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12 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

of historical change and as the expression of localised social and political
relations. Michel de Certeau, for instance, famously asserted that ‘places
are fragmentary and inward-turning histories … accumulated times that
can be unfolded.’ 24 Moreover, studies of colonial urbanism inspired by
Michel Foucault have emphasised the political nature of space; that is,
how changing urban forms and institutions provide an insight into rela-
25
tions of power. In exploring these relations in the non-colonial context
of Manama, this study considers the agency of both urban residents and
the state. While merchants, immigrants and labourers developed and
organised the town of the pearl boom given the absence of a centralised
urban administration (Chapter 3), after the 1920s the government took an
increasingly active role in urban development, which by the 1950s had
become one of the primary tools for modernisation (Chapter 6).
The third approach is concerned with the evolution of the urban body
politic and public sphere under the aegis of patronage politics, grassroots
organisations cum religious institutions, particularly the Shi‘i houses of
mourning (ma’tams), professional and political associations, and the
municipality. ‘Informal’ networks of political mobilisation continued to
be prevalent in Manama in the oil era. As argued by Diane Singerman for
Egypt, these associations allowed individuals and groups to carve out vital
political space. 26 In order to understand the foundations of a ‘modern’
domain of public contestation (and how this domain shaped state and
nation building) Chapter 5 analyses different episodes of unrest and the
performance of Muharram rituals. As in British India before partition, the
violence and ritual performances staged in Manama were the key activities
which underscored the consolidation of Bahrain’s nationalist politics in
the 1950s. In the same way as many Indian cities Manama was in fact a
society starkly divided along communal and sectarian lines. 27 Its trans-
formation into a forum of Arab nationalist politics and anti-British

24
M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 108.
25
See for instance Z. Celik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French
Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); W. Cunningham Bissel,
‘Conservation and the Colonial Past: Urban Space, Planning and Power in Zanzibar’ in
D. Anderson and R. Rathbone (eds.), Africa’s Urban Past (Oxford: Currey, 2000),
pp. 246–61; M. Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay
City, 1845 –1875 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991); G. A. Myers, Verandahs of
Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa (New York: Syracuse University Press,
2003).
26
D. Singerman, ‘Informal Networks: The Construction of Politics in Urban Egypt’ in
T. Sato (ed.), Islamic Urbanism in Human History: Political Power and Social Networks
(London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1997), pp. 77–106.
27
The literature on communalism and violence in British India is abundant. See for instance
S. Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of