Page 40 - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_Neat

20 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf

pursuits which dominated the Shi‘i circles of Bahrain. It is also a poignant
testimony of the collapse of the Imami tradition in the early eighteenth
century as a result of the fierce contest between the Safavid Empire and
Oman, the new maritime power which emerged after the relinquishment
of Portuguese rule over Muscat in the mid seventeenth century. 11
Born into a religious family from the village of al-Diraz with connec-
tions to the pearling industry, Yusuf’s father Ahmad ibn Ibrahim
(d. 1719) moved to al-Mahuz to join the circle of Shaykh Sulayman ibn
‘Abdallah al-Mahuzi (d. 1709), a renowned cleric. After a long and
debilitating illness Sulayman ibn Salih (d. 1675), the paternal uncle of
Yusuf’s grandfather, abandoned his business as the owner of pearling
boats and became the imam al-jum‘ah wa al-jama‘ah (the prayer leader)
in the village of al-Diraz. In 1700, when Yusuf was five, Bahrain became
the battleground between the al-‘Utub and the al-Haram Sunni tribes, the
latter called in by the shaykh al-ra’is of Bahrain to defend the islands from
tribal incursions. Prolonged hostilities and the fear of a military occupa-
tion by the Imam of Muscat forced many clerics, including Yusuf’s father,
to leave Bahrain. On his way to al-Qatif, Ahmad left his young son in
charge of the family properties in the village of al-Shakurah. As the Safavid
administration collapsed in 1717, Yusuf joined his father on the mainland
but returned to Bahrain two years later to tend the family’s date planta-
tions. Shortly after, he ran into financial difficulties and left the islands for
good. His peregrinations continued in Iran and Iraq, where he died after a
distinguished career in 1772. 12
The departure of Yusuf al-Bahrani from Bahrain in 1717 anticipated
the religious diaspora which plagued the islands throughout the eight-
eenth century and continued after the takeover by the Al Khalifah in 1783.
Agriculturalists and merchants left for Iraq and Iran after the Omani
invasion of 1800–1. The influx of refugees into the port town of Bushehr
led to the creation of a new quarter there which was named after the
Bahraini village of al-Damistan. In recollecting his personal experience
of the first Omani attack in 1700, Yusuf al-Bahrani illustrates the extent to
which the survival of Imami learning had become by then closely associ-
ated with the political vicissitudes of the islands. Yusuf recounts that when
he sought sanctuary in the Portuguese fort, he brought with him only the
family collection of religious texts, his most cherished possessions. Once
the invaders entered the fort Yusuf’s books were burnt, the majority of the

11
On the Omani-Persian war see B. J. Slot, The Arabs of the Gulf, 1602–1784, 2nd edn
(Leidschendam: the author, 1995), pp. 217–47.
12
Y. al-Bahrani, Lu’luat, pp. 87, 442–3; Salati, ‘La Lu’lua al-Bahrayn’, pp. 115–17, 124,
129.