Page 194 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

174 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

The emergence of a new nationalist class in the interwar period

The 1930s and 1940s were crucial decades for the evolution of modernist

elites, and laid the foundations for the explosion of popular politics under

al-Ha’yah. The angry young men who started to populate the nationalist

landscape of Manama articulated the social interests of the middle ranks

of the town’s commercial classes whose economic position was greatly

62

enhanced by the boom in the trade and service economy of the late 1940s.

Although still divided along communal lines, the two types of ‘political

agitator’ which emerged in the 1930s violated the conventions and venues

of traditional elite politics and no longer sat at the feet of their elders in

majlises and ma’tams. The radical young Sunni Hawala became conver-

sant with nationalist ideals and imbued with a new class consciousness as a
result of his associations with the outside world. Exposed to the Iraqi,
Syrian and Egyptian nationalist press, his nationalism was strengthened
by easier travel and faster business links. Keenly political and generally
better educated than his peers, he epitomised the figure of the Manama
national activist. The Shi‘i militant pursued modern ideas of social justice
more pragmatically, and appealed to the sectarian solidarities of the tradi-
tional constituencies of merchant patrons. 63
‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bakir belonged tothe first group. Inspired by the ideas
of Pan-Arabism and by Nasserism after the Egyptian revolution of 1952,
he made use of the overseas contacts and entrepreneurial spirit which
had brought the Hawala community commercial success before oil. After
the collapse of his family business in 1933 he left Manama, returning to
Bahrain three years later to take up a job as a translator in the oil company.
While employed in BAPCO, he played a role in the first labour agitation of
1938 as the promoter of a sports and cultural club which gathered together
young employees. In 1941, after he joined the oilcompany in Qatar, al-Bakir
established a successful import–export firm in Dubai with links to East
Africa. When he returned to Bahrain in 1948 his career as a journalist and
64
propagandist becameclosely connectedto the establishmentof al-Ha’yah.
Hawala activism set the stage and pace of the urban political arena in
the oil era. In 1938, underground organisations such as Shabab al-Ahrar
62
See pp. 131–2.
63
For a cogent reading of the national movement from the perspective of Bahrain’s political
economy and class alliances, see Lawson, Bahrain: The Modernization of Autocracy,
pp. 58–62; Belgrave to Political Agent Bahrain, 17 February 1948, D.O. n. 782, R/15/2/
485 IOR. On the Hawala as the progressive segments of modern Gulf societies, see
A. Dessouki, ‘Social and Political Dimensions of the Historiography of the Arab Gulf’,
pp. 96–112.
64
al-Bakir, Min al-Bahrayn, pp. 28–35.