Page 154 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

134 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

9 Manama municipal council, photo taken before 1938. Front row: first
from the right ‘Abd al-Nabi Bushehri, the Persian merchant, and last
‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Qusaybi, the Najdi entrepreneur and representative of
Ibn Sa‘ud in Bahrain

taxation and the provision of services to the population, all of which
provided the framework for the continuation of old style patronage poli-
tics under the baladiyyah (see Figure 9).
Government appointments to the majlis and municipal elections for-
malised the patterns of political representation along communal and
sectarian lines in force before the reforms. After 1926, when half of the
members of the council started to be elected by popular vote, the majlis
was progressively extended from eight to twenty-four members and each
community obtained a fixed number of seats: the Arab subjects of the
Shaykh of Bahrain and the Persians were divided between Sunnis and
Shi‘is, Indians between a Muslim and Hindu constituency, while Najdis,
Jews and Iraqis acquired separate representation. Communities cast their
votes separately according to a strict timetable which was issued by the
52
government before the ballot, reinforcing traditional cleavages. The
introduction of elections did not break the dominance that the members
of the old elite had established in the first years of the municipal regime,

52
‘Surah qanun al-Baladiyyah’, c. 1929, R/15/2/1250 IOR; I‘lan Hukumah al-Bahrayn n. 66
of 1356, R/15/2/1924 IOR; I‘lan Hukumah al-Bahrayn n. 30 of 1353, R/15/2/1229 IOR;
Belgrave Diaries, 26 September 1927, AWDU.