Page 244 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

224 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

areas have continued to act as a source of historical memory and political
identity even after the relocation of their residents to modern residential
districts after the 1970s. Today for Bahraini nationals to claim to be a
Mukharaqi,a Fadhili or a ‘Awadi – either by birth or because their parents
and extended family resided there – is still a prestigious symbol of urbanity
which transcends the grim realities of the decaying landscape of the old
quarters now inhabited largely by poor Asian migrant labourers.
State intervention and modernisation had equally momentous implica-
tions for the tribal towns established after 1783 whose economic and
political importance decreased in parallel with that of former agricultural
districts. Muharraq remained the second largest settlement of Bahrain but
the transfer of the residence of the ruler to al-Sakhir in 1927 and the lack of
public and private investment over the following decades undermined its
demographic and economic development. al-Hidd and al-Budayya‘ never
recovered from the collapse of the pearling industry; by 1959 the popula-
tion of the former had halved while the latter suffered considerably from
the migration of its al-Dawasir settlers to the mainland in the 1920s. In
contrast, in the 1960s al-Rifa‘, which had become the residence of the
members of the ruling family, emerged as Bahrain’s third largest settle-
ment, absorbing the historic towns of Rifa‘ al-Sharqi and Rifa‘ al-Qibli. 3
Turning to Bahrain’s village communities, their situation after inde-
pendence continued to deteriorate. By the 1980s, the accelerated expan-
sion of Manama into its rural hinterland created a new ‘dialectics of
suburbanism’. As neatly planned, orderly and relatively affluent housing
projects mushroomed around Manama to accommodate the new Shi‘i
middle classes of urban extraction, old villages such as Jidd Hafs and Bilad
al-Qadim turned into satellites of Manama without modern housing and
adequate public services. The latter, a form of suburbanism that Fuad
4
Khuri has termed ‘dormitory’ communities, did not represent a transi-
tional stage in the process of integration of the Shi‘i underclass into the
social and economic fabric of modern Bahrain. It fostered a culture of
‘marginality’, underdevelopment and political militancy which drew on
the ethos and historical memory of the old agricultural communities. This
process started to become manifest in the 1960s and gathered momentum
in the political mobilisation of religiously inspired Shi‘i groups after the
Iranian Revolution of 1979.

3
Lorimer, Gazetteer, vol. II, pp. 237–8; Belgrave, Welcome to Bahrain, p. 16; Bahrain Census
of Population and Housing – 1981: Trends and Prospects (Directorate of Statistics, State of
Bahrain, c. 1981), p. 74.
4
Khuri, Tribe and State in Bahrain, pp. 253–4.