relatively low profile of
Sunni ‘ulama’, Shi‘i clergy and mosque imams in urban society. On the
other, their modest appearance signposted the utilitarian outlook of
Manama’s civic ethos and the intimacy and exclusivity of its community
networks. Religious sentiment found expression in the discreet combina-
tion of mercantile wealth and individual devotion, rather than reflecting
the flamboyancy of power and legitimacy emanating from a state-
sponsored religiosity. Although the imams of Sunni mosques gravitated
around the entourages of the ruler and of leading pearling tribes,
Manama’s religious institutions rarely enjoyed the direct patronage of
the tribal government as suggested by the tight network of endowments
by merchants and residents which permeated the property structure of the
town. Even Jami‘ al-Mahzah, the Friday mosque, one of the strongholds
of the tribal administration, was partly supported by merchant capital. In
71
Minutes by Political Agent Bahrain, 21 January 1938, R/15/2/151 IOR.
72
Bent, Southern Arabia, p. 12; Cursetjee, The Land of the Date, pp. 88–9.