Page 37 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Indigenous state traditions and the dialectics of urbanisation 17

political force of the region. With the Safavid occupation of Bahrain in 1602,
the ‘battle for Eastern Arabia’ entered a new phase. As Twelver Shi‘ism was
elevated to state religion in Iran, the Safavid Empire established a ground-
breaking tradition of imperial government in the islands. The collapse of the
dynasty in 1722 re-ignited tribal conflict across Iran and the Gulf. Persian
influence in Bahrain continued under Nadir Shah Afshar (1688–1747), the
new tribal leader of Iran who sought to restore the Sunni orthodoxy, and
continued until the arrival of the Sunni Al Khalifah family in 1783, a branch
of the al-‘Utub confederation from mainland Arabia.
The consolidation of tribal government and the inflow of Sunni tribes
from the mainland radically transformed the social, political and urban
fabric of the islands. In the nineteenth century the imposition of tribal
authority over Bahrain’s Shi‘i agricultural communities created strict
divisions along sectarian lines reinforced by the opposition, as well as by
the symbiotic relationship, between tribesmen and agriculturalists. These
divisions became enshrined in the different sociopolitical organisations
and built environments of towns and villages, and in the strictly compart-
mentalised religious and political life of their Sunni and Shi‘i residents.

Safavid Bahrain
The Safavids occupied Bahrain in 1602 as part of their expansionist drive
to counterbalance Portuguese and Ottoman influence along the southern
2
Iranian coast and in Iraq. Soon after the conquest, the majority of the
population of Bahrain embraced Imami Shi‘ism. As a political movement,
Shi‘i Islam had a long tradition in the region. Eastern Arabia had been the
centre of the state established by Carmathian dissidents in the tenth and
eleventh centuries, and Ismaili chieftains like the Banu Jarwan continued
to rule Bahrain from al-Ahsa’ and al-Qatif until the middle of the fifteenth
century. It is not clear to what extent Imamism was widespread in Bahrain
before the Persian occupation established the less intransigent doctrine of
Twelver Shi‘ism. In the thirteenth century Shaykh Maytham ibn ‘Ali al-
Bahrani (d. 1280), a renowed Shi‘i theologian, accepted the theory of the
occultation of the Twelfth Imam. A century later Muhammad Öljaytü
(1309–16), the Ilkhanid ruler of Iran, requested the religious services of
‘ulama’ from Bahrain after his conversion to Imamism. 3

2
W. Floor, The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, 1500–1730
(Washington: Mage, 2006), p. 202.
3
Cole, ‘Rival Empires’, 177–83. Archaeologists have discovered coins minted on the
occasion of the death of Öljaytü under the title of Zayn al-‘Abidin. Interview with ‘Ali
Akbar Bushehri, Manama, 24 March 2004.