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218 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

not contribute to the demographic growth of Manama, which was fuelled

mainly by immigration from overseas. The continuity of settlement main-

tained a degree of social unity among old village communities, serving to

keep alive religious codes and traditions. In the 1940s a young trading elite

which had benefited from the oil boom started to establish ‘official’ houses

of mourning in rural communities organised around family factions,

which were modelled upon the ma’tams which had mushroomed in

66

Manama at the turn of the century.

Religious ideology did not provide the main impetus for the political

mobilisation of the workforce of rural extraction against the government

in the 1950s. As we have seen their cause was taken up instead by the

nationalist and labour activists based in Manama. The response of the

villagers to the nationalist agitations was largely determined by their

occupation and by the political inclinations of their traditional leaders,

particularly men of religion and families which controlled ma’tams. 67 In

1958 a member of the staff of the British residency commenting on the
prospects of the newly formed Department of Rural Affairs envisaged that
many villagers might turn into supporters of the Al Khalifah given that
Arab nationalism had left the sectarian and traditionalist outlook of
Bahrain’s rural society ‘comparatively untouched’. 68
The conservatism of rural society reproduced the tensions between the
Shi‘i population and the Al Khalifah family which had dominated Bahrain’s
agrarian question before the reforms. With the gradual disappearance of the
indigenous agricultural economy, the importance of land as ideological
capital increased. Partly encouraged by the failure of land registration to
break the monopoly of the Al Khalifah, Shi’i clerics and mullas used the loss
of agricultural land as a rallying cry against the ‘neo-tribal’ regime sup-
ported by Belgrave. Revisiting the old popular myth of Bahrain as the
‘Islands of Paradise’, they voiced their opposition to the new government
by condemning the ‘alien’ tribal culture of the Al Khalifah which continued
to wreak havoc amongst Bahrain’s native population. The loss of land also
featured prominently as a major topic of sorrow and reproach among Shi‘is
of rural extraction living in Manama who accused a number of prominent
families of collaboration with the Al Khalifah in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. 69 Contrary to the predictions of the British residency, the failure of
66
Lawson, Bahrain: The Modernization of Autocracy, p. 58.
67
See for instance the case of the village of al-Diraz split between the al-Shihab and al-‘Asfur
families. Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain, pp. 162–3.
68
Minutes by W. J. Adams, 18 September 1958, FO 371/132531 PRO.
69
N. Fuccaro, ‘Understanding the Urban History of Bahrain’, Journal for Critical Studies of
the Middle East,17(2000), 48–82 (63–5); I. A. Schumacher, ‘Ritual Devotion among
Shi’i in Bahrain’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London (1987), p. 70.