Page 251 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Conclusion 231

councils were elected throughout Bahrain, Manama municipal politics

was central to the rise to power of al-Wifaq. The organisation boycotted

the 2002 parliamentary elections and transformed the municipal council

into the launch pad for its entry into national politics in 2006.

The municipal by-laws issued before the 2002 elections have curtailed

considerably the administrative powers of the council dominated by al-

Wifaq. To a certain extent, however, the municipality has been successful

in proposing a new vision for the development of the city. In 2005 the

residents of the last shanty town of modern Manama were resettled out-

side the municipal boundaries in purp ose-built housing. Under al-Wifaq,

central Manama has also become the target of a new wave of public

morality which reflects the Islamisation of national politics. In the first

speech delivered after the municipal elections of 2002, the president of the

council emphasised the need to keep prostitution and alcohol consump-

tion away from residential areas in order to restore public decency. This

was a clear reference to Manama’s growing weekend sex industry serving

many Saudis and Gulf nationals in hotels and furnished apartments. This

‘morality zoning’ is still a subject of debate at the time of writing, involv-

ing res iden ts, the baladiyyah, the government and members of the

Parli a ment.
Significantly, this ‘morality zoning’ is reminiscent of that enforced by

Belgrave in 1937, when he relocated Manama’s prostitutes to the red-light

district of Garandor. In fact, the sex industry of the contemporary city

stands as a legacy of the cosmopolitan port town of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. No longer are Manama’s sex workers African,
Omani, Iranian or Indian, as they had been in the pearl and early oil
eras, but come from Russia, Eastern Europe and the Far East. As part of
the present wave of public morality the municipality was also successful in

renaming a road in the inner city connecting several of its old ma’tams

after Imam Husayn in 2006. This was indeed a highly symbolic achieve-
ment which draws attention to the enduring relationship between
Manama, national politics and the vexed issue of sectarian contestation.
The novel cosmopolitanism of the early twenty-first century and the
new groups of migrants who now populate the inner city prompt a reflec-
tion upon the broad contours of Manama’s history. Although rooted in
different political, economic and social realities, this cosmopolitanism
evokes the multicultural world of the ‘town of foreigners’ during the
pearl boom. Significantly, old and new cosmopolitan traditions are in
contrast with the Arabism which transformed Manama into the centre
of Bahrain’s national culture in the mid twentieth century. Contrary to the
nationalist narratives now promoted by the state, it is this transformation
which represents the evident discontinuity in the history of the city.