Page 225 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

City and countryside in modern Bahrain 205

The first of such partnerships was the new neighbourhood of al-
Qudaybiyyah, developed on land which was partly owned by the govern-
ment (miri) and partly by Mustafa ‘Abd al-Latif, the wealthy entrepreneur
from Lingah and one of Manama’s largest property owners. The area
started to develop in the late 1930s around the palace of Shaykh Hamad,
which was completed in 1927, and around the new quarters of the Al
Khalifah family. Besides being the new stronghold of the ruling family in
Manama, by the end of World War II al-Qudaybiyyah had become
important to the expanding British political and military establishments:
the Royal Air Force owned an airfield in the vicinity of the palace com-
pound, and plans were put forward by the political agency in 1946 to erect
the headquarters of its Indian clerical staff. 24 Mixing old and new styles of
patronage, al-Qudaybiyyah became the first of Manama’s planned resi-
dential districts. The Land Department took on the role of planning office
in order to keep away the evils which beset the inner city, particularly
random building patterns. The government built roads, sponsored two
cinemas, and by the early 1950s initiated the construction of Buyut al-
‘Ummal, a housing project for junior civil servants and oil workers. In
parallel, Mustafa ‘Abd al-Latif who was the largest private landowner in
the area, instructed the Department of Land Registration to sell his land
at a nominal price in small allotments to poor immigrants from Iran. 25 ‘Ard
Mustafa (the land of Mustafa), as the area owned by the rich Persian
became known, stood alongside the modern al-Qudaybiyyah and contin-
ued to grow under the wing of its benefactor, displaying some of the
architectural features of the inner city (see Figure 19).
The 1960s ushered in a new phase of urban development inspired by
Western concepts of urban planning. Awali, the headquarters of BAPCO,
and ‘Isa Town, the first modern housing project sponsored by the govern-
ment outside Manama, provided the model for al-‘Adliyyah, a new residen-
tial district built in the 1960s with modern housing compounds and
26
residential villas surrounded by private grounds. Old merchant families

24
Political Agent Bahrain to British Resident Bushehr, 8 January 1946, n. 91–18/8, R/15/2/
1309 IOR; interview with Muhammad Ishaq ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Khan, Manama, 8 April
2004.
25
Belgrave, Personal Column, p. 181; The Bahrain Government Annual Reports, 1924–1970:
‘Annual Report for the Year 1365’, vol. III, p. 55; ‘Annual Report for the Year 1369’, vol.
IV, p. 38.
26
Awali was also used as a model for the construction of other purpose-built oil towns,
Dhahran in Saudi Arabia and Ahmadi in Kuwait. ‘Annual Report for the Year 1365’ in
The Bahrain Government Annual Reports, 1924–1970, vol. III, pp. 78–80; Belgrave,
Personal Column, pp. 139–41; J. Gornall, ‘Some Memories of BAPCO’, typescript,
May 1965,BA; Madinah ‘Isa/‘Isa Town (Ministry of Housing, Municipalities and
Environment, State of Bahrain, c. 1996), p. 2.