Page 39 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

Indigenous state traditions and the dialectics of urbanisation 19

mutawalli al-‘umur al-hisbiyyah, an indication of his political importance
as the executive of the provisions of the religious law. 7
Evidence on the activities of Shi‘i ‘ulama’ is anecdotal and coated in the
celebratory and rhetorical images of the Imami tradition. It seems that the
higher echelons of the clergy combined religious office with the control of
agricultural estates and direct involvement in the pearling industry.
Crucially, some ‘ulama’ families owned date plantations, financed pearl-
8
ing expeditions, owned boats and recruited labour. One famous example
was Shaykh Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Maqabi (d. 1674), the imam of
the village of al-Qadam who became the chief religious dignitary of
Bahrain. He bought the entire catch of the village at the end of the season
from pearl divers in exchange for advances on profit, and acted as a
wholesaler of pearls, attracting buyers from all corners of the islands. 9
Villages became organised around a hierarchy of place dictated by the
influence of local clerics with connections to the Shi‘i religious establish-
ment in and outside Bahrain. In the absence of detailed evidence, the
importance of the settlements of Safavid Bahrain can be inferred from the
recurrence of their names in the nisbahs of religious elites: al-Mahuzi, al-
Qadami, al-Jidd Hafsi and al-Dirazi. Regional networks of politics and
learning contributed further to the integration of Bahrain into the world of
Shi‘i Islam. Influential clerics attended the religious schools of the holy
cities of Najaf and Karbala and those of the Safavid provincial capitals. 10
While pilgrims crowded the shrines of Iran and Iraq, Bahrain’s mujtahids
held a prominent position in the cadres of the Safavid Empire and by the
second half of the seventeenth century they had replaced their colleagues
of Jabal ‘Amil in Lebanon who had provided the early foundations of the
state.

Piety, popular Shi‘ism and the collapse of the
‘Islands of Paradise’
The family history and biography of Yusuf ibn Ahmad al-Bahrani (1695–
1772) sheds light on the combined tradition of learning and mundane

7
Cole, ‘Rival Empires’, 187–90.
8
These developments are analysed in Cole, ‘Rival Empires’, pp. 190–2.
9
On Shaykh Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Maqabi see Yusuf ibn Ahmad al-Bahrani,
Lu’luat al-Bahrayn fi al-ijazat wa tarajim rijal al-hadith (Najaf: Matba‘ah al-Nu‘man,
1966), pp. 86–90; ‘Ali ibn Hasan al-Bahrani, Anwar al-badrayn fi tarajim ‘ulama’ al-Qatif
wa al-Ahsa’ wa al-Bahrayn (Najaf: Matba‘ah al-Nu‘man, 1960), pp. 125–7.
10
M. Salati, ‘La Lu’lua al-Bahrayn fî l-ijâza li qurratay al-‘ayn di Šayh Yûsuf b. Ahmad al-
Bahrânî (1107-1186/1695-1772): per lo Studio della Šî‘a di Bahrayn’, Annali di Ca’
Foscari, 28.3 (1989), 111–45 (124–36).