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158 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

harmony. 17 Evidence on the incident is far from conclusive and is col-
oured by partisan feeling. al-Khayri, a local Arab historian writing soon
after the events, maintains that Muhammad Sharif supplied policemen
with rifles and instructed them to fire upon the Najdis. Significantly,
British reports did not mention the episode in any detail although the
dismissal of some municipal guards suggests that they may have been
18
involved in acts of factional violence.
This episode inflamed the young loyalists of Shaykh ‘Isa who were
conversant with modern political ideas stirred by the anti-colonial struggle
unfolding in India, where many of Bahrain’s aristocrats of tribal descent
had received their education. In October 1923, they formed an organisa-
tion called the Bahrain National Congress inspired by the ideas of con-
stitutionalism and representative government championed by the Khilafat
movement and by the Indian National Congress. Led by ‘Abd al-Wahhab
al-Zayyani, the scion of a prominent pearling family, this organisation
demanded the establishment of a legislative council (al-Jam‘iyah al-
Tashri‘iyyah) under the guardianship of Shaykh ‘Isa as the rightful leader
of the people of Bahrain. 19 Further, as reported by Amin al-Rihani, the
Lebanese American traveller and Arab activist who visited the islands after
1923, Muharraq was developing as the centre of an Arab ‘revival’ also
under the influence of Pan-Islamism and Islamic modernism which since
the 1890s had monopolised the intellectual life of the town’s Sunni
religious circles. 20
The confrontation between the ‘Persian’ police and the ‘Arab’ rioters in
Manama inspired a new vocabulary of ‘national’ rights pioneered by the
Bahrain National Congress (which was prematurely dissolved in late 1923)
and popularised by intellectuals and activists in the following years. This
vocabulary denounced municipal government as ‘illegitimate’ and cele-
brated the common good of the nation (al-maslahah al-wataniyyah)as the
rallying cry against the dominance of foreigners, particularly in the bala-
diyyah. In a letter to Shaykh ‘Isa around 1927 ‘Abdallah al-Za’id, a young
intellectual from Muharraq, bitterly dismissed the spurious municipality as
a government within the government (al-hukumah al-munaddimah)and as a

17
R/15/2/86 IOR: Political Agent Bahrain to Political Resident Bushehr, 13 May 1923;
Statement of Mr McKie, 63/AC, 12 May 1923.
18
‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Abdallah al-Khayri, Qala’id al-nahrayn fi tarikh al-Bahrayn
(Manama: al-Ayyam, 2003), pp. 323–5; Political Resident Bushehr to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn
Sa‘ud Rahman al-Faysal al-Sa‘ud, 20 June 1923, R/15/1/341 IOR.
19
Rumaihi, Bahrain, pp. 161–2; al-Tajir, Bahrain 1920–1945, p. 62.
20
Amin al-Rihani, al-Muluk al-‘Arab, 2 vols. (Beirut: al-Mu’assasah al-‘Arabiyyah li al-
Dirasat wa al-Nashr, 1970), vol. II, pp. 282–93; Mubarak al-Khatir, al-Muntada al-Islami:
Hayyatihi wa atharihi, 1928–1932, 2nd edn. (Manama: al-Matba‘ah al-Hukumiyyah li
Wizarah al-‘Ilam, 1993), p. 17.