Page 172 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

152 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

Arab nationalist mobilisation (and led to the demise of the municipality)
reflected the combined influence of Great Britain and oil as ‘state makers’.
The explosion of popular nationalism as a movement of anti-colonial
resistance after World War II is the most illuminating example of the
success of this combined influence. The disturbances during Muharram
in 1953 which triggered the nationalist and labour agitations of 1954–6
represented a turning point in the consolidation of a modern political
community in Manama and Bahrain. They signposted the enduring role
played by ritual and Shi‘i culture in providing the framework for grass-
roots mobilisation and a referent for nationalist politics. At the same time,
they functioned as the catalyst for the establishment of al-Ha’yah
al-Tanfidhiyyah al-‘Uliya (The High Executive Committee), the cross-
sectarian political organisation which took the lead in the nascent nation-
alist and labour movements.

Communal violence and ‘foreigners’, 1900–23
In pre-modern Manama the fragmentation of popular politics along lines
of community, patronage and locality effectively prevented any large-scale
mobilisation against the tribal government. In the town of the pearl boom,
the urban population did not stage the tax or food riots which routinely
shook Middle Eastern and Indian provincial capitals in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. While the clientelist system effectively
defused popular discontent, the informal professional associations
focussed on the houses of mourning did not serve as avenues of political
dissent. Until the consolidation of the municipality in the 1920s and the
rise of nationalist politics in the early 1950s, these associations lacked the
independent economic base and the ideological drive to develop as polit-
ically conscious organisations. With no central control over goods, serv-
ices and membership, they did not enjoy the corporate autonomy of
traditional Middle Eastern guilds. Moreover, they did not function as
administrative or fiscal units, a feature which had allowed guild leaders in
major centres such as Cairo or Istanbul to acquire considerable influence
with the government. 2

2
Literature on Middle Eastern guilds is vast. The classic studies are G. Baer, Egyptian Guilds
in Modern Times (Jerusalem: Israel Oriental Society, 1964) and A. Raymond, Artisans et
commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle (Damascus: Institut Français, 1973–4). For a revi-
sionist study on the political and economic transformation which affected crafts and service
workers in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries see J. T. Chalcraft, The
Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2004).