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216 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

the cultivators to pay a fixed rent in kind. 59 Yet the emphasis on agricul-
tural development and the increasingly lucrative prospects offered by
artesian wells played a part in the adjudication of land rights in the
1930s. The Tabu issued title deeds for small plots on the basis of ten
years of occupancy to reward cultivators for having maintained produc-
tivity. To a certain extent it endorsed the Islamic principle of ihya’ (regen-
eration) invoked in the nineteenth century by Shi‘i clerics in order to
bolster the claims of villagers over uncultivated land whose ownership
(according to Shi‘i jurisprudence) had reverted to God. In many cases this
practice, popularly known as wada‘a al-yad (literally, to lay one’s hand;
i.e., to claim usufruct), allowed villagers to appropriate open grounds
located at the margins of cultivated areas. 60 Moreover, the Tabu protected
the interests of Shi‘i rural communities by allowing village committees to
participate in the redrawing of the boundaries of plots.

The decline of agriculture and the ideology
of rural resistance
In contrast with Manama, the landscape of Bahrain’s agricultural hamlets
in the oil era continued to be characterised by poverty and decay, a reflec-
tion of the social and economic realities of a vanishing rural world. In
speech and appearance villagers continued to be noticeably different from
townsfolk, easily distinguished in the crowds at the markets of Manama and
in the oil fields where many of them came to be employed. The oil company
provided the only form of modern transport for villagers, although during
World War II they started to organise buses to take agricultural produce to
Manama. The marketing of both foodstuffs and modern commodities
continued to be heavily dependent on peddlers who purchased provisions
61
in Manama, in some cases until the early 1960s. Isolation from the out-
side world epitomised the seemingly unchanging and backward nature of
Shi‘i rural society in contrast with Manama’s ‘modern’ life blessed by
consumerism, Western influence and technological innovation.
In spite of the efforts of the Land Department, a number of factors dealt
the final blow to Bahrain’s traditional village economy. First, the govern-
ment did not earmark funds for the development of Bahrain’s rural infra-
structure until the administrative reorganisation of the agricultural regions
59
I‘lan Hukumah al-Bahrayn, n. 1112/17 of 1347, R/15/2/1227 IOR; Khuri, Tribe and State
in Bahrain, pp. 37–49.
60
Hamza, Mu‘jam, p. 98; I‘lan Hukumah al-Bahrayn n.1 of 1361, HA.
61
‘Annual Report for the Year 1365’ in The Bahrain Government Annual Reports, 1924–1970,
vol. III, pp. 104–5. H. A. Hansen, Investigation in a Shi‘a Village in Bahrain (Copenhagen:
National Museum of Denmark, 1967), p. 61.