Page 127 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Ordering space, politics and community in Manama, 1880s–1919 107

supported by endowments such as shops, land and the large family ware-
house, properties acquired by the family in the years following the estab-
lishment of the funeral house. 79 The mushrooming of specialised
buildings for the celebration of ‘ashura’ also explains the changing demog-
raphy of expanding Shi‘i popular neighbourhoods. After the 1860s, the
al-‘Ajam al-Kabir and Bin Rajab, the oldest of Manama, were testimony
to the presence of large numbers of Persians and Baharna immigrants
in the inner city. Similarly, the appearance of the Ma’tam al-Ahsa’iyyin in
al-Mukharaqah district in 1895 is an indication of substantial migrations
from al-Ahsa’, which most likely occurred after the 1850s. 80
Ma’tams also fostered new uses of urban space. The establishment of
specialised buildings and the outdoors celebration of ‘ashura’ contributed
further to create a new public arena in Manama’s neighbourhoods trans-
forming them into spaces of popular devotion. Although individual families
and small congregations continued to sponsor indoor events, preachers
reciting the stories of the Ahl al-Bayt during religious holidays gathered
large crowds of listeners outside ma’tam buildings who were eager to weep
and lament their sad fate. Moreover, ritual performances for ‘ashura’
became the most heavily attended public events in town. From the seventh
to the tenth day of the month of Muharram, congregations marched
through the streets of the inner city conducting coordinated rituals of
chest beating, sword self-mutilation and the theatrical representation of
the battle of Karbala (al-tamthiliyyah). 81 In July 1926 Charles Belgrave
provided one of the earliest lengthy descriptions of Muharram’s celebra-
tions from the roof of a house in the vicinity of Manama’sFriday mosque:
The sides of the square simply packed with people and all the roofs crowded with
women, in black, all howling and crying. The procession really looked like a circus,
flags and banners and then all the figures, like a mystery play, from the story of
Hussein and Hosein, the corpses, very realistic and covered in blood, one headless
corpse, very unpleasant, horses covered in gore, wives, prisoners, Hosein’s house,
an affair of cardboard and tinsel, and camel and horses etc, etc, really amazing,
then thousands of men beating themselves and then, the pièce of resistance, about
50 men carrying swords and cutting themselves across the forehead, dressed in
white clothes, simply covered with blood! 82
Patterns of ritual patronage and participation in ma’tam congregations
reflected the economic position and social standing of their patrons as the
79
al-‘Urayyad, Nafidhah ‘ala al-tarikh, pp. 33–4.
80
Sayf, al-Ma’tam, vol. I, pp. 108–11, 119–23, 133–4; Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain,
pp. 160–2.
81
Videotape of ‘ashura’ procession (Manama, c. 1932), BA; P. Thomas, ‘The Passion Play
at Bahrain’, The Arabian Mission, vol. II, 65 (April–June 1908), pp. 3–5.
82
Belgrave Diaries, 21 July 1926, AWDU.