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188 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

early 1950s, bore the full brunt of the anti-Indian sentiment of the labour
movement. In January 1953 al-Qafilah published a letter from a reader
which sums up the causes of the widespread resentment against Indian
clerks and the strength of the Arab feeling of the readership:

It is strange that this department [the Post Office] continues to employ clerks who
do not understand the language of the country. In this connection, I remember
that a short time ago I sent my servant with a piece of paper on which I had written
in Arabic the quantity of stamps I wanted of each denomination. Shortly after-
wards he came back very angry. He told me that the clerk threw him out of the
building and ordered him to “tell [your master] to write in Indian, Persian, or
English … We are not Arabs”. 100
If the ideological orientation of al-Ha’yah was at odds with the multi-
cultural ethos of old communitarian Manama, its political legacy attests to
the importance of the organisation in forging powerful tools of statecraft.
After 1957 many of its members were co-opted into the bureaucracy, and
acquired political offices and wealth. Although al-Bakir died in exile in
Lebanon and al-‘Alawayt in Iraq after both were tried for high treason in
Bahrain, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Shamlan became the vice president of the
Constitutional Congress in 1971 and subsequently served as Bahrain’s
ambassador to Egypt. The old nationalist elites came to form a new
political class, dependent on the government, which allowed the state to
appropriate the ideological apparatus of Arabism.

Conclusion
Civic strife, popular politics and ideological contestation underscored the
transformation of Manama’s political life and public sphere in the tran-
sition between the pearl and the oil eras. In the fast expanding town of the
pearl boom and well into the 1920s, networks of patronage and interfac-
tional conflict were central to public life. As shown by the dynamics of the
clashes between Persians and Arabs in 1904 and 1923, the tribal admin-
istration, the British agency and the municipality were an integral part
of the apparatus of patronage. The political arena of the town was frag-
mented, dominated by the tension between British-protected commun-
ities and the subjects of the Shaykh of Bahrain, as well as between
mercantile groups, tribesmen and immigrants. In the oil era, two key
elements transformed the arena of urban politics and reshaped public
life. The first was the cumulative popular experience of nationalism
accrued through participation in a variety of activities: political rallies,

100
Qubain, ‘Social Classes and Tensions’, 277.